Is the danger of global warming really the heat?

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Crop scientists in the United States, the world's largest food exporter, are pondering an odd question: could the danger of global warming really be the heat?

For years, as scientists have assembled data on climate change and pointed with concern at melting glaciers and other visible changes in the life-giving water cycle, the impact on seasonal rains and irrigation has worried crop watchers most.

What would breadbaskets like the Midwest, the Central Asian steppes, the north China Plain or Argentine and Brazilian crop lands be like without normal rains or water tables?

Those were seen as longer-term issues of climate change.

But scientists now wonder if a more immediate issue is an unusual rise in day-time and, especially, night-time summer temperatures being seen in crop belts around the world.

Interviews with crop researchers at American universities paint the same picture: high temperatures have already shrunken output of many crops and vegetables.

"We don't grow tomatoes in the deep South in the summer. Pollination fails," said Ken Boote, a crop scientist with the University of Florida.

The same goes for snap beans which can no longer be grown in Florida during the summer, he added.

"As temperatures rise we are going to have trouble maintaining the yields of crops that we already have," said Gerald Nelson, an economist with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) who is leading a global project initially funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to identify new crop varieties adapted to climate change.

"When I go around the world, people are much less skeptical, much more concerned about climate change," said David Lobell, a Stanford University agricultural scientist.

Lobell was one of three authors of a much-discussed 2011 climate study of world corn, wheat, soybean and rice yields over the last three decades (1980-2008). It concluded that heat, not rainfall, was affecting yields the most.

"The magnitude of recent temperature trends is larger than those for precipitation in most situations," the study said.

Photo credit: Shutterstock, Dudarev Mikhail

Article continues: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/24/us-climate-crops-idUSTRE79N07420111024

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Snuffing Out Snakehead By Putting It On The Plate

Enlarge John Rorapaugh

A snakehead is filleted for a dinner this week hosted by the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

John Rorapaugh

A snakehead is filleted for a dinner this week hosted by the Oyster Recovery Partnership.

If you can't beat 'em, eat 'em.

That's the rallying cry for conservationists who are recruiting cooks — and their filet knives and frying pans — to the fight against invasive fish species.

The latest target is the snakehead fish, an aggressive animal native to Asia and Africa that has been populating the waterways of Maryland and Florida with frightening speed over the past decade. A predator capable of eating fish as large as perch and bass, the snakehead dominates rivers and lakes once it enters them.

But this week, the snakehead went from aquatic pest to delicacy at a fundraiser for an Annapolis-based environmental organization, the Oyster Recovery Partnership. Nine prominent chefs — including National Geographic Fellow Barton Seaver — grilled, seared, and broiled the pale filets, and then served them to a curious audience.

 

The dressed-up dinner plate strategy has been tried before to eradicate invasive species, or at least contain them. And it's had varying degrees of success.

With some problematic fish, like the Asian carp that has taken over the Mississippi River, it's been difficult to get people to adjust their palates for the environment's sake. And coral reef defenders are still hoping an appetite for lionfish will take hold.

But that may not be a problem with the snakehead. Snakehead is a traditional food in Vietnam and Thailand, among other places. And John Rorapaugh, the vice president for sustainable initiatives at ProFish, a seafood supplier based in Washington, D.C., describes the fish as "very clean tasting, mild, and just a great, great delicacy."

In the past, Maryland's Department of Natural Resources, or MDNR, has tried to drain and poison ponds to stop the snakehead from spreading.

But Rorapaugh hopes that convincing commercial fishermen to pursue and market the fish at fish markets will be more effective. The biggest challenge is catching it since it typically doesn't congregate in large schools.

Promoting this particular fish as a food source is an ironic choice of eradication strategies because, "unfortunately, that's probably how they got here to begin with," Donald Cosden of MDNR tells The Salt. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service concurs, listing the probable cause of the snakehead's establishment in the U.S. as "individuals releasing these fish to establish a local food source."

While Rorapaugh hopes to see snakehead filets for sale in local grocery stores, he says there are no plans to set up a real fishery. "I would be very happy to sell, sell, sell, sell, and then have no more to sell," he says. In the meantime, he says, recreational anglers can help out by seeking out the fish in rivers like the Potomac, where the snakehead has set up shop.

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Feds Asked Polar Bear Researcher To Take Polygraph

Enlarge Steve Amstrup/U.S Fish and Wild Life Service/AP

A researcher who wrote a famous report about dead polar bears was asked to take a polygraph test by a federal agent who has been investigating allegations of scientific misconduct. Above, a polar bear rests with her cubs on pack ice in the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska.

Steve Amstrup/U.S Fish and Wild Life Service/AP

A researcher who wrote a famous report about dead polar bears was asked to take a polygraph test by a federal agent who has been investigating allegations of scientific misconduct. Above, a polar bear rests with her cubs on pack ice in the Beaufort Sea in northern Alaska.

A government researcher who wrote a controversial report on dead polar bears was asked to take a polygraph test by a federal agent investigating allegations of scientific misconduct.

That's according to Jeffrey Gleason's lawyer, Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which is providing legal representation to Gleason and Charles Monnett, two researchers with agencies of the Department of the Interior.

In 2006, Monnett and Gleason published a report describing their sightings of apparently drowned polar bears in the Arctic. The report drew public attention to the plight of the bears as the climate changes and ice melts.

Last year, someone at the Department of the Interior alleged that acts of scientific misconduct may have been committed in relation to that report. The department's Office of Inspector General has spent months investigating, and does not typically comment on ongoing investigations.

Some critics of the investigation charge that the scientists were targeted for special attention because of their work's political implications; they say this investigation will have a chilling effect on other researchers.

During a second interview with Gleason on Oct. 26, according to Ruch, a federal agent asked the scientist about an internal routing slip — a slip of paper that various government officials initial after they review a manuscript — that had been attached to a different scientific report. That report was also related to long-term changes in polar bear habitats. It noted that in recent years, bear sightings associated with ice have decreased while sightings associated with land and open water have increased.

Gleason was asked whether he deliberately tried to hide that routing slip from investigators and if he would take a polygraph test, says Ruch, who adds the routing slip was just a third of a page; it was misplaced as Gleason photocopied a variety of documents to provide to investigators, Ruch says.

The routing slip, which Ruch emailed to NPR and posted on his organization's website, shows that officials signed off on this scientific report. One handwritten comment asked: "Are there enough data to make these statements? Was survey protocol the same thru the 26 years? (esp. as regards pol. bears.)"

Ruch says these questions were answered in subsequent correspondence. He says the discussion of that routing slip took up nearly a half-hour of the two-hour interview with Gleason.

"There appears to be kind of a desperate, almost fierce nature to pursue this until they find something," Ruch says, "which is why we think they have seized on this idiotic routing slip issue." He says Gleason wouldn't take a polygraph unless the agent would as well.

He says investigators also charged that just days before Gleason and Monnett made their sightings of apparently drowned polar bears, other researchers also saw dead polar bears floating in the water. But, according to Ruch, scientists said those sightings were neither recorded nor reported.

If that is true, says Ruch, the scientists were unaware of it when they wrote their famous report describing what they called "the first observations of polar bears floating dead offshore."

Investigators also spent considerable time asking why the role of weather was not more emphasized in the scientists' report as a possible contributor to the bears' deaths, Ruch says. "And so you have these criminal investigators asking questions as if they were the journal editors, as to why it was given greater prominence in a certain section in an earlier draft," he says.

Ruch accuses the investigators of taking issues raised during the normal scientific peer-review process and acting as though they constitute evidence of wrongdoing. He has filed a complaint with the department under its new scientific integrity policy, saying these issues should be investigated not by the Office of Inspector General, but by a review performed by other scientists.

The acting inspector general for the Department of the Interior, Mary Kendall, recently said in a letter to a senator that though her office would like to be able to respond to allegations by PEER and other outside entities, it cannot comment until its investigation is complete, because to do so would be unfair to all parties involved.

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New reports question whether scientific evidence against the prime suspect was ready for court.

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Scientific Case Still Open On 2001 Anthrax Attacks

Stephen Engleberg, reporter, anthrax series with McClatchy and PBS Frontline, managing editor, Propublica, New York, N.Y.

Paul Keim, microbiologist and evolutionary biologist, Northern Arizona University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute, Flagstaff, Ariz.

David Relman, professor, medicine and microbiology and immunology, Stanford University, chief, Infectious Diseases, VA Palo Alto Health Care System, Palo Alto, Calif.

Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, the FBI's prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks, died before his trial in an apparent suicide, and the case is now closed. John Dankosky and guests discuss new investigations that question whether scientific evidence against Ivins was conclusive enough to hold up in court.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

JOHN DANKOSKY, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky. Ira Flatow will be back next week. Coming up later this hour, a look at yogurt bacteria and whether they help out your gut. But first, 10 years ago, in September and October of 2001, letters containing anthrax spores showed up in news bureaus and Senate mail rooms.

The spores ended up in postal facilities and mailboxes, killing five people and sickening 17. The investigation of those attacks dragged on for years. Then in 2008, the FBI was prepared to file charges against its number one suspect - Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins - when he took his own life, overdosing on Tylenol.

Last year, the FBI and the Department of Justice closed the case, concluding that the late Dr. Ivins acted alone in executing the anthrax attacks. But how conclusive was the scientific evidence against Dr. Ivins? Several recent investigations, led in part by two of our next guests, have asked that question. And that's what we'll be talking about this hour.

Looking ahead, what have we learned since 2001? Are we better prepared to solve biomedical mysteries like the anthrax case today? You can give us a call. Our number is 1-800-989-8255. That's 1-800-989-TALK. If you're on Twitter, you can tweet us your questions by writing the @ sign followed by scifri. If you want more information on what we'll be talking about this hour, you can go to our website at www.sciencefriday.com, where you will find links to our topic.

Now let me introduce our guests. Stephen Engleberg is a managing editor at ProPublica here in New York and a reporter on ProPublica's anthrax series with McClatchy and PBS Frontline. He joins us in our New York studios. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

STEPHEN ENGLEBERG: Thank you.

DANKOSKY: Paul Keim is a microbiologist and evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University and at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff, Arizona. He joins us from KNAU. Welcome to the show, Dr. Keim.

PAUL KEIM: Thanks, John, I'm glad to be here.

DANKOSKY: And David Relman is professor of medicine and microbiology and immunology at Stanford. He's also chief of infectious diseases at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto. He joins us today from WYPR in Baltimore. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Relman.

DAVID RELMAN: Thank you very much.

DANKOSKY: I want to start with you, Paul Keim. Maybe you can set the scene for us. Your lab was called upon to do some scientific work for the anthrax investigation. What was your role?

KEIM: So my lab is an evolutionary genetics laboratory, and we'd been working on how bacillus anthraces, you know, or anthrax as it's commonly called, evolved and spread around the world. It's an extremely biological entity. It grows very slowly in some ways, and it changes in evolutionary time very slowly, and so it was a challenge that we wanted to tackle.

And so that's what we did is we went into the genome, tried to identify rapidly evolving regions that we could focus in on. This was in the mid-'90s and well before we could sequence all genomes. And what we were able to do, then, is reconstruct the evolutionary pathway for anthrax on a global scale.

So what happened then was in October of 2001, we received a call from the FBI and said, you know, there's this unusual case, can you help us out. And so we said sure. And so they threw the first culture on an airplane, a jet out of Atlanta and flew it into Flagstaff. And we worked all night and came back and said this looks like the laboratory strain that we call the Ames strain, which to us was really the first piece of evidence that this is a bioterrorism event and not just a natural case of anthrax because that particular strain is very rare in nature.

So that was really our role is in the strain identification and continuing to screen samples from the crime scene, helping to understand what was a part of the crime scene, and wasn't - there were natural cases of anthrax going on at that same time. And it was real quick, using our DNA technologies, to say this is not the same as what was seen in the letters, and so leave it alone, or turn it over to public health officials.

DANKOSKY: Stephen Engleberg, maybe we can pick it up from there. Your investigation at ProPublica takes a look at the way the anthrax case was handled. Maybe you can talk a bit about some of the findings in your stories and also a little bit of what Paul Keim and others were doing.

ENGLEBERG: Well, sure. I'd like to just remind your listeners that the case kind of proceeded in two halves. It began, and for several years focused, on a government scientist by the name of Dr. Stephen Hatfill, who the FBI released significant portions of it, which were persuaded was the perpetrator.

And there were some interesting things in his background that made them suspicious, and eventually they even searched his house and his lab. They emptied an entire pond. They had anthrax-sniffing dogs barking when they walked by him. So there was some evidence there.

But ultimately, the case against Hatfield fizzled out. In fact, he ultimately sued the government and won a $5.8 million settlement. They then focused on Dr. Ivins. At this point, you're looking for a needle in a haystack. You're looking for somebody who sent letters. There are literally hundreds of people who have access to the strain of bacteria that Dr. Keim has mentioned, the Ames strain.

And so the question was how to narrow that, and ultimately the FBI focused on him because of a series of circumstantial things. They were never able to find specific forensic evidence. What our investigation did is looked at some of those things and looked at some of the science, and we found things to question.

DANKOSKY: And just to be clear, some of the circumstantial things had to do with his personality, his behaviors, having nothing to do with science at all.

ENGLEBERG: Yes, and, you know, it would be fair to say that when you get to know the personality of Dr. Ivins, which was largely hidden from his colleagues, that he was not the perfect guy you'd want to have handling deadly germs. He had severe psychological problems. He was obsessed with a sorority, a particularly sorority. He took late-night drives. He did a number of things that would make any reasonable person suspicious.

DANKOSKY: Dr. Relman, you were vice-chair of the National Academy's panel that investigated how scientific evidence was handled in the anthrax case. What was that panel's conclusion? And was the scientific evidence against Ivins as thorough or conclusive as has been described by the FBI?

RELMAN: Well, first of all, we were asked to look at the scientific data and the conclusions that were drawn from it. We were not asked to comment upon or assess the probative value of the scientific data.

Our conclusion, our bottom line, was that the evidence linking the material in the letters to the material in the flask that happened to be found in Bruce Ivins' lab was consistent with an association, a relationship between the two, but was not conclusive or definitive.

DANKOSKY: What was so challenging about this, Paul Keim, this investigation?

KEIM: Well, it was very much a changing landscape from a technology standpoint. You know, during this same period of time, the human genome was completed, and our ability to go in and do comprehensive genome analysis was changing.

And so, you know, the fact that we could do that and that we had pretty much an open checkbook to go out and try new technologies, meant that we did it. And so we were trying to keep up to speed the entire time.

You know, the evidence linking the letter material back to this flask, RMR1029, involved a new level of analysis that none of us had ever done before, and that was to go in and look at individual types within a culture. Previously, everyone had just looked at the culture en mass. And in fact when we did that - and this was done with Claire Fraser and Jacques Ravel at TIGR - when we did that we found that the material in all the cases looked the same. And that's because we were looking at the cells en mass.

And so kind of the breakthrough that led back to that flask involved scientists identifying morphological differences within the culture, subculturing that, and then doing the whole genome analysis on those individual, single-cell-derived colonies, and then taking that back and trying to find a pattern of mutants that were in the letters that was similar to the pattern that was in the flask.

And so the breakthrough there, is, in fact, we're no longer trying to do genetic analysis on a large number of cells, but we're trying to look inside those cells to see what the composition or the heterogeneity within those cultures would be. Really a new approach to this type of science, and again, one that Dr. Relman just referred to that the committee looked at very closely.

DANKOSKY: So we talk about the investigation into the anthrax attacks of 2001. You can call us at 1-800-989-8255 if you have questions, 1-800-989-TALK. Paul Keim, do you think that you'd be called upon again in the event of a bioterrorism attack? I mean, would you get a call like this if this same sort of thing happened today?

KEIM: It would be a little different type of call. I think there was a level of desperation in the FBI's voice when they were calling me back in 2001. At that time, the government didn't have the capability to handle dangerous pathogens like this. They didn't have the linkage between handling dangerous pathogens and genomics.

And my laboratory had that, because we'd been studying the evolutionary patterns of this select agent, bacillus anthraces. The government has spent, I assume, billions of dollars building new facilities up at Fort Dietrich. So they now have the capability to not only handle the material, but also do the genomic analysis in-house.

I think what would happen is they would call me, but it would be more for my scientific expertise and insights rather than actually handling and doing the analysis.

DANKOSKY: Stephen Engleberg, from what you've learned, do you think that things have changed substantially as to how an investigation like this would be undertaken?

ENGLEBERG: I think it has, and I'd like to hear from both of your guests a little bit more about this. But my sense from interviewing them and others is that the techniques available today are far, far, far more acute in terms of detecting the very thing we're trying to detect. So Dr. Keim, for example, today, if you were given a sample of anthrax from a letter, an unknown letter, how would you approach it differently, and how much more sure could you be in the result?

KEIM: Well, we would certainly immediately to whole-genome analysis. Again, this is a technology that's approachable. It's cheap. It's not quite as fast as we'd like, but it's getting there. You know, a good model for this is what happened with the German outbreak of E. coli recently, where they began to analyze with traditional methods, and there was some confusion, in fact, before they got the whole genome out.

They, you know, there was this accusation that the Spanish cucumbers, for example, were the source of the outbreak, when ultimately, it came back to some sprout production. And it was the whole genome and the identity of the particular strain involved that was based upon a whole genome analysis that led to very rapid diagnostic tests and eventually led to the sprouts, where they never did culture a live E. coli from. But the DNA technologies were able to point them to - link the sprouts to the clinical cases.

And this all took place in a timeframe of two to three weeks. You know, it took us, you know, what, eight years to get where we were at in the anthrax investigation. And they did that investigation in three weeks. Amazing.

DANKOSKY: We're talking with Paul Keim, a microbiologist and evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University. Stephen Engleberg is also here, managing editor at ProPublica. They've been doing a series on the anthrax investigations with McClatchy and PBS Frontline. David Relman joins us, as well. He's a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Stanford, and he joins us from Baltimore today.

If you want to join our conversation: 1-800-989-8255, 989-TALK. We'll be right back after this short break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. Today, we're talking about the 2001 anthrax attacks and the scientific evidence in that case. My guests today are Stephen Engleberg, managing editor at ProPublica. Paul Keim is here from Northern Arizona University. David Relman is here from Stanford, as well.

We're taking your calls at 1-800-989-8255. And we'll get to those in just a moment. I'm wondering, Dr. Relman: How much of the investigation of Bruce Ivins, the main target of this investigation, how much of this was really based on science, and how much was based on other things?

RELMAN: It's an interesting question. It's one that we really weren't in a position to be able to answer. We were simply asked to look at the science. But, of course, it's a blurry line between what constitutes science done for science's sake in the setting of an investigation, and what is other kinds of investigatory lead and data that bear on the case, as well.

DANKOSKY: Well, how is scientific investigation different than a criminal investigation, for instance?

RELMAN: So there are, of course, similarities, and yet I think one of the differences is that when one goes about science for science's sake, there are certain sort of basic questions that are being asked, hypotheses posed and a plan set out. And as the plan is pursued, new data arise, and new leads become available.

Now, this is similar to science in a criminal case. The difference, I think, is that in the setting of science for science's sake, one can pursue multiple leads at the same time, turn back in time and go off in different directions, whereas in a case there is a certain pressure to get to an answer and bring a case to trial.

So it's a more open-ended procedure in the scientific world, and much more of a directed, deliberate and sort of linear path in the criminal investigation world.

KEIM: And what our investigation found was that as the case was built, they became less and less interested in doing things that might undermine the case. One example, which Dr. Relman's panel pointed to, was at one point, there were environmental samples of anthrax taken from one of the crime scenes, and the prosecutor declined to sequence them.

And, you know, they said, well, it was resources. It was time. But the fact is, there were unlimited resources for this case. My guess - and here it's just a guess - is that they didn't want to ask a question they didn't have the answer to. They were afraid it would show something unexpected. And I think for scientists, that's exactly what you'd want to do, is find something unexpected.

DANKOSKY: Dr. Relman, is it possible that there were key anthrax samples missing from the FBI repository from abroad, maybe from U.S. government labs?

RELMAN: It's possible. I think in any case like this, you're always going to be confronted with the problem of knowing what is the true universe within which one needs to search. We were told of a certain set of samples, and there were a large number that were collected from all over the world. And yet we did become aware, for example, of some environmental samples that were collected overseas which gave inconsistent results in the presence of Ames anthrax.

And these samples, because they didn't yield a cultivated organism, never made their way into the repository, where the more formal, deliberate testing was undertaken. So that's one bit of evidence or one indication that there may have been certain kinds of samples that never really made their way into the final repository.

DANKOSKY: Martin is in Los Angeles. Hi there, Martin. Go ahead. You're on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

MARTIN: Good afternoon. I'm the commander of the homicide bureau of our department, which also encompasses our scientific investigation division. And I can tell you from a law enforcement perspective - I sit on a joint antiterrorist task force here in California, and we are much more concerned with a possible bioterrorism than, let's say, a dirty bomb or something similar to that.

When we started looking into this a little more closely, we were - found that it was pitifully inadequate how these pathogens and agents are controlled just on campuses in our state and people that have access to them on a daily basis. So the probability - simply because of the fact that it's a whole lot easier to get some of these things than it is nuclear components, it put a good chill down our spines.

DANKOSKY: And the security, Stephen Engleberg, you reported on Dr. Ivins' lab - very, very lax.

ENGLEBERG: Yes, now in fairness, it has been significantly tightened since the case of the anthrax letters. But I think your caller's point is well-taken. I did a book 10 years ago with Judith Miller and Bill Broad of the New York Times on this subject, and I was startled, as well, as to how easy it would be to do this.

Now, you know, again, in this case what we're talking about is supposedly is an insider who did it. But you can't rule out other possibilities, because it is that easy.

DANKOSKY: I want to go Mark, who's calling from Oklahoma City. Hi, Mark.

MARK: Yeah, I was kind of following up on that. I saw the "Frontline" episode, and it raised some questions with me, the first one being is my understanding is is there's - when it comes to the highest level of biohazard containment, there's Fort Dietrich and maybe a handful of other places in the U.S., like the CDC. And I was always assuming that there was a high degree of psychological screening required of people allowed to deal with those kinds of pathogens. In which case, how did a guy like Dr. Ivins - who they say is mentally unstable - get access to that kind of facility?

DANKOSKY: Yeah, what can we say about that? What do we know about how you get a security clearance? Dr. Relman?

RELMAN: Well, there is - there has been a fairly extensive procedure in place, and there was one with the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense. It has been reassessed and reevaluated. But I think the bottom line is we can't be absolutely positive that there won't be individuals that harbor instability or other motives that we simply can't detect.

And I think we're going to have to rely upon a sensitized and sort of well-tuned-in, motivated scientific community to speak up when they see things that don't seem right. This is where we need to sort of buy the goodwill of the scientific community and all those who work in this area of science because there is no foolproof method.

DANKOSKY: So we've talked a bit about the circumstantial evidence and some of the science. Dr. Keim, I'll ask you first: Do you think, in the end, that the scientific evidence here was solid enough to go to court to charge Dr. Ivins?

KEIM: Well, I can't tell you whether it was enough to charge Dr. Ivins. I can only speak to the part of the investigation that I worked on, which was, really, the Ames strain. And, you know, for seven years that's all I thought about, was going to court. I have testified in murder trials and other DNA trials before, and so I was aware of the standards that were necessary when you are on the stand.

And for the part of the investigation we were tasked with, we were definitely ready to go to court. We had to change from being an academic laboratory to putting, you know, things in place like evidence tracking, chain of custody. We had highly validated DNA assays. We had - you know, things that you'd do in an academic lab to speed things up just went by the wayside as we started to have double and triple-witnessing of every single procedure.

So I would have gone to court and I would have been able to say quite precisely that this was a strain that came from a laboratory. It was very unlikely that it would have come from nature. You know, and when you move into other types of evidence, the nuance becomes the language that the expert witness uses.

Is this definitive? Is it consistent? I'm highly confident, or I suspect that it's true. In science, we like to deal in probabilities, but frequently, when you get into court, those probabilities have to be translated into a language when you're addressing a jury. And that language doesn't always equate perfectly with a P value, or a probability value, that we would prefer to be using in science.

And doubtlessly, part of the evidence that was being developed was going to be less strong than the evidence that we had. But again, what we were working on was ready for court.

DANKOSKY: Dr. Relman, what do you think? Do you think that there was enough evidence to go to court?

RELMAN: Again, it would be hard for me to say. I think there certainly were data that were suggestive and consistent with a link between the letters and the flask. But, you know, I think we have to step back and really ask: What is it that we expect science to be able to do for us?

I don't think we should be expecting that a scientific experiment is going to reveal a result that points to a person. It may point to a possible source or an evolutionary history or a set of relationships. But, you know, we have a tendency to put science on a pedestal sometimes, and in this case, like many others, we would have to hope that there are other kinds of evidence to bring this case, you know, fully around and point it in the right direction.

KEIM: Just to be clear on that, I mean, what we're talking about is the question of whether or not a particular anthrax culture, the person who made the letters actually took this and grew it somewhere else. It's not taken out of the flask and then dried. So they grew it someplace separately.

Did that person take it from this particular flask? If so, there are well over 200 people who had access to this particular flask. But that's not the end of the story, because this material, this very same material, was in other places. So, for example, to say that one of the research laboratories in Ohio did not contain the perpetrator, the FBI needed to look at those people and ask questions like: Did they have enough time to drive to the Princeton, New Jersey mailbox? And science can't answer that question because it's the same stuff. And so there's no scientific test that can prove to you that it came - that one genetically identical thing came from Ohio or from Fort Detrick, Maryland.

DANKOSKY: Paul Keim, knowing what you know about growing anthrax, do you think that Dr. Ivins had the capability to produce these dry spores, the ones that ended up in the letters in such a high quantity?

KEIM: I'm going to have to decline to answer that. I'm not a spore-production expert, and I, you know, really don't know what Bruce had in his laboratory, and whether it would have been able to do that. That's just beyond my area of expertise. I'm sorry, John.

DANKOSKY: No. I apologize. David Relman, you want to weigh in? I mean, do you think that this is even possible to do what Dr. Ivins had at his disposal?

RELMAN: Well, you know, we actually were never presented with what we had at his disposal. And what there might have been at someone's disposal in 2009 when we began our work could certainly have been something very different than what was at someone's disposal in 2001. So there are a lot of unknowns. And we - and to be honest, we were not presented with a specific scenario, a set of resources and equipment and other reagents, you know, that might have been the, you know, the scenario through which these things were made.

ENGLEBERG: Now, that said, if you interviewed Dr. Ivins' colleagues at Fort Detrick, there are one or two who say he could have done it and a larger number who say he couldn't have done it. And frankly, none of the people speaking are really truly expert in the area of spore cultivation. So having spent some time interviewing people on this, I would say that it's still a difficult question to answer.

DANKOSKY: Paul Keim, one recent anthrax investigation you worked on involved contaminated heroin in Scotland. I'm wondering if you can quickly tell us about that investigation.

KEIM: Yeah. There were a lot of parallels between this recent outbreak of anthrax in Scotland and the anthrax letters. And, of course, we're able to take advantage of our ability to do DNA analysis. But in late 2009 into 2010, there were a series of anthrax cases among drug users in Scotland, and what the investigators quickly tied together was that they were all injecting or smoking heroin. And so this epidemiological leak is very suspicious. And they were able to isolate live Bacillus anthracis, the bacterium, out of the victims, although they never actually got it out of the heroin itself.

So they brought us in, and we worked with the British government and the health protection agencies up in Scotland to try to figure out exactly what type of anthrax was being involved. And like much of science, we're able to disprove things more easily than we're able to prove them, but the things we disproved were pretty important. For example, we very quickly were able to say that this outbreak among the drug users was not associated with the anthrax letters. It was not the aim strain.

Importantly, it was not the British biological weapon strain. The British had actually tested anthrax as a biological weapon in the 1940s and '50s in Scotland, and so the locals were, of course, already pointing fingers at the government and saying this is residual from that biological weapons program. But it wasn't true. It was a very different strain than that. We had a lot of information about anthrax in Afghanistan, as you can imagine, with the terrorist threat coming out of that country.

And that's where heroin in Europe is produced. Ninety percent of all heroin that ends up in the U.K. comes from Afghanistan. And again, we're able to quickly rule that out. Now, we have these really large genetic databases of anthrax. It's kind of like the law enforcement equivalent of Dakota's database that they use for human forensics. So we've developed this over the last 10 years. And when we queried that database with the genetic type that we found in the drug users, it matched up with a smuggling route that snakes its way through the Middle East.

And so we're able to actually tie it to several independent isolates from the Middle East. So the law enforcement officials now believe what happened was that that the heroin was contaminated with anthrax spores as it was being smuggled, possibly, you know, in animal hides or maybe adulterated with some type of animal product.

DANKOSKY: Hang on for one second, doctor. I'm John Dankosky. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

KEIM: So, you know, from a public relations, political and even public health standpoint, this is very important to try to identify a source or, even better, rule out alternate sources. And so, again, this is all based upon research that had been developed during the anthrax letters and methodologies.

DANKOSKY: I want to get to...

RELMAN: You know, it's...

DANKOSKY: Go ahead, Dr. Relman.

RELMAN: I was going to say - this is Dave Relman. Paul Keim has done some incredible work, and this just, again, points to the potential value of having a lot of expertise and understanding of certain organisms. But as we look forward - I think that's an important thing at this point - the next event is not going to look like the last event, and the next event may not involve anthrax. And it may involve an organism that we know less about or that can be cultured less easily or has been engineered by somebody, by the perpetrator.

And we may not have attack material the way we did this past time. And for all of those reasons, I think we have to now sit down and really think about what are the tools and kinds of understandings that we need to develop to be able to address the next time.

DANKOSKY: Well, what do you think we do need, Dr. Relman?

RELMAN: Well, I think the kind of thing that Paul has developed for many other kinds of organism, both the specifics of the population structures of other kinds of threat agents, but also just the tools and the conceptual understanding of how to understand populations and evolution, the kinds of experiments that can teach us more, but also just the technical tools of how one now goes about sampling the environment, making use of very small amounts of material, which is likely what we're going to have in front of us the next time.

DANKOSKY: Stephen Engleberg, quickly, what have you learned about our ability to protect against the next bioterror attack?

ENGLEBERG: Well, I've always felt that there's an overlap between public health and biodefense. And, you know, in this case, I think we learn a lot of things about how to deal quickly with the public health threat that we saw. You know, the movie "Contagion" is actually pretty accurate. One of my favorite lines in it is the question about is it weaponized, some government official asked. And the CDC guy says, no, the birds have weaponized it, and they're doing a heck of a job. And I think that's true in these biological events that you really got to look at your - the fundamentals of your public health system first. And I think it's better today than it was 10 years ago.

DANKOSKY: Stephen Engleberg is the managing editor at ProPublica here in New York, a reporter on ProPublica's anthrax series, done in conjunction with McClatchy and PBS "Frontline." Thank you so much for being here.

ENGLEBERG: Thank you.

DANKOSKY: Thanks also to Paul Keim, a microbiologist and evolutionary biologist at Northern Arizona University and at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff. Paul, thank you for being here.

KEIM: Thanks a lot, John.

DANKOSKY: And Dr. David Relman is a professor of medicine, microbiology and immunology at Stanford. He is also chief of infectious diseases at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto. Thank you all of you for joining us today. Now, after the break, we turn to some friendly microbes, the bugs that live in yogurt. Do they help out your gut? Stay with us.

Copyright © 2011 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.

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In Northwest Town, A Local Fight Against Global Coal

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Plans are underway to develop a coal terminal in Bellingham, Wash.

This is the first of two reports on plans to export U.S. coal to China.

Plans are afoot to build giant new coal terminals on the West Coast to ship this lucrative commodity to China. But activists want to stop this, in part because coal produces huge amounts of carbon dioxide when it's burned. Federal climate policy is silent on this potentially large source of emissions, so the debate is happening at the local level.

One fight is taking place over a proposed terminal near Bellingham, Wash. And if you want to get a sense of what the proposed coal terminal there would be like, visit Westshore Terminals just across the border in Vancouver, B.C.

Trains a mile-and-a-half long rumble into this port, day and night, snaking through a large building. There, the trains roll onto a device that tips the coal cars over, two at a time, with the ease of a 5-year-old playing with a toy train.

Most of the trains haul Canadian coal, but increasingly the trains are arriving from Wyoming and Montana, loaded with coal that will be burned in Asia to make electricity.

It's almost inconceivable that there would be a plan afoot to change this part of the world to a coal export facility. It seems ironic or cruel, or misguided at best.

- Julie Trimingham, community activist

The coal moves from the dumping station up to open conveyor belts. Some of it gets piled up in giant stacks; some gets trundled over to waiting ships. On this day, coal is being poured into a ship bound for Thailand.

Denis Horgan, the vice president and general manager of Westshore Terminals, takes us on a driving tour of the huge artificial island, which was built in the 1970s. We dodge and weave around some construction crews who are upgrading the facility. Right now, coal dust can fly off the open conveyor belts and blow into the sea, but that will eventually be put to an end, Horgan says.

"We've embarked upon a very heavy-duty solution here," he says. "It's about a $5 million solution to contain any dust that might come off."

Even with decades of open conveyors spreading coal dust, there is surprising marine life just offshore. Diving ducks called scoters congregate just offshore, and Horgan points to red floats nearby — markers for crab traps, he says. "There's a lot of salmon out here in the water. You see orcas going by."

The dusty coal piles also need to be managed so they don't simply burst into flames — a phenomenon called spontaneous combustion.

"The best way to deal with spontaneous combustion is to compact the product or turn it over quickly. And that's what we try to do," Horgan says.

At the end of our tour, Horgan asks me to roll up my window so we can drive through the car wash that's right on site. But even after that rinse, coal dust still clings to the van.

Impacts On Bellingham And The World

Coal is a dirty business — the mining, the handling and ultimately the burning. And that is all very much on the minds of people 35 miles across the border in Bellingham, Wash.

Enlarge Brett Beadle for NPR

Steve McMinn and Julie Trimingham, with their son. Trimingham's family has lived in Bellingham for generations, and she now finds herself stepping up as a community activist, opposing the proposed coal-export terminal.

Brett Beadle for NPR

Steve McMinn and Julie Trimingham, with their son. Trimingham's family has lived in Bellingham for generations, and she now finds herself stepping up as a community activist, opposing the proposed coal-export terminal.

Steve McMinn and his wife, Julie Trimingham, are at a child-filled park that's sandwiched between the shoreline and the railroad tracks that run right through town. Trimingham's family goes back generations in Bellingham, and now for the first time she finds herself stepping up as a community activist, opposing a proposed coal-export terminal up the coast at the industrial site of Cherry Point.

She's concerned about impacts on the immediate environment of the terminal, as well as the inevitable increase in train traffic through town.

"There would be a train on the tracks at least once every hour, day and night," she says. "So there's the noise and the pollution. The diesel particulate matter." She wonders what it would mean if emergency vehicles had to wait more often at the crossings. "And we're not sure how the intensified rail usage would affect the businesses on the wrong side of the tracks or close to the tracks."

[Bellingham has] built a reputation over the past few decades as a place that values sustainability. And there are few things that are as anti-sustainability as coal is.

- Dan Pike, Bellingham Mayor

It also just seems wrong for this progressive college town on sparkling Puget Sound. "It's almost inconceivable that there would be a plan afoot to change this part of the world to a coal export facility," Trimingham says. "It seems ironic or cruel, or misguided at best."

And it's not just about quality of life — it's about the future of the planet. But the reality is there's no other way to engage in global environmental issues like coal exports without focusing on the local impacts. After all, it's perfectly legal to dig up coal, transport it thousands of miles by rail and ship, and burn it for electricity. But climate change is pretty far down on the list of concerns they bring up in their community.

"Global warming is an issue most people aren't interested in," McMinn says. "People are interested in their own lives.

So McMinn knows this is where "think global, act local" comes into play. "We both think that the rail corridor is the place to stop it."

Enlarge Brett Beadle for NPR

Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike stands in front of a passing coal train at one of the major parks in downtown Bellingham. The proposed coal port is a big issue politically, and Pike is fully opposed to the port development.

Brett Beadle for NPR

Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike stands in front of a passing coal train at one of the major parks in downtown Bellingham. The proposed coal port is a big issue politically, and Pike is fully opposed to the port development.

Community Values Vs. Economic Benefits

At the moment, the train line through town is usually a minor inconvenience — a throwback to the days when Bellingham was an industrial town. They actually mined coal nearby and shipped it off to power plants.

Mayor Dan Pike meets me at another waterfront park near the tracks. He says he wants his city to move beyond its industrial era, and the coal terminal doesn't fit that new image.

"There are some folks advocating for it because, like a lot of communities, we really could use good jobs," Pike says. "But we've also built a reputation over the past few decades as a place that values sustainability. And there are few things that are as anti-sustainability as coal is."

These days, the Bellingham waterfront is dotted with sailboat marinas. The city is planning to turn 210 acres of old industrial development into a huge waterfront attraction. Pike says having trains rumbling right past is hardly a draw for tourists.

The question is: Will Canada reap the benefits of the jobs and the tax revenues? If we built our facility and we can get the coal to export through Cherry Point, then Whatcom County [Wash.] can generate the jobs and the tax revenues.

- Bob Watters, senior vice president, SSA Marine

"Beyond that, because of our reputation as a place that values sustainability, we've had a lot of businesses that choose to locate here because of that reputation," Pike says. "And things that damage that reputation damage our economic viability as a community."

Pike is pitted against labor unions, which welcome the construction jobs and the few hundred high-paying jobs that would eventually result at the terminal. Proponents also include Peabody Energy, which would mine the coal for export; Warren Buffett, who owns the railway that would carry the coal; and SSA Marine, which runs ports around the world and wants to build this one.

Bob Watters, in the Seattle office of SSA Marine, says the terminal will be much more environmentally sensitive than the one in British Columbia. For one thing, all the conveyor belts will be covered, and the coal piles will be fenced off from the wind.

"We're going to have a buffer over a half a mile that our storage is going to be away from the water," he says.

Besides, he says if the locals do block the terminal — which could also ship bulk commodities other than coal — that wouldn't necessarily stop the train traffic. The rails through Bellingham continue on to the coal terminal in British Columbia, and Westport is considering expanding its facility.

"The question is: Will Canada reap the benefits of the jobs and the tax revenues?" Watters asks. "If we built our facility and we can get the coal to export through Cherry Point, then Whatcom County [Wash.] can generate the jobs and the tax revenues."

The project is now embarking on a multiyear environmental review, and will ultimately be put to a vote of the Whatcom County commissioners.

Part two of this report will look at what a big increase in coal exports could mean for global carbon emissions — and American utility bills.

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Water use growing twice as fast as population!

/wildlife/article/43462

Like oil in the 20th century, water could well be the essential commodity on which the 21st century will turn.

Human beings have depended on access to water since the earliest days of civilization, but with 7 billion people on the planet as of October 31, exponentially expanding urbanization and development are driving demand like never before.

Water use has been growing at more than twice the rate of population increase in the last century, said Kirsty Jenkinson of the World Resources Institute, a Washington think tank.

Water use is predicted to increase by 50 percent between 2007 and 2025 in developing countries and 18 percent in developed ones, with much of the increased use in the poorest countries with more and more people moving from rural areas to cities, Jenkinson said in a telephone interview.

Factor in the expected impacts of climate change this century -- more severe floods, droughts and shifts from past precipitation patterns -- that are likely to hit the poorest people first and worst "and we have a significant challenge on our hands," Jenkinson said.

Will there be enough water for everyone, especially if population continues to rise, as predicted, to 9 billion by mid-century?

"There's a lot of water on Earth, so we probably won't run out," said Rob Renner, executive director of the Colorado-based Water Research Foundation.

"The problem is that 97.5 percent of it is salty and ... of the 2.5 percent that's fresh, two-thirds of that is frozen. So there's not a lot of fresh water to deal with in the world."

Over a billion people lack access to clean drinking water, and over 2 billion live without adequate sanitation, leading to the deaths of 5 million people, mostly children, each year from preventable waterborne disease, Renner said.

Only 8 percent of the planet's fresh water supply goes to domestic use and about 70 percent is used for irrigation and 22 percent in industry, Jenkinson said.

Image credit: , shutterstock.com, Andrea Danti

Article continues: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/25/us-population-water-idUSTRE79O3WO20111025

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To Save Soggy Grapes, Winemaker Looks To Helicopter

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Damp weather in wine country can make for moldy grapes that can't be harvested.

iStockphoto.com

Damp weather in wine country can make for moldy grapes that can't be harvested.

It's been raining for days and the crop you're a week away from harvesting is about to mold. If you don't dry it quickly, you will lose the crop. What do you do?

If you're Bruce Cakebread, you call in a helicopter to be a giant grape dryer.

When rain soaked Napa Valley two weeks ago, Cakebread — the president of Cakebread Cellars in Rutherford, Calif. — used a technique occasionally employed by orange and cherry farmers. It's just the latest example of farmers forced to take drastic measures to salvage crops in the face of extreme weather.

If mold forms on grape clusters, they can't be picked for harvest. Fortunately for the valley's winemakers who got drenched this month, most of the white and red varietals had already been picked, Cakebread tells The Salt. But the Cabernet Sauvignon — a tougher, more resilient varietal — still hung on the vines during the wet weather.

Cakebread's hired helicopter snaked up and down 100 acres of vineyard about 20 feet above the valley floor, using the wind from the chopper's blades to push water off the plants. (You can watch the video here.)

So did the helicopter technique work?

 

It's too soon to tell, Cakebread says. Shortly after the chopper left, fog rolled into the valley from the sea and may have counteracted some of the helicopter's work. He says he won't know the extent of the crop damage until the harvest finishes later this week. For now, workers are busy picking the healthy grapes for crushing. In the end, there just may not be as many bottles as in years past to sell.

"We've been through short crops before," he says. "Every year Mother Nature gives us a bigger crop in one variety and less in another."

It's a pricey endeavor to hire a helicopter — he says it's about $400 per hour — but it far outweighs the cost of losing a big chunk of his Cabernet Sauvignon. Cakebread, who tried the same technique in 2002, says he just couldn't sit around and do nothing.

"It's not an absolute method that works, but it makes you feel better," says Cakebread.

Farmers from Arkansas to Louisiana who have been pummeled by floods, tornadoes and droughts this year can probably relate. Thousands of acres of soybean, rice, corn and other crops have been destroyed despite farmers' best efforts to protect them, amounting to as much as $1 billion in losses.

Farmers expect some degree of extreme weather, but the string of devastating events in recent years means farming is becoming more risky. "We've seen this weather back in '79 and '89," Cakebread says. "You see this come through once every 10 years, but with all the recent weather changes, you never know."

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How Long Does A Pumpkin Last?

Enlarge Tony Dejak/AP

Pumpkin shoppers should be on the look out for a pumpkin with a firm stem, or handle, still attached. Fifteen-month-old Lucy Myers searches for a pumpkin at Patterson Fruit Farm Oct. 18, in Chesterland, Ohio.

Tony Dejak/AP

Pumpkin shoppers should be on the look out for a pumpkin with a firm stem, or handle, still attached. Fifteen-month-old Lucy Myers searches for a pumpkin at Patterson Fruit Farm Oct. 18, in Chesterland, Ohio.

It's pumpkins' moment in the limelight. They're all over the place, breaking records, getting makeovers by master carvers, moonlighting as cameras, and even ending up in the bowls of lucky dogs.

That's all fine and good, but some of us could use some pumpkin basics. For example, we were curious just how long a pumpkin can last, carved or uncarved?

 

Steve Reiners, a horticulturist at Cornell University, says it depends on the state of the pumpkin and the weather.

"If the pumpkin was healthy when picked and diseases were controlled in the field, the pumpkin can last 8 to 12 weeks," he says via email. He adds jack-o-lanterns don't fare as well: They last five to 10 days.

The best storage temperature for pumpkins ranges between 50 to 55 degrees Fahrenheit, he says. But cold weather can cut into a pumpkin's lifespan. A little light frost might cause a little discoloration; but the pumpkin won't fare well if temperature drop below freezing.

"Freezing temperatures damage the plant cells just like they would with any living organism," he says. "If the pumpkin actually freezes, once it warms up, the skin can soften, which may open it up to ... rot."

But where freezing can come handy is preserving the pumpkin pulp. The University of Nebraska has a number of good tips on how get the nutritious meat out and what to do with it.

When searching for a pumpkin, Reiners says it's important to find one with a firm stem, or handle, still attached. "That's a great indicator of how healthy it is," he says. When the stem is rubbery and weak, "chances are rot organisms will start to soften the pumpkin quickly." But once you find a firm stem, be gentle — it's better to carry to pumpkin around the fruit.

Once the carving begins, leave the stem on, experts say. It's still providing the pumpkin with some nutrients that will keep it pretty and orange for several more days.

Reiners says there are more than 200 varieties of Halloween-type pumpkins — which can range from one pound to 150 pounds — in the species Cucurbita pepo. And some squash in the related species, Cucurbita maxima, may be considered pumpkins, too. (Read more on cooking with newer kind of squash in Bonny Wolf's piece for Kitchen Window last year.)

But Reiners says he won't be buying any pumpkins, large or small, this year. One perk of knowing so much about pumpkins is that you usually find a way to get them for free.

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Want To Improve Your Lawn? Don't Bag Those Leaves

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The National Audubon Society considers fall leaves to be "natural vitamins" to use in yards.

iStockphoto.com

The National Audubon Society considers fall leaves to be "natural vitamins" to use in yards.

Every year, about 8 million tons of fallen leaves end up in landfills.

That's according to Melissa Hopkins of the National Audubon Society, who offers alternatives to raking up leaves and throwing them away.

"A lot of people think that when leaves fall, you need to really quickly scoop them up and get rid of them," she tells NPR's Melissa Block as they take a look Block's backyard in Washington, D.C., covered in a blanket of leaves. "We think about leaves as vitamins. They are free vitamins that naturally occur in your yard."

Melissa Block/NPR

Melissa Hopkins of the National Audubon Society says more than 8 million tons of leaves go into landfills each year. Instead, they can be used to create mulch and mini-ecosystems.

Hopkins says a way to take advantage of these vitamins is to create natural mulch. She says you can use a mower to shred some of the leaves and spread them across the grass, and then "come spring, you're going to have a healthy lawn," she says.

"One thing you want to keep in mind is that you don't want a really thick layer of leaves anywhere," Hopkins says. "Because sunlight can't get to what's beneath it, and moisture will kill what's underneath."

So, a very thin layer of leaves will do.

"Think about it in moderation," she says. "You want to be able to see the grass with an occasional leaf or leaf cutting around."

The remaining leaves can nourish the trees and shrubs. Rake them up and put them around trees and shrubs in 3- to 6-inch deep piles.

"Leaves in the forest provide about 50 to 80 percent of the nutrients that trees receive," Hopkins says. "No one is going into the forest to clean the leaves. On top of that, leaves protect the levels of moisture that reach the trees and also regulate the soil temperature. So they're like gold for trees."

After you create the tree and shrub piles, Hopkins suggests putting the remaining leaves in compost bins and stirring them up to circulate everything that's decomposing. For those without compost bins or piles, Hopkins says you can contact the local government to find out if it will compost the leaves for you.

If you put the leaves in a bag, she says, they'll go into a landfill.

For people who struggle with having leaves spread across their lawn, Hopkins offers a new way to look at your lawn.

"Instead of this perfectly manicured, untouchable space, think of it as this living, breathing habitat," she says. "And when you start thinking about it that way, you're going to start seeing that the more that you do stuff like this, the more birds are going to be attracted to your yard, diversity of birds, insects, butterflies. And with this leaf cover, come spring, it's going to go into the ground. So you're going to have your nice green lawn again."

So what's the downside to making the most of the fallen leaves? Not having enough for you — or your kids — to jump into. So jump first, mulch later.

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The National Audubon Society's Melissa Hopkins, who calls leaves "free vitamins," offers ideas.

New reports question whether scientific evidence against the prime suspect was ready for court.

A new report says evidence that the flu shot works for seniors is lacking.

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Scientists Say Texas Agency Edits Out Climate Change

Scientists and conservationists accuse the state environmental agency of editing references to climate change and sea level rise out of a public report — because the agency, like Gov. Rick Perry, is skeptical of global warming.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

RENEE MONTAGNE, host: The Texas coast has also battled its share of dangerous floodwaters. Now a controversy over alleged scientific censorship is roiling Galveston Bay. It involves the administration of Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry.

ARI SHAPIRO, host: Scientists and conservationists accuse the state environmental agency of editing references to climate change and sea level rise out of a public report because the agency and the governor remain staunch global warming skeptics. NPR's John Burnett reports.

JOHN BURNETT: Galveston Bay is a large estuary on the upper Texas coast whose deteriorating health is of great concern to stakeholders, from fishermen to boaters to birders. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the TCEQ, commissioned a scientific report called State of the Bay, but it wasn't happy with some of the results. The report's authors are in agreement that sea-level rise caused by global warming is threatening wetlands surrounding Galveston Bay, but the TCEQ did not want any mention of human-caused environmental calamities and pulled out its red pencil.

L'OREAL STEPNEY: I'm going to call the meeting to order. I'll guess I'll do my official gavel thing.

BURNETT: And that's what brought the issue before 50 people Wednesday morning inside a meeting room in a mosquito-infested marsh a few miles from the troubled bay. L'Oreal Stepney is deputy director of the Office of Water at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

STEPNEY: Let me say this clearly. We are not an agency that is about censorship. It is not what we do, it is wrong, it is not who we are.

BURNETT: Stepney played down the firestorm as merely professional differences between her agency and the report's authors. But the scientist who wrote the offending chapter claims what happened is nothing less than the muzzling of an inconvenient truth.

JOHN ANDERSON: One of the most striking edits that was made was the deletion of a figure that was taken from Science magazine that showed the measured rate of sea level rise over the long term in historical time, and the predicted rate of rise, and again, that was taken from Science magazine, one of the most credible journals on Earth.

BURNETT: The author is John Anderson, a ruddy-faced 67-year-old oceanographer from Rice University, who among other things has spent 26 seasons studying ice sheet changes in Antarctica, and its effect on global sea level rise. He says the agency deleted passages that Galveston Bay is currently rising three millimeters a year, a six-fold increase, and that human-induced global warming is the cause.

ANDERSON: And I think the travesty here is that this chapter was actually written for teachers. They're my target audience, and this to me is just an outward attempt to keep scientific information, scientific fact, from getting into classrooms.

BURNETT: The agency also deleted a reference that manmade dams on rivers have disrupted important sediment deposition into the bay. L'Oreal Stepney said in an interview that the report should focus on the overall health of the bay and avoid controversial theories. She said the TCEQ is not ignoring the reality of sea-level rise - it's mentioned elsewhere in the report - it's only Anderson's chapter linking it to global warming that they object to.

STEPNEY: It's unsettled science, in our opinion, and that's our - that's our position, and we've been clear about that.

BURNETT: At the meeting, the TCEQ offered a compromise - the agency would publish "State of the Bay" without Anderson's chapter, and dissident scientists could publish the unedited chapter on their own. But that didn't placate the Galveston Bay Council that held the meeting. One after another, members spoke up. The chair of the council said they wanted the state to publish the complete report unexpurgated. A representative from the EPA, which helped fund the study, echoed her comment. Then concerned citizen Albert Gonzalez spoke his mind.

ALBERT GONZALEZ: The political climate in our nation right now seems to be anti-regulation, anti-science. That just is very, very upsetting, and I just wanted to make that comment.

BURNETT: The world's leading science academies state that most of the global warming in recent decades is likely the result of human activities. Rick Perry, his commissioners on the TCEQ, and some members of Congress, mostly Republicans, say that human-caused climate change is junk science. The governor's office said he would have no comment on the Galveston Bay censorship controversy, which has yet to be resolved. John Burnett, NPR News, Houston.

Copyright © 2011 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.

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Calcutta leads world city list most at risk from climate change

/climate/article/43464

A major new mapping study, analysing climate change vulnerability down to 25km² worldwide, has revealed some of the world's fastest growing populations are increasingly at risk from the impacts of climate related natural hazards and sea level rise.

Many of the countries with the fastest population growth are rated as 'extreme risk' in the Climate Change Vulnerability Index (CCVI) released by risk analysis and mapping firm Maplecroft. These include the strategically important emerging economies of Bangladesh (2nd), Philippines (10th), Viet Nam (23rd), Indonesia (27th) and India (28th).

The CCVI forms part of Maplecroft's fourth annual Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas. It features subnational maps and analysis of climate change vulnerability and the adaptive capacity to combat climate change in 193 countries.

It analyses the exposure of populations to climate related natural hazards and sensitivity of countries in terms of population concentration, development, natural resources, agricultural dependency and conflict.

At a national level, the CCVI rates 30 countries at 'extreme risk,' with the top 10 comprising of Haiti, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, Madagascar, Cambodia, Mozambique, DR Congo, Malawi and the Philippines.

The value of Maplecroft's research is much better appreciated at a subnational level, where risks to towns, cities, economic zones and individual company assets can be identified through interactive maps, which chart vulnerability, exposure and sensitivity to climate change down to 25km² worldwide. For instance, extreme hotpots of vulnerability can be seen in the South West of Brazil and coastal regions of China, but both countries are rated 'medium risk' by the CCVI the national level.

Vulnerability on this scale is illustrated particularly well when looking at the effects of climate change on the megacities of Asia; some of which have the highest rates of population growth, along with extreme vulnerability to climate change.

Article continues: http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/analysis/general-analysis/122712-calcutta-tops-world-city-list-most-at-risk-from-climate-change.html

Image credit: Encyclopedia Brittanica

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Northern Lights Glow In Southern States

Melissa Block talks to Robert Moore of the University of West Georgia's physics department about a surprising display of the northern lights Monday night that went as far south as Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia itself.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

MELISSA BLOCK, host: Wild splashes of Technicolor - pink and green and red - bathed the sky yesterday in more than half the United States, from Minnesota down to Mississippi. The Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, put on a great display unusually far south.

And Robert Moore was among those lucky enough to see it. He teaches physics and astronomy at the University of West Georgia. Robert Moore, where were you? What did you see?

ROBERT MOORE: I was out in our observatory. We have our astronomy lab students come out to do a night observation at least once during the semester. And so, last night we were having one of those observations, looking at some of the wonders that are out there in the night sky.

BLOCK: And what happened? Would did you see?

MOORE: Well, we've got an unexpected one.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MOORE: What we saw was the whole northern horizon pretty much light up with these gorgeous red curtain of light that stretched from horizon up to about the North Star. So, it was pretty high in the sky.

BLOCK: Wow. Wow. And you've never seen anything like that before?

MOORE: I had not. This was my first experience with an aurora. And, of course, most our students had not, so it brought the observation, as far as other objects, to a complete halt.

BLOCK: Yeah, I bet. And to see if that far south in Georgia, any idea when the last time was that happened?

MOORE: I actually do not know, but it's not a common occurrence. I mean, at 42, this is the first time I've ever seen it.

BLOCK: That must've been something. I've read that to have the pure red, that you saw there in Georgia, is really rare.

MOORE: It is apparently incredibly rare. That takes where the aurora happening very high in the sky. And they're not really fully understood why they glow red. I mean, we know the mechanism, but typically they're green or purple or blue. And we did see shots of green shoot up through the curtain. But I'll also say there was no undulation to it or anything like that. It was just a nice, bright glow that shifted in brightness across the whole field.

BLOCK: How long did the light show last?

MOORE: I want to estimate probably about 20 minutes, because we were delayed for a while.

BLOCK: Yeah. Well, you would want to tear yourself away, for sure.

MOORE: Oh, no.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

MOORE: We were quite happy to stand there and watch until they faded down to the point where you could just barely see it anymore.

BLOCK: You know, the cause of this, the coronal mass ejection, doesn't sound nearly as romantic as what happen. What does happen in one of these light shows?

MOORE: Well, in the coronal mass ejection, what happens is that essentially it's an explosion of the sun. It sends out billions of tons of material off of the sun's surface, flying out through space. And it's traveling several hundred kilometers per second. So, it's traveling really fast, faster than anything here most people would have any experience at.

And so, what happens is, is this is made up of charged particles, which then hit the Earth magnetic field and compress it, and stretch it and make it break. And also, it sends these particles shooting down into the atmosphere. And when they come in contact with oxygen and nitrogen molecules, they ionize it. And then when electrons drop back into these ionized molecules and atoms, they give off light. And that's a very simple explanation for it, but I don't think people really want to get into the equations in math. So...

BLOCK: Well, it works for me.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

BLOCK: And for the Northern Lights to be visible that far south, where you are in Georgia, was it just a really big solar outburst?

MOORE: I - honestly, that's why I wasn't expecting it. I don't think it was really that big of an outburst, just something went right. And these high-altitude red aurora were the result, so I think that had something to do. But it may also be that we did actually take a pretty good impact from the CME, and that just put a lot of energy into the magnetic field.

BLOCK: Robert Moore teaches physics and astronomy at the University of West Georgia. We were talking about the Northern Lights last night that showed up remarkably far south. Robert Moore, thanks.

MOORE: No problem, ma'am.

BLOCK: And if you're hoping to catch the Northern Lights tonight, it might be tough especially in the South. SpaceWeather.com, a website the tracks these things says the geomagnetic storm that caused the lights is settling down. But for people farther north, it says stay alert for auroras.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

MICHELE NORRIS, host: This is NPR News.

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Analysis Questions Flu Shot Effectiveness

Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), professor in the School of Public Health, adjunct professor in the Medical School, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn.

William Schaffner, president, National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, professor and chair, Department of Preventive Medicine, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, Tenn.

A new report in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases says evidence that the flu shot offers protection in adults aged 65 years or older is lacking. Host John Dankosky and guests discuss the report, the upcoming flu season, and whether seniors should get the flu vaccine.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

JOHN DANKOSKY, host: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky filling in for Ira Flatow. A new analysis out this week says the seasonal flu shot may not be working as well as we'd like to think. Writing in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, a group of researchers says evidence for protection in adults age 65 or over is lacking.

For younger adults, aged 18 to 65, there's evidence that the vaccine gives some protection, but it varies from year to year. The researchers say that some seasons' protection is greatly reduced or even absent. So why the big push to get a flu shot every year? The CDC still says that everyone over six months needs to get vaccinated.

So is there any harm in getting a vaccine that might not even help you? That's what we'll be talking about this first hour. If you want to get in on the conversation, you can give me a call. Our number is 1-800-989-8255. That's 1-800-989-TALK. If you're on Twitter, you can tweet us your questions by writing the @ sign followed by scifri.

If you want more information on what we'll be talking about this hour, go to our website at www.sciencefriday.com, where you will find links to our topic.

Let me introduce our guests. Michael Osterholm is the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health. He joins us from the studios of Minnesota Public Radio in St. Paul. Michael Osterholm, welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

MICHAEL OSTERHOLM , UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Thank you very much.

DANKOSKY: William Schaffner is president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He's also professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Schaffner.

WILLIAM SCHAFFNER: Hi, John, good to be with you.

DANKOSKY: Again, you can join us at 1-800-989-TALK. Michael Osterholm, first to you: Let's talk about this report. You looked at over 5,500 studies on flu vaccine, and of all those studies over all these years, you decided that about 30 studies were useful. Really?

MINNESOTA: Well, first of all, we didn't look at that many studies. We looked at that many articles to identify the studies. And ultimately, we came up with 176 studies that were published among those journals. And of those 176, 73 were randomized controlled trials, where that kind of study which is considered the gold standard of measuring the effect of an intervention like a vaccine, where it was a double-blind placebo-controlled trial.

Some got vaccines; some got a placebo. We didn't know who it was until the code was broken. And then we looked at 103 observational studies. These are the kinds of studies where we follow what goes on in the clinic and using some very specific criteria to make sure that we don't bias who is vaccinated, who is actually evaluated. We looked at those, too.

And it's from those 176 we came up with 31 that really provided us, we believe, the very best and the most accurate information about what's happening with the flu vaccine.

DANKOSKY: So based on this analysis, what do we know about the vaccine's effectiveness? Let's talk about adults first, not seniors, not kids but the big path of adults.

MINNESOTA: Well, first of all, the overall effect of the trivalent inactivated vaccine, which is the shot that we think about, it's the one that has been around largely unchanged for a number of decades. And in that case, when we look at that, in eight of 12 vaccine seasons, or we study influenza during influenza season, we found that the vaccine was protective, so in two-thirds of the studies.

And when it was protective, it was protective at about a 59-percent rate across all the different studies. When we looked for live attenuated vaccine, the puff that goes up the nose that has been around more recently, there we could not identify any studies that either from an observational disease - or observational study standpoint or from an actual vaccine randomized control trial standpoint, showed that the vaccine was effective.

DANKOSKY: But in kids, that nasal vaccine did work a little bit better.

MINNESOTA: In fact we found just the opposite. Really the best news in this entire study was that among those studies of children, all eight studies, the live attenuated vaccine in children under eight years of age actually worked quite well. It was consistent protection. The pool, the average protection level was 83 percent.

However, there were only two studies in children of the inactivated vaccine in that same age group, both conducted by the same group, a year apart. In the first year, they found the vaccine worked 66 percent of the time. And in the second year, they found it worked minus-7 percent of the time or not a measurable effect.

So from that standpoint, we obviously think that the information about the live attenuated vaccine is very important in terms of everyday clinical practice.

DANKOSKY: Now, of course, the part that a lot of people are reading is how this affects seniors. What did you find for those 65 and older?

MINNESOTA: Well, this is where it's more troubling, and understandably, there's going to be some absence of data since the seniors have been recommended to get the trivalent inactivated vaccine since 1960. And because it's unethical to do studies where you withhold a vaccine from someone once it's been recommended, it's understandable that there'd be a relative absence of randomized control trials because you couldn't allocate someone to a placebo.

However, even looking - trying to look at observational studies, those that are just following clinical practice, we could only find one study that suggested there was protection that - in fact, I say suggested - show that there was protection in that population.

I would urge that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but I think that the amount of the protection is actually difficult to measure. Even in this year's data for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was reported several days ago for the 2009-2010 influenza season, they were unable, in their observational studies, to demonstrate a significantly protective effect in those 65 years of age and older.

DANKOSKY: So you're not finding studies that show it's effective. We're not finding studies, though, that show it isn't effective, right?

MINNESOTA: Well, that's actually not true in the sense of how you want to talk about effective. Back in the early part of the last decade, there were a number of studies that came out that suggested that up to half or even 70 percent of the mortality in those 65 years of age and older could be eliminated by using influenza vaccine.

We now know that in retrospect, those studies suffered from basically a bias of who got vaccinated and who didn't. It was basically a health vaccinee effect: Those over 65 who were healthy got vaccinated. Those were end-of-life or frail did not. That was pretty evident quickly when the data with the - despite the fact of seeing a major increase among the number of people over age 65 getting vaccinated, there was not a commiserate change in the mortality.

But in addition, we found in a number of these studies that the highest benefit for preventing death actually occurred during the summer months, when the virus wasn't even around.

Since that time, there's been a series of studies done by five different groups in three different countries, which demonstrate some moderate impact of the vaccine that isn't measure in vaccine efficacy or effectiveness. And in those studies, it's possible that as high as eight percent of hospitalizations are eliminated, but it's much more difficult to determine or to more specifically elucidate the benefit to those over age 65.

DANKOSKY: If you want to join our conversation, 1-800-989-8255. That's 989-TALK. We'll talk your questions about the flu in just a minute. But I want to get to Dr. Schaffner. What's surprising, to you, in this analysis? What stands out to you?

SCHAFFNER: Well, actually, those of us who are involved in influenza vaccine are familiar with these data and would largely agree, with some footnotes, to what Michael is saying. They throw out some studies that we wouldn't if we looked at them, and we've long known that influenza vaccine is not a perfect vaccine. We need a better influenza vaccine.

But I think that Michael gets vaccinated every year. So do I. And we all promote the immunization of people age six months and older in the United States because, as he says, even in most years, there is, at least, moderate benefit in most age groups. Influenza vaccine will if not eliminating the disease completely, modify the illness so that you do prevent some cases of pneumonia, hospitalization and death.

I like to paraphrase Voltaire: While we wait perfection, that can be the greatest enemy of the current good. And we have a good vaccine; we don't have a great vaccine. We need to use the good vaccine.

DANKOSKY: Is there an argument, Dr. Schaffner, though, that by using the good vaccine, we're not spending enough time, enough effort, enough money to try to get a better vaccine?

SCHAFFNER: I think actually that was correct. Also, the vaccine was so incredibly safe that there was not motivation, and there wasn't financial motivation for companies or the government until about five years ago to invest anything really worth talking about in trying to create a better flu vaccine.

But within the last five years, I think that there's been more investigation into trying to create a better influenza vaccine than there has been in the previous 40, and also though they are stepwise increments - just in the last two years, we've had - licensed a high-dose vaccine for seniors and now the intradermal vaccine.

Those aren't miracle drugs by any means. They are modest advances over what we have. But Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, said just this last weekend that he anticipates that maybe by 2016 we'll have at least a candidate universal influenza vaccine because of research.

And what that means is that we all know that the influenza virus changes so very frequently, that's why we have to create a new vaccine virtually every year. If we had a universal vaccine, one that would protect against the vast majority of strains, maybe we all wouldn't have to get vaccinated except maybe every 10 years, the way we get our tetanus shots. And that would be a huge advance.

We're not there yet, but there's a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel.

DANKOSKY: Michael Osterholm, do you think we're that close to a universal vaccine?

MINNESOTA: Well, I think you have to break this apart, really into two totally different component pieces. The study that we present here is a small part of a much larger effort that our center has undertaken for the last two years to really look at influenza vaccines from cradle to grave, from the very basic research and development and finance funding, all the way to consumer acceptance and how well and effective they work.

And I think that we actually find ourselves in a Catch-22 that is a very, very critical moment for us in terms of really understanding where we're going with this. I would possibly beg to differ a bit with Dr. Schaffner about how we've talked about these vaccines.

He and his colleagues have recently called them maximally effective, excellent vaccines, miracle of modern science, and what we have found is that we really feel very confident the results we present here are the best results. We can't fudge them. You can argue, and I've seen, Bill, your comments about serology, we would still disagree with you on whether or not you include those studies or not.

But what the really important part that we found is that we have worked so hard to get people to get vaccine, we've promoted it, and understandably, we want people to get vaccinated, I'm not here on the show today to say don't get vaccinated, we have left people with the sense that this is a really good vaccine.

Now, we have interviewed a number of venture capitalists. We have interviewed a number of the start-up companies who have new and novel technologies, not for example the Fluzone that Bill talked about, that high-dose vaccine, which is just more of the same old vaccine, and if you think that the vaccine matches the problem, why is more antibody going to make a difference? I don't know.

But the point being is that in fact we have a vaccine today that's holding back new development because why invest a billion dollars if you already have a good vaccine.

DANKOSKY: Let's take a break there. You can join us, 800-989-8255, as we talk about the seasonal flu here on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky. This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky. This hour we're talking about the flu. My guests are Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. William Schaffner is with us, as well, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Let's go to the phones. Wendy(ph) is calling from Patterson, California. Hi, Wendy, go ahead.

WENDY: Hi, I was calling to ask why we had to get a flu vaccine every year because some of the other vaccines only get when we're young, that we just get once. And you guys touched on that, that the virus changes, and that's the reason. I would like to know, like, how it changes every year. And are we causing or driving that change at all by vaccinating?

DANKOSKY: Good question, Michael Osterholm?

MINNESOTA: Well, first of all, we're not changing it by vaccinating. We're not driving the vaccine. Mother Nature and evolution is doing that just fine. I think one of the other things we learned in our study here is there are certain dogmas in the influenza world that we really need to take a step back and look at.

For example the idea of vaccine match and how well the vaccine does. We looked carefully at that in our studies, and we could find not rhyme nor reason as to how well the match for a given year really matched up with how well the vaccine did.

Look no further than the data we've presented in the paper from the H1N1 pandemic vaccine strain, where there we had virtually a perfect match, and in young, healthy adults in Europe, where they actually did use what we call an adjuvant, a chemical that actually boosts the immune response, the overall protection was only 69 percent.

And if you look in this country, the data from the CDC showed that where we didn't use the adjuvanted vaccines in that same population, the protection was 59 percent so that even there with a very, very close match, it didn't seem to show us the results one would think if you had a close match.

So I think we have a lot more work to do, and we've actually tried in this subsequent publication that will coming out to actually look at that much more carefully. And I think the more we learn about this, the less I think we may know about it.

DANKOSKY: I have another call from Cathy(ph), and a few callers want to ask this question. So let's go to Cathy in Abington, Massachusetts. Hi there, Cathy.

CATHY: Hi, thanks for taking my call. My question is about the myth that you can't catch the flu from the flu vaccine. And yet since the H1N1, I've had my family immunized, and three out of the last four years, three different ones of us caught the flu really badly. And it's kind of making me not want to get it. And I know it's a myth, but if you could just explain why that seems to happen. I hear it so often.

DANKOSKY: Dr. Schaffner, explain the myth for us.

SCHAFFNER: Well, it is a myth. You cannot get flu from the flu vaccine. And any number of things can explain what Cathy is talking about. The first is that, you know, we're immunizing right now, and there are people who have colds, and you can get the vaccine, and if you then get a cold four days later, you say where did I get that cold, and then you are likely to attribute it to the vaccine that you got a few days earlier.

And as Michael just said, the vaccine is not perfect. He cited success rates in young, healthy adults of 59 and 69 percent. I look at that as the jar half-full. He says it's half-empty. And so even though you're vaccinated, you can get illness on occasion. There's no doubt about it.

DANKOSKY: What about other side effects, especially for older people, Dr. Schaffner?

SCHAFFNER: Well, it's an incredibly safe vaccine. We give the vaccine in the literally hundreds of millions of doses, and other than really a bit of a sore arm, there are few serious adverse effects. It's one of the most incredibly safe vaccines there is. And indeed, apropos of Mike's comments, that's one of the disincentives for companies to invest a lot of money in creating a new vaccine because this one is so safe.

DANKOSKY: Go ahead, please.

MINNESOTA: Can I just follow up on that? Because I think that, first of all, I want to be really clear. I'm not saying the glass is half-full or half-empty. It's a very straightforward point. If we talk about the vaccine doing its very best, when it's closely matched to the circulating strain, the H1N1 pandemic vaccine was as close a match as we've had for almost 40 years, meaning that the strain did not change in any measurable way that should or could impact vaccine effectiveness.

And all we're pointing out is even with that, we still only got 59 to 69 percent. Do I think that's a lot better than zero? Absolutely. And when I tell people to get vaccinated for that benefit, absolutely. But it begs the question about what do we really know about this vaccine. How well is it really, really protecting?

And I think that that's the challenge that we're facing right now is in a sense we've oversold how well this vaccine's working, which doesn't mean that in fact we think we shouldn't get it. A 50-percent advantage is a heck of a lot better than zero.

But it's holding us back from driving us towards better vaccines because who's going to invest a billion dollars trying to bring a new vaccine to market that's very different than this vaccine when you've got the current conditions: universally recommended, everybody says it's very effective, excellent vaccine, maximally effective, it's considered to be safe, and it's readily available.

So I think that what we're trying to say is unless we want to stay with this basic vaccine antigen, the protein that's in here that's causing us to fool the body into thinking we've been infected, which is now over 60 years old, do we want to stick with that? We're going to have to acknowledge that we really do have a lot of questions that haven't been answered and that hopefully this study is starting to draw some of them out.

I've heard people who just several years ago are quoted widely as to how good this vaccine are now saying today oh, we always knew that it wasn't that good. That's not a credibility gap I think that can be easily jumped, and it's not one that's going to get us to that next vaccine.

DANKOSKY: What is it that you measure, exactly, to know whether or not it's effective? And hasn't that changed over the years?

MINNESOTA: Well, if you're asking about effective from the standpoint of illness outcome, that's what we're really looking at. What you want to know are what are those things that you can say with certainty. For example, one of the problems we have in looking at deaths, deaths are caused by many things that may be influenza-like illnesses.

If you're looking at influenza-like illness, as Dr. Schattner just said, you know, 20 to - five to 20 percent of illnesses may be influenza, but a lot of them are not. And so one of the things that I think is very important in effectively really measuring what the vaccine does is you have to know were you infected or not.

And our study actually looked at those studies, which actually showed that. We had a number of studies done during the 1960s through the 2000 time period that use serology, blood testing. Yet in the 1950s, researchers showed that if you vaccinated someone and then they got infected, you could culture the virus from them, they were actually ill, and about - very rarely did they ever show a four-fold antibody rise or one that would give you reason to think they were infected.

Such studies were recently done that just demonstrated that again. Seventy-five percent of the people basically who were vaccinated with a trivalent inactivated vaccine never showed a four-fold antibody rise.

So there you have such a strong bias against finding the real answer and over-inflating the importance of the vaccine. So we knew to take a step back and say: What really gives us the data to show these vaccines work or don't work?

And then once we have that understanding, we can move forward and say what do we need for vaccine? Flu is a critical disease. We need to have vaccines that are effective. We should use what we have until we get those effective vaccines. But we can't stand in the way of getting new vaccines by telling people what we have right now is good enough.

DANKOSKY: Getting back to this idea of it being unethical to do studies on people over 65 because we believe that everyone had to get the flu vaccine, where does this leave us? Is it time to start doing these studies in older people now?

SCHAFFNER: Well, what will happen is that as new vaccine candidates come up, they will be studied in comparison to the standard vaccine. We won't be able to withhold vaccines from anyone, but we can compare the new with the standard going forward.

And as a matter of fact, I'm a volunteer in just such a trial now. I got my influenza vaccine, but I don't know whether I got the standard one or a new one. We'll find out at the end of the trial.

DANKOSKY: I want to ask you, Dr. Osterholm, a lot of senior may be offered a vaccine called Fluzone. Can you tell us what that is?

MINNESOTA: Well, Fluzone is basically the same kind of influenza vaccine, the trivalent inactivated vaccine, with four times higher the dose, in terms of the antigen, which in turn should induce more antibody.

I think that again we'll wait for the data to come out. Clearly they make more antibody, but that is a long stretch. We have to understand that today, we have equated making antibody to this specific antigen as also being equal to protection, and we now know that's not true. There is clearly a correlation.

But we know there's a big difference. For example, the fact that we have to get vaccinated every year shows you that somehow the immune system's not picking this up. And when you put that into perspective with what happened with the pandemic, we had a number of 70- and 80-year-olds during the pandemic who surely had some innate protection against that virus based on just looking at the population risk of getting infected, and it turned out that these were people who were exposed 60 years before or more to that same circulating type of virus, and 60 years later, their bodies still recognized the fact that they had seem a similar virus 60 years ago.

It had induced antibody or a number of other parts of their immune system so that they were protected. That's what we need to move towards. The idea that we have to vaccinate every year already says that we're not doing a very good job of taking that immune system we have and turning it on in the right way to protect ourselves.

Best thing we've got, we should do it, but it's surely, surely far from what we can do and must do.

DANKOSKY: Well, I want to thank our guests. Michael Osterholm is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health. Thank you so much for joining us.

MINNESOTA: Thank you.

DANKOSKY: Thanks also to William Schaffner, president of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. He's also professor and chair of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Thank you, doctor.

SCHAFFNER: A pleasure, John.

DANKOSKY: Up next, theoretical physics for the masses - well, at least for those of us who watch Public Television. In a new four-part TV series that starts next week, physicist and best-selling author Brian Greene brings extra dimensions, string theory and multiverses right into your living room. With lots of computer graphics and special effects, the four episodes tackle some of the looming questions in cosmology. Does time move in more than one direction? Are there extra dimensions that we can't see? Are there multiple universes? This isn't exactly physics 101.

While you may not understand everything about theoretical physics by the end of part four, you'll probably be able to at least dazzle your dinner guests a bit with some cosmological small talk at Thanksgiving. Joining me now to talk more about it is my guest, Brian Greene, professor of math and physics at Columbia University. He's also the author of several best-selling books on physics, including "The Fabric of the Cosmos." This new series for NOVA is based on the book. Welcome back to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Dr. Greene.

Dr. BRIAN GREENE: Thank you.

DANKOSKY: So let's talk about the four parts of the series. What topics do you tackle here?

GREENE: Well, there are four shows. The first is about space, the second is about time, the third is about quantum mechanics, and the fourth is about the multiverse - the possibility of other universes.

DANKOSKY: How did you choose these four?

GREENE: Well, the show is based on my book of the same title, "The Fabric of the Cosmos," and these are four themes that I weaved together throughout the chapters of that book. And the challenge was to take some pretty esoteric, heady material and to turn it into compelling television. And the team at NOVA, people - Joe McMaster, Jonathan Sahula, Julia Cort and Paula Apsell, at the top, did a great job of doing that.

DANKOSKY: If you have questions for Brian Greene, 1-800-989-8255. That's 989-TALK. I'm sure you've got lots of big questions for him. It's a big-budget production. I mean, there's lots of animation, special effects. Did you feel like you needed all this to tell these very complex stories?

GREENE: Well, that, I think, is critical because when you're talking about space or time, what do you point the camera at? These are abstract ideas that are vital to our sense of ourselves and how the world works. Everything we do, everything we think, takes place in some region of space during some interval of time, so these are vital ideas, but they're still abstract. So what we do is, we use computer animation to take the viewer places that you can't literally go in the world around us to examine what the world would be like if time could run backwards, what the universe is like on fantastically small scales where space has vastly different properties from the space that we see in everyday life.

We take the viewer to the possibility of other universes, by showing these other universes and features about them. We can't literally go to those universes because we don't even know if they exist. It's what the math suggests might be out there, and animation only needs math in order to give us a sense of what it would be like if these ideas are true.

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. We're talking with Brian Greene, the theoretical physicist, and his brand-new series for NOVA called "The Fabric of the Cosmos." You can call us at 1-800-989-8255. That's 1-800-989-TALK. So who's the series meant for? Who's the target audience here?

GREENE: The target is very broad. When we sat down and tried to figure out what these programs would look like, we had in mind a young kid who might get excited about these ideas and go into science. We had in mind an older person who perhaps have heard about these ideas, but hasn't had the time to actually read a book on the subject but could take in a television program. So it is quite broad. And I should say when we did a similar program many years ago called "The Elegant Universe," similar in the sense of the way it was produced, the subject matter was quite different. That focused on string theory.

I was shocked that, after the series, I got letters from parents of 5-year-olds who had watched the show repeatedly. They hadn't taken in all of the ideas, but the questions the five-year-old was asking were so potent and so sensible that they definitely were understanding some of it. So I think these programs can be taken in at a variety of levels. You can allow the ideas to wash over you and take in the great computer graphics, or you can try to really grapple with, to my mind, some of the most heady ideas our species has ever contemplated.

DANKOSKY: A lot of this really has to do with the examples, the metaphors that you use. How do you arrive at some of these things, the idea that space is like a pool table, and I'm going to put down now a bowling ball on the poll table, and it's going to bend the space? How do you arrive at those, and how do you work through those to try to make sure they're things that people actually understand but are also scientifically accurate?

GREENE: Well, to me, when I do my own physics research, I'm never satisfied if when I'm doing my mathematical equations, my understanding is completely rooted in the symbols on the page. I'm always building a mental image in my own mind of what it is that I'm doing. So that, for me, is part of the process - always to have some visualization of what the equations are telling us, telling me if I'm doing my own work. When I go to write a book, I basically take those visualizations, strip away the mathematics, try to wrap up those visualizations and some side of compelling story or anecdote, and in that way, create something which communicates the ideas.

When then the team at NOVA translates it to television, we usually start with those metaphors and those visualizations, and then, they take it to the next level by using the wonders of computer animation to bring them to life in a way that words on a page simply can't do.

DANKOSKY: I have to say that as much as the computer animation is fascinating, and it takes me to places that I couldn't imagine. Some of the most interesting stuff, to me, is the personal stories of these scientists, the people who were the groundbreakers here. Maybe you can talk about - a bit about telling their stories and how you want to weave them into all of this.

GREENE: Well, when I think about science, I think about it as surely the ideas that we have come to, but it's much more than that. It is a drama of exploration, a drama of discovery and are real people who have the courage to go out into the world, into the universe, into areas that we don't understand and hopefully come out the other side with some deep intuition or understanding about how the world works. So we tell a lot of those stories. We have Peter Higgs, physicist, whose idea of a particle called the Higgs boson is now being searched for at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland.

We have the story of Alan Guth, who surprisingly to himself and everybody around him, came up with a new theory of how the universe began. A theory, that in due course has suggested that there might be many big bangs, not just one big bang, giving rise to many universes. And, of course, Newton always makes an appearance in these shows, as does Einstein. So those characters are there in a big way, as well.

DANKOSKY: We're, of course, used to seeing Newton, you know, just a picture of him, but these guys, you set them up as rock stars, these real-life people.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GREENE: Well, you know, Einstein really was a rock star in his day. When he discovered the general theory of relativity, he became headline news in The New York Times.

DANKOSKY: When we come back from our break, we'll take some of your phone calls at 1-800-989-8255. We're talking with Brian Greene, professor and - of math and physics at Columbia University and, of course, author of the book "The Fabric of the Cosmos." It's a brand-new series from NOVA, and you can see that in just a little bit. We'll be back with more right after this break.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky in for Ira. We're talking with Brian Greene, a professor of math and physics at Columbia University. He's also author of the book "The Fabric of the Cosmos." His new NOVA series is based on the book, starts next week. We want to hear a little bit from the Episode Four, on multiverses. We were talking a little bit about the people who you profiled who tell the story of physics. Let's hear the clip, and we'll talk about it afterward.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS")

ANDREAS ALBRECHT: I'm very uncomfortable with the multiverse. To become solid science, it's got a lot of growing up to do.

DAVID GROSS: You know, it exists in the same way that, you know, angels might exists.

STEVEN WEINBERG: We have to make our bets, and I think, right now, the multiverse is a pretty good bet.

ALAN GUTH: I think there's a good chance that the multiverse is real, and that 100 years from now, people might be convinced that it's real.

DANKOSKY: We heard from Andreas Albrecht, David Gross, Steven Weinberg and Alan Guth there. It's interesting how there's this little split, this battle. How did you set up this throughout the series because people are not exactly settled on some of the science, especially the multiverse?

GREENE: Well, the programs don't shy away from controversy because, again, one of the key things about science is while in school we learned it as a subject that's completed in the textbook. In reality, it's a living, breathing entity in which different physicists have different perspectives on where science should go, what's right and what's wrong. So the multiverse, in particular, is a very controversial subject. After all, you look around, you see one universe. There's no direct evidence for other universes. So why should you take the idea seriously?

DANKOSKY: And you're a believer in this, but leading into this, you say that some people think this could be a dead-end for science. Maybe you can explain both what that means and how you feel about it.

GREENE: Well, first, let's say I'm not a believer.

DANKOSKY: Yeah.

GREENE: I only believe in things for which there is experimental or observational support. I do think the idea of a multiverse is a powerful one that may be able to address some questions that we have not been able to address in any other way, and therefore, it's worthy of study and pursuing it and seeing where it leads. But the basic controversy is that some say if you're going to talk about realms that you can't visit, that you can't see, that you can't, in some way experiment with, you've gone beyond the bounds of science.

Science should only focus upon those things that you can absolutely experiment with or observe with. To my mind, that is too limited a perspective of what science is, because we can have mathematics that fantastically describes what we can see and then that math can go further and describe things that we can't, perhaps, yet see. We've seen this play out many times. Einstein's math told him and the world who understood the math that there should be black holes.

Einstein didn't believe that mathematics. He figured that was just too far out. But years later, we find that there are black holes. The same is true of the big bang. His math showed that the universe should have begun in this compressed state and then expanded. He didn't believe it. There's now evidence for it. So the point is, math can take us places that we haven't yet been able to see, and therefore, we can't be so close-minded, in my perspective, to completely wall ourselves off from things that we can't yet observe.

DANKOSKY: I want to get to some people who definitely want to ask you questions. Let's go to Tommy who's calling from Kentucky. Hey, Tommy, go ahead.

TOMMY: Yes. Mine is with time travel. If time slows down and theoretically stops at the speed of light, with the neutrinos that go faster than the speed of light, would time travel not be possible now?

GREENE: Well, that's why most of us don't believe the results about the neutrinos going faster than the speed of light. Because you're right, if indeed, we take Einstein's idea seriously, and the data that these recent experiments suggest showing that neutrinos go faster than the speed of light, there would be a crack in time. In a sense, we would be able to send signals to the past. So most of us believe that those experiments are probably not going to stand up to scrutiny. Even the experimenters themselves put it out as something that they want the physics community and the rest of the world to try to poke holes in to see what they did wrong.

As yet, nobody has done that, but you need independent confirmation of such a wild possibility of going faster than the speed of light. We're going to wait and see what happens. I would be thrilled if the data does stand up to scrutiny. We live for this kind of revolution in our understanding of the world. I don't think this is one of those moments.

DANKOSKY: Catherine is calling from Menlo Park, California. Hi there, Catherine. You're on with Brian Greene.

CATHERINE: Hi, Brian. How are you?

GREENE: Good. Thanks.

CATHERINE: I'm fascinated by the idea of multiple universes. When I took an astronomy class in college, they taught us that the universe is expanding, and I spent nights wondering, into what – into what is the universe expanding. And I was wondering, has there been any research or anything recently come up in terms of the physics or mathematics to indicate if the universe is expanding into a vacuum, or what might be the substance or particles that the universe would be expanding into?

GREENE: Well, in a traditional picture, where there's one universe, the idea is that when the universe expands, it's not expanding into a pre-existing realm. Because what would that realm be? It should be part of the universe, after all. Rather, the traditional idea is that space is stretching, creating the new space that it then inhabits. So that's the way in which the universe can get bigger and bigger.

In this new idea of the multiverse, however, the notion that the caller had in mind starts to come a little closer to what the math is suggesting, that there is a larger cosmos within which our universe is expanding. Our universe would be viewed as one bubble, if you will, in a big cosmic bubble bath with each bubble being universe upon universe upon universe. So there would be a larger container in some sense for our universe to expand within if this new picture is correct. I underscore if. This is, again, very hypothetical, cutting-edge ideas.

DANKOSKY: These the universes bouncing up against one another, moving farther apart as the universe expands or the space expands?

GREENE: Yes. As the space between the universes expand...

DANKOSKY: Exactly.

GREENE: ...then the universes themselves will be driven apart. However, if two universes are born very close together, something we talk about in the program, then as they expand, they can smash into each other. And if that were to happen, if our universe got hit by another, it could leave observable data in the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is a way that we might gain observational evidence for other universes.

DANKOSKY: OK. So Mark(ph) on Facebook has a question for you about some of these other universes. Since it's believed that our rules of physics may not apply to other universes, is it possible that each universe has certainly particles that do behave the same, like the quarks? Could this be the reason they act so bizarre? Wouldn't this be consistent with relativity? This is from Mark on Facebook, Brian.

GREENE: Well, the other universes in this multiverse proposal would, indeed, have other kinds of particles and would be governed by laws that, perhaps, would look different from the laws that we are familiar with here. So there'd be a whole range of possible physical features that one would encounter if you could journey from one universe to another. The weirdest thing of all - and I do consider this weird, and we discuss this in the program and many physicists give their perspective on it - the math seems to suggests that if the other universes are out there, then some of them actually do look close to ours. Some of them, in fact, have copies of us out there. You and I are having this conversation in some of these other universes way out there in this wider cosmos.

DANKOSKY: But potentially, a limitless number of copies of us in other universes. So it's not as though another me and another you are talking to another, but millions of other mes and you were talking to each other.

GREENE: Absolutely right, as strange as that sounds.

DANKOSKY: As unusual as that is. Let's go to John(ph) in Sioux City, Iowa. Hi there, John. Go ahead. You're on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

JOHN: Hey. Yeah. Oh, man. I mean, in one universe, this one, I have a question about black holes. And the other one, I have a question about the neutrino thing. So, I guess, I'll ask the black hole one. When light comes toward a black hole, is it getting sucked in or is it because space, time has been contorted so much that it's like in a fractal pattern and it just can't get out?

GREENE: Well, it's more that space is bent in such a way that the light in some sense is flowing downhill. Think of ball rolling down the side of a mountain. It rolls down to the bottom. Similarly, in the universe, if light is heading toward a black hole, the black hole warps space sort of like the hill of a mountain, and light rolls down that hill much like that ball goes down the side of the mountain. And in that way, it gets sucked in.

Now, let's me say that other question that you had, we don't have, perhaps, time to answer it now, but I will say that you should look at the World Science Festival website Wednesday night, November 2, at 10 p.m., because we're going to have a live conversation about the program that airs that night in which you and the rest of the digital audience can ask any questions that you like. And I'll do my best to answer as many as I can.

DANKOSKY: And again, this is worldsciencefestival.com, is where you can find this, right?

GREENE: Exactly.

DANKOSKY: We're talking with Brian Greene, his new "NOVA" series is coming out next month. If you want to join the conversation, it's 1-800-989-8255. That's 1-800-989-TALK. Let's go to Rick, who's calling from Palo Alto, California. Hi there, Rick.

RICK: Hey, Dr. Greene. So I – we've had a couple of fundamental open questions that, basically, all of our best efforts have failed to be able to answer, you know, uniting gravity with the other forces in a quantum theory, and more recently, dark energy and dark matter. And all this seems to suggests that we may need a radical departure from the stuff we've been doing up until now. And I wanted to get your comments on a departure that's both radical but also curious that I've heard about recently called entropic gravity with the - basically saying that gravity is not a fundamental force. I mean, maybe that could go someway to explaining some of these open questions. And what were your thoughts on that?

GREENE: Well, it is a very interesting idea, which suggests that gravity, as you say, is not as fundamental an element of the makeup of reality as we once we thought. The way I like to think about it is temperature. We all know what it means for something to be hot or cold. But the real meaning of hot and cold is not that macroscopic feeling we've learned over the course of 100 years, that if something is hot, its atoms are moving very quickly. Or if it's cold, its atoms are moving very slowly. So temperature is an emergent property of the speed of the constituent particles. And maybe the case that gravity emerges from some more fundamental underpinning in much the same as the temperature emerges from this fundamental idea of the speed particles.

And the proposals are on the table for how that might happen, it's very controversial. It stirred up a lot of excitements in the physics community. I'm not convinced yet, but it does have all of the features that many of us have thought would one day emerge in a deeper understanding, that space may not be fundamental, time may not be fundamental. Gravity, which is curves in space and time, therefore, would not be fundamental. And we are probing to see what that more fundamental structure might be. So it's an exciting time, but by no means is this idea settled.

DANKOSKY: Any of these ideas that you're talking about here, are they dependent on just – on one thing going right, going wrong? And in the research, you talked about the neutrinos, whether or not this is a finding that we can really hang our hats on here. How much of all the work that you're doing is hanging on one or two big things that we could find in the next, say, 10 or 20 years?

GREENE: Well, if we could get some new insight from the Large Hadron Collider, find some of the new particles that our theories have suggested might be out there, that would be a pivotal moment because it would really show that mathematics that we've been pursuing for decades is on the right track. It's pointing us in the direct correction. If we don't find anything at the Large Hadron Collider, that is fantastically interesting because it means that many of the ideas that we have thought were true are not, which means we have to go back to the drawing board. And again, that is great. The problem is how do you go to funding agencies and say, well, you have this big machine and it turned up nothing, and that's so exciting, we want to build another machine to pursue that further?

DANKOSKY: That's an expensive drawing board.

GREENE: It's an expensive drawing board, but it's a vital idea because it may turn out - I hope not - maybe we'll find something great at the Large Hadron Collider. But if we don't, that's a fantastically interesting result. And I hope people are at least aware of that as a potential outcome and something that should drive us forward.

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR. Let's go to Paul in Orlando, Florida. Hi there, Paul. Go ahead.

PAUL: Hi. Hi, Dr. Greene. I read "Fabric of the Cosmos." It was worth every minute I spent with it.

GREENE: Thank you.

PAUL: Two things, quickly. In conversations with other colleagues, recently, we've just been talking about quantum mechanics. It's been around for over 100 years. It's provided a lot of great science, but there doesn't seem to be any great challenges to it. Are people too accepting of it or there's a lot of the - no pun intended - uncertainty about it in areas, should there be a major assault on quantum mechanics? And two, will your show address entanglement at all?

GREENE: Two good questions. So for the second one, yes, our quantum program, which is the third in this series - I guess that means November 16, if I've got that right. One of the main ideas is quantum entanglements. So we go through the whole development of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen and John Bell and all that great stuff, which suggests, from the experiment, that something you do in one location can immediately affect something in another location. Again, one of these crazy ideas but comes out of the math quantum mechanics.

And for your first question, yes, I think there are some gaping holes in quantum mechanics. Not everybody agrees with that. We need to understand how the active measurement affects the system. This is still up in the air after a century, and we're working on it and, hopefully, more and more people will.

DANKOSKY: So what exactly does a theoretical physicist do all day? In the second of SCIENCE FRIDAY's Desktop Diaries series, Brian Greene takes us into his home office for a tour of his tidy workspace using his desk mainly for calculations, often executed with pencil and paper, a tradition that dates back to his childhood when his father would give him 30-digit by 30-digit multiplication problems to work out.

Here to tell us more about the tour is our multimedia editor, Flora Lichtman. Hi, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, John.

DANKOSKY: So this is interesting. You got a chance to visit Brian in his workspace.

LICHTMAN: Yes, and everybody else has this chance, too. If you've been loving this interview, you can go to our website and see where Brian works. And, you know, the premise of this series is that our desk trinkets maybe reveal a little about us. And in Brian Greene's case, there were very few desk trinkets. It was a very clean space. So actually, I wanted to ask you, what do you think it - you know, do you think it means anything about you that you work in such a clean area?

GREENE: Well, it means I've certainly changed because I think I've mentioned awhile ago, when I was in college, I was very, very sloppy. My room was voted the sloppiest on campus, and it's in the college yearbook. I mean, I walk around and I'd heard like little Chinese mustard packets squirting under my feet. But I found that I couldn't think clearly if I was surrounded by a clutter. If I've got a file of stuff that I haven't looked at for a few months, I realized I should throw it away because I'm never going to look at it. And I just think more clearly in a clean space.

LICHTMAN: Yeah. It's not piles of papers like you see in some of these scientists' workspace.

DANKOSKY: Well, actually, in the shows, in the "NOVA" shows, some of the scientists have some pretty - very messy workspaces, let's just say.

GREENE: Yes. Saul Perlmutter, who just won the Nobel Prize, he has a pretty cluttered space you'll see in the show.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DANKOSKY: We see clips of your dad in this video, who was a performer. Do you feel like your following in his footsteps now, getting out on the green screen, getting out on stage?

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

GREENE: Vaguely. You know, my dad was a performer. He was a singer and quite a showman. And I guess, maybe some of it rubbed off in some way.

DANKOSKY: I'm wondering if this idea of using a pencil and paper is still vital to what you do. I mean, is it important to have that pencil there to (unintelligible)?

GREENE: For me, it is. I mean, I can imagine a generation or two from now, people won't know what a pencil is, and it will just change the way they do things. For instance, when I write books, I do them purely on a computer. I cannot write a book on a piece of paper. When it comes to calculations, I have to do them on a piece of paper.

LICHTMAN: So no iPad?

GREENE: Not yet, but I will.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

DANKOSKY: Well, we've just about run out of time. So I'd like to thank my guest, Brian Greene, professor of math and physics at Columbia University, author of the book "The Fabric of the Cosmos." His new "NOVA" series based on the book starts next week. Brian, thanks so much for joining us once again.

GREENE: My pleasure.

DANKOSKY: And thanks also to Flora Lichtman, multimedia editor for SCIENCE FRIDAY. You can check out this video, right?

LICHTMAN: Go to our website, sciencefriday.com, to see Brian Greene's desk.

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