![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
Beyond Carbon: Scientists Worry About Nitrogen’s Effects
By RICHARD MORGAN, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska — As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer. Peter Vitousek, a Stanford ecologist whose 1994 essay put nitrogen on the environmental map, co-authored a study this summer in the journal Nature that put greater attention on the nitrogen cycle and warned against ignoring it in favor of carbon benefits.
For example, Dr. Vitousek said in an interview, “There’s a great danger in doing something like, oh, overfertilizing a cornfield to boost biofuel consumption, where the carbon benefits are far outweighed by the nitrogen damage.”
Soon after Dr. Vitousek’s report, the journal Geophysical Research Letters branded as a “missing greenhouse gas” nitrogen trifluoride, which is used in production of semiconductors and in liquid-crystal displays found in many electronics. According to the report, it causes more global warming than coal-fired plants. Nitrogen trifluoride, which is not one of the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol, the celebrated international global warming accord, is about 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Its estimated worldwide release into the atmosphere this year is equivalent to the total global-warming emissions from Austria.
“The nitrogen dilemma,” Dr. Vitousek added, “is not just thinking that carbon is all that matters. But also thinking that global warming is the only environmental issue. The weakening of biodiversity, the pollution of rivers, these are local issues that need local attention. Smog. Acid rain. Coasts. Forests. It’s all nitrogen.”
Dr. Vitousek’s summer report followed a similar account in May in the journal Science by James N. Galloway, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia and a former chairman of the International Nitrogen Initiative, a group of scientists pushing for smarter use of nitrogen.
Dr. Galloway is developing a universal calculator for individual nitrogen footprints. “It’s Goldilocks’s problem,” he said in an interview. “Reactive nitrogen isn’t a waste product. We need it desperately. Just not too much and not too little. It’s just more complicated than carbon.” He continued, “But we’re not going to get anywhere telling people this is simple or easy.”
Dr. Giblin of Woods Hole spent the summer at the field station here, midway between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean, researching the nitrogen content of lakebed sediment — not the inert nitrogen that makes up 80 percent of air, the reactive nitrogen that Dr. Galloway referred to. In forms like nitric acid, nitrous oxide, ammonia and nitrate it plays a variety of roles.
Nitrogen is part of all living matter. When plants and animals die, their nitrogen is passed into soil and the nitrogen in the soil, in turn, nourishes plants on land and seeps into bodies of water. Dr. Giblin is pursuing her research because as the Arctic warms, the tundra’s permafrost will thaw, and the soil will release carbon and nitrogen into the atmosphere.
When an ecosystem has too much nitrogen, the first response is that life blossoms. More fish, more plants, more everything. But this quickly becomes a kind of nitrogen cancer. Waters cloud and are overrun with foul-smelling algae blooms that can cause toxic “dead zones.” Scientists call this process eutrophication, but the laymen’s translation is that the water gets mucked up beyond all recognition. A recent such plague bedeviled China when its Yellow Sea was smothered in algae at Qingdao, the planned site of Olympic sailing events this summer. More than mere inconvenience, such problems routinely threaten many coastal areas and riverside communities.
Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is known as Queen of the Dead Zone. She cruises around the Gulf of Mexico every summer in the research vessel Pelican to look for damage from nitrogen-rich river flows into the gulf. This year, she expects a dead zone that will beat the Massachusetts-size 8,500-square-mile bloom of 2002.
One of the problems, Dr. Rabalais said, is that the Mississippi River involves so many communities that it requires stronger federal guidance, which she said was not a part of the Bush administration’s policies. She is part of a national research committee financed by the Environmental Protection Agency and run by the National Academies of Science, but, she said, “it’s so much talk and not enough action.”
She continued: “Because you’re not just going up against the agribusiness lobby, but also the livelihood of farmers. It’s not exactly popular in the Midwest.”
Fertilizer use is largely inefficient. With beef, only about 6 percent of nitrogen used in raising cows ends up in their meat; the rest leeches out into air or water supplies. With pork, it is 12 percent; chicken, 25 percent. Milk, eggs and grain have the highest efficiency, about 35 percent, or half of what, in the metric of report cards, is a C-minus.
“Look,” she said, “you just can’t have all these states and all these communities knowingly overfertilizing their land because they want a bumper crop every year. That’s just all kinds of bad. But Des Moines, for example, is willing to filter their drinking water to an extra degree just to be able to flood their water supply with more-than-normal levels of fertilizer.”
Reactive nitrogen competes with greenhouse gases that have greater public awareness. “But it’s like looking at malaria and AIDS in Africa,” Dr. Rabalais said. “They’re both problems. And they both need vigilant attention.”
Environmentalists face the puzzle of how to deal with multiple problems at once. And some worry that after the hard-fought campaign spotlighting carbon, turning to focus on nitrogen could upset that momentum.
The tension can plague even the most informed and articulate campaigners. “One of the many complexities that complicate the task I’ve undertaken is complexity,” said Al Gore, the former vice president who won a Noble Peace Prize for his environmental work. Mr. Gore added, “Look, I can start a talk by saying, ‘There are 14 global warming pollutants, and we have a different solution for addressing each of them.’ And it’s true. But you start to lose people.”
Europeans’ Genomes Reveal Their Geographic Origins
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
Europe has a rich history of wars, invasions and migrations, seemingly enough to have mixed its population pretty thoroughly. But it turns out that there is a geographical pattern to European genetics. By analyzing people’s genomes, geneticists can tell roughly where in Europe they come from.
The genetic differences across Europe are so slight that examining them just one at a time would mean almost nothing. But a new generation of gene chips — devices that test the DNA at specific sites along the genome — can assess 500,000 of the genome’s 3 billion units at a time. When all these differences are added together, a striking linkage emerges between genetics and geography.
Two teams of scientists working independently have now reported essentially the same results. In the August issue of Current Biology, a group led by Oscar Lao and Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands reported that European genetic structure was correlated with geography.
A second team, led by John Novembre of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Carlos D. Bustamente of Cornell University, describes a similar finding in an article released online by Nature on Aug. 31. They estimate that with present technology they can place 50 percent of Europeans to within 192 miles of their reported origin and 90 percent to within 434 miles.
Subjects whose parents come from two different countries were excluded from the analysis.
With more sophisticated technology, it will be possible to make a much more precise estimate of Europeans’ geographic origins from their genetics, Dr. Novembre said.
The present gene chips look only at genomic sites where variation is commonly found. But rare mutations, like those found in just a single village, can be much more informative about a person’s origin, and these may be programmed into the more powerful gene chips now under construction.
Dr. Kayser hopes the method will have forensic uses, although right now the gene chips require more DNA than is present in most crime scene samples. Still, they could be useful when DNA is plentiful, like in determining the geographic origin of a dead body.
The fact that the English can be distinguished genetically from the Irish or the French, say, might suggest that some difference in national character is showing up at the DNA level. But this is not the case, Dr. Novembre said.
The differences emerging from his gene chips are mostly neutral variation, meaning changes to which natural selection is indifferent because they do not affect survival. Such changes are probably too inconsequential to affect any properties that people are likely to notice.
Kenya: Google’s Philanthropy Arm Leads Effort to Use Weather Data to Fight Disease
By ELIZA BARCLAY, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
DERTU, Kenya — After three months of unusually heavy rainfall in late 2006, an outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya left 118 people and hundreds of cattle dead. Kenya’s Meteorological Department predicted the outbreak, but health officials failed to act on the warning until it was too late.
This month Google.org, the technology company’s philanthropic arm, is convening African health, weather, insect and climate experts in Nairobi to identify research gaps and opportunities for collaboration. In many countries, meteorological systems set up in colonial times have deteriorated, and the scant data gathered never reaches the health officials who could use it in an early warning system.
As floods, drought and variable weather increase, Google.org is looking at the effects of climate change on the distribution and severity of diseases like cholera, Rift Valley fever and malaria.
Other international groups are focusing on weather data collection. This remote village, which was badly affected by the Rift Valley fever outbreak, recently installed a low-tech weather station financed by the Millennium Villages Project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The station, called a Rainwise Portalog, runs on solar energy and collects temperature, humidity, rainfall and other information every 10 minutes. Twice a month, a community manager downloads the data and sends it to the Kenya Meteorological Department. There the data is integrated into seasonal weather forecasts that can be used to predict and prevent outbreaks. If the Portalog scheme is effective, the Earth Institute says, hundreds more may be installed across the continent.
Vital Statistics: The Odds It Will Kill You? See New Charts
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
A 55-year-old man who smokes is as likely to die in the next 10 years as a 65-year-old who has never smoked. Less than 1 woman in 1,000 younger than 50 will die in the next decade from cervical cancer. A 35-year-old nonsmoking man is five times as likely to die in an accident before 45 as he is to die of heart disease, and a 35-year-old woman is twice as likely to die accidentally by 45 as she is to die from breast cancer.
New risk charts in a paper published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute provide a broader perspective than most of the risk calculators on the Internet, because they cover the risks for 10 different causes of death, and for all causes combined, while differentiating by age and between smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers.
At first glance, it may appear that smokers and nonsmokers die of heart disease at the same rate, but a 35-year-old male smoker is seven times as likely to die of heart disease as a nonsmoker the same age. The numbers begin to converge as some smokers survive the more common smokers’ diseases, and by age 75, their rate of death from heart disease is almost the same as nonsmokers’.
Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz, a co-author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth, said people were often presented with statistics intended to frighten them about a particular disease. But a disease may present a large risk to some and very little to others. “These charts allow you to get stats that are about people who are more like you,” she said.
Another advantage of the new charts, Dr. Schwartz said, is the 10-year time frame. “Often numbers are presented as lifetime statistics, which make the risk look too large, or as one-year statistics, which make the risk look too small. The charts provide the information you need to understand a risk, and whether to consider taking some action to reduce it.”
By RICHARD MORGAN, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
TOOLIK FIELD STATION, Alaska — As Anne Giblin was lugging four-foot tubes of Arctic lakebed mud from her inflatable raft to her nearby lab this summer, she said, “Mud is a great storyteller.”
Dr. Giblin, a senior scientist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., is part of the Long Term Ecological Research network at an Arctic science outpost here operated by the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.
Public discussion of complicated climate change is largely reduced to carbon: carbon emissions, carbon footprints, carbon trading. But other chemicals have large roles in the planet’s health, and the one Dr. Giblin is looking for in Arctic mud, one that a growing number of other researchers are also concentrating on, is nitrogen.
In addition to having a role in climate change, nitrogen has a huge, probably more important biological impact through its presence in fertilizer. Peter Vitousek, a Stanford ecologist whose 1994 essay put nitrogen on the environmental map, co-authored a study this summer in the journal Nature that put greater attention on the nitrogen cycle and warned against ignoring it in favor of carbon benefits.
For example, Dr. Vitousek said in an interview, “There’s a great danger in doing something like, oh, overfertilizing a cornfield to boost biofuel consumption, where the carbon benefits are far outweighed by the nitrogen damage.”
Soon after Dr. Vitousek’s report, the journal Geophysical Research Letters branded as a “missing greenhouse gas” nitrogen trifluoride, which is used in production of semiconductors and in liquid-crystal displays found in many electronics. According to the report, it causes more global warming than coal-fired plants. Nitrogen trifluoride, which is not one of the six gases covered by the Kyoto Protocol, the celebrated international global warming accord, is about 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Its estimated worldwide release into the atmosphere this year is equivalent to the total global-warming emissions from Austria.
“The nitrogen dilemma,” Dr. Vitousek added, “is not just thinking that carbon is all that matters. But also thinking that global warming is the only environmental issue. The weakening of biodiversity, the pollution of rivers, these are local issues that need local attention. Smog. Acid rain. Coasts. Forests. It’s all nitrogen.”
Dr. Vitousek’s summer report followed a similar account in May in the journal Science by James N. Galloway, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Virginia and a former chairman of the International Nitrogen Initiative, a group of scientists pushing for smarter use of nitrogen.
Dr. Galloway is developing a universal calculator for individual nitrogen footprints. “It’s Goldilocks’s problem,” he said in an interview. “Reactive nitrogen isn’t a waste product. We need it desperately. Just not too much and not too little. It’s just more complicated than carbon.” He continued, “But we’re not going to get anywhere telling people this is simple or easy.”
Dr. Giblin of Woods Hole spent the summer at the field station here, midway between the Arctic Circle and the Arctic Ocean, researching the nitrogen content of lakebed sediment — not the inert nitrogen that makes up 80 percent of air, the reactive nitrogen that Dr. Galloway referred to. In forms like nitric acid, nitrous oxide, ammonia and nitrate it plays a variety of roles.
Nitrogen is part of all living matter. When plants and animals die, their nitrogen is passed into soil and the nitrogen in the soil, in turn, nourishes plants on land and seeps into bodies of water. Dr. Giblin is pursuing her research because as the Arctic warms, the tundra’s permafrost will thaw, and the soil will release carbon and nitrogen into the atmosphere.
When an ecosystem has too much nitrogen, the first response is that life blossoms. More fish, more plants, more everything. But this quickly becomes a kind of nitrogen cancer. Waters cloud and are overrun with foul-smelling algae blooms that can cause toxic “dead zones.” Scientists call this process eutrophication, but the laymen’s translation is that the water gets mucked up beyond all recognition. A recent such plague bedeviled China when its Yellow Sea was smothered in algae at Qingdao, the planned site of Olympic sailing events this summer. More than mere inconvenience, such problems routinely threaten many coastal areas and riverside communities.
Nancy Rabalais, executive director of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, is known as Queen of the Dead Zone. She cruises around the Gulf of Mexico every summer in the research vessel Pelican to look for damage from nitrogen-rich river flows into the gulf. This year, she expects a dead zone that will beat the Massachusetts-size 8,500-square-mile bloom of 2002.
One of the problems, Dr. Rabalais said, is that the Mississippi River involves so many communities that it requires stronger federal guidance, which she said was not a part of the Bush administration’s policies. She is part of a national research committee financed by the Environmental Protection Agency and run by the National Academies of Science, but, she said, “it’s so much talk and not enough action.”
She continued: “Because you’re not just going up against the agribusiness lobby, but also the livelihood of farmers. It’s not exactly popular in the Midwest.”
Fertilizer use is largely inefficient. With beef, only about 6 percent of nitrogen used in raising cows ends up in their meat; the rest leeches out into air or water supplies. With pork, it is 12 percent; chicken, 25 percent. Milk, eggs and grain have the highest efficiency, about 35 percent, or half of what, in the metric of report cards, is a C-minus.
“Look,” she said, “you just can’t have all these states and all these communities knowingly overfertilizing their land because they want a bumper crop every year. That’s just all kinds of bad. But Des Moines, for example, is willing to filter their drinking water to an extra degree just to be able to flood their water supply with more-than-normal levels of fertilizer.”
Reactive nitrogen competes with greenhouse gases that have greater public awareness. “But it’s like looking at malaria and AIDS in Africa,” Dr. Rabalais said. “They’re both problems. And they both need vigilant attention.”
Environmentalists face the puzzle of how to deal with multiple problems at once. And some worry that after the hard-fought campaign spotlighting carbon, turning to focus on nitrogen could upset that momentum.
The tension can plague even the most informed and articulate campaigners. “One of the many complexities that complicate the task I’ve undertaken is complexity,” said Al Gore, the former vice president who won a Noble Peace Prize for his environmental work. Mr. Gore added, “Look, I can start a talk by saying, ‘There are 14 global warming pollutants, and we have a different solution for addressing each of them.’ And it’s true. But you start to lose people.”
Europeans’ Genomes Reveal Their Geographic Origins
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
Europe has a rich history of wars, invasions and migrations, seemingly enough to have mixed its population pretty thoroughly. But it turns out that there is a geographical pattern to European genetics. By analyzing people’s genomes, geneticists can tell roughly where in Europe they come from.
The genetic differences across Europe are so slight that examining them just one at a time would mean almost nothing. But a new generation of gene chips — devices that test the DNA at specific sites along the genome — can assess 500,000 of the genome’s 3 billion units at a time. When all these differences are added together, a striking linkage emerges between genetics and geography.
Two teams of scientists working independently have now reported essentially the same results. In the August issue of Current Biology, a group led by Oscar Lao and Manfred Kayser of the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands reported that European genetic structure was correlated with geography.
A second team, led by John Novembre of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Carlos D. Bustamente of Cornell University, describes a similar finding in an article released online by Nature on Aug. 31. They estimate that with present technology they can place 50 percent of Europeans to within 192 miles of their reported origin and 90 percent to within 434 miles.
Subjects whose parents come from two different countries were excluded from the analysis.
With more sophisticated technology, it will be possible to make a much more precise estimate of Europeans’ geographic origins from their genetics, Dr. Novembre said.
The present gene chips look only at genomic sites where variation is commonly found. But rare mutations, like those found in just a single village, can be much more informative about a person’s origin, and these may be programmed into the more powerful gene chips now under construction.
Dr. Kayser hopes the method will have forensic uses, although right now the gene chips require more DNA than is present in most crime scene samples. Still, they could be useful when DNA is plentiful, like in determining the geographic origin of a dead body.
The fact that the English can be distinguished genetically from the Irish or the French, say, might suggest that some difference in national character is showing up at the DNA level. But this is not the case, Dr. Novembre said.
The differences emerging from his gene chips are mostly neutral variation, meaning changes to which natural selection is indifferent because they do not affect survival. Such changes are probably too inconsequential to affect any properties that people are likely to notice.
Kenya: Google’s Philanthropy Arm Leads Effort to Use Weather Data to Fight Disease
By ELIZA BARCLAY, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
DERTU, Kenya — After three months of unusually heavy rainfall in late 2006, an outbreak of Rift Valley fever in Kenya left 118 people and hundreds of cattle dead. Kenya’s Meteorological Department predicted the outbreak, but health officials failed to act on the warning until it was too late.
This month Google.org, the technology company’s philanthropic arm, is convening African health, weather, insect and climate experts in Nairobi to identify research gaps and opportunities for collaboration. In many countries, meteorological systems set up in colonial times have deteriorated, and the scant data gathered never reaches the health officials who could use it in an early warning system.
As floods, drought and variable weather increase, Google.org is looking at the effects of climate change on the distribution and severity of diseases like cholera, Rift Valley fever and malaria.
Other international groups are focusing on weather data collection. This remote village, which was badly affected by the Rift Valley fever outbreak, recently installed a low-tech weather station financed by the Millennium Villages Project of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.
The station, called a Rainwise Portalog, runs on solar energy and collects temperature, humidity, rainfall and other information every 10 minutes. Twice a month, a community manager downloads the data and sends it to the Kenya Meteorological Department. There the data is integrated into seasonal weather forecasts that can be used to predict and prevent outbreaks. If the Portalog scheme is effective, the Earth Institute says, hundreds more may be installed across the continent.
Vital Statistics: The Odds It Will Kill You? See New Charts
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, September 2, 2008
A 55-year-old man who smokes is as likely to die in the next 10 years as a 65-year-old who has never smoked. Less than 1 woman in 1,000 younger than 50 will die in the next decade from cervical cancer. A 35-year-old nonsmoking man is five times as likely to die in an accident before 45 as he is to die of heart disease, and a 35-year-old woman is twice as likely to die accidentally by 45 as she is to die from breast cancer.
New risk charts in a paper published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute provide a broader perspective than most of the risk calculators on the Internet, because they cover the risks for 10 different causes of death, and for all causes combined, while differentiating by age and between smokers, nonsmokers and former smokers.
At first glance, it may appear that smokers and nonsmokers die of heart disease at the same rate, but a 35-year-old male smoker is seven times as likely to die of heart disease as a nonsmoker the same age. The numbers begin to converge as some smokers survive the more common smokers’ diseases, and by age 75, their rate of death from heart disease is almost the same as nonsmokers’.
Dr. Lisa M. Schwartz, a co-author of the paper and an associate professor of medicine at Dartmouth, said people were often presented with statistics intended to frighten them about a particular disease. But a disease may present a large risk to some and very little to others. “These charts allow you to get stats that are about people who are more like you,” she said.
Another advantage of the new charts, Dr. Schwartz said, is the 10-year time frame. “Often numbers are presented as lifetime statistics, which make the risk look too large, or as one-year statistics, which make the risk look too small. The charts provide the information you need to understand a risk, and whether to consider taking some action to reduce it.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-09-02 05:41 pm (UTC)