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Handle With Care
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.
“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.
Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”
So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”
That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a United Nations group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.
“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.
Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.
But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too late.
Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic discrimination.
But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that still prevails in biotechnology.
“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would recommendations take, all those details.”
But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in these kinds of ethical questions.”
And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.
But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr. Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”
Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”
And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in inaccurate or sensationalized terms.
Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress in genetics. If scientific research has serious potential implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.
In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.
As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it, “with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”
Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,” factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems across a continent.
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”
In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”
In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.
Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as important.
“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”
Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.
This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.
The work involves materials that have a property known as negative refraction, which means that they essentially bend light backward. Once thought to be pure fantasies, these substances, called metamaterials, have been constructed in recent years, and scientists have shown they can bend long-wavelength microwaves.
Negative refractive materials can in principle lead to fantastical illusions; someone looking down at a fish in a pool of negative refractive liquid would see the fish swimming in the air above.
Two separate advances are described in two scientific papers being published this week, one demonstrating negative refraction at infrared and visible wavelengths. The second article will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Both papers come out of the research laboratory of Xiang Zhang, a professor at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Berkeley.
When a ray of light crosses the boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by a property known as the index of refraction. Transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher for visible light, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends toward an imaginary line perpendicular to the surface.
With the engineered metamaterials, scientists can create refractive indices less than 1 or even negative. Light entering a material with a negative index of refraction would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off the imaginary perpendicular line.
In the Nature paper, the Berkeley researchers created a fishnet structure with 21 layers, alternating between a metal and magnesium fluoride, resulting in a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for infrared light. The researchers said by making the fishnet structure even smaller, they should be able to do the same with visible light.
In the Science paper, a different group of scientists in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory used a different approach, building an array of minuscule upright wires, which changed the electric fields of passing light waves. That structure was able to bend visible red light.
Dr. Zhang said both approaches had advantages and disadvantages. “There are many roads to Rome,” he said. “At this point, honestly speaking, we don’t know which road will be the best.”
One application of negative index materials could be a “superlens.” Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”
The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplifies the evanescent waves, preserving detail lost in conventional optics, and the hope is to eventually build an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.
Prescriptions for Health, the Environmental Kind
By AMANDA SCHAFFER, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
In a bright studio at New York University, Natalie Jeremijenko welcomes visitors to her environmental health clinic. She wears a white lab coat with a rotated red cross on the pocket. A clipboard with intake forms hangs by the door.
Inside, circuit boards, respirators, light bulbs, bike helmets and books on green design clutter the high shelves. In front of a bamboo consultation desk sits a mock medicine cabinet, which turns out to be filled with power tools.
Dr. Jeremijenko, an Australian artist, designer and engineer, invites members of the public to the clinic to discuss personal environmental concerns like air and water quality. Sitting at the consultation desk, she also offers them concrete remedies or “prescriptions” for change, much as a medical clinic might offer prescriptions for drugs.
“It’s a widely familiar script,” said Dr. Jeremijenko, 41, who has a doctorate in engineering and is an assistant professor of visual art at N.Y.U. “People know how to ring up and make an appointment at their health clinic. But they don’t really know what to do about toxins in the air and global warming, right?
“So the whole thing is how do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?”
Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents.
“People are frustrated by their inability to cope with environmental problems in their apartments and their neighborhoods,” said George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Jeremijenko, he continued, “provides a service that’s needed, educating people about what they’re up against and showing them that they can do something themselves while waiting for larger societal solutions.”
Dr. Jeremijenko has worked with scores of individuals and community groups since starting the clinic last fall. “I call them impatients,” she said — meaning that they don’t want to wait for legislative action.
She holds daily office hours at N.Y.U., but also runs periodic off-site clinics at sites around the city — “like the M*A*S*H field offices,” she said.
For instance, she met with “impatients” on the edge of the East River and took some of them out on a float made of two-liter soda bottles connected to a flexible polycarbonate sheet. Micah Roufa, who recently graduated from architectural school, was one of those present, though he said he chose to remain on solid ground.
Mr. Roufa owns a vacant lot in St. Louis that is contaminated with low levels of lead. He said he wanted to remedy that problem while using the space in a creative way and raising awareness about lead poisoning in the neighborhood.
Dr. Jeremijenko suggested planting a grid of sunflowers, along with a chemical agent called EDTA, to draw lead out of the soil. (EDTA is used to bind metals, making it easier for them to be taken up by plants; scientists caution that the approach requires technical care, because if too much of the chemical is added, a contaminant could migrate to neighboring property.)
Mr. Roufa planted the sunflowers this summer within an artistic grid of steel bars and glass orbs. “She has been a great guide and an inspiration,” he said.
Of all the concerns Dr. Jeremijenko hears about at the clinic, she said indoor air quality tops the list. For common pollutants like formaldehyde, benzene and toluene she typically prescribes the copious use of houseplants, which have been shown to absorb some chemicals.
With the designers Will Kavesh and Amelia Amon, she has also developed a system that uses solar energy to power customized L.E.D. lights, which promote plant growth while providing a light intended for human use. The sun’s energy is captured by a “solar awning,” which is a stretch of glass, fabric or stainless steel that can be fitted to an apartment or office window.
And Dr. Jeremijenko has a prescription for storm-water runoff, which can cause sewers to flood and can increase pollution in rivers: putting small plots of greenery, including mosses and grasses, in no-parking zones around the city. One such temporary plot, on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village, was called a “butterfly truck stop,” with plant life specifically designed to attract butterflies.
In past projects, Dr. Jeremijenko has coupled art and environmental activism. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, she organized a group of bicyclists to ride around New York wearing air-filtering masks, as an ironic comment on the government’s Clear Skies Initiative.
In 2006, as part of the Whitney Biennial, she installed a series of bird perches in the museum’s sculpture court. When birds landed on the perches, they set off computer sound files with comments on the interdependency of birds, other animals and people.
Dr. Jeremijenko’s work occupies a niche “between popular culture and high art, between art, science and engineering,” said Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Chelsea. “In a sense it’s performance, in a sense it’s awareness raising, and in a sense it empowers an audience to take action.”
In March, Dr. Jeremijenko had environmental clinic hours at Eyebeam, where she distributed tadpoles named after government officials whose decisions affect water quality.
“Tadpoles are exquisite sensors of water quality,” she said, adding that she had already named a tadpole after Commissioner Pete Grannis of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“I had it in a sample of water from the Bronx River and, unfortunately it died,” she said. “But we’re going to resurrect him.”
Charles M. Marcus, professor of physics and director of the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard, is a longtime admirer of Dr. Jeremijenko’s work. “So much of what environmentalism involves is things you shouldn’t do, and that can be very unsatisfying,” he said. “She’s addressing that head-on.
“She seems to be saying: ‘If you’re like me and you consider action and anxiety to be poles between which we navigate, then I can help get your hands dirty and I can help get you involved in doing something that will help with your mind and will help with the world.’ ”
Science Visuals: How the First Farmers Colonized the Mediterranean
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, August 11, 2008
The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
Using a different criterion, that of when herds first show signs of human management, Dr. Zeder finds that goats and sheep were first domesticated about 11,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, with pigs and cattle following shortly afterwards. The map, from her article in the August 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the regions and dates where the four species were first domesticated. Other dates, color-coded as to species, show where domesticated animals first appear elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
The earlier dates mean that animals were domesticated at much the same time as crop plants, and bear on the issue of how this ensemble of new agricultural species – the farming package known as the Neolithic revolution – spread from the Near East to Europe.
Some experts say the technology spread by cultural diffusion, others that the first farmers themselves moved into Europe, bringing their new technology with them and displacing the resident hunter gatherers.
Dr. Zeder concludes that both processes were involved. A test case is the island of Cyprus, where the four domesticated species of livestock appear as early as 10,500 years ago, replacing native fauna such as pygmy elephants and pygmy hippopotamuses (large animals often get downsized in island settings).
Since Cyprus lies 60 kilometers off the Turkish coast, the suite of agricultural species must have been brought there on boats by the new farmers. That establishes one episode of colonization, and Dr. Zeder sees evidence for several others. The second map shows, in red circles, the dates when farming colonists' enclaves were set up around the Mediterranean.
Dr. Zeder believes that in France and Spain the indigenous hunter gatherers adopted the new farming technology by cultural diffusion (shown as green dots). The farmers themselves settled the regions that are now Turkey and the Balkans (red dots) but in surrounding areas they integrated with indigenous peoples (blue dots).
Dr. Zeder says her evidence indicates that several waves of settlers spread the new farming technology through the Mediterranean. It's yet not known what drove the expansion, or what the relationship was between the colonists and the native inhabitants. Studies of ancient DNA, she said, may help test her thesis that farming spread through a mix of colonization and cultural diffusion.
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
Last year, a private company proposed “fertilizing” parts of the ocean with iron, in hopes of encouraging carbon-absorbing blooms of plankton. Meanwhile, researchers elsewhere are talking about injecting chemicals into the atmosphere, launching sun-reflecting mirrors into stationary orbit above the earth or taking other steps to reset the thermostat of a warming planet.
This technology might be useful, even life-saving. But it would inevitably produce environmental effects impossible to predict and impossible to undo. So a growing number of experts say it is time for broad discussion of how and by whom it should be used, or if it should be tried at all.
Similar questions are being raised about nanotechnology, robotics and other powerful emerging technologies. There are even those who suggest humanity should collectively decide to turn away from some new technologies as inherently dangerous.
“The complexity of newly engineered systems coupled with their potential impact on lives, the environment, etc., raise a set of ethical issues that engineers had not been thinking about,” said William A. Wulf, a computer scientist who until last year headed the National Academy of Engineering. As one of his official last acts, he established the Center for Engineering, Ethics, and Society there.
Rachelle Hollander, a philosopher who directs the center, said the new technologies were so powerful that “our saving grace, our inability to affect things at a planetary level, is being lost to us,” as human-induced climate change is demonstrating.
Engineers, scientists, philosophers, ethicists and lawyers are taking up the issue in scholarly journals, online discussions and conferences in the United States and abroad. “It’s a hot topic,” said Ronald C. Arkin, a computer scientist at Georgia Tech who advises the Army on robot weapons. “We need at least to think about what we are doing while we are doing it, to be aware of the consequences of our research.”
So far, though, most scholarly conversation about these issues has been “piecemeal,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. “It leaves the door open for people to do something that is going to cause long-term problems.”
That’s what some environmentalists said they feared when Planktos, a California-based concern, announced it would embark on a private effort to fertilize part of the South Atlantic with iron, in hopes of producing carbon-absorbing plankton blooms that the company could market as carbon offsets. Countries bound by the London Convention, an international treaty governing dumping at sea, issued a “statement of concern” about the work and a United Nations group called for a moratorium, but it is not clear what would have happened had Planktos not abandoned the effort for lack of money.
“There is no one to say ‘thou shalt not,’ ” said Jane Lubchenco, an environmental scientist at Oregon State University and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
When scientists and engineers discuss geoengineering, it is obvious they are talking about technologies with the potential to change the planet. But the issue of engineering ethics applies as well to technologies whose planet-altering potential may not emerge until it is too late.
Dr. Arkin said robotics researchers should consider not just how to make robots more capable, but also who must bear responsibility for their actions and how much human operators should remain “in the loop,” particularly with machines to aid soldiers on the battlefield or the disabled in their homes.
But he added that progress in robotics was so “insidious” that people might not realize they had ventured into ethically challenging territory until too late.
Ethical and philosophical issues have long occupied biotechnology, where institutional review boards commonly rule on proposed experiments and advisory committees must approve the use of gene-splicing and related techniques. When the federal government initiated its effort to decipher the human genome, a percentage of the budget went to consideration of ethics issues like genetic discrimination.
But such questions are relatively new for scientists and engineers in other fields. Some are calling for the same kind of discussion that microbiologists organized in 1975 when the immense power of their emerging knowledge of gene-splicing or recombinant DNA began to dawn on them. The meeting, at the Asilomar conference center in California, gave rise to an ethical framework that still prevails in biotechnology.
“Something like Asilomar might be very important,” said Andrew Light, director of the Center for Global Ethics at George Mason University, one of the organizers of a conference in Charlotte, N.C., in April on the ethics of emerging technologies. “The question now is how best to begin that discussion among the scientists, to encourage them to do something like this, then figure out what would be the right mechanism, who would fund it, what form would recommendations take, all those details.”
But an engineering Asilomar might be hard to bring off. “So many people have their nose to the bench,” Dr. Arkin said, “historically a pitfall of many scientists.” Anyway, said Paul Thompson, a philosopher at Michigan State and former secretary of the International Society for Environmental Ethics, many scientists were trained to limit themselves to questions answerable in the real world, in the belief that “scientists and engineers should not be involved in these kinds of ethical questions.”
And researchers working in geoengineering say they worry that if people realize there are possible technical fixes for global warming, they will feel less urgency about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Even beginning the discussion, putting geoengineering on the table and beginning the scientific work could in itself make us less concerned about all the things that we need to start doing now,” Dr. Light said. On the other hand, some climate scientists argue that if people realized such drastic measures were on the horizon, they would be frightened enough to reduce their collective carbon footprint. Still others say that, given the threat global warming poses to the planet, it would be unethical not to embark on the work needed to engineer possible remedies — and to let policy makers know of its potential.
But when to begin this kind of discussion? “It’s a really hard question,” Dr. Thompson said. “I don’t think anyone has an answer to it.”
Many scientists don’t like talking about their research before it has taken shape, for fear of losing control over it, according to David Goldston, former chief of staff at the House Science Committee and a columnist for the journal Nature. This mind-set is “generally healthy,” he wrote in a recent column, but it is “maladapted for situations that call for focused research to resolve societal issues that need to be faced with some urgency.”
And then there is the longstanding scientific fear that if they engage with the public for any reason, their work will be misunderstood or portrayed in inaccurate or sensationalized terms.
Francis S. Collins, who is stepping down as head of the government human genome project, said he had often heard researchers say “it’s better if people don’t know about it.” But he said he was proud that the National Human Genome Research Institute had from the beginning devoted substantial financing to research on privacy, discrimination and other ethical issues raised by progress in genetics. If scientific research has serious potential implications in the real world, “the sooner there is an opportunity for public discussion the better,” he said in a recent interview.
In part, that is because some emerging technologies will require political adjustments. For example, if the planet came to depend on chemicals in space or orbiting mirrors or regular oceanic infusions of iron, system failure could mean catastrophic — and immediate — climate change. But maintaining the systems requires a political establishment with guaranteed indefinite stability.
As Dr. Collins put it, the political process these days is “not well designed to handle issues that are not already in a crisis.” Or as Mr. Goldston put it, “with no grand debate over first principles and no accusations of acting in bad faith, nanotechnology has received only fitful attention.”
Meanwhile, there is growing recognition that climate engineering, nanotechnology and other emerging technologies are full of “unknown unknowns,” factors that will not become obvious until they are put into widespread use at a scale impossible to turn back, as happened, in a sense, with the atomic bomb. At its first test, some of its developers worried — needlessly — that the blast might set the atmosphere on fire. They did not anticipate the bombs would generate electromagnetic pulses intense enough to paralyze electrical systems across a continent.
Bill Joy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, cited the bomb in a famous 2000 article in the magazine Wired on the dangers of robots in which he argued that some technologies were so dangerous they should be “relinquished.” He said it was common for scientists and engineers to fail “to understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of discovery” and, as a result, he said, “we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the most compelling 21st-century technologies — robotics, genetic engineering and nanotechnology — pose a different threat than the technologies that have come before. They are so powerful they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses.”
He called it “knowledge-enabled mass destruction.”
But in an essay in the journal Nature last year, Mary Warnock, a philosopher who led a committee formed to advise the British government after the world’s first test-tube baby was born there in 1978, said when people fear “dedicated scientists and doctors may pursue research that some members of society find repugnant” the answer is not to allow ignorance and fear to dictate which technologies are allowed to go forward, but rather to educate people “to have a broad understanding of science and an appreciation of its potential for good.”
In another Nature essay, Sheila Jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said a first step was for scientists and engineers to realize that in complex issues, “uncertainty, ignorance and indeterminacy are always present.”
In what she described as “a call for humility,” she urged researchers to cultivate and teach “modes of knowing that are often pushed aside in expanding scientific understanding and technological capacity” including history, moral philosophy, political theory and social studies of science — what people value and why they value it.
Dr. Hollander said the new ethics center would take up issues like these. “Do we recognize when we might be putting ourselves on a negative technological treadmill by moving in one direction rather than another?” she said. “There are social questions we should be paying attention to, that we should see as important.
“I mean we as citizens, and that includes people in the academy and engineers. It includes everybody.”
Surpassing Nature, Scientists Bend Light Backward
By KENNETH CHANG, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
Using tiny wires and fishnet structures, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found new ways to bend light backward, something that never occurs in nature.
This technology could lead to microscopes able to peer more deeply and clearly into living cells. And the same kind of structures might one day be adapted to bend light in other unnatural ways, creating a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak. “This is definitely a big step toward that idea,” said Jason Valentine, a graduate student and a lead author of a paper to be published online Wednesday by the journal Nature. But scientists are still far from designing and manufacturing such a cloak.
The work involves materials that have a property known as negative refraction, which means that they essentially bend light backward. Once thought to be pure fantasies, these substances, called metamaterials, have been constructed in recent years, and scientists have shown they can bend long-wavelength microwaves.
Negative refractive materials can in principle lead to fantastical illusions; someone looking down at a fish in a pool of negative refractive liquid would see the fish swimming in the air above.
Two separate advances are described in two scientific papers being published this week, one demonstrating negative refraction at infrared and visible wavelengths. The second article will be published in Friday’s issue of the journal Science. Both papers come out of the research laboratory of Xiang Zhang, a professor at the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center in Berkeley.
When a ray of light crosses the boundary from air to water, glass or other transparent material, it bends, and the degree of bending is determined by a property known as the index of refraction. Transparent materials like glass, water and diamonds all have an index of 1 or higher for visible light, meaning that when the light enters, its path bends toward an imaginary line perpendicular to the surface.
With the engineered metamaterials, scientists can create refractive indices less than 1 or even negative. Light entering a material with a negative index of refraction would take a sharp turn, almost as if it had bounced off the imaginary perpendicular line.
In the Nature paper, the Berkeley researchers created a fishnet structure with 21 layers, alternating between a metal and magnesium fluoride, resulting in a metamaterial with a negative index of refraction for infrared light. The researchers said by making the fishnet structure even smaller, they should be able to do the same with visible light.
In the Science paper, a different group of scientists in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory used a different approach, building an array of minuscule upright wires, which changed the electric fields of passing light waves. That structure was able to bend visible red light.
Dr. Zhang said both approaches had advantages and disadvantages. “There are many roads to Rome,” he said. “At this point, honestly speaking, we don’t know which road will be the best.”
One application of negative index materials could be a “superlens.” Light is usually thought of as having undulating waves. But much closer up, light is a much more jumbled mess, with the waves mixed in with more complicated “evanescent waves.”
The evanescent waves quickly dissipate as they travel, and thus are usually not seen. A negative refraction lens actually amplifies the evanescent waves, preserving detail lost in conventional optics, and the hope is to eventually build an optical microscope that could make out tiny biological structures like individual viruses.
Prescriptions for Health, the Environmental Kind
By AMANDA SCHAFFER, The New York Times, August 12, 2008
In a bright studio at New York University, Natalie Jeremijenko welcomes visitors to her environmental health clinic. She wears a white lab coat with a rotated red cross on the pocket. A clipboard with intake forms hangs by the door.
Inside, circuit boards, respirators, light bulbs, bike helmets and books on green design clutter the high shelves. In front of a bamboo consultation desk sits a mock medicine cabinet, which turns out to be filled with power tools.
Dr. Jeremijenko, an Australian artist, designer and engineer, invites members of the public to the clinic to discuss personal environmental concerns like air and water quality. Sitting at the consultation desk, she also offers them concrete remedies or “prescriptions” for change, much as a medical clinic might offer prescriptions for drugs.
“It’s a widely familiar script,” said Dr. Jeremijenko, 41, who has a doctorate in engineering and is an assistant professor of visual art at N.Y.U. “People know how to ring up and make an appointment at their health clinic. But they don’t really know what to do about toxins in the air and global warming, right?
“So the whole thing is how do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?”
Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents.
“People are frustrated by their inability to cope with environmental problems in their apartments and their neighborhoods,” said George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Jeremijenko, he continued, “provides a service that’s needed, educating people about what they’re up against and showing them that they can do something themselves while waiting for larger societal solutions.”
Dr. Jeremijenko has worked with scores of individuals and community groups since starting the clinic last fall. “I call them impatients,” she said — meaning that they don’t want to wait for legislative action.
She holds daily office hours at N.Y.U., but also runs periodic off-site clinics at sites around the city — “like the M*A*S*H field offices,” she said.
For instance, she met with “impatients” on the edge of the East River and took some of them out on a float made of two-liter soda bottles connected to a flexible polycarbonate sheet. Micah Roufa, who recently graduated from architectural school, was one of those present, though he said he chose to remain on solid ground.
Mr. Roufa owns a vacant lot in St. Louis that is contaminated with low levels of lead. He said he wanted to remedy that problem while using the space in a creative way and raising awareness about lead poisoning in the neighborhood.
Dr. Jeremijenko suggested planting a grid of sunflowers, along with a chemical agent called EDTA, to draw lead out of the soil. (EDTA is used to bind metals, making it easier for them to be taken up by plants; scientists caution that the approach requires technical care, because if too much of the chemical is added, a contaminant could migrate to neighboring property.)
Mr. Roufa planted the sunflowers this summer within an artistic grid of steel bars and glass orbs. “She has been a great guide and an inspiration,” he said.
Of all the concerns Dr. Jeremijenko hears about at the clinic, she said indoor air quality tops the list. For common pollutants like formaldehyde, benzene and toluene she typically prescribes the copious use of houseplants, which have been shown to absorb some chemicals.
With the designers Will Kavesh and Amelia Amon, she has also developed a system that uses solar energy to power customized L.E.D. lights, which promote plant growth while providing a light intended for human use. The sun’s energy is captured by a “solar awning,” which is a stretch of glass, fabric or stainless steel that can be fitted to an apartment or office window.
And Dr. Jeremijenko has a prescription for storm-water runoff, which can cause sewers to flood and can increase pollution in rivers: putting small plots of greenery, including mosses and grasses, in no-parking zones around the city. One such temporary plot, on Stuyvesant Street in the East Village, was called a “butterfly truck stop,” with plant life specifically designed to attract butterflies.
In past projects, Dr. Jeremijenko has coupled art and environmental activism. During the Republican National Convention in 2004, she organized a group of bicyclists to ride around New York wearing air-filtering masks, as an ironic comment on the government’s Clear Skies Initiative.
In 2006, as part of the Whitney Biennial, she installed a series of bird perches in the museum’s sculpture court. When birds landed on the perches, they set off computer sound files with comments on the interdependency of birds, other animals and people.
Dr. Jeremijenko’s work occupies a niche “between popular culture and high art, between art, science and engineering,” said Amanda McDonald Crowley, executive director of Eyebeam, an art and technology center in Chelsea. “In a sense it’s performance, in a sense it’s awareness raising, and in a sense it empowers an audience to take action.”
In March, Dr. Jeremijenko had environmental clinic hours at Eyebeam, where she distributed tadpoles named after government officials whose decisions affect water quality.
“Tadpoles are exquisite sensors of water quality,” she said, adding that she had already named a tadpole after Commissioner Pete Grannis of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.
“I had it in a sample of water from the Bronx River and, unfortunately it died,” she said. “But we’re going to resurrect him.”
Charles M. Marcus, professor of physics and director of the Center for Nanoscale Systems at Harvard, is a longtime admirer of Dr. Jeremijenko’s work. “So much of what environmentalism involves is things you shouldn’t do, and that can be very unsatisfying,” he said. “She’s addressing that head-on.
“She seems to be saying: ‘If you’re like me and you consider action and anxiety to be poles between which we navigate, then I can help get your hands dirty and I can help get you involved in doing something that will help with your mind and will help with the world.’ ”
Science Visuals: How the First Farmers Colonized the Mediterranean
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, August 11, 2008
The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
Using a different criterion, that of when herds first show signs of human management, Dr. Zeder finds that goats and sheep were first domesticated about 11,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought, with pigs and cattle following shortly afterwards. The map, from her article in the August 11 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows the regions and dates where the four species were first domesticated. Other dates, color-coded as to species, show where domesticated animals first appear elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent.
The earlier dates mean that animals were domesticated at much the same time as crop plants, and bear on the issue of how this ensemble of new agricultural species – the farming package known as the Neolithic revolution – spread from the Near East to Europe.
Some experts say the technology spread by cultural diffusion, others that the first farmers themselves moved into Europe, bringing their new technology with them and displacing the resident hunter gatherers.
Dr. Zeder concludes that both processes were involved. A test case is the island of Cyprus, where the four domesticated species of livestock appear as early as 10,500 years ago, replacing native fauna such as pygmy elephants and pygmy hippopotamuses (large animals often get downsized in island settings).
Since Cyprus lies 60 kilometers off the Turkish coast, the suite of agricultural species must have been brought there on boats by the new farmers. That establishes one episode of colonization, and Dr. Zeder sees evidence for several others. The second map shows, in red circles, the dates when farming colonists' enclaves were set up around the Mediterranean.
Dr. Zeder believes that in France and Spain the indigenous hunter gatherers adopted the new farming technology by cultural diffusion (shown as green dots). The farmers themselves settled the regions that are now Turkey and the Balkans (red dots) but in surrounding areas they integrated with indigenous peoples (blue dots).
Dr. Zeder says her evidence indicates that several waves of settlers spread the new farming technology through the Mediterranean. It's yet not known what drove the expansion, or what the relationship was between the colonists and the native inhabitants. Studies of ancient DNA, she said, may help test her thesis that farming spread through a mix of colonization and cultural diffusion.
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Date: 2008-08-12 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-12 05:01 pm (UTC)That's my philosophical take on it, anyways. On a gritty realism level, is a UN treaty banning work on, say, nanotech really going to stop the people who really want to develop it? Better to keep things in the light as much as we can instead of driving research underground where there's no oversight.