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brdgtFrom the Sea, on Shaky Legs
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, September 6, 2005
Around 360 million years ago, the first animals crawled out of the sea and onto land. Now it appears that rather than crawling, precisely, one of them may have inched its way along.
That suggestion comes from a new reconstruction of Ichthyostega, one of the earliest four-legged land animals, by scientists from Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Cambridge in Britain.
Their research shows that the animal, which was about three feet long with short legs and a long tail, could not have undulated like a fish, but could have arched its spine, something like an inchworm, to move.
"Flexing and straightening of the back really helps you along," said Per Erik Ahlberg, a professor at Uppsala and the lead author of a paper describing the reconstruction in the journal Nature.
"It's the principle of the mammalian gallop," he added. "Ichthyostega, with its short and stumpy legs, obviously didn't gallop. "But it might have been able to effect some inchworm-like shuffle." If so, it probably dragged its hind legs and tail, he said.
Dr. Ahlberg, with Jennifer A. Clack and Henning Blom, reconstructed Ichthyostega from fossils from East Greenland. There are plenty of fossils around from the same period, Dr. Ahlberg said, but none are complete. So it takes a bit of detective work to come up with a picture of the entire skeleton.
The new work differs in several crucial respects from earlier reconstructions. Most notably, Dr. Ahlberg said, in earlier representations the spinal vertebrae were of uniform shape.
Their research showed that the vertebrae differ depending on their location along the spine. Those near the head are canted toward the tail; those near the hip are canted toward the head. In the middle they are straight.
"Our best guess is that the chest part of the backbone was almost completely rigid," Dr. Ahlberg said. "Behind that, in the small of the back there was likely a modest degree of vertical flexion." Ichthyostega might have also kept its spine rigid, he said, and walked by moving diagonally opposite limbs simultaneously.
There is a tendency to think that the first animals to make the transition from sea to land must have had a side-to-side movement, like fish. "What we can say is that this animal definitely did not undulate," Dr. Ahlberg said.
Not that Ichthyostega was a great walker. If it were around today, Dr. Ahlberg said, "you'd watch this thing flounder along pathetically and wonder how long it would survive.
"But that's not the world we're talking about here," he added. "You don't have to do this well; you just have to do this better than the competition. Which there isn't much of."
A new reconstruction of Ichthyostega, one of the first creatures to crawl from the sea, suggests that it propelled itself by arching its spine.
Parasitic Hairworm Charms Grasshopper Into Taking It for a Swim
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 6, 2005
Only in science fiction do people's minds get possessed by alien beings. For grasshoppers, zombification is an everyday hazard, and it obliges them to end their lives in a bizarre manner.
Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects it.
The interaction occurs as the worm induces the grasshopper to seek out a large body of water and then leap into it.
The parasite, known as a hairworm, lives and breeds in fresh water. But it spends the early part of its life cycle eating away the innards of the grasshoppers and crickets it infects.
When it is fully grown, it faces a difficult problem, that of returning to water. So it has evolved a clever way of influencing its host to deliver just one further service - the stricken grasshopper looks for water and dives in.
The suicidal behavior of the infected grasshoppers has been studied by a team of biologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, France, led by Frédéric Thomas and David Biron.
They did their fieldwork around a swimming pool on the border of a forest near Avène les Bains in southern France. Hordes of infected grasshoppers - more than 100 a night - arrive at the pool during summer nights at the behest of the parasites.
The biologists captured grasshoppers before their suicidal plunge and removed the worms.
The worms grow to several times the length of the grasshopper's body before they emerge. Because of their unusual size, it is easy to extract and analyze the different sets of proteins that they produce before, during and after they compel their hosts to drown themselves.
"We found the parasite produces and injects proteins into the brain of its host," Dr. Thomas said.
Two of the proteins belonged to a well-known family of signaling agents known as the Wnt family that are deployed in developing the cells of the nervous system.
Though produced by the worm, the two proteins seemed similar to insect-type proteins and perhaps developed so as to mimic them, the French biologists report in an article in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Parasites have long been known to influence their hosts' behavior in ways beneficial to the parasite. The rabies virus, for instance, makes animals rabid so that they bite others and transmit the virus.
An unusually specific instance of behavioral manipulation was discovered recently in a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.
The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.
Somehow the larva reprograms the spider into executing, over and over again, just the first two steps in a five-step subroutine from the early phase of web-building.
If the larva is removed just before it can kill its host, the orb weaver will spin a platform-style web that and the following night, but revert to its usual web on the third night, as if it has shaken off some mesmerizing chemical the wasp has injected into its nervous system.
The hairworm seems to have perfected an equally intimate manipulation of its host by inducing a fantastical desire to swim, of which the grasshopper is scarcely more capable than the worm is of flying.
This is not the parasite's only trick. No one knows how, from its aquatic home, the hairworm manages to infect a terrestrial species. Dr. Thomas said he suspects that the larvae, minuscule on hatching, first infect aquatic insects like mosquito larvae and hide as cysts in their tissues.
When the adult mosquito flies away and when it dies, its body may be eaten by a grasshopper or cricket. The hairworm "will then develop, eating absolutely everything not essential to keep its host alive," Dr. Thomas said. The zombified grasshopper is reduced to just its head, legs and outer skeleton by the time it goes for its final swim.
There are some 300 species of hairworm found around the world. Their billions of larvae "will infect everything - frogs, fish, snails," Dr. Thomas said. But it is only in grasshoppers, crickets and katydids that these uninvited guests are able to usurp both the body and mind of their hosts.
A grasshopper was tricked into jumping into water by a hairworm that had infected it and had eaten most of its insides. In the water, the worm left the insect to start the next portion of its life. The grasshopper drowned.
Vermont Blends 'Green' Flush Toilets and a Greenhouse
By KATIE ZEZIMA, The New York Times, August 31, 2005
SHARON, Vt. - It is a rare rest stop attraction, especially in Vermont, a humid greenhouse soon to be filled with orchids and other flora better suited to steamy jungles than snowy mountains.
But this exotic enticement is possible here because of the most mundane of rest stop features: flushing toilets.
The State of Vermont has installed a system that uses plants and organisms to clean wastewater at a rebuilt rest stop on Interstate 89 here, 10 miles northwest of White River Junction, and then pumps the treated water back to the toilets for reuse.
State officials said the system, called a living machine, not only advanced so-called green construction, but also allowed the rest area to stay open and the country's first Vietnam veterans memorial, erected in 1982, to remain at the site.
"Its purpose is two-fold," Gov. Jim Douglas said. "We thought it was important to do something honoring our Vietnam veterans, and Vermont has a long tradition of environmental stewardship."
The rest stop, a $6.3 million complex that includes the toilets, the greenhouse, an array of Vermont tourism brochures and a newer, bigger Vietnam memorial, will open to the public in September.
But the project is not without skeptics, who say that while the spot should be preserved for the veterans memorial, the additional bells and whistles are a waste of taxpayer money.
"Is this going to be a rest stop or a Four Seasons resort?" Jim Kenyon of The Valley News of White River Junction wrote in a June 29 column critical of the cost.
Mr. Kenyon said politicians had been loath to question the cost because of potential political risks.
State officials and the state's builders trade association said rest areas were expensive because the construction had to be sturdy enough for high use and because many spots on Vermont highways had poor drainage. The state completed two rest areas from 1999 to 2002 at a total cost of $12 million. Much of the money, like that for the Sharon rest stop, was federal highway money.
Ed Von Turkovich, state director of buildings and environmental services, said the state was sensitive to cost, but thought the Sharon rest center would help promote Vermont's economy.
"We think it will be a destination stop for veterans from around the country to come and pay their respects and see the first Vietnam memorial on the Interstate system," Mr. Von Turkovich said.
The Sharon rest area was threatened with being shut down in the mid-1990's because of problems with sewage drainage. A coalition of veterans furiously lobbied Gov. Howard Dean and the legislature to spare the rest area, where the Vietnam memorial, a simple granite obelisk, had been placed for a particular reason.
"When it was put there in 1982, there were very specific reasons why," John Miner, president of the Vermont chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, said. "One was the proximity to the highway, which was used many times by people heading to Canada to flee the draft, and the area looks like Highway 1 in Vietnam." The legislature spared the rest area and committed to building a larger memorial, but officials were not sure how to remedy the drainage problem. The living machine, they said, was the perfect solution.
The technology is used by businesses, schools and some local governments to purify toilet water, industrial runoff and contaminated bodies of water. People familiar with the technology say this is the first time a state has built a permanent rest area whose toilets run exclusively on a living machine. A few years ago, Vermont installed a temporary system at another rest stop that has been shut down.
In a living machine, the contents of a flushed toiled are pumped into a filtration system to rid them of odor and then into six concrete cylinders holding vegetation. The various plants are South Asian natives, a good choice both because of the Vietnam memorial and because their roots are well suited to host the organisms that eat the waste, converting it into plant food.
After the water is clean for reuse, it is pumped back into the toilets, to resume the cycle. Just to be safe, signs hanging over toilets warn users that the water, dyed blue for good measure, is nonpotable wastewater.
In a wing of the building, in the glass greenhouse, visitors look down on the vegetation from a grated ledge. The room, which offers spectacular mountain views, smells like a combination of mulch and chlorine.
The building is heated and cooled by 24 geothermal wells. A similar system lies under the sidewalks to melt snow in the winter.
"This is a great idea," Virginia McCormack, 54, said as she stood in the women's restroom in mid-August shortly before a rededication of the Vietnam memorial. "It makes much more sense than sucking clean water out of here."
In the center of the 6,000-square-foot rest area structure is a glass monument with the names of all 7,230 Vermonters who served in Vietnam. A timeline detailing major events around the United States, in Vermont and in Vietnam in the 1960's and 70's is on a stone wall to its left.
Outside, beyond a small footbridge, the original memorial now stands in a small granite amphitheater. One hundred thirty-eight white slabs of marble protrude from its walls, representing Vermonters killed in the Vietnam era. Semicircles ringed in marble rise out of the ground, allowing visitors to sit.
"It's overwhelming," Chuck Delano, 58, a Vietnam veteran from Londonderry, N.H., said at the rededication. "It's beautiful. I wasn't expecting anything like this."
The greenhouse at the Sharon, Vt., rest area mimics the shape of the surrounding mountains, said to be reminiscent of the landscape in Vietnam.
Georgia Loggers Prepare to Raise Sunken Timber
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, September 5, 2005
CAIRO, Ga., Sept. 4 (AP) - Along with regular lumber, Ryan Lee's sawmill supplies wood from cypress and pine logs that sank while being transported to ports and sawmills during the heyday of Southern logging in the 1800's and early 1900's.
Retrieving the valuable logs has been illegal in Georgia since 1998 because of legal and environmental concerns, forcing suppliers like Mr. Lee to buy them in other states.
But that is about to change.
This year, Georgia lawmakers approved legislation authorizing underwater logging for two years on parts of the Flint and Altamaha Rivers, mostly in southern Georgia. If no problems develop, the law may be extended.
Environmentalists oppose the work, citing concerns about spawning fish, water quality and getting less than market value for the logs, which are technically state property.
"This is the nursery grounds of the river," said Deborah Sheppard, executive director of Altamaha Riverkeeper, a watchdog group based in Darien, Ga. "To create a business that benefits a few," she said, "certainly is not in the public interest."
But State Senator Tommie Williams, a Republican from Lyons, said the law had been patterned after a Florida program, which he called a "safe way to do this."
"I didn't see a reason, as long as we could protect the environment, that we shouldn't do it," Mr. Williams said.
An estimated 3 percent to 5 percent of the millions of logs sent down the rivers in the 19th and 20th centuries sank to the bottom short of their destinations. These logs, known as deadheads or sinkers, remain well preserved on river bottoms.
The wood that comes from the logs is prized for its color and tight grain. It is up to 10 times as valuable as conventional wood.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources plans to begin accepting applications from loggers in early January. Applicants will have to post a $50,000 bond and will need a $10,000 license. A proposal, not yet approved by the department's board, would also require loggers to pay the state 20 percent of the logs' value.
Each license will cover a two-mile stretch of river. Deadhead logging will still be prohibited in areas where it could cause contamination, endanger fish or conflict with recreation.
Mr. Lee said his Cairo company, Riverwood Flooring and Paneling, had been pushing the idea for nearly three years and already had a small barge with a winch to lift logs to the surface. To attach the cables, Mr. Lee would dive down to the logs in the Flint River, which is infested with alligators, cottonmouth snakes and snapping turtles.
"This is not a job for the faint of heart," he said. "It's physically hard and demanding. Not everybody wants to do a job where every time you go to work, you could die. You're playing pixie sticks with 20-foot logs weighing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds."
Mr. Williams sees underwater logging as a way to pay tribute to the old loggers, including four generations of his family, who felled trees with axes or crosscut saws and hauled them to the river with mules or oxen.
"It's really a treasure," Mr. Williams said. "The quality of the wood and the uniqueness of the wood is something we can't duplicate. There really aren't any virgin forests left."
A Corner of Kyrgyzstan Has a Cure-All: Let Them Eat Clay
By ETHAN WILENSKY-LANFORD, The New York Times, September 5, 2005
NARYN, Kyrgyzstan - High in the Tien Shan Mountains, about 100 miles from the Chinese border on a midsummer day, two Kyrgyz women scoured a sandpit for choice clay. Plucking a clump of dusty earth as if picking fruit from a tree, the younger of the two popped a sample in her mouth, letting the dirt melt on her tongue like a lozenge.
"It's oilier here, tastier," the woman, Baishekan Saginova, 40, said to her companion. "It was too salty over there, and not very good."
Tolkonezhe Kasmanbetova, 52, agreed with the appraisal. "This is a bit more fatty," she said, smacking her lips to savor the flavor.
Ms. Saginova and Ms. Kasmanbetova live in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, a distant corner of the former Soviet Union, and say they eat the clay, known locally as gulpota, for its health benefits. "If somebody is anemic, or doesn't have much blood left, then they eat it," Ms. Kasmanbetova explained. "Pregnant women also use it, probably because they need the extra vitamins."
Most health professionals in this country do not endorse the use of unrefined mineral supplements.
"There's more trash in here than iron," said Dr. Abdukhalim R. Rianzhanov, director of the Kyrgyz Scientific Center of Hematology, when shown a chalky gray substance sold in the capital, Bishkek. "You'll go straight to the devil if you eat this clay!"
Although people have been eating the clay in Central Asia for thousands of years, the practice is neither highly regarded, nor praised as a tradition.
Dr. Rianzhanov said the odd behavior was caused by anemia, or iron shortage in the blood, because the patients quickly stabilize with proper supplements.
"These people are sick," he explained. "When they have low iron, they develop the desire to eat this clay, plaster, chalk, or uncooked meat. They'll eat eggshells, pull the bark off trees. It's even written in the medical literature that they will eat building material."
A condition, called pica, is described in the West as the ingestion of non-nutritive substances.
Across town at the Osh Bazaar, women who look quite healthy regularly purchase gulpota.
Galina Kosheleva, 45, said she first ingested clay in 1997 to prolong her life, believing that the practice cleans out the body, and can help prevent weight gain. A true gulpota connoisseur, she prefers chalky gray clay from the Batken region to redder Naryn clay, which she says is higher in iron.
"This one tastes like butter," she said, while sampling merchandise at Osh Bazaar. "It's sweet, not too salty, this Batken clay, and very good. It doesn't scratch your teeth, like sand. This is from nature, and only found in Kyrgyzstan."
Paying 5 som, or 12 cents, for just over a pound, Ms. Kosheleva was pleased. "The clay sold for dollars in American pharmacies is much more expensive," she said.
In Naryn, people who eat gulpota, generally older or pregnant women and young children, collect it themselves in the mountains, near roadsides, or in sandpits, as Ms. Saginova and Ms. Kasmanbetova do.
Ms. Kasmanbetova grew up on a kolkhoz, or Soviet collectivized farm, but lost her job after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, in addition to her meager monthly pension, she occasionally sells homemade meat pies in the bazaar.
The gulpota she collected, however, was not for sale.
"A kilogram for me, a kilogram for you," Ms. Saginova said to Ms. Kasmanbetova. "We won't need to come back for the rest of the summer!"
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, September 6, 2005
Around 360 million years ago, the first animals crawled out of the sea and onto land. Now it appears that rather than crawling, precisely, one of them may have inched its way along.
That suggestion comes from a new reconstruction of Ichthyostega, one of the earliest four-legged land animals, by scientists from Uppsala University in Sweden and the University of Cambridge in Britain.
Their research shows that the animal, which was about three feet long with short legs and a long tail, could not have undulated like a fish, but could have arched its spine, something like an inchworm, to move.
"Flexing and straightening of the back really helps you along," said Per Erik Ahlberg, a professor at Uppsala and the lead author of a paper describing the reconstruction in the journal Nature.
"It's the principle of the mammalian gallop," he added. "Ichthyostega, with its short and stumpy legs, obviously didn't gallop. "But it might have been able to effect some inchworm-like shuffle." If so, it probably dragged its hind legs and tail, he said.
Dr. Ahlberg, with Jennifer A. Clack and Henning Blom, reconstructed Ichthyostega from fossils from East Greenland. There are plenty of fossils around from the same period, Dr. Ahlberg said, but none are complete. So it takes a bit of detective work to come up with a picture of the entire skeleton.
The new work differs in several crucial respects from earlier reconstructions. Most notably, Dr. Ahlberg said, in earlier representations the spinal vertebrae were of uniform shape.
Their research showed that the vertebrae differ depending on their location along the spine. Those near the head are canted toward the tail; those near the hip are canted toward the head. In the middle they are straight.
"Our best guess is that the chest part of the backbone was almost completely rigid," Dr. Ahlberg said. "Behind that, in the small of the back there was likely a modest degree of vertical flexion." Ichthyostega might have also kept its spine rigid, he said, and walked by moving diagonally opposite limbs simultaneously.
There is a tendency to think that the first animals to make the transition from sea to land must have had a side-to-side movement, like fish. "What we can say is that this animal definitely did not undulate," Dr. Ahlberg said.
Not that Ichthyostega was a great walker. If it were around today, Dr. Ahlberg said, "you'd watch this thing flounder along pathetically and wonder how long it would survive.
"But that's not the world we're talking about here," he added. "You don't have to do this well; you just have to do this better than the competition. Which there isn't much of."
A new reconstruction of Ichthyostega, one of the first creatures to crawl from the sea, suggests that it propelled itself by arching its spine.
Parasitic Hairworm Charms Grasshopper Into Taking It for a Swim
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 6, 2005
Only in science fiction do people's minds get possessed by alien beings. For grasshoppers, zombification is an everyday hazard, and it obliges them to end their lives in a bizarre manner.
Biologists have discovered and hope to decipher a deadly cross talk between the genomes of a grasshopper and a parasitic worm that infects it.
The interaction occurs as the worm induces the grasshopper to seek out a large body of water and then leap into it.
The parasite, known as a hairworm, lives and breeds in fresh water. But it spends the early part of its life cycle eating away the innards of the grasshoppers and crickets it infects.
When it is fully grown, it faces a difficult problem, that of returning to water. So it has evolved a clever way of influencing its host to deliver just one further service - the stricken grasshopper looks for water and dives in.
The suicidal behavior of the infected grasshoppers has been studied by a team of biologists from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Montpellier, France, led by Frédéric Thomas and David Biron.
They did their fieldwork around a swimming pool on the border of a forest near Avène les Bains in southern France. Hordes of infected grasshoppers - more than 100 a night - arrive at the pool during summer nights at the behest of the parasites.
The biologists captured grasshoppers before their suicidal plunge and removed the worms.
The worms grow to several times the length of the grasshopper's body before they emerge. Because of their unusual size, it is easy to extract and analyze the different sets of proteins that they produce before, during and after they compel their hosts to drown themselves.
"We found the parasite produces and injects proteins into the brain of its host," Dr. Thomas said.
Two of the proteins belonged to a well-known family of signaling agents known as the Wnt family that are deployed in developing the cells of the nervous system.
Though produced by the worm, the two proteins seemed similar to insect-type proteins and perhaps developed so as to mimic them, the French biologists report in an article in the current issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society.
Parasites have long been known to influence their hosts' behavior in ways beneficial to the parasite. The rabies virus, for instance, makes animals rabid so that they bite others and transmit the virus.
An unusually specific instance of behavioral manipulation was discovered recently in a wasp that parasitizes an orb-weaving spider in Costa Rica.
The night before the wasp larva kills its host, it somehow reprograms the spider's web-building activity so that instead of its usual temporary web, the spider constructs a durable platform ideal for the larva to pupate on.
Somehow the larva reprograms the spider into executing, over and over again, just the first two steps in a five-step subroutine from the early phase of web-building.
If the larva is removed just before it can kill its host, the orb weaver will spin a platform-style web that and the following night, but revert to its usual web on the third night, as if it has shaken off some mesmerizing chemical the wasp has injected into its nervous system.
The hairworm seems to have perfected an equally intimate manipulation of its host by inducing a fantastical desire to swim, of which the grasshopper is scarcely more capable than the worm is of flying.
This is not the parasite's only trick. No one knows how, from its aquatic home, the hairworm manages to infect a terrestrial species. Dr. Thomas said he suspects that the larvae, minuscule on hatching, first infect aquatic insects like mosquito larvae and hide as cysts in their tissues.
When the adult mosquito flies away and when it dies, its body may be eaten by a grasshopper or cricket. The hairworm "will then develop, eating absolutely everything not essential to keep its host alive," Dr. Thomas said. The zombified grasshopper is reduced to just its head, legs and outer skeleton by the time it goes for its final swim.
There are some 300 species of hairworm found around the world. Their billions of larvae "will infect everything - frogs, fish, snails," Dr. Thomas said. But it is only in grasshoppers, crickets and katydids that these uninvited guests are able to usurp both the body and mind of their hosts.
A grasshopper was tricked into jumping into water by a hairworm that had infected it and had eaten most of its insides. In the water, the worm left the insect to start the next portion of its life. The grasshopper drowned.
Vermont Blends 'Green' Flush Toilets and a Greenhouse
By KATIE ZEZIMA, The New York Times, August 31, 2005
SHARON, Vt. - It is a rare rest stop attraction, especially in Vermont, a humid greenhouse soon to be filled with orchids and other flora better suited to steamy jungles than snowy mountains.
But this exotic enticement is possible here because of the most mundane of rest stop features: flushing toilets.
The State of Vermont has installed a system that uses plants and organisms to clean wastewater at a rebuilt rest stop on Interstate 89 here, 10 miles northwest of White River Junction, and then pumps the treated water back to the toilets for reuse.
State officials said the system, called a living machine, not only advanced so-called green construction, but also allowed the rest area to stay open and the country's first Vietnam veterans memorial, erected in 1982, to remain at the site.
"Its purpose is two-fold," Gov. Jim Douglas said. "We thought it was important to do something honoring our Vietnam veterans, and Vermont has a long tradition of environmental stewardship."
The rest stop, a $6.3 million complex that includes the toilets, the greenhouse, an array of Vermont tourism brochures and a newer, bigger Vietnam memorial, will open to the public in September.
But the project is not without skeptics, who say that while the spot should be preserved for the veterans memorial, the additional bells and whistles are a waste of taxpayer money.
"Is this going to be a rest stop or a Four Seasons resort?" Jim Kenyon of The Valley News of White River Junction wrote in a June 29 column critical of the cost.
Mr. Kenyon said politicians had been loath to question the cost because of potential political risks.
State officials and the state's builders trade association said rest areas were expensive because the construction had to be sturdy enough for high use and because many spots on Vermont highways had poor drainage. The state completed two rest areas from 1999 to 2002 at a total cost of $12 million. Much of the money, like that for the Sharon rest stop, was federal highway money.
Ed Von Turkovich, state director of buildings and environmental services, said the state was sensitive to cost, but thought the Sharon rest center would help promote Vermont's economy.
"We think it will be a destination stop for veterans from around the country to come and pay their respects and see the first Vietnam memorial on the Interstate system," Mr. Von Turkovich said.
The Sharon rest area was threatened with being shut down in the mid-1990's because of problems with sewage drainage. A coalition of veterans furiously lobbied Gov. Howard Dean and the legislature to spare the rest area, where the Vietnam memorial, a simple granite obelisk, had been placed for a particular reason.
"When it was put there in 1982, there were very specific reasons why," John Miner, president of the Vermont chapter of the Vietnam Veterans of America, said. "One was the proximity to the highway, which was used many times by people heading to Canada to flee the draft, and the area looks like Highway 1 in Vietnam." The legislature spared the rest area and committed to building a larger memorial, but officials were not sure how to remedy the drainage problem. The living machine, they said, was the perfect solution.
The technology is used by businesses, schools and some local governments to purify toilet water, industrial runoff and contaminated bodies of water. People familiar with the technology say this is the first time a state has built a permanent rest area whose toilets run exclusively on a living machine. A few years ago, Vermont installed a temporary system at another rest stop that has been shut down.
In a living machine, the contents of a flushed toiled are pumped into a filtration system to rid them of odor and then into six concrete cylinders holding vegetation. The various plants are South Asian natives, a good choice both because of the Vietnam memorial and because their roots are well suited to host the organisms that eat the waste, converting it into plant food.
After the water is clean for reuse, it is pumped back into the toilets, to resume the cycle. Just to be safe, signs hanging over toilets warn users that the water, dyed blue for good measure, is nonpotable wastewater.
In a wing of the building, in the glass greenhouse, visitors look down on the vegetation from a grated ledge. The room, which offers spectacular mountain views, smells like a combination of mulch and chlorine.
The building is heated and cooled by 24 geothermal wells. A similar system lies under the sidewalks to melt snow in the winter.
"This is a great idea," Virginia McCormack, 54, said as she stood in the women's restroom in mid-August shortly before a rededication of the Vietnam memorial. "It makes much more sense than sucking clean water out of here."
In the center of the 6,000-square-foot rest area structure is a glass monument with the names of all 7,230 Vermonters who served in Vietnam. A timeline detailing major events around the United States, in Vermont and in Vietnam in the 1960's and 70's is on a stone wall to its left.
Outside, beyond a small footbridge, the original memorial now stands in a small granite amphitheater. One hundred thirty-eight white slabs of marble protrude from its walls, representing Vermonters killed in the Vietnam era. Semicircles ringed in marble rise out of the ground, allowing visitors to sit.
"It's overwhelming," Chuck Delano, 58, a Vietnam veteran from Londonderry, N.H., said at the rededication. "It's beautiful. I wasn't expecting anything like this."
The greenhouse at the Sharon, Vt., rest area mimics the shape of the surrounding mountains, said to be reminiscent of the landscape in Vietnam.
Georgia Loggers Prepare to Raise Sunken Timber
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, The New York Times, September 5, 2005
CAIRO, Ga., Sept. 4 (AP) - Along with regular lumber, Ryan Lee's sawmill supplies wood from cypress and pine logs that sank while being transported to ports and sawmills during the heyday of Southern logging in the 1800's and early 1900's.
Retrieving the valuable logs has been illegal in Georgia since 1998 because of legal and environmental concerns, forcing suppliers like Mr. Lee to buy them in other states.
But that is about to change.
This year, Georgia lawmakers approved legislation authorizing underwater logging for two years on parts of the Flint and Altamaha Rivers, mostly in southern Georgia. If no problems develop, the law may be extended.
Environmentalists oppose the work, citing concerns about spawning fish, water quality and getting less than market value for the logs, which are technically state property.
"This is the nursery grounds of the river," said Deborah Sheppard, executive director of Altamaha Riverkeeper, a watchdog group based in Darien, Ga. "To create a business that benefits a few," she said, "certainly is not in the public interest."
But State Senator Tommie Williams, a Republican from Lyons, said the law had been patterned after a Florida program, which he called a "safe way to do this."
"I didn't see a reason, as long as we could protect the environment, that we shouldn't do it," Mr. Williams said.
An estimated 3 percent to 5 percent of the millions of logs sent down the rivers in the 19th and 20th centuries sank to the bottom short of their destinations. These logs, known as deadheads or sinkers, remain well preserved on river bottoms.
The wood that comes from the logs is prized for its color and tight grain. It is up to 10 times as valuable as conventional wood.
The Georgia Department of Natural Resources plans to begin accepting applications from loggers in early January. Applicants will have to post a $50,000 bond and will need a $10,000 license. A proposal, not yet approved by the department's board, would also require loggers to pay the state 20 percent of the logs' value.
Each license will cover a two-mile stretch of river. Deadhead logging will still be prohibited in areas where it could cause contamination, endanger fish or conflict with recreation.
Mr. Lee said his Cairo company, Riverwood Flooring and Paneling, had been pushing the idea for nearly three years and already had a small barge with a winch to lift logs to the surface. To attach the cables, Mr. Lee would dive down to the logs in the Flint River, which is infested with alligators, cottonmouth snakes and snapping turtles.
"This is not a job for the faint of heart," he said. "It's physically hard and demanding. Not everybody wants to do a job where every time you go to work, you could die. You're playing pixie sticks with 20-foot logs weighing 3,000 to 5,000 pounds."
Mr. Williams sees underwater logging as a way to pay tribute to the old loggers, including four generations of his family, who felled trees with axes or crosscut saws and hauled them to the river with mules or oxen.
"It's really a treasure," Mr. Williams said. "The quality of the wood and the uniqueness of the wood is something we can't duplicate. There really aren't any virgin forests left."
A Corner of Kyrgyzstan Has a Cure-All: Let Them Eat Clay
By ETHAN WILENSKY-LANFORD, The New York Times, September 5, 2005
NARYN, Kyrgyzstan - High in the Tien Shan Mountains, about 100 miles from the Chinese border on a midsummer day, two Kyrgyz women scoured a sandpit for choice clay. Plucking a clump of dusty earth as if picking fruit from a tree, the younger of the two popped a sample in her mouth, letting the dirt melt on her tongue like a lozenge.
"It's oilier here, tastier," the woman, Baishekan Saginova, 40, said to her companion. "It was too salty over there, and not very good."
Tolkonezhe Kasmanbetova, 52, agreed with the appraisal. "This is a bit more fatty," she said, smacking her lips to savor the flavor.
Ms. Saginova and Ms. Kasmanbetova live in Naryn, Kyrgyzstan, a distant corner of the former Soviet Union, and say they eat the clay, known locally as gulpota, for its health benefits. "If somebody is anemic, or doesn't have much blood left, then they eat it," Ms. Kasmanbetova explained. "Pregnant women also use it, probably because they need the extra vitamins."
Most health professionals in this country do not endorse the use of unrefined mineral supplements.
"There's more trash in here than iron," said Dr. Abdukhalim R. Rianzhanov, director of the Kyrgyz Scientific Center of Hematology, when shown a chalky gray substance sold in the capital, Bishkek. "You'll go straight to the devil if you eat this clay!"
Although people have been eating the clay in Central Asia for thousands of years, the practice is neither highly regarded, nor praised as a tradition.
Dr. Rianzhanov said the odd behavior was caused by anemia, or iron shortage in the blood, because the patients quickly stabilize with proper supplements.
"These people are sick," he explained. "When they have low iron, they develop the desire to eat this clay, plaster, chalk, or uncooked meat. They'll eat eggshells, pull the bark off trees. It's even written in the medical literature that they will eat building material."
A condition, called pica, is described in the West as the ingestion of non-nutritive substances.
Across town at the Osh Bazaar, women who look quite healthy regularly purchase gulpota.
Galina Kosheleva, 45, said she first ingested clay in 1997 to prolong her life, believing that the practice cleans out the body, and can help prevent weight gain. A true gulpota connoisseur, she prefers chalky gray clay from the Batken region to redder Naryn clay, which she says is higher in iron.
"This one tastes like butter," she said, while sampling merchandise at Osh Bazaar. "It's sweet, not too salty, this Batken clay, and very good. It doesn't scratch your teeth, like sand. This is from nature, and only found in Kyrgyzstan."
Paying 5 som, or 12 cents, for just over a pound, Ms. Kosheleva was pleased. "The clay sold for dollars in American pharmacies is much more expensive," she said.
In Naryn, people who eat gulpota, generally older or pregnant women and young children, collect it themselves in the mountains, near roadsides, or in sandpits, as Ms. Saginova and Ms. Kasmanbetova do.
Ms. Kasmanbetova grew up on a kolkhoz, or Soviet collectivized farm, but lost her job after the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, in addition to her meager monthly pension, she occasionally sells homemade meat pies in the bazaar.
The gulpota she collected, however, was not for sale.
"A kilogram for me, a kilogram for you," Ms. Saginova said to Ms. Kasmanbetova. "We won't need to come back for the rest of the summer!"
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Date: 2005-09-07 06:25 pm (UTC)