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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Federal Budget Limits Affect Scientific Conferences

After General Services Administration workers were found splurging on hotels, food and catering for a regional conference near Las Vegas two years ago, the Obama administration imposed new guidelines that limit the amount of money that federal agencies can spend on such events. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the directive saved more than $600 million in the first two quarters of this fiscal year, compared with the same period in 2010.

But a number of science and technology organizations are now arguing that the federal belt-tightening is affecting the ability of the scientific community to share research and collaborate.

The U.S. Public Policy Council of ACM, the Computing Research Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have written to Congress and federal officials, asking for an exemption from the spending policy for "recognized scientific, technical and educational meetings" and "meetings of national and international standards bodies."

"Participation in scientific conferences is a critical opportunity for scientists and engineers to keep current in rapidly changing fields of science and technology," said the letter, dated Sept. 10 and sent to House and Senate leaders of both parties, as well as the federal Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. "These conferences facilitate communication among scientists, engineers, practitioners and students. They provide an important venue for presenting cutting-edge research."

Representatives from agencies like the Energy Department, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department regularly attend conferences to exchange findings with private organizations. Participation in the events usually includes setting up booths where the federal researchers can demonstrate new technologies. Officials said the meetings emphasize collaboration, as well as education.

Last year, for instance, 564 people from the Energy Department attended the 2011 Supercomputing Conference to meet with private groups, speak and present new research. The department's 12 laboratories — including Fermilab in Illinois, Brookhaven on Long Island, Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee — set up booths to exhibit their latest projects, allowing them to demonstrate their work in a hands-on setting that is vital to the scientific process, critics of the spending policy say.

But next month, when 11,000 hardware and software developers and vendors gather in Salt Lake City for the 2012 Supercomputing Conference, or SC12, none of the Energy Department's labs will have their own booths on the 125,000-square-foot exhibit floor, and there will be 172 fewer agency employees, organizers estimate, than in 2011.

The Energy Department is still sending nearly 400 employees to participate in the technical program, where scientists can discuss and present their research. But Vinton G. Cerf, president of the Association for Computing Machinery who has been described as one of the "fathers of the Internet," said that is not enough.

"This is a problem not just for the computing research community, but for almost anyone who's involved in scientific work," Mr. Cerf said. "The inability of the government researchers and program managers to participate in these conferences is actually very damaging."

Mr. Cerf said he understood the government's interest in cutting costs, but thought the policy was "a terrible penny-wise decision."

"This is not a boondoggle," he said. "This is hard work."The government has also had a large presence at Siggraph, an annual international computer graphics and interactives conference, as well as smaller events that might feel the agencies' reduced presence even more keenly, Mr. Cerf said.

In October 2010, the General Services Administration spent $822,751 to prepare for and hold its Western region annual meeting. A review by the agency's inspector general concluded the spending was "excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissible."

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David Haskell Finds Biology Zen in a Patch of Nature

Buck Butler for The New York Times

David Haskell in in Sewanee, Tenn., on the Domain of the University of the South.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest "mandala," as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in "The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature."

He is pointing out flowers, salamanders, insects, trees, as we follow a well-worn hiking path, and stops for a moment to listen. These are swamp cicadas, he says, not the kind that hatch all at once after years underground and hammer the ear mercilessly.

"Was it last year or the year before we had the 13-year cicadas?" he says. "I took my sound pressure meter down to a place where they were really loud, and it came to over 90 decibels. At 85 OSHA says you need hearing protection in your workplace.

"Everybody else hates them."

But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. "These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it's 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out."

It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like "nature deficit disorder" and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science.

"You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare," he says, "but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there's such beauty there.

"And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that's O.K. It's not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane's going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA."

Dr. Haskell wanted to tell the story of forest ecology and also to refresh himself with a kind of natural history meditation, as opposed to goal-directed scientific research. He has a daily practice of sitting and concentrating on his breathing (he doesn't use the word "meditation") of no specific religious bent. He does, however, set himself apart from crusading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, saying he harbors a "deep suspicion that the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves."

He did no experiments and no research at his forest circle. He sat, and watched, and listened.

"I had my hand lens and binoculars and a notebook," he said. "And that was it. And of course my senses."

He is not, however, averse to technology when it comes to reaching an audience. He blogs (davidhaskell.wordpress.com) and tweets (@dghaskell).

As we walk in the forest, he points out shagbark hickory, baneberry ("very poisonous") and blue cohosh ("you wouldn't want to eat it"). The forest is rich in animal and plant diversity partly because it never suffered the onslaught of glaciers that scoured more northern forests in the last ice age. His small circle lies in an area that has been untouched for hundreds of years.

But this forest is no pristine wilderness, as is obvious from the occasional golf ball resting under the ground cover. The path we are on is well down the side of a rough hill, beyond the crest of which lies the golf course. "They remind me of eggs," Dr. Haskell says. "You hatch one of these things and you get a golfer."

Dr. Haskell was born in England, raised in Paris and educated at Oxford and Cornell before he came to Tennessee, 16 years ago, with his wife, Sarah Vance. One result of his background is that his accent is so hard to pin down, he says, that wherever he goes, people say, "You're not from around here."

At Oxford he met two people who had great influence on his approach: the evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, with whom he studied, and Ms. Vance, a biologist, artist, goat keeper and soap maker. They live on less than an acre in Sewanee with a garden and dairy goats for Ms. Vance's Cudzoo Farm, along with ducks, rabbits, bees, a dog and several cats.

His wife, Dr. Haskell says, "really taught me what it would be like to look at nature with a more empathetic eye. And a careful eye."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the farm where Sarah Vance keeps dairy goats. It is Cudzoo Farm, not Cudz Zoo Farm.

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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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David Haskell Finds Biology Zen in a Patch of Nature

Buck Butler for The New York Times

David Haskell in in Sewanee, Tenn., on the Domain of the University of the South.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest "mandala," as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in "The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature."

He is pointing out flowers, salamanders, insects, trees, as we follow a well-worn hiking path, and stops for a moment to listen. These are swamp cicadas, he says, not the kind that hatch all at once after years underground and hammer the ear mercilessly.

"Was it last year or the year before we had the 13-year cicadas?" he says. "I took my sound pressure meter down to a place where they were really loud, and it came to over 90 decibels. At 85 OSHA says you need hearing protection in your workplace.

"Everybody else hates them."

But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. "These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it's 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out."

It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like "nature deficit disorder" and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science.

"You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare," he says, "but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there's such beauty there.

"And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that's O.K. It's not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane's going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA."

Dr. Haskell wanted to tell the story of forest ecology and also to refresh himself with a kind of natural history meditation, as opposed to goal-directed scientific research. He has a daily practice of sitting and concentrating on his breathing (he doesn't use the word "meditation") of no specific religious bent. He does, however, set himself apart from crusading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, saying he harbors a "deep suspicion that the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves."

He did no experiments and no research at his forest circle. He sat, and watched, and listened.

"I had my hand lens and binoculars and a notebook," he said. "And that was it. And of course my senses."

He is not, however, averse to technology when it comes to reaching an audience. He blogs (davidhaskell.wordpress.com) and tweets (@dghaskell).

As we walk in the forest, he points out shagbark hickory, baneberry ("very poisonous") and blue cohosh ("you wouldn't want to eat it"). The forest is rich in animal and plant diversity partly because it never suffered the onslaught of glaciers that scoured more northern forests in the last ice age. His small circle lies in an area that has been untouched for hundreds of years.

But this forest is no pristine wilderness, as is obvious from the occasional golf ball resting under the ground cover. The path we are on is well down the side of a rough hill, beyond the crest of which lies the golf course. "They remind me of eggs," Dr. Haskell says. "You hatch one of these things and you get a golfer."

Dr. Haskell was born in England, raised in Paris and educated at Oxford and Cornell before he came to Tennessee, 16 years ago, with his wife, Sarah Vance. One result of his background is that his accent is so hard to pin down, he says, that wherever he goes, people say, "You're not from around here."

At Oxford he met two people who had great influence on his approach: the evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, with whom he studied, and Ms. Vance, a biologist, artist, goat keeper and soap maker. They live on less than an acre in Sewanee with a garden and dairy goats for Ms. Vance's Cudzoo Farm, along with ducks, rabbits, bees, a dog and several cats.

His wife, Dr. Haskell says, "really taught me what it would be like to look at nature with a more empathetic eye. And a careful eye."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the farm where Sarah Vance keeps dairy goats. It is Cudzoo Farm, not Cudz Zoo Farm.

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

Federal Budget Limits Affect Scientific Conferences

After General Services Administration workers were found splurging on hotels, food and catering for a regional conference near Las Vegas two years ago, the Obama administration imposed new guidelines that limit the amount of money that federal agencies can spend on such events. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that the directive saved more than $600 million in the first two quarters of this fiscal year, compared with the same period in 2010.

But a number of science and technology organizations are now arguing that the federal belt-tightening is affecting the ability of the scientific community to share research and collaborate.

The U.S. Public Policy Council of ACM, the Computing Research Association, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers have written to Congress and federal officials, asking for an exemption from the spending policy for "recognized scientific, technical and educational meetings" and "meetings of national and international standards bodies."

"Participation in scientific conferences is a critical opportunity for scientists and engineers to keep current in rapidly changing fields of science and technology," said the letter, dated Sept. 10 and sent to House and Senate leaders of both parties, as well as the federal Office of Management and Budget and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. "These conferences facilitate communication among scientists, engineers, practitioners and students. They provide an important venue for presenting cutting-edge research."

Representatives from agencies like the Energy Department, NASA, the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department regularly attend conferences to exchange findings with private organizations. Participation in the events usually includes setting up booths where the federal researchers can demonstrate new technologies. Officials said the meetings emphasize collaboration, as well as education.

Last year, for instance, 564 people from the Energy Department attended the 2011 Supercomputing Conference to meet with private groups, speak and present new research. The department's 12 laboratories — including Fermilab in Illinois, Brookhaven on Long Island, Los Alamos in New Mexico and Oak Ridge in Tennessee — set up booths to exhibit their latest projects, allowing them to demonstrate their work in a hands-on setting that is vital to the scientific process, critics of the spending policy say.

But next month, when 11,000 hardware and software developers and vendors gather in Salt Lake City for the 2012 Supercomputing Conference, or SC12, none of the Energy Department's labs will have their own booths on the 125,000-square-foot exhibit floor, and there will be 172 fewer agency employees, organizers estimate, than in 2011.

The Energy Department is still sending nearly 400 employees to participate in the technical program, where scientists can discuss and present their research. But Vinton G. Cerf, president of the Association for Computing Machinery who has been described as one of the "fathers of the Internet," said that is not enough.

"This is a problem not just for the computing research community, but for almost anyone who's involved in scientific work," Mr. Cerf said. "The inability of the government researchers and program managers to participate in these conferences is actually very damaging."

Mr. Cerf said he understood the government's interest in cutting costs, but thought the policy was "a terrible penny-wise decision."

"This is not a boondoggle," he said. "This is hard work."The government has also had a large presence at Siggraph, an annual international computer graphics and interactives conference, as well as smaller events that might feel the agencies' reduced presence even more keenly, Mr. Cerf said.

In October 2010, the General Services Administration spent $822,751 to prepare for and hold its Western region annual meeting. A review by the agency's inspector general concluded the spending was "excessive, wasteful and in some cases impermissible."

15.49 | 0 komentar | Read More

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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David Haskell Finds Biology Zen in a Patch of Nature

Buck Butler for The New York Times

David Haskell in in Sewanee, Tenn., on the Domain of the University of the South.

SEWANEE, Tenn. — It is afternoon in a hardwood forest on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau, and the cicadas are singing.

David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South, is taking me through part of the 13,000 acres owned by the university, to a small circle of forest floor a bit over a yard in diameter. He visited this randomly chosen forest "mandala," as he calls it, many times over the course of a year and recorded his observations in "The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature."

He is pointing out flowers, salamanders, insects, trees, as we follow a well-worn hiking path, and stops for a moment to listen. These are swamp cicadas, he says, not the kind that hatch all at once after years underground and hammer the ear mercilessly.

"Was it last year or the year before we had the 13-year cicadas?" he says. "I took my sound pressure meter down to a place where they were really loud, and it came to over 90 decibels. At 85 OSHA says you need hearing protection in your workplace.

"Everybody else hates them."

But to him, the noise is biological alchemy, sunlight into sound. "These guys have been feeding on roots for 13 years. And so it's 13 years of combined Tennessee forest productivity being blasted out."

It is this kind of perception, halfway between metaphor and field note, that makes his voice a welcome entry in the world of nature writers. He thinks like a biologist, writes like a poet, and gives the natural world the kind of open-minded attention one expects from a Zen monk rather than a hypothesis-driven scientist. He avoids terms like "nature deficit disorder" and refuses to scold the bug-fearing masses. His pitch is more old-fashioned, grounded in aesthetics as much as science.

"You can live a perfectly happy life never having heard of Shakespeare," he says, "but your life is in some ways a little diminished, because there's such beauty there.

"And I think the same is true of nature. Much of it is useless to us, and that's O.K. It's not true that every species that goes extinct is like another rivet off the plane and the plane's going to crash. We lost the passenger pigeon and the U.S. economy did not tank. But we lost the passenger pigeon and we lost some of this remarkable music made out of atoms and DNA."

Dr. Haskell wanted to tell the story of forest ecology and also to refresh himself with a kind of natural history meditation, as opposed to goal-directed scientific research. He has a daily practice of sitting and concentrating on his breathing (he doesn't use the word "meditation") of no specific religious bent. He does, however, set himself apart from crusading atheists, like Richard Dawkins, saying he harbors a "deep suspicion that the world is more than atoms rearranging themselves."

He did no experiments and no research at his forest circle. He sat, and watched, and listened.

"I had my hand lens and binoculars and a notebook," he said. "And that was it. And of course my senses."

He is not, however, averse to technology when it comes to reaching an audience. He blogs (davidhaskell.wordpress.com) and tweets (@dghaskell).

As we walk in the forest, he points out shagbark hickory, baneberry ("very poisonous") and blue cohosh ("you wouldn't want to eat it"). The forest is rich in animal and plant diversity partly because it never suffered the onslaught of glaciers that scoured more northern forests in the last ice age. His small circle lies in an area that has been untouched for hundreds of years.

But this forest is no pristine wilderness, as is obvious from the occasional golf ball resting under the ground cover. The path we are on is well down the side of a rough hill, beyond the crest of which lies the golf course. "They remind me of eggs," Dr. Haskell says. "You hatch one of these things and you get a golfer."

Dr. Haskell was born in England, raised in Paris and educated at Oxford and Cornell before he came to Tennessee, 16 years ago, with his wife, Sarah Vance. One result of his background is that his accent is so hard to pin down, he says, that wherever he goes, people say, "You're not from around here."

At Oxford he met two people who had great influence on his approach: the evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, with whom he studied, and Ms. Vance, a biologist, artist, goat keeper and soap maker. They live on less than an acre in Sewanee with a garden and dairy goats for Ms. Vance's Cudzoo Farm, along with ducks, rabbits, bees, a dog and several cats.

His wife, Dr. Haskell says, "really taught me what it would be like to look at nature with a more empathetic eye. And a careful eye."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the farm where Sarah Vance keeps dairy goats. It is Cudzoo Farm, not Cudz Zoo Farm.

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Out There: Discovery Rekindles Wish for a Journey to the Stars

What will you wear to Alpha Centauri?

The news last week that there is a planet circling Alpha Centauri B, only a little more than four light-years away, set off an epidemic of daydreaming among the astronomical and sci-fi set, me among them.

For people who believe that interstellar voyages, either for people or for robots, are in the future, Alpha Centauri, a triple-star system that is the Sun's nearest known neighbor, has always loomed large and close as a destination. It was the home of the mythical jungle world Pandora in James Cameron's epic "Avatar," for example.

The new planet doesn't have jungles, giant blue-skinned cats or, as far as we know, the magical mineral unobtainium. It is, rather, a hellish unlivable blob of lava probably about the size of Earth, only four million short miles from the fires of Alpha Centauri B, the second brightest star in the system.

But if astronomers have learned anything over the last few years from devices like the Kepler satellite, it is that small planets come in packs. There is plenty of room in the system for more planets, habitable ones.

"I think we should drop everything and send a probe there," said Sara Seager, an astronomer at M.I.T., echoing a call made last year by the exoplanet pioneer Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley.

There is in fact somebody in charge of doing something just like that. Her name is Mae Jemison, a former astronaut, engineer, dancer, actor and entrepreneur. This year she, in conjunction with the nonprofit foundation Icarus Interstellar, won a $500,000 government grant to set up 100 Year Starship, an organization that is to come up with a business plan for interstellar travel.

Darpa, the government agency that helped invent the Internet and now wants to help invent interstellar travel, estimated that just planning for such a trip could take 100 years. Dr. Jemison, 56, hopes it can happen sooner.

The Centauri planet was officially announced on her birthday, and over the phone from her new headquarters in Houston she sounded practically bubbly. "I can't imagine a cooler birthday," she said.

Dr. Jemison's main work these days is spreading the word and raising money. The prospect of habitable real estate makes the idea of journeying to other stars that much more real, she said, adding: "This is a boon, because most people have heard of Alpha Centauri. It's close."

Well, sort of close. Space is deeper and older than most humans can comprehend. You can't measure a light-year by your stride. There are 4.4 of them — 27 trillion miles — from here to Alpha Centauri B.

We won't get there by doing business as usual. Voyager 1, the fastest and most distant human artifact, is more than 11 billion miles from the Sun and is speeding away at 11 miles per second; it would take 78,000 years to get to Alpha Centauri if it were going that way, which it is not.

Other schemes, based on existing or about-to-be-existing technology like solar sails and thermonuclear rockets, have been proposed that could reach a tenth the speed of light and make the crossing in less than a human lifetime. (If you have a design for a faster-than-light warp drive, send it directly to Dr. Jemison, not me.)

Of course the cost would be staggering, even for the robots (perhaps genetically engineered nanoprobes) that would precede humans. And whoever eventually goes won't ever come back.

It won't be me, despite what I once wrote in my high school yearbook: "Ambition: To go to the stars."

Perhaps it is a sign of my age that I think more these days about what I would be leaving behind than what I would be gaining: my family and other loved ones, autumn in the Catskills, one more cowboy trout stream or New Year's Eve with old friends.

I asked Dr. Jemison if she would go, knowing it was forever.

"Yeah," she answered. "I would go."

Perhaps hearing the catch of loneliness in my voice, she added, "It makes a difference who goes with you."

In science fiction, she said, space travel is sterile.

"I think it won't be like that," she said. "It has to be reimagined. We will bring our culture along with us."

All that is part of the Starship study's mandate, she said.

At a recent symposium that was a sort of housewarming for the new institute, Dr. Jemison said, there was a lot of talk about what it means to be an interstellar civilization. "Do we start calling ourselves Earthlings instead of Americans?"

Another big topic of conversation, surprisingly or not so surprisingly, was how to dress on a star cruise. As Dr. Jemison pointed out, not all of us are going to look good in those little spandex Star Trek uniforms. And even for those who do, the look will get old after 40 years.

Perhaps, some people suggested, we won't need clothes at all on the starship. Everyone would go around in the Band-Aids that passed for underwear in this summer's "Prometheus," Ridley Scott's not-quite prequel to "Alien."

But the urge to decorate oneself seems built into human nature. And anyway, the urge to see what concoctions can be worn successfully in zero gravity is likely to be overwhelming. The Japanese fashion designer Eri Matsui has already designed a wedding dress — actually a clever pantsuit — that was worn for a wedding aboard a "vomit comet" flight in 2009.

So start shopping and packing — if you dare.

Presumably you won't be limited to one carry-on.

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The Energy Rush: In a Natural Gas Glut, Big Winners and Losers

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

A Chesapeake Energy drill rig in DeSoto Parish, La. A natural gas glut and price plunge have hurt gas exploration companies — and their investors. More Photos »

THE crew of workers fought off the blistering Louisiana sun, jerking their wrenches to tighten the fat hoses that would connect their cement trucks to the Chesapeake Energy drill rig — one of the last two rigs the company is still using to drill for natural gas here in the Haynesville Shale.

At its peak, Chesapeake ran 38 rigs in the region. All told, it has sunk more than 1,200 wells into the Haynesville, a gas-rich vein of dense rock that straddles Louisiana and Texas. Fed by a gold-rush mentality and easy money from Wall Street, Chesapeake and its competitors have done the same in other shale fields from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania.

For most of the country, the result has been cheaper energy. The nation is awash in so much natural gas that electric utilities, which burn the fuel in many generating plants, have curbed rate increases and switched more capacity to gas from coal, a dirtier fossil fuel.

Companies and municipalities are deploying thousands of new gas-powered trucks and buses, curbing noxious diesel fumes and reducing the nation's reliance on imported oil.

And companies like fertilizer and chemical makers, which use gas as a raw material, are suddenly finding that the United States is an attractive place to put new factories, compared with, say, Asia, where gas is four times the price. Dow Chemical, which uses natural gas as a material for producing plastics, has assembled a list of 91 new manufacturing projects, representing $70 billion in potential investment and up to three million jobs, that various companies have proposed or begun because of cheap gas.

"The country has stumbled into a windfall on the backs of these entrepreneurs," said Edward Hirs, a finance professor at the University of Houston who contributed to a report that estimated that the nation's economy benefited by more than $100 billion last year alone from the lower gas prices.

But while the gas rush has benefited most Americans, it's been a money loser so far for many of the gas exploration companies and their tens of thousands of investors.

The drillers punched so many holes and extracted so much gas through hydraulic fracturing that they have driven the price of natural gas to near-record lows. And because of the intricate financial deals and leasing arrangements that many of them struck during the boom, they were unable to pull their foot off the accelerator fast enough to avoid a crash in the price of natural gas, which is down more than 60 percent since the summer of 2008.

Although the bankers made a lot of money from the deal making and a handful of energy companies made fortunes by exiting at the market's peak, most of the industry has been bloodied — forced to sell assets, take huge write-offs and shift as many drill rigs as possible from gas exploration to oil, whose price has held up much better.

Rex W. Tillerson, the chief executive of Exxon Mobil, which spent $41 billion to buy XTO Energy, a giant natural gas company, in 2010, when gas prices were almost double what they are today, minced no words about the industry's plight during an appearance in New York this summer.

"We are all losing our shirts today," Mr. Tillerson said. "We're making no money. It's all in the red."

Like the recent credit bubble, the boom and bust in gas were driven in large part by tens of billions of dollars in creative financing engineered by investment banks like Goldman Sachs, Barclays and Jefferies & Company.

After the financial crisis, the natural gas rush was one of the few major profit centers for Wall Street deal makers, who found willing takers among energy companies and foreign financial investors.

Big companies like Chesapeake and lesser-known outfits like Quicksilver Resources and Exco Resources were able to supercharge their growth with the global financing, transforming the face of energy in this country. In all, the top 50 oil and gas companies raised and spent an annual average of $126 billion over the last six years on drilling, land acquisition and other capital costs within the United States, double their capital spending as of 2005, according to an analysis by Ernst & Young.

Now the gas companies are committed to spending far more to produce gas than they can earn selling it. Their stock prices and debt ratings have been hammered.

"We just killed more meat than we could drag back to the cave and eat," said Maynard Holt, co-president of Tudor Pickering Holt & Company, a Houston investment bank that has handled dozens of shale deals in the last four years. "Now we have a problem."

A Master Salesman

Aubrey K. McClendon, chief executive of Chesapeake Energy, had a secret, and he was anxious to share it.

He called Ralph Eads III, a fraternity buddy from Duke who had become his go-to banker. Mr. McClendon explained that he had quietly acquired leases on hundreds of thousands of acres somewhere in the southern United States — he would not say exactly where — that could become one of the world's biggest natural gas fields.

But to develop the wells, he needed billions of dollars.

"I can get the assets," Mr. McClendon told Mr. Eads, a vice chairman of Jefferies, according to three people who participated in that call, nearly five years ago. "You have to get the money."

Clifford Krauss reported from Evelyn, La., and Eric Lipton from Houston and Washington.

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