A Worm's Ovary Cells Become A Flu Vaccine Machine

As the flu season grinds on from news cycle to news cycle, there's some flu news of a different sort. Federal regulators have approved a next-generation type of flu vaccine for the second time in two months.

The two new vaccines are the first fruits of a big government push to hasten and simplify the laborious production of flu vaccines.

But alas, there's no firm evidence that either the newfangled flu vaccine approved last November, called Flucelvax, or the even newerfangled one the Food and Drug Administration greenlighted this week, called Flublok, will be any more effective in preventing flu than ordinary vaccines.

This season's conventional flu vaccine prevents illness 62 percent of the time among people who get it — certainly better odds than no vaccination, but not great. Protection is even poorer among people over 65, whose immune systems are weaker.

Flucelvax was the first approved flu vaccine to be made in cell culture rather than eggs. In Flucelvax's case, the cells come from dog kidneys.

Flublok uses cells taken from the ovaries of fall armyworms in the pupal stage to crank out its active ingredient — a piece of the flu virus's outer coat. Conventional vaccines use the whole virus.

The advantage of this technology, the FDA says, is that it "offers the potential for faster start-up of the vaccine manufacturing process."

That's because the new vaccines don't require eggs to grow up its active ingredient.

For decades, flu vaccines have been made this way:

A new seasonal flu strain emerges (or more than one), which is par for the course. Laboratories rush to hybridize the strain with one that grows in eggs. That can take up to nine months, and often the yield per egg isn't great in the end.Vaccine makers inject the hybridized flu strain(s) into millions and millions of eggs to grow enough virus to make 150 million or more doses of that season's vaccine.The virus is extracted from the eggs, inactivated, purified and put into vials for repackaging into syringes of finished vaccine.

The Flublok manufacturing process starts with the gene for hemagglutinin, the protein that flu viruses carry on their coat and use to get inside human cells. Hemagglutinin, or HA, is one of the shape-shifting proteins that require flu vaccine makers to tweak their product every year.

Once Flubok's maker isolates the HA gene from an emergent virus, scientists insert it into another virus that infects only insects. Then they use this recombinant virus to infect billions of cells derived from the fall armyworm, a well-studied agricultural pest. The infected worm cells obligingly churn out quantities of the desired HA protein, which the manufacturer then purifies for insertion into that season's vaccine.

"Once you have the genetic code of HA, within 21 days you can be in production," Manon Cox of Protein Sciences, Flublok's developer, tells Shots. That's roughly three months faster than a conventional flu vaccine, she says.

The FDA says in studies involving 2,300 people, Flublok was 44.6 percent effective against "all circulating influenza strains" in that season, not just the particular strains against which the vaccine was matched.

Cox says no data are available yet on how well Flublok does against flu strains against which it is specifically targeted. The new vaccine costs around $30 a dose, somewhat above conventional vaccines.

But flu guru Michael Osterholm says the vaunted "matchiness" yardstick might not matter. He's director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Osterholm notes federal health officials' claim that the current seasonal flu vaccine is an especially good match with the circulating viruses – yet its effectiveness is not significantly better than usual.

"A match doesn't tell us how well a vaccine is going to work," Osterholm tells Shots. "It's almost meaningless."

He says what's needed is a "game-changing vaccine" that protects against the flu 80 or 90 percent of the time. That's scientifically feasible, he maintains, but it will take a billion dollars or more to develop and bring to market.

Meanwhile, it's "probably safe to say" that the new cell-culture vaccines are "no more effective than the current vaccines."

Flulok's fast turnaround time is "absolutely a good thing," Osterholm says. "It's better to have more of this vaccine faster when we really need it. But is it a sea-change? Absolutely not. It's incremental at best."

View the original article here

Beijing Grapples with Record Air Pollution

Last weekend, air pollution in Beijing reached record highs, raising concerns about the cost of China's rapid industrialization. David Pettit, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, discusses the pollution problem in China's capital, and why severe smog can be deadly.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

Last weekend, air pollution levels in Beijing hit a record high, cloaking China's capital in a thick smog and forcing residents inside. The air quality index measures ozone, carbon monoxide and particles, basically the stuff in the air, and the scale - the index scale that we use for particulate matter here in the U.S. goes from zero to 500. If this reading goes up past 300, that's considered a health hazard.

Well, last Saturday, monitors in Beijing recorded an air quality index of over 750. Remember, that scale is supposedly - supposedly tops out at 500. So what does that off-the-charts pollution mean for residents? We asked Beijing-based journalist and filmmaker Jocelyn Ford.

JOCELYN FORD: Well, I've lived in Beijing for 11 years, and sometimes we call it raging(ph) here(ph) because of the air pollution. But the air pollution last weekend was really beyond anything that I've experienced. And I live on the 16th floor of a building and I have a great view over Beijing. I can usually see about five kilometers, I would say, on a good day. But over the weekend the whole scene out my window basically turned into a Chinese ink painting where I could see just a lot of gray and a few dark objects. I could probably see about 500 meters, I'd say, and that was it.

LICHTMAN: So what's causing all that smog now? And is it going to get worse? David Pettit is a senior attorney at the National Resources Defense Council and director of the Southern California Air Program. He joins me by phone from Los Angeles. Welcome to the show.

DAVID PETTIT: Thank you. Good afternoon.

LICHTMAN: So how can a measurement be a 750 on a 500 scale? Does that mean that we've never measured smog this bad before?

PETTIT: I think it means that the engineers who built the scale thought it was ridiculous to have numbers any higher than they did because a circumstance like that would never occur. It's like having a, you know, your car's speedometer go up to 500 miles an hour. Why would you need that?

LICHTMAN: What is that 750 tallying exactly?

PETTIT: Well, there's two different scales that people are using. The air quality index is a relative scale with a hundred on the air quality index, meaning that the conditions are pretty much at the United States EPA limits. But - and so if it's 500, that basically means it's, you know, just substantially, very substantially more than that. You can also look at readings directly from the - both from our embassy and now, for the first time, from the Chinese government, of the particulate matter load. And those are the little tiny particles that you breathe in and you can't get rid of them. They don't come out.

And just yesterday, in fact, in Beijing, the reading of that, the direct reading was about 30 times the United States limit on a 24-hour basis. So it's just unimaginably bad by U.S. standards.

LICHTMAN: And these particulates, they are really tiny, right? They are 2.5 microns, is that - do I have that right?

PETTIT: That's right, about a thirtieth the diameter of a human hair.

LICHTMAN: And what's the deal? Why did it get so bad right now?

PETTIT: Well, I think the consensus is that in the winter in Beijing, and I've been there in the Winter, they get a temperature inversion sometimes, much like we have here in Los Angeles, where I'm talking to you from, where the colder air sort of sits on a lid in the Beijing area and prevents the warmer air underneath from moving around.

Plus there's more coal burning because of the cold weather. And you've just got an enormous number of cars now in Beijing. And you put that all together, you know, with a zero wind condition and that's a recipe for environmental disaster in terms of how people and what people breathe.

LICHTMAN: What are the studied health effects of this kind - of breathing this polluted air?

PETTIT: Well, there's lots of studies on this. It's really pretty well-known. The most dramatic effect and immediate effect is to people who have asthma or their lung function is otherwise compromised. And I've read stories from Beijing that hospital admissions for asthma are up 20 or 30 percent, and that's pretty much what you would expect.

There's also a tremendous problem with young children whose lungs haven't fully developed yet, that a big intake of very small particulate matter can affect their lung function far into the future. Also here in California, our state Air Resources Board has determined that particular matter is a carcinogen. And so it can directly increase your risk of getting cancer.

LICHTMAN: And in the U.S., isn't it like anything above 300 and the EPA says it's dangerous?

PETTIT: Yes. That's on the AQI index. Yes, that's correct.

LICHTMAN: It seems like there are these - also these secondary dangers to having the air clogged with, you know, a fog almost but pollution, because you can't see in front of you. I mean how do you drive in that - in those conditions?

PETTIT: Well, driving in Beijing is a whole different story anyhow. But I mean Jocelyn is right. I've been there - I've been to Beijing a few times recently, and I've been there where I couldn't see, you know, a quarter mile down one of the, you know, the main 10-lane highways that go through downtown Beijing. And yeah, it's a terrible problem. And you know, the air stinks. The air really stinks. I grew up here in Los Angeles and I'm used to - in the old days we had these smog alerts, and I've never smelled anything as bad or felt as badly as I have in Beijing just walking around, perhaps stupidly, on one those really smoggy days.

LICHTMAN: Hmm. I'm Flora Lichtman and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

Talking with David Pettit, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council about the air pollution in Beijing right now. So other than staying indoors, what are ways in which Beijing residents can protect themselves, keep themselves safe?

PETTIT: Well, I know a lot of people in Beijing have air filters. And if you have that, it's, you know, good to crank those up to a maximum level. Those facial masks that you see are good for a while. But when the pollution is this bad, I don't think they really give you much protection. So in the very short range, there's not a lot that you can do. In the longer range, people need to work with the government to cut down on the coal burning for power and heat, and do something about the Beijing traffic.

LICHTMAN: We have a clip from another Beijing-based reporter. Laurie Burkitt is a consumer reporter for The Wall Street Journal. And here's what she had to say about the local response to the pollution.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED AUDIO)

LAURIE BURKITT: We living in Beijing are somewhat accustomed to having pollution, but we were all warned. The media coverage of the pollution was actually unprecedented in terms of the amount, and actually the criticism, as well.

LICHTMAN: David Pettit, this is an interesting social - there is an interesting social media component to this story. How was the reading - the 750, that notorious reading - first released?

PETTIT: Well, the - going back a while, the U.S. embassy set up its own monitoring system to monitor particulate matter, these small particles we've been talking about. And there's a Twitter feed, actually, that still exists. You know, you can get on it. And they tweeted - the embassy tweeted a level that was just monstrously higher than what the government was reporting. And there was - in the tweet there were something, words something like crazy bad. And that got around and actually caused a bit of diplomatic, you know, kerfuffle. The Chinese weren't too happy about it.

But what's interesting to me in that sense is now these reports - fairly accurate reports, I think, are occurring in the government-controlled Chinese media, which tells me that somebody in the government has figured out that there's a danger to social harmony here and they can't go around, you know, telling people, oh, it's just fog and expect people to believe that.

LICHTMAN: Do you think that social media and Twitter and pictures zooming around the Internet with all over the world puts a different sort of pressure on the government to respond?

PETTIT: Absolutely. I absolutely do think so. And I do know that social harmony is a very important goal for the government and when the problem gets this big, you know, it's not just some local protest over a, you know, manufacturing plant that's polluting the water or something. There are, you know, scores of millions of people affected by this. I think the government felt that they had to respond and they had to tell people, look, we recognize there's a problem, and we're trying to do something about it.

LICHTMAN: Hmm. Is there any danger of this happening in the U.S. to this degree?

PETTIT: Well, I don't think so. One interesting and possibly awful fact is some of this particular pollution that we're reading about, and you can see in the pictures, is likely to wind up in the West Coast of the U.S. I mean it - you know, it doesn't just go away. When the winds finally come up, the stuff will blow over Korea and over Japan, and some of it winds up over here.

In terms of this happening in the U.S., I don't think so. You know, stuff like this used to happen, you know, in the '40s and '50s. But I really don't think that it's going to happen now. The EPA has really cracked down in, you know, the last couple of decades on emissions from coal plants, and the automobiles are much better controlled than they've ever been, so I really don't see this happening here in the U.S.

LICHTMAN: That's about all we have time for today. David Pettit is a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and the director of the Southern California Air Program. Thanks for joining us.

PETTIT: Thank you.

LICHTMAN: Have a great weekend.

PETTIT: You, too. Bye-bye.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Colossal Quasar Clump Too Huge To Exist, In Theory

Astronomers have discovered a clump of 73 quasars that spans four billion light years at its widest point—that's like 40,000 Milky Way galaxies lined end-to-end. The only problem? Theory says the quasar cluster is too big to exist. Astronomer Gerard Williger and reporter Ron Cowen discuss this cosmological oddity, and other news about the cosmos.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman. We all rely on the sun to survive. It's a pretty big deal to us earthlings. But in the big picture, the sun is just one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And while the Milky Way is an awesome place to live - I mean, it is, right - it, too, is just one of hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. You feeling small yet? I am. There's lots of stuff in the cosmos bigger than us. And now researchers have discovered the biggest thing so far: a glob of galaxies that's four billion light years wide.

That's like stacking 40,000 Milky Ways end-to-end. There's just one problem with this colossal formation: According to cosmologists' calculations, it's not supposed to exist. It's too big. Of course, the universe doesn't play by our rules. So what do we make of this? Could the universe be a little stranger than we thought? Always, right? My guests are here to talk about that and other astronomy discoveries for the rest of the hour. Ron Cowen is a freelance astronomy and physics reporter based in Silver Spring, Maryland. You can read his stories at roncowen.com. He joins us from NPR in Washington. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Ron.

RON COWEN: Thanks a lot.

LICHTMAN: Gerard Williger is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Louisville in Kentucky. He joins us from Louisville Public Radio. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Williger.

DR. GERARD WILLIGER: Thanks for inviting me on.

LICHTMAN: Let's start with you, Dr. Williger. Tell us a little bit about this, a little bit more about this clump of galaxies. What was it, exactly? What is it?

WILLIGER: It's a large quasar group. And that begs the question: What is a quasar? A quasar is actually a piece of the galaxy. It's the core of the galaxy, which is very, very bright. It outshines the rest of the galaxy by a lot. So it would be like having - if you have a galaxy which is, say, a bunch of houses in a housing development, the quasar's a skyscraper. So it completely outshines - in terms of light - the stuff around it. And if you look at it from far away, it looks like a little point.

WILLIGER: Now, these quasars are a very rare phenomenon. They might be only a fraction of a percent of all galaxies would have one of these bright quasars in them at any one time. They're also transient phenomenon. So imagine you have a skyscraper and it has a light to warn airplanes, but it's only on for a little bit of the time. So what we found is basically a long string of these quasars. They're galaxies. They probably have other galaxies around them. They're faint, and we don't see them yet because we have to stare for a long time.

WILLIGER: And we see this long string of these rare objects which are only bright for a short time, and they're statistically different from the other quasars around in the sky. So it's like finding an archipelago of islands all together, but these islands are constantly bobbing up and down into the waves or all the skyscrapers are turning on their lights at the same time. And we don't know whether that means that there are a lot of galaxies around there - which, well, there's some indirect evidence that there may be - or they all happen to be turning on their lights at the same time. Whichever the reason, it's a bigger cohesive unit than we think should exist based on our best models of the universe so far.

LICHTMAN: Gerald Williger, so tell us about how it breaks the theory. Wasn't this related to something that Einstein put forward for his theory of relativity, that the universe is more uniform than this?

WILLIGER: Well, what Einstein did, he postulated something called the cosmological principle, which says that if you look on a big enough scale, one part of the universe should be pretty much another part of the universe. And that makes it possible for us to take a sample, look at a piece of the sky and say, OK, we're going to learn about the rest of the universe. As long as you look at a big enough piece of sky, you're fine. It's like if you're looking at a map of - or if you're looking at the Earth, looking at, say, the United States from space and you want to know what's in the country, you're looking with your satellite, if you have a little camera with a little field of view and you have, say, a 10-mile swath, then you can only catch maybe a cornfield or maybe a city or maybe Manhattan. But you have to look at enough of that to make a generalization about the U.S.

WILLIGER: And for the same reason, you have to look at a big enough piece of space to understand the universe as a whole, and that underpins a lot of the way - or calculations and the way we look at the universe. So looking at pieces of the sky is actually pretty expensive in terms of telescope time. You have to take a telescope, and you have to look, look and look and look and look. The sky is big.

We can't survey the sky, the whole sky, to the kind detail we want. So we pick a little piece and we study it - fine. And we've made a large number of surveys of various sensitivities in various areas. And occasionally, we look all over the sky.

So in terms of the size of this group of quasars compared the size of the universe, it takes up a volume, which is something like two percent, 140th, 150th of the universe. That's actually really, really big. And so if we want to have a good idea what the universe is like in general, if this is a cohesive unit which is the kind of size is something that you have to probe to get a good idea of the universe, then we have to make our surveys bigger.

LICHTMAN: Hmm. Ron, what do you make of this study?

COWEN: Well, I guess one question I have is, was there enough time since the universe formed for such a large structure to come into being? I mean, is there enough time for that?

LICHTMAN: Gerry.

WILLIGER: Aha. That's actually the key. Although this is a big discovery, we have to go into the details, and there are several ways of looking at what's an object. OK. You look at our solar system, that's it. It's a cohesive unit. You have the planets. It's going around the sun. It's held together by gravity. You have our galaxy. That's actually also a cohesive unit. You have the stars that are held together by their gravity, and they're spinning around at the center. That's fine. We actually live in a group of galaxies, and that's a cohesive unit too. It's called the Local Group and they're bound together by their gravity.

Now when you talk about clusters of galaxies, those also are bound together by their gravity. But beyond that, there are things called superclusters. Clusters of galaxies tend to be globbly(ph). Superclusters tend to have some complicated structure - snaky, maybe like a skeleton, something like that. They're not round blobs, and they're also less and less and less held together by their own gravity.

Now this large quasar group is big enough. It is - it would be very difficult to accept it being held together by its own gravity. What it could be is a signature of a primordial density fluctuation. When the universe was young, after the Big Bang, there were little regions of the universe that were slightly denser than other regions, and these grow because gravity is a one-way force. You fall in. But it does take time for assemblies of objects to come together by gravity.

This large quasar group is bigger that than that scale. So it didn't pull itself together by gravity. It's just there. Now is it there because there was a big dense spot in the universe when it was young, or do we see this because all the quasars happen to turn on at the same time and otherwise, it's not a lot of extra matter there?

LICHTMAN: Hmm, yet to be determined, I take it.

WILLIGER: Mm-hmm. Maybe they are making a giant Christmas celebration. They're putting up strobe lights in all the skyscrapers.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: Ron, you were at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week in California, and you reported on a fascinating story about an old timer, the oldest star we've ever discovered. Is that right?

COWEN: Right. Right. It's sort for the Methuselah of stars, and it's at least 13.2 billion years. I mean, the way they - ancient as they say, it's 13.9 billion years, give or take, 700 million, and that may sound like a somewhat imprecise number, but it's the most precise number so far. And the thing is that the universe itself, we believe from other data, is 13.7 billion years. So this star formed really early.

And what's interesting is we - as old as it is, it is not the first generation star to form. It's got to be in the second. And the reason we know that is that the first generation of stars formed from the stuff that was forged in the Big Bang, which was mostly hydrogen helium. This star contains some known elements that are heavier than helium, and those would have had to have been forged within the first generation of stars. So it's a second generation star despite the fact that it's 13.2 billion years. And that means the first generation, not only did it have to - we already believed that it lived and died quickly, but that there was some kind of lag, delay between the first generation and the second, but there wasn't much. The delay was very short. That second generation came to into being very, very quickly.

LICHTMAN: Is aging stars - does that come down to just looking at what they're made of?

COWEN: Only it will - there's a couple of ways to do it. People knew for a couple of decades this particular star was elderly because it did - it only had - I'll call it trace amounts of elements heavier than helium. But the way these guys did is they used some star trackers on the Hubble Space Telescope to get a really precise distance for this star, found out that it was 190 light-years from the solar system, which is actually really, essentially in our backyard. And from there, they could get the true brightness of the star and seed it into models where, given the true brightness of the star and kind of the phase of where it is in this evolution, they could figure out exactly how old it was. But in this case, a key was getting its distance. And they looked over a period, I think, of between 2003 to 2011 with Hubble, to get the distance with these star trackers.

LICHTMAN: What are the chances of finding one of those first generation stars?

COWEN: Right. I think we probably can't find it with an existing telescope, but the James Webb Space Telescope, which is Hubble's successor, which is supposed to be launched in 2018, it looked with this infrared eye and it will have the ability to see if not single first stars, certainly groups of the first stars. Looked back far enough in time, 13.7 billion years, and actually have perhaps images of at least groups of these first stars.

LICHTMAN: Gerry Williger, anything to add?

WILLIGER: That's one of the name pushes actually for the James Webb Space Telescope. This very first generation of stars is actually - it's very interesting because the physics changes the actual recipe for how do stars shine - how do they born, how do they shine and how do they die. It's different because these trace elements, although, not a very high percentage, these elements are very, very important because they had a lot of electrons into the mix. And electrons make things happen with photons. And so the whole mechanism how these early stars formed is different from what we know. There are lots and lots of models. We would love to observe some of these so we can see whether the multiples are actually correct.

LICHTMAN: What are some of the - let me just sneak in an ID. I'm Flora Lichtman and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

So what are some of the ideas about how these stars might behave differently, these first generation stars?

WILLIGER: They could be very massive and very short-lived. And - actually, there's a big industry in astronomy, how do stars form, the exact mechanism. You have cloud of gas and then there's a little density clumped inside of it, and then that starts to grow. Gravity is a one way force. A galaxy forms from little density clump (unintelligible). A star, too, actually forms in a very much smaller scale. And so this - you have a collapse and it happens on a certain time scale and then you have an object in the middle, which is getting denser and denser.

And if you push on something in general, you heat it up. So it heats up in a certain way, a certain speed and then eventually forms of jets because there's material crashing in, but not all of it can go down the drain. It's like pouring a bucket of water down a bathtub drain. And the drain can only take so much water and the rest of it splashes back. And then the star will ignite its nuclear fire. It'll turn hydrogen into helium in its core. And then, eventually, if it's a big star, it explodes. And then it feeds the rest of the space around it with elements not only that it made during its life, but elements that were made in the explosion. Those are heavy elements. Now, how many of these heavy elements are made? That's the stuff for the next generation of stars. So we're looking at how the second generation of stars formed, as well.

LICHTMAN: Ron, another story you reported, the incredible number of planets in the Milky Way, new research into this. Tell us about it.

COWEN: Right. And so this is - it's - looking at data from the Kepler space telescope, and Kepler finds planets in a - it's in a pretty narrow patch of sky and it's also pretty distant. And the way Kepler looks for planets is that if planets are aligned very well, they will pass in front of their parent star, periodically, as they orbit as seen by Kepler. And there'll be a tiny, tiny amount of dimming, a mini eclipse each time it passes in front. And that's how Kepler sees planets. And so researchers, for example, looked at stars - the number of planets around stars called M-dwarfs. M-dwarfs are less massive than the sun. They are fainter. They're cooler.

And the neat thing M-dwarfs is they account for 75 percent of all the stars in our galaxy. And people extrapolated from seeing how many planets there were around M-dwarfs in this now patch of sky that Kepler's seen. Basically, it's sort of like one planet per star. And because we think there is around 100 billion stars in our whole galaxy, therefore, there's about 100 billion planets. One thing that's interesting is that another group - David Charbonneau and Courtney Dressing of Harvard - took that a bit further. They wanted to find out the number of habitable - potentially, habitable planets around M-dwarfs.

These are - one way and by potentially habitable, during a zone where water - liquid water could exist on a rocky surface of a planet. And they calculate from the number of potentially habitable planets for any M-dwarfs that Kepler sees that there should be an Earth-size potentially habitable planet within 20 light-years of the solar system. So it would be - there'd be a planet just like home - not orbiting a sun-like star, orbiting an M-dwarf, but basically among the nearest stars in the Milky Way.

And that six percent of the 100 billion number that I just talked about, six percent of them, which is still a very big number, are likely to have planets where liquid water could exist. And, I mean, the whole thing here is that it takes a full year for a habitable Earth-like planet to orbit a sun-like star because the Earth takes a year to form - to go around the sun. So Kepler doesn't know how many Earth-size habitable planets orbit sun-like stars, but they do with M-dwarfs.

LICHTMAN: Well, it's fascinating. Unfortunately, that flew by. But we have to leave it here. Thank you both for joining me.

WILLIGER: Thank you very much.

COWEN: My pleasure

LICHTMAN: Ron Cowen is a freelance astronomy and physics reporter based in Silver Spring, Maryland. You can read his stories at roncowen.com and Gerard Williger is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Dementia Takes The Stage In 'The Other Place'

In the Broadway play The Other Place actress Laurie Metcalf ("Jackie" on the TV show "Roseanne") plays a scientist suffering from the dementia she studies. Playwright Sharr White discusses the play and the challenge of presenting complicated science on a theater stage.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I am Flora Lichtman filling in for Ira today. Imagine this. You're a brilliant scientist, a biophysicist studying the causes of dementia. And one day, mid-Power Point, you can't recall what you're supposed to say when the next slide comes up. Eventually you learn that the disease you're studying is now the disease you have.

That's the plot of the Broadway play called "The Other Place." It stars Laurie Metcalf as the scientist - and you may remember her as Jackie on the TV show "Roseanne." And joining me now is the man who wrote the play, Sharr White. Thanks for coming into our studio today.

SHARR WHITE: Thanks for having me, Flora.

LICHTMAN: This is an intense play.

WHITE: Yes. Absolutely.

LICHTMAN: Would you agree? Tell us a little bit more about it.

WHITE: Well, I mean, it's really - I do always say that it's a play about the smartest woman on Earth who discovers that actually nothing she knows is true. And it's told really, really, especially from the beginning, really from the first person. She is really the ultimate narrator - sorry, the ultimate unreliable narrator. So as things start to go wrong with her, because it's told so - it's told so closely from her perspective, as she starts to break down, we sort of really experience it along with her.

LICHTMAN: Right. And she is very credible. And I wondered if part of that is because she's a scientist.

WHITE: Well, absolutely. And there is a bit of trickery in there. I mean, the real key in making the play work is establishing that she is indeed the smartest person on Earth. So it opens with - it essentially opens with her giving this - yeah, this medical lecture to other doctors. And you establish really - I think it does establish really quickly that no one can really top her in terms of her intelligence.

LICHTMAN: Right. I mean, you write, actually - I came across an article you wrote, and you say a particular feature of the very smart people in my life is that they think their sheer intelligence can protect them from all manner of harm. And it seems like this is echoed in this play.

WHITE: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean I think in a lot of ways there's something very Greek about the play. I think it definitely has undertones of Oedipus. You know, here is this reigning king whose life is really taken quite suddenly.

LICHTMAN: By the dementia.

WHITE: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.

LICHTMAN: How did the research go for this play?

WHITE: The research was really intense for me. I mean, I really - I do a lot of research for plays. I love the research. And because - because - I mean, the research around dementia is very fascinating and especially around protein (unintelligible) disorders such as Alzheimer's and early onset Alzheimer's.

My father is a scientist. He actually works with protein structures. So it was a really great thing for me to be able to delve more into the processes that he works with. So you know, so I really just - I think you can go as deeply as you want to into any research but especially with scientific - researching any sort of scientific issue, you can delve very deeply into it.

LICHTMAN: How did you decide when enough was enough? I mean, it seems like you could've made this - you could have even added more had you wanted to.

WHITE: Well, yeah. And there was a tremendous amount when we first began the process. And really a lot of the rehearsal process and putting the script together was about peeling the non-necessary science out. There was a night when I was at home on the couch and I was doing all this research - and I said, you know, and part of the storyline is that she has developed a very plausible drug that can interrupt, you know, the processes of Alzheimer's.

And I was sitting there on my couching - and I had to say to myself, you know what? Actually, you don't have to figure out how to cure Alzheimer's. You just have to figure out...

(LAUGHTER)

WHITE: You know? How to work this into the story. You know?

LICHTMAN: Well, that's good.

WHITE: Yeah. Yeah.

LICHTMAN: It could've taken a long time to write.

WHITE: Yeah. Some playwright, you know, trying to, trying to, you know, solve the Alzheimer's problem. So, yeah.

LICHTMAN: But it can pull you in, right? You know, these mysteries of science.

WHITE: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, I mean, I sort of, especially from a layman's standpoint, you read these sentences that really should make sense but they kind of don't make sense, so you start looking up all the words that you don't really understand and looking up all of the processes that you don't understand. You get really excited because you start understanding them.

And then the trap is for somebody working, you know, in theater building a story is that, you know, at the end of the day you have to make that something - you have to make it something dynamic and relatable to the audience. So, I mean, yeah. At the end of the day, really, I wound up throwing almost all of it out.

LICHTMAN: Well, what about the drug? Did you invent that?

WHITE: Well, I don't know. I think I did.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: What's it called?

WHITE: It's called Serna(ph) Seven. Actually, that's my mythical - that's the name of the molecule she invented, but the drug itself is called Identimel(ph). So I did sort of hypothetically say, OK, what if there is a small interfering RNA strand that can actually, you know - and I did do research on this. There are these small interfering RNA strands that can cleave mutant genes.

So I thought, well, that's got to be a part of it, you know, and it's got to - well, it's got to be made of, I don't know, you know, beta amino acids to, you know, better incorporate with the body's immune system and all this stuff. So I made up this sort of theory behind this drug, and of course, you know, I threw all that out too.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: What about research into the symptoms of dementia? I think Laurie Metcalf just does a phenomenal job sort of playing between this very credible, put-together high-powered scientist and someone who is clearly having lapses and showing these signs of a brain disease or neurological disease. Did you research dementia symptoms? Are those written in? Did she take them and run with them? How did that work?

WHITE: You know, there was a lot of collaboration in that. I mean, she just does an absolutely brilliant job of getting so specific with all of the behaviors in there. And especially in the first sort of process when the play was first produced at MCC, she was watching a lot of videos and really picking up on a lot of symptoms from people.

And I certainly wrote a lot of that in there. I mean, I think the stage at which this is beginning to express for this character is a very early stage in which I think there's a lot of commonality between dementias often, when they begin to express. And so a lot of it was from some experience that I've had with - actually with mental illness, through conversations with some friends of mine who - one friend of mine's mother did pass of Alzheimer's.

And in the early stages of her disease she really did, he said, behave as if she had paranoid schizophrenia. So there was - so when I started really placing the story in the beginning of the expression there was - I really gave myself permission to - I think there was a lot of permission to be able to have her make up reality and have these really massive mood swings. And I think there are a lot of commonalities to the disease.

LICHTMAN: There's a lot of denial in this play, too.

WHITE: Absolutely.

LICHTMAN: And then not only on the part of the characters, even, but also the audience were sort of in denial about the symptoms, I think. Did you - is that something that you encountered when you were talking to friends or people who've had personal experiences, that...

WHITE: Yeah, absolutely, and with a lot of the reading that I've done, too. I mean, I think there's this - what's really interesting in the expression of most dementias is that a lot of times, people don't know how long they've been living with dementia. And especially the people around them don't know how long they've been living with dementia. It could be years. Then, you know, the earliest expressions are just - are very, you know, small forgetfulness, and then a lot of covering.

I mean, I worked with a lot of covering. Laurie's character Juliana has a habit of just keeping people off-balance, of keeping people on the defensive. And that was something that I put together as really, you know, she probably had been slipping for a long time. And that's the way that she maintains her aura of impenetrability, is by keeping everybody on the defensive.

LICHTMAN: Right. Keeping them guessing.

WHITE: Keeping them guessing - say, is there something wrong with me. You know, something's wrong with me. I am somehow inferior. And if Juliana can keep everybody feeling that way, then she'll never be - than her, you know, her mind will never be questioned.

LICHTMAN: How did you decide to include science at all in this? I mean, she didn't have to be a scientist, necessarily.

WHITE: No, no. She didn't. She didn't. I just - no, she didn't. I mean, I think it was really because - I think it was really because I really wanted to again sort of - well, I mean, I - before I decided to go into theater, I thought maybe I would be a biologist. And there's - my father's a scientist and my brother-in-law and my sisters both went to school for the sciences. And so I think it sort of runs in my family.

And I - I don't know. It was an interesting choice. I wanted to explore the science in it. I wanted to explore the biology in it. And I think the structure that I was looking for in the play, in a way, you know, was - I sort of - I wanted a structure that had a metaphor to it. And I think proteins, when they fold, when they misfold, which can fire off what begins to - the breakdown of the disease, I sort of felt that there was a metaphor in the protein misfolding in a way that the structure of the play is a very, you know, sort of densely folded structure. So I like that idea, too.

LICHTMAN: Any plans to take it on the road?

WHITE: Not yet.

LICHTMAN: How long is it running here in New York, and where can people see it?

WHITE: It's at Manhattan Theatre Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 47th Street. And it's just been extended until March 3rd - through March 3rd.

LICHTMAN: And in the 30 seconds we have left, tell us what you're working on now.

WHITE: It's a play that has nothing to do with science called "The Snow Geese." And I'm work-shopping that with MCC Theater, who first produced the other plays.

LICHTMAN: You think science will be in any of your future works?

WHITE: I don't know. I'd have to be a scientist in order to tell you.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: Thank you, Sharr White, for coming in today.

WHITE: Thank you.

LICHTMAN: Sharr White's a playwright. His play "The Other Place" is running, as you just heard, now through March 3rd at Manhattan Theatre Club's Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. Stay with us. After the break, we have the Galileo of graphics, the da Vinci of data. You may know him as Edward Tufte. If you have questions for Dr. Tufte: 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LICHTMAN: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Edward Tufte Wants You to See Better

Data scientist Edward Tufte (dubbed the "Galileo of graphics" by BusinessWeek) pioneered the field of data visualization. Tufte discusses what he calls "forever knowledge," and his latest projects: sculpting Richard Feynman's diagrams, and helping people "see without words."

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman. Up next: the man who wrote the book - well, the books, rather - on data visualization. He was doing infographics before everybody was doing infographics. Back in the '80s, data scientist Edward Tufte remortgaged his house so he could start a company and self-publish his first book, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information." Sound like a snoozer? Well, that book, along with his others on the same topic, have sold more than a million-and-a-half copies.

And over 100,000 people have paid to hear his seminar in data visualization. His ideas keep it simple, get rid of the chart junk have made him a legend in design circles. But ET, as he's known, isn't just interested in data. He's an artist, a sculpture, and now he's working on a new project called "The Thinking Eye." He joins us now. Edward Tufte, welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

EDWARD TUFTE: Hello, hello.

LICHTMAN: Thank you for coming. Tell us how you describe your work.

TUFTE: Most of my work has been secretly about trying to make people smarter. The - and it means smart both in terms of science and seeing and information and art. The science and art, at least at a high level, have in common intense seeing, bright-eyed observing and deep curiosity. And I'm starting to now surface these ideas that have been lurking in my work for so long in my project "The Thinking Eye," which will be a book-movie. It's going so slowly that I think books and movies will be the same by the time I get it done.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: I want to ask you a little bit more about that, but let me give out the number again, because I'm sure a lot of people will have questions for you. It's 1-800-989-TALK, 1-800-989-8255. What's "The Thinking Eye" all about?

TUFTE: Well, first, it's about how to see, intensely, this bright-eyed observing curiosity. And then what follows after that is reasoning about what one sees, and asking: What's going on here? And in that reasoning, intensely, it involves also a skepticism about one's own understanding. The thinking eye must always ask: How do I know that? That's probably the most powerful question of all time. How do you know that?

And then, finally, the creative thinking eye, it escapes itself and produces and executes, teaches a class, writes an article, makes a visualization, creates an artwork. Tweets, however, probably don't count.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: You know, we have a lot of observers in our audience, professionals and lay people observers. So let's start with that seeing part. Do you have suggestions for how we can see better? Just that first part.

TUFTE: The great, big thing is to try to devote most of one's brain-processing power to the seeing. That is, as we know from all the studies of cell phones and driving automobiles, people don't do very well in seeing where they're going when they're talking. And so deep seeing requires a fairly certain serenity of one's self, but also a serene environment. And in that way, all the brain's processing power can veto into seeing.

I had this experience - almost a magical experience. I was walking out on our farm by a long, stone wall and I said to my friend, let's just not talk. And for the first three or four or five minutes, you start - what you start to hear is simply the sounds that the inner ear makes. And then, after a while, you hear things, just the slightly rustling of leaves. But what happened to seeing after maybe 10 minutes of just seeing - not talking, not doing anything else - was it like the light became perfect. Like when you have filtered light from the sun, the shadows don't blow out the dark and the brights don't go out the white. But everything, you know, is in focus and not blown out.

But now, it was just because you were seeing so much better, because all your brain power was devoted to it, it was like you were creating a perfect light for seeing. That is, you could see the details in the shadow, and you could protect the eye against blowing out to brightness.

And that's one of the main things. If you want to see well, you've got to, you know, go all out, you know, really be highly focused just on that, and not doing anything else.

LICHTMAN: Zip it, in other words.

TUFTE: Yeah. And also, the environment itself should be, you know, quiet. I think the hardest place in the world to see is at an art gallery reception, an art gallery party, because of the chaos and the din. And it's simply impossible to see the artworks on the wall.

LICHTMAN: Is seeing better related to thinking more clearly?

TUFTE: Well, I sure think so. The - that's why I call it "The Thinking Eye." In some ways, seeing is thinking. The light comes in through the lens and is focused on the retina. And the retina is doing - is pretty much working like brain cells. It's processing. And then the two optic nerves are sending what we now know are 20 megabits a second of information back to the brain. That's sure a lot better than my Wi-Fi at home.

And so the seeing right then is being transformed into information, into thinking, right as that step from the retina to the brain. And the brain is really busy, and it likes to economize. And so it's quick to be active and jump to conclusions. So if you're told what to look for, you can't see anything else. So one thing is to see, in a way, without words. That avoids the confirmation bias, where, you know, that once you have a point of view, all history will back you up. And that's the eye and brain busy economizing on those 20 megabits a second that are coming in.

LICHTMAN: So that means seeing things and not labeling them, either?

TUFTE: I think there's a lot of premature labeling. Now, the situation in teaching is different. You're trying to point out where people should see. But analytical seeing, I believe you should try to stay in the sheer optical experience as long as possible. As - once you have an idea, or somebody tells you something to look for, that's about all you can see.

I had this experience recently. A dear friend of ours has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and I hadn't seen her for about six months. And when she came and visited, I couldn't see her anymore. I could only - I was always looking now for symptoms, how the dementia was manifesting itself. And, I mean, I know about how (unintelligible), and I couldn't see her through any other lens but, you know, the possible symptoms. And that one word, that one piece of knowledge totally - and I was self-aware of it, but it so totally corrupted every time I looked at Sigrid(ph) .

LICHTMAN: A lot of people want to ask you questions, so let's go to the phones to Springfield, Virginia. Enrique, you're on the air.

ENRIQUE: Yes. My question is: Have you seen good examples of data visualizations and visual experience, either on the Web or mobile? And what are the pitfalls or potential issues with data visualizations in a digital medium?

LICHTMAN: Good question.

TUFTE: I don't think the issues involve being digital. In other words, it doesn't really matter, the analytical issues, whether you're, you know, scratching a piece of stone, or on a piece of paper or on a computer screen. I have been recently - partly at the end of the year, but also thinking more broadly - I think probably the best visualization ever are Feynman diagrams. They show nature's subatomic behavior. They've been used for 70 years by scientists, and they've thankfully replaced a lot of hairy mathematics.

I think there's been - obviously, the digital world has opened up more possibilities with visualizations. But some of the most spectacular visualizations were done of all - in 1610 by Galileo, as he made these - made his remarkable discoveries. So visualization is timeless, and the principles for showing information - like nature's laws - are timeless. So we can - I think I can learn more, a lot more sometimes, from 1610 and Galileo than I can learn from the last five years of looking at visualizations.

The main thing that's happened is the information throughput and the information resolution has gone up enormously in the last decade. And I view high resolution pretty much like being smart. So that - you know, we talk about high-res people, but it - that's where visualizations have been helped, by a much higher data throughput. So I think resolution is not everything, but it's really important, really, and our screens have become close to magical now in terms of resolution.

LICHTMAN: The Feynman diagrams, you made sculptures - which you can see pictures of those on our website at sciencefriday.com if you'd like to see Edward Tufte's sculptures of some of those Feynman diagrams. Do those count as what you call forever knowledge? And explain that term.

TUFTE: That phrase has meant a lot in my own life. I - years ago, I was at the Center for Advanced Study, and I wrote a manuscript, and I showed it to Bob Merton, the great sociologist. And he wrote on the margin that this was an echo of some very famous work. I did not take that as a particular compliment. I took that as telling me: play in the big leagues.

And what that meant to me was to be like, in a way, like science, which - the findings of which are forever, because the laws of nature apply to every particle in the universe forever. And so knowledge about that is, in a sense, forever knowledge. And though I wanted to stop worrying about this quarter's latest journal of whatever it was, or what's - what is topical or what's in The New York Times this week, I wanted to do things that have that universality and forever-ness of science.

And so I've been ever since preoccupied with how the fundamental tasks of thinking can be replicated in our designs of information, so that our architectures support learning about causality - that's a forever cognitive task - support, that our architectures support making comparisons, which is a fundamental forever task. Our displays help us assess the credibility of a display, and how do they know that? That's a forever task. So it's - that - in other words, the mind-information relationship and learning from evidence, optical evidence, is a forever problem.

LICHTMAN: I'm Flora Lichtman. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR, talking with Edward Tufte. Sorry. I rudely interrupted you there to pay the bills, as Ira would say.

TUFTE: I'm awaiting the next question, here, from our callers.

LICHTMAN: OK. Well, then, I think we should go to the phones. How about to Mark in Salt Lake City, Utah?

MARK: Yes, hello. I just want to say, Mr. Tufte, you are a true inspiration and a wonderful person. I think you're one of the most fascinating people on our planet today.

TUFTE: Well, that's very kind. I hope I don't screw it up.

(LAUGHTER)

MARK: I don't think so. I just really am curious to know - you know, I used to be a graphic designer when I was at the university, at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and we were all big fans of you down there. And what's your background? How did you get your start, and how did you fall into what you do today? I've just always been very curious to know that.

LICHTMAN: Thanks for calling, Mark.

TUFTE: I don't quite know how I ever arrived like this. In a rough sense, I just go to the studio every day and go to work, that it's very hands-on. My background comes - my mother is a professor of English emeritus at the University of Southern California. My father was a civil engineer. They had also very good taste about furniture and things, even though they were both the youngest of 10 children on the farm. They had a very elegant and gracious eye.

And it seems like I've always bumped into the right people all along. I've always tried to celebrate excellence in any field I went into and go to the best people as soon as I could and listen to them. And I've been involved in a lot of things, usually at a, you know, recently high level, and I never got trapped by the disciplinary chauvinism of the university world. I - the world is much more interesting than any one discipline, and I've just - I'm interested and curious in so many of things in the world. And the...

LICHTMAN: Hold that thought because we have to take a quick break. But we'll be back to hear...

TUFTE: OK.

LICHTMAN: ...hear more about it. Thank you. We're talking with Edward Tufte, data scientist, the Galileo of graphics, the da Vinci of data, as he's been called. What are your questions for Dr. Tufte? 1-800-989-TALK. 1-800-989-8255. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LICHTMAN: I'm Flora Lichtman. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LICHTMAN: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman, talking with Edward Tufte. Dr. Tufte, I want to get your thoughts on some of the current superstars in data and design. Did you follow Nate Silver's blog this presidential season, the FiveThirtyEight?

TUFTE: I - yes. I followed his work for years, and I thought - actually, I gave some awards - the data table of the year, I gave to his data table that he did after the election, based on the real data. And I thought it was an extraordinary summary of the event. It was even better than most - than some of the tables on espn.com. It's a terrifically well-designed table that described the election. And he's a very wise person.

Predictions are very difficult, and it's easy to get your head knocked off, and you're out there on the high wire. And - then the other thing is he is just marvelously productive in, you know, producing things that people want to know about. And he's also able to separate his own, you know, political views from the predictions. That's usually where people go wrong. They get a little optimistic for their side. And he made the separation.

LICHTMAN: What about Steve Jobs? What do you think of the approach that he took towards design?

TUFTE: I think it was extraordinary. His approach was different from everyone else's, which is to start with the user experience, and work backwards to the technology. I always, in - likewise in my own work, I'm really indifferent to the methodology of producing visualizations, and all I care about is relationship between the viewer's brain and the intellectual tasks and the material at the - as it's presented.

And this is outside-in design, that you design the surface. That's what the user sees, after all. You design the surface first, and then you view the software as simply, you know, hey, is there - anybody - any software out there that can solve the problem? Most displays are designed the other way around. The government starts out refereeing among application solutions desperately looking for a problem to solve, and what the user sees is kind of byproduct of software houses.

But Steve Jobs started at the relevant point. It's all about the relationship between the viewer and the information on the screen, and the viewer's cognitive tasks in looking at that information.

LICHTMAN: Is there a data that - sorry - is there a data that can't be visualized well?

TUFTE: Not if you allow artists into the arena.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: Yeah.

TUFTE: The kinds of more subtle, emotional, grander, symbolic things. But for those kinds of things, I think art does very powerfully. I mean, I think, of course, of Picasso's "Guernica," one of the, you know, best few paintings of the 20th century and probably the best thing about the horror of war ever done, the unspeakable horror of war. But there it is in "Guernica."

LICHTMAN: Have you felt like there have been times in your career where - you have such high standards, it seems. And I think that's why so many people admire your work so much. But have you felt like there have been times when you've been too uncompromising in your principles, that you've lost an opportunity somehow because of that?

TUFTE: The opportunities I wouldn't want. I used to do a lot of consulting, and I consulted at one time for enough - to nearly everybody a long time ago. But I couldn't get much done as an outsider. I was a corporate consultant to IBM for a long time, and I learned a lot from them. And I didn't think I taught(ph) them enough. But a big company - changing IBM is like trying to change Sweden, and it would require, you know, diplomatic and bureaucratic work that I'm not good at, and some accommodation. And that's just not me.

I'm, at my best, on a kind of innocent and contrary posture, I think, wide-eyed, but somewhat skeptical posture. And that's not - it doesn't work in much of the world today.

LICHTMAN: Thank you for joining us today, Edward Tufte.

TUFTE: Well, thank you. Thank you. Good.

LICHTMAN: It's a pleasure to talk.

TUFTE: OK. Bye.

LICHTMAN: That was Edward Tufte, data scientist, based in Connecticut.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

Experts Urge Caution As $50 Billion In Sandy Aid Passes House

 

Much of the money from the Hurricane Sandy relief bill the House of Representatives passed will fund beach and infrastructure restoration projects in areas such as Mantoloking, N.J., seen on Oct. 31.

Doug Mills/AP

The House of Representatives passed a bill this week to spend $50 billion to help states struck by Hurricane Sandy. The action comes more than two months after the storm, and the measure now goes to the Senate.

The delay outraged politicians and residents from the Northeast, who blamed Washington for playing politics with desperately needed aid. But some scientists and engineers say there's danger in rushing ahead to rebuild a coastline that's sure to get hit again.

Tough talk in the House from Republican Peter King and Democrat Jerrold Nadler of New York and Democrat Bill Pascrell, Jr. of New Jersey paid off. The total aid package is now looking to run about $60 billion, compared to more than $80 billion for Hurricane Katrina.

Most of the money is to help people whose homes or businesses have been lost or damaged, or for infrastructure, including bridges and roads.

Hurricane Sandy exposed weaknesses in New York City's electricity grid. Experts say work can be done to revamp it so it's more tolerant to support backup solar power. Here, the New York City skyline, seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, on Nov. 3.

John Moore/Getty Images  Hurricane Sandy exposed weaknesses in New York City's electricity grid. Experts say work can be done to revamp it so it's more tolerant to support backup solar power. Here, the New York City skyline, seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, on Nov. 3.

John Moore/Getty Images

But several billion dollars are pegged for projects to reduce risk of future storms. Some scientists are alarmed, like Rob Young, a geologist at Western Carolina University who studies what happens to structures built along coastlines.

"What in the world are they going to spend that on?" he asks.

It looks like a lot of the money will go to things like trucking sand back onto beaches or rebuilding beachfront property the way it used to be. But Young says that's a ton of taxpayers' money for projects that may not make the coast more resilient.

"You have this massive government subsidy for development in vulnerable coastal areas, particularly on the immediate coast, on the oceanfront, in resort communities," he says.

Spending tax dollars to rebuild coastal communities isn't new. Young points to Dauphin Island along the Gulf Coast — it's been rebuilt numerous times after storms, to the tune of tens of millions of tax dollars. Most insurance companies shy away from these places. So the taxpayer pays.

And as the climate warms, all the scientific models predict more storms, bigger storms and more devastation. In fact, the insurance industry says giant disasters are becoming more common.

"So we're going to have to do these projects over and over again," Young says. "We're going to have to do it more frequently in the future and it's going to get more expensive."

Young is among many scientists and engineers who say: Slow down. Find out if more sand really saves beaches. Maybe wetlands are better. Do floodgates work? And who should pay for this?

New Yorkers like Andrew Darrell are thinking along the same lines.

"I live here in New York City. I'm raising kids here in New York City. I also believe that if there's any place that can get this right, it's a place like New York," he says.

Darrell is an energy analyst at the Environmental Defense Fund and an adviser to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He is focused on how the city's electricity grid gets rebuilt. He saw part of it go down from his apartment during Sandy at the 14th Street power station in Manhattan.

"A wave crested a 12-foot wall that surrounds the substation and caused a huge electricity arc, and it lit up the sky," Darrel says. "In the arc of that light, you could see quite clearly all of the buildings in lower Manhattan that night."

Darrell says rebuilding the grid means doing things differently. Take solar power, for example. After Sandy, a few buildings with solar panels had power when the sun came back out. But most did not — for a strange reason.

"Those solar panels largely work by feeding into the electric grid," Darrell says. "So when the grid goes down, those solar panels go down too."

Darrell says it costs building owners more money to get their solar panels to work independently of the grid. He says people should get paid to be independent from the grid, so they can provide a safety net for the power company during disasters.

Experts like Darrell and Young say little changes like that could reduce the cost — and the pain — of the next big storm. And the money's on the table right now to do it.

View the original article here

Figuring How To Pay For (Chimp) Retirement

 

Hannah and Marty eat watermelon snacks at the Save the Chimps sanctuary.

Save the Chimps

Retirees flock to Florida — and the Sunshine State even has a retirement home for chimpanzees.

There, chimps live in small groups on a dozen man-made islands. Each 3-acre grassy island has palm trees and climbing structures, and is surrounded by a moat.

This is Save the Chimps, the world's biggest sanctuary for chimps formerly used in research experiments or the entertainment industry, or as pets. The chimps living here — 266 of them — range in age from 6 years old to over 50. And as sanctuary Director Jen Feuerstein drives around in a golf cart, she recognizes each one.

"Hey, guys!" she says, pulling up to a small building that serves as the entrance to one island. "This is Luke on the left and Virgil on the right, and then the chimp walking up is Christopher."

Later, she spots a chimp sitting up in a tree and says it's Jaybee, a former research chimp who spent years alone in a small cage. She says he "had nothing natural, never went outside, never even saw the sun. So to see him in a tree, munching on leaves, just like a wild chimp would, is pretty amazing."

Next week, the National Institutes of Health will get some long-awaited advice from a working group that has been studying what the agency should do with its current research chimps. That group may recommend retiring a lot more chimps.

If so, finding them new homes in sanctuaries like this one won't be easy.

"After the recommendations from our working group, we anticipate there will be a much diminished need for animals in research," says James Anderson, an official with the NIH who has been working to plan for future chimp retirements.
"The single biggest issue will be the capacity of the sanctuary system. If we retire many more animals, there's no space."

The NIH owns or supports about 670 chimps, he says. About 100 are already officially retired and live at a wooded sanctuary in Louisiana called Chimp Haven, which is the designated facility for retired government chimps. If more chimps are going to be retired soon, it's not clear where they'll go.

Jude and JB play at Save the Chimps. The facility is home to 266 chimps.

Jo-Anne Macarthur/Save the Chimps  Jude and JB play at Save the Chimps. The facility is home to 266 chimps.

Jo-Anne Macarthur/Save the Chimps

Existing sanctuaries could potentially expand and make room for more chimps.
The trouble is, the NIH can't give them any money to do that. That's because Congress put a cap on how much the agency can spend on chimp sanctuaries when it passed the CHIMP Act in 2000.

"Congress set a cap of $30 million on total spending for construction and care of the animals in the sanctuary. And we are already over $29 million," Anderson says. "We'll hit that cap in July of this year."

It will take Congress to fix this. In the meantime, because the spending cap only applies to sanctuaries, one option is for retired chimps to just stay in research facilities.

"And we could continue to use taxpayers' dollars in that context to take care of them," Anderson says.

That's one reason why, when officials recently had to find a new home for about 100 lab chimps, they decided to make them ineligible for experiments — but only a small number would go to a sanctuary. The rest would get moved to a different lab that had space to house them. The decision caused a public outcry.

"We did step up and say, 'We want them all,' " says Jennifer Whitaker, vice president of Chimp Haven in Louisiana. "We, under good conscience, could not allow chimpanzees to be moved from one lab to another. We wanted them permanently retired at our sanctuary."

NIH officials quickly reversed course and agreed. But they could only do that because Chimp Haven and other nonprofits said they'd raise about $5 million for things like the construction of new living spaces.

"We're in the process of raising those funds and we are feeling very encouraged, but we do still have a long ways to go," Whitaker says.

She says the first group of eight to 10 chimps should arrive by the end of this month, and another will arrive in February.

"We will be integrating those groups into existing groups," she says, which means a series of introductions among all the chimps. "We are hoping that within the year, we will be able to retire all 111 at Chimp Haven."

When it comes to the prospect of taking on more chimps in the future, Whitaker says, "financial complications are our biggest challenge."

Back at Save the Chimps in Florida, Feuerstein says her sanctuary is at capacity. But if more government chimps are retired, they'd consider expanding, if there's funding available. Currently, this sanctuary doesn't have any chimps supported by the government, and is privately funded.

Caring for the animals at Save the Chimps costs about $15,000 per chimp per year.

Save the Chimps  Caring for the animals at Save the Chimps costs about $15,000 per chimp per year.

Save the Chimps

Taking care of one chimp, per year, costs around $15,000, she says. This is comparable to what the NIH might pay to house a chimp in a research setting. There's a huge amount of work involved in caring for these animals.

"Our job really is we're housekeepers, we're maids, we're butlers, we're servants," Feuerstein says.

Save the Chimps has about 50 employees to do endless chores. They hose down indoor rooms, prepare food and do the laundry — the chimp's brightly colored blankets and teddy bears hang on clotheslines to dry.

Every day, workers go out on the islands to scatter treats and toys. One day's entertainment, for example, was long sheets of paper smeared with ketchup and mustard.

And then there's the medical care. The sanctuary has a medications room that's stocked like a full pharmacy, where two women crush pills into plastic bottles, each labeled with a name — so it can get filled with that chimp's preferred juice or Gatorade. About half the chimps get daily meds for everything from arthritis to heart disease.

The goal of a sanctuary is for chimps to live like wild chimps and bond with other chimps, Feuerstein says, so working here isn't what people might expect. The sanctuary has a "no touch" policy, for example, so employees don't go out on the islands and play with the chimps.

She says most lab chimps adapt well to sanctuary life. But some do have problems. Cheetah, a research chimp who lived most of his life alone, can't adjust to a group.

"Hi, Cheetah. Hey, buddy," Feuerstein says, kneeling down to greet him. He pokes a piece of orange hose through a metal fence and gently drags it across her arm — his way of grooming her as he makes a soft clacking sound with his teeth.

This sanctuary has other chimps like Cheetah with special needs, and Feuerstein says it has a plan for how to improve their housing. But making those improvements, of course, means first having to raise the money.

View the original article here

Inventors Design Lamp Powered Entirely By Gravity

As part of a research initiative on how to harness off-grid energy for low-power electronics, a pair of U.K.-based designers created a lamp that uses gravity to generate light. Martin Riddiford, co-inventor of the GravityLight, talks about plans for the innovative project.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

FLORA LICHTMAN, HOST:

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm Flora Lichtman, filling in for Ira Flatow today. Solar wind, geothermal - now there's a new renewable energy source to add to that list. It's free, completely reliable and totally unlimited: the force of gravity. Two British designers have invented a lamp that runs on gravity alone. Their GravityLight - yes, that's its name, aptly named - uses, you guessed it, the pull of gravity on a weight to generate up to 30 minutes of light.

To turn the lamp on, you lift a weighted bag up, and voila, as the bag slowly descends, LED illumination. So how does this work? How hard is it to make? My next guest is here to tell us. Martin Riddiford is one of the inventors of the GravityLight and founder of the design company Therefore. He joins me by phone from London, England. Welcome to the program.

MARTIN RIDDIFORD: Hi, Flora.

LICHTMAN: Hi. Tell us what this GravityLight looks like, and then take us under the hood and tell us how it works.

RIDDIFORD: OK. So GravityLight is a project which we started, because we were working with a charity trying to find an alternative to kerosene lamps for the developing world. And we were working with solar power at the time, and we were doing a lamp which used LED bulbs and a battery. And we - you had to charge it through solar panels. And we found out that the cost of the unit was too expensive for people in Africa to buy, because they have very, very limited finances. And there's no micro-financing in Africa.

So the lowest possible bum(ph) cost, or purchase cost, was absolutely essential in the project. So we came out of a meeting when we presented our - the latest work we'd done with the battery powered device, and thought, we've got to find a cheaper way of doing this.

LICHTMAN: Now, how did you come up with the idea of - how did gravity come to mind?

RIDDIFORD: Well, we realized that there were two components, the LED and the battery, and, obviously, the means of charging it. And there are various means of charging devices like this, with hand cranks and things like that. But they generally always involve a battery, and we were trying to think of a way of getting rid of the battery. And this is where the gravity side came in.

So we envisioned this scenario where you lift the weights, as you say, the heaviest weight you can lift, about 10 kilograms or 20 pounds, as high as you can lift it, about six foot. And then you let it go, and this device releases the bag very slowly and powers a generator to create a very small amount of electricity, but enough electricity to give you sufficient light - well, more light than a kerosene lamp would give you.

LICHTMAN: So no battery required. It's just a teeny, tiny generator.

RIDDIFORD: Exactly. And that's one of the interesting things, because not only is it - can it create light, obviously, but because it's a generator, we can potentially charge batteries and things like that. But in a very - very, very slowly, which is important to realize. This isn't a way of generating large amounts of electricity, but because the developments of LEDs and electronics make power consumption less and less over time, then this kind of project becomes more and more worthwhile, because we can do more and more with the small amount of power that we create.

LICHTMAN: And how much power are you creating?

RIDDIFORD: Well, we call the project deciwatts, which basically tells you how much power it's creating. So depending...

LICHTMAN: So a tenth of a watt then, is that right? Just for people...

RIDDIFORD: A tenth of a watt, yes. So depending on how fast you let the weight travel down depends on how much light - how much - sorry, how much energy you get out of it. So the prototypes that we built generate between 30 milliwatts and half a watt. And we've got a variable drive on the end, which allows us to change from the very low power condition, where we're just able to light an LED and use it as a nightlight kind of thing. And then we can, as I say, generate half a watt for more of the sort of battery charging things that we're experimenting with.

LICHTMAN: Well, I guess our bright light - it's like a built-in dimmer.

RIDDIFORD: Sort of thing, yeah. They - one of the things that we discovered fairly early on was that the whole rig is a bit counterintuitive. So if you were imagining that you were going to increase the heat on a fire, you would chuck another log on, and you'd expect the log to last longer and also to give you more heat. The trouble with the GravityLight is that you - if you put more weight on it, it descends faster, so it lasts less time. But it doesn't necessarily light the LED much lighter because it's all about the efficiency curve of the LED.

LICHTMAN: Ah. So it's hard to scale up. You're not going to run a toaster off of this if you have a really heavy light, necessarily.

RIDDIFORD: No. It's really suited at this kind of deciwatt range. I mean, lots of people have said, oh, yeah, you know, I want to hang it from my, you know, third story. But the other part of what we're trying to do here, which is what makes it interesting, is that other systems - like a hand-cranked torch, or whatever - requires the user to invest quite a lot of time in doing the rewinding. So the joy of this system is that one very swift operation, three seconds or so, gives you 30 - 30 minutes of light. So there's a big payback for a very short period.

LICHTMAN: How much does it cost to make?

RIDDIFORD: Well, currently, the costing of the first prototype at about 5,000 units is about $6.50. But we've got various - a couple of bearings in there that we hope to not need in the future. And we, you know, we're obviously not using much buying power in terms of buying the LED and the motor. So what we're trying to do is to trial a thousand of these units in Africa and get all the feedback we can from how people use them, how high they hang them, how much light they need. Do they have it turned to the dimmest or the brightest? What else do they want to do with it?

We put a couple of terminals on the outside as a sort of open-source hacking kind of facility, so that you can attach other things to it. So you can attach, for instance, a radio to it and run a radio perfectly satisfactorily from it. You can attach a task light from it and use it for, sort of, desk reading. And as I say, you can charge batteries from it. So part of the trial that we're planning on doing in the next six months, we're going to build some of these accessories and give them to people and find out how they use them and how they get on.

LICHTMAN: You know, I know this isn't meant as a way to replace kerosene lamps, but I can imagine a market here where electricity is available, too. Have you ever thought of doing something like the TOMS model, the TOMS Shoes, where you buy one and they donate a pair, as well?

RIDDIFORD: Well, interestingly, we've been developing this for a number of years as a sort of skunkworks project after we did this project with our charity. And we got to a point where we got this prototype working, and we want to tool up and make enough units to go and distribute around the world to get the feedback that we need.

And we decided to use a crowdfunding campaign to do that, and we had terrific success there. Over a period of a month or so, we've raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, which enables us to pay for the tooling, but also to do research and other things with it.

But the other side of crowdfunding, which is wonderful, is that we've connected with a whole bunch of people around the world - firstly, a whole bunch of really generous Americans. American people probably account for 50 percent of the funders for our enterprise. And then we've connected with a whole bunch of people in developing countries who are wanting to distribute or help us do this research, or their charities, or whatever.

So we've got a really good spread of contacts through this, and a number of the American people who've funded us have said, well, you know, we live in Canada or Northern America, and we've got - you know, we do a lot of outdoor stuff. We'd love one of these, you know, for camping or in our hut or whatever in the wilderness.

So we're going to send a whole bunch of units out to people and see what happens. Sorry, the crowdfunding thing that I was talking about, we did a buy one for yourself, and then gift one to - for this trial. So - and that's the way that we would probably sell it in the West, is to do exactly that kind of thing, which I think people buy into very well.

LICHTMAN: Is your design company working on any other gravity-power applications?

RIDDIFORD: Well, we're currently - because now we've got the funding to do it, we're exploring lots of other opportunities. And we've got this internal development group who are currently looking at where those opportunities might take us. And we have sort of an ambition that we could potentially have a battery-less system for getting on the Internet, but it's obviously a long-shot. And we need to do the research to find out whether we can do that within the power budget that we have.

But the notion is that we could - one of our clients is Inmarsat, who do stationary satellites. And we want to try and engage with them to see whether we can do a receiver for broadcast satellite information, which runs at this kind of very low level. And if we can, then it would be great to imagine that we could, say, download a Wikipedia page with a device without batteries.

So that's a long-term goal, which may or may not be achievable, but it's - you know, we're setting our sights high.

(LAUGHTER)

LICHTMAN: Absolutely. It's exciting to think about. Well, good luck to you.

RIDDIFORD: OK. Well, thank you very much.

LICHTMAN: Thank you for coming on. Martin Riddiford is the founder of the design company Therefore and one of the inventors of the GravityLight. Stay with us, because our next segment is something that I think is on the minds of many people this season. It's the flu virus. We're talking about its preferred habitat, how it travels, and how to stay - how to outsmart it. Stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LICHTMAN: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

Copyright © 2013 National Public Radio. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to National Public Radio. This transcript is provided for personal, noncommercial use only, pursuant to our Terms of Use. Any other use requires NPR's prior permission. Visit our permissions page for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.

View the original article here

It's Legal For Some Insurers To Discriminate Based On Genes

Slides containing DNA sit in a bay waiting to be analyzed by a genome sequencing machine.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images  Slides containing DNA sit in a bay waiting to be analyzed by a genome sequencing machine.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Getting the results of a genetic test can be a bit like opening Pandora's box. You might learn something useful or interesting, or you might learn that you're likely to develop an incurable disease later on in life.

There's a federal law that's supposed to protect people from having their own genes used against them, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, or GINA. Under GINA, it's illegal for an employer to fire someone based on his genes, and it's illegal for health insurers to raise rates or to deny coverage because of someone's genetic code.

But the law has a loophole: It only applies to health insurance. It doesn't say anything about companies that sell life insurance, disability insurance or long-term-care insurance.

"GINA was a fabulous accomplishment," says Robert Green, a researcher in the genetics department at Harvard Medical School. "It was long in coming and much needed. But I think that it was not perfect."

Green oversaw a study that examined how people react after they learn they have ApoE4, a gene associated with Alzheimer's. He found that people who discover they have the gene are five times more likely than the average person to go out and buy long-term-care insurance.

"It would be a natural thing that people might consider if they find out that they are at an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. This is a logical outcome to getting genetic-risk information," Green says.

But when people go make that "logical" decision, there's nothing stopping the insurance companies from demanding to see the results of their genetic test. In fact, a long-term-care company could legally require someone to take a genetic test before selling him a policy.

Green says it's especially ironic that GINA does not apply to long-term-care insurance policies, since they cover the costs of nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health aides and other things that people with Alzheimer's disease often need to use.

Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from western New York, introduced GINA in the House back in 2007. She says she fought hard for the law because she didn't think it was fair that a few wayward strands of DNA could make you essentially uninsurable.

"There were countless people in this country who were not eligible for insurance at all, simply by the way they were born," Slaughter says.

But she knows the law still has gaps that need to be closed. "And we plan to do that," she says.

If that happens, the insurance industry will have a thing or two to say about it.

Insurance works best when lots of people purchase policies but only a few actually need to use them. Selling these kinds of policies suddenly becomes unsustainable if genetic testing becomes widespread, and most — or even all — of the people who buy long-term-care policies do so knowing they're probably going to develop Alzheimer's sometime down the road.

When Green talked about his study to a room full of insurance executives a few years ago, he found out just how frightened the industry is of this scenario.

"These very mild-mannered people in the audience got very, very heated," he says. "They were standing up and saying, 'This kind of situation is going to put us out of business.' "

A spokesman with the company Genworth, the largest seller of long-term-care policies in the U.S., said in an email to NPR that it doesn't want to lose its ability to "utilize all information." Genworth isn't restricted by the law now, and it doesn't want that to change.

View the original article here

Miss Piggy's Version Of Global Warming: What About Me?

Here's a new, sly (and frankly selfish) way to think about global warming: Instead of worrying about the whole planet and all its oceans, how about asking a more personal question ...

What about me? What about where I live? Or where my grandma lives? Or the North Pole? Or Siberia? What if I could take my curser, plop it onto any place on Earth and find out what's happened to temperatures right there.

Click! And a graph instantly registers how much temperatures have changed in that very region since the early 1950s. You can click anywhere you please, on deserts, oceans, island chains, mountains, on places you love or dream of, and discover if things have been warming up or cooling down, and by how much. Some places, I noticed, have gotten colder. But not many. It's easy to do. Go ahead, give it a whirl.

This graphic appears on New Scientist's website. It was built by Chris Amico and Peter Aldhouse, with help from Robert Schmunk from data produced by a team at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, whose offices, as it happens, are located not far from the Greek diner in New York City that you see featured on Seinfeld.

The team attached some detailed source material to its graphic that some of you will want to read. I'd put this stuff in fine print, but we at NPR don't have a "fine print option" for our blogs, so if you don't want to know this, squint or go walk the dog. (Or listen to Radiolab. I'm told it's a fine podcast.) For the rest of you:

How The Data Was Assembled And Adjusted:

The graphs and maps all show changes relative to average temperatures for the three decades from 1951 to 1980, the earliest period for which there was sufficiently good coverage for comparison. This gives a consistent view of climate change across the globe. To put these numbers in context, the NASA team estimates that the global average temperature for the 1951-1980 baseline period was about 14 degrees Celsius.

The analysis uses land-based temperature measurements from some 6,000 monitoring stations in the Global Historical Climatology Network, plus records from Antarctic stations recorded by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research. Temperatures at the ocean surface come from a measurements made by ships from 1880 to 1981, plus satellite measurements from 1982 onward.

Surface temperature measurements are not evenly distributed across the globe. So the NASA team interpolates from the available data to calculate average temperatures for cells in a global grid, with each cell measuring 2 degrees latitude by 2 degrees longitude. The analysis extrapolates up to 1,200 kilometres from any one station, which allows for more complete coverage in the Arctic — where monitoring stations are sparsely distributed, but where the warming trend is especially strong.

The NASA team also corrects the data to remove local heating caused by dense human settlements — a phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect. Temperature stations in urban areas are identified by referring to satellite images of the light they give off at night, and their records are adjusted to reflect the average trend of nearby rural stations.

View the original article here

No Fists, Gentlemen, Just Necks. The Ali & Frazier Of The Giraffe World

We're in Tanzania on safari, when two stately looking giraffes walk into view, looking thoughtful, gentle, as giraffes do, and all of a sudden one of them drops way low and swings his whole neck and head into his buddy's legs, hard, so hard the other giraffe gives off a little cry and then, wham, slams him back, and then the two of them are slamming, parting, clinging, pushing (Are they comparing necks? Looks that way ... ) just like boxers. It doesn't seem like either gets hurt, but wow! I didn't know giraffes do this. I looked it up. It's called "necking."

So what's going on? There's no lady giraffe in this scene (though I guess there could be one lingering nearby.) These two aren't females because they both have male "ossicones" — those hard, bony things you find on giraffe heads. On guys they're bald. On gals they're furry. Slamming onto your legs, they must hurt. So here we have two males, not fighting for keeps, but kind of measuring each other. It looks like they are trying to establish dominance, so the winner can later tour the neighborhood and have his pick of the harem.

iStockphoto 

For a little while, two scientists got a lot of attention when they proposed that these fights were the main reason giraffes have long necks. In a 1996 study, zoologists Robert Simmons and Lue Scheepers challenged the traditional explanation that giraffes born with longer necks could better feed themselves and therefore reproduce more successfully. There are other ways to evolve long necks, they said, proposing what has become known as the "Necks for Sex" theory.

Necks For Sex

Simmons and Scheepers claimed the giraffes in the wild don't do that much reaching for food in high places. They find most of their meals lower down, nearer the ground. Combat, they felt, was a better way to predict which giraffes passed their genes into the future. The stronger, bigger-necked males, they believed, would mate more often, producing more and more bigger-necked baby giraffes. Females would develop long necks as a side effect, and if this went on long enough, then, Thock! Bam! Clump! You get a modern giraffe.

Necks for Sex sounds like a plausible explainer, but according to Brian Switek (who is the reason I'm writing this story; he's fascinated by big animals, and I devour his blog Laelaps), it now seems Necks for Sex may be wrong.

Brian wrote how a second group of scientists went back into the field, took another look, and found that giraffes in the wild do indeed eat food that's high up (and sometimes low down), and long necks do give individuals a feeding advantage. And now this month there's a new paper by much the same group that says it's likely these necking bouts are not always related to copulation, sometimes it's just a king-of-the-mountain thing, and that "males with the longest and most massive necks don't always win these contests."

Ah, well. I don't mind that these neck slams may not be evolutionarily important, that they're more like prize fights, what feisty young giraffes do when they're feeling strong and combative. But it's extra-nice to know that not infrequently, the bruiser loses, and the skinny guy wins.

View the original article here