National Briefing | Space: A Tablespoon of Progress for Rover

Fresh off drilling into a rock for the first time, the Mars rover Curiosity is preparing to dissect the pulverized rock to determine what it is made of. NASA said Wednesday that Curiosity had successfully collected a tablespoon of powder from the drilling it did two weeks ago and was poised to transfer a pinch to its onboard laboratories. It is the first time a spacecraft has bored into a rock on Mars to retrieve a sample from the interior. The analysis is expected to take days to complete.

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Iceland Weighs Exporting the Power Bubbling From Below

Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

The Krafla plant is Iceland's largest geothermal power station, a showcase of renewable energy.

KRAFLA, Iceland — Soon after work began here on a power plant to harness some of the vast reserves of energy stored at the earth's crust, the ground moved and, along a six-mile-long fissure, began belching red-hot lava. The eruptions continued for nine years, prompting the construction of a stone and soil barrier to make sure that molten rock did not incinerate Iceland's first geothermal power station.

While the menacing lava flow has long since stopped and Krafla is today a showcase of Iceland's peerless mastery of renewable energy sources, another problem that has dogged its energy calculations for decades still remains: what to do with all the electricity that the country — which literally bubbles with steam, hot mud and the occasional cloud of volcanic ash — is capable of producing.

In a nation with only 320,000 people, the state-owned power company, Landsvirkjun, which operates the Krafla facility, sells just 17 percent of its electricity to households and local industry. The rest goes mostly to aluminum smelters owned by the American giant Alcoa and other foreign companies that have been lured to this remote North Atlantic nation by its abundant supply of cheap energy.

Now a huge and potentially far more lucrative market beckons — if only Iceland can find a way to transmit electricity across the more than 1,000 miles of frigid sea that separate it from the 500 million consumers of the European Union. "Prices are so low in Iceland that it is normal that we should want to sell to Europe and get a better price," said Stein Agust Steinsson, the manager of the Krafla plant. "It is not good to put all our eggs in one basket."

What Landsvirkjun charges aluminum smelters exactly is a secret, but in 2011 it received on average less than $30 per megawatt/hour — less than half the going rate in the European Union and barely a quarter of what, according to the Renewable Energies Federation, a Brussels-based research unit, is the average tariff, once tax breaks and subsidies are factored in, for "renewable" electricity in the European Union. Iceland would not easily get this top "renewable" rate, which is not a market price, but it still stands to earn far more from its electricity than it does now.

Eager to reach these better paying customers, the power company has conducted extensive research into the possibility of a massive extension cord — or a "submarine interconnector," in the jargon of the trade — to plug Iceland into Europe's electricity grid. Such a cable would probably go first to the northern tip of Scotland, which, about 700 miles away, is relatively close, and then all the way to continental Europe, nearly 1,200 miles away. That is more than three times longer than a link between Norway and the Netherlands, which is currently the world's longest.

Laying an underwater cable from the North Atlantic would probably cost more than $2 billion, and the idea is not popular with those who worry about Iceland — a country that takes pride in living by its own means in harsh isolation — becoming an ice-covered version of Middle East nations addicted to easy money from energy exports.

Backers of the cable "are looking for easy money, but who is going to pay in the end?" said Lara Hanna Einarsdottir, an Icelandic blogger who has written extensively on the potential risks involved in geothermal energy. "We will all pay."

Iceland, Ms. Einarsdottir said, should use its energy sources to "supply ourselves and coming generations" and not gamble with Iceland's unique heritage by "building more and more plants so that we can provide electricity to towns in Scotland."

The idea of somehow exporting electricity to Europe has been around for decades and has been "technically doable for some time," said Hordur Arnarson, the power company's chief executive, "but it was not seen as economically feasible until recently." The change is largely because of a push by the European Union to reduce the use of oil and coal and promote green energy, a move that has put a premium on electricity generated by wind, water and geothermal sources. The union's 27 member states agreed in 2009 to a mandatory target of deriving at least 20 percent of its energy from "renewable sources" by 2020.

A connection to Europe would not only allow Iceland to tap the export market but also to import electricity from Europe in the event of a crisis, a backup that would allow it to stop keeping large emergency reserves, as it does now.

"This is a very promising project," Mr. Arnarson said. "We have a lot of electricity for the very few people who live here." Compared with the rest of the world, he said, Iceland produces "more energy per capita by far, and it is very natural to consider connecting ourselves to other markets."

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Children in U.S. Are Eating Fewer Calories, Study Finds

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Balanced meals at the Blue School in Lower Manhattan. A drop in carbohydrate consumption drove the decline, research showed.

American children consumed fewer calories in 2010 than they did a decade before, a new federal analysis shows. Health experts said the findings offered an encouraging sign that the epidemic of obesity might be easing, but cautioned that the magnitude of the decline was too small to move the needle much.

Jessica Kourkounis for The New York Times

A salad for lunch at the William H. Ziegler Elementary School in North Philadelphia. The calorie drop surprised researchers.

And while energy intake has not changed considerably for adults in recent years, fewer of their calories are coming from fast food, researchers said. Obesity rates for adults have plateaued after years of increases. A third of adults are obese.

The results of the research on childhood consumption patterns, the only federal analysis of calorie trends among children in recent years, came as a surprise to researchers. For boys, calorie consumption declined by about 7 percent to 2,100 calories a day over the period of the analysis, from 1999 through 2010. For girls, it dropped by 4 percent to 1,755 calories a day.

"To reverse the current prevalence of obesity, these numbers have to be a lot bigger," said Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. "But they are trending in the right direction, and that's good news."

National obesity rates for children have been flat in recent years, but some cities have reported modest declines. The new evidence of a lower calorie intake for children may also foreshadow a broader national shift, experts said.

"A harbinger of change is a good phrase," said R. Bethene Ervin, a researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and one of the authors of the report. "But to see if it's really a real trend we would obviously need more years of data."

A drop in carbohydrate consumption drove the decline, a point of particular interest for those who study childhood obesity. Sugars are carbohydrates, and many argue that those added to food like cereal and soda during processing are at the heart of the childhood obesity epidemic. Dr. Ervin said it was not clear whether such added sugars alone were behind the carbohydrate decline.

Over all, calories from fat remained stable, while those from protein increased and those from carbohydrates fell. The calorie decline was most pronounced among boys ages 2 to 11, and among teenage girls.

Carbohydrate consumption declined among white and black boys, but not among Hispanic boys. Among girls, whites were the only group that consumed fewer calories from carbohydrates.

Another surprise, researchers said, was the decline in calories coming from fast food among American adults. Those calories fell to 11.3 percent of adults' total daily intake in 2010, down from 12.8 percent in 2006. The decline was sharpest among 40- to 59-year-olds, said Cynthia L. Ogden, a C.D.C. researcher who oversaw the research, which comprised two studies, one on caloric intake for children and the other on fast-food consumption among adults. For the analysis, called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, people were interviewed in their homes and at mobile examination centers around the country.

Americans eat about a third of their calories outside the home, according to federal data, and some demographic groups still get a lot of calories from fast food. Blacks between the ages of 20 and 39 consumed more than a fifth of their calories from fast food, the highest share for any group. The lowest rate was among older people, ages 60 and above, who got 6 percent of their daily caloric intake from fast food.

Obese people also consumed more fast food, researchers found.

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DNA Analysis, More Accessible Than Ever, Opens New Doors

Matt Roth for The New York Times

Sam Bosley of Frederick, Md., going shopping with his daughter, Lillian, 13, who has a malformed brain and severe developmental delays, seizures and vision problems. More Photos »

Debra Sukin and her husband were determined to take no chances with her second pregnancy. Their first child, Jacob, who had a serious genetic disorder, did not babble when he was a year old and had severe developmental delays. So the second time around, Ms. Sukin had what was then the most advanced prenatal testing.

The test found no sign of Angelman syndrome, the rare genetic disorder that had struck Jacob. But as months passed, Eli was not crawling or walking or babbling at ages when other babies were.

"Whatever the milestones were, my son was not meeting them," Ms. Sukin said.

Desperate to find out what is wrong with Eli, now 8, the Sukins, of The Woodlands, Tex., have become pioneers in a new kind of testing that is proving particularly helpful in diagnosing mysterious neurological illnesses in children. Scientists sequence all of a patient's genes, systematically searching for disease-causing mutations.

A few years ago, this sort of test was so difficult and expensive that it was generally only available to participants in research projects like those sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. But the price has plunged in just a few years from tens of thousands of dollars to around $7,000 to $9,000 for a family. Baylor College of Medicine and a handful of companies are now offering it. Insurers usually pay.

Demand has soared — at Baylor, for example, scientists analyzed 5 to 10 DNA sequences a month when the program started in November 2011. Now they are doing more than 130 analyses a month. At the National Institutes of Health, which handles about 300 cases a year as part of its research program, demand is so great that the program is expected to ultimately take on 800 to 900 a year.

The test is beginning to transform life for patients and families who have often spent years searching for answers. They can now start the grueling process with DNA sequencing, says Dr. Wendy K. Chung, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Columbia University.

"Most people originally thought of using it as a court of last resort," Dr. Chung said. "Now we can think of it as a first-line test."

Even if there is no treatment, there is almost always some benefit to diagnosis, geneticists say. It can give patients and their families the certainty of knowing what is wrong and even a prognosis. It can also ease the processing of medical claims, qualifying for special education services, and learning whether subsequent children might be at risk.

"Imagine the people who drive across the whole country looking for that one neurologist who can help, or scrubbing the whole house with Lysol because they think it might be an allergy," said Richard A. Gibbs, the director of Baylor College of Medicine's gene sequencing program. "Those kinds of stories are the rule, not the exception."

Experts caution that gene sequencing is no panacea. It finds a genetic aberration in only about 25 to 30 percent of cases. About 3 percent of patients end up with better management of their disorder. About 1 percent get a treatment and a major benefit.

"People come to us with huge expectations," said Dr. William A. Gahl, who directs the N.I.H. program. "They think, 'You will take my DNA and find the causes and give me a treatment.' "

"We give the impression that we can do these things because we only publish our successes," Dr. Gahl said, adding that when patients come to him, "we try to make expectations realistic."

DNA sequencing was not available when Debra and Steven Sukin began trying to find out what was wrong with Eli. When he was 3, they tried microarray analysis, a genetic test that is nowhere near as sensitive as sequencing. It detected no problems.

"My husband and I looked at each other and said, 'The good news is that everything is fine; the bad news is that everything is not fine,' " Ms. Sukin said.

In November 2011, when Eli was 6, Ms. Sukin consulted Dr. Arthur L. Beaudet, a medical geneticist at Baylor.

"Is there a protein missing?" she recalled asking him. "Is there something biochemical we could be missing?"

By now, DNA sequencing had come of age. Dr. Beaudet said that Eli was a great candidate, and it turned out that the new procedure held an answer.

A single DNA base was altered in a gene called CASK, resulting in a disorder so rare that there are fewer than 10 cases in all the world's medical literature.

"It really became definitive for my husband and me," Ms. Sukin said. "We would need to do lifelong planning for dependent care for the rest of his life."

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the use of DNA sequencing to identify rare genetic diseases misstated the name of a medicine taken by two teenagers who have a rare gene mutation. The drug is 5-hydroxytryptophan, not 5-hydroxytryptamine.

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A Flash in Russian Skies, as Inspiration for Fantasy

Life is scariest when it imitates science fiction. The stunning video of the meteor that whistled and boomed across Russian skies on Friday unnerved even those with long experience imagining catastrophic events. Past and present practitioners of fantasy fiction in print and movies reacted to the views with awe — and some new ideas.

"Most of the time we can forget the universe, frankly," said Stephen Baxter, president of the British Science Fiction Association and the author of books like "Space" and "Last and First Contacts." "But today, there was 'a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down,' to quote David Bowie. It reminds us of our true location, so to speak."

Some on Friday were moved to recall the Tunguska Event of 1908, in which a vast tract in Siberia was flattened, apparently by an airburst from a low-passing asteroid.

"This is a much smaller event, but a Tunguska-sized event would vaporize 900 square miles of land," said the journalist and fiction writer Tom Bissell, whose 2003 essay "A Comet's Tale" investigated end-of-the-world possibilities. "Can you imagine that happening above a major metropolitan area? It would either fill the churches or empty the churches."

More than a decade before Tunguska, H. G. Wells published "The Star," in which people helplessly watch as a star nears Earth, causing vast disruptions to the planet but never directly striking it. We are slightly less helpless now, Mr. Baxter said, as we track asteroids more closely and continue to research ways to divert potential party-crashers. But his optimism is the cautious kind.

"I think we got overconfident in the 1990s," with movies like "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," "when we thought we could fend off any threat," he said. "H. G. Wells knew we couldn't."

In "A Comet's Tale," Mr. Bissell spoke to an astronomer who had "stopped reading the sci-fi novels he loved as a teenager when the science he was involved in became more interesting to him than fantasy."

But for filmmakers, fantasy trumps reality, even when they turn their lens, as they have more recently, to the quotidian side of apocalypse from above. "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" uses a pending asteroid collision to pair up Steve Carell and Keira Knightley on a road trip. In Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, try to sort out their lives before the celestial credits roll.

For others, meteors suggest more outlandish scenarios. Damon Lindelof, a producer and co-writer of the coming "Star Trek Into Darkness" and a co-creator of "Lost," imagined being in a meeting with a studio chief on Friday morning and asked on the spot to come up with an idea for a movie tied to the meteor event.

"My pitch would start by focusing on the lie," he said. "The scientific community, particularly NASA, insists that the meteor that just exploded over Russia has nothing to do with the asteroid hurtling toward Earth — lies, all lies. Actually, that Russian explosion was an extraterrestrial mortar shell fired from multiple galaxies away as an attempt to divert the asteroid and save Earth."

He paused for a moment for dramatic effect.

"Of course, the twist is that these aliens want to enslave us, and Earth is useless to them if it's destroyed."

"We can do better than that," said Dave Howe, president of the Syfy channel, after being told of Mr. Lindelof's idea. "Imagine if that asteroid has dragon eggs inside it," he said. "Add in some low-budget special effects and it would be a classic Syfy Saturday night movie," referring to his network's franchise that pushes the B-movie genre to its limit, mashing up disasters and mutated animals into films like "Arachnoquake," about fire-breathing spiders that come to life after a natural disaster.

But who would save the day?

"Clearly President Putin," Mr. Howe said, meaning the Russian leader Vladimir V. "Only he would come to the rescue on horseback because the asteroid has knocked all the power out."

Along similar lines, Micho Rutare, the director and co-writer of the 2010 movie "Meteor Apocalypse," imagined a satire in which an asteroid has an electromagnetic effect that knocks out cellphones. "Imagine the horror and terror," he said. "People would have to actually have conversations in person."

Jokes aside, Mr. Bissell said he was glad we had not had an even more dangerous event. "Asteroids are bad, but comets are the worst," he said, "because all of mass extinction on this planet has probably been tied to massive comet impacts. Asteroids go around in a very predictable orbit. Comets can come from so distant in the galaxy, you only figure out where they're going when they go past you."

Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 20, 2013

An article on Saturday about the reactions of practitioners of fantasy fiction to the exploding meteor over Russia omitted two reporting credits. Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply contributed from Los Angeles.

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Fast New Test Could Help Nip Leprosy in the Bud

A simple, fast and inexpensive new test for leprosy offers hope that, even in the poorest countries, victims can be found and cured before they become permanently disabled or disfigured like the shunned lepers of yore.

American researchers developed the test, and Brazil's drug-regulatory agency registered it last month. A Brazilian diagnostics company, OrangeLife, will manufacture it on the understanding that the price will be $1 or less.

"This will bring leprosy management out of the Dark Ages," said Dr. William Levis, who has treated leprosy patients at a Bellevue Hospital outpatient clinic for 30 years.

Many consider leprosy, formally called Hansen's disease, a relic of the past, but annually about 250,000 people worldwide get it; Brazil is among the hardest-hit countries, as are India, the Philippines, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The United States has 150 to 250 new diagnoses each year, mostly in immigrants. Leprosy is curable, so better detection may mean that someday it could join the short list of ailments, like polio and Guinea worm disease, on the brink of eradication, experts say.

The new test gives results in under 10 minutes and is far simpler than the current diagnostic method of cutting open nodules, often in the earlobe, and looking for the bacteria under a microscope.

"It works like a pregnancy test and requires just one drop of blood," said Malcolm S. Duthie, who led the test's development at the Infectious Disease Research Institute in Seattle. "I can teach anyone to use it."

Even more important, he said, it is expected to detect infections as much as a year before symptoms appear. And the earlier treatment begins, the better the outcome. Leprosy is caused by a bacterium, Mycobacterium leprae, related to the one that causes tuberculosis, but reproducing so slowly that symptoms often take seven years to appear.

"We're definitely excited about this," said Bill Simmons, president of the American Leprosy Missions, a Christian medical aid group that has been fighting the disease since 1906.

Dr. Levis said that if the test eventually became available in this country he would use it to test the families of his Bellevue patients.

M. leprae is transmitted only after prolonged, close contact. The bacteria spread under the skin in the coolest parts of the body: the hands, feet, cheeks and earlobes.

The first visible signs are usually numb, off-color patches of skin, which are often misdiagnosed as fungus, psoriasis or lupus.

The victim may get repeated cooking burns or cuts. Feet develop sores from something as simple as a stone they cannot feel in a shoe.

"Finally, when it gets bad enough," Mr. Simmons said, "they go to a big city. And that's where they get the bad news: 'Yes, you have leprosy — and we wish you'd come here six months ago.' "

After about six months, the nerve damage is permanent. So even if a patient is cured — and a cure normally requires taking three kinds of antibiotics for six to 12 months — there is still a lifelong risk of developing ulcers that can become infected. The standard antibiotics are provided free through the World Health Organization.

The disease has historically been hard to diagnose, despite the popular, but inaccurate, image of fingers and toes dropping off victims. As the bacteria kill nerves, muscles atrophy and those digits curl into claws. After disuse and repeated injuries, the body reacts protectively by absorbing the bone calcium in the bones, shrinking the digits.

For centuries, some observant doctors have noticed early signs: the numb skin patches, missing eyebrows, drooping earlobes, bulging neck nerves, the flat "lion face" caused by nasal cartilage dissolving.

Since nothing could be done for them before the age of antibiotics, victims lost the use of their hands and had to beg. Some also went blind as the blinking muscles degenerated and their eyes dried out. In the Middle Ages, some towns banned lepers, while others required them to ring bells to warn of their approach. Religious charities created "leper colonies."

And they still exist, even in the United States. A few elderly residents have chosen to stay on in Carville, La., and Kalaupapa, Hawaii, despite having been cured. Several thousand live at one in northeast Brazil, said John S. Spencer, a leprosy researcher at Colorado State University who has worked there. "People say things like 'People outside won't understand what's wrong with my face,' " he said.

Nowadays, he said, most patients are cured before their faces are severely disfigured. Still, he said, he had read a survey in which health experts asked Brazilians whether they would rather have the human immunodeficiency virus or leprosy. Most chose H.I.V. — even though leprosy does not kill, can be cured, and does not make a victim risky to have sex with. "The stigma is that strong," he said.

A new test was crucial because trained microscope diagnosticians are rare in the rural areas where the disease persists. It is simple: one drop of blood goes into a well on a plastic test strip followed by three drops of solution.

It took a long time to develop, Dr. Spencer said, because researchers needed a steady supply of the bacterium, and no way to grow it in a laboratory has ever been found.

It grows vigorously in one animal: the armadillo, a fact discovered only in the 1970s at a federal laboratory in Baton Rouge, La. But armadillos come with their own complications. After a year of harboring the slow-growing bacteria, they must be killed for their livers and spleens — and armadillos do not breed in captivity.

"Luckily," Dr Duthie said, in Louisiana and Texas, "they're everywhere, and they're easy to catch."

However, armadillo hunting is not risk-free. Some Southerners hunt them for food and their armored skins, and some wild armadillos harbor strains of leprosy bacteria. Two years ago, federal researchers estimated that about a third of the human cases discovered in the United States each year are caught from armadillos — which have the honor of being one of the state mammals of Texas.

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A Flash in Russian Skies, as Inspiration for Fantasy

Life is scariest when it imitates science fiction. The stunning video of the meteor that whistled and boomed across Russian skies on Friday unnerved even those with long experience imagining catastrophic events. Past and present practitioners of fantasy fiction in print and movies reacted to the views with awe — and some new ideas.

"Most of the time we can forget the universe, frankly," said Stephen Baxter, president of the British Science Fiction Association and the author of books like "Space" and "Last and First Contacts." "But today, there was 'a crack in the sky and a hand reaching down,' to quote David Bowie. It reminds us of our true location, so to speak."

Some on Friday were moved to recall the Tunguska Event of 1908, in which a vast tract in Siberia was flattened, apparently by an airburst from a low-passing asteroid.

"This is a much smaller event, but a Tunguska-sized event would vaporize 900 square miles of land," said the journalist and fiction writer Tom Bissell, whose 2003 essay "A Comet's Tale" investigated end-of-the-world possibilities. "Can you imagine that happening above a major metropolitan area? It would either fill the churches or empty the churches."

More than a decade before Tunguska, H. G. Wells published "The Star," in which people helplessly watch as a star nears Earth, causing vast disruptions to the planet but never directly striking it. We are slightly less helpless now, Mr. Baxter said, as we track asteroids more closely and continue to research ways to divert potential party-crashers. But his optimism is the cautious kind.

"I think we got overconfident in the 1990s," with movies like "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," "when we thought we could fend off any threat," he said. "H. G. Wells knew we couldn't."

In "A Comet's Tale," Mr. Bissell spoke to an astronomer who had "stopped reading the sci-fi novels he loved as a teenager when the science he was involved in became more interesting to him than fantasy."

But for filmmakers, fantasy trumps reality, even when they turn their lens, as they have more recently, to the quotidian side of apocalypse from above. "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" uses a pending asteroid collision to pair up Steve Carell and Keira Knightley on a road trip. In Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," two sisters, played by Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg, try to sort out their lives before the celestial credits roll.

For others, meteors suggest more outlandish scenarios. Damon Lindelof, a producer and co-writer of the coming "Star Trek Into Darkness" and a co-creator of "Lost," imagined being in a meeting with a studio chief on Friday morning and asked on the spot to come up with an idea for a movie tied to the meteor event.

"My pitch would start by focusing on the lie," he said. "The scientific community, particularly NASA, insists that the meteor that just exploded over Russia has nothing to do with the asteroid hurtling toward Earth — lies, all lies. Actually, that Russian explosion was an extraterrestrial mortar shell fired from multiple galaxies away as an attempt to divert the asteroid and save Earth."

He paused for a moment for dramatic effect.

"Of course, the twist is that these aliens want to enslave us, and Earth is useless to them if it's destroyed."

"We can do better than that," said Dave Howe, president of the Syfy channel, after being told of Mr. Lindelof's idea. "Imagine if that asteroid has dragon eggs inside it," he said. "Add in some low-budget special effects and it would be a classic Syfy Saturday night movie," referring to his network's franchise that pushes the B-movie genre to its limit, mashing up disasters and mutated animals into films like "Arachnoquake," about fire-breathing spiders that come to life after a natural disaster.

But who would save the day?

"Clearly President Putin," Mr. Howe said, meaning the Russian leader Vladimir V. "Only he would come to the rescue on horseback because the asteroid has knocked all the power out."

Along similar lines, Micho Rutare, the director and co-writer of the 2010 movie "Meteor Apocalypse," imagined a satire in which an asteroid has an electromagnetic effect that knocks out cellphones. "Imagine the horror and terror," he said. "People would have to actually have conversations in person."

Jokes aside, Mr. Bissell said he was glad we had not had an even more dangerous event. "Asteroids are bad, but comets are the worst," he said, "because all of mass extinction on this planet has probably been tied to massive comet impacts. Asteroids go around in a very predictable orbit. Comets can come from so distant in the galaxy, you only figure out where they're going when they go past you."

Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply contributed reporting from Los Angeles.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 18, 2013

An earlier version of this article omitted the contributors.

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Dot Earth Blog: Is There Room for Varied Approaches to Energy and Climate Progress?

Is there room for more than one approach to pursuing energy and climate progress? I'd like to think so.

On various choices related to America's, and the world's, energy and climate future, I have a different view from those of many good friends and relations. A longtime bandmate pushes hard to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in New York; I seek responsible oversight of gas drilling as an important step down the carbon ladder away from coal.

But we still play together.

My wife and I differ on whether the Indian Point nuclear power plant eight miles from our house should have its license renewed. My view was expressed here and here.

We are lifers, nonetheless.

And Bill McKibben, the author and activist who's been exploring humanity's two-way relationship with climate in parallel with me since the 1980s, has different ways of characterizing the climate challenge than I do, and has chosen a different path toward achieving a sustainable human relationship with the climate.

Nonetheless, I still consider him a friend and credit his energy and passion.

But on the Keystone XL pipeline – which, if not blocked by President Obama, would carry the crudest form of oil from Canadian tar sand deposits to Gulf Coast fuel refineries — it seems there's little room for varied stances, at least according to some protesters.

As I wrote in 2011 (here, then here), a tight focus on Obama's decision over the pipeline could be counterproductive if the hope is to build policies that might someday reduce the need for oil, whether the source is Alberta oil sands, the floor of the Gulf of Mexico or the Niger River delta. (A solid review of the climate impact was provided by Raymond Pierrehumbert on Realclimate.org in 2011.)

But Wen Stephenson, a former Atlantic and Boston Globe editor who has become a climate campaigner on behalf of his, and others', children, sees little room for dialogue.

On Twitter yesterday, I engaged in some discussions of the pipeline protests with Michael Levi, who analyzes energy and climate issues for the Council on Foreign Relations, and Phil Aroneanu, a co-founder of 350.org (and, like me, a left-handed banjo player!).

Stephenson chimed in with this: 

@Revkin @levi_m 50,000 people come out to fight for our kids' future, and you dump on it. You are what we're fighting. @philaroneanu

— Wen Stephenson (@wenstephenson) 18 Feb 13

I have developed a pretty thick skin in recent years, which is a requirement if you inhabit the bombarded no man's land between the poles bounding eco-political discourse. But I had to respond, musing on what appeared to be Stephenson's "my way or the highway" environmentalism. I added: "I thought progressives were about rainbow coalitions and big tents."

Luckily the Twitter conversation between Aroneanu, Levi and me continued productively, including a vow by the two of us who play banjo to jam sometime soon.

At the same time, Jason Mark, who manages the Alemany Farm in a tough San Francisco neighborhood and edits Earth Island Journal, asked this question:

.@Revkin: I would love to hear YOUR thoughts on best strategies for green groups. Wld make interesting Dot-Earth post cc @philaroneanu

— Jason Mark (@writerfarmer) 18 Feb 13

I answered with two suggested first steps:

@writerfarmer @philaroneanu 1. Watch '03 Smalley talk: http://t.co/TtmBGuTZ 2. Assess with Serenity Prayer in mind. http://t.co/pE4jEttW

— Andy Revkin (@Revkin) 18 Feb 13

Here's a direct link to the opening section of the 2003 lecture that I described in telegraphic fashion on Twitter — an inspiring talk given repeatedly in 2003 by Richard Smalley, the chemistry Nobelist who spent his final years on the planet speaking about the great opportunities that lay in pursuit of a durable energy menu:

I look forward to engaging with Jason Mark, Wen Stephenson or anyone else on the lessons that can be drawn from Smalley's talk and the Serenity Prayer (tattoo by Collin Kasyan).

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Russians Prospect for Meteorite Fragments

Ben Solomon

Sasha Zarezina, 8, said of her find as she dug for meteorites in Deputatskoye, Russia, "I will sell it for 100 million euros."

DEPUTATSKOYE, Russia — Ever since the meteor exploded somewhere over this impoverished Siberian town, Larisa V. Briyukova wondered what to do with the fist-size stone she found under a hole in the roof tiles of her woodshed.

On Monday, a stranger knocked on her door, offering about $60, Ms. Briyukova said. After some haggling, they settled on a price of $230. A few hours later, another man pulled up, looked at the hole in the roof and offered $1,300.

"Now I regret selling it," said Ms. Briyukova, a 43-year-old homemaker. "But then, who knows? The police might have come and taken it away anyway."

On Friday, terror rained from the skies, blowing out windows and scaring people over an enormous swath of Siberia. But by Monday, for many people what fell from the sky had turned to pure gold, and it touched off a rush to retrieve the fragments, many buried in deep February snows.

Many of those out prospecting looked a lot like Sasha Zarezina, 8, who happily plunged into a snowbank here in this village of a thousand, laughing, kicking and throwing up plumes of powdery snow.

Then she stopped, bent over and started to dig. "I found one!" she yelled.

A warm breath and a rub on her pants later, a small black pebble, oval like a river rock, charred and smooth, was freed of ice.

While trade in material from meteorites is largely illegal, there is a flourishing global market, with fragments widely available for sale on the Internet, usually at modest prices. At least one from the recent meteor was available on eBay on Monday for $32, and there is a Web site called Star-bits.com devoted to the trade — much to the displeasure of scientists and the countries where the objects were found.

Early on, NASA reported that the meteor, the largest known celestial body to enter Earth's atmosphere in 100 years, was an airburst fireball type that would shower untold thousands of fragments onto the surface.

In the scramble now under way to find them, residents of towns like this one — founded in the 1920s around a collective dairy farm that is now defunct — are looking for small holes in the snow that hold the promise of yielding up polished black rocks encased in tiny clumps of ice, formed from the last expiring heat of their long journey.

"All it takes is looking carefully," said Sasha, who was out searching after school on Monday. "The stones are in the snowdrifts. To find a stone you find a hole. And then you dig."

Villagers here have plastic bags, matchboxes and jars filled with dozens of stones. One even tore a hole in the coat one woman was wearing outside Friday morning.

But this is Russia, so the excitement became tinged with anxiety on Monday as unknown cars appeared, cruising the streets and bearing men who refused to answer questions but offered stacks of rubles worth hundreds, then thousands, of dollars for the fragments. Strangely, no authorities were anywhere in sight.

M3-Media, a financial news site, reported that under Russian law a person can gain legal title to a meteorite, but only if it is reported to the authorities and submitted to a laboratory for tests. The laboratory will charge 20 percent of the estimated value of the object for certification, the site reported, citing the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In practice, though, the search for remnants of the meteor has become a haphazard, unregulated scramble, wholly lacking coordinated effort or scientific oversight in the collection of specimens from one of the most significant events in years for the community of scientists who study such things.

"We don't have a mechanism to prevent this from happening," said Viktor Grokhovsky, an assistant professor of metallurgy at Southern Ural Federal University, one of the scientists who made the positive identification of meteorites on Monday.

Law enforcement agencies actually blocked scientists from visiting a suspected impact site on Lake Chebarkul over the weekend, Professor Grokhovsky said. Yet here at Deputatskoye, where the first scientific expedition is planned for Tuesday, not a police officer was in sight.

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In Russia, Property Ruined and Spared by Meteor Share Space

CHELYABINSK, Russia — The shock wave from a meteor that exploded above Siberia last week somehow sheared the roof off a brick and steel factory building while leaving a nearby glass facade unscathed.

In some high-rises in this city, the first modern urban community to have felt the breath of a cosmic close encounter, every window blew out on the top floor; elsewhere, the ground floors suffered.

More ominously, reports came in to local news media over the weekend of stranger phenomena: behind unshattered apartment windows, glass jugs were said to explode into shards, dishes to crack, electronics to die. Balconies rattled. One man said a bottle broke right in his hand.

Anna V. Popova was at home with her daughter when she saw the flash, then heard explosions, then found the windows of her enclosed balcony blown in; her neighbor, with identical windows, escaped without property damage.

"A lot of people suffered, not us alone," Ms. Popova said, but added that there seemed to be randomness in whose property was damaged. "Who are we supposed to blame for all this? Nobody of course."

Scientists believe the space rock that tore through the atmosphere on Friday morning and blew apart here was the largest to have entered the atmosphere since 1908 and that it was unusual as well for the scale of its effects: more than 1,200 people injured and broad property damage.

Indeed, the event is providing a first indication of the type of structural and infrastructural costs meteors can exact from a highly industrialized society. NASA scientists say a meteor of this size strikes the Earth about once every hundred years.

Shattered glass caused most of the damage and injuries here in Chelyabinsk, a sprawling industrial city of about a million people.

What shattered the glass, scientists say, was both the explosion as the meteor fragmented and the waves of pressure created as it decelerated. Such low-frequency waves — called infrasound — are sometimes detected by cold-war era nuclear blast sensors in remote parts of the Pacific Ocean or Alaska, according to meteor experts.

The waves can bounce off buildings and be stronger in some places than others; they can also resonate with glass, explaining why bottles and dishes might have shattered inside undamaged kitchens, as if crushed by the airy hand of the meteor itself.

"A shock wave is like a ball," Aleksandr Y. Dudorov, director of the theoretical physics department at Chelyabinsk State University, said in an interview. "Throw a ball into a room and it will bounce from one wall to another."

Russia has mobilized 24,000 emergency officials to inspect roads, railroads, hospitals, factories and military facilities. Most are undamaged, including 122 sites identified as particularly critical, including nuclear power plants, dams and chemical factories, and a space launching site called Strela.

Also Sunday, Russia's consumer safety inspection agency, Rospotrebnadzor, released a statement saying the water in Lake Chebarkul, where a hole in the ice appeared on Friday, was not radioactive.

It was unclear why the agency released this finding only Sunday, or whether the tests were conducted to assuage popular concerns or out of any real official uncertainty over what happened on Friday. In any case, the agency said a mobile laboratory quietly dispatched to the lake tested for but did not discover cesium 137 and strontium 90, isotopes created in nuclear explosions.

Infrasound waves have not previously been studied in a cityscape, Richard P. Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an author of a textbook on asteroids and meteorites, said in a telephone interview. But he noted that the apparent randomness of the damage was consistent with the way such waves function.

"A shock wave can be coming from a particular direction, and if you face that direction you are more susceptible," Dr. Binzel said.

"One building might shadow another, or you may have a street that is optimally aligned to channel the wave, either in a fortunate or unfortunate way."

Peter Brown, a professor of physics at the University of Western Ontario, wrote in an e-mail that an infrasound wave "is very efficient at traveling long distances," and that "windows, structures or even glass jars susceptible to resonate at this frequency could be a factor to seemingly random damage at widely disparate locations."

Dr. Brown studied a similar, though smaller, explosion of a meteor over the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 8, 2009, which also sent out low-frequency waves, though too remote to affect homes or industry.

They were, though, registered by a network of infrasound sensors established to monitor compliance with the international ban on nuclear tests, according to Dr. Brown.

Alekdander V. Anusiyev, the spokesman for the governor of Chelyabinsk region, characterized the damage here as without a discernible pattern. "It is impossible to say more glass broke in one part of the city or another," he said. "Glass broke everywhere."

The roof of the zinc factory that collapsed was reinforced with a lattice of steel beams and supported by concrete joists that are now broken, jutting upward with mangled re-bar protruding. Windows on a neighboring house blew in with such force that the frames went with them.

Yet a few yards away on Sverdlovsky Street, the cosmos spared a seemingly vulnerable Hundai dealership, a three-story cube sheathed in glass, with glistening display models inside. Not a window broke.

"People can consider Feb. 15 their second birthday," the governor of Chelyabinsk, Mikhail Yurevich, told reporters, referring to the day of the meteor strike. "God directed danger away."

Ellen Barry contributed reporting from Moscow.

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