Dot Earth Blog: White House Stresses Widespread Energy Progress Ahead of New Climate Rule

The White House has released a report charting progress on several energy fronts that is clearly aimed at setting the stage ahead of President Obama's expected announcement next Monday of the first regulations restricting carbon dioxide from existing power plants. (It's been a very long journey — abetted by an important Supreme Court decision – since President George W. Bush tried to restrict carbon dioxide from such plants and quickly reversed course.)

One interesting facet of the report, "The All-Of-The-Above Energy Strategy as a Path to Sustainable Economic Growth," is how much of the progress it describes — particularly in reductions of petroleum and coal use — came as a complete surprise. (Read "Why Energy Forecasting Goes Wildly Wrong," a recent paper in the Journal of Energy Security, for some background on this consistent phenomenon.) Here's one graph that shows how this works:

There's plenty of value in the report besides the reminder not to pay too much attention to predictions. But I still think the president needs to do more than proclaim "all of the above." Among other things, Obama needs to spell out more clearly how he plans to clamp down on leakage from natural gas production, sustain investments in basic energy research despite lower energy prices and also overcome barriers to the deployment of non-polluting energy technologies.

On a related front, it'll be interesting to see if the White House tries to use the power plant rule as leverage in moving beyond the fight over the increasingly irrelevant Keystone pipeline extension. In 2011, I wrote, "This particular pipeline has a good chance of dying on the vine in any case if and when easier, less expensive sources of transportation fuel come online" and that appears to be what's happening.

Over all, the report, and the hints of what's coming next week, show that the White House is largely on a wise track. And it's a track that synchronizes well with an important pitch for a new post-treaty approach to climate negotiations outlined by former senators Tim Wirth and Tom Daschle in Yale Environment 360 last week. Wirth and Daschle see failure ahead if the goal in late 2015 at talks in Paris is a binding document:

Rather than strive for an elusive, binding global treaty, the idea is to encourage countries to make strong national commitments in their own economic self-interest and then roll those up in the Paris agreement, which would not take the form of a treaty and thus would not need to be ratified. Countries would be motivated to take these actions in response to competition, both economic and political; international peer pressure; and the aspirations of their own people. The overarching goal is to spur national action to bend the carbon curve downward in a meaningful and measurable fashion, giving greater certainty to the private sector to innovate and invest in low-carbon technologies. This is the world's best option for accelerating progress and averting catastrophic climate change.

It's a remarkable and creditable shift away from the 20th-century approach, which focused on binding, but unenforceable, targets and timetables that would never be accepted by the countries that mattered most (the United States and China). "A triumph of climate pragmatism," indeed.

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Phys Ed: To Age Well, Walk

Phys Ed

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

Regular exercise, including walking, significantly reduces the chance that a frail older person will become physically disabled, according to one of the largest and longest-running studies of its kind to date.

The results, published on Tuesday in the journal JAMA, reinforce the necessity of frequent physical activity for our aging parents, grandparents and, of course, ourselves.

While everyone knows that exercise is a good idea, whatever your age, the hard, scientific evidence about its benefits in the old and infirm has been surprisingly limited.

"For the first time, we have directly shown that exercise can effectively lessen or prevent the development of physical disability in a population of extremely vulnerable elderly people," said Dr. Marco Pahor, the director of the Institute on Aging at the University of Florida in Gainesville and the lead author of the study.

Countless epidemiological studies have found a strong correlation between physical activity in advanced age and a longer, healthier life. But such studies can't prove that exercise improves older people's health, only that healthy older people exercise.

Other small-scale, randomized experiments have persuasively established a causal link between exercise and healthy aging. But the scope of these experiments has generally been narrow, showing, for instance, that older people can improve their muscle strength with weight training or their endurance capacity with walking.

So, for this latest study, the Lifestyle Interventions and Independence for Elders, or LIFE, trial, scientists at eight universities and research centers around the country began recruiting volunteers in 2010, using an unusual set of selection criteria. Unlike many exercise studies, which tend to be filled with people in relatively robust health who can easily exercise, this trial used volunteers who were sedentary and infirm, and on the cusp of frailty.

Ultimately, they recruited 1,635 sedentary men and women aged 70 to 89 who scored below a nine on a 12-point scale of physical functioning often used to assess older people. Almost half scored an eight or lower, but all were able to walk on their own for 400 meters, or a quarter-mile, the researchers' cutoff point for being physically disabled.

Then the men and women were randomly assigned to either an exercise or an education group.

Those in the education assignment were asked to visit the research center once a month or so to learn about nutrition, health care and other topics related to aging.

The exercise group received information about aging but also started a program of walking and light, lower-body weight training with ankle weights, going to the research center twice a week for supervised group walks on a track, with the walks growing progressively longer. They were also asked to complete three or four more exercise sessions at home, aiming for a total of 150 minutes of walking and about three 10-minute sessions of weight-training exercises each week.

Every six months, researchers checked the physical functioning of all of the volunteers, with particular attention to whether they could still walk 400 meters by themselves.

The experiment continued for an average of 2.6 years, which is far longer than most exercise studies.

By the end of that time, the exercising volunteers were about 18 percent less likely to have experienced any episode of physical disability during the experiment. They were also about 28 percent less likely to have become persistently, possibly permanently disabled, defined as being unable to walk those 400 meters by themselves.

Most of the volunteers "tolerated the exercise program very well," Dr. Pahor said, but the results did raise some flags. More volunteers in the exercise group wound up hospitalized during the study than did the participants in the education group, possibly because their vital signs were checked far more often, the researchers say. The exercise regimen may also have "unmasked" underlying medical conditions, Dr. Pahor said, although he does not feel that the exercise itself led to hospital stays.

A subtler concern involves the surprisingly small difference, in absolute terms, in the number of people who became disabled in the two groups. About 35 percent of those in the education group had a period of physical disability during the study. But so did 30 percent of those in the exercise group.

"At first glance, those results are underwhelming," said Dr. Lewis Lipsitz, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife in Boston, who was not involved with the study. "But then you have to look at the control group, which wasn't really a control group at all." That's because in many cases the participants in the education group began to exercise, study data shows, although they were not asked to do so.

"It wouldn't have been ethical" to keep them from exercise, Dr. Lipsitz continued. But if the scientists in the LIFE study "had been able to use a control group of completely sedentary older people with poor eating habits, the differences between the groups would be much more pronounced," he said.

Over all, Dr. Lipsitz said, "it's an important study because it focuses on an important outcome, which is the prevention of physical disability."

In the coming months, Dr. Pahor and his colleagues plan to mine their database of results for additional followup, including a cost-benefit analysis.

The exercise intervention cost about $1,800 per participant per year, Dr. Pahor said, including reimbursement for travel to the research centers. But that figure is "considerably less" than the cost of full-time nursing care after someone becomes physically disabled, he said. He and his colleagues hope that the study prompts Medicare to begin covering the costs of group exercise programs for older people.

Dr. Pahor cautioned that the LIFE study is not meant to prompt elderly people to begin solo, unsupervised exercise. "Medical supervision is important," he said. Talk with your doctor and try to find an exercise group, he said, adding, "The social aspect is important."

Mildred Johnston, 82, a retired office worker in Gainesville who volunteered for the LIFE trial, has kept up weekly walks with two of the other volunteers she met during the study.

"Exercising has changed my whole aspect on what aging means," she said. "It's not about how much help you need from other people now. It's more about what I can do for myself." Besides, she said, gossiping during her group walks "really keeps you engaged with life."

A version of this article appears in print on 05/28/2014, on page A12 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Exercise for Older Adults Helps Reduce Their Risk Of Disability, Study Says .

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Dot Earth Blog: On World Fish Migration Day, Recalling When America’s Rivers Ran Silver

[If you're visiting thanks to Tom Friedman's kind Dot Earth mention in his column on acting with a long-term perspective, here's a link to the piece he's quoting from.]

John Waldman is a Queens College biology professor and author focused on the bountiful past and potential restoration of the waters of the Northeast. I loved "Heartbeats in the Muck," his history of the changing biology of the 1,500 square miles of New York Harbor, and am enjoying his new book, "Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations," which achingly describes the bygone biological bounty of eastern waterways and lays out strategies for bringing back at least a hint of that richness.

The book does for river-spawning fishes what Callum Roberts' great book "The Unnatural History of the Sea" did for marine species.

Waldman got in touch recently to let me know that today is the inaugural World Fish Migration Day and offered this short reflection drawing on his research: 

Can America's Eastern Rivers Run Silver Again?

By John Waldman

The great seasonal movements of fish, be they coveted species such as bluefin tuna and cod or prey species like menhaden, are one of the essential elements of many aquatic ecosystems. A spectacular example is the migrations between rivers and the sea by the so-called anadromous species such as salmon, shad, river herring and sturgeon. Local community events are being held today at 250 international locations to celebrate the importance of these movements and to highlight the need to protect and restore them with the first ever "World Fish Migration Day." Activities include the celebration of the removal of a dam in Japan and the inauguration of over 20 new "fishways" past dams on rivers around the globe. The theme of the day — organized by The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and the Dutch Wanningen Water Consult — is "Connecting Fish, Rivers and People."

In my new book, "Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and their Great Fish Migrations," I seek to reconnect people with the fish that once thrived in the damaged, blocked and long-depleted rivers of the East Coast.

I wrote the book in part to learn what pristine runs of migratory fish in Atlantic rivers looked like. In the writings of early colonists, there were so many salmon, shad, alewives and other species swimming upriver to spawn that the waters were said to "run silver" with these fish. And they were caught in numbers we can hardly imagine anymore — one single net haul in 1827 on the Susquehanna River was estimated to contain 15 million shad and river herring. Today, the runs of shad and river herring for a whole season on the Susquehanna and other rivers may number only in the hundreds or low thousands. Similarly, while a half million Atlantic salmon once returned to New England rivers each year, all of those runs combined totaled just 611 fish in 2013.

The devastation, over generations, of these fish migrations is a perfect example of "shifting baselines" — the phenomenon by which extraordinary losses of valuable resources take place in plain sight but largely unnoticed. It is not just the mass of fish that is lost. The vanishing of these migrations leaves glaring gaps in the ecologies of their rivers.  Dams have been the chief driver of these declines.

But overfishing, pollution, the water intakes of power plants, non-native species and, in the long run, climate change are major contributors, as well.

Portents of what has transpired were evident as long ago as 1839, when Henry David Thoreau paddled on the 1839 journey that formed the basis of his book "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."  He noted how healthy waterways were already being sacrificed for the power and waste disposal needs of industry and he predicted misfortune for their migratory fish.

Thoreau makes many references to their plight, even asking rhetorically: "Who hears the fishes when they cry?"

He urges them to "keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet."

Waldman sees the book as just step one in what he calls the "Running Silver Project." Thanks to the work of Waldman and many other scientists, conservationists and communicators, eastern migratory fishes at least have a fighting chance.

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Bits Blog: My T-Shirt Told Me to Take a Chill Pill

My T-shirt tells me things.

My heart rate, for instance: 62 beats a minute. And my breathing: 17 breaths a minute.

Unless I drink too many cappuccinos or a deadline looms. Then my T-shirt tells me my that heart rate has jumped to the high 80s, my breathing to 22.

My T-shirt is connected to me and also to the Internet. So along with an iPhone app, it can remind me to take a breath, relax, chill.

Seriously. The T-shirt I'm wearing was made by OMsignal of Montreal. It has sensors that are supposed to pick up all sorts of data about me — the aforementioned vital signs, plus how many calories I burn and even how stressed I am.

OMsignal is a part of a new breed of young companies focusing on wearable technology. We're not talking about Google Glass here. These are products made out of biometric materials, or smart textiles. And yes, these products are starting to hit the market. Their fans say they could represent the future of wearable computing.

Lots of people wear fitness bands that can monitor their health. Whether those products deliver all they promise is questionable. But why wear a wristband when you're already wearing clothes? Weave some sensors into the fabric, and you have one accessory fewer to worry about.

"Smart clothing is easy because it's the only wearable medium you've already been wearing your whole life," said Stéphane Marceau, co-founder of OMsignal. "In a decade, every piece of apparel you buy will have some sort of biofeedback sensors built in it."

Many challenges must be overcome first, not the least of which is price. OMsignal shirts start at $80, but they also need a module, which powers the shirt and talks to its sensors, that costs $120. But the shirt is machine washable.

"The leap that you have to make from a prototype or small-lot sizes of these wearables to an affordable mass-market product is pretty significant," said Jonathan Gaw, research manager for IDC Research. "The price is going to have to come way down before it becomes a product for most consumers."

Mr. Gaw said that wearable apparel would be used first for fitness, wellness and medical applications by a select group of consumers. He warned that it could be slow going for most people. "In terms of these being mainstream, and something that people will use on a daily basis, you're getting into Buck Rogers territory there," he said.

But Mr. Marceau of OMsignal said consumers were getting to a point where they want more information about themselves. "The first cars were completely blind. Then you had a gas gauge. Then a speedometer. Now you can't imagine a car without these things," he said. "Smart clothing is starting to do the same thing for the human body."

Most smart textile products use conductive yarns that can transmit electrical signals. The sensors woven into these materials are either so small you can't see them or so flexible you don't notice them. While many of these garments require a battery pack of sorts, some are experimenting with applications in which a smartphone can transmit power and Internet access to sensors and screens that are attached to the clothing.

"This type of fabric, until now, was a laboratory experiment, and no companies were able to develop something that would be a mass-scale product," said Eliane Fiolet, co-founder of Ubergizmo, the technology website. "Now you have companies that are claiming to figure out a manufacturing process that is viable to introduce these garments at scale." Ms. Fiolet said incorporating sensors into clothing, rather than wristbands, made sense. Clothing, after all, covers more of the body.

These sorts of devices are already emerging out of labs. Cityzen Sciences, based in Lyon, France, makes T-shirts that have microsensors embedded in the fabric. These sensors can monitor a person's temperature, heart rate and location. The company won the award for the most innovative new product at this year's International CES.

Sensilk, based in San Francisco, is making a smart bra with sensors to track a wearer's fitness. And the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has funded a number of projects to make wearable computerized clothing for soldiers. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a product called WearArm, which is a computing platform like iOS or Android, but one specifically for smart clothing.

The possibilities don't end there. A number of universities and research labs have experimented with wearable technology that can help blind people navigate city streets, such as gloves that vibrate when a user needs to make a turn. And then there is Studio Roosegaarde, a design lab in the Netherlands. It has developed a dress called Intimacy 2.0 with an opaque fabric that becomes transparent when its wearer is aroused — bringing T.M.I. to a whole new level.

A version of this article appears in print on 05/26/2014, on page B5 of the NewYork edition with the headline: My T-Shirt Told Me to Take a Chill Pill.

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Dot Earth Blog: On World Fish Migration Day, Recalling When America’s Rivers Ran Silver

[If you're visiting thanks to Tom Friedman's kind Dot Earth mention in his column on acting with a long-term perspective, here's a link to the piece he's quoting from.]

John Waldman is a Queens College biology professor and author focused on the bountiful past and potential restoration of the waters of the Northeast. I loved "Heartbeats in the Muck," his history of the changing biology of the 1,500 square miles of New York Harbor, and am enjoying his new book, "Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and Their Great Fish Migrations," which achingly describes the bygone biological bounty of eastern waterways and lays out strategies for bringing back at least a hint of that richness.

The book does for river-spawning fishes what Callum Roberts' great book "The Unnatural History of the Sea" did for marine species.

Waldman got in touch recently to let me know that today is the inaugural World Fish Migration Day and offered this short reflection drawing on his research: 

Can America's Eastern Rivers Run Silver Again?

By John Waldman

The great seasonal movements of fish, be they coveted species such as bluefin tuna and cod or prey species like menhaden, are one of the essential elements of many aquatic ecosystems. A spectacular example is the migrations between rivers and the sea by the so-called anadromous species such as salmon, shad, river herring and sturgeon. Local community events are being held today at 250 international locations to celebrate the importance of these movements and to highlight the need to protect and restore them with the first ever "World Fish Migration Day." Activities include the celebration of the removal of a dam in Japan and the inauguration of over 20 new "fishways" past dams on rivers around the globe. The theme of the day — organized by The Nature Conservancy, Wetlands International, and the Dutch Wanningen Water Consult — is "Connecting Fish, Rivers and People."

In my new book, "Running Silver: Restoring Atlantic Rivers and their Great Fish Migrations," I seek to reconnect people with the fish that once thrived in the damaged, blocked and long-depleted rivers of the East Coast.

I wrote the book in part to learn what pristine runs of migratory fish in Atlantic rivers looked like. In the writings of early colonists, there were so many salmon, shad, alewives and other species swimming upriver to spawn that the waters were said to "run silver" with these fish. And they were caught in numbers we can hardly imagine anymore — one single net haul in 1827 on the Susquehanna River was estimated to contain 15 million shad and river herring. Today, the runs of shad and river herring for a whole season on the Susquehanna and other rivers may number only in the hundreds or low thousands. Similarly, while a half million Atlantic salmon once returned to New England rivers each year, all of those runs combined totaled just 611 fish in 2013.

The devastation, over generations, of these fish migrations is a perfect example of "shifting baselines" — the phenomenon by which extraordinary losses of valuable resources take place in plain sight but largely unnoticed. It is not just the mass of fish that is lost. The vanishing of these migrations leaves glaring gaps in the ecologies of their rivers.  Dams have been the chief driver of these declines.

But overfishing, pollution, the water intakes of power plants, non-native species and, in the long run, climate change are major contributors, as well.

Portents of what has transpired were evident as long ago as 1839, when Henry David Thoreau paddled on the 1839 journey that formed the basis of his book "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."  He noted how healthy waterways were already being sacrificed for the power and waste disposal needs of industry and he predicted misfortune for their migratory fish.

Thoreau makes many references to their plight, even asking rhetorically: "Who hears the fishes when they cry?"

He urges them to "keep a stiff fin then, and stem all the tides thou mayst meet."

Waldman sees the book as just step one in what he calls the "Running Silver Project." Thanks to the work of Waldman and many other scientists, conservationists and communicators, eastern migratory fishes at least have a fighting chance.

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Dot Earth Blog: Gavin Schmidt on Why Climate Models are Wrong, and Valuable

I'm overdue to draw your attention to two fresh, and very different, discussions of climate science by Gavin Schmidt, the longtime climate modeler at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

First is his conversation with Perrin Ireland, a science illustrator with a playful touch at the Natural Resources Defense Council. She created an animated cartoon of their interview, which took place over lunch at Tom's Restaurant, a rather fabled diner on the ground floor of the building housing the institute:

Then there's Schmidt's presentation on climate modeling at this year's TED conference, which took place in Vancouver in February:

Here's an excerpt from the transcript, which can be explored in full here:

…Models are not right or wrong; they're always wrong. They're always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it's skillful….

I could go through a dozen…examples: the skill associated with solar cycles, changing the ozone in the stratosphere; the skill associated with orbital changes over 6,000 years. We can look at that too, and the models are skillful. The models are skillful in response to the ice sheets 20,000 years ago. The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades. Models are successful at modeling lake outbursts into the North Atlantic 8,000 years ago. And we can get a good match to the data.

Each of these different targets, each of these different evaluations, leads us to add more scope to these models, and leads us to more and more complex situations that we can ask more and more interesting questions, like, how does dust from the Sahara, that you can see in the orange, interact with tropical cyclones in the Atlantic? How do organic aerosols from biomass burning, which you can see in the red dots, intersect with clouds and rainfall patterns? How does pollution, which you can see in the white wisps of sulfate pollution in Europe, how does that affect the temperatures at the surface and the sunlight that you get at the surface?

…We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it's gotten warmer. We know where it's gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it's because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day.

But there's one key reason why we look at models, and that's because of this phrase here. Because if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, But unfortunately, observations of the future are not available at this time.

So when we go out into the future, there's a difference. The future is unknown, the future is uncertain, and there are choices. Here are the choices that we have. We can do some work to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's the top one. We can do more work to really bring it down so that by the end of the century, it's not much more than there is now. Or we can just leave it to fate and continue on with a business-as-usual type of attitude. The differences between these choices can't be answered by looking at models.

There's a great phrase that Sherwood Rowland, who won the Nobel Prize for the chemistry that led to ozone depletion, when he was accepting his Nobel Prize, he asked this question: "What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?" [Rowland background] The models are skillful, but what we do with the information from those models is totally up to you….

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Well: Remembering, as an Extreme Sport

Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

SAN DIEGO – The last match of the tournament had all the elements of a classic showdown, pitting style versus stealth, quickness versus deliberation, and the world's foremost card virtuoso against its premier numbers wizard.

If not quite Ali-Frazier or Williams-Sharapova, the duel was all the audience of about 100 could ask for. They had come to the first Extreme Memory Tournament, or XMT, to see a fast-paced, digitally enhanced memory contest, and that's what they got.

The contest, an unusual collaboration between industry and academic scientists, featured one-minute matches between 16 world-class "memory athletes" from all over the world as they met in a World Cup-like elimination format. The grand prize was $20,000; the potential scientific payoff was large, too.

One of the tournament's sponsors, the company Dart NeuroScience, is working to develop drugs for improved cognition. The other, Washington University in St. Louis, sent a research team with a battery of cognitive tests to determine what, if anything, sets memory athletes apart. Previous research was sparse and inconclusive.

Yet as the two finalists, both Germans, prepared to face off — Simon Reinhard, 35, a lawyer who holds the world record in card memorization (a deck in 21.19 seconds), and Johannes Mallow, 32, a teacher with the record for memorizing digits (501 in five minutes) — the Washington group had one preliminary finding that wasn't obvious.

"We found that one of the biggest differences between memory athletes and the rest of us," said Henry L. Roediger III, the psychologist who led the research team, "is in a cognitive ability that's not a direct measure of memory at all but of attention."

The Memory Palace

The technique the competitors use is no mystery.

People have been performing feats of memory for ages, scrolling out pi to hundreds of digits, or phenomenally long verses, or word pairs. Most store the studied material in a so-called memory palace, associating the numbers, words or cards with specific images they have already memorized; then they mentally place the associated pairs in a familiar location, like the rooms of a childhood home or the stops on a subway line.

The Greek poet Simonides of Ceos is credited with first describing the method, in the fifth century B.C., and it has been vividly described in popular books, most recently "Moonwalking With Einstein," by Joshua Foer.

Each competitor has his or her own variation. "When I see the eight of diamonds and the queen of spades, I picture a toilet, and my friend Guy Plowman," said Ben Pridmore, 37, an accountant in Derby, England, and a former champion. "Then I put those pictures on High Street in Cambridge, which is a street I know very well."

As these images accumulate during memorization, they tell an increasingly bizarre but memorable story. "I often use movie scenes as locations," said James Paterson, 32, a high school psychology teacher in Ascot, near London, who competes in world events. "In the movie 'Gladiator,' which I use, there's a scene where Russell Crowe is in a field, passing soldiers, inspecting weapons."

Mr. Paterson uses superheroes to represent combinations of letters or numbers: "I might have Batman — one of my images — playing Russell Crowe, and something else playing the horse, and so on."

The material that competitors attempt to memorize falls into several standard categories. Shuffled decks of cards. Random words. Names matched with faces. And numbers, either binary (ones and zeros) or integers. They are given a set amount of time to study — up to one minute in this tournament, an hour or more in others — before trying to reproduce as many cards, words or digits in the order presented.

Now and then, a challenger boasts online of having discovered an entirely new method, and shows up at competitions to demonstrate it.

"Those people are easy to find, because they come in last, or close to it," said another world-class competitor, Boris Konrad, 29, a German postdoctoral student in neuroscience. "Everyone here uses this same type of technique."

Anyone can learn to construct a memory palace, researchers say, and with practice remember far more detail of a particular subject than before. The technique is accessible enough that preteens pick it up quickly, and Mr. Paterson has integrated it into his teaching.

"I've got one boy, for instance, he has no interest in academics really, but he knows the Premier League, every team, every player," he said. "I'm working with him, and he's using that knowledge as scaffolding to help remember what he's learning in class."

Experts in Forgetting

The competitors gathered here for the XMT are not just anyone, however. This is the all-world team, an elite club of laser-smart types who take a nerdy interest in stockpiling facts and pushing themselves hard.

In his doctoral study of 30 world-class performers (most from Germany, which has by far the highest concentration because there are more competitions), Mr. Konrad has found as much. The average I.Q.: 130. Average study time: 1,000 to 2,000 hours and counting. The top competitors all use some variation of the memory-palace system and test, retest and tweak it.

"I started with my own system, but now I use his," said Annalena Fischer, 20, pointing to her boyfriend, Christian Schäfer, 22, whom she met at a 2010 memory competition in Germany. "Except I don't use the distance runners he uses; I don't know anything about the distance runners." Both are advanced science students and participants in Mr. Konrad's study.

One of the Washington University findings is predictable, if still preliminary: Memory athletes score very highly on tests of working memory, the mental sketchpad that serves as a shopping list of information we can hold in mind despite distractions.

One way to measure working memory is to have subjects solve a list of equations (5 + 4 = x; 8 + 9 = y; 7 + 2 = z; and so on) while keeping the middle numbers in mind (4, 9 and 2 in the above example). Elite memory athletes can usually store seven items, the top score on the test the researchers used; the average for college students is around two.

"And college students tend to be good at this task," said Dr. Roediger, a co-author of the new book "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning." "What I'd like to do is extend the scoring up to, say, 21, just to see how far the memory athletes can go."

Yet this finding raises another question: Why don't the competitors' memory palaces ever fill up? Players usually have many favored locations to store studied facts, but they practice and compete repeatedly. They use and reuse the same blueprints hundreds of times, and the new images seem to overwrite the old ones — virtually without error.

"Once you've remembered the words or cards or whatever it is, and reported them, they're just gone," Mr. Paterson said.

Many competitors say the same: Once any given competition is over, the numbers or words or facts are gone. But this is one area in which they have less than precise insight.

In its testing, which began last year, the Washington University team has given memory athletes surprise tests on "old" material — lists of words they'd been tested on the day before. On Day 2, they recalled an average of about three-quarters of the words they memorized on Day 1 (college students remembered fewer than 5 percent). That is, despite what competitors say, the material is not gone; far from it.

Yet to install a fresh image-laden "story" in any given memory palace, a memory athlete must clear away the old one in its entirety. The same process occurs when we change a password: The old one must be suppressed, so it doesn't interfere with the new one.

One term for that skill is "attentional control," and psychologists have been measuring it for years with standardized tests. In the best known, the Stroop test, people see words flash by on a computer screen and name the color in which a word is presented. Answering is nearly instantaneous when the color and the word match — "red" displayed in red — but slower when there's a mismatch, like "red" displayed in blue.

"Memory athletes are a little older on average than college students, so you'd expect them to do worse, because we know this ability declines with age," said Mary A. Pyc, a psychologist at Washington University who, with Kathleen McDermott and David Balota, rounded out the research team. "But in fact they do better," staying focused on the colors and blocking out the words. Outside experts familiar with the work say the findings are likely to hold up, given what is known about memory.

"While attentional control is not a direct measure of memory, we know that it certainly serves memory," said Zachary Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State. The skill is crucial in memory competitions, he added, "and it's one that likely has a genetic component, given what we know about expertise."

In short, memory champions are not only exceptional at remembering. They're also experts at forgetting. To put it another way, competitors stumble not when they remember too little but when they remember too much. The new research on extreme memory suggests that remembering and forgetting are not necessarily related in the way it seems, the one the enemy of the other.

The Final Showdown

All of that seemed academic when Mr. Reinhard and Mr. Mallow took their places on stage at sundown (well, late afternoon) on a recent Sunday to close out the tournament. The two are good friends who train and travel together. But this was all business, a best-of-nine series with the winner getting a fat check.

"Look, there are spelling bees, there's poker on TV, there's hot-dog eating contests — memory contests should be popular; everyone is fascinated by memory," said the master of ceremonies, Nelson Dellis, 30, the United States champion, who persuaded executives at Dart NeuroScience to co-sponsor the event and who designed the format.

For spectator appeal, Mr. Dellis, a consultant based in Miami, installed large flat screens that displayed the competitors' every move, as in televised poker.

The first category was words. The two studied 50, all in their native German, taking no more than a minute. The seconds flew, and the pair began entering the words into their computers, which were in turn projected onto the screens so the audience could follow. Mr. Reinhard, dressed all in black, was in motion, rocking in his chair, jerking this way and that, as if physically touring his memory palaces; he jumped out to an early lead, with 43 words correct and time ticking down.

Mr. Mallow, still stuck at 16, looked nearly meditative, poking at his computer in a way that seemed almost leisurely. He'd been here before; only an hour or so earlier, he came back from a 3-0 deficit in the semifinals against the current world champion, a Swedish wunderkind named Jonas von Essen. Mr. Mallow can start slow and finish like Usain Bolt.

Yet it wouldn't happen this time. After losing the words test, Mr. Mallow won the numbers category, but in the cards match Mr. Reinhard was fast and meticulous, arranging his cards in order on his computer in practically no time. He then won names and soon the match, and the tournament. The crowd exhaled, and Mr. Reinhard jumped to his feet and pumped his fists, letting his head roll back in relief. "I'm happy," he called out to the audience, "happy and — and exhausted."

In all it had been a weekend that none of the attendees — whatever their Stroop abilities — is likely to forget.

A version of this article appears in print on 05/20/2014, on page D1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Remembering, as an Extreme Sport.

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Dot Earth Blog: Arrests Made in Assault on Park Redwood Trees

Earlier this year I wrote about a spate of criminal assaults on redwood trees in a California park — all targeting the bulbous growths called burls that are prized by woodworkers and furniture makers.

Two arrests have now been made, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Here's an excerpt from the story, by Peter Fimrite:

A suspected redwood tree slasher and burl bandit was arrested after park officials tracked the wood poacher and an accomplice to a Del Norte County shop where they allegedly peddled the purloined lumber.

Danny Garcia, 43, of Orick (Humboldt County), was charged this week with felony grand theft, vandalism and receiving stolen property after the redwood burls he allegedly sold matched the large cuts found in a mutilated old growth tree in Redwood National and State Parks, in Humboldt County.

His co-conspirator, Larry Morrow, 34, also of Orick, was charged with the same crimes Wednesday, according to Jeff Denny, a Redwoods park ranger. Morrow was already being held in Humboldt County Jail on unrelated charges when he was booked on the burl banditry rap….

"We've had half a dozen incidents of these very large cuts within the last two years and we've documented other wood poaching in the park," Denny said. "It is our hope that we can stem the tide of this type of crime, show people we are working to protect their parks and let the public know that this is a significant problem in our parks." [Read the rest.]

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Dot Earth Blog: The Role of Education and Health Care in Fostering Sustainable Motherhood

Sustainable motherhood?

In stitching these words together on Mother's Day weekend, my goal is to stress the value of education and health care for young women as a means of fostering sustainable human progress in poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa.

Many countries there have seen extraordinary strides (read David Brooks), but face the extraordinary social turbulence that can accompany rapid change.

The example of the moment, of course, is the horrific Boko Haram school raid and threat to sell more than 200 kidnapped girls. (As Rick Gladstone reported, one under-appreciated driver of this act is that "the buying and selling of women and children, particularly young girls, has long been an underlying problem.")

The intent of these terrorists is to deter families from educating girls, and is all the more terrible because it's already so hard for girls to continue in education in the region beyond the primary level. Just one of many impediments is the lack of toilets, which is a particularly important issue as girls enter their teen years.

Here are two areas that matter:

Maternal health is greatly facilitated by the same family planning capacity that can help a woman manage her fertility. When family planning came up at the Vatican conference on sustainable development that I attended last week, it was not just in the context of population growth. It is a means of fostering healthier and more resilient communities, which is particularly important in places that are implicitly vulnerable to climate hazards like severe drought. The World Health Organization has some helpful graphics showing the continuing toll (800 women dying daily of complications from pregnancy or childbirth) and ways to save lives.

The Woodrow Wilson Center held an event last year summarizing findings and policy options related to the role of family planning in improving maternal health.

Here's a taped discussion:

Secondary-level education for girls is critical for advancing the prospects for young women, yet is still the exception in many developing countries. (The girls kidnapped in Nigeria were in high school.) Invaluable research by Wolfgang Lutz and others at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria has demonstrated this repeatedly. The core work was laid out in an important 2011 paper in Science: Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population. Make sure to explore the interactive graphics on demographics and education access.

Here's an excerpt from a 2011 article on his work:

Universal secondary female education could…lower population growth and break the vicious circle of poverty and high population growth. During the 1950s Mauritius experienced population growth rates of more than 3 percent a year. Following a strong but strictly voluntary family planning program launched by the government during the 1960s, the total fertility rate fell from more than 6 to less than 3, one of the world's most impressive fertility declines.

The reason for this success, researchers believe, is that by 1962 more than 80 percent of all young women could read and write: a factor that increased access to family planning. Subsequently Mauritius experienced the benefit of the so-called demographic bonus through a decline in youth dependency combined with still very low old age dependency, resulting in a period of economic growth, investments in infrastructure, and further education. In Ethiopia women without education have on average 6 children, whereas those with a least junior secondary education have only 2.

On both fronts, there are great opportunities to make progress and make the efforts of Boko Haram and its ilk a last gasp instead of a building threat.

In parting, here's an excerpt from "No Woman No Cry" — a 2010 documentary on maternal health problems around the world directed by Christy Turlington Burns:

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Dot Earth Blog: The Role of Education and Health Care in Fostering Sustainable Motherhood

Sustainable motherhood?

In stitching these words together on Mother's Day weekend, my goal is to stress the value of education and health care for young women as a means of fostering sustainable human progress in poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa.

Many countries there have seen extraordinary strides (read David Brooks), but face the extraordinary social turbulence that can accompany rapid change.

The example of the moment, of course, is the horrific Boko Haram school raid and threat to sell more than 200 kidnapped girls. (As Rick Gladstone reported, one under-appreciated driver of this act is that "the buying and selling of women and children, particularly young girls, has long been an underlying problem.")

The intent of these terrorists is to deter families from educating girls, and is all the more terrible because it's already so hard for girls to continue in education in the region beyond the primary level. Just one of many impediments is the lack of toilets, which is a particularly important issue as girls enter their teen years.

Here are two areas that matter:

Maternal health is greatly facilitated by the same family planning capacity that can help a woman manage her fertility. When family planning came up at the Vatican conference on sustainable development that I attended last week, it was not just in the context of population growth. It is a means of fostering healthier and more resilient communities, which is particularly important in places that are implicitly vulnerable to climate hazards like severe drought. The World Health Organization has some helpful graphics showing the continuing toll (800 women dying daily of complications from pregnancy or childbirth) and ways to save lives.

The Woodrow Wilson Center held an event last year summarizing findings and policy options related to the role of family planning in improving maternal health.

Here's a taped discussion:

Secondary-level education for girls is critical for advancing the prospects for young women, yet is still the exception in many developing countries. (The girls kidnapped in Nigeria were in high school.) Invaluable research by Wolfgang Lutz and others at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria has demonstrated this repeatedly. The core work was laid out in an important 2011 paper in Science: Global Human Capital: Integrating Education and Population. Make sure to explore the interactive graphics on demographics and education access.

Here's an excerpt from a 2011 article on his work:

Universal secondary female education could…lower population growth and break the vicious circle of poverty and high population growth. During the 1950s Mauritius experienced population growth rates of more than 3 percent a year. Following a strong but strictly voluntary family planning program launched by the government during the 1960s, the total fertility rate fell from more than 6 to less than 3, one of the world's most impressive fertility declines.

The reason for this success, researchers believe, is that by 1962 more than 80 percent of all young women could read and write: a factor that increased access to family planning. Subsequently Mauritius experienced the benefit of the so-called demographic bonus through a decline in youth dependency combined with still very low old age dependency, resulting in a period of economic growth, investments in infrastructure, and further education. In Ethiopia women without education have on average 6 children, whereas those with a least junior secondary education have only 2.

On both fronts, there are great opportunities to make progress and make the efforts of Boko Haram and its ilk a last gasp instead of a building threat.

In parting, here's an excerpt from "No Woman No Cry" — a 2010 documentary on maternal health problems around the world directed by Christy Turlington Burns:

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City Room: It’s Gadgets vs. Eyeballs as Two Species of Bird-Watchers Clash

Pete Dunne and Benjamin Van Doren are devout birders who share a passion for identifying rare species, recording their sightings and competing in birding events known as Big Days.

But as they prepared for the biggest Big Day of all, Saturday's World Series of Birding in New Jersey, their technological approaches could hardly be more disparate.

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Mr. Van Doren, 20, a sophomore at Cornell, has a $2,500 camera setup, and an iPhone stocked with digital field guides, apps that play recordings of bird songs and help him, with GPS, home in on where he might find certain species.

Mr. Dunne, 62, has been preparing a bit differently. He refuses to bring a camera and keeps his cellphone turned off. He eschews birding apps and digital libraries in favor of the handwritten journal that he has kept since he was 7. The proliferation of digital photography and other technology changes the whole dynamic of birding, he said, "getting away from the art of field identification."

It was all leading to a regrettable mind-set, he added, of "Shoot first and identify later."

Not long after professional baseball came around to instant replay, the booming world of competitive birding, once seen as a refuge from the clatter of the modern world, is now debating how much it should embrace technology. It is as close as birding, long proud of its honor system, has ever come to an identity crisis, particularly over the issue of whether photography should be required to prove a spotting. In debates among birders, the encroachment of smartphones and digital cameras has become inseparable from another touchy issue, the matter of questionable sightings, known as stringing.

The World Series is held every May throughout New Jersey, a major migration stop for birds heading north, and the event routinely attracts roughly 1,000 of the world's top birders, who will race around the state from midnight to midnight, often in four-member teams, trying to identify as many species as they can by sight or sound. Their reward will be bragging rights and the Urner-Stone Cup, which resembles a miniature version of hockey's Stanley Cup, though there are no cash prizes.

The competition, which also raises money for conservation, does not require photo evidence, and scoring remains on the honor system, though contestants who claim to have seen or heard rare birds can expect to be questioned by other teams about details. The rules do not allow the use of digital gadgets in the spotting or hearing of birds. Recorded calls cannot be played in the open, where they could inadvertently — or intentionally — induce birds to respond, for example. But birders are permitted to refresh themselves — in their cars, only — with recorded bird calls.

The pro-tech camp argues that it is silly to prohibit tools that educate birders, make birding more welcoming for novices, and build popular support for saving bird habitats.

"It is bringing a new breath of air into the competitions," said Scott Whittle, a commercial photographer from Cape May, N.J., who has a $10,000 photo setup. He is also helping develop an app called Bird Genie that recognizes and identifies bird calls in the field.

He said he began birding six years ago and photographed his sightings "because I knew I wasn't a good enough birder for people to trust me."

The verification of sightings and combating stringing — arguable sightings by inexperienced, overeager or simply cheating birders — is one of birding's most pressing issues and is the main argument for the use of photos.

Birding's popularity, fueled in part by the recent films, "The Big Year," and "A Birder's Guide to Everything," is approaching an extreme-sport level, with adrenaline-pumped teams putting in sleepless days.

The American Birding Association has begun discussions to revise portions of its code of ethics, said Jeffrey Gordon, the association's president. The code serves as a guideline for birders, though competition organizers are free to make their own rules. Mr. Gordon said that what little there was in the code regarding technology — there is a mention, for example, of curbing the use of "tape recorders" — has likely gone unchanged since being established a decade ago, "before people were walking around with libraries of bird songs in their pocket."

While the honor system remains paramount, Mr. Gordon said, photographs, provided they have not been altered, can offer "a higher standard of evidence," especially for rare sightings, and for newer birders who have yet to establish reputations of being rock-solid in their identifications.

"I hear young birders joking around saying, 'Photos or it didn't happen,' " he said. "The expectation is that if you report something rare, you're going to need a photograph. And I only see that increasing."

The association created a new category of competition: Photo Big Days. Last month, Mr. Whittle and Tom Stephenson, a Brooklyn-based birder who leads tours in Prospect Park, organized a Photo Big Day in Texas, and competed as well, photographing 209 birds in 24 hours, which the birding association has recognized as a record for North America.

Even purists like Mr. Dunne, a New Jersey Audubon Society official who founded the World Series, said any tool that made birding more accessible was welcome. But introducing them to competitions goes against the trust implicit in birding, the purists said, and turns what should be a contest of devotion and skill into a free-for-all where tech wizardry and expensive cameras become the de facto entry requirements.

"We're at a pivotal time," Mr. Dunne said, acknowledging that birding technology was "going to change birding dramatically and probably permanently."

Drew Weber, who writes a blog about birding and technology at NemesisBird.com and helps develop birding apps, said he has heard some resentment among old guard birders toward tech-savvy ones who have gained vast birding knowledge with comparably little time spent in the field.

"A lot of traditional birders, honing their skills for decades, had to put all this time in, and they might see technology as a shortcut," he said.

Teams in the World Series recruit members who can identify bird calls and can scout where targeted species are likely to be seen. To prepare for the event, Mr. Van Doren's Cornell team has spent a week driving around New Jersey using apps to log where specific birds had been spotted. They are not allowed to use apps to acquire new information during the event, but they can use them to refer to previously gathered information.

Mr. Van Doren acknowledged that technology should have its limits. The day will come, he predicted, when binoculars themselves will be able to identify birds. "That would be lame from a birding perspective," he said, "because it would take the skill out of it."

A version of this article appears in print on 05/10/2014, on page A1 of the NewYork edition with the headline: It's Gadgets vs. Eyeballs as Two Species of Bird-Watchers Clash .

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Dot Earth Blog: Vatican Dialogue: ‘Man is a Technical Giant and an Ethical Child’

VATICAN CITY — "Birth control."

Those words were uttered on Friday just 99 minutes into a novel four-day meeting of scientists, theologians, economists and other analysts convened at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences here.* The phrase — not heard often in these halls — was just one of many signs of the free-wheeling nature of discussions that unfolded in hopes of charting fresh paths toward durable human advancement on a finite planet.

Organizers said the workshop, "Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Planet, Our Responsibility," is largely aimed at bringing together disciplines and ideologies that rarely intersect.

Participants range from Walter Munk, a 96-year-old marine researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., to Juan Grabois, an Argentinian in his 30s who is a lawyer and organizer of street vendors, waste pickers and other marginalized workers.

The presentations, nearly all of which are online, are focused on food, health and energy, but also on the value of slowing climate change and conserving the planet's biological bounty, called by some participants "natural capital."

In introductory remarks, Margaret S. Archer, a sociologist who is president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is co-hosting the talks with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said her hope was that the interplay of points of view and specialties would identify new research opportunities and inspire lasting collaborations.

What she did not want, she stressed, was the kind of atmosphere seen at village dances, at which the "girls line up on one side, the boys on the other" and they only meet glancingly before going their separate ways.

Over 10 hours, a host of views were expressed, ranging from a hopeful picture of demographic trends from Gérard-François Dumont of the University of Paris to an urgent call for action to avoid crossing dangerous planetary boundaries from Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute. 

No one had a free ride. You can sift part of Friday's 10-hour session on YouTube here. Particularly interesting was a prolonged discussion following Sachs's talk, which focused on the United Nations push to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the Millennium Development Goals expiring next year. (Scroll to the spot on the video around 8:08:00 for his talk and the discussion. Sachs's slides are here.)

Even within disciplines, there was a constructive search for clarity. After Sachs spoke of the importance of fostering a "global ethics," Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, cautioned that it was important to qualify such statements. "When we talk about ethics we mean different things," he said, rattling off a list of ethical frames ranging from utilitarian to neo-contractualist.

One of the most profound phrases came first thing in the morning, in a wise and impassioned speech by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a close adviser to Pope Francis:

Nowadays man finds himself to be a technical giant and an ethical child.

(Of course I'm exhibiting confirmation bias in highlighting this line, given how it resonates with my notion that we're essentially going through "puberty on the scale of a planet.")

I encourage you to read his full speech, but here's another excerpt:

Built on consumerism and the rapid augmentation of profits, progress in our post-industrial age has led to serious environmental imbalances in the most comprehensive sense of the term: an over-consumption of non-renewable raw materials, noise, visual and air pollution, and the extinction of animal and vegetable species. It has also brought about profound social and economic imbalances: a wealthy Northern Hemisphere where a poverty-stricken Fourth World has emerged, a Southern Hemisphere riddled with deprivation and misery, and forced emigration. In addition, our world is currently the sad witness of energy crises and speculation, of health disorders caused by the overabundance of food in some places and by famine elsewhere, and of old diseases in a new form as a result of antibiotic-resistant microbia.

No doubt man's life on Earth has been riddled with ordeals, which explains his aggressiveness and his drive for domination.

In the face of a difficult and hostile world, more and more sophisticated techniques have been created to domesticate it and make it inhabitable.

But technical advancements have progressed so much that it already seems as if we were living in an artificial world. Thus a sort of "supra-nature" has been created, which has partly helped man, but which has also detached him from Mother Nature. Both history and our current existence show that our "software" — i.e., our ideas and values — has evolved much more slowly than our "hardware", which has focused for centuries on maximum growth and productivity.

Dan Misleh, the director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, provided a useful summary of the day on his blog.

I've been invited to offer a brief summary of the workshop's most resonant themes at the end of the final day, May 6. If the first day was any indication, I've got my work cut out for me.

I'll be trying to convey interesting points along the way using the Twitter hashtag #sustvatican. Keep track or weigh in.

Addendum, May 3 4:51 p.m. | * The first mention of birth control came from Hsin-Chi Kuan, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (and emeritus political science professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong). He asked Werner Arber, the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (and a Nobel laureate in medicine) if he approved of birth control. He did.

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Dot Earth Blog: Vatican Dialogue: ‘Man is a Technical Giant and an Ethical Child’

VATICAN CITY — "Birth control."

Those words were uttered on Friday just 99 minutes into a novel four-day meeting of scientists, theologians, economists and other analysts convened at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences here. The phrase — not heard often in these halls — was just one of many signs of the free-wheeling nature of discussions that unfolded in hopes of charting fresh paths toward durable human advancement on a finite planet.

Organizers said the workshop, "Sustainable Humanity, Sustainable Planet, Our Responsibility," is largely aimed at bringing together disciplines and ideologies that rarely intersect.

Participants range from Walter Munk, a 96-year-old marine researcher from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., to Juan Grabois, an Argentinian in his 30s who is a lawyer and organizer of street vendors, waste pickers and other marginalized workers.

The presentations, nearly all of which are online, are focused on food, health and energy, but also on the value of slowing climate change and conserving the planet's biological bounty, called by some participants "natural capital."

In introductory remarks, Margaret S. Archer, a sociologist who is president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which is co-hosting the talks with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said her hope was that the interplay of points of view and specialties would identify new research opportunities and inspire lasting collaborations.

What she did not want, she stressed, was the kind of atmosphere seen at village dances, at which the "girls line up on one side, the boys on the other" and they only meet glancingly before going their separate ways.

Over 10 hours, a host of views were expressed, ranging from a hopeful picture of demographic trends from Gérard-François Dumont of the University of Paris to an urgent call for action to avoid crossing dangerous planetary boundaries from Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University's Earth Institute. 

No one had a free ride. You can sift part of Friday's 10-hour session on YouTube here. Particularly interesting was a prolonged discussion following Sachs's talk, which focused on the United Nations push to develop a set of Sustainable Development Goals to succeed the Millennium Development Goals expiring next year. (Scroll to the spot on the video around 8:08:00 for his talk and the discussion. Sachs's slides are here.)

Even within disciplines, there was a constructive search for clarity. After Sachs spoke of the importance of fostering a "global ethics," Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, cautioned that it was important to qualify such statements. "When we talk about ethics we mean different things," he said, rattling off a list of ethical frames ranging from utilitarian to neo-contractualist.

One of the most profound phrases came first thing in the morning, in a wise and impassioned speech by Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga, a close adviser to Pope Francis:

Nowadays man finds himself to be a technical giant and an ethical child.

(Of course I'm exhibiting confirmation bias in highlighting this line, given how it resonates with my notion that we're essentially going through "puberty on the scale of a planet.")

I encourage you to read his full speech, but here's another excerpt:

Built on consumerism and the rapid augmentation of profits, progress in our post-industrial age has led to serious environmental imbalances in the most comprehensive sense of the term: an over-consumption of non-renewable raw materials, noise, visual and air pollution, and the extinction of animal and vegetable species. It has also brought about profound social and economic imbalances: a wealthy Northern Hemisphere where a poverty-stricken Fourth World has emerged, a Southern Hemisphere riddled with deprivation and misery, and forced emigration. In addition, our world is currently the sad witness of energy crises and speculation, of health disorders caused by the overabundance of food in some places and by famine elsewhere, and of old diseases in a new form as a result of antibiotic-resistant microbia.

No doubt man's life on Earth has been riddled with ordeals, which explains his aggressiveness and his drive for domination.

In the face of a difficult and hostile world, more and more sophisticated techniques have been created to domesticate it and make it inhabitable.

But technical advancements have progressed so much that it already seems as if we were living in an artificial world. Thus a sort of "supra-nature" has been created, which has partly helped man, but which has also detached him from Mother Nature. Both history and our current existence show that our "software" — i.e., our ideas and values — has evolved much more slowly than our "hardware", which has focused for centuries on maximum growth and productivity.

Dan Misleh, the director of the Catholic Climate Covenant, provided a useful summary of the day on his blog.

I've been invited to offer a brief summary of the workshop's most resonant themes at the end of the final day, May 6. If the first day was any indication, I've got my work cut out for me.

I'll be trying to convey interesting points along the way using the Twitter hashtag #sustvatican. Keep track or weigh in.

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Well: Helmets Do Little to Help Moderate Infant Skull Flattening, Study Finds

Pediatricians have long urged parents to put newborns to sleep on their backs to help prevent sudden infant death syndrome. While the practice undoubtedly has saved lives, it also has increased the numbers of babies with flattened skulls.

Roughly one baby in five under the age of 6 months develops a skull deformation caused by lying in a supine position. Now a study has found that a common remedy for the problem, an expensive custom-made helmet worn by infants, in most cases produces no more improvement in skull shape than doing nothing at all.

The new report, published Thursday in the journal BMJ, is the first randomized trial of the helmets. The authors found "virtually no treatment effect," said Brent R. Collett, an investigator at Seattle Children's Research Institute and author of an accompanying editorial.

Skull flatness at back of the head may be accompanied by facial asymmetry; one ear may be slightly farther back than the other, and sometimes the side of the head can flatten. Until now, less rigorous studies had mostly shown helmets did help normalize head shape.

The helmets are sometimes adorned with stickers, and are sometimes painted to resemble a pilot's helmet or with the logo of a beloved football team. "I was very surprised at the results," Dr. Mark R. Proctor, an associate professor of neurosurgery at Boston Children's Hospital, said of the new study, adding that it was "rigorous."

Still, the study leaves open the possibility that the helmets may still be useful for infants with severe skull flattening and those with tight neck muscles, which make it hard for infants to turn their heads, so they remain in one position. Researchers from the University of Twente in the Netherlands assigned 42 babies who had misshapen skulls, aged 5 to 6 months old, to wear a custom-designed helmet that allows flattened areas room to round out as the infant's skull expands.

Parents were instructed to have infants wear the helmets 23 hours a day for six months or so. Another 42 babies with similar deformities received no treatment. Infants with the most severe deformities were excluded.

After two years, a researcher who did not know which babies had worn helmets evaluated skull shape in the infants. The improvements were not significantly different between the helmet-wearers and the infants not wearing helmets.

"There are definitely cases of infants with mild to moderate skull deformation who are treated with helmet therapy, and this study confirms and reaffirms that this is not necessary," said Dr. James J. Laughlin, an author of the policy statement on skull deformities for the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Helmets to treat flattened skulls range in price from $1,300 to $3,000, and parents are told to make sure infants wear them around the clock. Dr. Laughlin said the paper provides pediatricians and worried parents "reassurance that not doing helmet therapy will give you the same results as doing helmet therapy, which is expensive" and can be "stressful for the family."

Makers of custom helmets questioned the study's results. Tim Littlefield, a spokesman for Cranial Technologies, called it "inherently flawed." William Gustavson, a spokesman for Orthomerica, called it "alarming" that nearly three-quarters of parents whose children received helmets in the study reported that the helmets shifted or rotated on their infants' heads.

"The value of this research is fully reliant upon the quality of the fit," said James Campbell, the vice president of the American Orthotic and Prosthetic Association, a trade group.

Some surgeons worried that the finding would be applied too broadly, jeopardizing insurance coverage for severely affected children who could benefit from helmets.

"What I fear happening is that children with a severe deformity are going to be denied helmets based on this evidence, which is really only talking about moderate cases," said Dr. Alex A. Kane, the director of pediatric and craniofacial surgery at UT Southwestern and Children's Medical Center in Dallas.

Courtney Reissig, 31, a stay-at-home mother in Little Rock, Ark., doesn't regret the eight months her son, Luke, wore a helmet. He had neck muscles so tight that he favored lying on his left side in bed, to the point that it "looked like the side of a toaster — flat, not round," Mrs. Reissig said.

He outgrew his first helmet, which cost $1,300, and required a second, she said. But wearing a helmet helped round out his head, and he now closely resembles his twin, Zach. "I do feel like the helmets were worth it," she said.

Only about a quarter of the babies in the BMJ trial made a full recovery by the age 2.

"This is a problem we created," said Dr. Proctor, of Boston Children's Hospital. "All parents are told is sleep the child on their back. They aren't told about flat heads and how to prevent it."

Some pediatricians and specialists advise parents to try repositioning an infant's head before considering a helmet.

Repositioning entails alternating to which side the infant's head turns once they are asleep on the back. That way, pressure isn't always squarely on the back of the head.

Repositioning isn't as feasible for infants with tight neck muscles, known as torticollis. They may benefit from physical therapy, said Dr. Chad A. Perlyn, craniofacial and pediatric plastic surgeon at Miami Children's Hospital.

In addition to repositioning, he advises parents to try more tummy time and to limit time spent in car seats. Use a baby carrier, he added, because "when the baby is awake, there's no deforming force on the skull."

Doctors noted that some helmet makers encourage parents to diagnose flattened skulls on their own, without a doctor's evaluation. It's important for a physician to rule out craniosynostosis, or bones fusing together prematurely, as a cause, they said. That much rarer condition requires surgery.

On the Web sites of some helmet manufacturers, assessment tools encourage parents to compare their infant's head shape to pictures.

"It's a bit like having the wolf guarding the henhouse," said Dr. Proctor.

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