South Carolina Threatens Washington Over Cleanup

AIKEN, S.C. — The Energy Department began cleaning up an environmental nightmare at the old Savannah River Site nuclear weapons plant here in 1996 and promised a bright future: Within a quarter-century, officials said, they would turn liquid radioactive bomb waste into a solid that could not spill or dissolve.

But 17 years later, the department has slowed the work to a pace that makes completion of the cleanup by the projected date of 2023 highly unlikely. Energy officials now say the work will not be done until well into the 2040s, when the aging underground tanks that hold the bomb waste in the South Carolina lowlands will be 90 years old.

"I don't know what the tanks' design life was intended to be, but it's not for infinity," the state's chief environmental official, Catherine B. Templeton, said in an interview.

The slowdown has set off a fierce battle between the Energy Department and South Carolina, where officials say they have been double-crossed in what they view as the state's biggest environmental threat. In an unusual display of resistance from a state that was host to a major part of the Cold War effort to make nuclear weapons — and is now home to most of the resulting radioactive waste — South Carolina is threatening to impose $154 million in fines on the federal government for failing to meet its promised schedule.

Energy Department officials counter that the slowdown is a temporary effect of budget stringency in Washington and that Congress has tied their hands. A combination of the across-the-board budget cuts known as sequestration and a 2011 cap on military spending — of which the environmental cleanup is technically part — do not leave them with enough money to meet their commitments, they say.

"There's only so much to go around," said Terrel J. Spears, the Energy Department's assistant manager for waste disposition here. "We can't increase the budgets. Now we have to balance the budgets."

Energy officials acknowledge, however, that for each additional year the waste stays in the tanks, they will have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on maintenance and security.

In South Carolina's reckoning, some of the money that should be spent on Savannah is going to a factory that the Energy Department is trying to finish at its Hanford nuclear reservation, near Richland, Wash., to process similar wastes there. But those wastes are more complex, and contractors have faced even tougher technical problems. That schedule has slipped repeatedly.

Giving more money to Hanford, Ms. Templeton insisted, was "rewarding bad behavior" by site managers there.

South Carolina and the Energy Department do agree on one thing: The current slowdown comes on top of past technical problems that pushed back the start of work by more than seven years and that more than doubled the cost.

Ms. Templeton said the tanks, which are near the Savannah River, already have leaks and are buried in soil below the water table, meaning that underground water flows around them.

"We have to get that waste out of the tanks so it's not Fukushima, so you don't have the groundwater interacting with the waste and running off," she said, referring to the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, where natural flows of subterranean water pick up contamination from the reactors and flow into the sea.

At the Washington State Department of Ecology, Suzanne Dahl, the tank waste treatment manager, said: "I feel their pain. We think the same things out here." All the deadlines there, in an agreement approved by a Federal District Court, will be missed. Ms. Dahl said that in the 1990s, her state approved a request by the Energy Department to delay work on solidifying wastes at Hanford while the technology was tried out first at Savannah River; Savannah River, therefore, has a 17-year head start, she said.

At Savannah, the Energy Department did succeed in building the world's largest factory for stabilizing the liquid bomb waste, done by mixing it with molten glass and pouring it into stainless steel canisters, 10 feet high by two feet across. The stabilized waste should then last for millenniums.

The department has also perfected a technique for separating nearly all of the troublesome radioactive materials from salts in the underground tanks to reduce the volume that must be mixed with the molten glass. The rest of the radioactive material is mixed with cement that will bind it up for centuries. Last year the factory began the business of making the canisters and produced 325 of them — a respectable fraction of the 7,824 department officials say will be needed.

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Dot Earth Blog: Giving Musical Thanks on Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving (and Hannukah), here's a quick note — and song — of thanks to you for reading this blog, for attending to the issues and opportunities facing humanity as we come of age on a finite planet and, for those who comment here, trying to maintain a constructive approach.

The tune in the video above is "Song For Lisa" and is on "A Very Fine Line," my new — and first — CD, which was released today. It's the only instrumental on the album and features the amazing mandolinist Mike Marshall. I play guitar and we're joined by my friends Mark Murphy on upright bass and Eric Starr on drums.

You can download this song or the full album here and get physical copies on Amazon.com at a nice discount through most of December. (If you happen to live near the lower Hudson Valley, come to my CD release celebration on December 22!)

For those who might not know, through 30 years of science writing, I've been a singer and songwriter in the background (along with frequently serving as a sideman to Pete Seeger). Without the restorative power of music, there's no way I could have worked so long in journalism.

On Medium.com, I explain the music side of my life, and offer details on the making of the album.

I shot the images on the Schoodic side of Acadia National Park.

Have a great closing stretch to this year.

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Bits Blog: The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented

Vaccination programs for children have prevented more than 100 million cases of serious contagious disease in the United States since 1924, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The research, led by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's graduate school of public health, analyzed public health reports going back to the 19th century. The reports covered 56 diseases, but the article in the journal focused on seven: polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough.

Researchers analyzed disease reports before and after the times when vaccines became commercially available. Put simply, the estimates for prevented cases came from the falloff in disease reports after vaccines were licensed and widely available. The researchers projected the number of cases that would have occurred had the pre-vaccination patterns continued as the nation's population increased.

The journal article is one example of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined. The project, which started in 2009, required assembling 88 million reports of individual cases of disease, much of it from the weekly morbidity reports in the library of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then the reports had to be converted to digital formats.

Most of the data entry — 200 million keystrokes — was done by Digital Divide Data, a social enterprise that provides jobs and technology training to young people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya.

Still, data entry was just a start. The information was put into spreadsheets for making tables, but was later sorted and standardized so it could be searched, manipulated and queried on the project's website.

"Collecting all this data is one thing, but making the data computable is where the big payoff should be," said Dr. Irene Eckstrand, a program director and science officer for the N.I.H.'s Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

The University of Pittsburgh researchers also looked at death rates, but decided against including an estimate in the journal article, largely because death certificate data became more reliable and consistent only in the 1960s, the researchers said.

But Dr. Donald S. Burke, the dean of Pittsburgh's graduate school of public health and an author of the medical journal article, said that a reasonable projection of prevented deaths based on known mortality rates in the disease categories would be three million to four million.

The scientists said their research should help inform the debate on the risks and benefits of vaccinating American children.

Pointing to the research results, Dr. Burke said, "If you're anti-vaccine, that's the price you pay."

The medical journal article notes the recent resurgence of some diseases as some parents have resisted vaccinating their children. For example, the worst whooping cough epidemic since 1959 occurred last year, with more than 38,000 reported cases nationwide.

The disease data is on the project's website, available for use by other researchers, students, the news media and members of the public who may be curious about the outbreak and spread of a particular disease. Much of the data is searchable by disease, year and location. The project was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"I'm very excited to see what people will find in this data, what patterns and insights are there waiting to be discovered," said Dr. Willem G. van Panhuis, an epidemiologist at Pittsburgh and lead author of the journal article.

The project's name itself is a nod to the notion that data is a powerful tool for scientific discovery. It is called Project Tycho, after the 16th century Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, whose careful, detailed astronomical observations were the foundation on which Johannes Kepler made the creative leap to devise his laws of planetary motion.

The open-access model for the project at Pittsburgh is increasingly the pattern with government data. The United States government has opened up thousands of data sets to the public.

Just how these assets will be exploited commercially is still in the experimental stage, other than a few well-known applications like using government weather data for forecasting services and insurance products.

But the potential seems to be considerable. Last month, the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the total economic benefit to companies and consumers of open data could reach $3 trillion worldwide.

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A Part of Utah Built on Coal Wonders What Comes Next

PRICE, Utah — For generations, coal has been the lifeblood of this mineral-rich stretch of eastern Utah. Mining families proudly recall all the years they toiled underground. Supply companies line the town streets. Above the road that winds toward the mines, a soot-smudged miner peers out from a billboard with the slogan "Coal = Jobs."

But recently, fear has settled in. The state's oldest coal-fired power plant, tucked among the canyons near town, is set to close, a result of new, stricter federal pollution regulations.

As energy companies tack away from coal, toward cleaner, cheaper natural gas, people here have grown increasingly afraid that their community may soon slip away. Dozens of workers at the facility here, the Carbon Power Plant, have learned that they must retire early or seek other jobs. Local trucking and equipment outfits are preparing to take business elsewhere.

"There are a lot of people worried," said Kyle Davis, who has been employed at the plant since he was 18.

Mr. Davis, 56, worked his way up from sweeping floors to managing operations at the plant, whose furnaces have been burning since 1954.

"I would have liked to be here for another five years," he said. "I'm too young to retire."

But Rocky Mountain Power, the utility that operates the plant, has determined that it would be too expensive to retrofit the aging plant to meet new federal standards on mercury emissions. The plant is scheduled to be shut by April 2015.

"We had been working for the better part of three years, testing compliance strategies," said David Eskelsen, a spokesman for the utility. "None of the ones we investigated really would produce the results that would meet the requirements."

For the last several years, coal plants have been shutting down across the country, driven by tougher environmental regulations, flattening electricity demand and a move by utilities toward natural gas.

This month, the board of directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the country's largest public power utility, voted to shut eight coal-powered plants in Alabama and Kentucky and partly replace them with gas-fired power. Since 2010, more than 150 coal plants have been closed or scheduled for retirement.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the stricter emissions regulations for the plants will result in billions of dollars in related health savings, and will have a sweeping impact on air quality.

In recent weeks, the agency held 11 "listening sessions" around the country in advance of proposing additional rules for carbon dioxide emissions.

"Coal plants are the single largest source of dangerous carbon pollution in the United States, and we have ready alternatives like wind and solar to replace them," said Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign, which wants to shut all of the nation's coal plants.

"We have a choice," he said, "which in most cases is cheaper and doesn't have any of the pollution."

Coal's downward turn has hit Appalachia hardest, but the effects of the transition toward other energy sources has started to ripple westward.

Mr. Eskelsen said Rocky Mountain Power would place some of the 70 Carbon facility employees at its two other Utah coal plants. Other workers will take early retirement or look for different jobs.

Still, the notion that this pocket of Utah, where Greek, Italian and Mexican immigrants came to mine coal more than a century ago, could survive without it, is hard for people here to comprehend.

"The attack on coal is so broad-reaching in our little community," said Casey Hopes, a Carbon County commissioner, whose grandfather was a coal miner. "The power plants, the mines — they support so many smaller businesses. We don't have another industry."

Like others in Price, Mr. Hopes voiced frustration with the Obama administration, saying it should be investing more in clean coal technology rather than discarding coal altogether.

Annual Utah coal production, though, has been slowly declining for a decade according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

Last year, mines here produced about 17 million tons of coal, the lowest level since 1987, though production has crept up this year.

"This is the worst we've seen it," said David Palacios, who works for a trucking company that hauls coal to the power plants, and whose business will slow once the Carbon plant closes.

Mr. Palacios, president of the Southeastern Utah Energy Producers Association, noted that the demand for coal has always ebbed and flowed here.

"But this has been two to three years we're struggling through," he said.

Compounding the problem, according to some mining experts, is that until now, most of the state's coal has been sold and used within the region, rather than being exported overseas. That has left the industry here more vulnerable to local plant closings.

Cindy Crane, chairwoman of the Utah Mining Association, said demand for Utah coal could eventually drop as much as 50 percent. "For most players in Utah coal, this a tough time," said Ms. Crane, vice president of PacifiCorp, a Western utility and mining company that owns the Carbon plant.

Mr. Nilles of the Sierra Club acknowledged that the shift from coal would not be easy on communities like Carbon County. But employees could be retrained or compensated for lost jobs, he said, and new industries could be drawn to the region.

Washington State, for example, has worked with municipalities and utilities to ease the transition from coal plants while ensuring that workers are transferred to other energy jobs or paid, if nearing retirement, Mr. Nilles said.

"Coal has been good to Utah," Mr. Nilles said, "but markets for coal are drying up. You need to get ahead of this and make sure the jobs don't all leave."

For many here, coal jobs are all they know. The industry united the area during hard times, too, especially during the dark days after nine men died in a 2007 mining accident some 35 miles down the highway. Virtually everyone around Price knew the men, six of whom remain entombed in the mountainside.

But there is quiet acknowledgment that Carbon County will have to change — if not now, soon.

David Palacios's father, Pete, who worked in the mines for 43 years, has seen coal roar and fade here. Now 86, his eyes grew cloudy as he recalled his first mining job. He was 12, and earned $1 a day.

"I'm retired, so I'll be fine. But these young guys?" Pete Palacios said, his voice trailing off.

Clifford Krauss contributed reporting from Houston.

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New Clues May Change Buddha’s Date of Birth

Ira Block/National Geographic

Archaeologists have uncovered a series of ancient temples within the Maya Devi Temple in Nepal.

In traditional narratives, Queen Maya Devi, the mother of Buddha, gave birth to him while holding on to a branch of a tree in a garden at Lumbini, in what is now Nepal. Accounts vary as to when this occurred, leaving uncertain the founding century of one of the world's major religions.

Until now, archaeological evidence favored a date no earlier than the third century B.C., when the Emperor Asoka promoted the spread of Buddhism through South Asia, leaving a scattering of shrines and inscriptions to the man who became "the enlightened one." A white temple on a gently sloping plateau at Lumbini, 20 miles from the border with India, draws hundreds of thousands of pilgrims each year to read a sandstone pillar documenting Asoka's homage at the Buddha's birthplace.

But new excavations by archaeologists at Lumbini have uncovered evidence of a much earlier timber shrine and brick structures above it — all of which lay beneath the temple that is a Unesco World Heritage site long identified as the birthplace. Dating fragments of charcoal and grains of sand, researchers determined that the lower structures were erected as early as the sixth century B.C.

The international team of archaeologists said the lower structures were laid out on the same design as the more recent temple. The timber shrine even had an open space in the center that suggested a link to the Buddha's nativity tradition. Deep tree roots in the center space may even have been from the tree his mother presumably held on to.

The archaeologists, led by Robin A. E. Coningham of Durham University in England, reported the findings on Monday in an article published online in the December issue of the international journal Antiquity. This was, they said, "the first archaeological evidence regarding the date of the life of Buddha."

They also described the new line of research as having "the potential to provide yet more evidence for the earliest expressions of Buddhist architecture and ritual practice."

Concluding its report, Dr. Coningham's group wrote that "the sequence at Lumbini is a microcosm for the development of Buddhism from a localized cult to a global religion." The shrine, for example, was transformed from a localized timber temple into "a monumental Asokan-period temple and pillar complex inscribing it as a site of imperial pilgrimage."

Before the sixth century B.C., the Lumbini site was apparently cultivated land. The postholes of the timber building were the first evidence of a shrine focused around a tree, Dr. Coningham said in a teleconference for reporters arranged by the National Geographic Society, which partly supported the research, along with Durham University in England and Stirling University in Scotland.

"These discoveries are very important to better understand the birthplace of the Buddha," Ram Kumar Shrestha, Nepal's minister of culture, tourism and civil aviation, said in a statement released by the archaeology team. "The government of Nepal will spare no effort to preserve this significant site."

Although much is known of the Buddha's teachings and half a billion people are Buddhists, there is little to document his life, Dr. Coningham said, except through textual sources and oral tradition. He said, "We thought, why not go back to archaeology to try to answer some of the questions about his birth?"

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 28, 2013

An article on Tuesday about archaeological evidence that suggests a different birth date for Buddha misstated the location of Stirling University. It is in Scotland, not England.

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Bits Blog: The Vaccination Effect: 100 Million Cases of Contagious Disease Prevented

Vaccination programs for children have prevented more than 100 million cases of serious contagious disease in the United States since 1924, according to a new study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The research, led by scientists at the University of Pittsburgh's graduate school of public health, analyzed public health reports going back to the 19th century. The reports covered 56 diseases, but the article in the journal focused on seven: polio, measles, rubella, mumps, hepatitis A, diphtheria and pertussis, or whooping cough.

Researchers analyzed disease reports before and after the times when vaccines became commercially available. Put simply, the estimates for prevented cases came from the falloff in disease reports after vaccines were licensed and widely available. The researchers projected the number of cases that would have occurred had the pre-vaccination patterns continued as the nation's population increased.

The journal article is one example of the kind of analysis that can be done when enormous data sets are built and mined. The project, which started in 2009, required assembling 88 million reports of individual cases of disease, much of it from the weekly morbidity reports in the library of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Then the reports had to be converted to digital formats.

Most of the data entry — 200 million keystrokes — was done by Digital Divide Data, a social enterprise that provides jobs and technology training to young people in Cambodia, Laos and Kenya.

Still, data entry was just a start. The information was put into spreadsheets for making tables, but was later sorted and standardized so it could be searched, manipulated and queried on the project's website.

"Collecting all this data is one thing, but making the data computable is where the big payoff should be," said Dr. Irene Eckstrand, a program director and science officer for the N.I.H.'s Models of Infectious Disease Agent Study.

The University of Pittsburgh researchers also looked at death rates, but decided against including an estimate in the journal article, largely because death certificate data became more reliable and consistent only in the 1960s, the researchers said.

But Dr. Donald S. Burke, the dean of Pittsburgh's graduate school of public health and an author of the medical journal article, said that a reasonable projection of prevented deaths based on known mortality rates in the disease categories would be three million to four million.

The scientists said their research should help inform the debate on the risks and benefits of vaccinating American children.

Pointing to the research results, Dr. Burke said, "If you're anti-vaccine, that's the price you pay."

The medical journal article notes the recent resurgence of some diseases as some parents have resisted vaccinating their children. For example, the worst whooping cough epidemic since 1959 occurred last year, with more than 38,000 reported cases nationwide.

The disease data is on the project's website, available for use by other researchers, students, the news media and members of the public who may be curious about the outbreak and spread of a particular disease. Much of the data is searchable by disease, year and location. The project was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"I'm very excited to see what people will find in this data, what patterns and insights are there waiting to be discovered," said Dr. Willem G. van Panhuis, an epidemiologist at Pittsburgh and lead author of the journal article.

The project's name itself is a nod to the notion that data is a powerful tool for scientific discovery. It is called Project Tycho, after the 16th century Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe, whose careful, detailed astronomical observations were the foundation on which Johannes Kepler made the creative leap to devise his laws of planetary motion.

The open-access model for the project at Pittsburgh is increasingly the pattern with government data. The United States government has opened up thousands of data sets to the public.

Just how these assets will be exploited commercially is still in the experimental stage, other than a few well-known applications like using government weather data for forecasting services and insurance products.

But the potential seems to be considerable. Last month, the McKinsey Global Institute, the research arm of the consulting firm, projected that the total economic benefit to companies and consumers of open government data could reach $3 trillion worldwide.

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Fred Kavli, Benefactor of Science Prizes, Dies at 86

Fred Kavli, a physicist who left Norway for California as a young man and made millions manufacturing sensors for appliances, automobiles and aircraft, then late in life began donating much of his fortune to science, establishing a major prize he intended to rival the Nobel, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 86.

The cause was cancer, according to the Kavli Foundation, which Mr. Kavli started in 2000.

The foundation has given more than $200 million to establish 17 scientific research institutes at universities around the world for work in astrophysics, neuroscience, nanoscience and theoretical physics. In 2008, the first Kavli Prizes were awarded, with recipients in each of three categories splitting $1 million. The prizes are awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in Oslo in September every other year.

"The point is to create visibility for science," Mr. Kavli said in an interview with The New York Times in 2005. "The Nobels do a good job. It might take us 100 years to catch up."

Mr. Kavli, who as a child marveled at the Northern Lights from his family's farm on a fjord, earned a degree in applied physics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in 1955 and arrived in the United States the next year. Two years later, after putting an ad in a newspaper saying he was an engineer seeking financing for a new company, he created the Kavlico Corporation.

Kavlico developed a series of sophisticated sensors that help control a wide range of mechanical functions, whether helping car engines save fuel and limit pollution or operating dishwashers. They have been used on the space shuttle, the International Space Station, and Trident and Poseidon missiles. By 2000, the company had 1,500 employees. Mr. Kavli sold it that year for $340 million.

He knew he wanted to establish a philanthropic foundation to benefit science, but he was unsure of how to do it efficiently. He consulted with several top university leaders, who told him that while they might have staff and facilities, they often lacked seed money to allow their researchers to explore experimental ideas — ideas that might fail.

The 17 Kavli institutes — they are scattered from Delft to Beijing to Berkeley — are intended to provide the seed money. The foundation has given each institute at least $7.5 million, with the assurance that the university hosting it will find another source to match the money. The money serves as an endowment that returns about $400,000 per year toward research. The foundation plans to expand the contribution to each institute to about $10 million, which, when matched, would provide about $1 million annually for research at each location, said Robert W. Conn, the foundation's president.

Several scientists affiliated with the Kavli institutes have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

"It is unrestricted funds," Mr. Conn said, "which is indispensable in discovery science."

Mr. Kavli was born on Aug. 20, 1927, in Eresfjord, Norway, near the country's southwest coast. During much of his childhood, Norway was occupied by German forces. Food and gas were in short supply, and he and his brother, Aslak, risked their lives stealing fuel oil from the Nazis. The boys were entrepreneurs, running a lumber business. A lifetime later, Mr. Kavli's passions included his 12,000-square-foot-house on a bluff overlooking the Pacific.

Survivors include two children from a marriage that ended in divorce.

Science leaders have praised Mr. Kavli and other newer philanthropists, including Paul W. Allen, the Microsoft co-founder, for making large donations toward research at a time when many university research budgets have declined.

The Kavli Foundation has supported a wide range of work. Among the seven winners of the Kavli Prizes in 2012 were, in nanoscience, Mildred S. Dresselhaus, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose research helped usher in the age of nanotechnology; in neuroscience, Cornelia Isabella Bargmann of Rockefeller University, who studies the neural circuits of Caenorhabditis elegans, a worm with only 300 nerve cells, to learn how the brain processes information from the environment; and, in astrophysics, scientists who discovered the Kuiper belt, a cloudy disk of ice and rock near Neptune.

In 2005, when Mr. Kavli announced that he planned to start the prizes, he recalled skiing in the Norwegian mountains as a boy.

"At times," he told a gathering in New York, "the whole sky was aflame with the Northern Lights shifting and dancing across the sky down to the white-clad mountaintops. In the stillness and loneliness of the white mountains, I pondered the universe, the planet, nature and the wonders of man. I'm still pondering."

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Monterey Journal: With Extra Anchovies, Deluxe Whale Watching

By Sean Patrick Farrell

Whales and Anchovies: A spike in the anchovy population in California's Monterey Bay has made for exciting wildlife viewing as humpback whales, dolphins, sea lions and pelicans swarm to feed on the small fish.

MONTEREY, Calif. — It began with the anchovies, miles and miles of them, their silvery blue bodies thick in the waters of Monterey Bay.

Then the sea lions came, by the thousands, from up and down the California coast, and the pelicans, arriving in one long V-formation after another. Fleets of bottlenose dolphins joined them.

But it was the whales that astounded even longtime residents — more than 200 humpbacks lunging, breaching, blowing and tail flapping — and, on a recent weekend, a pod of 19 rowdy orcas that briefly crashed the party, picking off sea lions along the way.

"I can't tell you where to look," Nancy Black, a marine biologist leading a boat full of whale watchers last week, said as the water in every direction roiled with mammals. "It's all around."

For almost three months, Monterey and nearby coastal areas have played host to a mammoth convocation of sea life that scientists here say is unprecedented in their memories, inviting comparisons to African scenes like the wildebeest migration or herds of antelope on the Serengeti.

Humpback whales, pelicans and sea lions are all common summer sights off the Monterey coast, with its nutrient-rich waters. But never that anyone remembers have there been this many or have they stayed so long, feeding well into November.

"It's a very strange year," said Baldo Marinovic, a research biologist with the Institute for Marine Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

What has drawn the animals is a late bloom of anchovies so enormous that continuous, dense blankets of the diminutive fish are visible on depth sounders. The sea lions, sea birds and humpbacks (which eat an average of two tons of fish a day) appear to have hardly made a dent in the population. Last month, so many anchovies crowded into Santa Cruz harbor that the oxygen ran out, leading to a major die-off.

Marine researchers are baffled about the reason for the anchovy explosion.

"The $64,000 question is why this year?" said Dr. Marinovic, who noted that anchovies had been unusually scarce for the last five or six years and that when they do thrive, they usually appear in the spring and early summer.

He and other scientists speculated that a convergence of factors — a milder than usual fall, a strong upwelling of colder water, the cycling of water temperatures in the bay — have created what Dr. Marinovic called "the perfect storm."

"Now they're all kind of concentrating on the coast," he said of the anchovies. "They seem to seek out Monterey Bay because the water tends to be a little warmer and the eggs will develop quickly." The fish, he said, "are providing a feast for all these things that feed on them."

The frenzy has been a boon for whale-watching companies like Monterey Bay Whale Watch, of which Ms. Black is the owner, and for their customers.

In a normal season, passengers are lucky to see one or two humpbacks and a single whale breaching. On the trip last week, more than 60 whales were spotted feeding in the deep water of the canyon offshore, and the breaches were almost too numerous to count — in one case, two whales arced their bodies out of the water in unison, like competitors in an Olympic synchronized swimming event. Foul-smelling whale breath occasionally permeated the air.

Ms. Black said that for the first time this year — she has studied whales here since 1986, specializing in orcas — she has seen evidence that the humpbacks are feeding cooperatively with groups of thousands of sea lions. The sea lions dive simultaneously, surfacing a few minutes later. They herd the anchovies into tight balls, called bait balls, and the whales scoop them up, several hundred in a mouthful. Food is plentiful enough that the giant cetaceans — an adult male humpback measures 45 to 50 feet in length, Ms. Black said, and weighs a ton per foot — can afford to take breaks to play.

The humpback population off the California coast, once rapidly decreasing, has rebounded with restrictions on hunting, to about 2,000, experts say. Many whales and sea lions have been congregating to feed near the rim of the Monterey Submarine Canyon offshore. Bottlenose dolphins — groups of 100 or more have been spotted this year — feed closer in.

In most years, the humpbacks would have departed for Mexico weeks ago and the pelicans flown south. But with the anchovies still in abundance, no one is sure how long they will stay. They could remain through December, scientists said, or depart any day.

"I hope it doesn't end," Ms. Black said. "But it will."

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Deals at Climate Meeting Advance Global Effort

WARSAW — Two weeks of United Nations climate talks ended Saturday with a pair of last-minute deals keeping alive the hope that a global effort can ward off a ruinous rise in temperatures.

Delegates agreed to the broad outlines of a proposed system for pledging emissions cuts and gave their support for a new treaty mechanism to tackle the human cost of rising seas, floods, stronger storms and other expected effects of global warming.

The measures added momentum to the talks as United Nations members look toward a 2015 conference in Paris to replace the moribund Kyoto Protocol.

"I think this is what they needed to move the ball forward," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute, "even if you can't say that it provided a lot of new ambition."

The conference, known as the 19th annual meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, got underway two weeks ago in the shadow of the giant Philippine typhoon. The talks were attended by more than 10,000 people, including national delegations, journalists, advocates and, for the first time, business leaders.

The death and destruction brought by the Philippine storm helped to highlight the question of "climate justice." Final agreement on Saturday was held up by a thorny dispute over a proposal by developing nations for the creation of a "loss and damage mechanism" under the treaty. The United States, the European Union and other developed nations opposed the measure, fearing new financial claims.

Peace was restored when the parties papered over their differences, agreeing with the United States to nest the new instrument under an existing part of the treaty dealing with adapting to climate change, but saying they would review its status in 2016. Mohamed Adow, an activist with Christian Aid, said the deal showed that "countries have accepted the reality" of the effects of climate change, but that "they seem unwilling to take concrete actions to reduce the severity of these impacts."

René Orellana of the Bolivian delegation, said: "It's important that the loss and damage structure has finally been created. There's a baby now, and we have to give him enough time to grow."

Mr. Orellana said the agreement would eventually grow to encompass things like technology transfer, capacity building and migration.

The United States hailed the agreement on calculating emissions reductions, which was along lines proposed by Todd S. Stern, President Obama's climate envoy. Mr. Stern had called for each nation to make a public offer early enough to be evaluated for the Paris summit meeting. He argued that peer pressure was the best hope for concerted action after the 2009 Copenhagen meeting showed a binding top-down approach could not succeed at the international level.

Conflicts between rich nations, led by the United States and European Union, and developing nations, led by China, India and Brazil, had stalled progress and threatened to scuttle the conference altogether. Negotiations ended a full day later than originally planned, and delegates, who had gone days with little sleep, were nodding exhaustedly in their seats well before the end of the day on Saturday.

The language grew heated at times by diplomatic standards, with Mr. Stern on Saturday reminding China that it had agreed two years ago that climate action would be "applicable to all parties," and expressing surprise "that China would be assuming no commitments under the future agreement." Lead negotiators eventually worked out compromise language — changing the word "commitments" to "contributions" — for 2015 to allow some wiggle room.

The deal Saturday came less than a year before a "climate summit" of leaders called by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for September in New York, where world leaders will be asked to show progress on cutting emissions in the full glare of the United States and the world news media.

Despite relief that a Copenhagen-type failure was averted, treaty members remain far from any serious, concerted action to cut emissions. And developing nations complained that promises of financial help remain unmet.

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Captain of Seized Greenpeace Ship Speaks From Russia

Anatoly Maltsev/European Pressphoto Agency

Peter Willcox, right, the captain of a Greenpeace ship boarded by Russian commandos in September, was released on bail.

MOSCOW — The Russian commandos who boarded a Greenpeace ship in the Arctic two months ago were coldly professional at first, pointing automatic weapons at terrified crew members and forcing them to kneel.

But after discerning no threat, they began plundering the crew's alcohol supply, and quickly descended into drunken revelry.

So went the account of Peter Willcox, the American captain of the ship, the Arctic Sunrise, in his first interview since his release from detention. He recalled his odyssey through the Russian legal system, from arrest at sea to confinement in grim, concrete prisons where guards showed occasional gestures of kindness.

"The way we were arrested was quite scary," Mr. Willcox, 60, said on Saturday by telephone from St. Petersburg, where all but two of the 30 people who were on board the Arctic Sunrise have been released on bail ahead of a trial in February.

About a dozen commandos descended onto the ship on Sept. 19. They "wore balaclavas and uniforms with no insignia of any kind, and rappelled out of a helicopter," he said. "They made the crew kneel on deck and took over the ship as quickly as possible. They had machine guns out."

The commandos locked most of the crew members, who had been protesting oil drilling in the Arctic to the north of Russia, in their cabins. But soon enough, as it became clear that the crew posed no real danger, the air of sleek professionalism disappeared. Besides, they knew there had to be alcohol on board.

"The first thing they did was search everybody's cabins and steal everybody's liquor, and then they proceeded to drink it," Mr. Willcox said of the first night under Russian command. The Russians staggered on the deck and were "quite drunk," he said.

Mr. Willcox, who was locked in his cabin like the others, likened the party on his ship that night to a maritime tradition "from the square-rigger days," when the first booty usually found by an invading crew was the rum.

He had never spent more than a night in jail for Greenpeace before, and he described his detention as trying.

At one point, Mr. Willcox recalled kneeling in despair in the corner of a prison yard, in a freezing rain, contemplating spending a decade in the Russian gulag. "I would sit and wonder, 'How the heck did I get in this situation?' " he said. One guard, though, allowed him to walk without handcuffs after meeting with investigators on a sunny day.

Before being transferred to St. Petersburg, the 28 crew members and two freelance journalists who had been on board the Arctic Sunrise were held in a jail in Murmansk, a glum northern port. There, Mr. Willcox said, he was served fish-head stew, which he enjoyed, and cold mashed potatoes with herring, which went down with some difficulty.

He and the other activists face charges of hooliganism, punishable by up to seven years in prison. Russian prosecutors initially also pressed, but now appear to be ready to drop, charges of piracy, which carry a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.

Greenpeace International sent the ship to the Pechora Sea to draw attention to the potential environmental threats caused by a rush to exploit natural resources in the Arctic. The activists wanted to hang banners on a drilling platform operated by Gazprom, the Russian state-controlled energy giant. Mr. Willcox said the Arctic Sunrise was certainly in international waters when the commandos boarded it.

Russia says the activists threatened a complicated and dangerous piece of industrial equipment, in a region where impromptu protests cannot be tolerated because they increase the risk of accidents.

For Greenpeace, it was the worst crisis since the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in a New Zealand harbor in 1985. One crew member was killed in that attack. Mr. Willcox, a 32-year veteran of Greenpeace, was also captain of the Rainbow Warrior when it was bombed.

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Selling That New-Man Feeling

One afternoon a few months ago, a 45-year-old sales representative named Mike called "The Dr. Harry Fisch Show," a weekly men's health program on the Howard Stern channel on Sirius XM Radio, where no male medical or sexual issue goes unexplored.

"I feel like a 70-year-old man in a 45-year-old body," Mike, from Vancouver, British Columbia, told Dr. Fisch on the live broadcast. "I want to feel good. I don't want to feel tired all day."

A regular listener, Mike had heard Dr. Fisch, a Park Avenue urologist and fertility specialist, talk about a phenomenon called "low testosterone" or "low T." Dr. Fisch likes to say that a man's testosterone level is "the dipstick" of his health; he regularly appears on programs like "CBS This Morning" to talk about the malaise that may coincide with low testosterone. He is also the medical expert featured on IsItLowT.com, an informational website sponsored by AbbVie, the drug maker behind AndroGel, the best-selling prescription testosterone gel.

Like many men who have seen that site or commercials or online quizzes about "low T," Mike suspected that diminished testosterone was the cause of his lethargy. And he hoped, as the marketing campaigns seem to suggest, that taking a prescription testosterone drug would make him feel more energetic.

"I took your advice and I went and got my testosterone checked," Mike told Dr. Fisch. Mike's own physician, he related, told him that his testosterone "was a little low" and prescribed a testosterone medication.

Mike also said he had diabetes and high blood pressure and was 40 pounds overweight. Dr. Fisch explained that conditions like obesity might be accompanied by decreased testosterone and energy, and he urged Mike to exercise more and to lose weight. But if Mike had trouble overhauling his diet and exercise habits, Dr. Fisch said, taking testosterone might give him the boost he needed to do so.

"If it gives you more energy to exercise," Dr. Fisch said of the testosterone drug, "I'm all for it."

Recommendations like Dr. Fisch's and the marketing of low T as a common medical condition helped propel sales of testosterone gels, patches, injections and tablets to about $2 billion in the United States last year, according to IMS Health, a health care information company. In 2002, sales were reported to be a mere $324 million; around that time, Solvay Pharmaceuticals, which was then marketing AndroGel, began using the term "low T," replacing a previous euphemism for male aging, "andropause." Today the low-T trend is global. From 2000 to 2011, there was "a major and progressive increase" in testosterone use in 37 countries, according to a recent study published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

This marketing juggernaut is running into mounting opposition from some prominent medical researchers and industry experts. They contend that the pharmaceutical industry has vastly expanded the market for testosterone drugs to many men who may not need them and may be exposed to increased health risks by taking them. And drug makers have done so, these critics say, by exploiting loopholes in federal marketing regulations.

Drug makers spent $107 million last year to advertise the top brand-name testosterone drugs in the United States, according to Kantar Media. That amount doesn't include marketing known as unbranded campaigns, which raise awareness of low T itself. The Food and Drug Administration closely regulates advertisements for brand-name prescription drugs, but does not generally regulate unbranded campaigns. That two-track system, says John Mack, an analyst who runs a blog called Pharma Marketing, has enabled companies to position low T as a malady with such amorphous symptoms — listlessness, increased body fat and moodiness — that it can be seen to afflict nearly all men, at least once in a while. Drug makers also promote low-T screening quizzes directly to consumers, Mr. Mack says, in an effort to prompt men to seek testosterone prescriptions from their doctors.

"You might not have the medical condition as described in the textbook," Mr. Mack explains. "But you may have low T as defined by marketing quizzes, and you go to the doctor and ask for treatment."

David Freundel, a spokesman for AbbVie, declined requests to interview company executives. In a statement, Mr. Freundel wrote: "AndroGel is approved by the F.D.A. to treat adult men with low or no testosterone (hypogonadism) who have been diagnosed by a physician, and has more than 10 years of clinical, safety, published and post-marketing data." He added that the company continues to finance research into the long-term effects of testosterone therapy and that its unbranded informational efforts, like the IsItLowT.com site, "follow F.D.A.'s guidance."

Nevertheless, some public health experts warn that the popularization of testosterone drugs is outpacing research into efficacy and possible harms. The drugs' labels warn users about the potential for sleep apnea, congestive heart failure and low sperm counts; the topical gels warn that women and children exposed to the substances could develop male characteristics like chest hair. Others have raised concerns about the potential for prostate cancer and heart attacks.

"The big thing is, we just don't know the long-term risk of testosterone therapy at this time," says Jacques G. Baillargeon, an epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston who has studied testosterone-prescribing trends in the United States. "It's particularly concerning when you see the dramatic increase happening at such a large scale so quickly."

Seeking a Fountain of Youth

In a TV commercial promoting awareness of "low T," the shadow of a middle-age man sits on a bench watching his friends play basketball in an indoor gym.

"Feeling like a shadow of your former self? Don't have the hops for hoops with your buddies?" says the voice-over for the spot, paid for by AbbVie and currently posted on the IsItLowT site. "You might have a treatable condition called low testosterone or low T."

A few seconds later, presumably after the man is treated with testosterone, the shadow evaporates and a man materializes in the flesh, besuited and smiling. Cue the voice-over: "Step out of the shadows."

Testosterone, which plays a central role in the development of the male sexual organs, as well as muscle and body hair, has long been a synonym for youthful vigor and virility. And the quest to stave off aging by manipulating the hormone is an old business.

Toward the end of the 19th century, Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, a French physiologist, began injecting himself with "juice" extracted from crushed dog or guinea-pig testicles, as reported in The Lancet in 1889. Although he contended that the injections were rejuvenating, subsequent researchers came to believe that the placebo effect was at work.

In the 1920s and '30s, surgeons began transplanting monkey and goat testes into men, says Dr. John E. Morley, the director of endocrinology and geriatrics at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. But that fad ended quickly after one well-known surgeon implanted goat testicles into his patients, where they apparently emitted a noxious odor.

"This is the hilarious history of testosterone," recounts Dr. Morley, who in the past received speaking fees or consulting fees from drug makers that marketed testosterone treatments or planned to do so. "It may not have gotten any better. But, gee whiz, it was crazy."

Researchers were eventually able to synthesize testosterone, and drug makers capitalized on the discovery by using it to develop medical treatments.

The classic endocrine disorder for which testosterone drugs were originally developed and federally approved is called hypogonadism. That condition can be caused by problems like undescended testicles or a tumor in the pituitary gland, typically resulting in severe testosterone deficiency, along with poor libido, minimal muscles and scant body hair. "That is the real hypogonadal patient," says Dr. Richard Quinton, an endocrinologist at Newcastle University in Britain, "not the overweight businessman whose erections aren't as good as they used to be."

In fact, physicians weren't precisely quantifying men's testosterone levels until the 1960s, after the development of sensitive tests to determine the concentration of different hormones in blood samples. These enabled researchers to record men's testosterone levels over time. Dr. Morley and others have reported that, after age 30, men's testosterone levels typically decline by 1 percent a year. To the pharmaceutical industry, that decline was ripe for treatment.

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James H. Steele, Pioneer in Veterinary Public Health, Dies at 100

James H. Steele, a veterinarian whose pioneering efforts to prevent the spread of disease from animals to people led him to be called "the father of veterinary public health," died on Nov. 10 in Houston. He was 100.

His death was announced by several organizations with which he had long affiliations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Texas School of Public Health.

The potential for a disease to pass from animals to people had been understood for millenniums, but it was not until the late 18th century, when Edward Jenner developed a vaccine for smallpox, that someone found a way to prevent it. The idea that government could take a systematic approach to fighting disease in animals to protect people did not take hold until the middle of the 20th century, when Dr. Steele led the way.

He helped establish mass vaccination and prevention programs in the United States for diseases like rabies and bovine brucellosis. After setting up federal programs, he helped start them at the state level. He visited dozens of countries to start veterinary public health programs and to help trace specific diseases, like Rift Valley fever in Nigeria, where he traveled in the 1970s. He constantly looked beyond his immediate field: in 1964, he published a paper titled "The Socioeconomic Responsibilities of Veterinary Medicine."

He participated via Skype this summer at the annual conference of the American Veterinary Medical Association in Chicago during a lecture series, "The James Steele Challenge: A Better World Through One Health." It focused on his lifelong passion: convincing people that economic prosperity was rooted in animal, human and environmental health. Scores of students cite him as their mentor.

"What would things be like if there had never been a Jim Steele?" said Dr. Craig N. Carter, a veterinarian who studied under Dr. Steele and later wrote a biography of him, recalling the questions he and several colleagues asked one another after a recent memorial service for Dr. Steele. "Would we be 30 or 40 years behind where we are now?"

In 1942, a year after Dr. Steele received his doctor of veterinary medicine degree from Michigan State University, he became one of the first veterinarians to receive a master's degree in public health from Harvard. In 1945 he started the veterinary public health program at the United States Public Health Service in Washington. In 1947, he and the unit moved to Atlanta, to what is now called the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Two years after that he went to work for the office of the surgeon general as chief veterinary officer. He became the nation's first assistant surgeon general for veterinary affairs in 1968 and deputy assistant secretary for health and human services in 1970. The formal name for the types of diseases Dr. Steele dealt in, which pass from animals to humans, is zoonoses. While he had strong science and field experience — his interest in pursuing a veterinary degree increased after he helped investigate a brucellosis outbreak in a lab at Michigan State in the 1930s — his special talent was in finding practical ways to address disease on a large scale.

"He had to take all that science and translate it into a disease control program," said Dr. Peter Cowen, who teaches epidemiology and public health in the college of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University. "Jim took the science and protected public health."

James Harlan Steele was born on April 3, 1913, in Chicago to James Hahn Steele and the former Lydia Norquist. He grew up, all the way to 6-foot-7, in Chicago, and stayed there into his 20s, selling insurance to help his family before he entered Michigan State.

In 1971, he became a professor at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston.

He retired in 1983. His survivors include his wife, Brigitte; his sons, Michael, James and David; and four grandchildren. His first wife, the former Aina Oberg, died in 1969.

Many veterinarians and public health officials credit Dr. Steele for a recent increase in attention to what is called "one health" or "one medicine." They note that epidemiologists are now far more aware of humans' vulnerability to animal diseases, in part because among the emerging diseases of the last two decades, including West Nile virus, mad cow disease and monkeypox, 70 percent are zoonoses, crossing from animals to people.

"This was something that just totally was not considered before Jim Steele," Dr. Carter said. "His work has led to this progression toward integrated medicine."

Dr. Steele wrote several books and received scores of awards, including the Medal of Merit from the World Animal Health Organization and the Surgeon General's Medallion.

He was quick to credit his mentors and students, and he always put his accomplishments in context.

"The impact of veterinary research through the years has been startling," he wrote in the 1960s. "It has opened vast areas of continents to animal husbandry, given a base to many industries and improved human nutrition beyond expectation. Probably in no other creative area has an investment returned so great a dividend for mankind."

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Bits: Ad Takes Off Online: Less Doll, More Awl

Who said girls want to dress in pink and play with dolls, especially when they could be building Rube Goldberg machines instead?

That is the message of a video that has gone viral, viewed more than 6.4 million times since it was posted Monday on YouTube — an ad for GoldieBlox, a start-up toy company that sells games and books to encourage girls to become engineers.

In the ad, three girls are bored watching princesses in pink on TV. So they grab a tool kit, goggles and hard hats and set to work building a machine that sends pink teacups and baby dolls flying through the house, using umbrellas, ladders and, of course, GoldieBlox toys.

The ad has become a hot topic of conversation on social media, generating discussion about a much broader issue: the dearth of women in the technology and engineering fields, where just a quarter of technical jobs are held by women.

"I've been so excited to watch this wave," said Rachel Sklar, an advocate for women in technology and co-founder of TheLi.st, a digital media company for women. "It really does highlight that this gap is not that little girls aren't interested in it, it really is a function of 'you can't be what you can't see.' "

Cindy Gallop, who started the United States branch of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the advertising agency, said the ad also illustrated how advertising created by and for women and girls is powerful because women share so frequently on social media and control most purchases. Yet ad agencies are predominantly men, she said, and the men in ads are generally heroic and funny while women are sidekicks or homemakers.

"I tell marketers and the ad industry, 'When you want a video to go viral, this is what you do, you talk to women and girls and you talk to them in the right kind of way,' " Ms. Gallop said. "This ad is the absolute paradigm."

The ad is set to the tune of "Girls" by the Beastie Boys, a decidedly anti-feminist ballad with lyrics that the ad's creators rewrote.

The Beastie Boys sang, "Girls to do the dishes/Girls to clean up my room/Girls to do the laundry/Girls and in the bathroom/Girls, that's all I really want is girls."

One of the actresses in the ad sings: "Girls build a spaceship/Girls code the new app/Girls that grow up knowing/That they can engineer that/Girls, that's all we really need is girls/To bring us up to speed it's girls/Our opportunity is girls/Don't underestimate girls."

"I thought back to my childhood with the princesses and the ponies and wondered why construction toys and math and science kits are for boys," Debbie Sterling, founder and chief executive of GoldieBlox, said in an interview. "We wanted to create a cultural shift and close the gender gap and fill some of these jobs that are growing at the speed of light."

In 2010, women earned just 18 percent of computer science degrees, down from 37 percent in 1985, according to the National Center for Women and Information Technology. Analysts say the low numbers are partly because girls are not encouraged to pursue science as often or as enthusiastically as boys.

Ms. Sterling started the company two years ago, after graduating with a degree in product design from the mechanical engineering department at Stanford, where she was disappointed that there were not more women in her classes. She then worked in design and marketing.

GoldieBlox did not work with an ad agency on the video. GoldieBlox's small team, based in Oakland, Calif., conceived the ad over Mexican food a few months ago and produced it and wrote the song. The ad was directed by the Academy, a group of filmmakers in Los Angeles. Brett Doar, an artist who specializes in making machines, created the Rube Goldberg machine.

The ad premiered on YouTube and is not scheduled to appear on TV. (GoldieBlox is a finalist, though, for an Intuit contest to pay for a Super Bowl commercial.) The company has relied on the Internet for other parts of its business, too, raising its initial capital on Kickstarter and benefiting from promotions on Upworthy, a site that posts content with a social mission.

GoldieBlox toys join others on the shelf aimed at encouraging girls to build things and consider engineering. Lego sells a pink set with a girl character, and Mattel introduced a computer engineer Barbie that wears high heels and carries a hot pink laptop.

Yet the pink-washing of those toys, including the toys from GoldieBlox, has been criticized for feeding into the same stereotypes about girls that the ad aims to knock down. One GoldieBlox kit is to build a belt drive — which is pink. Another is to build a parade float for princesses to ride. On Wednesday, they were the top-selling toys on Amazon.com.

Ms. Sterling said she did not believe pink was bad, but that girls should be encouraged to be confident and inventive. She added that new toys were in development.

"It's O.K. to be a princess," she said. "We just think girls can build their own castles too."

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Font of Natural Energy in the Philippines, Crippled by Nature

ORMOC, the Philippines — Clouds of steam surge from fissures in the earth along the beds of mountain streams here that splash down slopes carpeted with coconut palm forests, hints of the enormous source of renewable energy that lies underground.

Engineers have drilled a series of boreholes a mile down into hot volcanic rocks, tapping into superheated water under enormous pressure. The water surges to the surface, expands into steam and then cools, spinning a series of turbines that produce five times as much electricity as all of Leyte Island, with 1.5 million people, can consume. The rest of the electricity is sold to other islands in the Philippines.

Or at least that is the way it is supposed to work. When Typhoon Haiyan barreled across Leyte Island almost two weeks ago with a tsunami-like storm surge and nearly tornado-strength winds, killing thousands of people and effortlessly tearing the roofs off homes, it also damaged the crucial geothermal operations here.

For many in the Philippines, the damage here exemplifies a broader paradox: A storm consistent with some scientists' warnings about climate change has done tremendous damage to an island that is one of the world's biggest success stories of renewable energy, and to a country that has contributed almost nothing to the global accumulation of greenhouse gases.

"Many Filipino families have become climate refugees," said Senator Loren Legarda, the chairwoman of the Philippine Senate's standing committee on climate change. "We may not pollute the world, yet we are victims of extreme weather and climate change."

As if to highlight that rueful conclusion, the United Nations climate talks in Warsaw, which unfolded as the world became aware of the typhoon's savagery, have been marred by bitter quarrels between rich and developing nations.

The Tongonan geothermal field on the outskirts of Ormoc on western Leyte Island is the world's second-largest producer of geothermal energy, after one in California. Yet the operation here is remarkably little known even among renewable energy experts because of its unusual history and a lingering penchant for secrecy for national security reasons.

The New People's Army, one of the world's longest-lasting Maoist insurgencies and an enduring though low-intensity threat on Leyte Island, represents a potential risk to the operations. A small army of soldiers and security guards defends the site and maintains layers of checkpoints to keep visitors out of the mountain valley where five geothermal power plants are.

The extraordinary force of the typhoon's winds shattered the coconut palm forests that line the steep, narrow valley that for years has churned out so much geothermal energy. Particularly near the ridgelines, mile after mile of trees have changed from green to brown since the winds tore loose virtually every frond. The winds then twisted and bent the usually resilient trunks until they snapped or burst.

Sheltered in the valley below, however, the homes of the site's 795 workers seem to have fared surprisingly well, although one of the military barracks has lost much of its green, corrugated steel roof. Agnes de Jesus, the senior vice president for the environment at the Energy Development Corporation, which now owns the power plants, said that no one was killed or seriously injured at the plants during the typhoon, even as the storm surge on the opposite side of the island, 50 miles to the east, killed thousands in the coastal cities of Tacloban, Palo and Tanauan.

Responding to the Arab oil embargo of 1973, President Ferdinand E. Marcos began developing the field in the late 1970s with a small demonstration project. The goal from the start was not environmental, but nationalistic and economic: to reduce the Philippines' dependence on imported energy and save money on fuel bills.

After the demonstration project proved successful, five large geothermal plants were built atop boreholes in the same valley here in the mid-1990s, each big enough even today to power the entire island. Each of the five was built by a different company, and then all five transferred them to a state-owned company.

The state-owned company subsequently privatized them and they became the Energy Development Corporation, a company listed seven years ago on the Philippine Stock Exchange.

The valley here differs from many geothermal sites around the world in that the underground rocks are hotter and what comes up through the boreholes is superpressurized water, not steam.

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Frederick Sanger, 95, Two-Time Winner of Nobel and Pioneer in Genetics, Dies

Frederick Sanger, a British biochemist whose discoveries about the chemistry of life led to the decoding of the human genome and to the development of new drugs like human growth hormone, earning him two Nobel Prizes, a distinction held by only three other scientists, died on Tuesday in Cambridge, England. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Adrian Penrose, communications manager at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge. Dr. Sanger lived in a nearby village called Swaffham Bulbeck.

Dr. Sanger won his first Nobel Prize, in chemistry, in 1958 for showing how amino acids link together to form insulin. The discovery gave scientists the tools to analyze any protein in the body.

In 1980 he received his second Nobel, also in chemistry, for inventing a method of "reading" the molecular letters that make up the genetic code. This discovery was crucial to the development of biotechnology drugs and provided the basic tool kit for decoding the entire human genome two decades later.

Unusual for someone of his stature, Dr. Sanger spent his entire career in a laboratory. Long after receiving his first Nobel, he continued to perform many experiments himself instead of assigning them to junior researchers as is typical in modern science labs. Dr. Sanger said he was not particularly adept at coming up with experiments for others to do and had little aptitude for administration or teaching.

"I was in a position to do more or less what I liked, and that was doing research," he said.

Frederick Sanger was born on Aug. 3, 1918, in Rendcomb, England, where his father was a physician. He expected to follow his father into medicine, but after studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, he decided to become a scientist. His father, he said in a 1988 interview, "led a scrappy sort of life" in which he was "always going from one patient to another."

"I felt I would be much more interested in and much better at something where I could really work on a problem," he said.

He received his bachelor's degree in 1939. Raised as a Quaker, he was a conscientious objector on religious grounds during World War II and remained at Cambridge in those years to work on his doctorate, which he received in 1943.

Later in life, however, he became an agnostic, saying he lacked hard evidence to support his religious beliefs.

"In science, you have to be so careful about truth," he said. "You are studying truth and have to prove everything. I found that it was difficult to believe all the things associated with religion."

Dr. Sanger stayed on at Cambridge and became immersed in the study of proteins. When he started his work, scientists knew that proteins were chains of amino acids, fitted together like a child's colorful snap-bead toy. But there are 22 different amino acids, and scientists had no way of determining the sequence of these amino acid "beads" along the chains.

Dr. Sanger decided to study insulin, a protein that was readily available in a purified form for the treatment of diabetes. His choice of insulin turned out to be a lucky one: with 51 amino acid beads, insulin has a relatively simple structure. Still, it took him 10 years to unlock its chemical sequence.

His approach, which he called the "jigsaw puzzle method," involved breaking insulin into manageable chunks for analysis and then using his knowledge of chemical bonds to fit the pieces back together. Using this technique, scientists went on to determine the sequences of other proteins. Dr. Sanger received the Nobel just four years after he published his results in 1954.

In 1962, Dr. Sanger moved to the British Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where he was surrounded by scientists studying deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the master chemical of heredity.

Scientists knew that DNA, like proteins, had a chainlike structure. The challenge was to determine the order of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine — the chemical bases from which DNA is made. These bases, which are represented by the letters A, T, G and C, spell out the genetic code for all living things.

Dr. Sanger quickly discovered that his jigsaw method was too cumbersome for large pieces of DNA, which contain many thousands of letters. "For a while I didn't see any hope of doing it, though I knew it was an important problem," he said.

But he persisted, developing a more efficient approach that allowed stretches of 500 to 800 letters to be read at a time. His technique, known as the Sanger method, increased by a thousand times the rate at which scientists could sequence DNA.

In 1977, Dr. Sanger decoded the complete genome of a virus that had more than 5,000 letters. It was the first time the DNA of an entire organism had been sequenced. He went on to decode the 16,000 letters of mitochondria, the energy factories in cells.

Because the Sanger method lends itself to computer automation, it has allowed scientists to unravel ever more complicated genomes — including, in 2003, the three billion letters of the human genetic code, giving scientists greater ability to distinguish between normal and abnormal genes.

Dr. Sanger shared the 1980 chemistry Nobel with two other scientists: Paul Berg, who determined how to transfer genetic material from one organism to another, and Walter Gilbert, who, independently of Dr. Sanger, also developed a technique to sequence DNA. Because of its relative simplicity, the Sanger method became the dominant approach.

Other scientists who have received two Nobels are John Bardeen for physics (1956 and 1972), Marie Curie for physics (1903) and chemistry (1911), and Linus Pauling for chemistry (1954) and peace (1962).

Dr. Sanger received the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, often a forerunner to the Nobel, in 1979 for his work on DNA. He retired from the British Medical Research Council in 1983.

Survivors include two sons, Robin and Peter, and a daughter, Sally.

In a 2001 interview, Dr. Sanger spoke about the challenge of winning two Nobel Prizes.

"It's much more difficult to get the first prize than to get the second one," he said, "because if you've already got a prize, then you can get facilities for work, and you can get collaborators, and everything is much easier."

Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.

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Scores of Tornadoes Slam Midwest States

Severe storms moved through the Midwest on Sunday, leveling towns, killing at least six people in Illinois and injuring dozens more, and causing thousands of power failures across the region.

Officials warned of a fast-moving, deadly storm system on Sunday morning and issued tornado watches throughout the day for wide areas of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Wisconsin. By the time the storm had passed on Sunday evening, tornadoes — scores of them, according to the National Weather Service — had left paths of destruction.

Homes were leveled and trees shredded in Washington, Ill., and nearby farms were turned upside down, with farm equipment dotting the landscape.

Weather officials were uncertain just how many confirmed tornadoes might have hit the region. But as of Sunday evening, the National Weather Service website listed reports of at least 77 — most of them in Illinois — although officials cautioned that in some cases there may have been multiple reports on the same storm.

At least six deaths were reported by early Monday morning. An 80-year-old man and his 78-year-old sister were killed when a tornado struck their farm outside New Minden, Ill., about 50 miles east of St. Louis. The man was found in a field about 100 yards from the home, and the woman was found under a pile of rubble, according to the Washington County coroner's office.

A third person was killed in Washington, Ill., one of the hardest-hit towns, and three others were killed in Massac County in Southern Illinois, according to Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. The details of the deaths were not available late Sunday.

Dozens of people were also injured in the town, which has 15,000 residents and is about halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. At least 35 people were taken to a hospital with injuries, according to a statement from OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria. There was also extensive damage in the nearby city of Pekin, which has about 34,000 people.

In Indiana, tornadoes and storm damage were reported in 12 counties, according to Gov. Mike Pence. In Missouri, the utility company Ameren reported that more than 35,000 customers had lost power, mostly in the St. Louis area.

Officials said a tornado also struck Coal City, Ill., about 60 miles southwest of Chicago. At least 100 buildings there were damaged and at least four people were injured, according to local media reports.

Storms also caused extensive damage in East Peoria, officials said.

Members of the Illinois National Guard and other emergency rescue teams were sent to the towns to help with search and recovery operations. Whole neighborhoods in Washington were destroyed, according to Tyler Gee, an alderman on the City Council.

"I went over there immediately after the tornado, walking through the neighborhoods, and I couldn't even tell what street I was on," Mr. Gee told the radio station WBBM in Chicago. "It just completely flattened some of the neighborhoods here in town, hundreds of homes."

Photographs from the town showed overturned cars and piles of debris where homes once stood. The National Guard also sent 10 firefighters and three vehicles to Washington, and the American Red Cross in central Illinois sent volunteers to set up shelters and distribute water and food.

Washington town officials implemented an overnight curfew on Sunday starting at 6 p.m., said Ms. Arnold of the Illinois Emergency Management Agency. Officials were worried about safety because of the debris and downed power lines, she said.

There were several shelters for evacuees, she said, including one at the Crossroads United Methodist Church in Washington.

In Roanoke, Ill., about 15 miles east of Washington, one family was at church on Sunday when a tornado hit their farm. Tony Johnson of Germantown Hills said he arrived at his niece's farm about 30 minutes after the tornado passed and found that it had destroyed everything in its path. His niece and her husband and three children were not home when the storm hit, he said.

"The house is gone, everything is leveled," Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview. "There is nothing that is usable. Their trucks were tossed around like toys."

Soon, neighbors started arriving to help the family sift through the rubble, he said.

"You get that in the heartland for sure," he said. "There were probably 100 people there to help — it was just amazing."

On Sunday evening, officials were still trying to assess the damage. Telephone lines in the most devastated towns were not working, making it difficult to get more information, said Patti Thompson, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.

Thunderstorms and strong winds also caused problems in Chicago, disrupting power and hundreds of flights and delaying a National Football League game.

Fans attending the afternoon football game at Soldier Field were asked to leave the stands and take shelter during the first quarter of the Bears' game against the Baltimore Ravens. The game was suspended for almost two hours before play resumed, and the Bears finished with a victory.

More than 230 flights were canceled at O'Hare International Airport because of the weather, and many other flights were delayed. Flights were also delayed at Midway Airport in Chicago.

Wind gusts reached as high as 75 miles per hour in the Chicago area, according to the National Weather Service.

The storm caused widespread power failures in Chicago and nearby suburbs. There were at least 89,000 reported losses of power in Northern Illinois, according to ComEd, the utility company that serves the city.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: November 21, 2013

Because of an editing error, a picture credit on Monday with an article about a deadly tornado outbreak in the Midwest misidentified the photographer who took the picture of a tornado outside Flatville, Ill. It was by Jessie Starkey of The News-Gazette in central Illinois — not by John Dixon/News-Gazette via Associated Press.

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Patenting Their Discoveries Does Not Pay Off for Most Universities, a Study Says

Universities try to cash in on discoveries — gene splicing, brain chemistry, computer-chip design — but the great majority of them fail to turn their research into a source of income, according to a new study from the Brookings Institution.

Research universities have "technology transfer" offices that make thousands of business deals annually for the use of their patents. But in any given year, at about seven of eight universities, the resulting revenue funneled into university budgets is not even enough to cover the cost of running that office, said the study's author, Walter D. Valdivia.

Universities make money from patents primarily by licensing them to outside companies, which turn them into commercial products. Mr. Valdivia said the universities needed to become more aggressive about nurturing new businesses, encouraging professors to start new companies based on the patents and making licensing deals that would give them an ownership stake in corporations, not just a share of the royalties.

A 1980 federal law gave universities ownership of patents arising from federally funded research, and the results have generally been seen as a boon to universities. They make more than 4,000 patent licensing agreements annually and collect about $2 billion a year in licensing revenue, according to surveys by the Association of University Technology Managers.

But only a small number of universities consistently produce lucrative breakthroughs and collect the vast majority of the money. A blockbuster discovery can alter a university's fortunes, like the patents on inserting foreign DNA into cells, which brought $790 million to Columbia University, or the patents leading to the drug Remicade, used to treat autoimmune diseases, from which New York University collected more than $1 billion.

The vast majority of licensing deals yield little or no money, and for most universities the royalty returns are low. And the odds of finding the elusive game changer are small.

"There's nothing inherently wrong with the current model, but it isn't enough. There need to be more alternatives," Mr. Valdivia said. "They have historically put all their efforts into hoping for a blockbuster patent and then aggressively negotiating licensing fees, which alienates industry instead of making it a partner."

Universities are increasingly eager to find new sources of revenue, as they see projections of shrinking student populations, declining government support and growing resistance to tuition increases.

The report touches on a long-running debate within universities about the proper role of academia, and whether professors should be entrepreneurs and their labs business incubators. That approach has been embraced for years in some disciplines, notably computer sciences, and at some universities, like Stanford, which has converted work done within its walls into minority stakes in high-tech companies including Google.

Some schools have gone so far as to set aside space for budding business moguls to get started, a central feature of Cornell University's planned applied-sciences graduate school on Roosevelt Island. The number of university licensing agreements grows each year, but the share that give the university an ownership stake in the company (about one in 10) or result in the creation of a start-up company (about one for every seven deals) has changed little in the last several years. Some schools, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Utah, make dozens of such deals annually, but many more research universities go years without making any.

Those strategies can take years to earn a financial return, if they ever do, whereas collecting royalties from a major corporation can pay off quickly. And start-ups often need help with things like navigating government bureaucracy and finding work space.

"There's a growing understanding, more in some places than in others, that it can't just be about revenue," Mr. Valdivia said. "It's about creating an entrepreneurial environment, about taking advantage of the strengths in your university and your region's economy, and if you do that the benefits will follow."

In a typical licensing deal, the royalties are split three ways — by the researchers, their academic department and the university's general fund — an arrangement that can seem very generous to the scientist but paltry to the school. In a typical year, Mr. Valdivia estimated, that last one-third covers the cost of operating technology-transfer offices at only 13 percent of research universities.

The Brookings report calls on Congress to make it easier for researchers to use patented technology, short of commercializing it, and to direct funding to university technology transfer.

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Colorado Governor Proposes Strict Limits on Greenhouse Gas Leaks From Drilling

Gov. John W. Hickenlooper of Colorado proposed on Monday tough new limits on leaks of methane and other gases from well sites and storage tanks. Supporters called the limits, which would exceed existing federal rules, the most sweeping in the nation.

Although the rules would also cover traditional petroleum and gas exploration and production, pollution from fracking — hydraulic fracturing, used to extract gas and oil from rock formations — is the driving force behind the proposal.

The proposal, which would directly regulate emissions of methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, for the first time, came just after Colorado voters indicated their unease with the state's booming oil and gas industry in elections this month.

Mr. Hickenlooper developed the proposal in negotiations with three of the state's largest oil and gas developers — Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, Encana Corporation and Noble Energy — and the Environmental Defense Fund, a national advocacy group.

Among other measures, it would require companies to regularly search for and repair gas leaks in their drilling and production equipment and to keep records of their findings.

It would also regulate aspects of production to keep escaping gases to a minimum — for instance, by requiring the use of high-efficiency burners when flaring gas at well sites, or by limiting emissions from valves that are designed to bleed gas when opening or closing.

Equally important, many provisions would apply to existing as well as new wells and equipment, requiring retrofits to ensure that older sites comply with the new rules.

According to the federal Energy Information Administration, the number of producing wells in Colorado rose nearly 50 percent from 2006 to 2011, to more than 30,000, mostly because of the growth of fracking.

In recent years, a smoggy haze has crept across the front range of the Rocky Mountains north of Denver, where new wells are concentrated, partly as a result of gas leaks that have reacted with other chemicals to form ozone. Nine counties in the area, including much of Rocky Mountain National Park, exceed federal ozone limits.

Pollution appears to have been one reason voters in four Colorado towns and cities enacted bans or moratoriums on fracking within their boundaries. The votes were widely seen as a rebuff to the fracking industry and to Mr. Hickenlooper, a Democrat and onetime geologist who has strongly backed increased oil and gas exploration.

In crucial respects, the new proposal goes well beyond the restrictions that the federal Environmental Protection Agency began enforcing last year.

The federal rules apply primarily to new wells, leaving thousands of older sites exempt from regulation, and cover only leaks of volatile organic compounds. They do not directly limit leaks of methane, although requirements to limit emissions of volatile organic compounds also end up reducing methane.

Nor do the federal rules require companies to check for leaks at well sites and repair them.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, breaks down relatively quickly in the atmosphere, but its impact on global warming over a 100-year period is at least 20 times that of the most common greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide.

Officials at the Environmental Defense Fund and one of the petroleum companies, Anadarko, said the proposal would benefit the industry and the environment. The fund's president, Fred Krupp, called it "a model for the nation."

A spokesman for Anadarko, John Christiansen, said in an interview that the rules would not only reduce pollution but also benefit oil and gas firms financially by reducing the amount of natural gas wasted.

"We have 1,300 employees in Colorado, and they all share the same goal with all residents that live there," he said. "It's about cleaner air."

The proposal is designed to place the stiffest requirements on big producers like Anadarko. But Mr. Christiansen said many of the biggest companies had already deployed many of the pollution-reducing measures that the new Colorado rules would require. Smaller operators are likely to face the biggest adjustment, and the largest expense, should the proposal be adopted by the state's Air Quality Control Commission.

The Colorado Oil and Gas Association, which represents the industry, offered a more muted response, saying in a news release that its officials looked forward to reviewing the proposal.

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