Orchards may vanish by the end of the century, conservationists warn

An apple crop being harvested in Somerset. Their price is set to rise this year. Photograph: Mark Bolton/Corbis

Small traditional orchards could vanish from the British landscape by the end of the century unless action is taken to save them, environmental experts and campaigners warned yesterday.

Natural England and the National Trust claimed 60% of England's orchards had isappeared since the 1950s as they launched a £500,000 project aimed at halting the decline. The crisis has been even worse in some areas, such as Devon, which has lost almost 90% of its orchards.

The organisations argued that if nothing was done, a focal point for communities across the country and a crucial habitat for flora and fauna could be wiped out forever.

The loss of orchards would be accompanied by a huge loss of apple varieties, some unique to just a few square miles, and many of them with wonderfully eccentric names such as the Hangy Down, the Oaken Pin and Polly White Hair.

Steve Morris: 'Sixty per cent of smaller orchards have vanished' Link to this audio

David Bullock, the head of nature conservation at the National Trust, said: "Traditional orchards have been disappearing at an alarming rate. We are in real danger of losing these unique habitats."

Bullock also said that unless more was done to map the many disused orchards in England, rare varieties would be lost, with no records kept of them ever having existed.

In a blossom-filled apple orchard at Killerton, a National Trust estate in Devon, the scale of the crisis was spelled out.

Though cider has grown in popularity over the last few years, it tends to be made from apples grown intensively and treated with chemicals. Many smaller traditional orchards have been built on, or uprooted to make way for arable crops and pony paddocks.

That meant the loss of habitats for birds, beetles including the threatened Noble Chafer, mammals — such as long-eared bats — moths, lichens and fungi.

For the purposes of the new £500,000 project, traditional orchards are defined as having at least five trees widely spaced and allowed to grow gnarled, hollowed and eventually fall where they stand . They are not intensively managed, are treated with few or no chemicals and are often grazed by animals such as sheep or geese or cut for hay.

Lucy Cordrey, the project manager, said: "Traditional orchards have become an extremely rare and precious habitat. We need to do something to stop this decline. Orchards bring people and wildlife together. It's about food, the culture behind them, the heritage. They are magical places to be in."

Under the two-year project old orchards are being restored and long forgotten or neglected ones rediscovered and mapped. Workshops are being set up to train people in skills such as pruning and grafting and communities are being told how they can revive old orchards, plant new ones and market the fruit they produce.

Sue Clifford, director of the environmental charity Common Ground, said she was confident the traditional orchard would be saved.

Clifford, whose favourite apple is the west country's Slack-ma-Girdle, said: "The interest is escalating. In the last two or three years we've seen a change in people's attitudes.

"We've been trying to excite people since the late eighties about traditional orchards. We've tried to say to them, look there's 2,300 varieties of eating and cooking apples, several hundred more of cider apples. And that's just apples. Think of the pears and the plums and the

damsons. And I think people are starting to realise that orchards are beautiful places. They are fantastic for wildlife and they are good for community spirit. "

Traditional orchards, traditional apples

Here are just a few of the varieties of apples to be found in the orchards of the Killerton estate in Devon:

Killerton Sweet

Unique to Killerton, a pale green cider apple. One of the varieties used in the estate's popular 6% cider.

Killerton Sharp

Also found only at Killerton. A little drier and sharper than the sweet, and gives the cider a bit of bite. Ripens in October.

Philbert Nut Bush

A bright red Somerset apple. Excellent in chutney but also makes a tasty desert apple.

Star of Devon

Originally from the village of Broadclyst just a few miles away from Killerton. A pale yellowy-green pithy apple.

Ten Commandments

Split it in two and you find 10 brown dots - hence the name. Pale green and yellow, becoming red as it ripens in late September and early October.

Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

Parents all know that children make it harder to do some of the most enjoyable adult things. Bluntly put, kids can get between you.

Now scientists have attached some numbers to the situation.

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.

"Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time," says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. "However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child."

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don't get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

There are key variables to note in the new study.

Couples who lived together before marriage experienced more problems after the birth of a child than those who lived separately before marriage, as did those whose parents fought or divorced.

However, some couples said their relationships were stronger post-birth. They tended to have been married longer or had higher incomes.

Children don't ruin everything, Stanley points out.

"There are different types of happiness in life and that while some luster may be off marital happiness for at least a time during this period of life, there is a whole dimension of family happiness and contentment based on the family that couples are building," he said. "This type of happiness can be powerful and positive but it has not been the focus of research."

The new research, funded by a grant to the University of Denver from the National Institutes of Health, is detailed in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

• Why We Fear Parenting
• 10 Things You Didn't Know About You
• Video: A Mother's Touch

• Original Story: Kids Curb Marital Satisfaction

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Cambridge University Unveiled Solar Car

Cambridge University Eco Racing’s (CUER) new solar racing car demonstrates cutting-edge environmentally-friendly technology, applicable to the next generation of electric vehicles.

The vehicle, currently codenamed ‘Bethany‘, will compete in the World Solar Challenge in Australia in October 2009. This vehicle is capable of cruising at 60mph using the same power as a hairdryer. The car will weigh just 160kg and sports 6m2 of the world’s highest efficiency silicon solar cells.

In order to achieve the car’s extraordinary performance, CUER’s engineering team has systematically reduced energy usage for each part of the car. Aerodynamics, rolling resistance, weight and electrical efficiency have all been optimised to create a vehicle that uses up to 50 times less power than a normal petrol car and has potentially infinite range.

Extensive computer modelling and simulation have been necessary to achieve this, using Dassault Systèmes’ SolidWorks and Simulia packages for mechanical design, ANSYS’s Fluent for aerodynamic simulation, as well as National Instrument’s LabVIEW and The MathWorks’ MatLab and Simulink for systems modelling. Under its solar skin, the racing car is simply an ultra-efficient electric vehicle.

The technologies used are therefore applicable to the commercial electric cars that are beginning to appear on our roads. Technologies used include a 98% efficient electric hub motor, control systems providing battery management (supplied by REAPsystems) and regenerative braking, lightweight mechanical design, and carbon fibre composite bodywork.

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Aerosols May Drive a Significant Portion of Arctic Warming

Aerosols can influence climate directly by either reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation as it moves through the atmosphere. The tiny airborne particles enter the atmosphere from sources such as industrial pollution, volcanoes and residential cooking stoves. Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio
> Larger image

Though greenhouse gases are invariably at the center of discussions about global climate change, new NASA research suggests that much of the atmospheric warming observed in the Arctic since 1976 may be due to changes in tiny airborne particles called aerosols.

Emitted by natural and human sources, aerosols can directly influence climate by reflecting or absorbing the sun's radiation. The small particles also affect climate indirectly by seeding clouds and changing cloud properties, such as reflectivity.

A new study, led by climate scientist Drew Shindell of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, used a coupled ocean-atmosphere model to investigate how sensitive different regional climates are to changes in levels of carbon dioxide, ozone, and aerosols.

The researchers found that the mid and high latitudes are especially responsive to changes in the level of aerosols. Indeed, the model suggests aerosols likely account for 45 percent or more of the warming that has occurred in the Arctic during the last three decades. The results were published in the April issue of Nature Geoscience.

Though there are several varieties of aerosols, previous research has shown that two types -- sulfates and black carbon -- play an especially critical role in regulating climate change. Both are products of human activity.

Sulfates, which come primarily from the burning of coal and oil, scatter incoming solar radiation and have a net cooling effect on climate. Over the past three decades, the United States and European countries have passed a series of laws that have reduced sulfate emissions by 50 percent. While improving air quality and aiding public health, the result has been less atmospheric cooling from sulfates.

Researchers used an electron microscope to capture these images of black carbon attached to sulfate particles. The spherical structures in image A are sulfates; the arrows point to smaller chains of black carbon. Black carbon is shown in detail in image B. Image C shows fly ash, a product of coal-combustion, that's often found in association with black carbon. While black carbon absorbs radiation and contributes to warming, sulfates reflect it and tend to cool Earth. Credit: Peter Buseck, Arizona State University
> Larger image At the same time, black carbon emissions have steadily risen, largely because of increasing emissions from Asia. Black carbon -- small, soot-like particles produced by industrial processes and the combustion of diesel and biofuels -- absorb incoming solar radiation and have a strong warming influence on the atmosphere.

In the modeling experiment, Shindell and colleagues compiled detailed, quantitative information about the relative roles of various components of the climate system, such as solar variations, volcanic events, and changes in greenhouse gas levels. They then ran through various scenarios of how temperatures would change as the levels of ozone and aerosols -- including sulfates and black carbon -- varied in different regions of the world. Finally, they teased out the amount of warming that could be attributed to different climate variables. Aerosols loomed large.

The regions of Earth that showed the strongest responses to aerosols in the model are the same regions that have witnessed the greatest real-world temperature increases since 1976. The Arctic region has seen its surface air temperatures increase by 1.5 C (2.7 F) since the mid-1970s. In the Antarctic, where aerosols play less of a role, the surface air temperature has increased about 0.35 C (0.6 F).

That makes sense, Shindell explained, because of the Arctic's proximity to North America and Europe. The two highly industrialized regions have produced most of the world's aerosol emissions over the last century, and some of those aerosols drift northward and collect in the Arctic. Precipitation, which normally flushes aerosols out of the atmosphere, is minimal there, so the particles remain in the air longer and have a stronger impact than in other parts of the world.

Since decreasing amounts of sulfates and increasing amounts of black carbon both encourage warming, temperature increases can be especially rapid. The build-up of aerosols also triggers positive feedback cycles that further accelerate warming as snow and ice cover retreat.

In the Antarctic, in contrast, the impact of sulfates and black carbon is minimized because of the continent’s isolation from major population centers and the emissions they produce.

"There's a tendency to think of aerosols as small players, but they're not," said Shindell. "Right now, in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere and in the Arctic, the impact of aerosols is just as strong as that of the greenhouse gases."

Since the 1890s, surface temperatures have risen faster in the Arctic than in other regions of the world. In part, these rapid changes could be due to changes in aerosol levels. Clean air regulations passed in the 1970s, for example, have likely accelerated warming by diminishing the cooling effect of sulfates. Credit: Drew Shindell, Goddard Institute for Space Studies
> Larger image (pdf) The growing recognition that aerosols may play a larger climate role can have implications for policymakers.

"We will have very little leverage over climate in the next couple of decades if we're just looking at carbon dioxide," Shindell said. "If we want to try to stop the Arctic summer sea ice from melting completely over the next few decades, we're much better off looking at aerosols and ozone."

Aerosols tend to be quite-short lived, residing in the atmosphere for just a few days or weeks. Greenhouses gases, by contrast, can persist for hundreds of years. Atmospheric chemists theorize that the climate system may be more responsive to changes in aerosol levels over the next few decades than to changes in greenhouse gas levels, which will have the more powerful effect in coming centuries.

"This is an important model study, raising lots of great questions that will need to be investigated with field research," said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist from Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. who was not directly involved in the research. Understanding how aerosols behave in the atmosphere is still very much a work-in-progress, she noted, and every model needs to be compared rigorously to real life observations. But the science behind Shindell’s results should be taken seriously.

"It appears that aerosols have quite a powerful effect on climate, but there's still a lot more that we need to sort out," said Shindell.

NASA’s upcoming Glory satellite is designed to enhance our current aerosol measurement capabilities to help scientists reduce uncertainties about aerosols by measuring the distribution and microphysical properties of the particles.

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Brazilian faces retrial over murder of environmental activist nun in Amazon

David Batty

Dorothy Stang was shot to death at point-blank range. Photograph: Reuters

A Brazilian court has ordered the arrest and retrial of an Amazon rancher acquitted of orchestrating the murder of American nun and rainforest activist, Dorothy Stang.

Para state's highest court threw out last year's verdict, which found Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura not guilty of the 2005 shooting of Stang, 73, who campaigned for 30 years to save the Amazon rainforest from the interests of wealthy landlords.

"We're elated and we are convinced we will get a guilty verdict in the new trial," said prosecutor Edson Souza.

Souza said Moura was charged with ordering Stang's murder but he had yet to be arrested.

Stang was shot six times at close range with a revolver in the small jungle city of Anapu. The nun, from Dayton, Ohio, spent three decades on the Amazon's wild frontier, working to preserve the rainforest and defend the rights of poor settlers whose lands were seized by powerful ranchers.

Her death prompted Amazon activists – more than 1,000 of whom have been murdered in the last 20 years – to demand Brazil's government crack down on the illegal seizure and clearance of the rainforest to graze cattle, raise soy crops and harvest timber.

"I am excited that perhaps Dorothy will find justice," David Stang, the nun's brother, wrote in an email to the Associated Press.

He has travelled from his home in Palmer Lake, Colorado, to Brazil several times to witness the trials. "All of us who love Brazil today are so proud of this great country, as would Dorothy be proud today," he wrote.

Prosecutors said Moura and rancher Regivaldo Galvao hired gunmen to kill Stang over a disputed plot of land.

Galvao, who denies the charge, was arrested in 2005 but was freed on bail in 2006.

Moura has already been tried twice in the case as Brazil has no double jeopardy law. He was found guilty by a state court in 2007 and sentenced to 30 years in prison.That ruling was overturned last year after the man who confessed to shooting Stang recanted his earlier testimony, insisting he had acted alone. Gunman Rayfran das Neves Sales was sentenced to 28 years in prison.

The court ruled yesterday that Moura and Sales must be retried because a video that Moura's defence showed the jury was inadmissible.

That video depicting Amair Feijoli da Cunha, who was jailed for 17 years for acting as the middleman between the gunman and the ranchers, was made while he was in prison and without a judge's approval.

The video, made by the defence team, showed Cunha saying that Moura had nothing to do with the case. He had testified earlier that Moura paid the hired gunmen.

Para court officials said no date had been set for the trials of Moura or Sales.

More than 1,100 activists, small farmers, judges, priests and other rural workers have been killed in land disputes in the last two decades, according to the Catholic Land Pastoral, a Brazilian watchdog group.

Of those killings, fewer than 100 cases have gone to court. About 80 convicted suspects were hired gunmen for powerful ranchers and loggers seeking to expand their lands, according to federal prosecutors and the watchdog.

About 15 of the men who hired them were found guilty but none of them are serving a sentence today.

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A Solar-Powered Solution to Florida Sprawl

By Michael Grunwald

An architect's rendering of Babcock Ranch, which plans to provide for its electricity needs on site with solar energy

Coming soon to the Sunshine State: the sunshine city.

An NFL lineman turned visionary developer today is unveiling startlingly ambitious plans for a solar-powered city of tomorrow in southwest Florida's outback, featuring the world's largest photovoltaic solar plant, a truly smart power grid, recharging stations for electric vehicles and a variety of other green innovations. The community of Babcock Ranch is designed to break new frontiers in sustainable development, quite a shift for a state that has never been sustainable and lately hasn't had much development. (Read "Is Florida the Sunset State?")

"Some people think I got hit in the head a few too many times," quips developer Syd Kitson, who spent six years in the trenches for the Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys before entering the real estate business in the mid-1980s. "But I still believe deeply in Florida. And the time has come for something completely different." (See the top 10 green stories of 2008.)

To anyone familiar with southern Florida's planning-nightmare sprawl of golf courses, strip malls and cookie-cutter subdivisions named after the plants and animals they replaced, Kitson's vision for his solar-powered, smart-growth, live-where-you-work city of 45,000 people east of Fort Myers is breathtakingly different. That's why the press conference held today to reveal his development plans for the historic Babcock Ranch property will feature representatives from the Audubon Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Sierra Club.

The history of Florida is littered with spectacular landscape-changing proposals that never made it past the drawing board. The watery wisp of Everglades National Park known as Flamingo — population zero — was once touted as the next Chicago. Kitson's financial partner, Morgan Stanley, has had a rough time lately, and some locals remain skeptical that he can turn his $2 billion green vision into reality. "We've been hearing a lot of very exciting ideas, but we have no idea how this is actually going to happen," says Conservancy of Southwest Florida CEO Andrew McElwaine.

Then again, Kitson has already cleared two of his most difficult hurdles: getting the land and the right to build on it. In 2006 he engineered a deal with then governor Jeb Bush and the previous owners of the 91,000-acre ranch in which the state spent $350 million to purchase 73,000 of the most environmentally sensitive acres — it was the largest preservation buy in Florida history. Kitson paid about the same amount for the remaining 18,000 acres, and he says half of that will remain green space within the new community.

Kitson has been promising unprecedented sustainability all along, but today's shocker was the announcement of Florida Power & Light's plan to provide electricity for Babcock Ranch with a 75-megawatt photovoltaic plant nearly twice as big as the current record holder in Germany. Solar power has been slow to catch on in the gas-powered Sunshine State, but FPL hopes to start construction on the 400-acre, $300 million plant by year's end. The utility expects it will provide enough power for Babcock Ranch and beyond. At $4 million per megawatt — FPL estimates the cost to its customers at about 31� per month over the life of the project — it should be more than four times as cost-effective as the nuclear reactors FPL is trying to build near the Florida Keys.

Kitson's slick website also promises "groundbreaking" strategies to promote energy efficiency for all Babcock Ranch buildings. And that's not all: "Ultramodern electric vehicles will glide along avenues beneath the glow of solar-powered street lamps, plugging in to recharge at convenient community-wide recharging stations. Revolutionary smart-grid technologies will monitor and manage energy use, while smart-home technology will allow residents to operate their homes at maximum efficiency." Kitson's goal is to reduce carbon emissions, oil dependence and energy bills, while turning Babcock Ranch into a mecca for clean-energy research and development, attracting high-tech companies that will provide high-wage jobs.

The idea is to create a self-contained community where people can live and shop and work and go to school and have fun without long car trips. Kitson's construction plans start with a walkable and bikeable downtown that will include a magnet school, a wellness facility and sustainable retail, as well as 8,000 homes — including affordable homes for local workers. "In Florida, everyone has to drive everywhere they want to go," Kitson says. "And everyone thinks the solution to congestion is to build more roads. I think the solution is to design communities so you don't need more cars on the roads."

Of course, talk is cheap. It's no secret that growth has been Florida's primary economic engine for decades. Yet Fortune 500 companies haven't flocked to its sprawling bedroom communities with lousy schools and overpriced houses, and the paving of paradise has left the state with overtapped aquifers, overcrowded hospitals, overstretched services, traffic jams, a dying Everglades and a vanishing sense of place.

Kitson promises to avoid the mistakes of the past. "We're impressed with their commitments," says Wayne Daltry, Lee County's director of smart growth. "Now we have to pound them to keep their commitments. No plan survives contact with reality — and in this case, the reality is called the bottom line."

Given the dismal state of the economy in Florida and the dismal environmental track record of developers, it's easy to be skeptical. Kitson already had to lay off some of his southwest Florida staff. But unless the sun stops shining, the current housing collapse won't last forever. Florida is always going to be nicer than Brooklyn or Cleveland in the winter. It's about time someone tried to make growth environmentally and economically sustainable. And it's about time someone tried to use that sunshine for something other than getting a tan.

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Chicago Gets First Solar Powered EV Charging Station

Written by Jerry James Stone

San Francisco and Portland might be engaged in some electric vehicle pissing contest, but I think both cities just got seriously spanked by Chicago!

Yes…Chicago!

The Windy City just unveiled the first solar-powered electric vehicle charging station during the IOC tour. The Solar Plug-In Stations will be used daily by the City of Chicago Department of Fleet Management to power the city’s electric cars.

“Carbon Day and the City of Chicago are demonstrating true innovation, ingenuity and initiative,” said Richard Lowenthal, CEO of Coulomb Technologies. “Solar energy and electric vehicles are an inevitable partnership that is one more step to reducing our dependence on foreign oil.”

Carbon Day Automotive’s Solar Plug-In Station(TM), built by Carbon Day Construction, was designed by the world renowned firm of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture.

“Without these stations it would be like driving around in traditional cars without the availability of gas stations,” said Scott Emalfarb, CEO at Carbon Day. “The day of true plug-in electric vehicles will be here sooner than most people realize and the world needs to be ready to accommodate them. Carbon Day will build them and they will come.”

Wanxiang America Corporation manufactured the solar panels that form a tree-like canopy built by Residential Steel. Pure Energy, LLC, Northbrook installed the sculpted piece and interfaced it with the concealed underground battery pack enhanced to store solar energy, specially designed and developed by ALL CELL Technologies.

“Chicago is that most American of American cities,” Obama said. Well, I hope other American cities follow suit.

So does Carbon Day Automotive as they hope to have thousands of these stations nationwide by 2011. I hope so too!

More Recent News on EV Charging Infrastructure:

• Connecticut and Massachusetts Could Get EV Charging Network
• It’s On! Portland and San Francisco Battle For Electric Car Domination
• Raleigh, N.C. to Install Plug-in Hybrid Charging Stations
• San Francisco Plugs In To the Future with Electric Vehicle Recharging Stations (by Gavin Newsom)

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Inventor turns cardboard boxes into eco-friendly oven

By Saeed Ahmed

(CNN) -- When Jon Bohmer sat down with his two little girls for a simple project they could work on together, he didn't realize they'd hit upon a solution to one of the world's biggest problems for just $5: A solar-powered oven.

Inventor Jon Bohmer with the oven he has made out of a cardboard box.

The ingeniously simple design uses two cardboard boxes, one inside the other, and an acrylic cover that lets in the sun's rays and traps them.

Black paint on the inner box, and silver foil on the outer one, help concentrate the heat. The trapped rays make the inside hot enough to cook casseroles, bake bread and boil water.

What the box also does is eliminate the need in developing countries for rural residents to cut down trees for firewood. About 3 billion people around the world do so, adding to deforestation and, in turn, global warming.

By allowing users to boil water, the simple device could also potentially save the millions of children who die from drinking unclean water.

Bohmer's invention on Thursday won the FT Climate Change Challenge, which sought to find and publicize the most innovative and practical solution to climate change.

"A lot of scientists are working on ways to send people to Mars. I was looking for something a little more grassroots, a little simpler," Bohmer said Thursday.

Bohmer's contest win notwithstanding, solar cooking with a cardboard oven isn't new. Two American women, Barbara Kerr and Sherry Cole, were the solar box cooker's first serious promoters in the 1970s. They and others joined forces to create the non-profit Solar Cookers International -- originally called Solar Box Cookers International -- in 1987.

Further, the organization's executive director, Patrick Widner, said that the plans for a solar box cooker were found in a book published by the Peace Corps in the 1960s.

"We are pleased that Mr. Bohmer has taken up the cause and interest of the 95 member organizations and 160 individuals of the Solar Cookers Worldwide Network," Widner said. "It would be a pleasure to work with Mr. Bohmer in Kenya where we have been promoting the use of solar cookers for ten years."

Bohmer, a Norwegian-born entrepreneur based in Kenya, said he also had been looking at solutions "way too complex, for way too long."

"This took me about a weekend, and it worked on the first try," Bohmer said. "It's mind-boggling how simple it is."

The contest was organized by the Forum for the Future -- a sustainable development charity -- and the Financial Times newspaper. Among the judges were British business magnate Richard Branson and environmentalist Rajendra Pachauri. The public also voted on the finalists.

Bohmer's invention beat about 300 other entries, including a machine that turns wood and other organic material into charcoal, wheel covers that make trucks more fuel efficient by reducing drag, and a feed supplement for livestock that reduces the methane they emit by 15 percent.

Bohmer named his invention the Kyoto Box, after the international environmental treaty to reduce global warming.

The box can be produced in existing cardboard factories. It has gone into production in a factory in Nairobi, Kenya, that can churn out about 2.5 million boxes a month.

Bohmer has also designed a more durable version, made from recycled plastic, which can be produced just as cheaply.

He envisions such cardboard ovens being distributed throughout rural Africa.

"In the West, we cook with electricity, so it's easy to ignore this problem," he said. "But half the world's population is still living in a stone age. The only way for them to cook is to make a fire.

"I don't want to see another 80-year-old woman carrying 20 kilos of firewood on her back. Maybe we don't have to."

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Report From Antarctica: Heaps of Trash or Historical Treasures?

By Wired Science

NEKO BAY, Antarctica — On the 2 percent of Antarctica that isn't covered in ice, the juxtaposition of man-made refuse and Planet Earth-worthy wildlife tableaux is far from rare. But cleaning up that prime real estate is complicated by the nature of the debris, much of which is deemed "historical" and thus unmovable.

Geobiologist Jeff Marlow traveled to Antarctica during the past two weeks as part of an international expedition exploring conservation and environmental issues, sponsored by BP. In a series of reports for Wired.com, he shares his experience seeing the area first-hand with a number of Antarctic climate, conservation and biology experts. The journey brought a number of issues to the fore, including trash accumulation, ecosystems knocked out of balance by warming temperatures, and simmering political tensions over the region.

Marlow is from Denver and is currently earning a Ph.D. at Imperial College London, working on the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover.

There aren't exactly piles of trash covering Antarctica, but the waste’s location on biologically active shores makes it most disruptive to both wildlife and other human visitors. On a rocky outcrop overlooking Neko Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula, a sheet of red corrugated iron shares space with several hundred gentoo penguins.

Over the last few days, we’ve seen several signs of previous human activity, including a wrecked early–20th-century whaling vessel, some wooden water boats, a rusting sledge and a decrepit shack. Determining which structures hold legitimate historical or cultural value and which should be removed is a contentious task without any clear answers.

The answer for some structures is obvious. Even the strictest conservationist would concede the cultural and historical value of sites like Captain Scott’s hut on the Ross Sea or Mawson's camp in Cape Denison. But significant quantities of disused buildings and machinery dating from the last several decades are a different story.

"An old whaling station is a real mess," said Robert Swan, a stubborn Antarctic conservationist and the first man to walk to both poles. "It’s revolting, but actually it’s not, because it’s a statement saying 'Don’t think of Antarctica as pristine: We were about to come and pillage the place.'"

A few dismal landscapes may have a cautionary function "as a reminder of what could have been," had humanity not declared the Antarctic off-limits, said Graham Charles, a guide and adventurer who has worked in the Antarctic for 15 years. "The rest of them are junk piles, and it’s just abysmal."

There’s plenty of accumulated trash to ship off the continent. From 1994 to 2002, Swan helped the Russian Bellingshausen station on King George Island offload 1,500 tons of garbage that had accumulated since the Cold War. The effort cost $6 million and took eight years, but native penguins soon reclaimed their beach, and the station is a much more pleasant place to visit and live.

Retroactive efforts like the Bellingshausen cleanup will likely continue to take significant amounts of both money and time, but legal frameworks in the last 20 years have helped address waste problems at more recent bases: According to Antarctic law, any active bases must remove all trash from the continent. How each nation manages this mandate varies widely, and regulation is nearly nonexistent.

"Most bases are diligent enough to take their trash out on a ship," Charles said. "But a lot of them have just turned over the soil and buried it."

The designation of "historical" structures and sites remains uncodified and controversial, but there is still plenty of uncontroversial trash that still must be shipped out of Antarctica. Without regulation or public accountability, however, illegal Antarctic dumping is likely to continue. In the meantime, penguins, seals and human visitors alike are learning to live with wood and iron.

—Jeff Marlow for Wired.com

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Spain Leads the World in New Solar Energy Development

Written by Bryan Nelson

According to a newly released draft of a report by the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21), Spain now leads the world in added photovoltaic capacity.

Although Germany is still the leading nation in total grid-connected solar photovoltaic capacity, this news now means Spain has surged into second place there. The report comes as an embarrassment for a floundering Japan, who used to lead the world, but now has fallen to third place in total capacity and forth place in added capacity.

Spain added 1.7 million kilowatts of capacity in 2008, followed by Germany at 1.5 million kilowatts. The United States lagged behind in a distant third place at 300,000 kilowatts, followed by Japan with only 240,000 kilowatts. The news is disappointing for Japan, but it should be equally as distressing for the United States, which continues to show only slow improvements year to year.

The big difference between the top two countries and the U.S. and Japan appears to be public policy. In Germany and Spain, power companies are required to make long term purchases of renewable energy at uniform prices. Although similar requirements exist in the U.S. and Japan, they are so small that they lead to policy failure, which in turn prompts legislators to be apprehensive when it comes to strengthening those policies.

Nevertheless, Spain has become a shining example of how more ambitious policies can lead to real improvements.

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New Wild Orangutan Population Discovered

Written by Jake Richardson

Ecologist Erik Meijaard of the The Nature Conservancy posted on their site last week about the discovery of up to 1000 or slighly more Borneo Orangutans, which are an endangered species. Human demand for timber and agricultural products is reducing their habitat swiftly.

In fact the nearby Sumatran Orangutan is critically endangered and has an estimated population of about 7,000 in the wild. Borneos may be as many as 50,000 total.

That may seem like a large number, but their habitat is being altered so rapidly they could be wiped out just as swiftly. In 2007 a United Nations report indicated 98% of orangutan range in both Borneo and Sumatra could be wiped out by 2022.

The discovery took place several months ago in a very rugged area called East Kalimantan. A survey of the area showed the prescence of trees used by the great apes for food, and that it is untouched by humans. These two factors lead the researchers to the conclusion that a relatively large population could be living there, and yet remain undiscovered for so long. The Nature Conservancy has partnered with over 18 organizations to protect the Borneo primates.

Orangutans are known for their intelligence and gentleness. Supposedly several have been observed using spears to hunt fish. The orangutan fishing in the photo on the linked page was living in a sanctuary at the time. Richard Zimmeran of Orangutan Outreach provided this background information, “This orangutan, like the 650 others at Nyaru Menteng, is an orphan. He watched as his mother was murdered and his forest home was destroyed. ”

Borneo is the third largest island in the world and has a vast richness of biodiversity.

Image Credit: Public Domain
2nd image: Aaron Logan

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Scientists pinpoint the 'edge of space'

Canadian technology on NASA mission is a prototype for future, longer mission

Where does space begin? Scientists at the University of Calgary have created a new instrument that is able to track the transition between the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space – flows that can reach speeds well over 1000 km/hr. And they have accomplished this in unprecedented detail.

Data received from the U of C-designed instrument sent to space on a NASA launch from Alaska about two years ago was able to help pinpoint the so-called edge of space: the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space.

With that data, U of C scientists confirmed that space begins 118 km above Earth and the results were published this week in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

The instrument – called the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager – was carried by the JOULE-II rocket on Jan. 19, 2007. It travelled to an altitude of about 200 kilometers above sea level and collected data for the five minutes it was moving through the "edge of space."

The Canadian Space Agency invested $422,000 in the development of the Supra-Thermal Ion Imager instrument on JOULE-II.

The ability to gather data in that area is significant because it's very difficult to make measurements in this region, which is too high for balloons and too low for satellites.

"It's only the second time that direct measurements of charged particle flows have been made in this region, and the first time all the ingredients – such as the upper atmospheric winds – have been included," says David Knudsen, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Calgary.

Knudsen and his former PhD student Laureline Sangalli are the lead authors of the paper. Co-authors include: JOULE-II lead scientist Miguel Larsen of Clemson University, Robert Pfaff and Douglas Rowland of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and T. Zhan of Conseco Inc.

"When you drag a heavy object over a surface, the interface becomes hot. In JOULE-II we were able to measure directly two regions being dragged past each other, one being the ionosphere -- being driven by flows in space -- and the other the earth's atmosphere," says Knudsen, who also is the head of the Space Physics Division of the Institute for Space Imaging Sciences (ISIS). The institute is a research partnership between the University of Calgary and University of Lethbridge.

The measurements confirmed what other scientists consider the boundary or edge of space.

"The results have given us a closer look at space, which is a benefit to pure research in space science," Knudsen says. "But it also allows us to calculate energy flows into the Earth's atmosphere that ultimately may be able to help us understand the interaction between space and our environment. That could mean a greater understanding of the link between sunspots and the warming and cooling of the Earth's climate as well as how space weather impacts satellites, communications, navigation, and power systems."

The U of C-designed instrument has been adopted by COM DEV, an Ontario-based global designer and manufacturer of space hardware, and is being used as a prototype for three instruments currently being readied to fly on the European Space Agency's "Swarm" satellite mission, set to launch late next year and to collect data for four years. The JOULE-II instrument is one in a long list of more than a dozen instruments designed by U of C scientists in the past forty years which have flown in space. There are at least five more being readied to go on missions in the next two years.

"Understanding the boundary between the Earth's atmosphere and outer space is fundamental to the bigger picture of the effects of space on the Earth's climate and environment," says Russ Taylor, the director of ISIS and head of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the U of C. "This detection is part of a long history of success by ISIS researchers in designing and building innovative instruments flown on rockets and satellites to image the flow of matter and energy between the Earth and Space."

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NASA's early lunar images, in a new light

By John Johnson Jr.

Rising over the battered surface of the moon, Earth loomed in a shimmering arc covered in a swirling skin of clouds.

The image, taken in 1966 by NASA's robotic probe Lunar Orbiter 1, presented a stunning juxtaposition of planet and moon that no earthling had ever seen before.

It was dubbed the Picture of the Century. "The most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," remembered Keith Cowing, who saw it as an 11-year-old and credited it with eventually luring him to work for NASA.

But in the mad rush of discovery, even the breathtaking can get mislaid.

NASA was so preoccupied with getting an astronaut to the moon ahead of the Soviets that little attention was paid to the mountains of scientific data that flowed back to Earth from its early space missions. The data, stored on miles of fragile tapes, grew into mountains that were packed up and sent to a government warehouse with crates of other stuff.

And so they eventually came to the attention of Nancy Evans, a no-nonsense woman with flaming red hair that fit her sometimes-impatient nature. She had been trained as a biologist, but within the sprawling space agency she had found her niche as an archivist.

Evans was at her desk in the 1970s when a clerk walked into her office, asking what he should do with a truck-sized heap of data tapes that had been released from storage.

"What do you usually do with things like that?" she asked.

"We usually destroy them," he replied.

Workhorse missions

If there is an unsung hero of the moon race, it is the Lunar Orbiter program of 1966 and 1967. There were five unmanned spacecraft, resembling stubby candleholders with 12-foot-diameter solar arrays at their bases.

On board each were two large telescopes that could focus on objects as small as a yard, along with specially built Kodak cameras using 70-millimeter film. An on-board darkroom developed the lunar images and prepared them for transmission back to Earth.

Their mission was to map the entire surface of the moon in preparation for the Apollo landings -- and all five performed magnificently.

Incidental to its mission, Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first pictures of Earth as a full planet. Taken pre-Summer of Love, pre-Watergate, pre-global warming, it was a family photo of a less-stressed home planet.

Altogether, nearly 2,000 frames were photographed by the five missions, each of which ended with a silent crash onto the lunar surface.

But there was a problem. Although the original high-resolution images were saved on 2-inch-wide tape, those pictures weren't seen by the public. The images that scrolled across television screens and appeared on the front pages of newspapers were snapshots of the originals using standard 35-millimeter film. The images were grainy and washed-out, like a poorly tuned television set.

Still, they inspired wonder as humanity for the first time contemplated the surface of another body in space from a front-row seat. In addition to the famous image of Earth, there were pictures of the giant Copernicus crater, the 800-million-year-old impact crater more than two miles deep and 60 miles across.

It was a short-lived moment of glory for the workhorse missions. Two years after the last one, Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. With him was a high-resolution Westinghouse TV camera and three exotic Hasselblad still cameras, among other equipment.

The images the astronauts took easily surpassed the Lunar Orbiter shots. But even they eventually migrated into the realm of the ho-hum as the world was inundated with images of moon buggies, lunar golf and the satellite's monotonously barren surface.

By the time of the final Apollo mission in 1972, the American public and Congress had begun to lose interest.

Evans wasn't particularly interested in the moon either when she went to work the next year for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

The daughter of a Colorado physician, she had trained in anatomy and the biological sciences. Her bosses saw something in the determined young woman that made them think she would be perfect for a new job in Washington: straightening out NASA's archives. The mountains of data from the early Mercury, Mariner and Gemini missions had become a jumbled mess.

Evans turned out to be the perfect choice. She was organized and could take care of herself. She knew her mission: to preserve the history of human space exploration.

When the clerk came in to ask about the Lunar Orbiter tapes, she didn't hesitate.

"Do not destroy those tapes," Evans commanded.

She talked her bosses at JPL into storing them in a lab warehouse. "I could not morally get rid of this stuff," said Evans, 71, in an interview at her Sun Valley home.

She had no idea what she was letting herself in for. The full collection of Lunar Orbiter data amounted to 2,500 tapes. Assembled on pallets, they constituted an imposing monolith 10 feet wide, 20 feet long and 6 feet high.

The mountain of tapes was just part of Evans' new burden.

There was no point, she realized, in preserving the tapes unless she also had an FR-900 Ampex tape drive to read them. But only a few dozen of the machines had been made for the military. The $330,000 tape drives were electronic behemoths, each 7 feet tall and weighing nearly a ton.

Evans scoured salvage lists for a castoff FR-900. As a member of the federal government's Trash Evaluation Board, she was privy to everything being thrown away from government institutions.

One day in the late 1980s, she got a call from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida: "We heard you're looking for FR-900s. We've got three of them. Where do you want us to send them?"

Having already stretched her bosses' goodwill at JPL by storing the tapes there, she reluctantly agreed to take the drives herself. Evans stored the three tape drives from Eglin and a fourth she got off a salvage list -- none of which worked -- in her own garage.

There they sat, for two decades.

"I was stuck with these drives," Evans said. "I couldn't get rid of them."

Space junkie's help

Evans applied regularly to NASA for funding to repair the drives. She was turned down every time. One NASA center estimated it would cost $6 million to restore the drives and digitize the tapes.

Finally, in 2005, retired and increasingly doubtful that the historic images would ever see the light of day, Evans gave up on NASA and went public.

She submitted a paper to a lunar conference stating her plight. Her plea ended up on a blog frequented by space buffs, where it caught the attention of Dennis Wingo, a kind of space junkie extraordinaire.

Author, designer and dreamer, Wingo is well-known in the private space world, the community of activists trying to show that private enterprise can explore space more effectively and cheaply than the government.

"I have been working in lunar exploration for 20 years," Wingo said. "I knew the value of the tape drives and the tapes."

Wingo went for a second opinion from his friend Keith Cowing, who worked for NASA for several years and now operates the NASA Watch website, which frequently aims slings and arrows at space agency administrators. Cowing agreed that they had stumbled on a treasure trove of space history.

One evening in April 2007, he and Wingo pulled up to Evans' home with two rented trucks and loaded up the dirty, dusty and broken FR-900s.

Three hundred miles later, they pulled up to the gate at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, probably the only NASA institution that would even consider admitting them and their pile of junk.

Ames Director Pete Worden offered space in an abandoned McDonald's that in the heyday of the lunar program had been called "McMoon's."

The tape drives were installed where customers once ate fries. Behind the counter, where employees had flipped burgers, stood the massive wall of tapes.

Wingo, who has an engineering physics degree from the University of Alabama, knows his way around a computer. But repairing the FR-900s was beyond him. It was also beyond almost everyone else they tried.

Finally, they heard about an old Army vet, Ken Zin, who knew machinery and happened to work at Ames repairing video equipment.

Zin was a jack-of-all-trades who'd grown up on a farm in the Central Valley, repairing tractors and dairy equipment. In the Army, he'd graduated to fixing top-secret cryptograph machines. He sat down with Wingo and the rest of the team. "Can you make that thing run?" they asked him.

"Yeah, I can make it work," Zin replied.

A long rebuild

It turned out to be a lot harder than he expected. "I hadn't seen that type of stuff for 40 years," he said.

Wingo, Cowing and Zin worked into the night with student volunteers, cannibalizing the tape drives to get one machine working. "We felt a sense of urgency," said Greg Schmidt, deputy director of NASA's Lunar Science Institute at Ames.

They had managed to get $100,000 from NASA for their project, and decided they would focus their efforts on the Earthrise picture.

The drives kept breaking down. Rebuilding the demodulator that converted the electronic signals into images proved particularly difficult. When they couldn't find parts at warehouses, they dug through rusted rocket shells at Ames' junkyard to perform what Zin called a "wrecking yard rebuild."

They had been at work for three months when Schmidt got a call from Wingo one afternoon. "You'd better get over here."

After 42 years, Cowing gazed again at the image of Earth rising above the lunar landscape.

"When that picture came up, I had tears in my eyes," Cowing said.

Unlike the picture that the public had seen, this version had twice the resolution and four times the dynamic range.

It "was breathtaking," Schmidt said. "It felt like looking into the past."

Newly useful

The project has so far cost $250,000, far less than the $6-million estimate by NASA.

Having succeeded once, the team released its second image this weekend -- the Copernicus crater. The team eventually hopes to retrieve all 2,000 images from the five missions.

The images will be of more than historical interest. In April, NASA is scheduled to launch the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to again map the moon. This time it will be looking for a site to erect a permanent human base.

By comparing the new images with the old ones, scientists will be able to study changes in the lunar surface. That information could be invaluable to colonists.

Schmidt flew Nancy Evans up for a small ceremony at Ames in November, when the first image was released.

To the old-timers at NASA, she was a heroine, the best example of a person who, in Schmidt's words, "goes far beyond her professional duties" in the name of science.

Evans herself was less impressed. "Anybody in the same place could have done this," she said.

john.johnson@latimes.com

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Little House On The Moon? Robot Being Created For First Moon Construction Project

Modells of robot Roony and the cottage. The mechanical design of the cottage has not yet been completed, the aim is a mass of 5kg and transport size about 6 liters, with a final living space of 10 square meters. (Credit: Image courtesy the Swedish Research Council)

Mälardalen University is working with the multi-artist Mikael Genberg to create a robot to be sent to the moon to construct a house. The House on the Moon is a project that aims to put a little read cottage on the moon as a symbol of what one man can achieve. The robot will roll out Genberg’s little cabin from the space rocket, find a stable vacant lot, and erect the planet’s first building.

“We want to teach students who think creatively, work together, use the very latest technology, and dare to set their sights high. The most important thing is not always to reach the goal. If you aim for the stars, at least you’ll reach the treetops or even the moon,” says Lars Asplund.

Working together, the students are to go all the way from idea to construction and programming to finally having a real robot. “We’re good at that here at Mälardalen University,” asserts Professor Lars Asplund, who is the country’s leading robot inventor and a good role model in the program.

The goal is for the robot – which has the working name of Roony – to be able to place the cabin on the moon in 2012.

Mikael Genberg is an artist from Västerås who is best known for his alternative living environments. Today Hotel Woodpecker is located 13 meters up in the highest tree in Vasa Park in Västerås. Out in Lake Mälaren, one kilometer out from the harbor, there is a building with an underwater room named Hotel Otter Inn. The little house on the moon will be barn red with white trim – after all, the first ones on the moon this time will be Swedes.

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Flying saucer galaxy!

Hubble spies invading saucer from space!

Click to Brobdignagify.

OK, it’s not an alien spaceship. But Holy Haleakala, what a gorgeous galaxy! It’s NGC 7049, a kind of hybrid galaxy, one that is part disk (like our spiral Milky Way) and part elliptical. These types of galaxies are fairly rare. They are shaped like disk galaxies — a flattened disk surrounding a central bulge — but have almost no gas compared to a normal spiral galaxy. It’s the gas that makes spiral galaxies obvious to the eye. As gas orbits the galactic center in a disk, odd gravitational instabilities build up, creating spiral-shaped traffic jams in the disk. Gas piles up there, collapses, and forms stars. The stars light up the gas, and from a few dozen million light years away, you see a gorgeous spiral galaxy.

But NGC 7049 is not gifted with gas, so the disk is fuzzy and featureless… almost. This galaxy does have a ring of beautiful dust lanes circling the center, which is unusual even for these types of galaxies! We see the dust in silhouette because it absorbs light from stars, blocking the starlight behind it. It takes a considerable quantity of dust to absorb that much light, which is weird– dust is usually formed when there’s lots of star formation. But without gas, NGC 7049 can’t make new stars, and so there shouldn’t be much dust. What gives?

My first thought when I saw this picture was that the galaxy must have recently eaten a smaller galaxy and taken on all its dust. And it turns out that may very well be the case. Studies of these types of galaxies shows that some do have gas, but in some cases the gas is orbiting the galaxy in the wrong direction, the opposite direction as the stars do. That’s a sure sign that a smaller galaxy got too close, collided with the larger galaxy, and finally merged with it. In some of those events the geometry of the collision with smaller galaxy will yield a counter-rotating block of stars, gas, and dust.

So that’s probably what happened to NGC 7049. And now, a few hundred million years later, we reap the benefit of being able to see this spectacular and lovely galaxy.

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Is a Death Star Poised for Final Supernova Detonation Aimed at Earth? Astronomers Say "Maybe"

Australian astronomers have been studying an intergalactic assassin poised to wipe out life on Earth. Maybe. Observations indicate that cosmological curiosity WR104 may be a killer - and we might be the victim.

The pretty pinwheel that makes the system so distinctive is now know to be a combination of two stars - a blue star orbiting the Wolf-Rayet 104. Note that the "Wolf-Rayet" name is the astronomical equivalent of a beeping red LCD countdown reading "0:01" - it's a swollen star getting ready for final supernova detonation. At the moment its fusion reactions are blasting its own photosphere off into space, where the blue companion orbits and illuminates the material, creating a seriously impressive spiral over twice the size of our solar system.

We have a perfect view of this pinwheel pattern, since the spiral is at right angles to us, in the same way a man being held at gunpoint has a perfect view of the little hole the bullets come out of. And the gun is over twenty-five times the size of the sun. When a binary system collapses into a black hole, which astronomers call 'coalescence' (a euphemism which makes 'heated debate' a valid description of World War II), it can release a gigantic burst of gamma rays. Gamma rays are the ultimate high energy electromagnetic radiation, and while the burst lasts less than two minutes it can contain more energy than the entire mass of the sun converted into energy by E = m c^2. You'll notice that the mass of the sun and the speed of light, c, are extremely large numbers.

On the upside we'll never see it coming. The EM-burst travels the speed of light so the only warning we'd have is dying - which most people will accept is a little too late. The dinosaurs certainly did (some scientists believe historical mass extinctions were caused by similar intergalactic "life reset button" gamma bursts). Even better, this Earthicidal explosion may have already happened with the lethal radiation already speeding its way right at us. On the other hand, the big boom might not happen for hundreds of thousands of years - and might do so without a peep of gamma radiation.

The combination of science and philosophy is a challenging field that many don't bother with, but this is a strong motivation to start. If you could die tomorrow, how would you like to live today?

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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Jenny McCarthy counts for something

by Phil Plait

Regular readers know I am no fan of Jenny McCarthy. I have called her a public health risk here before, and I stand by that: her claim that vaccines cause (or contribute to) autism is nothing short of breathtakingly ridiculous.

And I’m not the only one who knows this to be true. Medical doctors Orac and Steve Novella have words about her, as does Skeptic Dad, and the Stop Jenny McCarthy site was created to expose her as the danger she is.

And now the gauntlet is well and truly thrown down: a website has been created called Jenny McCarthy Body Count. Stark and grim, it has one purpose: to show how many preventable illnesses and preventable deaths have occurred due to unvaccinated people since Jenny McCarthy became the de facto face of the antivaccination movement.

The website, created by skeptic Derek Bartholomaus, stops short of saying she is directly responsible for these illnesses and deaths, but her indirect responsibility is arguably relevant. We know that some outbreaks of measles have occurred due to the antivax movement, for example. And there have been deaths — children have died — because they were unvaccinated. McCarthy may have started out as a comedian, but I’m not laughing at her anymore.

The statistics for the site are from the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality reports, which Bartholomaus has linked for reference. The diseases specifically include measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, Hib, the flu, and diphtheria. In fact, his numbers underestimate the problem, since other vaccine-preventable diseases are not listed in the CDC reports. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of fatalities are from the pediatric flu, a tragedy I have a difficult time grasping.

The Jenny McCarthy Body Count site itself only launched on March 29, but it’s already had thousands of views. Bartholomaus, a self-described "statistics geek", updates it by hand once a week, when the new CDC reports are issued. He also has some basic info on McCarthy’s claims there, but for more background info on McCarthy and her pro-disease stance, go to Stop Jenny McCarthy.

It’s too bad we need something like this site, but McCarthy gets a free pass from the media, even from those that claim to "spar" with her (but really only give her a platform in which she can spew more dangerous nonsense). The Jenny McCarthy Body Count site is a very stark — and sadly, very necessary — reminder that just because people’s beliefs aren’t real, they can still have a very real and very tragic impact.

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Type A Personalities Have the Edge in Procreating

By John Cloud

Throughout most of human history, you didn't get some unless you had some. More precisely: it was wealthy, powerful men who scored the most sexual mates and, therefore, fathered the most offspring. Men with less wealth and low standing, meanwhile, died disproportionately childless. (As for women, they had little choice about sex regardless of status, since men treated them as property.)

Many evolutionary scientists believe that those thousands of years of human behavior are no artifact: modern men still strive for status partly because it is an evolutionary advantage for improving reproductive success. But other researchers have disputed that theory by citing data showing that wealthier, higher-status men do not in fact have more children than their less moneyed, lower-status peers. (See pictures of Barack Obama's family tree.)

Now a new study in the Journal of Personality offers another theory: it is not necessarily wealth that facilitates procreation but a more basic and deeply ingrained evolutionary trait — having a Type A personality. The study finds that adolescents who say they always take charge, tell others what to do, anger quickly, get into fights easily, and walk, talk and eat fast end up having more kids than others when they grow up. That's true regardless of the kids' performance in school.

This is terrible news for nerds, since it implies that in the end, even if they go on to invent software or write Lost episodes or produce great books, the bullies and jocks will win in a far more primal way: they spread their genes to more little bullies and jocks. Call it the ultimate victory of Attila the Hun.

The authors of the study, psychologists Markus Jokela and Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen of the University of Helsinki, interviewed 1,313 Finnish men and women who were participating in a long-term study on an separate topic (cardiovascular risk). The participants underwent psychological assessments first when they were young (between the ages 12 to 21) and then again 18 years later. Those young people with more Type A personality traits ended up having significantly more children by age 39. (The math is complicated, but for those readers who are statistically minded: for every standard deviation of increase in Type-A traits, the probability of having kids rose 11% in men and 19% in women.) (See pictures of U.S. presidents and their children.)

The research suggests that leadership qualities like taking charge and being competitive have an evolutionary advantage even if high socioeconomic status no longer does. "Perhaps the idea of having children is most attractive (or least frightening) to individuals who prefer to act as leaders and to influence other people, including their own offspring," the authors write. The theory is that evolution genetically predisposes Type A's to like having kids because thousands of years ago, people with Type A personalities accrued more resources to guarantee their kids' survival.

The paper offers new insight into an evolutionary conundrum posited in 1986 by Daniel Vining Jr. of the University of Pennsylvania in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Vining pointed out that in contemporary societies, rich couples have the same number (and often fewer) kids than poor ones. The article suggested that human reproductive behavior was entirely learned, not inherited.

The most notable challenges to that perspective have been put forth in recent years by sociologist Rosemary Hopcroft of UNC Charlotte and evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, who now teaches at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). In a 2006 article in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, Hopcroft showed that after you account for children born to mistresses and second (or third, or fourth...) trophy wives, rich men do have more kids than poor men. And Kanazawa, in a 2003 Sociological Quarterly paper, noted that even if wealthy men don't have more kids within marriage, they have more sex partners total — and more sex with each partner — than poor men.

Today's moguls, then, differ only in degree from the prolific breeders of the past, such as Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Emperor of Morocco, who produced at least 700 sons (people stopped counting after that) and an untold number of daughters before he died in the early 17th century. One big reason today's powerful men don't have as many kids as they could is a relatively new invention that our reproductive instincts haven't had time to adapt to: contraception. (See pictures of classic stars' families at LIFE.com.)

The new paper shows that the debate over Vining's theory may be beside the point, since it is not wealth per se but a forceful, take-no-prisoners personality that has the genetic advantage. To be sure, many Type A's turn out to be wealthy, but we all know plenty of Type A's who live average lives (think of your persnickety high-school math teacher, or that Type A mom down the street who slices the carrots for the lunch box just so.

As for nerdy, studious guys, the research suggests they can't expect to be fruitful unless they become more like the bullies who tormented them as boys. That's because, as past studies have shown, the higher your intelligence, the less sex you tend to have — and, therefore, the fewer kids you will have. The last 20 years have been a golden era for dorks as video games and graphic novels and software engineering have become respectable, even mainstream. But in the end, the brutish football players who tormented them in high school will likely win in the merciless world of genetic favor.

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