Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2008 May 27

Phoenix at Mars
Credit: Phoenix, HiRISE, NASA, JPL-Caltech, Univ. Arizona

Explanation: The Phoenix lander's footpads are about the size of a dinner plate. One of three is shown at the right, covered with Martian soil after a successful soft landing on the Red Planet on May 25. Amazingly, the left panel image is of the spacecraft during its descent phase, captured by the HiRISE camera onboard Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter -- the first image ever of a spacecraft descending to the surface of another planet. Taken from 750 kilometers above Mars, the picture shows Phoenix suspended beneath its unfurling, 10 meter-wide parachute, against the much darker Martian surface. The lander is still attached to its protective backshell. Phoenix released its parachute at an altitude of 12.6 kilometers. Using rockets to further reduce its speed for landing, Phoenix now rests in the northern polar region of Mars at about 68 degrees latitude.

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Engineering researcher seeks answers to asteroid deflection

Contacts:
Bong Wie, Aerospace Engineering, 515 294-3124, bongwieiastate.edu
Mary Jo Glanville, Engineering Communications and Marketing, 515 294-8787, mglanviliastate.edu

Ames, Iowa—An Asteroid Deflection Research Center (ADRC) has been established on the Iowa State campus to bring researchers from around the world to develop asteroid deflection technologies. The center was signed into effect in April by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.

“In the early 1990s, scientists around the world initiated studies to assess and devise methods to prevent near-Earth objects from striking Earth,” said Bong Wie, the Vance D. Coffman Chair Professor in Aerospace Engineering and director of the center. “However, it is now 2008, and there is no consensus on how to reliably deflect them in a timely manner,” he noted.

Wie, whose research expertise includes space vehicle dynamics and control, modeling and control of large space structures, and solar sail flight control system development and mission design, joined the Iowa State faculty last August. “I am very happy that Professor Bong Wie has joined the faculty at ISU,” said Elizabeth Hoffman, executive vice president and provost. “His work on asteroid deflection is exciting and of great importance.”

The ADRC will host an International Symposium on Asteroid Deflection Technology in fall 2008. Scientists and engineers from NASA, the European Space Agency, academia, and the aerospace industry will be invited to the Iowa State campus to formulate a roadmap for developing asteroid deflection technologies.

Despite the lack of an immediate threat from an asteroid strike, scientific evidence suggests the importance of researching preventive measures. Sixty-five million years ago, a six-mile-wide asteroid struck near the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and created the 106-mile-diameter Chicxulub Crater. Most scientists now believe that a global climate change caused by this asteroid impact may have led to the dinosaur extinction. Seventy-four million years ago, a smaller one-mile-wide asteroid struck in central Iowa, creating the Manson Crater. Now covered with soil, it is the largest crater in North America at more than 23 miles across.

Just 100 years ago, June 30, 1908, an asteroid or comet estimated at 100–200 feet in diameter exploded in the skies above Tunguska, Siberia. Known as the Tunguska Event, the explosion flattened trees and killed other vegetation over a 500,000-acre area. But if the explosion had occurred four hours later, it would have destroyed St. Petersburg or Moscow with an equivalent energy level of about 500 Hiroshima nuclear bombs.

The potential for such devastation has astronomers scanning the skies to find and track asteroids that pose a danger, and it has Wie initiating this concerted research effort now before any asteroids are discovered heading toward Earth.

Last November, NASA reported 900 known potentially hazardous objects (PHOs), most of which are asteroids. PHOs are defined as objects larger than 492 feet in diameter whose trajectories bring them to within about 4.6 million miles of the Earth’s orbit. NASA scientists estimate the total population of PHOs to be around 20,000. “However,” Wie said, “the asteroid we have to worry about is the asteroid that we don’t know.”

“Developing technologies that can be used to prevent or mitigate threats from asteroids while also advancing space exploration is a challenge we accept as we work to assure a high quality of life for future generations,” said Mark J. Kushner, dean of Iowa State’s College of Engineering. “This research center serves as an excellent opportunity to provide leadership on an issue that has worldwide implications.”

According to Tom Shih, professor and chair of aerospace engineering, “the potential for a major catastrophe created by an asteroid impacting Earth is very real. It is a matter of when, and humankind must be prepared for it. Our aerospace engineering department strongly supports Professor Bong Wie’s effort in establishing this center to address the engineering and science issues of asteroid deflection.”

Both high-energy nuclear explosions and low-energy non-nuclear alternatives will be studied as deflection techniques. The nuclear approach, which is often assessed to be 10–100 times more effective than non-nuclear approaches as stated in NASA’s 2007 report to Congress, will be researched to verify its effectiveness and determine its practical viability, according to Wie.

“A 20-meter (66 feet) standoff distance is often mentioned in the literature for a maximum velocity change of a 1-kilometer (0.6 mile) asteroid. However, we have to determine how close the nuclear explosion must be to effectively change the orbital trajectories of asteroids of different types, sizes, and shapes,” Wie explained. “We will develop high-fidelity physical models to reliably predict the velocity change and fragmentation caused by a nuclear standoff explosion.”

The non-nuclear alternatives include kinetic impactors and slow-pull gravity tractors. Wie, who has previously worked on solar sail technology as applied to asteroid deflection, will present his recent study, “Multiple gravity tractors in halo orbits for towing a target asteroid,” at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Astrodynamics Specialists Conference in August. His paper has been accepted for publication in the AIAA Journal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics.

The chances of having to use deflection technologies on an asteroid in the near future are admittedly remote. Scientists estimate the frequency of an extinction-class (6 miles in diameter or larger) object striking Earth as once every 50–100 million years, and for a 200-foot or larger object as once every 100–500 years.

The technologies that will be developed, including precision orbital guidance and navigation and control, however, have other applications as well. These may include future advanced space vehicles that will carry astronauts to an asteroid or Mars and homeland security applications.

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One-Way Mission to Mars: US Soldiers Will Go

Sergeant First Class William H. Ruth III contemplates his current duty in a barren landscape in Afghanistan, and says he's willing to lead a human mission to Mars.

An article published on Universe Today back in March of this year detailing former NASA engineer Jim McLane's idea for on a one-way, one-person mission to Mars generated a lot of interest. The many comments on the subject posted here on UT and numerous other websites such as ABC News ranged from full support to complete disbelief of the idea. McLane's concept has literally gone around the world, and a journalist from Spain, Javier Yanes who writes for the newspaper Publico shared with me his correspondence with a US soldier stationed in Afghanistan, who says that battle-hardened soldiers would be the perfect choice to send on a mission of no return to a new world. SFC William H. Ruth III says he and the men in the 101st Airborne Division are ready and willing to go.

SFC Ruth wrote, "While reading Jim McLane and Nancy Atkinson’s thoughts on Space Colonization, I started to realize that we ‘ALL’ have lost our way. We have become so consumed by petty differences and dislikes of others that we all have forgotten our pre destiny of something better."

And what is the 'something better' that Ruth envisions? Military personnel from different countries joining together to make "the ultimate sacrifice" of forging the way to establish an outpost on another world, like Mars.

"Here is an ‘out of the box idea’," Ruth writes. "Let the heroes of ‘All’ our countries, for once, risk the ultimate sacrifice for something greater than one man’s idea. Maybe once let these men and woman that rise every morning and say ‘today I will stand for something’ and say ‘evil will not prevail, not on my watch’. For once let them volunteer for us all, you never know, mankind, the human race. It might just catch on if we let it."

Ruth continues, "Will we falter at a hint of death or danger? Or will we do now what so many in ‘ALL’ of the world’s history has done before us. NASA of all thinking societies should understand this. Would there even be an America or NASA if a man named Columbus had not pursued a dangerous and possibly deadly voyage to a new world? He certainly had to consider whether or not he would ever return home to see all those he loved so dearly. But what of those aboard his ships, those that left Spain knowing that they would never return. Those few that willingly risked all for the chance at a new world and a new future, could they have possibly known what effects they would have had on the future due to their sacrifices? Now can we have enough vision to see our destiny, can we, for a moment, see past our petty differences of race and religion to see…peace, prosperity and possibly a new world."

3rd Platoon at Fire Base Ter-Wa, April 2008. SFC Ruth is first on the left.

Ruth says 15 years in the military has prepared him for such a mission. "So I am no fool and I am no stranger to what some might call high risks," he says. "Hundreds of thousands of fighting men and woman from around this world have walked, rode, swam and even jumped into what some would call a high risk situation. Some even considered suicide missions, ones with low probability of success. And why, what did they risk all for? Each and every one of us, even those throughout this earth that has made that choice, risk all for what we believed would make our world better."

Ruth first began pondering such a mission after reading a quote by Stephen Hawking on Space.com: "The discovery of the New World made a profound difference on the old," Hawking said. "Spreading out into space will have an even greater effect. It will completely change the future of the human race, and maybe determine whether we have any future at all."

Ruth sent an email to Space.com's Anthony Duignan-Cabrera, which was posted on the LiveScience blog: "Here is an idea: Send battle-hardened, strong-minded soldiers and marines on the long trips into space. We are conditioned to live with the bare minimal (of) life’s necessities and are trained to be prepared for … the worst conditions that any environment could throw at us. Hell, me and my men will go, set up a colony somewhere and await colonists to arrive."

Javier Yanes read Ruth's proposition and contacted him, sending him the link to the Universe Today article with McLane's idea.

Ruth responded by sending Yanes a written statement called "A Soldier's Perspective;," Yanes wrote an article about Ruth in Publico, and shared Ruth's proposal and pictures with me.

Ruth doesn't agree with McLane's idea of a one-person mission to Mars, but supports the one-way idea.

"I fully agree with NASA and others that it is completely dangerous and potentially deadly for anyone who sets out on this voyage," he wrote. "But since when has that ever stopped anyone? A one way trip is the way to go about this, it is a proven fact of human history that when the human species is thrown into a no alternative situation, that they will prevail and survive.

The military would never send someone out alone, and Ruth thinks a multiple ship mission is the way to proceed, with three to four smaller vessels, with four to six crew members each.

Ruth admits that other might see sending soldiers into space as more like an invasion or occupation than exploration. "To those who share this concern, consider this for a moment and ask yourself, who else?" Ruth asked. "Who else has the mentality to volunteer to face certain danger and possibly death, thousands of miles away from their homes? I could think of a few hundred thousand that do it everyday across this planet."

Ruth says that getting the worlds militaries involved with something other than making war with each other could change humanity's future for the better.

"I wonder who will be the first to extend the hand of complete partnership, representing the whole human species?" Ruth asks. "Could this be the answer that so many have searched for? Could this one thing unite humanity in a new era of global cooperation and a new planetary respect for human life, unlike we know it today? My answers… ask me again when I’ve reached the new world!"

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Best. Image. Ever.

Emily has what is simply The Coolest Picture Ever. It is that simple.

That is exactly what you think it is: Phoenix descending to the Martian surface underneath its parachute. This incredible shot was taken by the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. You can easily see the ‘chute, the lander (still in its shell) and even the tether lines!

Think on this, and think on it carefully: you are seeing a manmade object falling gracefully and with intent to the surface of an alien world, as seen by another manmade object already circling that world, both of them acting robotically, and both of them hundreds of million of kilometers away.

Never, ever forget: we did this. This is what we can do.

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100 Explosions on the Moon

Not so long ago, anyone claiming to see flashes of light on the Moon would be viewed with deep suspicion by professional astronomers. Such reports were filed under "L" … for lunatic.

Not anymore. Over the past two and a half years, NASA astronomers have observed the Moon flashing at them not just once but one hundred times.

"They're explosions caused by meteoroids hitting the Moon," explains Bill Cooke, head of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC). "A typical blast is about as powerful as a few hundred pounds of TNT and can be photographed easily using a backyard telescope."

As an example, he offers this video of an impact near crater Gauss on January 4, 2008:

Above: A lunar impact on Jan. 4, 2008. This is number 86 on the list of 100 impacts recorded by the MEO team since their survey began in 2005. Larger movies: 0.8 MB gif, 5.9 MB avi.

The impactor was a tiny fragment of extinct comet 2003 EH1. Every year in early January, the Earth-Moon system passes through a stream of debris from that comet, producing the well-known Quadrantid meteor shower. Here on Earth, Quadrantids disintegrate as flashes of light in the atmosphere; on the airless Moon they hit the ground and explode.

"We started our monitoring program in late 2005 after NASA announced plans to return astronauts to the Moon," says team leader Rob Suggs of the MSFC. If people were going to be walking around up there, "it seemed like a good idea to measure how often the Moon was getting hit."

"Almost immediately, we detected a flash."

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That first detection—"I'll never forget it," he says--came on Nov. 7, 2005, when a piece of Comet Encke about the size of a baseball hit Mare Imbrium. The resulting explosion produced a 7th magnitude flash, too dim for the naked eye but an easy target for the team's 10-inch telescope.

A common question, says Cooke, is "how can something explode on the Moon? There's no oxygen up there."

These explosions don't require oxygen or combustion. Meteoroids hit the moon with tremendous kinetic energy, traveling 30,000 mph or faster. "At that speed, even a pebble can blast a crater several feet wide. The impact heats up rocks and soil on the lunar surface hot enough to glow like molten lava--hence the flash."

During meteor showers such as the Quadrantids or Perseids, when the Moon passes through dense streams of cometary debris, the rate of lunar flashes can go as high as one per hour. Impacts subside when the Moon exits the stream, but curiously the rate never goes to zero.

"Even when no meteor shower is active, we still see flashes," says Cooke.

Above: A map of the 100 explosions observed since late 2005. A complete list with lunar coordinates is available here.

These "off-shower" impacts come from a vast swarm of natural space junk littering the inner solar system. Bits of stray comet dust and chips off old asteroids pepper the Moon in small but ultimately significant numbers. Earth gets hit, too, which is why on any given night you can stand under a dark sky and see a few meteors per hour glide overhead—no meteor shower required. Over the course of a year, these random or "sporadic" impacts outnumber impacts from organized meteor showers by a ratio of approximately 2:1.

"That's an important finding," says Suggs. "It means there's no time of year when the Moon is impact-free."

Fortunately, says Cooke, astronauts are in little danger. "The odds of a direct hit are negligible. If, however, we start building big lunar outposts with lots of surface area, we'll have to carefully consider these statistics and bear in mind the odds of a structure getting hit."

Secondary impacts are the greater concern. When meteoroids strike the Moon, debris goes flying in all directions. A single meteoroid produces a spray consisting of thousands of "secondary" particles all traveling at bullet-like velocities. This could be a problem because, while the odds of a direct hit are low, the odds of a secondary hit may be significantly greater. "Secondary particles smaller than a millimeter could pierce a spacesuit," notes Cooke.

Right: A simulated meteoroid explodes on impact at the NASA/Ames Vertical Gun Range. This is a genuine photo showing the spray of secondary particles: more.

At present, no one knows how far and wide secondary particles travel. To get a handle on the problem, Cooke, Suggs and colleagues are shooting artificial meteoroids at simulated moon dust and measuring the spray. This work is being done at the Vertical Gun Range at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA: full story.

Meanwhile, back at the observatory, the team has upgraded their original 10-inch (25 cm) telescope to a pair of telescopes, one 14-inch (36 cm) and one 20-inch (51 cm), located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. They've also established a new observing site in Georgia with a 14-inch telescope. Multiple telescopes allow double- and triple-checking of faint flashes and improve the statistical underpinnings of the survey.

"The Moon is still flashing," says Suggs. Indeed, during the writing of this story, three more impacts were detected.

New title: 103 Explosions on the Moon.

Stay tuned to Science@NASA for a follow-up story describing how amateur astronomers can participate in this research.

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STEM CELLS IN THE BANK

Junying Yu / Univ. of Wisc.

Skin cells can be modified to create cells that seem as versatile as embryonic stem cells.

Someday, researchers will be able to order up living human cells afflicted with the genetic flaw they need to study. Gene-splicers will be able to correct the flawed code that causes diseases. And if you're struggling with one of those diseases yourself, your doctor just might be able to fix you, using semi-tailor-made cells ordered from a biobank. The whole process would be almost as easy as drawing blood from a blood banks today.

Such are the breakthroughs that could spring from future efforts to create stockpiles of reprogrammed human cells.

"Banking cells sounds pretty boring and trivial," said cardiologist Timothy Kamp, co-director of the University of Wisconsin Stem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center in Madison. "But it turns out that there is a lot of hard work that goes into that, to actually guarantee that you have high-quality, reproducible lots of cells."

Birth of a super-cell
The cells are known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells. Last November, research groups in Japan and the United States announced that they had converted ordinary human skin cells into super-cells that appeared to be as versatile as embryonic stem cells, with the ability to transform themselves into virtually any tissue in the body.

For years, embryonic stem cells have been held up as the gold standard in regenerative medicine. By massaging such cells in just the right way, doctors could create new cardiac cells for faulty hearts, new neurons for broken spinal cords, new pancreatic cells for diabetics - the list goes on and on. But the cells have to be harvested from human embryos, which raises ethical as well as medical questions.

If IPS cells can be made safely, and if they truly do the same things that embryonic stem cells can do, researchers could theoretically take a skin sample from someone who had a particular genetic disease and manufacture an unlimited supply of cells that manifested that disease. That would open up a promising path to future cures.

From the lab to the clinic
The first step would be to study the living tissue in the lab, to find out how it responds to various therapies and genetic tweaking.

"I think we'll get things out of cells in a dish faster than putting cells in people," Kamp said.

He envisioned a repository for IPS cells that manifest genetic conditions ranging from sickle-cell anemia to a predisposition for bad drug reactions.

For example, Kamp is interested in the factors that contribute to a type of potentially fatal heart condition known as long-QT syndrome. Studying heart cells from a wide range of individuals with an inherited disposition for the syndrome could tell researchers which people are more vulnerable than others - or which ones might suffer an attack by taking a particular drug. (A decade ago, the allergy drug Seldane and some other antihistamines were banned from the U.S. market because of such a linkage.)

An IPS cell bank could be the source of heart cells for such studies, and many others besides. The result could be new drugs (or old drugs, perhaps like Seldane) that are suited to your genetic makeup.

Farther down the line, researchers could find ways to tweak the DNA in IPS cells to fix genetic flaws and create healthy tissue tailor-made for you. For example, UW-Madison dermatologist Joyce Teng is already looking into whether cells can be tweaked to fix rare genetic skin condition known as ichthyosis, Kamp said.

Cell transplantation has been applied to a wide range of maladies - including heart disease - but some diseases will be more suited to cell therapy than others.

"There are a number of fairly rare diseases that might end up being some of the first headline successes, because they're terrible diseases wtih pretty devastating shortening of life expectancy ... and also the genetics have been well-studied," he said. "The more complex diseases might take a little more work."

The road ahead
In fact, there's a lot more work that needs to be done to clear the way for IPS cell banks.

First, scientists have to find out whether the reprogrammed cells are actually the functional equivalent of embryonic stem cells. Kamp and his colleagues are checking into that question for heart cells, by attaching tiny electrodes to the cells and measuring their electrical function.

"So far, the properties look similar, but that's not really the end of the story," Kamp said. "I think you're going to find an explosion of literature in the next year."

Other researchers have undertaken similar experiments using neurons, blood cells and other tissue types spawned by IPS cells.

Scientists also have to figure out safer methods for creating IPS cells from skin cells. Currently, genetic factors have to be introduced into the cells using retroviruses - which is not considered safe enough for transplantation into humans.

It will take a lot of samples to build an IPS cell bank. Kamp said many of the lines could be reprogrammed using cells held by other biobanks, such as the Coriell Institute for Medical Research as well as UW's own National Stem Cell Bank. Other disease-specific lines might have to come from new donors, however.

Who's in the banking business?
Then there's the issue of funding: UW's institute isn't the only organization interested in setting up an IPS cell bank. Kyoto University's Shinya Yamanaka, the stem-cell researcher who independently created IPS cells last year, has also called for the establishment of such a bank. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun, the Japanese government backs the idea.

Although Kamp doesn't know specifically what other research groups in the United States are working on, he knows there's lots of interest in the cell-bank idea.

"Everybody's plans are not well-designed and not public knowledge at this point," he said. "I expect the NIH [National Institutes of Health] will support some of this banking in the long term, but it will take some time."

Theoretically, people could "bank" their cells for conversion into IPS cells, just as an increasing number of families bank newborns' umbilical-cord blood as a stem-cell insurance policy. But the IPS conversion process is so expensive that Kamp doesn't think such a scenario is realistic.

"We're already spending 16 percent of our gross domestic product on health care," he said. "Developing your own stem-cell line for every patient? I don't think that's going to lower the cost of health care."

The more likely scenario is that your doctor would go to the cell bank and pick out the IPS cell type that was the closest genetic match - following the medical model set for bone marrow transplants (which is one of the oldest forms of stem-cell therapy).

"I expect we're going to get smarter and smarter as far as the issue of immune rejection goes," he said.

Kamp emphasized that these are only the early days of the IPS cell revolution. After all, the first successes with human cells were reported just six months ago. Medical researchers haven't yet figured out precisely how to define high-quality cells, let alone how to make them reliably and efficiently. But Kamp is confident that things will be getting a lot more interesting in the months and years ahead.

"There are a lot of surprises around every corner," he said. "That's part of the fun."

Update for 2:10 p.m. ET May 24: I wanted to address an issue that usually comes up when discussing human embryonic stem cells: that no cures have become available using such cells, while treatments that rely on other types of stem cells (for example, adult stem cells) have been available for some time. Virtually every researcher I've spoken with over the years has said that we can't afford to overlook any avenue to stem cell therapies, including the less versatile adult cells as well as cells derived from cord blood and other sources.

However, the reason why embryonic stem cell therapies aren't as far along is not because they're less promising. They're more promising, based on animal studies. The problem is that the field is so controversial that regulators and investors are moving much more slowly.

Last week's news is a case in point: The Food and Drug Administration has put the first clinical trial involving embryonic stem cells on hold, and advisers have said that such trials will have to be held to more stringent standards than other, more conventional clinical trials.

Part of that is because of safety concerns: For example, animal-derived biological factors are used even for culturing human embryonic stem cells. Some have voiced fear that the therapies could give rise to tumors, although the company involved in last week's development, Geron, says that hasn't happened in its animal studies.

Will the situation change with the next administration in the White House? That's hard to tell, and some researchers in the field worry that tighter budgets will put an extra squeeze on research with embryonic stem cells.

To learn more about regenerative medicine, check out msnbc.com's special section on cloning and stem cells.

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Angry Young Men

Michael Currie, author of Doing Anger Differently

A clinical psychologist practicing in Newcastle, Australia, Michael Currie has worked with adolescent boys and their families for 20 years. Much of his attention has centered on the anger that can consume boys during their high-school years. Manifesting in the home as sullenness, disobedience and fierce assertions of independence, teen rage confuses and distresses parents, who often make matters worse with their clumsy, if well-meaning, attempts to address it. In his new book, Doing Anger Differently, Currie explores what's at the core of boys' anger and lays out the dos and don'ts of the parental response. Between patients, he chatted with TIME about the turbulent inner world of the adolescent boy.

What's the difference between the anger of adolescent boys and the anger we all feel from time to time?
In its essence, not a lot. Anger is made of two components: one is an idea that there's something wrong, two is that someone else is to blame. The difference in adolescence is the struggle behind the anger. The teenager is trying to grasp the responsibilities and freedoms that come with entering the second epoch of life — that between childhood and adulthood. His identity is fragile, and it can be inevitable that anger comes with that.

Is this anger necessarily a bad thing?
No. Saint Thomas Aquinas talked about anger being an attack on the evil present in the mind, and how if one ignores this evil — the thing that's wrong — the result is sadness. The truth that has to be mastered in adolescence is that a boy can do whatever he likes, inside the law. Leaving those boundaries is a fundamentally self-destructive thing to do.

Is the focus of your book problem kids or the average teenage boy who sometimes shouts at his parents?
Both. A lot of my work with teenage anger has been with the 5% of the male population in early high school, trying to help them find other ways of addressing what's wrong rather than swearing at teachers or being violent or smashing property. But there are boys across the spectrum of anger difficulties, and all could benefit from their parents knowing more about how to manage things.

What kind of damage can adolescent anger do to families?
Enormous damage. It can destroy the bonds that keep a family together. A problem with anger is that it's contagious. When parents have an angry son in the house, it's very easy to get caught up in that anger and to respond in kind. When the son starts yelling, they yell back. If his parents keep responding in this way, the son will begin to feel there's no place for him in the home.

Aren't there angry girls, too?
No doubt. Perhaps one of the differences with girls — and it's very hard to generalize — is that they have more of a facility with speech. They tend to be able to talk about what their inner life is like, whereas boys tend not to have too many models in their life who can help them to articulate the powder keg that's inside them.

What are the keys to dealing with a teenager's anger?
Because they're the adults, parents need to suck it in and step back and try a whole lot of other things besides getting mad. Parents have to try, at times when the anger's not around, to come back to their son and revisit the issue at the core of the argument. They need to identify the kernel of truth contained in his anger, and go back to their son and say, Listen, you said this — can you tell me a little bit more about what you're feeling?

What else?
In adolescence, boys need to feel they're working towards something, whether it be an apprenticeship or university or whatever. If they have something they want to preserve, that's a reason for them to hang on to their anger. It's those boys who feel marginalized, who feel they have no future and nothing to lose, they're the boys who end up joining groups made up of other marginalized youth. They come to think, I'm going to act exactly how I feel — and I feel terrible.

Why do they feel terrible? Is it because they don't have a goal, or is that lack of a goal a symptom of feeling terrible?
The crucial point is that we all feel terrible at times. The difference between boys who get into difficulty with their anger and those who don't is the way they respond to feeling terrible.

To what extent can the anger of adolescence be traced to changes going on in the brain at this stage of life?
There's a lot of explanations that circle about as to why adolescents are angry. There's the neurological argument, the hereditary argument. Some parents look at their teenage son and say, What have I done? There must be something that I really stuffed up in his childhood for him to be acting this way. The problem with all these explanations is that, while they might have some validity, all of them render the parents powerless to do anything about the problem. My point would be that parents can do something. They can have an influence on their angry son.

Withdrawal, lack of motivation, apathy — are these other manifestations of teenage anger?
Yes. There's no doubt about that. Parents can get abused one moment, then the next the adolescent withdraws and doesn't want to talk.

So yelling at their teenagers doesn't generally help. But what about the broader idea of parents getting tough?
Some parents take up a very authoritarian stance, trying to lay down the rules. This doesn't help an adolescent boy at all because it means the rules are imposed from outside, like a moral law. Parents need to be involved in a dialogue with their son. They need to fill the role of intellectual midwife: engage them in a conversation where the rules, the laws, what's right and what's wrong are talked about and not imposed. Sometimes parents have to forbid. But that doesn't mean the forbidding should happen in the absence of a dialogue.

What's going on in the head of the angry boy? What have most parents forgotten about adolescence?
Adolescent anger is an assertion, and the assertion is: I am not wrong about myself. Boys are busy building an image or an identity of themselves, and this is vulnerable to being smashed and destroyed. That is a threat that causes anger, and the accompanying act to anger can be aggression.

But what if the self-image the son is building up is loathsome to his parents? Do they have to respect it?
No, because that's where parents can and do have some authority over their children, and they absolutely need to know where he is and what he's doing. One of the difficulties of boys joining gangs is that they often celebrate an ideal of who can be the most ruthless, the most destructive, the most violent. There's this violent ideal that boys can fall into, and by following that ideal it sort of assuages their negative self-feelings. Absolutely this is a time to intervene, while at the same time trying to find out why he's drawn to that ideal in the first place.

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Titanic search was cover for secret Cold War subs mission

Actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in a scene from the movie Titanic

Lewis Smith, Environment Reporter

The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines.

When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.

Both of the United States Navy vessels sank during the 1960s, killing more than 200 men and giving rise to fears that at least one of them, Scorpion, had been sunk by the USSR.

Dr Ballard, an oceanographer, has admitted that he located and inspected the wrecks for the US Navy in top secret missions before he was allowed to search for the Titanic.

Only once he had used his new underwater robot craft to map the submarine wreck sites was he able to use it to crisscross the North Atlantic seabed to pinpoint the last resting place of the luxury liner. It meant he had only 12 days to find the Titanic.

“I couldn’t tell anybody,” he said. “There was a lot of pressure on me. It was a secret mission. I felt it was a fair exchange for getting a chance to look for the Titanic.

“We handed the data to the experts. They never told us what they concluded – our job was to collect the data. I can only talk about it now because it has been declassified.”

Dr Ballard said what he had seen during the inspection of the wrecks gave him the idea of finding a trail of debris that would lead to the main sections of the Titanic. Thresher, had imploded deep beneath the surface and had broken up into thousands of pieces and Scorpion was almost as completely destroyed. “It was as though it had been put through a shredding machine. There was a long debris trail.” Dr Ballard developed a robotic submarine craft in the early 1980s and approached the US Navy in 1982 for funding to search for the Titanic, which sank in 1912 with the loss of 1,500 lives after hitting an iceberg.

He was told that the military were not willing to spend a fortune on locating the liner, but they did want to know what had happened to their submarines.The military were anxious to know how the nuclear reactors had been affected by being submerged for so long.

During the 1980s the nuclear submarine fleet was reduced after the Salt II (strategic arms limitation talks) agreement and one option was to sink unwanted reactors at sea. Dr Ballard said that samples taken from the reactor sections of both submarines showed that there was little risk to the environment from radioactivity.

The oceanographer was given the funding to embark on two expeditions, one to find the wreck of Thresher in 1984 off the eastern coast of the US and another to find Scorpion in the eastern Atlantic.

Thresher, the US Navy’s most advanced attack submarine at the time, sank with all her 129 crew in April 1963 while undergoing seaworthiness tests after dockyard repairs.

A surface ship, Skylark, was in contact when the submarine’s crew reported that a high-pressure pipe supplying the nuclear reactor with cooling water had blown. The accident 1,000ft down, caused the vessel to lose power. It then sank so deep that the pressure hull imploded.

Scorpion disappeared with 99 crew in 1968, and there had been speculation that it was sunk by Soviet forces. Dr Ballard’s visual examination of the wreck site showed that the most likely cause of its destruction was being hit by a rogue torpedo that it had fired itself.

— Titanic: The Final Secret will be shown on the National Geographic Channel at 9pm on June 8.

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The superior eyes of shrimp

We mammals have been beaten again. Shrimp have more sophisticated eyes than we do, with the ability to see things we can't, and I'm feeling a bit envious.

There are a couple of general properties of light that can be captured and measured with a light detector. One is the amplitude of the light wave, which we see as differences in the intensity of light. This is the most basic measurement of a photoreceptor, sensing the raw amount of energy being transmitted. Another property is wavelength, which we perceive as the color of light. Many mammals are incapable of detecting the wavelength, having monochromatic vision, so we're actually among the fortunate lineages that have a sufficiently elaborate photoreceptor system that we can actually see the color of objects.

Don't get cocky, though: there are some features of light that we can't see, but that would be very useful. One is phase. You can have two light waves of equal amplitude and wavelength, which look identical to our eyes, but they can be a fraction of a wavelength out of phase relative to one another.

That may not sound particularly useful to you because you've never experienced it. However, many materials shift the phase of light as it passes through them; a transparent (to our eyes) piece of glass can actually change the phase of light, as can cell membranes. We can build instruments to detect phase shifts, and they are extremely useful in microscopy — by aligning light waves that pass through a specimen with an unperturbed reference wave, we can generate patterns of constructive and destructive interference that our eyes can see, and voila, the transparent cell is made visible.

One other ability that we lack, but that many other animals possess, is light polarization detectors. Again, this is a property you may not be able to appreciate until you experience it, but it's another powerful visualization tool. Light waves can be vibrating in any of multiple planes. For instance, the plane of vibration can be up and down, or it can be side to side, or at any angle in between. Light can also be circularly polarized, where the plane of vibration corkscrews through space. (How, you may wonder? It's actually not hard; circularly polarized light can be decomposed into two linearly polarized light waves of equal frequency, but with the planes orthogonal to one another and with each out of phase with respect to the other).

We can't see the polarity of light! Up and down, side to side, it's all the same to our eyes, which is unfortunate, because we are often in environments where the light is polarized. Sunlight, for instance, is partially polarized as it passes through the atmosphere, and has a plane of polarization perpendicular to the direction of the sun, a property that many insects can use for navigation. Light reflected off of shiny surfaces is also selectively polarized. Polarizing sun glasses, for instance, are useful because than can selectively filter out glare reflected from horizontal surfaces. As light passes through otherwise transparent materials, like, say, a transparent animal swimming through the ocean, it can also be selectively polarized, a useful property to take advantage of if you are hunting for small, nearly transparent animals to eat.

The cephalopod eye has polarization detectors, but if you really want some sophisticated light detection, look to the arthropods, especially mantis shrimp. Even a superficial view of the eye reveals that something special is going on: there are specialized ommatida (the facets of the compound eye) and a curious equatorial band of aligned and specially organized receptors.

A) Adult Gonodactylus smithii, or mantis shrimp, ˜7 cm long. The stalked apposition compound eyes are divided into a dorsal and a ventral hemisphere by an equatorial mid-band of enlarged and structurally specialised ommatidia. Inset. Mid-band position indicated by curved dark lines. The three pseudopupils (dark spots) visible within each eye indicate that the visual fields of the two hemispheres and the mid-band almost completely overlap at the equator of the eye, so that the three eye regions view the equatorial strip simultaneously. Photograph by R.L. Caldwell. B) Frontal view of the right eye to illustrate the division of the eye into a dorsal hemisphere (DH) and a ventral hemisphere (VH) by the equatorial mid-band formed by six rows of enlarged ommatidia, numbered row 1 to row 6 from dorsal to ventral. Mid-band rows 1-4 contain spectral photoreceptors; mid-band rows 5 and 6 are specialised for circular polarisation vision; the dorsal and ventral hemispheres for linear polarisation vision. Recording electrodes were lowered through corneal holes cut in the lateral half of the dorsal hemisphere, where the mid-band is ˜15° relative to the equator of the eye. The black scale bar is 1 mm, the axes refer to Dorsal, Medial, Ventral and Lateral. C) Electron micrograph of a longitudinal section through a mid-band row 6 rhabdom. The alternating layers of microvilli are highly ordered and in thinner layers than in hemispheric rhabdoms. The polarisation discrimination D of mid-band rows 5 and 6 retinular cells is twice as high as that of hemispheric cells due to a more crystalline microvillar structure: c.f. D̅_mid = 0.340±0.061 with D̅_hemi = 0.145±0.035

Kleinlogel and White dug deeper into that eye and found that the structures specifically support detection of polarized light, both linearly and circularly. They inserted microelectrodes into the photoreceptors and measure the responses as the eyes were flashed with polarized light, and got some beautiful electrophysiological data that showed wonderfully clean response curves. They have optimal polarization vision, capable of resolving all of the parameters necessary to detect the plane of circularly and linearly polarized light in their field of vision. This is powerful stuff; mantis shrimps are moving through a visual world rich with novel details beyond our imagination, able to detect qualities of light outside our experience. The authors see the importance, too.

Stomatopods are shallow-water crustaceans in a visual environment with a partially polarised background. Crustaceans are known to use polarisation for navigation; many stomatopod prey species are either reflective or transparent but change the polarisation of the light—an obvious possible driver of evolutionary change. Optimal polarisation vision provides all the information about polarisation of the visual field without confusion states or neutral points—giving the greatest ability to detect changes in both the degree and type of polarisation. This goes beyond simple contrast enhancement: optimal polarisation vision is analogous to the improvement afforded by stereo over mono vision in terms of increased information capacity.

The only conclusion possible is that it is completely false that God hates shrimp — he must like them very much indeed, and the biblical injunction against eating them must be because he likes them better than us.

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The Value of a Human Life: $129,000

In theory, a year of human life is priceless. In reality, it's worth $50,000.

That's the international standard most private and government-run health insurance plans worldwide use to determine whether to cover a new medical procedure. More simply, insurance companies calculate that to make a treatment worth its cost, it must guarantee one year of "quality life" for $50,000 or less. New research, however, would argue that that figure is far too low.

Stanford economists have demonstrated that the average value of a year of quality human life is actually closer to about $129,000. To get to that number, Stefanos Zenios and his colleagues at Stanford Graduate School of Business used kidney dialysis as a benchmark. Every year dialysis saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who would otherwise die of renal failure while waiting for an organ transplant. It is also the one procedure that Medicare has covered unconditionally since 1972 despite rapid and sometimes expensive innovations in its administration. To tally the cost-effectiveness of such innovations Zenios and his colleagues ran a computer analysis of more than half a million patients who underwent dialysis, adding up costs and comparing that data to treatment outcomes. Considering both inflation and new technologies in dialysis, they arrived at $129,000 as a more appropriate threshold for deciding coverage. "That means that if Medicare paid an additional $129,000 to treat a group of patients, on average, group members would get one more quality-adjusted life year," Zenios says. Based on patient surveys, one "quality of life" year is defined as about two years of life on dialysis.

Zenios's conclusions arrive amidst mounting debate over whether Medicare, the U.S. government health plan for seniors, ought to use cost-effectiveness analysis in determining coverage of procedures. Nearly all other industrial nations — including Canada, Britain and the Netherlands — ration health care based on cost-effectiveness and the $50,000 threshold. Medicare, on the other hand, decides whether to pay for new technology based on whether a treatment is "medically necessary and appropriate." But as health care expenses rise and entitlement programs grow fiscally strapped — at least one part of Medicare is now expected to be bankrupt by 2019 — more and more academics have called for this approach to be reconsidered, and for cost to become a factor. Such a move would mean that "if the incremental cost of a new technology was more than the threshold," Zenios says, "then the recommendation would be that Medicare not cover that new technology."

Assigning a dollar figure to Medicare patients' lives may sound crass, but such valuations are routine in Americans' daily lives. Take, for example, the $500,000 death benefit the government pays families when a soldier is killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or the cost calculations that for-profit health insurers make to determine how much coverage they'll give customers. In fact, at least some Americans seem at ease with allowing money to play a prominent role in health care decisions. In a 2007 survey of New Yorkers, 75% of participants felt "somewhat" to "very" comfortable with allowing cost to inform Medicare treatment decisions, once they understood how the system worked. "Americans understand and are prepared to engage the issues that arise when setting priorities and limits for their public programs," Marthe Gold, the City University of New York Medical School professor who conducted the study, wrote with colleagues this past fall in the journal Health Affairs.

The Stanford researchers caution that if Medicare fully adopted a cost-benefit analysis model, too many patients could be denied life-saving treatment. They return to the example of dialysis patients. Their study showed that for the sickest patients, the average cost of an additional quality-of-life year was much higher — $488,000. "It is difficult to justify the burden and expense of dialysis when persons have other serious health conditions such as, for example, advanced dementia or cancer," says co-author Glenn Chertow, a nephrology professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. "In these settings, dialysis is unlikely to provide any meaningful benefit." But with organs including kidneys for transplant so scarce, is it justifiable to deny these patients a chance to live through dialysis? It is a question, Zenios says, everyone should approach with trepidation. "What is the true value of a human life? That's what we're asking people," he adds. "I wouldn't pretend to know."

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How to Do the Candle Experiment

Paradise lost - with napalm

To Australia's shame, loggers are being allowed to destroy Tasmania's extraordinary primeval forest

I am writing this in our autumn, once Tasmania's most beautiful season. But the china-blue skies are now nicotine scummed, as smoke from the burning of old-growth forest floats over Hobart, an inescapable reminder that the destruction of ancient woodland - like no other in the world - is accelerating.

In Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland whose primeval forests astonished 19th-century Europeans, an incomprehensible ecological tragedy is being played out.

Recent calls from Britain to boycott Tasmanian goods and tourism are not going to end logging. But in an Australian election year, with the forests emerging as a major issue, they form part of a chorus of international condemnation that shows Australians that the forests are not just a natural resource, but are globally significant wild lands.

Rainforest is being clearfelled and then burnt with napalm. The world's tallest hardwood trees, eucalyptus regnans, are being reduced to mud and ash. And the monocultural plantations that replace the old growths soak up so much groundwater that rivers are drying up.

Compound 1080, a lethal poison, is laid to kill off native animals that might graze plantation seedlings. In the resulting slaughter, wallabies, kangaroos, possums, and protected species such as wombats, bettongs and potoroos, die in slow agony.

The survival of extraordinary creatures such as the giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish - the largest in the world - is in doubt because of logging. Scientists warn that numerous insect species still unrecorded are disappearing in the conflagration. Local people are finding their water contaminated with atrazine, a potent weedkiller.

Logging is an industry driven solely by greed. It prospers with government support and subsidies, and it is accelerating its rate of destruction, so that Tasmania is now the largest hardwood chip exporter in the world. And Gunns, the largest logging company in Australia with a monopoly in Tasmania, is making record profits selling these forests as woodchips, which are in turn made into paper and cardboard.

But the woodchippers are destroying not only Tasmania's natural heritage, but also its parliament, its polity, its media and its society. The close relationship which leading Tasmanian politicians enjoy with Gunns, goes beyond sizeable donations to both major parties; it has given rise to a political culture of bullying, cronyism and threats, a culture that allowed the state's electoral system, under a 1997 Liberal-Labour deal, to be altered to minimise Green representation.

Because of the forest battle, a subtle fear has entered Tasmanian public life; it stifles dissent and is conducive to the abuse of power. To question or to comment is to invite the possibility of ostracism and unemployment.

The reality, relentlessly denied with lies, is that logging old growth brings neither wealth nor jobs to impoverished rural communities. Most wealth made out of woodchips flows out of the state; less than 15% of Gunns' profits stay in Tasmania, which remains the poorest Australian state. Contrary to the government's claim that 10,000 jobs depend on old-growth logging, John Gay, Gunns' managing director, recently admitted that only 480 jobs were at stake.

However, the giving away of such an extraordinary resource does threaten Tasmania's broader economic prospects. Key industries in which job growth is concentrated, such as tourism and fine foods and wines, trade as much on the island's pristine image as they do on the products they sell, and there is growing concern at the damage being done to Tasmania's name by images of smouldering forest.

Since woodchipping began 32 years ago, Tasmanians have watched as one extraordinary place after another has been sacrificed. Beautiful places, holy places, lost not only to them, but for ever. They overwhelmingly want the practice of old-growth logging ended - Wilderness Society polls show that 69% of Tasmanians are opposed to the practice.

But with both major political parties in Tasmania as one in their rigid support of Gunns and old-growth logging, Tasmanians cannot stop this coalition of greed and power from within their island. Change can only be brought about by the Australian government, and it will only act when the issue becomes one of inescapable national shame.

Of course it can be argued that the destruction of one more unique piece of our natural world, while regrettable, is small change next to the horror of Madrid, or the tragedy of Iraq. But in the lineaments of the struggle in a distant island, it is possible to see a larger battle, the same battle the world over - that between truth and power.

Günter Grass, writing of Tasmania's forests, has described their destruction as an aspect of the same attitude that led to Nazi book-burnings. Could it be that, when all our skies appear to be darkening, the great forests of Tasmania are a symbol of hope for us all?

Richard Flanagan's most recent novel is Gould's Book of Fish

jane.novak@macmillan.com.au

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No more pyrotechnics

Taming the rock-concert industry's excesses

AS ANY country-music fan knows, Willie Nelson, America's favourite outlaw-troubadour, can’t wait to get on the road again. Although he often sings about whiskey, since 2004 his tireless touring has been fueled by an entirely different sort of liquid: biofuel (which he has cleverly branded “BioWillie”).

Mr Nelson, one of the founders of the annual Farm Aid concert series, began running his tour bus on biofuel to support American farmers, but musicians and concert promoters have started using the fuel as part of an effort to reduce the environmental impact of their live shows. How effective has the concert industry been in shrinking its carbon footprint?

AFPDo as Sting says, not as he does

During last July’s Live Earth concerts held simultaneously in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Johannesburg and Hamburg, Al Gore tried to harness the promotional power of environmentally inclined rock stars like Madonna, The Police and the Red Hot Chili Peppers to raise global awareness of “a climate in crisis”. But some wags dubbed the concert “private jets for climate change”, referring to the rockstar lifestyle, and the concerts themselves produced 35,000 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

That figure is large but sadly typical: according to National Geographic’s Green Guide, a single stadium concert releases 500 to 1000 tons of carbon dioxide, which is between 25 and 50 times more than the average American produces in a year. That number does not even take into account fans' transport, the immense amount of garbage produced or any fire-spewing Kiss-style pyrotechnic displays. Reverb, an advocacy group promoting environmentally responsible music tours, estimates that fans' commutes can quintuple the carbon cost of a show.

Despite these costs, tour schedules are growing longer and more intensive. Consumers are downloading (both legally and illegally) more individual tracks and buying fewer complete albums; bands need to make their money somewhere.

Some bands and concert organisers have taken strides to minimise touring’s environmental impact. Festivals such as Lollapalooza, an American summer institution, and Britain’s massive Glastonbury Festival have switched to biofuel-powered generators. The organisers of last summer's Osheaga Festival in Montreal went one step further: they hired Hydro Quebec to supply their main stage with emission-free geothermal energy. Reverb has encouraged organisers to offer reusable aluminum canteens rather than plastic water-bottles, and also set up “Eco-Villages”, with information on how to minimise one’s carbon footprints, outside concert venues.

This is all very well, but bands still seem more committed to talk than action. The Dave Matthews Band, peripatetic college favourites, made much of its decision in 2006 to use biofuels and emissions reduction credits (ERCs) to make its annual summer tours “carbon neutral”. But it still schedules concerts at places like the Gorge Amphitheater, 150 miles east of Seattle and hundreds of miles from any public transport. That produces immense quantities of CO2, half of which will still be there in 100 years.

Though popular, biofuels are no panacea: once the water, fertiliser, and diesel required used to grow, harvest, process and distribute corn and soybean-based biofuels are factored into the carbon calculations, biofuels have only a marginally lower carbon intensity, or carbon output per unit of energy, than standard petrol. Furthermore, the increased production of biofuels has been blamed in part for the global surge in food prices.

As the summer tour season begins, bands and promoters ought to follow the lead of Radiohead, a genre-bending rock band, or the Lollapalooza festival. Both have eschewed globetrotting tours in favour of staging shows in areas accessible by public transport.

The staging of last year's Live Earth event served, if nothing else, to make the environmental costs of the concert industry impossible to ignore. Getting their carbon emissions under control will let rockers return with a clean conscience to more interesting vices.

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WCI student isolates microbe that lunches on plastic bags

Karen Kawawada
RECORD STAFF

WATERLOO

Getting ordinary plastic bags to rot away like banana peels would be an environmental dream come true.

After all, we produce 500 billion a year worldwide and they take up to 1,000 years to decompose. They take up space in landfills, litter our streets and parks, pollute the oceans and kill the animals that eat them.

Now a Waterloo teenager has found a way to make plastic bags degrade faster -- in three months, he figures.

Daniel Burd's project won the top prize at the Canada-Wide Science Fair in Ottawa. He came back with a long list of awards, including a $10,000 prize, a $20,000 scholarship, and recognition that he has found a practical way to help the environment.

Daniel, a 16-year-old Grade 11 student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, got the idea for his project from everyday life.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," he said. "One day, I got tired of it and I wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

The answer: not much. So he decided to do something himself.

He knew plastic does eventually degrade, and figured microorganisms must be behind it. His goal was to isolate the microorganisms that can break down plastic -- not an easy task because they don't exist in high numbers in nature.

First, he ground plastic bags into a powder. Next, he used ordinary household chemicals, yeast and tap water to create a solution that would encourage microbe growth. To that, he added the plastic powder and dirt. Then the solution sat in a shaker at 30 degrees.

After three months of upping the concentration of plastic-eating microbes, Burd filtered out the remaining plastic powder and put his bacterial culture into three flasks with strips of plastic cut from grocery bags. As a control, he also added plastic to flasks containing boiled and therefore dead bacterial culture.

Six weeks later, he weighed the strips of plastic. The control strips were the same. But the ones that had been in the live bacterial culture weighed an average of 17 per cent less.

That wasn't good enough for Burd. To identify the bacteria in his culture, he let them grow on agar plates and found he had four types of microbes. He tested those on more plastic strips and found only the second was capable of significant plastic degradation.

Next, Burd tried mixing his most effective strain with the others. He found strains one and two together produced a 32 per cent weight loss in his plastic strips. His theory is strain one helps strain two reproduce.

Tests to identify the strains found strain two was Sphingomonas bacteria and the helper was Pseudomonas.

A researcher in Ireland has found Pseudomonas is capable of degrading polystyrene, but as far as Burd and his teacher Mark Menhennet know -- and they've looked -- Burd's research on polyethelene plastic bags is a first.

Next, Burd tested his strains' effectiveness at different temperatures, concentrations and with the addition of sodium acetate as a ready source of carbon to help bacteria grow.

At 37 degrees and optimal bacterial concentration, with a bit of sodium acetate thrown in, Burd achieved 43 per cent degradation within six weeks.

The plastic he fished out then was visibly clearer and more brittle, and Burd guesses after six more weeks, it would be gone. He hasn't tried that yet.

To see if his process would work on a larger scale, he tried it with five or six whole bags in a bucket with the bacterial culture. That worked too.

Industrial application should be easy, said Burd. "All you need is a fermenter . . . your growth medium, your microbes and your plastic bags."

The inputs are cheap, maintaining the required temperature takes little energy because microbes produce heat as they work, and the only outputs are water and tiny levels of carbon dioxide -- each microbe produces only 0.01 per cent of its own infinitesimal weight in carbon dioxide, said Burd.

"This is a huge, huge step forward . . . We're using nature to solve a man-made problem."

Burd would like to take his project further and see it be used. He plans to study science at university, but in the meantime he's busy with things such as student council, sports and music.

"Dan is definitely a talented student all around and is poised to be a leading scientist in our community," said Menhennet, who led the school's science fair team but says he only helped Burd with paperwork.

Other local students also did well at the national science fair.

Devin Howard of St. John's Kilmarnock School won a gold medal in life science and several scholarships.

Mackenzie Carter of St. John's Kilmarnock won bronze medals in the automotive and engineering categories.

Engineers Without Borders awarded Jeff Graansma of Forest Heights Collegiate a free trip to their national conference in January.

Zach Elgood of Courtland Avenue Public School got honourable mention in earth and environmental science.

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