Focus on Ocean’s Health as Dolphin Deaths Soar

Dorothy Edwards/The Virginian-Pilot, via Associated Press

Krystal Rodrique, left, and Liz Schell of the Virginia Aquarium's stranding response team with a dead dolphin last summer in Norfolk.

MIAMI — Like a macabre marine mystery, the carcasses — many badly deteriorated and tossing about in the surf — first turned up along the coast of New Jersey in June. Soon, droves of them washed up in Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia and most recently Florida, their winter home.

So far this year, nearly 1,000 bottlenose dolphins — eight times the historical average — have washed up dead along the Eastern Seaboard from New York to Florida, a vast majority of them victims of morbillivirus. Many more are expected to die from the disease in the coming months.

The high death toll from the resurgence of the virus, which killed 700 dolphins in an outbreak 25 years ago, has alarmed marine scientists, who say it remains unclear why the dolphins have succumbed to the disease. The deaths, along with a spate of other unrelated dolphin die-offs along Florida's east and west coasts, raise new questions about the health of the ocean in this part of the country and what role environmental factors may be playing, scientists said.

"Marine mammals are very good sentinels for ocean and human health, and they really act like the proverbial canaries in a coal mine," said Dr. Greg Bossart, a veterinary pathologist and senior vice president in charge of animal health at the Georgia Aquarium. "They give us an idea of what's occurring in the environment."

Because bottlenose dolphins are top predators, have long life spans and live near shore, Dr. Bossart said, "whatever happens coastally impacts them and potentially us."

The deaths, classified as an unusual mortality event, have puzzled scientists. They show no discernible demographic pattern, affecting dolphins that are young and old, male and female. One possible explanation is that some of those who have died this year were not alive during the first outbreak and may not be immune to the virus.

In Florida, the situation is particularly dire, with dolphins facing a triple threat this year. Nearly 80 dolphins who live permanently in the state's ecologically compromised Indian River Lagoon estuary on the east coast have died. An additional 233 perished in the northern Gulf of Mexico this year. Both of those events have also been labeled unusual mortality events by the federal government.

The causes of death appear to be unrelated; each group of dolphins faces separate challenges that in some cases remain scientifically murky — disease, a polluted environment, infection and possible residue from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010.

"It is alarming when you see so many different die-offs of marine mammals going on at once," said Erin Fougeres, a marine mammal biologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's fisheries service, which is tracking and investigating the deaths. "We can't say they are linked. But it says there are a lot of challenges that marine mammals are facing."

This time around, scientists who first encountered morbillivirus 25 years ago were able to pinpoint the disease soon after the initial wave of dead dolphins washed ashore along the Eastern Seaboard. By August, the federal government had confirmed through necropsies that the virus was present. More than 90 percent of the 181 dolphins tested had the virus.

During the first outbreak in the late 1980s, it took scientists several years to uncover the reason for the die-offs, Ms. Fougeres said. Scientists found the virus only after testing dolphin tissue retroactively.

There is little scientists can do to stop the airborne virus, which cannot be spread to humans. During the last outbreak, the virus killed off dolphins for 10 months, which means that this time, dolphins may continue to die through May. The dolphins infect one another by expelling air through their blowholes.

In the meantime, other threats remain, chief among them the possibility that the virus could spread to Gulf Coast dolphins and the already vulnerable population in the Indian River Lagoon.

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Dot Earth Blog: A Gift That Keeps on Giving – to Strumming Musicians

Here's an unsolicited, last-minute, pre-Christmas plug for the Pick Punch, a device my 15-year-old son gave me for my last birthday that turns old credit cards or other plastic sheet — in this case a stray hotel key — into stringed instrument picks.

I got busy with it today ahead of the party and jam session I'm running tonight at the Dogwood Bar in Beacon, N.Y to celebrate the release of my first CD, "A Very Fine Line." Come on by if you're in the area!

I'm sure it'll take quite a few picks before I make back the embedded energy in the sturdy hand-held punch (and the cost), but I plan to be strumming and picking for a long while to come.

Postscript: Click below to listen to a radio interview I just did with Kacey Morabito Grean of WHUD about the genesis of my first album. Here's her blog post: "A Very Fine Line: Life, Luck & Lessons with Andy Revkin."

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Japanese Team Dominates Competition to Create Generation of Rescue Robots

By Aubrey Aden-Buie

A Woodstock for Robots: At the Robotics Challenge 2013 Trials in Homestead, Fla., teams that built rescue robots competed for a chance at a $2 million prize next year.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — An international competition to pave the way for a new generation of rescue robots was dominated by a team of Japanese roboticists who were students in the laboratory of a pioneer in the design of intelligent humanoid machines.

John Markoff/The New York Times

The Johnson Space Center's Valkyrie robot competes at completing a task, closing a valve, at the Darpa Robotics Challenge.

Andrew Innerarity/Reuters

A Boston Dynamics employee with the company's LS3 robot during a demonstration Friday.

Andrew Innerarity/Reuters

Boston Dynamics' Atlas, a high-mobility, humanoid robot designed to negotiate rough terrain, takes on an irregular surface in a terrain negotiation exercise.

The early roboticist, Hirochika Inoue, began working in the field almost a half-century ago at the University of Tokyo, and in the mid-1990s led the design of robots that could both walk and manipulate objects.

Students from the lab where Dr. Inoue did his early work, who then studied under Masayuki Inaba, a roboticist who was one of Dr. Inoue's pupils, emerged as the clear leaders at the Pentagon's Darpa Robotics Challenge 2013 Trials on Friday and Saturday.

Their team, called Schaft, completed the eight required tasks in the challenge almost flawlessly, losing points only because the wind blew a door out of its robot's grasp and because the robot was not able to climb out of a vehicle after it successfully navigated an obstacle course.

The trials, held on the infield of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, included 16 teams that competed for a chance at a $2 million prize next year, and eight were selected to move on. The eight are now eligible for $1 million in support to help them prepare for the final event.

Gill Pratt, the Darpa program manager who is overseeing the Robotics Challenge, praised the scientist who paved the way for Team Schaft. "Dr. Inoue is a remarkable guy who really is the father of a lot of the stuff in Japan," he said.

He also noted that the team of Japanese roboticists had a striking work ethic. Starting from an agency handout, the team had built three prototypes and were already testing the machines when Darpa officials visited Tokyo last summer. Dr. Pratt said the officials were expecting to see only plans.

"When we got there to do the site review and walked into their lab," he said, "we were amazed."

The students recently left the university to enter the Darpa contest and created the company Schaft. It has since been bought by Google as part of the company's new robotics initiative.

The Darpa event has been described as a grand challenge to open the way for an era in which a generation of mobile robots will aid in disaster situations, traveling and working where humans cannot. The research agency is trying to develop systems that could be used in situations like the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The fact that there were no robots that could quickly be called upon in that emergency led to consternation in Japan, a nation that has prided itself on its advanced robots.

Darpa officials emphasized that the awards were not final, but were pending contract negotiations with the United States government.

IHMC Robotics from the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition placed second. Third place went to Tartan Rescue, developed by the National Research Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and fourth place was awarded to a team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The fifth-place robot, RoboSimian, designed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, would have fared better, but the Darpa judges disallowed a clever solution the team had come up with for one of the tasks.

In a debris-clearing test, in which the robots were supposed to painstakingly remove a simulated pile of two-by-fours and a metal girder piece by piece, the humans on Team RoboSimian decided that removing the entire pile of debris at once would be the most efficient way toward the maximum points.

The RoboSimian robot was almost successful, but it did not get all of the material across a line until after the Darpa officials declared that the team had run out of time.

The incident suggested that there might still be room for human ingenuity in the robot era.

"That was our goal, to exploit human intelligence and give humans a tool," said Max Bajracharya, the group leader and a member of the technical staff at the lab.

Although the robots were moving in slow motion, there was general agreement that the Darpa event was a watershed in the evolution of the technology, perhaps similar to the advent of the Homebrew Computer Club, which began the personal computer industry.

Marc Raibert, whose company, Boston Dynamics, demonstrated two of its agile and mobile robots, said he believed that the event signified merely a point in the evolution of a new industry. Still, he said, it was an event that would be remembered.

"This was a Woodstock for robots," he said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 22, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misidentified the institution that developed Tarten Rescue, which placed third in the Robotics Challenge. Tarten Rescue was developed by the National Research Engineering Center at Carnegie Mellon University, not the National Science Foundation's Engineering Research Center at the university.

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Janet D. Rowley, Who Discovered Cancer Can Be Genetic, Dies at 88

Dr. Janet D. Rowley, a physician who four decades ago became the first person to show a conclusive link between certain genetic abnormalities and certain cancers, died on Tuesday at her home in Chicago. She was 88.

The death, from complications of ovarian cancer, was announced by the University of Chicago, where Dr. Rowley was the Blum-Riese distinguished service professor of medicine, molecular genetics and cell biology, and human genetics.

Dr. Rowley, described by The New York Times in 2011 as "the matriarch of modern cancer genetics," made her pathbreaking discovery in 1972, when she found that a particular type of leukemia could result when two chromosomes abnormally exchanged genetic material.

Her findings helped establish cancer as a genetic disease. They also made possible the development of targeted drug therapies for specific cancers.

For her work, Dr. Rowley received the Lasker Award, given for distinguished contributions to medical science; the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, among many other honors.

Janet Davison was born in New York City on April 5, 1925, and at 2 moved with her family to Chicago. At 15, she entered Hutchins College of the University of Chicago, which let gifted high school students start college.

After receiving her bachelor's degree at 19, she was accepted to the university's medical school but was told she would have to wait nine months to enroll: the school had already accepted its quota of women for the year — three in a class of 65.

She earned her M.D. from Chicago in 1948 and that year married a classmate, Dr. Donald Rowley. The mother of four young sons before long, she worked part time at a local clinic for children with Down syndrome.

The prospect of a research career, Dr. Rowley later said, did not occur to her.

"I actually thought I had it made working three days a week," she said in a 2009 interview. "I could take care of my children, garden, weave and go to museums."

Then, in 1961, Dr. Rowley joined her husband on a sabbatical year at Oxford University. Because Down syndrome was known to be caused by a chromosomal abnormality, she chose to spend her year there studying new methods of chromosome analysis.

Returning to Chicago, she begged the university for a room, a microscope and sufficient salary to pay a babysitter. The director of the laboratory that offered her space was an authority on leukemia, and Dr. Rowley began hunting for chromosomal anomalies in genetic samples from his patients.

While genetic abnormalities had long been known to cause other diseases, Dr. Rowley would be the first to show that they were also a cause — and not merely a consequence, as had been supposed — of cancer.

Her discovery took 10 years of peering through the microscope: at the time it was hard to tell chromosomes apart, even under magnification.

"This was less than a decade after Watson and Crick's discovery," Dr. Rowley told The Times in 2011, referring to James D. Watson and Francis Crick, the biologists who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. "We were only beginning to have a notion of what DNA was like. There weren't the right tools yet to stain it, cut it apart, examine and manipulate it."

Dr. Rowley's first significant advance came in 1970, on another sabbatical at Oxford. There she was introduced to a chemical staining technique, newly developed in Sweden, that made chromosomes appear striated and, as a result, easier to differentiate.

She stained and studied an array of chromosomes from patients with blood cancers, photographing the resulting images. Back in Chicago, she cut the photos into tiny fragments, with each fragment showing a chromosome in isolation — "paper dolls," her children called them.

One day in 1972, Dr. Rowley cut up a sheaf of photos from a patient with acute myeloid leukemia, known as A.M.L. She laid the fragments out, chromosome by chromosome, on her dining table and ordered the children not to sneeze.

Aligned, the photos told a story of mutation. As Dr. Rowley noticed, two chromosomes had inappropriately swapped genetic material: a piece of chromosome 8 was now on chromosome 21, and vice versa. Examining photos from other A.M.L. patients, she saw that nearly every set showed the identical genetic swap.

Surely, she thought, other researchers had observed this before. She rushed to the library.

"They hadn't," Dr. Rowley told The Associated Press in 1988. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life."

She soon identified another swap, between chromosomes 9 and 22, which resulted in chronic myelogenous leukemia, or C.M.L.

It was then so unorthodox to regard cancer as a genetic disease that "I got sort of amused tolerance at the beginning," Dr. Rowley later said.

In 1977, she and her colleagues uncovered a third swap — between chromosomes 15 and 17 — which caused acute promyelocytic leukemia.

"That showed what we'd observed with the other two wasn't an anomaly," Dr. Rowley told The Times in 2011. "The third finding made me a believer."

In chromosomes that had undergone the swaps — known in medical parlance as translocations — genes regulating processes like cell growth and cell division were no longer where they ought to be. As a result, cancer could arise.

Over the years, researchers have identified hundreds more translocations linked to specific cancers. The discoveries have given rise to drugs that target the genetic defects underpinning the cancers while sparing healthy cells.

Among the most successful of these drugs is Gleevec, used to treat C.M.L. Before its development, C.M.L. patients typically lived three to five years after diagnosis. Today, 90 percent are considered cured and have a normal life span.

Dr. Rowley's husband, a noted pathologist at the University of Chicago, died this year; their eldest son, Donald, died in 1983. Survivors include three sons, David, Robert and Roger, and five grandchildren.

Her other awards include the Japan Prize and a lifetime achievement award from the American Association for Cancer Research. From 2002 to 2009, she served on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics.

Despite her laurels, Dr. Rowley by all accounts remained almost preternaturally modest.

"People accuse me of being too humble," she told The Times in 2011. "But looking down a microscope at banded chromosomes is not rocket science."

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With Makeshift Snorkels, NASA Astronauts Start Spacewalk

NASA, in preparation for a spacewalk on Saturday, has devised makeshift snorkels that would allow an astronaut in a spacesuit to continue breathing even if a sudden water leak should fill the helmet, as happened to an Italian astronaut who almost drowned in July.

Two astronauts, Col. Michael S. Hopkins of the Air Force and Richard A. Mastracchio, are to step out of an air lock on the International Space Station at 7:10 a.m. Eastern time in the first of at least two spacewalks aimed at replacing a malfunctioning pump module that is part of the space station's cooling system.

Koichi Wakata, a Japanese astronaut, will be operating a robotic arm from inside the station to assist with the repairs.

Colonel Hopkins will be wearing the same spacesuit — No. 3011 — that leaked in July. During that spacewalk, water partly filled the helmet. The astronaut in the suit then, Luca Parmitano, was able to hurry back to safety, but not before water covered his eyes and blocked his nostrils.

Engineers found that contamination had clogged one of the suit's filters, causing water from the suit's cooling system to back up. Those parts have been replaced, and tests have indicated no lingering problems.

Officials admit to some uneasiness, however, because the source and cause of the contamination remain unknown.

NASA had planned to send a replacement spacesuit to the station. But on Dec. 11, a valve controlling one of two loops of circulating ammonia that cool equipment on the space station malfunctioned. When attempts to control the ammonia flow using a different valve proved inadequate, space station managers decided to send the astronauts out on the spacewalks.

Engineers have devised low-tech countermeasures in case water again floods into a helmet.

An absorbent pad installed in the back of the helmet can hold 20 to 27 ounces, or about 600 to 800 grams, of water. The astronauts will periodically tilt their heads back to check if the pads have become "squishy."

In addition, station crew members made improvised snorkels out of available materials: plastic tubing and Velcro. The tubes will extend from the helmet down into the chest area of the spacesuit. If water is encroaching on the astronaut's face, "this is your last resort," said Allison Bolinger, the lead spacewalk officer. "The crew member can lean down and use this to breathe, to receive fresh oxygen down near his midsection."

During Saturday's spacewalk, which is expected to last about six and a half hours, Colonel Hopkins and Mr. Mastracchio will disconnect cables to the pump module and open up the insulation that covers it.

The ammonia pump itself is operating normally, but the ammonia has been too cold because of the problem with the valve, which controls the temperature. That led to the shutdown of an internal cooling loop of circulating water, to stop the cold ammonia from freezing the water.There is no immediate danger to the station's six crew members, but the station would be in more serious trouble if the other ammonia loop malfunctioned.

On the second spacewalk, planned for Monday, the astronauts will replace the 780-pound pump module with a spare one. If necessary, a third spacewalk would take place on Wednesday.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the astronaut who is wearing a spacesuit that once leaked. It is Col. Michael S. Hopkins, not Richard A. Mastracchio.

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Astronauts Begin Repairs on a Space Station Module

NASA, via Reuters

NASA Video of Saturday's Spacewalk: Two NASA astronauts at the International Space Station began the first of at least two spacewalks on Dec. 21. Their goal is to replace a malfunctioning pump module that is part of the cooling system.

Two NASA astronauts, working more quickly than expected, completed a spacewalk on Saturday in which they took the first steps to repair a malfunctioning pump module that is part of the cooling system for the International Space Station.

The astronauts, Col. Michael S. Hopkins of the Air Force and Richard A. Mastracchio, were far ahead of schedule throughout the nearly five-and-half-hour spacewalk as they detached tubing and electrical connectors from the pump. They were able to remove the 780-pound module and move it to a temporary storage location, a task that had been scheduled for completion during a second spacewalk.

Koichi Wakata, a Japanese astronaut, was operating a robotic arm from inside the station to help with the repairs.

Colonel Hopkins and Mr. Mastracchio stepped out of an airlock at 7:01 a.m. Eastern time, and even though they accomplished more than they had set out to do, they were able to return at 12:29 p.m., an hour earlier than scheduled. The two encountered few complications.

There were also no problems with the spacesuits, which was not the case during a spacewalk in July when a leak in the cooling system caused the helmet of an Italian astronaut to partly fill with water. That spacewalk was called off early as the astronaut, Luca Parmitano, hurried back inside the space station.

For Saturday's spacewalk, Colonel Hopkins used the same suit, but critical components had been replaced, and NASA engineers expressed confidence that the problem — a clogged filter — had been fixed.

NASA had also developed two low-tech workarounds in case there was a repeat of the earlier problem. The astronauts had absorbent pads installed in the back of their helmets and during the spacewalk tilted their heads to check if the pads were "squishy." Neither astronaut reported any signs of moisture in their helmets.

The astronauts also had improvised snorkels made out of plastic tubing and Velcro, extending from their helmets down into the chest area of the spacesuit. If water encroached, the tube would allow them to breathe air from the lower part of the suit.

Saturday's spacewalk was required after a valve controlling one of two loops of circulating ammonia that cool equipment on the space station malfunctioned on Dec. 11. When efforts to control the ammonia flow using a different valve proved inadequate, space station managers decided to send the astronauts out to make repairs.

The work is scheduled to continue on Tuesday.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified the astronaut who is wearing a spacesuit that once leaked. It is Col. Michael S. Hopkins, not Richard A. Mastracchio.

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By Sci-Fi Standards, Newest Robots May Disappoint

John Markoff/The New York Times

The Johnson Space Center's Valkyrie robot competes at completing a task, closing a valve, at the Darpa Robotics Challenge.

HOMESTEAD, Fla. — The robot gently grabbed the door handle and pulled it open. But before it could shuffle through the frame, it lost its grip and the spring-loaded door slammed shut.

Team Schaft, an elite group of former Tokyo University roboticists whose company was recently acquired by Google, is one of the favorites to win the Pentagon's Darpa Robotics Challenge 2013 Trials. But in its first event on Friday, the team's 4-foot-8, 210-pound Schaft HRP-2 robot was not perfect. The robot passed through just two of the three doors and as a result failed to get a valuable third point or a fourth bonus point.

With computer technology and robot development rapidly advancing, the Robotics Challenge is a coming-out party of sorts for a new generation of robots that are being designed to walk around in the human environment and collaborate with people on tasks. But the event is much more than a robot showcase; it is also an attempt by the federal government to push technology forward, with the goal of creating machines that can be used in place of humans to perform dangerous tasks.

Nine years ago, Darpa — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — sponsored the first of three autonomous vehicle "grand challenges." That has led to an explosion of activity in self-driving cars.

The agency is trying to repeat its success by offering a $2 million prize next year to the team that develops a robot that can perform a series of tasks simulating the kind of things a robot might be called upon to do in a disaster like a nuclear power plant meltdown.

There have been a series of prechallenge events this year, building up to the "trials" here on Friday and Saturday. Even with all of that, expectations have been set low.

Rightly so, apparently. The Schaft robot, even with its imperfections, performed better than many of the other competitors who have struggled with far easier tasks, like pressing the gas pedal in the golf-cart-like vehicle that the robots are supposed to control or making their way up a ladder. Many of the competitors are not even trying all of the eight required tasks, which include driving a car, breaking through a wall, operating power tools and removing debris.

Gill Pratt, the roboticist and Darpa program manager who is in charge of the event, said Thursday that public perceptions of the state of robot science were unrealistic. "We've all seen science fiction movies," he said at a news briefing. "And in science fiction movies, robots walk around quickly, they do nice things, sometimes not so nice — and in general they're inside of action films."

He said one reason for the Darpa trials was to establish where the science stood, "as a reference point, as a way for us to learn what is the state of the art right now."

By the look of things here in the pit lane of the Homestead-Miami Speedway, humanoid robots will remain more science fiction than science fact for a while longer.

Dr. Pratt, who before coming to Darpa was a pioneer in developing technologies that made it possible for robots to work in proximity to humans, has drawn an analogy between today's robots and human 1-year-olds, who can barely walk and frequently lose their balance and topple over.

The question is how quickly the robots will progress. In the case of self-driven vehicles, the rate of progress was much faster than predicted.

Although the original event ended in failure in 2004, just a year and a half later a number of the vehicles were able on their own to complete a long course over desert roads. In 2010, Google shook up the automotive industry with the news that it was testing self-driving cars on California's freeways. Now, in the 2014 model year, a number of car companies will offer a feature known as "traffic jam assist" in which cars will drive autonomously in limited freeway situations.

To add realism to the 2013 Challenge event, Darpa officials have made it more difficult to control the robots by varying the amount of Internet bandwidth that is available to operators at its computer control station. In theory, that rewards teams whose designs are built around more self-guidance and punishes those who manually control or "teleoperate" their machines.

At the trials, some autonomy is on display. For example, the Atlas robot that was designed for seven of the teams by Boston Dynamics, a Massachusetts company, has the ability to walk on its own, as well as balance, a challenging robotics feat. The Schaft robot climbs over a debris field largely on its own, with the operator selecting the positions for the robot to place its feet, but the robot then taking the steps on its own.

Although the trials have shown so far that the teams are struggling to reach even the low bar that Darpa has set, there are expectations that a year from now, considerable progress will have been made. Indeed, at least one of the teams may try to automate their performance entirely next year.

Darpa has specified, down to the tiniest detail, what it wants from the teams in the way of the contest, which will help any teams that want to go back to the lab to try again.

"It's not that different from the challenge faced by Disney engineers," said Aaron Bobick, a Georgia Tech computer-vision specialist who is a member of the DRC-Hubo team led by Drexel University. And like the Walt Disney Company when designing a new thrill ride, he said, Darpa participants find that the challenge is to keep the ride on the rails.

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Applying Creativity to a Byproduct of Oil Drilling

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Workers installing a device to capture natural gas at an oil well in McKenzie County, N.D. The gas would otherwise simply be flared, or burned off.

WATFORD CITY, N.D. — Viewed from outer space, the 1,500 blazing oil well flares burning off excess natural gas illuminate the plains of western North Dakota more brilliantly than Minneapolis hundreds of miles away.

The gas being burned in the Bakken field is a byproduct of a frenzy of oil drilling in isolated areas where there are too few gas-gathering lines and few limits on drilling. In total, the excess gas could heat a million homes, releasing roughly six million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year — roughly equivalent to three medium-size coal-fired power plants.

That level of emissions is three times as great as only two years ago, outraging environmentalists, encouraging landowners to sue oil companies and prompting lawmakers to push for tighter regulations.

But for A. Lance Langford, Statoil's vice president for Bakken development and production, and other energy executives, the flaring problem can be the mother of invention. "You take a problem and you turn it into an opportunity," he said. "We're trying to think outside the box."

Oil companies and other industries are intensifying their efforts to stem the flaring, like building more pipelines and gas processing plants, planning new fertilizer factories that use natural gas as a feedstock and converting rigs and other equipment to use natural gas as a fuel.

But so far, the companies have been losing ground, and will probably not reduce the amount of flaring to the level of other oil-producing states for at least another five years.

Statoil, the Norwegian oil giant, is teaming up with General Electric here in the wheat fields of McKenzie County, the heart of the Bakken field, on a low-cost prototype it hopes will be used as far away as Africa and Asia, where gas now flared could be gathered for cooking and other uses.

The first step of the process is to strip out of the gas valuable natural gas liquids like butane and propane, which can be used for petrochemical production. The liquids can then be put in pressurized tanks and delivered by truck to processing plants. The rest of the gas can be compressed and stored in what G.E. calls "C.N.G. in a box."

The device was originally designed to be a mobile natural gas station to fill up cars, trucks and buses. But Statoil plans to use the boxes to fuel equipment, particularly drilling rigs that have already been converted to replace 40 percent of the diesel they burn with gas.

By Statoil's calculations, if all the rigs in the Bakken were converted to run even partly on natural gas, more than 60 million cubic feet of natural gas — or roughly a fifth of the gas now being flared — could be saved every day.

Statoil is also bringing new equipment to the Bakken for fracking — the high-pressure injection of water, sand and chemicals that forces open the deep underground shale rock — that can also run on a mix of diesel and natural gas.

The costs of the program are modest. A General Electric compression box costs about $1.1 million, and the mobile processor costs about $500,000, according to Statoil executives. The company hopes to get the first pilot running by early January and have up to eight compression units running by the end of 2014.

"If we can show a successful pathway to adopting natural gas in high-horsepower applications — rigs, frack crews, heavy duty trucking, railways — that will increase demand," said John Westerheide, the strategic marketing leader for unconventional resources at G.E. Oil and Gas. And if demand goes up, energy economists say, natural gas prices will also go up and further increase incentives to capture it.

Other companies already have their own plans to make the gas more of an economic asset.

The railroad giant BNSF, which now ships the majority of Bakken crude oil out of the state, is preparing to test North Dakota's abundant and cheap natural gas as an alternative fuel to far more expensive diesel for its locomotives. And two companies have begun planning construction of two giant fertilizer plants, representing nearly $3 billion in investments in the state, which would use North Dakota's natural gas as a feedstock and supply farmers in the Dakotas, Minnesota, Montana and Canada.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 21, 2013

An article on Wednesday about efforts to capture natural gas now being burned off at oil wells in North Dakota misstated both the current daily capacity of the state's gas processing plants and the projected capacity at the end of 2015. Current capacity is 1.01 billion cubic feet, not 1.01 million cubic feet, and the projected capacity is 1.7 billion cubic feet, not 1.7 million cubic feet.

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Janet D. Rowley, Who Discovered That Cancer Can Be Genetic, Dies at 88

Dr. Janet D. Rowley, a physician who four decades ago became the first person to show a conclusive link between certain genetic abnormalities and certain cancers, died on Tuesday at her home in Chicago. She was 88.

The death, from complications of ovarian cancer, was announced by the University of Chicago, where Dr. Rowley was the Blum-Riese distinguished service professor of medicine, molecular genetics and cell biology, and human genetics.

Dr. Rowley, described by The New York Times in 2011 as "the matriarch of modern cancer genetics," made her pathbreaking discovery in 1972, when she found that a particular type of leukemia could result when two chromosomes abnormally exchanged genetic material.

Her findings helped establish cancer as a genetic disease. They also made possible the development of targeted drug therapies for specific cancers.

For her work, Dr. Rowley received the Lasker Award, given for distinguished contributions to medical science; the National Medal of Science from President Bill Clinton; and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama, among many other honors.

Janet Davison was born in New York City on April 5, 1925, and at 2 moved with her family to Chicago. At 15, she entered Hutchins College of the University of Chicago, which let gifted high school students start college.

After receiving her bachelor's degree at 19, she was accepted to the university's medical school but was told she would have to wait nine months to enroll: the school had already accepted its quota of women for the year — three in a class of 65.

She earned her M.D. from Chicago in 1948 and that year married a classmate, Dr. Donald Rowley. The mother of four young sons before long, she worked part time at a local clinic for children with Down syndrome.

The prospect of a research career, Dr. Rowley later said, did not occur to her.

"I actually thought I had it made working three days a week," she said in a 2009 interview. "I could take care of my children, garden, weave and go to museums."

Then, in 1961, Dr. Rowley joined her husband on a sabbatical year at Oxford University. Because Down syndrome was known to be caused by a chromosomal abnormality, she chose to spend her year there studying new methods of chromosome analysis.

Returning to Chicago, she begged the university for a room, a microscope and sufficient salary to pay a babysitter. The director of the laboratory that offered her space was an authority on leukemia, and Dr. Rowley began hunting for chromosomal anomalies in genetic samples from his patients.

While genetic abnormalities had long been known to cause other diseases, Dr. Rowley would be the first to show that they were also a cause — and not merely a consequence, as had been supposed — of cancer.

Her discovery took 10 years of peering through the microscope: at the time it was hard to tell chromosomes apart, even under magnification.

"This was less than a decade after Watson and Crick's discovery," Dr. Rowley told The Times in 2011, referring to James D. Watson and Francis Crick, the biologists who discovered the structure of DNA in 1953. "We were only beginning to have a notion of what DNA was like. There weren't the right tools yet to stain it, cut it apart, examine and manipulate it."

Dr. Rowley's first significant advance came in 1970, on another sabbatical at Oxford. There she was introduced to a chemical staining technique, newly developed in Sweden, that made chromosomes appear striated and, as a result, easier to differentiate.

She stained and studied an array of chromosomes from patients with blood cancers, photographing the resulting images. Back in Chicago, she cut the photos into tiny fragments, with each fragment showing a chromosome in isolation — "paper dolls," her children called them.

One day in 1972, Dr. Rowley cut up a sheaf of photos from a patient with acute myeloid leukemia, known as A.M.L. She laid the fragments out, chromosome by chromosome, on her dining table and ordered the children not to sneeze.

Aligned, the photos told a story of mutation. As Dr. Rowley noticed, two chromosomes had inappropriately swapped genetic material: a piece of chromosome 8 was now on chromosome 21, and vice versa. Examining photos from other A.M.L. patients, she saw that nearly every set showed the identical genetic swap.

Surely, she thought, other researchers had observed this before. She rushed to the library.

"They hadn't," Dr. Rowley told The Associated Press in 1988. "It was one of the greatest moments of my life."

She soon identified another swap, between chromosomes 9 and 22, which resulted in chronic myelogenous leukemia, or C.M.L.

It was then so unorthodox to regard cancer as a genetic disease that "I got sort of amused tolerance at the beginning," Dr. Rowley later said.

In 1977, she and her colleagues uncovered a third swap — between chromosomes 15 and 17 — which caused acute promyelocytic leukemia.

"That showed what we'd observed with the other two wasn't an anomaly," Dr. Rowley told The Times in 2011. "The third finding made me a believer."

In chromosomes that had undergone the swaps — known in medical parlance as translocations — genes regulating processes like cell growth and cell division were no longer where they ought to be. As a result, cancer could arise.

Over the years, researchers have identified hundreds more translocations linked to specific cancers. The discoveries have given rise to drugs that target the genetic defects underpinning the cancers while sparing healthy cells.

Among the most successful of these drugs is Gleevec, used to treat C.M.L. Before its development, C.M.L. patients typically lived three to five years after diagnosis. Today, 90 percent are considered cured and have a normal life span.

Dr. Rowley's husband, a noted pathologist at the University of Chicago, died this year; their eldest son, Donald, died in 1983. Survivors include three sons, David, Robert and Roger, and five grandchildren.

Her other awards include the Japan Prize and a lifetime achievement award from the American Association for Cancer Research. From 2002 to 2009, she served on President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics.

Despite her laurels, Dr. Rowley by all accounts remained almost preternaturally modest.

"People accuse me of being too humble," she told The Times in 2011. "But looking down a microscope at banded chromosomes is not rocket science."

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The Texas Tribune: Sinking Land Brings Calls for Pumping Alternative

Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune

A GPS receiver was mounted on a pipe at a subsidence monitoring station in Fort Bend County near Richmond, Tex.

Amid a persistent drought, a growing population and a dwindling supply of surface water, much of Texas is searching for underground water resources.

Expanded coverage of Texas is produced by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit news organization. To join the conversation about this article, go to texastribune.org.

Michael Stravato for The Texas Tribune

Stan Ulcak, a representative with the Harris Galveston Subsidence District, working with a receiver last week. The area is prone to flooding.

But a large swath of Texas — home to close to one-quarter of its population — is looking for water supplies anywhere but beneath its surface. A century of intense groundwater pumping in the fast-growing Houston metropolitan area has collapsed the layers of the Gulf Coast Aquifer, causing the land above to sink. The only solution is to stop pumping, a strategy that some areas are resisting.

The geological phenomenon, unique to this part of Texas because of the makeup of the aquifer's clay layers, is known as subsidence. Areas in and around Houston have sunk as much as 10 feet in 100 years, causing neighborhoods to flood, cracking pavements and even moving geologic faults that could lead to infrastructure damage. "It's an upfront and personal issue when you're on the coast and you see land loss," said Mike Turco, who heads the subsidence districts responsible for addressing the problem in Harris, Galveston and Fort Bend Counties. "You have oil barracks that are out in Galveston Bay now."

Subsidence has long been a concern in Harris and Galveston Counties, which are nearer to the gulf and more prone to flooding. Spurred by state lawmakers in the 1970s, the counties have worked to reduce their groundwater dependency to 25 percent from more than 50 percent. That number will continue to fall as they increase their reliance on rivers like the Trinity and San Jacinto, as well as planned reservoirs.

Neighboring Fort Bend County, on the other hand, which still relies on the Gulf Coast Aquifer for 60 percent of its water, is farther inland, and the effects of subsidence can be less tangible.

"There are perception issues," Mr. Turco said. Whether subsidence means anything to someone depends on where you're standing, he said. "If you're standing next to the river, it could be a big deal."

In Fort Bend County, unlike Houston, "there isn't a ship channel to walk to," he said.

Now that the county is starting to grow, in part because of the expansion of nearby Houston, studies by the subsidence districts estimate that if nothing is done, parts of Fort Bend County will sink about five feet in the next four decades. The impact could be lessened to just two feet under recent regulations asking certain areas to convert 60 percent of their groundwater supplies by 2025. Not everyone agrees with the approach. Some towns dislike the rules that force them to find alternative water supplies, worried about the high cost of conversion and unsure whether their own land is actually sinking.

"Typically, subsidence is equated to growth," said Terri Vela, the city manager for Richmond, which is about 30 miles west of Houston. "And Richmond proper has not seen that growth. I don't even know that we have subsidence today in Richmond."

Ms. Vela pointed out that subsidence in the county affected some areas more than others. For instance, the land has sunk nearly a foot in 15 years just a few miles to the east of Richmond, in booming Sugar Land. But in Richmond itself, the ground has lowered less than three inches — although the Fort Bend subsidence district warns that could change if its outlying areas continue to grow as they have in recent years.

Alternative supplies have been difficult to find, Ms. Vela said. About five years ago, Richmond and a neighboring town, Rosenberg, secured a long-term contract to take water from the Brazos River, with plans to build a water treatment plant. But then the area was hit by drought, and the river's flows were at their lowest by 2009. the towns were then besieged with requests from industrial and other water users to buy the newly acquired water.

The overwhelming demand for Brazos River water led the towns to question whether it would really be available. "Is this a long-term, sustainable water source?" Ms. Vela said. "Everyone else has put their straws in before we've gotten to it."

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