851. Some Whales Are Coping with Man-Made Noise While Many Go Deft

A minke whale found deft due to man-made noise

By William J. Broad, The New York Times, July 16, 2012

Scientists have long known that man-made, underwater noises — from engines, sonars, weapons testing, and such industrial tools as air guns used in oil and gas exploration — are deafening whales and other sea mammals. The Navy estimates that loud booms from just its underwater listening devices, mainly sonar, result in temporary or permanent hearing loss for more than a quarter-million sea creatures every year, a number that is rising.

Now, scientists have discovered that whales can decrease the sensitivity of their hearing to protect their ears from loud noise. Humans tend to do this with index fingers; scientists haven’t pinpointed how whales do it, but they have seen the first evidence of the behavior.

“It’s equivalent to plugging your ears when a jet flies over,” said Paul E. Nachtigall, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii who led the discovery team. “It’s like a volume control.”

The finding, while preliminary, is already raising hopes for the development of warning signals that would alert whales, dolphins and other sea mammals to auditory danger.

Peter Madsen, a professor of marine biology at Aarhus University in Denmark, said he applauded the Hawaiian team for its “elegant study” and the promise of innovative ways of “getting at some of the noise problems.” But he cautioned against letting the discovery slow global efforts to reduce the oceanic roar, which would aid the beleaguered sea mammals more directly.

The noise threat arises because of the basic properties of seawater. Typically, light can travel for hundreds of feet through ocean water before diminishing to nothingness. But sound can travel for hundreds of miles.

The world’s oceans have been getting noisier as companies and governments expand their undersea activities. Researchers have linked the growing racket to deafness, tissue damage, mass strandings and disorientation in creatures that rely on hearing to navigate, find food and care for their young.

The danger has long been a political football. In 2008, the Supreme Court heard a lawsuit by the National Resources Defense Council against the Navy over ocean noise; the court ruled that naval vessels had the right to test sonar systems for hunting submarines. But environmentalists saw a tacit victory in getting the nation’s highest court even to consider the health of sea mammals in a debate over national security.

The latest development took place at a research facility off Oahu — at an island where the opening shots of “Gilligan’s Island” were filmed.

Scientists there are studying how dolphins and toothed whales hear. In nature, the mammals emit sounds and listen for returning echoes in a sensory behavior known as echolocation. In captivity, scientists taught the creatures to wear suction-cup electrodes, which revealed the patterns of brainwaves involved in hearing.

The discovery came in steps. First, Dr. Nachtigall and his team found the animals could adjust their hearing in response to their own sounds of echolocation, mainly sharp clicks. The scientists then wondered if the animals could also protect their ears from incoming blasts.

The team focused on a false killer whale named Kina and sought to teach her a conditioned behavior similar to how Pavlov taught dogs to salivate upon hearing a bell.

First, the scientists played a gentle tone repeatedly. Then they followed the gentle pulse with a loud sound. After a few trials, the warning signal alone caused Kina to decrease the sensitivity of her hearing.

“It shows promise as a way to mitigate the effects of loud sounds,” said Dr. Nachtigall, founding director of the Marine Mammal Research Program at the University of Hawaii. “People are generally very excited about it.”

In May, Dr. Nachtigall and his colleagues presented the findings to acoustic scientists and groups meeting in Hong Kong, including the Acoustical Society of America. The team cited the protective deafening as a potential way to help sea mammals cope with noisy blasts from naval sonars, civilian air guns and other equipment.

In the future, the team plans to expand the research to other species in captivity and ultimately to animals in the wild. “We have a problem in the world,” Dr. Nachtigall said of the oceanic roar. “And we think the animals can learn this response very rapidly.”

Scientists unconnected to the mammal research called it important. “It’s a big deal,” said Vincent M. Janik, a prominent marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In an e-mail, he said it revealed a rare ability among the planet’s creatures.

Carl Safina, president of the Blue Ocean Institute, a conservation group in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., called the discovery a potential window into what sea mammals may already do on some occasions to protect their hearing.

“I’ve sometimes wondered why these high intensity sounds don’t cause problems all the time,” he said in an interview. “Maybe it’s that, once the animals hear something very loud, they can adjust their hearing — dial it down and protect themselves.”

Scientists say the extraordinary hearing of sea mammals evolved to compensate for poor visibility beneath the waves and to take advantage of the unique qualities of seawater. Sound travels five times faster than in air and undergoes far less diminishment.

The heads of whales and dolphins are mazes of resonant chambers and acoustic lenses that give the animals not only extraordinary hearing but complex voices. The distinctive songs of humpback whales appear to be sung exclusively by males seeking mates.

In recent decades, scientists have linked the human cacophony to reductions in mammalian vocalization, which suggests declines in foraging and breeding. And the problem is poised to get worse: In May, the Navy disclosed draft environmental impact statements (Atlantic and Pacific operations) that said planned expansions could raise the annual hearing losses among sea mammals to more than one million.

Zak Smith, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, recently called the new estimates “staggering.”

A question of science, Dr. Nachtigall said, is whether the levels of protective deafening found in Kina can be increased. The team plans to study the auditory response in such species as bottlenose dolphins and beluga whales before trying it on wild populations.

The big political hurdle is financing, he said. Federal support for the sea mammal research has declined in recent years, and industry is only starting to show interest in the finding.

“I’m pulling in money where I can,” he remarked. Dr. Nachtigall said the research was costly because sea mammals need high levels of care.

But he called it revealing and rewarding. “When it comes to whales and sound,” Dr. Nachtigall said, “we’re just starting to understand.”

850. Origins of Modern Humans: A Conversation with Chris Stringer

Paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer 

By John Noble Wilford, The New York Times, July 17, 2012

Who are we, and where did we come from? Scientists studying the origin of modern humans, Homo sapiens, keep reaching deeper in time to answer those questions — toward the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, then forward to the emergence of people more and more like us in body and behavior.

Their research is advancing on three fronts. Fossils of skulls and bones expose anatomical changes. Genetics reveals the timing and place of the Eve of modern humans.

And archaeology turns up ancient artifacts reflecting abstract and creative thought, and a growing self-awareness. Just last month, researchers made the startling announcement that Stone Age paintings in Spanish caves were much older than previously thought, from a time when Neanderthals were still alive.

To help make sense of this cascade of new information, a leading authority on modern human evolution — the British paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer — recently sat for an interview in New York that ranged across many recent developments: the evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens; the puzzling extinct species of little people nicknamed the hobbits; and the implications of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinkie finger found in a Siberian cave.

Dr. Stringer, an animated man of 64, is an anthropologist at the Natural History Museum in London and a fellow of the Royal Society. But he belies the image of a don: He showed up for our interview wearing a T-shirt and jeans, looking as if he had just come in from the field.

A condensed and edited version of our conversation follows. In it and in a new book, he describes a new wrinkle to the hypothesis of a recent African origin of modern Homo sapiens. His ideas may light up more debate in a contentious science.

First of all, would you explain the title of your new book?

Yes, the title is “Lone Survivors: How We Came to Be the Only Humans on Earth.” And this comes from the fact that if we went back 100,000 years, which is very recent, geologically speaking, there might have been as many as six different kinds of humans on the earth. All those other kinds have disappeared, and left us as the sole survivors.

You wrote that in 1970, when you started doing research in this field, the origin of modern humans was hardly recognized as a topic worthy of study in science. What has changed since then?

It’s been a fantastic time to be involved in the field, and even when I was writing this book in the last two years, I had to regularly go back and rewrite things I thought I’d finished with, because new developments were coming up all the time. In 1970, for some people, there was no single origin of modern humans: We evolved globally, all over the world. There was a view that in the different regions an earlier species, Homo erectus, evolved relatively seamlessly to modern humans. This idea was known as multiregionalism.

The argument went that we remained one species throughout that evolutionary process, because there was interbreeding among the different populations. It meant that the Neanderthals in Europe, for example, would be the ancestors of modern Europeans; Homo erectus in China would be the ancestor of modern Asians. And Java Man would be a distant ancestor of modern Australian aboriginal populations.

What we have seen since then is a growth in the fossil record, in our ability to date that record and to CT-scan fossils and get minute details out of them. DNA studies have had a huge impact on our field. We now have the genomes of Neanderthals and of these strange people in Siberia called the Denisovans.

Speaking of DNA, what about the African Eve? This established an approximate date for the genetic origin of modern humans, in Africa. As a leading advocate of the recent African origin, in contrast to the multiregional model, did you believe this settled the debate?

To be honest, it’s not been totally resolved, but the Mitochondrial Eve publication of 1987 was a key moment. Up to then, a few of us were arguing for a recent African origin from the fossil and archaeological evidence. But the evidence was pretty skimpy, and the majority opinion was against our view.

When this new genetic technique appeared, it seemed to give clarity to the picture. Here was an independent bit of data, from our mitochondrial DNA, inherited through females, suggesting we originated, all of us, all over the world, from a single ancestral population that lived in Africa maybe 200,000 years ago.

I came to this conclusion gradually, starting with the Neanderthals. They were the best-known ancient humans, and there was a view that they were our ancestors. I tested that model in my Ph.D. research, and I concluded the Neanderthals did not make good ancestors of modern humans, even in Europe, where we had the best data. So gradually my search moved from one region to another, to see where the evidence best fitted the idea of our origins.

It turned out that Africa was the place that had the oldest fossils of modern humans. Africa, for me, was the only place that showed a transition from archaic to modern humans.

In your book you propose that there was not one place in Africa where modern humans originated.

Earlier, influenced by the mitochondrial DNA data, I felt there was one place in Africa, a sort of garden of Eden, where we evolved, where we changed behaviorally and physically to become modern humans.

But the story is much more complicated. Even the DNA data show that essentially each of our genes has a separate evolutionary history. And so, when you look at the total picture, including the fossil data and archaeological data, there is no single spot in Africa that seems to be the place for our origins genetically.

The story is dominated by East Africa, because that’s the area that has the best preservation of the fossil record. You could say southern Africa is giving scientists the best record of behavioral evolution. They are finding evidence pretty early of processing marine resources, the use of red ocher for symbolic purposes, self-adornment with shell beads.

In my view, different parts of Africa were important at different times, to distinct human species, and this was being controlled by the climate. Africa is a huge place influenced by many different factors: the Mediterranean, the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, the Southern Ocean, the monsoons coming off the Indian Ocean. At different times this would have produced good areas for humans and bad areas.

Populations in different areas would have flourished briefly, developed new ideas, and then maybe those populations could have died out, even — but not before exchanging genes, tools and behavioral strategies. This kept happening until we get to within the last 100,000 years, and then finally we start to see the modern pattern behaviorally and physically coalescing from these different regions to become what we call modern humans by about 60,000 years ago.

Previously, the splendid cave art of Europe influenced the view that modern behavior began there some 40,000 years ago. How firm is the new interpretation that Homo sapiens developed modern behavior as well as modern anatomy in Africa?

There were remarkable things happening in Europe at least 40,000 years ago, with the painted caves, with flutes, with the statuettes and so on. But the seeds of that revolution were sown in Africa more than 100,000 years ago. I would argue that when modern humans came out of Africa, say 60,000 years ago, fundamentally they were behaviorally modern. They took that into Europe. They took that into Asia and into Australia. So there was no single revolutionary event in Europe; this was something that was in modern humans when they came out of Africa, and the ones who stayed behind as well.

How does the discovery in Indonesia, on the island of Flores, fit in with current thinking about human migrations and lineage? Are the so-called hobbits really members of our genus Homo?

The hobbit, Homo floresiensis, is a really challenging find for everyone. There’s still a minority of scientists who don’t accept that it is a distinct human species; it’s some kind of a weird, maybe diseased form of modern human. But I think it is a genuine distinct form, and actually a very primitive form.

It’s either derived from a very primitive form of Homo erectus, maybe similar to the ones at Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia, or it’s evidence of an earlier Africa exit, maybe before two million years ago, by something that’s pre-erectus that somehow got all the way over to the Far East and survived there in isolation, evolving for more than a million years. It’s an extraordinary story, if that’s true. And again, further evidence of how little we know about much of Asia in terms of this story.

The more you learn, the more fascinating the subject becomes.

Absolutely, and that’s how I found it right through my career.

In your earlier career, you concentrated on Neanderthals. Do you now accept the new evidence of Neanderthal-Homo sapiens interbreeding, which seems to establish that we are more than 2 percent Neanderthal?

This is one of the remarkable bits of news of the last couple of years. We’ve had the genomes of Neanderthals reconstructed, and yes, indeed, it shows that people outside of Africa have, on average, about 2.5 percent of an input of Neanderthal DNA in them. And, of course, it’s led to a rethinking of our relationship with them; clearly there was viable interbreeding.

We don’t know the circumstances. Maybe a parsimonious view is that there was a single interbreeding period when modern humans came out of Africa. They met some Neanderthals in the Middle East. There was some interbreeding, under circumstances we don’t know yet, and that input of Neanderthal DNA was then transferred as those populations spread to Europe and to China, down to New Guinea, into the Americas; they took that bit of Neanderthal with them.

Archaeologists have found evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens occupied the same caves in Israel. Could this have been an interbreeding contact?

Western Asia becomes a critical area for this possibility of interbreeding. It could have been 25 Neanderthals mixing with 1,000 modern humans. It doesn’t have to be a lot of Neanderthals, but clearly there might have been interbreeding somewhere like Israel or Lebanon or Syria — all possible places where we know Neanderthals lived, and at times modern humans also lived.

There’s also a view that the interbreeding was more widespread, but that either cultural or physiological factors limited the successful births. For example, we know that the pelvic shape of Neanderthal females is different from the pelvic shape of modern human females. If a modern human female was giving birth to a hybrid baby, part Neanderthal, could there have been obstetric problems? We don’t know the circumstances of these encounters: if it was a peaceful mixing and merging of these people, or if the circumstances were violent.

Just who were the Denisovans?

It’s an extraordinary discovery. Two or three years ago I vaguely knew there was an archaeological site in Siberia called Denisova Cave. And then a few teeth, a finger bone have produced a really high-quality genome now that’s posted on the Web site of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Leipzig, Germany. The preservation of the DNA is exceptional, and well beyond anything we have from Neanderthals. It seems these Denisovans were related to the Neanderthals, an early branch off the Neanderthal line.

We know a lot about the Denisovans genetically, but physically we know very little about them. These fossils are so fragmentary. The even more remarkable thing is they are only known from one site in Siberia, and their DNA turns up in people only in really one region today — not in Siberia, or Asia, but down in Australia and New Guinea. That’s extraordinary.

This is difficult to explain, because we thought that the ancestors of the Australian Aborigines and New Guineans must have got to their regions through southern Asia. Somewhere in Southeast Asia is the most likely place they would have had interbreeding with the Denisovans. That also implies the Denisovans were not just in Siberia; they must have been a widespread group.

This raises one more question: Could we ever clone these extinct people?

Science is moving on so fast. The first bit of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA was recovered in 1997. No one then could have believed that 10 years later we might have most of the genome. And a few years after that, we’d have whole Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes available. So no one would have thought cloning was a possibility. Now, at least theoretically, if someone had enough money, and I’d say stupidity, to do it, you could cut and paste those Denisovan mutations into a modern human genome, and then implant that into an egg and then grow a Denisovan.

I think it would be completely unethical to do anything like that, but unfortunately someone with enough money, and vanity and arrogance, might attempt it one day. These creatures lived in the past in their own environments, in their own social groups. Bringing isolated individuals back, for our own curiosity or arrogant purposes, would be completely wrong.

In the introduction to your book, you list the kinds of questions you’re always getting from people. One of them will be the closing question: What is the future of human evolution?

That’s a tough one to answer. There’s a lot of data, not my research, but mainly geneticists have been working on this, and they’ve showed just how many genetic changes there have been in the last few thousand years in the human genome. And this is because we’ve undergone great changes with urbanization, with agriculture, very big changes in lifestyles. And this has influenced our genetic makeup as much as living in the Paleolithic had done. We’ve seen, if anything, an acceleration of genetic changes in humans due to these lifestyle changes. So, I think human evolution has been going on quite rapidly recently, and it’s going to carry on.

Not everyone agrees. My colleague in London, Steve Jones, has argued essentially that evolution has stopped in humans because we are in control of it. We have medical care. Nearly everyone reaches reproductive age. Everyone has enough food and water. So natural selection has been nullified in humans. I disagree with him because, of course, there are still a lot of people in the world who don’t have the best medical care, who don’t have enough food and water. Think of the impact of AIDS in Africa.

So selection is still operating on many human populations just as much as it ever has done, really. Also, all of us probably have 50 mutations in our DNA compared with our parents. So that’s going on every generation as well. We are still evolving. We will continue to evolve.

849.Studies Rebut Finding That Arsenic May Support Life

How science works.

By The Associated Press, The New York Times, July 9, 2012


It was a provocative finding. Strange bacteria in a California lake thrived on something completely unexpected: arsenic. What it suggested was that a very different kind of life could exist — possibly on some other planet.

The research, supported by NASA and published by the journal Science in 2010, led to widespread speculation that life might exist elsewhere, along with sharp dissents about the finding.

Now Science has released two papers that it says repudiate the original research. They “clearly show” that the bacteria cannot use arsenic as the researchers claimed, the journal said in an accompanying statement.

The original paper, based on research led by Felisa Wolfe-Simon of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, said bacteria found at Mono Lake in eastern California could grow by substituting arsenic for phosphorus. Phosphorus is considered essential to life; arsenic, while chemically similar, is a poison.

If the bacteria can break the rules like this, the speculation went, who knows what kinds of life may be possible beyond our planet?

But the paper has long been an object of skepticism; last year Science published a number of challenges from other scientists.

For both new papers, scientists did their own tests of the bacteria. One team, led by Rosemary Redfield of the University of British Columbia, reports that arsenic does not contribute to the growth of the bacteria. They suggest that the original results may have been skewed by an undetected contaminant in the arsenic the researchers used.

The other paper, from Swiss researchers, finds the bacteria highly resistant to the poisonous effects of arsenic but still dependent on phosphorus; in the original experiment, trace contamination with phosphorus may have allowed the bacteria to grow.

Dr. Wolfe-Simon, who is now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said she stood by her research.

In an e-mail to The Associated Press, she wrote, “There is nothing in the data of these new papers that contradicts our published data,” and added that her team continued to build on its original finding.

848. Global Warming Makes Heat Waves More Likely, Study Finds

Extreme heat waves such in Texas are due to global warming

By Justin Gillis, The New York Times, July 10, 2012

Some of the weather extremes bedeviling people around the world have become far more likely because of human-induced global warming, researchers reported on Tuesday. Yet they ruled it out as a cause of last year’s devastating floods in Thailand, one of the most striking weather events of recent years.

A new study found that global warming made the severe heat wave that afflicted Texas last year 20 times as likely as it would have been in the 1960s. The extremely warm temperatures in Britain last November were 62 times as likely because of global warming, it said.

The findings, especially the specific numbers attached to some extreme events, represent an increased effort by scientists to respond to a public clamor for information about what is happening to the earth’s climate. Studies seeking to discern any human influence on weather extremes have usually taken years, but in this case, researchers around the world managed to study six events from 2011 and publish the results in six months.

Some of the researchers acknowledged that given the haste of the work, the conclusions must be regarded as tentative.

“This is hot new science,” said Philip W. Mote, director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University, who led the research on the Texas heat wave and drought. “It’s controversial. People are trying different methods of figuring out how much the odds may have shifted because of what we have put into the atmosphere.”

The general conclusion of the new research is that many of the extremes being witnessed worldwide are consistent with what scientists expect on a warming planet. Heat waves, in particular, are probably being worsened by global warming, the scientists said. They also cited an intensification of the water cycle, reflected in an increase in both droughts and heavy downpours.

The study on extreme weather was released along with a broader report on the state of the world’s climate. Both are to be published soon in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The broad report found no surcease of the climate trends that have led to widespread concern about the future.

The Arctic continued to warm more rapidly than the planet as a whole in 2011, scientists reported, and sea ice in the Arctic was at its second-lowest level in the historical record. In 2010, rains were so heavy that the sea level actually dropped as storms moved billions of gallons of water onto land, they said, but by late 2011 the water had returned to the sea, which resumed a relentless long-term rise.

So far this year in the United States, fewer weather disasters seem to be unfolding than in 2011. But it is still turning out to be a remarkable year, with wildfires, floods, storms that knocked out electrical power for millions and sizzling heat waves in March and June.

Globally, the new research makes clear that some of the recent weather damage resulted not from an increased likelihood of extremes, but from changes in human exposure and vulnerability. The 2011 floods in Thailand are a prime example.

An analysis by Dutch and British scientists found that the amount of rain falling in Thailand last year, while heavy, was not particularly unusual by historical standards, and that “climate change cannot be shown to have played any role in this event.”

More important, the researchers said, was rapid development in parts of Thailand. Farm fields have given way to factories in the floodplains of major rivers, helping to set the stage for the disaster.

In the new report, researchers in Oregon and Britain found that natural climate variability played a big role in setting the stage for the heat wave in Texas. The weather in 2011 was heavily influenced by a weather pattern called La Niña, which has effects worldwide, including making drought in the American Southwest more likely.

But even taking that into account, the researchers found, the overall warming of the planet since the 1960s made it about 20 times as likely that such a heat wave would occur in Texas in a La Niña year.

Martin P. Hoerling, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who was not involved in the new study but is conducting his own research on the Texas disaster, agreed that human-induced global warming had probably made the odds of record-setting heat somewhat more likely. But he said his research showed that the rainfall deficits were unrelated to global warming.

He said he was skeptical about several aspects of the new paper, including the claim of a 20-fold increase in likelihood.

More broadly, he said he was worried that the newly published studies had been done so hastily that the conclusions may not stand the test of time. “We need to think carefully about what kind of questions we can credibly pursue with this sort of rapid turnaround,” Dr. Hoerling said.

847. What Does the Discovery of the Higgs Boson Tell Us About Our Place in the Universe?

By Lawrence M. Krause, The New York Times, July 9, 2012  

A computer-generated image shows a typical proton collision
of the kind that produced evidence of a particle thought to be the Higgs boson.

ASPEN, Colo. — Last week, physicists around the world were glued to computers at very odd hours (I was at a 1 a.m. physics “party” here with a large projection screen and dozens of colleagues) to watch live as scientists at the Large Hadron Collider, outside Geneva, announced that they had apparently found one of the most important missing pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that is nature.

Podcast: Science Times

The “Higgs particle,” proposed almost 50 years ago to allow for consistency between theoretical predictions and experimental observations in elementary particle physics, appears to have been discovered — even as the detailed nature of the discovery allows room for even more exotic revelations that may be just around the corner.

It is natural for those not deeply involved in the half-century quest for the Higgs to ask why they should care about this seemingly esoteric discovery. There are three reasons.

First, it caps one of the most remarkable intellectual adventures in human history — one that anyone interested in the progress of knowledge should at least be aware of.

Second, it makes even more remarkable the precarious accident that allowed our existence to form from nothing — further proof that the universe of our senses is just the tip of a vast, largely hidden cosmic iceberg.

And finally, the effort to uncover this tiny particle represents the very best of what the process of science can offer to modern civilization.

If one is a theoretical physicist working on some idea late at night or at a blackboard with colleagues over coffee one afternoon, it is almost terrifying to imagine that something that you cook up in your mind might actually be real. It’s like staring at a large jar and being asked to guess the number of jelly beans inside; if you guess right, it seems too good to be true.

The prediction of the Higgs particle accompanied a remarkable revolution that completely changed our understanding of particle physics in the latter part of the 20th century.

Just 50 years ago, in spite of the great advances of physics in the previous half century, we understood only one of the four fundamental forces of nature — electromagnetism — as a fully consistent quantum theory. In just one subsequent decade, however, not only had three of the four known forces succumbed to our investigations, but a new elegant unity of nature had been uncovered.

It was found that all of the known forces could be described using a single mathematical framework — and that two of the forces, electromagnetism and the weak force (which governs the nuclear reactions that power the sun), were actually different manifestations of a single underlying theory.

How could two such different forces be related? After all, the photon, the particle that conveys electromagnetism, has no mass, while the particles that convey the weak force are very massive — almost 100 times as heavy as the particles that make up atomic nuclei, a fact that explains why the weak force is weak.

What the British physicist Peter Higgs and several others showed is that if there exists an otherwise invisible background field permeating all of space, then the particles that convey some force like electromagnetism can interact with this field and effectively encounter resistance to their motion and slow down, like a swimmer moving through molasses.

As a result, these particles can behave as if they are heavy, as if they have a mass. The physicist Steven Weinberg later applied this idea to a model of the weak and electromagnetic forces previously proposed by Sheldon L. Glashow, and everything fit together.

This idea can be extended to the rest of particles in nature, including the protons and neutrons and electrons that make up the atoms in our bodies. If some particle interacts more strongly with this background field, it ends up acting heavier. If it interacts more weakly, it acts lighter. If it doesn’t interact at all, like the photon, it remains massless.

If anything sounds too good to be true, this is it. The miracle of mass — indeed of our very existence, because if not for the Higgs, there would be no stars, no planets and no people — is possible because of some otherwise hidden background field whose only purpose seems to be to allow the world to look the way it does.

Dr. Glashow, who along with Dr. Weinberg won a Nobel Prize in Physics, later once referred to this “Higgs field” as the “toilet” of modern physics because that’s where all the ugly details that allow the marvelous beauty of the physical world are hidden.

But relying on invisible miracles is the stuff of religion, not science. To ascertain whether this remarkable accident was real, physicists relied on another facet of the quantum world.

Associated with every background field is a particle, and if you pick a point in space and hit it hard enough, you may whack out real particles. The trick is hitting it hard enough over a small enough volume.

And that’s the rub. After 50 years of trying, including a failed attempt in this country to build an accelerator to test these ideas, no sign of the Higgs had appeared. In fact, I was betting against it, since a career in theoretical physics has taught me that nature usually has a far richer imagination than we do.

Until last week.

Every second at the Large Hadron Collider, enough data is generated to fill more than 1,000 one-terabyte hard drives — more than the information in all the world’s libraries. The logistics of filtering and analyzing the data to find the Higgs particle peeking out under a mountain of noise, not to mention running the most complex machine humans have ever built, is itself a triumph of technology and computational wizardry of unprecedented magnitude.

The physicist Victor F. Weisskopf — the colorful director in the early 1960s of CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, which operates the collider — once described large particle accelerators as the gothic cathedrals of our time. Like those beautiful remnants of antiquity, accelerators require the cutting edge of technology, they take decades or more to build, and they require the concerted efforts of thousands of craftsmen and women. At CERN, each of the mammoth detectors used to study collisions requires the work of thousands of physicists, from scores of countries, speaking several dozen languages.

Most significantly perhaps, cathedrals and colliders are both works of incomparable grandeur that celebrate the beauty of being alive.

The apparent discovery of the Higgs may not result in a better toaster or a faster car. But it provides a remarkable celebration of the human mind’s capacity to uncover nature’s secrets, and of the technology we have built to control them. Hidden in what seems like empty space — indeed, like nothing, which is getting more interesting all the time — are the very elements that allow for our existence.

By demonstrating that, last week’s discovery will change our view of ourselves and our place in the universe. Surely that is the hallmark of great music, great literature, great art ...and great science.

Lawrence M. Krauss, the director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, is the author, most recently, of “A Universe From Nothing.”

846. Cuban Authorities Try to Stamp Out Rare Outbreak of Cholera

By Associated Press, The Washington Post, July 9, 2012

HAVANA — Authorities in eastern Cuba are in full prevention mode to contain a rare cholera outbreak amid fears that it may have spread to the capital, distributing chlorine and water purification drops and quarantining hospital patients with diarrhea until they are checked for the disease.

In the eastern city of Manzanillo, in Granma province, cars crawl through the streets with loudspeakers reminding people of the importance of good hygiene, and the sale of oysters at private kiosks has been suspended, according to several residents interviewed by The Associated Press. But there has been no travel quarantine on the city, and the streets are calm even if some people are jittery.

“I haven’t seen any panic or anything like that,” David Chavez, a 40-year-old computer worker, said by phone from Manzanillo, 430 miles (700 kilometers) east of Havana. “But what’s certain is that there are some who are scared. And when somebody gets diarrhea, they immediately go to the hospital.”

The precautions follow last week’s announcement of three deaths and 53 diagnosed cases of the waterborne disease, which hadn’t been seen in Cuba for many years. Cholera can kill quickly through dehydration but is easily treatable if caught in time. A Health Ministry bulletin said the outbreak was under control.

The government has not responded to requests for comment on reports that several cases have been found in Havana, nor has it followed up last week’s announcement with more information, fueling rumors and contradictory stories.

Residents of the capital’s El Cerro neighborhood told the AP that a father and daughter had been diagnosed with cholera and were being treated at a local hospital, but it was not clear where they had contracted the disease. The residents spoke on condition of anonymity for fear they would get into trouble for talking to international journalists.

The BBC reported over the weekend that at least one case of cholera had been detected in Havana, without naming its sources. The Miami Herald, quoting an apparent dissident who lives in Granma province, said more than 1,000 people had been sickened. And exile blogs such as Cafe Fuerte have reported additional deaths, citing residents and unnamed officials.

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a staunch anti-Castro congresswoman from Florida, accused the Cuban government of withholding information to avoid scaring away tourists.

Amid the uncertainty, there were also reports that airports in southeastern Mexico had issued a medical alert and were screening passengers from Cuba. But Mexican officials denied that.

“There has not been even a single passenger suspected” of carrying cholera, said Luis Vazquez, spokesman for the Yucatan state health agency. “Cuba is a country with a very good epidemiological system. They don’t even let (sick) passengers leave.”

Cuba has a well-organized civil defense system capable of rapidly mobilizing government agencies and citizens’ groups, as it does for tropical storms and hurricanes. Brigades of workers routinely scrutinize every dwelling and other property to eliminate standing water where mosquitos bearing another tropical disease, dengue, could breed.

The country also has battalions of well-trained doctors and nurses, many of whom played a key role in fighting a much deadlier cholera outbreak in nearby Haiti after that country’s devastating earthquake.

The Manzanillo outbreak happened in poor outlying neighborhoods that rely on wells for their water. Cuba’s Health Ministry said in its announcement last week that it was collecting samples from the wells, sealing off tainted water supplies and disinfecting hydraulic systems.

Doctors were going door to door to look for people running a fever and to advise residents about preventive measures such as using chlorine drops to disinfect drinking water.

Hotels in Manzanillo were accepting guests as usual, but have ramped up hygienic measures. At the Guacanayabo Hotel everyone was washing their hands and feet in buckets with chlorinated water and the pool was being treated daily.

“There are meetings every day at noon to go over how everything’s going, and so far there are no problems here,” hotel worker Luleima Ortiz said by phone.

Some people in Havana were also taking precautions.

One man, a barber, said he was washing his hands more often, avoiding touching his mouth at work and boiling his drinking water.

Another, a street vendor, got rid of the cardboard box he had used to hold his sweet pastries, replacing it with a plastic one that’s easier to keep clean and does a better job keeping the flies away.

“I, as a vendor, must protect and take care of others,” Alfredo Bruceta said.

845. Lynne Stewart: Bittersweet Week and the Future

By Lynne Stewart, Justice for Lyne Stewart, July 2, 2012

Lynne Stewart

The past week has confronted me with changes both bitter and sweet and I want to share with all of you my outlook.  On the “sweet” side (because as progressive leftists, we always try to assuage the bitter !) the best  and most important news is that I have had my long awaited surgery, more problematic than the Doctor expected, spent a few days in hospital in Fort Worth and at Carswell prison and am in a slow recovery back in my unit.  I have been given a walker to insure that I don’t have a fall as the operation left me anemic and I sometimes am a little dizzy and weak…BUT THE GREAT THING IS THAT I AM CURED AND AM FUNCTIONING NORMALLY, with a rebuilt bladder and an absence of discomfort from a distended uterus.  (I know that this is more information than many of you want — my male supporters particularly !!!)  I feel better and stronger every day and am, of course, determined to deal with healing naturally.  I am not here to praise the great care I received ( still had my feet shackled, belly chained and cuffed ; no contact with anyone who might be  worrying about me etc. from the Bureau of Prisons(I can tell plenty of horror stories about the care of the women in here) but I have come through and am ready to soon resume STRUGGLE.  Ralph paid me an unscheduled visit this weekend gave me a real boost and will be more than happy to report further on this positive health development !!!

THAT SAID,  the bitter occurrence was of course, the snide and unsubstantiated  opinion of the Second Circuit (posted on my website) denying any relief from the draconian sentence change imposed the second time around.  A blow, but not mortal.  We will do an appeal to all of the Judges of the Second Circuit sitting en banc, to reverse.   Hopefully and we always hope, those Judges will take a different viewpoint.  In reading the opinion there is a hypocritical view expressed that the first Judge Koeltl sentence and opinion is all wrong but the second sentence and opinion (as orchestrated by their remand) was all right. Will the real decision maker please stand up??   Also, the moral underpinning of their entire prosecution is now more questionable with the newly elected President of Egypt demanding the return of my “terrorist” client Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman.  If he is a hero of the Arab Spring than my aid was a positive thing –yes??? Certainly not the criminal  support the US government gave to the 40 year Dictator Mubarak !!!

In any event, we also go forward after the enbanc to the next “legal” stage of the case…the certiorari petition for my entire case to the United States Supreme Court.  As should be remembered, from that April day in 2002 when Attorney General Ashcroft rode into NY and announced a “significant arrest and indictment”, this is the case that has the Bill of Rights affronted on almost every issue. As my colleague and brother, Attorney Michael Smith said to me then; there are First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth Amendment violation and that’s just for starters.  We are going to confront the Government and the Supremes and hopefully raise the awareness of the legal and the community at large to the terrible infringements and danger to all if my case is not reversed. Back Now to the fundamentals and as Ralph says—-”We’ve got them right where we want them”!!  We fight on.

In closing I have to say that any weakness in my body should not be mistaken for a weakness in my spirit or will.  When I signed on for this struggle back in 1962,to rescue my country and all its people from the powers that would ruin, twist and destroy  us all, it wasn’t for a week or a day but always–until we win.  I welcome your support and love.