Some Exhibits at Natural History Museum Are Only Seen by Researchers

Michael Nagle for The New York Times

COLD STORAGE At the American Museum of Natural History, George Amato reached into a vat, cooled by liquid nitrogen, holding vials of tissue samples.

George Amato climbs a step and lifts the lid on a shiny stainless steel vessel that is basically a tall, portly thermos bottle. Clouds swirl off liquid nitrogen inside, making the tank look like a high-tech witch's caldron.

This vessel and the others in the room hold some of the least-imposing exhibits in the American Museum of Natural History, the sprawling, 143-year-old complex on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Inside the vessels are tall racks that hold small boxes; each box contains dozens of plastic vials; each vial contains a tissue sample, and all of it is preserved at minus 160 degrees Celsius. The museum has collected 70,000 of these vials from 40,000 animal species since the Ambrose Monell Cryo Collection opened in 2001.

"There is no other tissue bank that has the overall diversity of life represented here," said Dr. Amato, director of the museum's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics.

Few visitors to the museum would be likely to want to see the little bar-coded vials. They lack the grandeur of the rearing Barosaurus skeleton in the Roosevelt Rotunda or the 94-foot model of a blue whale. Those can be found in the vast public spaces of the museum's complex of 26 buildings; the Monell collection sits in a basement room next to the carpentry shop.

The samples in the mist are part of more than 32 million biological specimens and cultural artifacts owned by the museum, only a tiny fraction of which are seen by the public. Their purpose is not to educate and entertain visitors, but to further the museum's role as one of the world's leading research institutions, with more than 200 scientists on board. This is the museum's less-known life, but one that goes back to its founding in 1869.

Anesthetized by visits to museums that have more in common with amusement parks than with research centers, most visitors would be surprised to find that the American Museum of Natural History grants graduate degrees to scientists who work within its walls. Facilities like the Monell collection show how the scientific work undertaken at the museum has broadened over the years: what started with avid collecting, comparing and drawing of specimens, skeletons, feathers and skin now involves DNA sequencing, CT scanning and high-powered computational analysis.

The office of Michael J. Novacek, provost of science at the museum, shows the blending of old and new. The outer wall of the office is curved, tucked into one of the seemingly ancient towers at a corner of the building. On his desk is a big-screen iMac computer displaying a project the museum is engaged in under a multimillion-dollar grant from the National Science Foundation, a database known as the MorphoBank.

The database turns morphology — the study of the form and structure of organisms to discern the evolutionary relationships among them — into a social media endeavor that incorporates physical characteristics, genetic expression and environmental factors to more fully describe "the tree of life," Dr. Novacek said. As he gazes at a screen filled with information about the anatomy of elephants, he notices that a colleague in England has added an image and filled in accompanying information about it.

"It changes the way people work, it changes the way people collaborate, and it really shoots science ahead," he said.

And, he added, projects like this mean that the museum's scientific resources are open to the world. "It's as if we took these 32 million things — specimens, tissues and artifacts — and opened a window on them," he said. "It's not just on display in an exhibit or sitting in a drawer in the corner of the museum."

These resources will eventually be accessible to schoolchildren and the general public in formats they can understand and use, he predicted. The hundreds of schoolchildren waiting at a nearby subway stop to enter the museum may not know about the online world of the collections, he said, but "they will know this."

For now, he notes, the rich scientific work of the museum goes largely unnoticed outside the scientific community. Dinosaurs, meteorites, the hominid Lucy and the Star of India sapphire get the spotlight. "In some ways, we're victims of our own success," he said. "The objects are so amazing."

The museum now looks at its objects differently, with tools that include scanning electron microscopes and a CT scanner that allow magnification and imagery that seem the stuff of science fiction — or nightmares. Scientists can study the hairs and carapaces of insects, wear patterns on ancient rock tools from Kenya or the inscription on a sword that has fused with its sheath. In the room that houses the CT scanner, a table is crowded with jars containing snakelike creatures preserved in alcohol, ready for their extreme close-ups.

Underlying the museum's research efforts is computational power that is now beginning to tackle some of the tough problems of sorting through enormous amounts of data for comparison, pattern recognition and analysis. That is the work of Ward Wheeler, whose banks of clustered computers sit in the museum's basement around a corner from the cryo lab.

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Rachel Carson’s Lessons, 50 Years After ‘Silent Spring’

SHE was a slight, soft-spoken woman who preferred walking the Maine shoreline to stalking the corridors of power. And yet Rachel Carson, the author of "Silent Spring," played a central role in starting the environmental movement, by forcing government and business to confront the dangers of pesticides.

Carson was a scientist with a lyrical bent, who saw it as her mission to share her observations with a wider audience. In the course of her work, she also felt called upon to become a leader — and was no less powerful for being a reluctant one.

As a professor at Harvard Business School, I encountered the great depth of her work when I was creating a course on the history of leadership. I was amazed to learn she wrote "Silent Spring" as she battled breast cancer and cared for a young child. After the book was published, 50 years ago last month, she faced an outburst of public reaction and a backlash from chemical companies. Yet throughout her personal and public struggles, she was an informed spokeswoman for environmental responsibility.

She was a classic introvert who exhibited few of the typical qualities associated with leadership, like charisma and aggressiveness. But as people like Susan Cain, author of "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking," have pointed out, leadership can come in less obvious forms.

Carson's life shows that individual agency, fueled by resolution and hard work, has the power to change the world. In this election year, when so much influence seems concentrated in "super PACs," lobbying groups and other moneyed interests, her story is a reminder that one person's quiet leadership can make a difference.

The natural world had fascinated Carson since she was a young girl growing up near Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania College for Women, later Chatham College, she majored in biology and earned her master's degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins.

In the 1930s, there were few professional opportunities for women in the sciences. But in 1935, she found a job writing radio scripts about the ocean for what would become the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. Within four years, she was editor in chief of all the agency's publications, a position that connected her with researchers, conservationists and government officials.

Her work at the agency fed her larger calling as a writer. Throughout the 1930s and '40s, she wrote freelance articles about the natural world for Colliers, the Atlantic Monthly and other magazines. In 1941, she published her first book, "Under the Sea-Wind," a narrative account of the birds and sea creatures of North America's eastern shores.

Carson wrote within the crevices of a busy life, and often with serious health problems. In 1950, she had surgery to remove a tumor from her left breast. The next year, she published "The Sea Around Us," a wide-ranging history of the ocean. It was an instant best seller. Readers responded to her graceful prose and marshaling of scientific facts, as well as to her long-term perspective. The book's success enabled her to leave her position at the wildlife agency and devote herself to writing.

IN early 1958, she began working intently on "Silent Spring" while serving as both a breadwinner and a caregiver. The previous year, her niece died after an illness and she adopted her 5-year-old grandnephew. Unmarried and living in Silver Spring, Md., she also cared for and financially supported her ailing mother.

For the next four years, she gave all the time and energy she could spare to researching and writing "Silent Spring." A diligent investigator, she reached out to a network of scientists, physicians, librarians, conservationists and government officials. She found colleagues, clerks, whistle-blowers and others who had studied pesticide use and were willing to share their knowledge.

With an assistant's help, she spent weeks in the research libraries of Washington. Many of her contacts generated even more leads.

Carson was particularly interested in possible connections between cancer and human exposure to pesticides. In late 1959, she wrote this to Paul Brooks, her editor at Houghton Mifflin: "In the beginning I felt the link between pesticides and cancer was tenuous and at best circumstantial; now I feel it is very strong indeed."

Her research, she wrote, "has taken very deep digging into the realms of physiology and biochemistry and genetics, to say nothing of chemistry. But I now feel that a lot of isolated pieces of the jigsaw puzzle have suddenly fallen into place," she said, as quoted in "Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature," a book by Linda Lear.

In late 1958, Carson's mother died. And the next summer, her grandnephew's illness slowed her work. By late 1959, she knew that the book would take longer than she originally planned. Yet she remained confident, writing to her editor that she was building her work "on an unshakable foundation."

As she researched her book, Carson knew she was playing with fire. Still, she realized she had to bring her findings to a large audience. "Knowing what I do," she wrote to a close friend in 1958, "there would be no future peace for me if I kept silent."

In early 1960, medical problems interrupted Carson's work again. She learned that she had an ulcer, and she developed pneumonia. In early April, she had surgery in Washington to remove two tumors in her left breast. One was apparently benign, she told a friend. The other was "suspicious enough to require a radical mastectomy." Her doctors stopped short of diagnosing cancer and recommended no further treatment.

She went home to recover from the surgery and slowly resumed work. In November, Carson discovered a mass in her left chest. This led her to seek a second opinion at the Cleveland Clinic.

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Casualties of Toronto’s Urban Skies

Ian Willms for The New York Times

DEADLY TOWERS Each year buildings in and around Toronto prove deadly for migratory birds that crash into their gleaming facades. More Photos »

TORONTO — In the shadow of the massive black towers of a bank's downtown headquarters here was an almost indistinguishable puff of dark gray fluff on the sidewalk.

It was the body of a golden-crowned kinglet, an unlucky one, that had crashed into the iconic Toronto-Dominion Center building somewhere above.

There is no precise ranking of the world's most deadly cities for migratory birds, but Toronto is considered a top contender for the title. When a British nature documentary crew wanted to film birds killed by crashes into glass, Daniel Klem Jr., an ornithologist at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., who has been studying the issue for about 40 years, directed them here, where huge numbers of birds streaking through the skies one moment can be plummeting toward the concrete the next.

"They're getting killed everywhere and anywhere where there's even the smallest garage window," Professor Klem said. "In the case of Toronto, perhaps because of the number of buildings and the number of birds, it's more dramatic."

So many birds hit the glass towers of Canada's most populous city that volunteers scour the ground of the financial district for them in the predawn darkness each morning. They carry paper bags and butterfly nets to rescue injured birds from the impending stampede of pedestrian feet or, all too often, to pick up the bodies of dead ones.

The group behind the bird patrol, the Fatal Light Awareness Program, known as FLAP, estimates that one million to nine million birds die every year from impact with buildings in the Toronto area. The group's founder once single-handedly recovered about 500 dead birds in one morning.

Toronto's modern skyline began to rise in the 1960s, giving it a high proportion of modern, glass-clad structures, forming a long wall along the northwestern shore of Lake Ontario. That barrier crosses several major migratory flight paths, the first large structures birds would encounter coming south from the northern wilderness.

Though those factors make Toronto's buildings particularly lethal, Professor Klem was quick to say that the city also leads North America when it comes to addressing the problem.

After years of conducting rescue and recovery missions and prodding the city to include bird safety in its design code for new buildings, FLAP has recently begun using the courts to help keep birds alive. It is participating in two legal cases using laws normally meant to protect migratory birds from hunting and industrial hazards to prosecute the owners of two particularly problematic buildings.

Briskly walking on a recent morning with a volunteer bird patrol, Michael Mesure, who founded FLAP 19 years ago, pointed out many examples of killer buildings. As he neared one particularly troublesome spot, on the eastern edge of the financial district, he pointed to a gaggle of sea gulls sitting in trees across the street from an office building. They were waiting, he said, to dine on the smaller birds maimed or killed by the building.

The building has a glass facade that disorients birds by reflecting the surrounding trees. Perceiving the reflection as habitat, birds zoom at it full throttle without regard for the danger.

The victims are largely songbirds. Perhaps because of familiarity, the urbanites of the bird world, like house sparrows, pigeons and gulls, are much less prone to crashing into glass, Professor Klem said.

All the birds collected by FLAP, dead or alive, go into paper bags. Though there were no survivors that recent morning, the merely stunned or frightened would have been released in a park near the shore of Lake Ontario. The injured would have been taken to one of two animal rehabilitation centers outside the city.

The dead birds, with the location of their deaths marked on their bags, first end up in a freezer at FLAP's headquarters, which is part of a sympathetic city councilor's offices. Although the autumn migration was barely under way, the freezer was already close to full. Its contents ranged from owls to hummingbirds, and the vividness of their plumage was generally offset by the gruesomeness of their smashed heads.

"If the people were colliding with buildings at the same rate birds are, this issue would have been dealt with a long time ago," Mr. Mesure said. "There's a detachment in society about this."

One especially effective, if unpopular, method of reducing the threat to birds, Mr. Mesure said, is simply to cover the outside of windows up to the height of adjacent trees with the finely perforated plastic film often used to turn transit buses into rolling billboards. The film can be printed with advertising or decorative patterns, although the group has found that a repetitive pattern of small circles made from the same adhesive plastic is both effective and less likely to prompt aesthetic objections.

For new buildings, the solution can be as simple as etching patterns into its glass. A German glass company is also developing windows that it hopes can take advantage of the ability of birds to see ultraviolet light, by including warning patterns that are invisible to humans.

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The Agenda: Nearly Absent in the Campaign: Climate Change

Left, Eric Thayer for The NYT; right, Doug Mills/ The NYT

At left, Mitt Romney during campaign event at a coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio in August.  In March, President Obama, at right, spoke at the Copper Mountain Solar Project in Nevada.

WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.

Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general-election debates asked about climate change, nor did either of the candidates broach the topic.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Mr. Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Mr. Romney has laid out during the campaign a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet. Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?

Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world American intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.

"On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country," said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. "Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed."

Mr. Steer noted that climate change was no longer a partisan issue in Europe and that China, Japan, Australia and South Korea had taken significant steps to reduce emissions and invest heavily in clean energy technology.

"The real question in this country," said Mr. Steer, a British citizen, "is why politicians don't see it as in their interest to discuss it."

The list of reasons is long.

Any serious effort to address climate change will require a transformation of the nation's system for producing and consuming energy and will, at least in the medium term, mean higher prices for fuel and electricity. Powerful incumbent industries — coal, oil, utilities — are threatened by such changes and have mounted a well-financed long-term campaign to sow doubt about climate change. The Koch brothers and others in the oil industry have underwritten advertising campaigns and grass-roots efforts to support like-minded candidates. And the Republican Party has essentially declared climate change a nonproblem.

The two most effective ways of reducing global warming pollution — taxing it or regulating it — are politically toxic in a year when economic problems are paramount. After a bill died in the Senate in 2010, Mr. Obama abandoned his support for cap and trade, a market-based method to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and he has given little hint of what regulatory policies he intends to pursue if he wins a second term. Aides said that he would not propose a carbon tax or other energy tax, but that he would consider supporting one as part of a larger budget and spending deal.

As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney considered joining a regional cap-and-trade system, then abandoned it because of uncertainty over costs. He has opposed Mr. Obama's steps to regulate emissions from power plants and vehicles. He has said he would reverse Mr. Obama's air quality regulations and would renegotiate the auto efficiency standard of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 that automakers agreed to this year.

The struggling economy has made it difficult for emerging clean energy companies to get the capital they need to reach commercial scale and compete with producers of traditional energy sources. Government programs to provide that seed money are highly controversial, as the fight over tax breaks for wind power companies and the recent failures of the solar panel maker Solyndra and the advanced battery manufacturer A123 Systems showed.

The Obama administration provided $90 billion in new financing from the 2009 stimulus for clean energy projects, but most of that money is gone.

Though there is little doubt that the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have altered the earth's climate, some uncertainty remains about whether and when such changes will become unmanageable. Huge technological challenges persist in transforming the energy generation system. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney refer to "clean coal," shorthand for capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, but the technology is still in its infancy.

International efforts to address climate change, which showed great promise when Mr. Obama took office, have sputtered in recent years because of fears that limiting carbon emissions means limiting economic growth. There is also considerable resistance to any plan that would require the United States and other wealthy countries to take stronger measures than those demanded of China, India and other fast-growing economies that are responsible for the bulk of the growth in global emissions.

Mr. Romney's chief domestic policy adviser, Oren Cass, said the nation should not take unilateral steps. "What it is going to do is hurt our economy very seriously, and it's going to drive a lot of industrial activity from the United States to countries that are, frankly, much less efficient in their use of energy," he said at an energy debate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this month.

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Poor Sanitation Found at Pharmacy Linked to Meningitis Outbreak

Bryce Vickmark for The New York Times

The building housing the New England Compounding Center and the nearby recycling center.

WASHINGTON — A federal inspection of a company whose tainted pain medicine has caused one of the worst public health drug disasters since the 1930s found greenish-yellow residue on sterilization equipment, surfaces coated with levels of mold and bacteria that exceeded the company's own environmental limits, and an air-conditioner that was shut off nightly despite the importance of controlling temperature and humidity.

The findings, made public on Friday by the Food and Drug Administration, followed a report from Massachusetts regulators on Tuesday and offered disturbing new details in an emerging portrait of what went wrong inside the New England Compounding Center, the pharmacy at the heart of a national meningitis outbreak in which 25 people have died, 313 more have fallen ill and as many as 14,000 people are believed to have been exposed.

Instead of producing tailor-made drugs for individual patients, as the law allowed, the company turned into a major drug maker that supplied some of the most prestigious hospitals in the country, including ones affiliated with Harvard, Yale and the Mayo Clinic, all with minimal oversight from federal regulators.

Federal officials also drew attention to the company's proximity to a recycling plant where excavators and freight trucks heaped old mattresses, plastics and other materials, generating large amounts of dust. The plant, which is owned by one of the same people as the pharmacy, has not always complied with regulations and has drawn complaints, according to records in Framingham, Mass., where the company is located.

And as the death toll continues to rise, the F.D.A.'s commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, who was appointed by President Obama, has stayed mostly silent.

Some observers said that weighing in loudly and publicly on a contentious issue was simply not Dr. Hamburg's style. Others said that it was because the agency was preparing a criminal case and would not want to endanger that with statements construed to be prejudicial. David Kessler, a former F.D.A. commissioner, pointed to the impending presidential election and efforts to keep the outbreak from becoming a political issue.

"Everyone is closed down right now," he said. "People are being very careful. No one wants to make a mistake."

The inspection report offered the clearest indication yet that the fungus that contaminated the company's vials of methylprednisolone acetate, an injectable pain medicine, may have gotten there because of the company's own practices.

Inspectors said that 83 out of 321 vials from one of the lots linked to the meningitis outbreak that they observed contained "greenish black foreign matter" and another 17 vials had "white filamentous material."

The report said the company had tested only one sample from that lot, and it had proved sterile. When the F.D.A. tested 50 vials from that same lot, all of them contained some microbial growth.

Experts said that perhaps the most worrisome finding was that the company's own testing between January and September found surfaces in the clean rooms contaminated with either bacteria or mold exceeding the levels at which the company's own procedures called for remedial measures. In some cases, there were so many bacteria or fungi in a sample that the whole testing dish was overrun with a so-called overgrowth.

"Think of a plant just growing out of control," said Steven Lynn, director of the Office of Manufacturing and Product Quality at the F.D.A. Yet, according to the agency, there was no evidence the company took remedial actions.

"This is pretty heinous stuff," said Lou Diorio of LDT Health Solutions, a consultant to compounding pharmacies. "This just shows a general lack of basic clean-room principles."

Russell E. Madsen, a consultant on sterility issues to the pharmaceutical industry, said of the inspection report: "In all my time in the pharmaceutical industry, which is 45 years, I've never seen one this bad."

Another problem was the company's air-conditioning system, which employees said was switched off between 8 p.m. and 5:30 a.m. in the room where sterile drugs were made. Maintaining proper temperature and humidity is important for retarding the growth of microbes.  

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Washington, and Andrew Pollack from Los Angeles. Abby Goodnough contributed reporting from Boston, and Denise Grady from New York. Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.

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Dying Satellites Could Lead to Shaky Weather Forecasts

WASHINGTON — The United States is facing a year or more without crucial satellites that provide invaluable data for predicting storm tracks, a result of years of mismanagement, lack of financing and delays in launching replacements, according to several recent official reviews.

The looming gap in satellite coverage, which some experts view as almost certain within the next few years, could result in shaky forecasts about storms like Hurricane Sandy, which is expected to hit the East Coast early next week.

The endangered satellites fly pole-to-pole orbits and cross the Equator in the afternoon, scanning the entire planet one strip at a time. Along with orbiters on other timetables, they are among the most effective tools used to pin down the paths of major storms about five days ahead.

All this week, forecasters have been relying on such satellites for almost all the data needed to narrow down what were at first widely divergent computer models of what Hurricane Sandy would do next: hit the coast, or veer away into the open ocean?

Right on schedule, the five-day models began to agree on the likeliest answer. By Friday afternoon, the storm's center was predicted to approach Delaware on Monday and Tuesday, with powerful winds, torrential rains and dangerous tides ranging over hundreds of miles.

New York and other states declared emergencies; the Navy ordered ships to sea to avoid damage. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York City warned that no matter where or when the storm landed, the city would not escape its effects. And from the Carolinas to New England, public safety officials were urgently advising tens of millions of residents to prepare for the worst, including the possibility of historic flooding, power failures and snow.

Experiments show that without this kind of satellite data, forecasters would have underestimated by half the huge blizzard that hit Washington in 2010.

"We cannot afford to lose any enhancement that allows us to accurately forecast any weather event coming our way," said Craig J. Craft, commissioner of emergency management for Nassau County on Long Island, where the great hurricane of 1938 killed hundreds. On Thursday, Mr. Craft was seeking more precise forecasts for Sandy and gearing up for possible evacuations of hospitals and nursing homes, as were ordered before Tropical Storm Irene last year. "Without accurate forecasts it is hard to know when to pull that trigger," he said.

Experts have grown increasingly alarmed in the past two years because the existing polar satellites are nearing or beyond their life expectancies, and the launch of the next replacement, known as J.P.S.S.-1, has slipped to 2017, probably too late to avoid a coverage gap of at least a year.

Prodded by lawmakers and auditors, the satellite program's managers are just beginning to think through alternatives when the gap occurs, but these are unlikely to avoid it.

This summer, three independent reviews of the $13 billion program — by the Commerce Department's inspector general, the Government Accountability Office, and a team of outside experts — each questioned the cost estimates for the program, criticized managers for not pinning down the designs and called for urgent remedies. The project is run by the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, and NASA.

The outside review team, led by A. Thomas Young, an aerospace industry leader, called the management of the program "dysfunctional."

In response, top Commerce and NOAA officials on Sept. 18 ordered what they called an urgent restructuring — just the latest overhaul of the troubled program. They streamlined the management, said they would fill major vacancies quickly and demanded immediate reports on how the agency planned to cope with the gap. They have moved quickly to nail down the specific designs of the J.P.S.S.-1's components, many of them already partly built. And they promised to quickly complete a new independent cost estimate to verify the program's budget.

Ciaran Clayton, NOAA's communications director, said in a statement that the agency's top priority was to provide timely, accurate forecasts to protect the public, and that it would continue to develop and update plans to cover any potential gap.

The under secretary of commerce responsible for NOAA, Jane Lubchenco, issued the memorandum ordering the changes. In it, she wrote that the administration had been trying all along to fix "this dysfunctional program that had become a national embarrassment due to chronic management problems."

"It is a long, sad history," said Dennis Hartmann, the chairman of a broad review of earth-observing satellite programs released in May by the National Research Council. The report projected a dismal decline in what has been a crown jewel of modern earth and atmospheric science.

The Joint Polar Satellite System also includes important sensors for studying the global climate, and these too are at risk.

But its main satellites are most notable because they put instruments to sense atmospheric moisture, temperature and the like into what is known as the "polar p.m." orbit, a passage from lower altitude that provides sharp and frequent images of global weather patterns. (Other satellites stare continuously at one part of the globe from farther off, for short-term forecasting.)

Polar satellites provide 84 percent of the data used in the main American computer model tracking Hurricane Sandy.

For years, as the accuracy of this kind of forecasting has steadily improved, NOAA's p.m. polar satellites have been a crucial factor, like the center on a basketball team.

But all the while, despite many warnings, the coverage gap has grown ever more likely.

The department told Congress this summer that it could not come up with any way to launch J.P.S.S.-1 any sooner. Kathryn D. Sullivan, assistant secretary of commerce, said it would "endeavor to maintain the launch date as much as practicable."

The Government Accountability Office, which views a gap as "almost certain," has been urging NOAA to come up with alternatives, like leaning on other commercial, military or government satellites for helpful data. But it said it would take a long time and more money to get any such jury-rigged system running.

For now, the agency is running on a stopgap bill that allows it to redirect money from other projects to the polar satellites. In approving it, Congress demanded a plan by next week showing how NOAA intended to stay on schedule and within a strict limit — about $900 million a year.

"NOAA does not have a policy to effect consistent and reliable cost estimates," the Commerce inspector general said. The outside review team said it could not tell "if the current $12.9 billion is high, low, or exactly correct."

The program's problems began a decade ago with an effort to merge military and civilian weather satellites into a single project. After its cost doubled and its schedule slipped five years, that project was sundered by the Obama administration.

As its existing satellites aged and the delays mounted, NOAA finally put a new model named Suomi into orbit a year ago that now helps bridge the gap until the next launchings, in 2017 and in 2022 — two and four years late, respectively.

But there are lingering concerns that technical glitches have shortened Suomi's useful lifetime, perhaps to just three years. Predicting a satellite's lifetime is like trying to guess when a light bulb will go out. The most likely timing of a gap in coverage is between 2016 and 2018, according to the best official estimates.

That would "threaten life and property," the independent review team warned.

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Green Blog: A Multitude of Oysters? Looks Can Be Deceiving

Watching a professional  shuck oysters is hypnotic. With thick-gloved hands, he steadies the mollusk on a cushion of cloth stained  with gray juice and grit. Next he drives a stubby blade into the valve that separates the two shells, wiggling it to slice through the muscle that clamps them shut. Then he  jerks the oyster open, and the scent of salt and sea wafts through  the air.

Finally, with a flick of his wrist, the shucker flings away  the flat side of the shell and inspects the meat encased in the remaining half. If it's good, it is added  to a tray that will be hurried out to hungry customers. They may add a dash of lemon and hot sauce before gulping down each glistening blob.

It's an industry that ticks along like a metronome in New Orleans, where I recently spent a long weekend. Restaurants in the French Quarter were full every night of my stay, and part of the draw was the oyster harvest, which began in early October.

With roughly two million acres of public and private oyster beds and annual revenue of $350 million, Louisiana's oyster industry is the largest  in the United States. New Orleans prides itself on being the "oyster capital" and has devised endless ways to prepare the delicacy — pannéed, broiled or baked; in sandwiches, stews or pies; or most traditionally, raw on the half shell.

Still, the industry has yet to bounce back from recent calamities that took a heavy toll on the state's coastal estuaries, where freshwater meets seawater and oysters form part of the ecosystem's bedrock. "The word I would use for recovery is that it's 'beginning,' " said John Supan, an oyster specialist at Louisiana State University who is the  director of the Sea Grant Grand Isle oyster hatchery.

In 2005, Hurricane Katrina upended vast networks of reefs along the Gulf Coast. Then came the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, which sent oil coursing through the marshes. Oyster beds were disrupted again in late August of this year by the gales and pounding rains of Hurricane Isaac, which sowed muck that impeded the seasonal start of production.

Sal Sunseri, sales manager at the P&J Oyster Company in New Orleans, the oldest shucking operation in the United States, said that while business has gradually been improving  since the 2010 spill, the company is still at only 35 percent of its normal production – and the company has yet  to resume shucking its own oysters.

Still, it's hard to fully quantify the impacts of storms and spills because the estuarine oyster beds go through natural dips and surges  of their own. Louisiana's seem to be undergoing a natural recession at the moment, so "it's hard to say what the man-made impact is, superimposed over the tremendous variation that exists naturally," said Thomas Soniat, a biology professor at the University of New Orleans.

It's particularly difficult to measure the impact of the oil that sullied the estuaries in 2010 and the tar balls that return during major storms in the gulf region.

One ecological shock that scientists target with more confidence is the freshwater diversion  of 2010, when  Gov. Bobby Jindall ordered the opening of giant valves  to pump freshwater into the Mississippi in an effort to  force out some of the oil that was seeping in. The diversion severely damaged the oyster beds, which thrive only in a delicate balance of saltwater and fresh.

Mr. Sunseri of P&J Oyster said there was no question  that the torrents of freshwater damaged his business. "The approach of an oysterman is to create smaller diversions that replicate the way it used to be — not these big major diversions that change the environment," he said. Dr. Soniat said the mortality rate  was 98 percent in some oyster beds.

Adding to the challenge of recovery, the waves unleashed by Hurricane Isaac churned up marshlands, causing them to  release what is known as overburden, an influx of loosened marsh grasses that is then cast atop the reefs. Uprooted, the vegetation rots and bacteria then thrive, sapping the estuarine water of oxygen and effectively suffocating the oysters.

The only solution is dredging. "The challenge is to get out there and clean the reef as well as you can," said Dr. Supan, the Louisiana State researcher. By "raking'' the reefs, the dredgers free oysters from this toxic soup by turning them over "like you're plowing a field," he said.

Ultimately, the most prudent strategy is active reef management,  Dr. Supan said. Traditionally, oyster production in the gulf allowed nature to take its course.  But other avenues have recently proved attractive.

"Really, when you're managing oyster resources, there are two words: 'plant cultch,'  he said. Cultch is a mass of shells, pebbles and gravel; by spreading it on the estuary floor, workers can create a substrate for the oysters to latch onto so they can then cluster to form underwater fortresses.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries has its own Oyster Cultch Project under way in six estuarine environments across the state, from Sister Lake to Three Mile Bay. By simultaneously building hatcheries where oyster larvae are cultivated, the state  hopes to seed the new reefs with generations of oysters that will build new fortresses.

Back in the restaurant in New Orleans where I was lulled by the shucking routine, the piles of oysters teetering atop trays make it hard to absorb the reality that gulf oysters are not yet thriving the way they used to.

The shucker tapped his knife in front of me, sending a tiny round object rolling my way. "A pearl for the girl," he joked. Its shape was rather irregular and it was not exactly lustrous, but to me it was a remarkable thing.

Maybe the enduring oyster itself, which slips so smoothly down millions of throats, ought to be regarded as a kind of treasure, too.

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Fish Off Fukushima, Japan, Show Elevated Levels of Cesium

TOKYO — Elevated levels of cesium still detected in fish off the Fukushima coast of Japan suggest that radioactive particles from last year's nuclear disaster have accumulated on the seafloor and could contaminate sea life for decades, according to new research.

The findings published in Friday's issue of the journal Science highlight the challenges facing Japan as it seeks to protect its food supply and rebuild the local fisheries industry.

More than 18 months after the nuclear disaster, Japan bans the sale of 36 species of fish caught off Fukushima, rendering the bulk of its fishing boats idle and denying the region one of its mainstay industries.

Some local fishermen are trying to return to work. Since July, a handful of them have resumed small-scale commercial fishing for species, like octopus, that have cleared government radiation tests. Radiation readings in waters off Fukushima and beyond have returned to near-normal levels.

But about 40 percent of fish caught off Fukushima and tested by the government still have too much cesium to be safe to eat under regulatory limits set by the Japanese government last year, said the article's author, Ken O. Buesseler, a leading marine chemistry expert at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who analyzed test results from the 12 months following the March 2011 disaster.

Because cesium tends not to stay very long in the tissues of saltwater fish — and because high radiation levels have been detected most often in bottom-feeding fish — it is likely that fish are being newly contaminated by cesium on the seabed, Mr. Buesseler wrote in the Science article.

"The fact that many fish are just as contaminated today with cesium 134 and cesium 137 as they were more than one year ago implies that cesium is still being released into the food chain," Mr. Buesseler wrote. This kind of cesium has a half-life of 30 years, meaning that it falls off by half in radioactive intensity every 30 years. Given that, he said, "sediments would remain contaminated for decades to come."

Officials at Japan's Fisheries Agency, which conducted the tests, said Mr. Buesseler's analysis made sense.

"In the early days of the disaster, as the fallout hit the ocean, we saw high levels of radiation from fish near the surface," said Koichi Tahara, assistant director of the agency's resources and research division. "But now it would be reasonable to assume that radioactive substances are settling on the seafloor."

But that was less of a concern than Mr. Buesseler's research might suggest, Mr. Tahara said, because the cesium was expected to eventually settle down into the seabed.

Mr. Tahara also stressed that the government would continue its vigorous testing and that fishing bans would remain in place until radiation readings returned to safe levels.

Naohiro Yoshida, an environmental chemistry expert at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, said that while he agreed with much of Mr. Buesseler's analysis, it was too early to reach a conclusion on how extensive radioactive contamination of Japan's oceans would be, and how long it would have an impact on marine life in the area.

Further research was needed on ocean currents, sediments and how different species of fish are affected by radioactive contamination, he said.

As much as four-fifths of the radioactive substances released from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are thought to have entered the sea, either blown offshore or released directly into the ocean from water used to cool the site's reactors in the wake of the accident.

Sea currents quickly dispersed that radioactivity, and seawater readings off the Fukushima shore returned to near-normal levels. But fish caught in the area continue to show elevated readings for radioactive cesium, which is associated with an increased risk of cancer in humans.

Just two months ago, two greenling caught close to the Fukushima shore were found to contain more than 25,000 becquerels a kilogram of cesium, the highest cesium levels found in fish since the disaster and 250 times the government's safety limit.

The operator of the Fukushima plant, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, said that the site no longer released contaminated water into the ocean, and that radiation levels in waters around the plant had stabilized.

But Yoshikazu Nagai, a spokesman for the company, said he could not rule out undetected leaks into the ocean from its reactors, the basements of which remain flooded with cooling water.

To reduce the chance of water from seeping out of the plant, Tokyo Electric is building a 2,400-foot-long wall between the site's reactors and the ocean. But Mr. Nagai said the steel-and-concrete wall, which will reach 100 feet underground, would take until mid-2014 to build.

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The Agenda: Nearly Absent in the Campaign: Climate Change

Left, Eric Thayer for The NYT; right, Doug Mills/ The NYT

At left, Mitt Romney during campaign event at a coal mine in Beallsville, Ohio in August.  In March, President Obama, at right, spoke at the Copper Mountain Solar Project in Nevada.

WASHINGTON — For all their disputes, President Obama and Mitt Romney agree that the world is warming and that humans are at least partly to blame. It remains wholly unclear what either of them plans to do about it.

Even after a year of record-smashing temperatures, drought and Arctic ice melt, none of the moderators of the four general-election debates asked about climate change, nor did either of the candidates broach the topic.

Throughout the campaign, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have seemed most intent on trying to outdo each other as lovers of coal, oil and natural gas — the very fuels most responsible for rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Mr. Obama has supported broad climate change legislation, financed extensive clean energy projects and pushed new regulations to reduce global warming emissions from cars and power plants. But neither he nor Mr. Romney has laid out during the campaign a legislative or regulatory program to address the fundamental questions arising from one of the most vexing economic, environmental, political and humanitarian issues to face the planet. Should the United States cut its greenhouse gas emissions, and, if so, how far and how fast? Should fossil fuels be more heavily taxed? Should any form of clean energy be subsidized, and for how long? Should the United States lead international mitigation efforts? Should the nation pour billions of new dollars into basic energy research? Is the climate system so fraught with uncertainty that the rational response is to do nothing?

Many scientists and policy experts say the lack of a serious discussion of climate change in the presidential contest represents a lost opportunity to engage the public and to signal to the rest of the world American intentions for dealing with what is, by definition, a global problem that requires global cooperation.

"On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country," said Andrew Steer, the president of the World Resources Institute and a former special envoy for climate change at the World Bank. "Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed."

Mr. Steer noted that climate change was no longer a partisan issue in Europe and that China, Japan, Australia and South Korea had taken significant steps to reduce emissions and invest heavily in clean energy technology.

"The real question in this country," said Mr. Steer, a British citizen, "is why politicians don't see it as in their interest to discuss it."

The list of reasons is long.

Any serious effort to address climate change will require a transformation of the nation's system for producing and consuming energy and will, at least in the medium term, mean higher prices for fuel and electricity. Powerful incumbent industries — coal, oil, utilities — are threatened by such changes and have mounted a well-financed long-term campaign to sow doubt about climate change. The Koch brothers and others in the oil industry have underwritten advertising campaigns and grass-roots efforts to support like-minded candidates. And the Republican Party has essentially declared climate change a nonproblem.

The two most effective ways of reducing global warming pollution — taxing it or regulating it — are politically toxic in a year when economic problems are paramount. After a bill died in the Senate in 2010, Mr. Obama abandoned his support for cap and trade, a market-based method to limit greenhouse gas emissions, and he has given little hint of what regulatory policies he intends to pursue if he wins a second term. Aides said that he would not propose a carbon tax or other energy tax, but that he would consider supporting one as part of a larger budget and spending deal.

As governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney considered joining a regional cap-and-trade system, then abandoned it because of uncertainty over costs. He has opposed Mr. Obama's steps to regulate emissions from power plants and vehicles. He has said he would reverse Mr. Obama's air quality regulations and would renegotiate the auto efficiency standard of 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 that automakers agreed to this year.

The struggling economy has made it difficult for emerging clean energy companies to get the capital they need to reach commercial scale and compete with producers of traditional energy sources. Government programs to provide that seed money are highly controversial, as the fight over tax breaks for wind power companies and the recent failures of the solar panel maker Solyndra and the advanced battery manufacturer A123 Systems showed.

The Obama administration provided $90 billion in new financing from the 2009 stimulus for clean energy projects, but most of that money is gone.

Though there is little doubt that the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation have altered the earth's climate, some uncertainty remains about whether and when such changes will become unmanageable. Huge technological challenges persist in transforming the energy generation system. Both Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney refer to "clean coal," shorthand for capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning power plants, but the technology is still in its infancy.

International efforts to address climate change, which showed great promise when Mr. Obama took office, have sputtered in recent years because of fears that limiting carbon emissions means limiting economic growth. There is also considerable resistance to any plan that would require the United States and other wealthy countries to take stronger measures than those demanded of China, India and other fast-growing economies that are responsible for the bulk of the growth in global emissions.

Mr. Romney's chief domestic policy adviser, Oren Cass, said the nation should not take unilateral steps. "What it is going to do is hurt our economy very seriously, and it's going to drive a lot of industrial activity from the United States to countries that are, frankly, much less efficient in their use of energy," he said at an energy debate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this month.

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Basics: True Blue Stands Out in an Earthy Crowd

Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press

NATURAL COLOR: Wild blueberries ready for harvesting in Warren, Me.

For the French Fauvist painter and color gourmand Raoul Dufy, blue was the only color with enough strength of character to remain blue "in all its tones." Darkened red looks brown and whitened red turns pink, Dufy said, while yellow blackens with shading and fades away in the light. But blue can be brightened or dimmed, the artist said, and "it will always stay blue."

Scientists, too, have lately been bullish on blue, captivated by its optical purity, complexity and metaphorical fluency. They're exploring the physics and chemistry of blueness in nature, the evolution of blue ornaments and blue come-ons, and the sheer brazenness of being blue when most earthly life forms opt for earthy raiments of beige, ruddy or taupe.

One research team recently reported the structural analysis of a small, dazzlingly blue fruit from the African Pollia condensata plant that may well be the brightest terrestrial object in nature. Another group working in the central Congo basin announced the discovery of a new species of monkey, a rare event in mammalogy. Rarer still is the noteworthiest trait of the monkey, called the lesula: a patch of brilliant blue skin on the male's buttocks and scrotal area that stands out from the surrounding fur like neon underpants.

Still other researchers are tracing the history of blue pigments in human culture, and the role those pigments have played in shaping our notions of virtue, authority, divinity and social class. "Blue pigments played an outstanding role in human development," said Heinz Berke, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Zurich. For some cultures, he said, they were as valuable as gold.

As a raft of surveys has shown, blue love is a global affair. Ask people their favorite color, and in most parts of the world roughly half will say blue, a figure three to four times the support accorded common second-place finishers like purple or green. Just one in six Americans is blue-eyed, but nearly one in two consider blue the prettiest eye color, which could be why some 50 percent of tinted contact lenses sold are the kind that make your brown eyes blue.

Sick children like their caretakers in blue: A recent study at the Cleveland Clinic found that young patients preferred nurses wearing blue uniforms to those in white or yellow. And am I the only person in the United States who doesn't own a single pair of those permanently popular pants formerly known as dungarees?

"For Americans, bluejeans have a special connotation because of their association with the Old West and rugged individualism," said Steven Bleicher, author of "Contemporary Color: Theory and Use." The jeans take their John Wayne reputation seriously. "Because the indigo dye fades during washing, everyone's blue becomes uniquely different," said Dr. Bleicher, a professor of visual arts at Coastal Carolina University. "They're your bluejeans."

According to psychologists who explore the complex interplay of color, mood and behavior, blue's basic emotional valence is calmness and open-endedness, in contrast to the aggressive specificity associated with red. Blue is sea and sky, a pocket-size vacation.

In a study that appeared in the journal Perceptual & Motor Skills, researchers at Aichi University in Japan found that subjects who performed a lengthy video game exercise while sitting next to a blue partition reported feeling less fatigued and claustrophobic, and displayed a more regular heart beat pattern, than did people who sat by red or yellow partitions.

In the journal Science, researchers at the University of British Columbia described their study of how computer screen color affected participants' ability to solve either creative problems — for example, determining the word that best unifies the terms "shelf," "read" and "end" (answer: book) — or detail-oriented tasks like copy editing. The researchers found that blue screens were superior to red or white backgrounds at enhancing creativity, while red screens worked best for accuracy tasks. Interestingly, when participants were asked to predict which screen color would improve performance on the two categories of problems, big majorities deemed blue the ideal desktop setting for both.

But skies have their limits, and blue can also imply coldness, sorrow and death. On learning of a good friend's suicide in 1901, Pablo Picasso fell into a severe depression, and he began painting images of beggars, drunks, the poor and the halt, all famously rendered in a palette of blue.

The provenance of using "the blues" to mean sadness isn't clear, but L. Elizabeth Crawford, a professor of psychology at the University of Richmond in Virginia, suggested that the association arose from the look of the body when it's in a low energy, low oxygen state. "The lips turn blue, there's a blue pallor to the complexion," she said. "It's the opposite of the warm flushing of the skin that we associate with love, kindness and affection."

Blue is also known to suppress the appetite, possibly as an adaptation against eating rotten meat, which can have a bluish tinge. "If you're on a diet, my advice is, take the white bulb out of the refrigerator and put in a blue one instead," Dr. Bleicher said. "A blue glow makes food look very unappetizing."

Not so to those that would dine upon us. Field studies of color-coded insect traps have shown that mosquitoes are particularly attracted to blue.

That blue can connote coolness and tranquillity is one of nature's little inside jokes. Blue light is on the high-energy end of the visible spectrum, and the comparative shortness of its wavelengths explains why the blue portion of the white light from the sun is easily scattered by the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in our atmosphere, and thus why the sky looks blue.

Down on earth, organisms assume many of their colors with pigments, chemical substances that selectively absorb some wavelengths of light and reflect others — the ones we then see as the object's color. Plants look green because the chlorophyll pigment in their leaves absorbs pretty much all sunlight except green. Cardinals owe their flaming feathers to carotenoids, orange-reflecting pigments the birds extract from ingested berries and insects.

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