Science is the best way to dig out the truth of the natural world, but that doesn’t prevent many people from denying truths that are inconvenient or contrary to their preconceptions or faith.

ENLARGE

U.S. 30, east of Blair, Neb. June, 2011, Iowa DOT

The stunning floods, tornadoes, droughts and heat waves in 2011 caused more Americans to accept global warming — even if climate whizzes are chary of attributing individual weather events to the warming trend.

In the last month, denial of global warming has subsided in the wake of a string of floods, droughts and heat waves, culminating in the “summer in March,” 2012. Although Americans’ attitudes toward warming ebb and flow, on April 17, a Yale University poll reported that 69 percent think global warming is affecting the weather in the United States.

In the same month, however, a Discovery Channel series called “Frozen Planet” attracted ire when scientists noted that it documented massive melting at the poles, but ignored the “why?” question. Scientists have said for decades that polar warming would be an early sign of global warming.

In the recent past, this phenomenon of “denialism” has also appeared in doubts about issues that have long been settled in the scientific community, such as whether:

An April conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison delved into the origin and development of denialism. Is a refusal to face facts growing more common? Are there better ways to explain how the world works?

Denial in the brain

Scientists, by training, are professional skeptics, but if after decades of debate 97 percent of them accept the link between greenhouse gases and global warming, why are so many unconvinced? “The theory is that if we tell people what we know, they will change,” says Arthur Lupia, a professor of political science at the University of Michigan, but that ignores how people really listen and make decisions.

Speaking to a high-level gathering of science journalists in Madison, Lupia said the problem does not reside with the audience. “The problem is us. Our expectations aren’t consistent with how humans react to information, what they will listen to, or what they will remember. People don’t pay attention, or they don’t remember what we said or what we intend them to remember.”

To change an opinion, you must first attract and then hold the audience’s attention, but attention wanders all the time. No matter how important you think your message is, Lupia says, “Biology does not change its rules … about when people will think about things that challenge them. … If I am saying something abstract, that does not connect to your core aspirations,” you may be more interested in counting tiles on the ceiling.

Can you hear me now?

To communicate with a general audience, Lupia says, “You have to make it close, concrete, immediate. I understand the joy of telling the whole story about climate, but there are some audiences that can’t handle it; in their reality, it’s not the most immediate thing. They might be more receptive if you make the conversation about pollution, energy security or energy costs.”

Information is filtered by attention and ideology, Lupia concludes. “Learning is always an away game. All the real action occurs in the audience’s heads,” he says.

Reasoning: Logical or “motivated”?

Ideally, science adheres to logical reasoning: the conclusion must be true if the premises are true.

But psychologists say it’s common to see “motivated reasoning,” the tendency to fit new information into existing attitudes.

Making a judgment or decision can often involve a “fundamental tension between believing what you want and believing what you have to believe based on the information in front of you,” says Peter Ditto, professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California-Irvine.

“There is overwhelming evidence” that hopes, fears and social connections affect our judgments, Ditto adds, “but it’s not just that we believe whatever we want. I want to be taller, but I don’t believe that because the data won’t let me.”

Since processing information and making judgments have major emotional components, the standards for evidence are skewed in favor of reinforcing our preconceptions. We are more skeptical about ideas that are new, or that conflict with our thoughts and opinions, Ditto contends.

Over the course of evolution, bad events — but not beneficial ones — forced our ancestors to focus on whether to fight or flee. “People are the same way about information,” says Ditto.

The social element in motivated reasoning surfaced in a 1950s experiment, when six people convinced a seventh, the only real subject, that two lines were equally long. One line was clearly shorter than the other, Ditto says, “But six of them are confederates, and a substantial number of [subjects] go with the obviously wrong answer. That’s the power of having other people who believe as you do. It’s much easier to believe something that does not comport with reality if a whole bunch of others” hold the same erroneous belief.

History of denialism

Although denial of global warming and the erroneous link between vaccines and autism both originated in the 1990s, the organized rejection of evolution dates to the 1920s, when some American Christian fundamentalists promoted creationism — a Biblical explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.

In a 2009 survey, 87 percent of scientists, but only 32 percent of all Americans, agreed that organisms have evolved over time through natural processes. Thirty-one percent of Americans thought humans and other living things “have existed in the present form since the beginning of time.”

Scientists and other Americans certainly have a different understanding of how organisms change through time!

Scientist data and general public data from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press surveys, May-June 2009. For question wording, see survey toplines. Numbers may not sum to 100 due to rounding. Reprinted from Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Much of the attention to the issue comes from battles over teaching of evolution or creationism in public schools, but there is “a lot of misunderstanding,” about the anti-evolution movement in the United States, says Ronald Numbers, a professor of the history of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and longtime student of the movement.

Although creationism is commonly considered a backlash against science, “Virtually nobody in the movement [in the 1920s] thought of themselves as anti-scientific,” Numbers says. “They were denying the scientific status of evolution.”

The dictionary defines science as “organized, certain knowledge about nature, and they said, ‘Nothing is certain about evolution, nobody has seen it.’”

During the 1970s, primarily in response to court decisions, creationism morphed into “creation science” or “scientific creationism,” Numbers says. “The anti-evolutionists realized that evolution had a great deal of scientific support … so their approach was that they, too, were scientific.”

Unlike most anti-evolutionists in the 1920s, the new creationists used a literal interpretation of the Bible to date creation to less than 10,000 years ago. But this created a problem, Numbers says, since according to the Bible, on the sixth day, “God created the animals and Adam named them all.”

No way Adam could rattle off the more than 1 million names of the modern species so quickly, but Numbers notes that the Bible refers to “kinds,” not “species.” If those “kinds” — created in Eden and saved on Noah’s ark — were equivalent to taxonomic families, they could have evolved into the profusion modern species.

“So creationists can accept evolution within the family, and all the evidence for speciation is welcome, because in only about 4,300 years since the flood, they have to have evolution of all the species,” says Numbers. “It’s evolution in fast-forward,” but only among closely related species.”

Even if “kind” equals family, anti-evolutionists exempt humans from this reasoning, allowing them to reject human descent from apes — our fellow hominids.

“It’s strange, I know,” says Numbers. “They are anti-evolution, but most of the evidence evolutionists use against them, they are happy to embrace! One thing that has not been true for 50 years, but lingers in the popular mind, is that creationists deny all forms of evolution.”

The manual of denialism?

Evolutionary biologists regard evolution through natural selection as the organizing principle of biology. Yet for 30 or 40 years, surveys have shown a substantial fraction of Americans, even a majority, who do not “believe in” evolution, Sean Carroll, vice-president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, told the denial conference.

Carroll, who like many biologists is aghast at the effort to squeeze evolution into a biblical straitjacket, says, “The denial of evolution was my introduction to denialism.”

ENLARGE

American Museum of National History

In 1954, children got a “Polio Pioneer” card, and a piece of candy after getting a jab of polio vaccine.

Typically, biologists have approached the evolution debate by amassing evidence, but “it’s never been about the data,” maintains Carroll, who is also a professor of genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “And if it’s not about the data, what are we talking about?”

An earlier example of denialism occurred in the 1950s, after Jonas Salk developed the polio vaccine, a breakthrough that halted a dreaded, paralyzing disease.

Many chiropractors, Carroll found, opposed vaccines since they negated the central premise of chiropractic — that all disease results from misalignment of the vertebrae. “It shocked me. They actively opposed, disputed the efficacy of the polio vaccine. The opposed the March of Dimes, and federal and state efforts to get everybody vaccinated.”

Five hallmarks of denialism

The opposition continued — even after the polio epidemic tapered off as a result of the mass vaccination that started in 1955, says Carroll. And he identifies the tactics used then as a “playbook” of science denial that is echoed in more recent struggles over evolution, vaccines and global warming:

We just don’t agree!

Add it up, and the theme is this: The science must not be allowed to endanger a key philosophy, Carroll says.

But the cost of denialism is high, Carroll maintains. “It’s difficult, as an evolutionary biologist, to realize that half the county is deaf to anything you have to say, especially if the story you have to tell is about a magnificent achievement, understanding the complex relationship of living things on the planet, the deep history of our species.”

To reach young people, Howard Hughes has begun producing and giving away a series of videos on evolution called The making of the fittest.

Go to links for videos

Howard Hughes Medical Institute

To bring science to the masses, Hughes has produced videos on evolution; this one describes how cold-water fish evolved “anti-freeze” genes.

The idea is to engage in storytelling — to help people understand and remember facts by putting them into a narrative framework, Carroll says. As a professor, he’s seen the power of a story. “When I got lost, off-topic, and students see me years later, they say they still remember some of those stories, and I know they don’t remember any of the genetics. Stories count.”

Time (dis)honored tactics

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California at San Diego, has written about the “merchants of doubt.”

The message, she says, is simple: The facts are not all in. We need to hold judgment until the scientists agree.

This kind of corrosive doubt — in the face of scientific certainty — is “very depressing” if you “believe that knowledge is power,” Oreskes says. “Knowledge is not powerful enough — an ideology is more powerful still. It’s about ideas, not facts.”

During the last half-century, she says, “Political powers are willing to attack rational truths, and those who deliver them.”

There is also money at stake in many of the issues, especially in the case of climate change, which threatens the fossil-fuel industry.

Car exhaust from eutrophication&hypoxia; smoky butt from Raul Lieberwirth

What do these have in common? Many companies in the oil and tobacco industries have sown seeds of doubt about the long-term effects of their products.

The model for such campaigns, Oreskes said, came from the tobacco industry in the 1960s. Facing growing evidence linking their profitable product to lung cancer, the industry settled on a strategy of promoting “Questions, manifested in a memorable maxim: “Doubt is our product.”

And for decades, doubt helped big tobacco deride and deny a tidal wave of evidence that cigarettes cause lung and heart disease.

December, 2011, Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

After the crazy weather of the past year, pollsters have seen a bump in the number of Americans seeing “solid evidence” for global warming.

The same strategy, Oreskes says, was adapted to undermine “nuclear winter” (the discovery that huge clouds of ash and dust released during nuclear war could freeze and starve the planet), the dangers of the insecticide DDT, acid rain caused by power-plant pollution, the ozone hole, and global warming.

The tactics were to “challenge the evidence, claim the science is not settled, cherry-pick the data, to demand balance from journalists and threaten to sue if they don’t,” says Oreskes.

Changing the climate change story

The basic physics of global warming have been known for 100 years, Oreskes said. Scientists started exploring the subject with early computerized climate models in the 1980s.

In 1992, Oreskes said, the first President George Bush, “Called for concrete action to protect the planet. We had political leadership that committed us to doing something, yet we never did take the concrete steps that Bush called for. It’s a story about political challenges, selling uncertainty, about science in the age of denial.”

The doubters, funded by the oil industry, included some prominent Cold-War physicists who had been advocates for Ronald Reagan’s anti-missile defense system. “They said the science was unsettled, that it would be premature to act,” says Oreskes, who was intrigued to find that one of those physicists, Frederick Seitz, had been a consultant to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company.

In 1998, Seitz organized a petition against the Kyoto Protocol, the first international agreement to control greenhouse gases.

Seitz and his fellow doubters, Oreskes says, “Found a new enemy: environmental extremism. You see anxiety about environmentalists as socialists, using climate change as a lever to effect social or economic change.”

What began with a handful of people with roots in the Cold War has since spread to “a range of free-market think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute,” Oreskes says.

The arguments against the settled scientific debate over warming, she adds, “are not just different interpretation of the data; that’s a normal part of scientific life. This is not about normal scientific claims. These are the scientific equivalent of saying Belgium invaded Germany during World War I.”

Why deny? Because it works, Oreskes implies. Almost 25 years after the scorching summer of 1988 brought global warming into the public sphere, the United States has yet to get serious about controlling greenhouse gases.

“We ignore the facts of nature at our peril,” says Oreskes. “Ignoring them is not going to make them go away.”

Microsoft’s April 9 deal to spend $1.3 million apiece on 800 patents from AOL was another skirmish in the patent wars that have engaged the technosphere. Just last summer, we watched a blizzard of headlines, lawsuits, and billion-dollar bills:

We wonder: Is this a situation that only a patent lawyer could love, or are these purchases and lawsuits the inevitable price of progress in our high-tech world? Are they the inevitable outgrowth of a venerable system that, for all its flaws, is still better than nothing?

Patents are licenses to exclusively make and market an invention that are inscribed in the U.S. Constitution. The concept is simple — and ridden with inherent conflict. If you invent a small device (a “midget widget”) that is new, useful, and “not obvious” to people skilled in the art of widgetry — your widget can be protected by a U.S. patent.

If I make or sell a widget that uses your invention (that “infringes on your patent”), you can sue me for damages, and a court may order me to close my widget-works.

So far, my invention has benefited me, my employees and customers, but when the patent (which must explain the inner workings of my midget widget) expires after 20 years, it becomes available to anybody.
And so (in theory) patents stimulate innovation and progress by conferring a short-term monopoly in return for short- and long-term social and economic benefits.

But what sounds good on paper can hide complexities that only a patent lawyer could love:

“Greasing the wheels of innovation” or “throwing sand in the gearbox”?

It’s not hard to find claims that the patent system is “broken,” and nobody disputes that “bad patents” have been issued for innovations that are obvious, inane or unworkable.

Patent battles are nearly as old as the U.S. patent system: Eli Whitney spent years in court trying to enforce his patent against infringers who cobbled together homemade cotton gins. His “victory” came just one year before the patent expired.

Lawyer-letters about patent infringement are a dreaded fact of life in technology industries, but no matter who wins, patent battles transfer money from the buyers of phones and computers to patent lawyers.

The pace of U.S. patent awards has picked up to about 200,000 per year, and some with a dog in the fight say the system does protect the rights of inventors.

The sentiment is not universal.

Adam Jaffe, an economist at Brandeis University, co-wrote a book on the patent system² that refers to a “broken patent system” in the subtitle. Jaffe says patents cut both ways. “Patents are important in fostering innovation, because 99.9 percent of the time, inventing something is just the first step. You require a significant investment … to get something from the invention stage to actual production, and unless you are independently wealthy, you need someone who is hoping to make money to take you through the development stage.”

And that “someone” may view a strong patent as your most valuable asset.

Software and high-tech patents?

Innovation “is a very complicated process,” Jaffe adds. “In most cases multiple ideas are interacting. In the extreme case, in software and high technology, people say a product might invoke 100,000 patents. It can get very messy.”

When the United States started issuing large numbers of software patents in the 1990s, the inexperienced patent examiners issued many dubious patents. Although the examinations have gotten more stringent, some still think software should be exempt, or patented under different standards.

Searching for competing inventions in software, for example, is comparatively difficult, and the search is the basis of the patent examination.

In most cases, says Tim Berners-Lee, a commentator on tech issues, software developers don’t bother doing thorough patent searches, which, he maintains, could require more patent lawyers than exist on earth.

Trolling for profits?

Although patent disputes are nothing new, they have been systematized by “patent trolls” — companies that own, defend and license a library of patents. Depending on your point of view, trolls are:

NPR covered a prominent case of trolling, complete with shadowy, unoccupied offices.

But even if trolls can be a barricade to innovation, “in practice it will be very difficult to change the rules in such a way as to prevent that,” says Jaffe. Would you allow infringement suits only from those who are moving a patented idea toward the market? “Say I’ve got an invention and am looking for a company that has the resources to bring it to market… and someone else comes along and steals the idea. Are you saying I can’t sue because I am not on the market?”

As with many parts of the patent system, finding faults is easier than fixing flaws, he indicates. “I don’t disagree that in a sense people are abusing the system by amassing piles of patents, but it’s naïve to think you can tweak the system to shut that down.”

First-to-file, or first to invent?

The America Invents Act, signed into law September, 2011, made what former commissioner of the Patents and Trademark Office Robert Stoll calls “the most revolutionary change in patent law in 60 years.”
The changes start with the basis for obtaining a U.S. patent. Previously, you had to prove that you were the first to invent something; now you must be the first inventor to file.

“First-to-file” will make life simpler, Stoll told an audience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in April, by deleting disputes about who made the invention first. “First-to-file provides more certainty to the system, and reduces the ugly interference cases that don’t provide much benefit to the United States.” (An interference proceeding now determines whether someone made the invention before the patent applicant.)

“First-to-file really favors large companies that have sufficient resources to get to the patent office first,” argues Carl Gulbrandsen, managing director of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), the private, not-for-profit technology transfer arm of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and it disadvantages independent inventors and universities. I expect filing costs will go up.”

Got an app for that patent?

Here’s the snag: When you invent a molecule that could make a tire last forever, you may not know right away if it’s worth filing a patent application. Under first-to-invent, you could wait as much as one year to file.

Filing a patent can cost tens of thousands of dollars, which is money you could better spend on research that might show that your invention is solid — or as evanescent as a rainbow.

But under first-to-file, you lose if an inventor in Berlin or Tokyo files an app before you have time to decide. “AIA has weakened the grace period and the ability of independent inventors to test out the invention, and appropriately get financing to help with filing,” says Gulbrandsen.

Gulbrandsen also charges that the new law contains, “So many undefined terms that they will be litigating it for 15 years. They have essentially thrown out 100 years of case law; it’s a full employment act for lawyers.”

Winnowing the chaff — or weakening the patent system?

Although interference proceedings are now history, Gulbrandsen says AIA contains too many new ways to challenge patents. “There used to be two principal ways to attack a U.S. patent, and that made them strong. Now there are literally nine ways, and that weakens them overall. For a university, this will mean increased expense [for defending existing patents], and many of them won’t be able to bear that.”

Since its founding in 1925, WARF has contributed $1.24 billion to UW-Madison as royalties from more than 2,300 patents for inventions by university researchers. It has become a significant source of income to the university’s researchers and a model for other university patent offices.

A strong patent system has benefited the United States, says Gulbrandsen. “It’s necessary for innovation, and the last thing you want to do, if you want to create jobs, is to weaken the patent system, and that is exactly what we have done” with AIA.

But Jaffe, although no fan of the patent system, sees a benefit in these after-the-fact challenges, since “the vast majority” of the 200,000 U.S. patents granted each year are trivial (like that baling-wire-and-chewing-gum flying machine). Because the patent office must judge a flood of applications with limited resources, “It cannot do an exhaustive analysis, and it would be crazy to invest the resources to get it right every time.”

Under the new system, after the initial patent examination culls the obvious chaff, Jaffe says, competing inventors could contest a wobbly patent. Now, he says, “You have the opportunity, at least in theory, to go to the patent office and say, ‘This wasn’t really novel.’”

Although it’s easy to criticize the patent office, Jaffe says it has more expertise than the federal courts, the final resting place for most patent disputes.

Who benefits, who gets hurt?

In the ideal world — where patents are perfectly drawn — innovation wins. “I equate patents and innovation,” says Gulbrandsen. But despite its promising moniker, the America Invents Act “makes it more difficult for the inventor to raise the funds necessary to bring the invention to market. One of the best tools an entrepreneur or a startup has to raise money is a patent. It gives some assurance to investors that if they provide the funding, they will be able to recover it and get a return. The patent gives you the right to exclude others. Weakening the patent system increases the risk for investors, and that’s bad for inventors.”

University technology-transfer offices are going to suffer, says Gulbrandsen, who directs one of the oldest and largest in the nation, since many of them must wait to file a patent until they have found a business that wants to pay for filing and license the patent. “Although WARF is an exception, under first-to-file, you don’t have time to find a licensee, and so most universities tech-transfer offices will drop out.”

Individual inventors, Gulbrandsen notes, seldom have a patent lawyer on retainer.

Still, too much protection stifles innovation, says Jaffe, who says the system requires balance. “I don’t think first-to-file changes a lot. The rest of the world has been on that for a long time. There are going to be impacts in both directions, but in most cases, first-to-invent is just a source of conflict, because it’s harder to establish. This just simplifies things and reduces controversy, which is a very good thing.”

As farmers north of the equator get ready to plant their seeds, we’ve started wondering about agriculture before Columbus. Conventional wisdom says Native Americans were mostly hunters and gatherers. When they did farm, their slash-and-burn techniques exhausted the soil, forcing them to clear new fields.

Although Native Americans domesticated corn, tomatoes and potatoes, their farms were generally unproductive, and most of their plant food came from gathering tubers, greens, berries and shoots.

But as we learned at a series of talks at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, this picture needs editing:

The provision of permaculture

Until the 1960s, the government of Canada enforced assimilation of First Nation children at boarding schools that banned ancestral languages and practices. The goal was to homogenize Canada’s population, but suppressing culture also squelched knowledge of the traditional methods for raising and gathering food.

When the police boats arrived in British Columbia in the 1930s, to take children to boarding schools, Adam Dick (tribal name Kwaxsistalla) escaped, and went to live in secluded locations with his grandparents for about a decade.

Dick, a member of the Kwakwaka’wakw (formerly Kwakiutl) tribe, has become a link to a vanishing past. “His people have learned from him, they all benefit from his teaching,” says Nancy Turner, in the School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria (Canada).

Turner, who has spent a career studying indigenous agriculture, says knowing what to look for is key to understanding native agriculture on the coast of British Columbia. “They used perennial cultivation. ‘Keep it living’ was part of their philosophy, and it shows the way they value other life. A lot of perennial plants were being cultivated, but outsiders saw this as random plucking.”

People in the First Nations of British Columbia ate 35 species of roots, 25 greens, berries, even the inner bark of some trees, Turner says.

Overall, coastal people used 250 species of plants for food, tea, fuel, construction, fiber, canoes, dye and glue, Turner says.

When the natives harvested bark and wood from a living tree, they took what they needed without killing the tree. “They believed trees have sentient life, and called these ‘begged from’ trees,” Turner says. “‘We have come to beg a piece of you today.’”

“Gardens” in the water

The same attitude of “stewardship and caring” also applied to aquatic food, Turner says, especially the all-important salmon. “The salmon streams were carefully tended, and even cleaned. If the stream changed course, Adam and the others were taught by the elders to transplant [salmon] eggs to the new stream channel.”

Similarly, she says, people moved rocks to “create the most productive clam beds on the coast.”

Courtesy Nancy Turner.

Small plots of springbank clover (Trifolium wormskioldii), about to blossom in British Columbia produced “immense quantities” of roots that were “regarded as indispensable to good health,” says Turner. In this permaculture, the harvesters replanted segments of the roots for another crop.

This was more like farming and harvesting than hunting-and-gathering, Turner insists. But the colonists, more interested in survival and profit than the people they were displacing, “were blind to these practices. They had in mind Mr. McGregor’s garden, with a fence and rows you can harvest. They looked at these things, but they did not see them.”

Restoring the foods

Most cultures give a central role to the production, preparation and consumption of food. What happens when the land that grew traditional foods is drowned by dams?

That’s the conundrum facing Linda Different Cloud Jones, an activist and student from the Lakota Sioux Nation. “The loss of biodiversity is the greatest challenge on traditional lands,” she told an audience in March at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “and the loss of one culturally important species has significant impact.”

The Lakota people “are stereotyped as the people of the plains,” says Jones, “but we are also people of the river, or were a people of the river, until, in the 1950s and ’60s, when dams built in the Pick-Sloan project changed the way of life for the Lakota forever.”

Standing Rock, the Lakota reservation, is sandwiched between the Dakotas, and borders the Missouri River. “Overnight, hundreds of thousands of acres of native land was underwater,” said Jones. “All the plant and animal species in the riparian cottonwood forest were gone.”

The underground seedpods of the hog peanut (AKA mouse bean), were collected by prairie voles. These small mammals, which the Lakota called “mice,” cached the big seeds underground.

Lakota women found the caches with a stick and removed the seeds, Jones said, but “They always left a gift, dry berries, animal fat or corn. They would sing, ‘You have helped sustain my children during this coming winter, and we will not let your children go hungry.’ Their song echoed from the trees, and it seriously breaks my heart that my young children will never see that.”

A sustainable yield?

The song revealed that “an entire world view and behavior went along with this one plant species,” Jones said, and both suffered when dams flooded the forest. “We haven’t eaten these for 50 or 60 years. With the death of this one plant was the death of a little piece of our culture.”

The hog peanut was part of a larger cycle, Jones says. In spring, “We would tap box elder maples for syrup, then collect biscuit root, wild strawberries, currants, juneberries, cattail shoots, and acorns in December. Nothing was ripe at exactly the same time. When the plants are no longer there, the cycle is broken.”

Jones, a Ph.D. student at Montana State University, is attempting to grow the hog peanut as a form of “ecocultural restoration.” “Research for the sake of research was not what I wanted to do,” she says. “I wanted to change the world for my people, to make their lives better.”

Millions of people made a living for thousands of years in the New World, she says. “Everyone always thought that when European people colonized the Americas, they were coming into a pristine place, but we were managing the landscape for thousands of years.”

Iroquois corn

Corn is an indisputable triumph of Native American agriculture. The plant, domesticated thousands of years ago in Mexico and Central America, was a staple of the American diet and is now the largest crop in the world (global production in 2009 was 819 million metric tons).

Although natives also invented the highly productive “three sisters” companion-cropping technique, their agricultural prowess has been underestimated, says Jane Mt. Pleasant, an associate professor of horticulture at Cornell University.

Although the Native Americans had transformed a weed into the phenomenally productive crop maize, “There are claims by scholars, archeologists, geographers and historians that native agriculture was predominantly shifting cultivation… largely marginal, not too productive,” Mt. Pleasant says.

In “shifting cultivation” (a politically correct locution for “slash and burn”), farmers move to new plots as they exhaust their soil. According to this logic, native farmers in North America “sowed the seeds of their own destruction through environmental degradation,” says Mt. Pleasant, who directs the American Indian Program at Cornell.

But Mt. Pleasant says this is bunk. Rather, she contends that:

The soil should be the starting point for understanding agriculture, says Mt. Pleasant. While many soils on the Eastern Seaboard are not great, large parts of upstate New York had good soil that still supports productive farms.

About 300 years ago, the Iroquois Confederacy, a union of five (later six) tribes, lived in the area, and evidence for their farm productivity comes, ironically, from armies that sought to destroy them. “The quantity of corn which we found in store in this place, and destroyed by fire is incredible,” wrote the governor of New France in 1687.²

The French attacked the Iroquois, who were allied with France’s great enemy, Great Britain.

Slash ‘n burn, or sustainable agriculture?

Then in 1779, a soldier sent by General George Washington reported that his unit had destroyed at least 200 acres of Iroquois corn and beans that was “the best I ever saw.”

“This was not backyard gardening, not primitive farming,” Mt. Pleasant says. “They were dynamic, producing farmers on really good soils.”

In modern tests of corn varieties believed to resemble those grown by the Senecas, one of the Iroquois tribes, Mt. Pleasant got yields of 2,500 to 3,000 pounds per acre (45 to 54 bushels per acre or 2,800 to 3,400 kilograms per hectare).

This was far above the 500 kilograms per hectare of wheat grown in Europe.

Turner calculated that the Iroquois could support roughly three times as many people on an acre as contemporaneous Europeans could with their wheat crops.

Part of the advantage, she says, comes from maize’s inherent productivity. But observers have long wondered how this production could have occurred with neither plow nor draft animals, usually deemed the hallmarks of agricultural progress.

Plows, however, are now viewed as mixed blessing by many soil scientists. Although they prepare a good seedbed and bury weeds, they expose soil to the air, which encourages oxidation of humus, the organic content that supports essential microorganisms.

Although, after plowing, the humus briefly releases a burst of nitrogen, the depletion of organic matter and increased erosion continue for decades.

And thus on balance, Mt. Pleasant says the lack of the plow was an advantage, because planting with hand tools saves soil organic matter.

“If you are not tilling, and start with good soil, you are not going to lose fertility,” Mt. Pleasant says. “The system is stable as long as the crop yields are moderate and there is no plowing.”

But without plowing, there was no need for slash and burn.

Overall, Mt. Pleasant says, the new data provide a “quite different” perspective on agriculture. “Who were the primitive farmers? This is sustainable agriculture at its highest level.”

Rethinking agriculture

This type of revelation changes our view of the origin of agriculture, says Eve Emshwiller, an assistant professor of botany at UW-Madison who organized the seminar on native agriculture and who studies oca, a root crop grown in the Andes. “We have always talked about hunter-gatherers as if one day they were gathering food and noticed a plant growing from seed and thought, ‘We could gather seeds and start farming,’ as if this brilliant idea happened all of a sudden.”

Aside from historical curiosity, why worry about how native Americans grew their crops? One reason is the growing interest in sustainable agriculture, says Emshwiller. As agriculture faces the challenge of feeding more people without further damaging soil and water, older traditions could contribute.

Looking at other ways to grow and gather food will broaden our perspective, Emshwiller says. “There were a lot of people who were not considered agriculturalists, who were [supposedly] just gathering from the wild. But if you really understand what they were doing, there is not a sharp line between gathering and farming. There is a huge continuum of ways that people manage resources and get more from them.”

In hot, dry places, water recycling has joined water conservation as a weapon against water shortages. After being treated at a sewage plant, wastewater is increasingly used for irrigation, industrial purposes, restoring groundwater, and after further purification, for drinking.

Photo: gingerpig2000

He thinks it’s pure water, but could this thirsty hiker be guzzling recycled filtered, treated, oxidized, and disinfected, sewage water?  Could that be safe?

About 0.1 percent of the municipal wastewater treated in the United States is reused for potable (drinking) water, according to a new National Research Council report. That may sound trivial, but “reclaimed water can account for the majority of the drinking water supply in some areas,” the report said.

In general, those areas have taken every reasonable measure to clamp down on water waste before embarking on the more dicey path of reuse. Drinking water is a small part of the growing movement toward reuse; far more common is the recycling of water for irrigating farms and landscapes, recharging groundwater, and for cooling generators and other industrial equipment.

But recycling for potable water is a growing trend in the Middle East, Australia, California and Florida. Miami-Dade County, Florida is about 80 percent through a project at a sewage plant that will use microfiltration, reverse osmosis, advanced oxidation and ultraviolet disinfection to disinfect partially treated wastewater. Each day, 21 million gallons of water “whose quality will be near that of distilled water” will be piped from a moat at the Miami Metrozoo. From there, the water will percolate into the ground to recharge groundwater.

The interest in reuse coincides with a need to update potable water-treatment plants, to the tune of $200 to $300-billion over the next 20 to 25 years.

In 2002, Florida was recycling the most wastewater, followed by California, Texas and Arizona.

The 2004 Guidelines for Water Reuse from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated total U.S. water reuse at 1.7 billion gallons per day, with a growth rate of 15 percent per year.

But that’s just an estimate; the comprehensive Research Council report could not find solid numbers on current water recycling in the United States. “In 30 years we have not made a concerted effort in the United States to even figure out how much water we are reusing,” says Anders Andren, a professor of environmental chemistry and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of its Sea Grant Institute.

Globally, the estimate on total (not just potable) water reuse was 5.5 billion gallons per day.

Drink in the irony

If you’re gagging at the idea of guzzling highly treated wastewater, you may already be doing so, courtesy of “de-facto reuse.” The treated effluent discharged by wastewater plants often winds up in rivers, streams and lakes, and can easily enter intakes at downstream water utilities.

“Nobody has tried to figure out where we are in the United States by doing a quantitative survey of de facto reuse,” says Andren, meaning an unknown number of water utilities are delivering drinking water containing an unknown amount of treated wastewater.

If drinking water meets federal water-purity standards, it’s safe, but the issue of de facto reuse does merit further study. “This is the kind of thing every water system ought to be looking at, where the source water is coming from, and what is its quality,” says Henry Anderson, adjunct professor of population health science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In most cases, he says, the quality of the intake water is already a factor in deciding how to treat potable water.

On a per-capita basis, Israel, Singapore and Australia are leaders in water reuse. In every case, the local culture, economy, environment and demand for water affect how water is treated and used.

Here, we’ll concentrate on drinking water — the most demanding aspect of water reuse. Because it’s not legal to connect a drinking-water system directly to a sewage plant outfall in the United States, the treated effluent must reside in groundwater, surface water or a container for a while before it is piped to the water-treatment plant.

This delay provides a second layer of protection called “environmental attenuation,” says Anderson, who helped write the recent Research Council report. “The concern of the committee is that no system works with 100 percent efficiency all the time. If you are using a membrane to treat wastewater and it tears … we want multiple layers of protection.”

During attenuation, the treated wastewater can be mixed with surface water or groundwater, and then the water will go through the complete process for treating potable water, Anderson says.

How clean is safe?

Science and technology play dual roles in the adoption of water recycling. Improving water purification technology is offering an increasing number of choices. But technology costs money, and drinking water that comes from ground- or surface water is almost always cheaper than reclaimed drinking water.

But science is also able to detect an increasing number of contaminants in drinking water, and at ever-lower doses. In recent years, this analytical equipment has raised worries about hormones and pharmaceuticals in wastewater that have added to traditional worries about pathogens.

However, these highly accurate chemical-detection methods can raise spurious warnings, says Andren, an expert in water purification techniques. “Analytical capacities are such now that you can find literally everything, but they may pose no health hazard at those concentrations. It’s getting to the point that we can detect a thousand molecules in a liter of water, but this does not necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with the water.”

How it’s done

Water treatment plants come in two varieties. Some treat sewage, and others treat drinking water. In essence, water recycling creates a loose connection between these two plants, although federal law requires that treated wastewater be mixed and stored before it enters a plant treating potable water.

Both types of water plant already use multiple steps for treating water, but recycling has entailed an increase in the amount and intensity of treatment.

The specific treatment methods depend on the nature of the incoming water stream, which could come from sewage treatment plants, street runoff or industry. “The incoming streams can vary so much, in composition, type, quality and quantity,” he says.

Technologies must be chosen to deal with the situation, says Andren. “In certain instances, the main problem is getting rid of salt, in others it’s getting rid of bacteria, or pharmaceuticals, or organic chemicals or metals. It depends on the source water.”

Many challenges

Even though per-capita use in the United States is declining, recycling makes a lot of sense in water-short regions, says Andren. In the United States, “about 12 billion gallons a day [of 32 billion gallons treated per day] is shot into estuaries and oceans. In areas with generally high populations we are shooting away this water and will never have our hands on it again. If just a part of that could be reused, that would be good.”

But due to cost, recycling will only interest places with significant water shortages, Andren says. “We can do a great job at a cost, we can do anything at a cost.”

Ramping up reuse depends on introducing new technology, but that is a natural outgrowth of the steady introduction of sophisticated ways to clean wastewater and drinking water.

Andren, who reviewed the recent National Research Council report, says, “One of the major recommendations is that we basically have the treatment technology, and the approach to assess the hazards through risk assessment. Now we have to formalize that and work together on federal guidelines on how to start using more reclaimed water in daily life.”

Although a water shortage is not healthy, recycling, even if it increases supply, must still overcome the obvious “ecch” factor. “A lot of people ask, ‘If you have effluent from a sewage plant, and it goes through treatment, would you drink that?’” Anders says. “Absolutely, the technology is there, it’s being done all over the world. Our treatment technology and our ability to determine the quality of the water are such that it can be absolutely safe; it can be better than what you presently get out of the tap.”

Ever wonder why the calendar requires us to retool a schedule every year? Ever question why your birthday will fall on a different day of the week next year? Do you grit your teeth trying to remember to insert a leap day every four years, except on the century, except you do add a leap day on the fourth century?

Any rule that requires a double-exception to the exception, friend, is a rule that has overstayed its welcome.

Our calendar must account for the fact that Earth rotates 365.2422 times during one full orbit of the sun, so any calendar will require some shimming.

Two questions: How many shims are too many? And how many people would be willing to swap out the clunky calendar for a better one? Remember, no matter how smart the invention, inertia always gives an undeserved advantage to tried-and-true kludges like the QWERTY keyboard, invented to slow your typing speed.

Shims and arrows of outrageous calendar

The modern calendar dates to 46 B.C., when Julius Caesar (or more likely a lackey) built a calendar on the assumption that the year contains 365.24 days.

For a while, that was close enough, but by the 16th century, the tiny error was adding up, and the actual seasons no longer jibed with the calendar. In 1582, Pope Gregory (or was it his flunkeys?) pruned 11 days from October and produced the modern calendar.

The Gregorian calendar, sadly, still relies on that jury-rigged leap day, and it also forces any given date, whether holiday or not, to rotate around the seven days of the week like a weather vane in a tornado.

All those encumbrances bothered Richard Conn Henry, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “It’s disjointed, hideously inefficient and there’s no value added,” he told us.

Hideously inefficient?

Rather than kvetch ’til the end of days, however, Henry worked with Steve H. Hanke, an economist also at Hopkins, to build the logical, “permanent” calendar seen in the rollover, above.

Henry studies an obscure type of background radiation in the universe. We mentioned that astronomers are obsessed with time, date and Earth’s position, but Henry says, “I got into this calendar as a complete sideline. Some years ago, I was putting together a schedule for my course, and I thought, ‘Why do I have to put together a schedule? I just taught the same identical course.’ The reason is the stupid calendar changes each year in a pattern that is completely irregular.”

Nor was he the only person with this problem, he realized. “Every school, team, club, everybody has to go through this. But it’s not necessary at all. We can make a simple adjustment, preserve religious sensibilities, and come up with a stable calendar.”

Calling clever calendars

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar has 12 months: four have 31 days, and eight have 30. Each quarter of the year is 91 days long, with two 30-day months and one 31-day month. Each year starts on Sunday, meaning Christmas is also Sunday.

Every year.

If you’ve been pecking keys on your calculator, you’ve already objected: I’ve been short-changed! The year has only 364 days! Right, and to compensate, every five or six years, we get an added seven-day week.

The freebie week, while not part of a month, allows the calendar to jibe with the seasons.

Beyond simplicity, the new calendar would help the money-changers, Hanke observes. Financial institutions calculate interest on a daily basis, but months have different numbers of days, and calculations require a lot of software tweaks. “Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the ‘rip off’ factor,” explains Hanke. “To determine how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward-rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required. Our current calendar is full of anomalies that have led to the establishment of a wide range of conventions that attempt to simplify interest calculations.”

Can the new calendar fly? The Gregorian calendar won acceptance because the Pope backed it, Henry notes, but he’s not sure he can get papal participation this time around. But without widespread acceptance, an “improved” calendar would really make things even worse.

Image: eliazar

Here’s a great idea that flopped: Part of a lesson in Esperanto, a simplified language invented in 1887 that, sadly, never caught on and brought international peace despite its many practical advantages.

One time fits all?

We’ve been saving the best for last. Doesn’t a stable calendar deserve a universal system of time? That’s right: one time, one date, worldwide. If it’s midnight in London (already hour zero on universal time), it’s midnight in San Francisco — where the sun is shining.

For people who do lots of traveling, or arrange international meetings, the advantages are obvious. Although this sounds awkward to The Why Files, Henry notes that, “In every single country, with zero exceptions,” airplane pilots already use coordinated universal time (UTC) rather than local time.

UTC helps fight confusion in the air, but even Henry recognizes that one-time-fits-all could be a tougher harder sell than the permanent calendar. The new calendar, he says, can stand on its own. “There are 365.2422 days in the year, there is nothing you can do about that. Our calendar must reflect that length. We have to take that magic number that nature has given us by accident and see what kind of calendar we can make.”

Robots are great at what they do — if the job is dull and predictable. Throw in the unexpected, and robots can do the unpredictable.

The task of programming a robot’s brain for the real world can be gnarly, says Josh Bongard, an assistant professor in the University of Vermont College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences. “It turns out that building a robot, and programming it to do something interesting is a very non-intuitive process, and it’s a difficult one for humans to do well.”

The real world, he says, “is quite messy.”

Robots, in the jargon, need “adaptive behavior” to accommodate changing circumstances, says Bongard. When programming a free-roaming robot, “We are not likely to factor in a lighting change or people moving in and out of the field of view.”

It’s not clear how animals or people make adaptations, Bongard says, “and so it’s difficult to program a robot to do them.”

Robots: Are they alive?

Bongard, like a number of roboticists, is turning to biology for answers. But he does not want to emulate living structures. Instead, he wants to use evolution to craft robot control.

The process is akin to the “artificial selection” that helped lay the foundation for the science of evolution. Darwin, after all, wrote about how animal breeders had changed their livestock by repeatedly breeding the best animals and eating the rest.

In January, 2011, Bongard reported that he had taught four-legged, digital robots to stand and run toward a light source, by grading their control software on its ability to meet those goals.

Adaptive behavior was necessary, he says, because the light source could appear anywhere, or even take evasive action, “so the robot can’t just move its legs blindly every time.”

The robots had five seconds to do or die, and their first movements were grotesque because the control software initially moved their body parts at random. After every attempt, the control programs were graded by their ability to walk, stay upright and approach the light.

It’s brutal. More than 100 million failed programs went to the virtual graveyard in the name of science, Bongard says. The programs that showed some promise were retained, randomly varied and re-tested.

The same process is found in nature, where successful genes that face random mutation are re-tested by tomorrow’s environment.

Like the average biological mutation, the mutated robot software usually failed. But over a year of supercomputer time — equivalent to 1,000 years on a desktop computer — the winning programs evolved the ability to walk toward the light.

Weird winners

Considering the amount of trial and error, that was a satisfying but not necessarily surprising result. But here’s something to chew on. Bongard found that robots “born” with four legs had a handicap. During repeated simulations, the robots that started as snakes and developed legs during the five-second experiment were much quicker to learn the task.

You might guess — we would have — that the quick learning would have occurred in robots with full-time four-leg drive, given their longer experience with legged locomotion, but Bongard says the leg-free starters benefited by chunking the challenge: a) learn to approach the light, and b) learn to walk.

These robots “could evolve the ability to go from point A to point B while they still look like a snake, they don’t have to worry about balance, because they are already on the ground,” Bongard says. “Once evolution has figured out how to move toward the light, the ability to move on four legs could evolve.”

Meanwhile, the four-legged counterparts may still be flipping, flopping and floundering (Note to self: sell soul as political hit-man if science-writing gig crash-burns?) “The robots that had to stand upright would fall over, and it took evolution a long time to master balance,” Bongard says.

The approach — take the winners and vary them for a retest — resembles directed chemical evolution, which aims to create a better antibiotic by modifying and retesting molecules that show some ability to kill bacteria. “It’s basically the same idea,” says Bongard, “but instead of a candidate drug, we have virtual robots, and instead of selecting for … resistance to disease, they are selected for the ability to get to the light.”

Robots resemble rodents?

As a final exam for the digital robots, Bongard tested their balance with a blast of air. Although the leg-less robots “had evolved into legged robots that looked exactly like the other species, they were better able to run around under simulated windy conditions,” Bongard reports.

Bongard is first to acknowledge that he is “stealing from biology to help us build better robots,” but says, “the more interesting question is what this tells us about biological evolution. This recent work suggests that robots that change their bodies gain an adaptive advantage … and you see the same radical changes in body plan in nature: in insects, reptiles and in humans as they develop from infant to adult.”

Twelve years on, and another billion people are sharing the planet.

Starting half a century ago, the Green Revolution doubled or tripled production of the major grains, using modern seeds, heavy use of fertilizer and irrigation. The revolution helped India and China to feed themselves and averted widespread starvation.

Today, an estimated billion people go to bed hungry. Hundreds of millions are stunted by poor nutrition. And by 2025 another billion people will want to know what’s for dinner…

What to do?

After World War II, agronomist Norman Borlaug played a role in founding international farm research stations that invented and distributed seeds and technologies to Latin America and Asia, with a focus on the big three crops: rice, wheat and corn (maize).

The green revolution that resulted gave a dramatic boost to farm production. But population continues to rise, and funding for food projects tapered off after the initial gains were realized.

The green revolution averted massive starvation “in some situations, but in others, especially Africa, it failed terribly,” says James Lassoie, a professor of natural resources at Cornell University, and leader of Agriculture Bridge, which attempts to harmonize agriculture with conservation.

Small could be beautiful

As the green-revolution research organizations continue working on high-yield crops, a newer approach to raising food production is emerging that concentrates on methods and technologies that can be built and maintained locally.

For reasons related to economics, environment, and efficient technology transfer, the new projects have steered away from large-scale provision of food, equipment, seeds and fertilizer, and toward social and environmental goals. Many projects work in Africa, where food and population problems are most acute, and with women, who do most of the farming.

Although few would discount the role of high-yield seeds in feeding seven billion, “Economic development needs to support both environmental protection and livelihoods,” Lassoie says. “Technologies are not going to help if they don’t also deal with the social and political dynamics.”

Our look at a few of these projects only offer an educated scanning of the horizon. We neither visited these projects nor possess a crystal ball, and so can neither vouch for their results nor predict the end game. But farmers are smart people who gravitate to things that work — if they fit the local culture, economy and environment.

Enough introductory blather. Let’s take a look!

Progress on one acre in Kenya and Rwanda

Africa’s agriculture is dominated by “small-holders,” people who work an acre or two, mainly with family labor, and are an increasing focus of attention in the effort to feed ourselves.

Services are loans, not gifts, and as is common with micro-lenders, borrowers join small groups that guarantee each loan. One Acre says 99 percent of its loans are repaid.

The fund’s advisors offer farming advice during weekly visits that emphasize profitability as much as productivity. For example, because prices are usually lowest during the harvest, the advisors suggest that farmers hold on to their crops for a few months.

One Acre says its growing and marketing strategies double the average farmer’s income, allowing small-holders to pay school fees and buy land to improve family income and food security. One Acre is reaching 55,000 families in Kenya and Rwanda, and aims to enroll 150,000 families by 2013.

Fish, water and wetland in Uganda

The realization that healthy ecosystems improve water quality and store carbon from the atmosphere has spawned a system called “payment for ecosystem services.” After all, if people downstream are getting clean water or hydroelectric power from a well-forested watershed, that should be worth paying for…

It’s a simple concept that conceals any number of complexities, but these payments do bring in outside money that can support environmental improvements.

In densely populated southwestern Uganda, the organization Nature Harness Initiatives is combining payment for ecosystem services with collaborative management to protect the environment of a wetland in the Kanyabaha-Rushebeya region.

The wetland provides fish for food, bees for honey, and fiber for thatch, mats and baskets, but farming and deforestation by people trying to make a living are causing serious soil erosion, harming the wetland and its many human and non-human residents.

Although baseline data on water quality is short, Nature Harness is convinced that it’s program works, and can be expanded to regions with similar problems.

Growing new farmers in Uganda

In Uganda – and elsewhere — farming is often seen as an occupation best suited to school dropouts and people who cannot afford college. Could interesting the younger generation of Ugandans in growing vegetables reverse this trend?

Through the Project for Developing Innovations in School Cultivation, more than 1,100 children in at least 31 schools have transformed schoolyards into gardens as they learn to grow local crops with traditional and environmentally-minded methods.

Project DISC was inaugurated in 2006 to combat rising food shortages and preserve Uganda’s culinary traditions. By allowing children to experience growing, tasting and cooking fruits and vegetables, it is cultivating a generation that values agriculture and quality, local food.

(The whole setup reminds us of the U.S. urban farming movement.)

The farming lessons includes methods for sustainably growing crops in Uganda’s increasingly hostile climate, as the children learn about raised gardens, drip irrigation and drought-tolerant crops.

Project DISC does face obstacles, such as Uganda’s staggering population growth and declining soil fertility. All the more reason to encourage young Ugandans to see agriculture as a respectable livelihood, rather than a last-resort job.

Community grazing rights in Mongolia

In land-locked Mongolia, 2.7 million people coexist with about 10 times as many horses, cattle, sheep, goats and camels. The people of Mongolia have followed their animals for centuries, living a nomadic life in portable shelters called gers.

This windy, dry and cold land exists at the mercy of the weather; the harsh winter of 2010 killed 20 percent of the country’s livestock. Meanwhile, overgrazing is promoting erosion and making the pastures less productive, while the Gobi Desert encroaches from the South.

It’s a classic case of the “Tragedy of the commons,” the idea that resources owned by all are protected by none.

To avert tragedy, Mongolia is experimenting with “co-management,” a system for making joint decisions about the grasslands to maximize benefits and prevent long-term degradation. In co-management, groups of herders contract with the government to assume the regulation and protection of tracts of land. Contracts are adapted as needed during annual renegotiations.

The result has been a reduction in herd size and an attempt to breed better animals to maximize profits from a resources that is now managed with an eye to community prosperity. Evaluations say the process is raising family incomes by 5 to 10 percent annually, and the idea is catching on elsewhere in Mongolia and Central Asia.

Banking on the harvest in Niger

In many lands with poor people and marginal agriculture, the months before harvest are called the “hunger season.” In Niger, in the dry Sahel region just south of the Sahara Desert, the hunger season has been exacerbated by droughts and locusts.

Niger is second to last in the United Nations Human Development Index.

Micro-lending is catching on as a way to fight poverty, but there’s a twist in Niger: Instead of lending money, the Project for the Promotion of Local Initiative for Development in Aguie lends grain through “soudure” (pre-harvest) banks.

The cooperative buys grain from local farmers, and lends it when needed at 25 percent interest, a fraction of what moneylenders charge.

By the middle of 2010, about 168 soudure banks, managed by over 50,000 women, were storing enough millet – a local staple grain — to feed 350,000 people for at least a month. That storehouse helped villagers survive the hunger season (see #38) during the spike in global food prices in 2008.

Beating hillside erosion in Yunnan, China

After a devastating flood in 1998 in Southwest China (blamed largely on deforestation of steep slopes), a new reforestation project focused on planting trees that generate income. (Reforestation projects can drive farmers and herders from their land by planting trees that may offer long-term environmental advantages but do not provide income to local people.)

The World Agroforestry Center has sponsored a different approach to reforestation on a 42-square-kilometer watershed in Yunnan Province. The project began with a collaborative design process that focused on using trees for food, forage or other purposes.

Walnut trees provide edible nuts. Beneath the trees, medicinal herbs are planted as a cash crop. Women may spend four hours a day collecting firewood, but new fermentation devices transform pig dung into biogas for cooking.

Although the project is said to be working on the small scale, and is producing enough income so parents can send kinds to school, these techniques will only provide a meaningful benefit once they are applied more broadly.

WFARM-TV in Benin

Rice, a staple crop and food through much of southern Asia and tropical Africa, is usually grown on small farms. To stimulate and propagate farmer creativity, Africa Rice develops short videos with significant input from local farmers, and distributes them across the rice-growing region.

Farmers are inherently interested in the ideas of other farmers, and seeing their innovations legitimizes farmer experiments and leads to further improvements.

The 10- to 20-minute videos cover such topics as preparing land, transplanting seedlings, managing weeds and harvesting the rice. AfricaRice distributes the videos through farmer associations; the farmers line up the video equipment and stage the screenings, which are often held outdoors.

By 2009, 11 videos were available to communities in Africa; some have been translated into more than 30 African languages and/or been transcribed for radio broadcast.

– David J. Tenenbaum

UPDATE 27 APRIL 2012: The retired space shuttle Enterprise will fly over New York City today, aboard a jumbo jet, as part of the move to its final resting place at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the Hudson River. END UPDATE

For advocates of space travel, the news is grim. In July, 2011, the last U.S. space shuttle was parked, as planned. Over 30 years, the shuttles helped build the International Space, but two explosions killed 14 astronauts, and each flight cost nearly half a billion dollars.

On August 24, 2011, a clogged pipe caused the crash of a Russian Soyuz rocket. Soyuz is a reliable space-truck whose ancestor launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 1957.

With the shuttles in the old-age home, any delay of a Soyuz launch to resupply the space station, planned for Nov. 14, 2012, could force the station’s evacuation.

Abandoning the space station after a decade of continuous occupation might have limited scientific impact, as the station is not proving to be a scientific bonanza as promised. (However, on Sept. 21, NASA reported that a Japanese astronaut did perform “bubbling experiments” on green tea before staging a “traditional Japanese tea ceremony.”)

The growing problem of getting into space got more attention on Aug. 24, when a sub-orbital space taxi built by Blue Origin, a company funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, crashed in West Texas, setting back the nascent space-tourism industry.

People have been going into space for 40 years, but the process is neither cheap nor routine. For comparison, 40 years after the first automobiles, millions of cars were changing the U.S. economy and landscape. And 40 years after Kitty Hawk (1903), airplanes had circled the globe and become a dominant force in World War II.

So, 40 years after Yuri Gargarin became the first space-farer, why is it so hard to get people into space?

It’s the gravity, stupid!

The first clue to the difficulty of reaching orbit is evident in the controlled explosion needed to launch anything: reaching orbit requires a speed of almost 18,000 miles per hour and overcoming gravity.

And gravity is a stern customer.

Although gravity is fixed, a changing political backdrop has deprived the space program of its historic justification, says Howard McCurdy, a professor of public administration and policy at American University, and student of the space program. “The key problem, as a political scientist, was the end of the Cold War. Now the rationale for a lot of human space program is jobs, but in the absence of Cold War competition, we get these anomalies,” like thumbing a ride to space from your former enemy.

Faced with the prospect of being stuck on Earth, on Sept. 14, NASA administrator Charles Bolden announced the Space Launch System (SLS), a heavy-lift rocket and space capsule designed to reach earth orbit and beyond. “American leadership in space will continue for at least next half century,” Bolden said. “We have laid the foundation for success.”

Better than nothing?

The reaction to SLS was a bit ho-hum. The proposal “has been controversial because some say it’s just the same old technology, a combination of Apollo, Saturn V, and the shuttle, and we really should be advancing the technology, doing something new that will get us to deep space more quickly,” says astrophysicist Jack Burns, who has served on the NASA Advisory Council science committee, and is vice-president emeritus for academic affairs and research at the University of Colorado System.

But what else is there? Burns asks. “I look at SLS as a practical vehicle that will get a lot of mass into orbit, and then to the moon, the asteroids. Having a heavy lift vehicle, for the first time since the mid ’70s, when we did away with Saturn V, should be an important part of U.S. space architecture.”

The shuttle, whose demise has forced the current concern over space launching, was hatched in 1972, by Pres. Richard Nixon, who proposed a reusable, flying bus to reach low orbit and “take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.”

Getting to orbit didn’t turn out to be cheap: NASA chalks up the average price tag on 135 shuttle launches at $450 million.

Consternation over Constellation

In 2005, faced with mission failures and an aging shuttle fleet, Pres. George W Bush called for the shuttle program to end after the space station was constructed. As a replacement, Bush proposed Constellation, a new rocket, and Ares, a new spaceship, which would visit the moon and then Mars.

However much the Mars mission was beloved by space-travel enthusiasts, it carries certain health hazards…

Cost estimates for Constellation and Ares rose faster than a rocket and by 2010, the projects had black-holed $9 billion, and the guesstimated price of launching a single Ares-1 had reached $1 billion. So Pres. Obama trash-binned the twin projects and directed NASA to come up with something cheaper and faster – which turned out to be the poetically-branded “Space Launch System.”

The proposal has, as we’ve said, met grudging acceptance at best. “This is a turning point for all kinds of reasons,” says Michael G. Smith, a space historian at Purdue University. “The shuttle program is finished after 30 years — it was too expensive, too old — and the Bush program to take us to the moon is finished.”

Although NASA has another job — the SLS — the manned space program needs goals with more focus, Smith says. Because Obama has failed to set a clear challenge before NASA, “they have nothing to prove, no short-term mission.”

In a sense, Smith adds, the Obama plan conforms to American desires. “There’s a paradox. A Gallup poll says the American public wants a space program, and is proud of it, but does not want to pay for it, and that’s the Obama Administration approach: ‘We want something, we have announced something, without a clear-cut commitment to what it is.’”

Take the money and … design?

In an era that is short of cash and jobs, however, NASA has an immense constituency in its legion of employees, contractors and their employees, Smith says. “Lawmakers with NASA investment in their districts are challenging the administration’s lack of clarity.”

But viewing a space program as a jobs program is unlikely to maximize either cost savings or scientific breakthroughs. “NASA has half-lost the ability to innovate,” says McCurdy. “People are hunkering down like turtles, protecting what they have, playing defense to hang onto the field stations [such as Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama], and Congress is pushing them in ways that are inefficient for cost reduction. Most members want to know if contracts are still going to their districts.”

Space is inherently expensive, and McCurdy questions whether the current NASA budget will accomplish much space travel, or mainly rocket design and construction. “A big issue for NASA is whether the budget for exploration is going to be sufficient to actually develop, build and test the rocketry,” he says. “It looks like it will be sufficient to provide aerospace jobs, but they need a little bit more money to bend metal.”

Confronting costs

It’s odd, McCurdy says, that developing a new rocket and space vehicle are expected to cost $100 billion, considering that Saturn V, which launched Skylab and the moon shots, cost about $10 billion in 1960 dollars. “Multiply that by five to get today’s price — $50 billion — and that included the production line, a test vehicle and the actual rocket.”

Much engineering has been done for Constellation and previous rockets, and McCurdy, who acknowledges that the engineering and manufacturing expertise and the Saturn assembly line have long disappeared, wonders why NASA cannot produce a heavy-lift rocket for $50-billion.

Cutting the budget to the bone can be penny wise and pound foolish, McCurdy adds. “Once they got the assembly line going for Saturn V, it was very efficient, but if they build only one rocket every two years, it becomes more of a craft rocket.”

What are the other options for launching people into space?

Government rocket, private rocket

International rockets such as Ariane have gotten into the satellite-launch business, but most of them are not powerful enough to take people into orbit, or to leave earth orbit and reach the moon.

China, with one satellite orbiting the moon, and an imminent launch of an 8.5 ton component for its first space station, definitely has the lift capacity, but we’ve not heard about any discussions about launching U.S. space equipment.

Government is not the only game in town, however, and many hope that the genius of private enterprise will fill the gap, even if some of the efforts are watered with buckets of federal funds. If you place a challenge before rocket manufacturers, “both the startups and old horses, somebody may come up with a breakthrough,” says McCurdy. Even so, he adds, NASA must still “pick a winner before knowing whether it is a working design, and they are no better at that than I am at picking stocks.”

So how is the private sector faring in the human space travel biz?

the private role

Corporations are contending for two roles in space. Many are interested in space tourism, a business that began in 2001 with a seven-day visit to the International Space Station but today is focused on sub-orbital flights – spending a few minutes in micro-gravity beyond the edge of the atmosphere:

Photo: Jim Campbell/Aero-News Network

SpaceShipOne, built by Scaled Composites, slung beneath White Knight, the mother ship that lifts it toward the edge of space.

Blue Origin, a secretive operation funded by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire, is working on “New Shepard,” a sub-orbital vehicle. According to the website, “We’re working, patiently and step-by-step, to lower the cost of spaceflight so that many people can afford to go and so that we humans can better continue exploring the solar system. Accomplishing this mission will take a long time, and … we do not kid ourselves into thinking this will get easier as we go along.” Blue Origin has a NASA contract to develop a taxi for hauling astronauts to orbit, but recently lost a spaceship at 45,000 feet.

Scaled Composites, an advanced aircraft maker, won the $10-million X-prize in 2004 for attaining 328,000 feet twice within 10 days. The firm is working with Virgin Galactic to enhance its a sub-orbital spaceship-mother-ship combination. Virgin says 430 private-nauts are already put down a deposit for flights that will cost $200,000.

Xcor Aerospace is also selling seats on an unfinished spaceship, for a suborbital flight priced at $95,000, starting with a spare-change deposit of $20,000. Buy now, and your seat-mate could be a Victoria’s Secret model… Honest!

Let’s really go to space!

Above the sub-orbital realm, however, comes the real high-technology interest: resupplying the space station, or reaching the moon or an asteroid. In this realm, one company has grabbed most of the headlines: SpaceX, founded by PayPal founder Elon Musk.

SpaceX is developing two types of “Falcon” rockets, and has a $1.6 billion NASA contract to launch 12 loads of cargo to the space station (the first flight is scheduled for Nov. 30), in NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program. (Orbital Science Corp. is the other contractor in the program.)

In December, 2010, SpaceX became the first private company to launch and recover a spaceship. “The technology has advanced,” says Burns, “but so far SpaceX only has a couple of launches of the Falcon 9. It’s a long way from that all the way to orbit, with real live astronauts. It’s a risky venture.”

SpaceX says it emphasizes reliability, and the business end of Falcon 9 houses nine individual rocket engines. The rocket is supposed to reach space even if one engine goes kaplooey.

A human role remains

When President Ronald Reagan proposed and promoted what is now called the International Space Station, a howl went up among scientists who called it a diversion of resources from the more productive unmanned spacecraft. Carting people around raises the price and the stakes at every stage of design, production and operation, and these scientists accurately forecast a fruitful program of robotic exploration — everything from the Hubble Space Telescope, to the Opportunity and Sojourner rovers on Mars to the Galileo spaceship that explored Jupiter.

Those robots were awesome and inspiring, says Burns. “Opportunity is U.S. technology, it’s something we all should be proud of it, it has well exceeded its lifetime, the engineers were very clever in the design and operation. That good old-fashioned American ingenuity ought to get kids excited about going into science, engineering, math, whether that gets directed to space or something else.”

The manned vs. robot argument had merit in its time, given that the space station alone has cost NASA north of $50 billion (with other countries contributing about the same amount), and NASA never has enough money for all the scientists who write grants, which leads some critics to question whether the money is well spent, or would have been more productive if spent on funding conventional science.

But the manned vs. robot dichotomy may be fading, says Steven Collicott, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Purdue University, who placed an experiment about the fluid flow in micro-gravity on the space station. “There is a great benefit to doing both. The astronauts who have operated space station experiments I have been involved in have been incredibly creative thinkers, problem solvers.”

The flow experiment cannot be performed on Earth, Collicott says. “We do everything we can to test on earth, or on short-duration, low-gravity [aircraft] flights, but there are times when … the camera position needs to be changed, or a liquid gets trapped. An astronaut can unbolt and shake the experiment … or act on their observations to explore a new phenomenon immediately, without reprogramming, relaunching or rebuilding, which involves years and millions of dollars.”

Human hands, eyes and brains are irreplaceable, Collicott says. “If people were not needed for research of this type, why would we be spending money to send people to Antarctica each year?”

human vs. robot — the dichotomy wanes

“I never felt comfortable with the manned versus unmanned argument,” says Purdue’s Smith. “We have always pursued both [approaches]. Satellite, probes and telescopes… There is no ICBM [inter-continental ballistic missile] system without satellites, there is no exploration of the moon or Mars without the [robotic] probes we have sent there.”

More on the manned vs. robot issue…

Yet despite the phenomenal allure of space-telescope photos, manned exploration plays a critical motivational role, Smith adds. “Without an orbital station, and the public interest and international cooperation that revolve around it, NASA can’t do anything. Satellites and probes just don’t drive that public interest.”

What Smith calls “fierce debates” between astronomers, who favor robotic exploration, and engineers who favor manned exploration are “not about policy or philosophy, they center on funding; those seem to me very parochial questions.”

Burns offers one suggestion for merging people and robots: sending astronauts to a low-gravity point above the far side of the moon (which never faces Earth), where they could control a moon rover. “Astronauts who are familiar with geological exploration could operate the rover in real time, there’s much less delay [in the radio signals]. They could visit the oldest [known] impact basin in the solar system, and it would not require a human lander, would be cheap, and would give you the kind of experience that is going to be needed” for further exploration of the solar system.

The quest to populate the solar system would entail a search for signs of life – and for water and useful minerals, Burns says. “This is going to require knowledge of geology, chemistry, astronomy and mechanical engineering; it will be very different than the first few flights to the moon that were just trying to get there. I argue that the difference between manned and unmanned travel is going to start to fade.”

Historic moment

Tele-operation, as remote-control is currently called, is being used every day by earthbound “pilots” in Nevada to fly drones in the Middle East, highlighting the firm link between space engineering and the military.

Rockets and satellites have military roots, and the space race was an early and intense focus of Cold-War competition, as the United States and Soviet Union both relied on German rocketeers who had helped the Third Reich try to conquer Europe. Now the United States and Russia, World-War II allies, then Cold-War enemies, have become allies once again, at least in terms of space cooperation.

Dating back to the late 1950s, Smith says, “Space policy has always been as much about perception as reality. It goes all the way back to the first ballistic missiles, the space race, the missile gap.”

John F. Kennedy warned about a “missile gap” while running for president, and even though it proved illusory, the fear of Soviet supremacy — Sputnik was in orbit while American rockets were exploding in front of TV cameras — supported the development of missiles that could be used for global nuclear war or putting men on the moon.

The result was lavish budgets for rockets and space.

But the easy goals have been reached, and visiting the moon is so last-century. Visiting an asteroid will answer important scientific questions, but will never have the sex appeal of visiting the man on the moon. As Smith says, today, “We are in another gap; an ambition gap.”

David J. Tenenbaum

We approach the Cave of the Mounds, a landmark (so to speak) in Southwest Wisconsin, along a walkway painted with fossils and markings that start at the Ordovician era (450 million years ago), when the limestone beneath our feet was deposited as a rain of sea shells on an ocean floor. Finally, at the cave’s entry, the asphalt calendar enters the last million years, when the cave started to be excavated by flows of acidic water.

The geological markings under our feet are one indication that the cave-men and -women who operate this site are intent on linking past and present, above- and below-ground.

Cave of the Mounds was discovered in 1939 by workers blasting in a limestone quarry on one of the highest spots in southern Wisconsin. Today, it is a tourist destination with a message — a cool, underground mecca, strategically illuminated, where tour guides leave the nettlesome lectures above ground, and offer easy-to-digest science along the cave’s alleyways.

The above ground section of the site features resurrected prairies and oak savannas, but the main attraction is the stalactites hanging over stalagmites, flowstone, the fossils embedded in ancient limestone, and the rare opportunity to see geology at work as you observe the earth from the inside out.

Aftermath of a flood unparalleled

What caused the huge erosion features, ancient shorelines, and scoured potholes in the “channeled scablands” in Eastern Washington state? In 1923, J. Harlen Bretz coined that ominous moniker and proposed that the features had been created by a gigantic flood.

During this time, geology was ruled by a “uniformitarianism” dogma, which highlighted gradual processes like deposition and erosion, and discounted the power of sudden events like floods (and perhaps even earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes).

Skeptics demanded to know the source of all that water in an arid region, and Bretz had a reputation as a kook. Then, geologists gradually realized that the ice-age flood had originated to the east, in glacial Lake Missoula, which had been plugged by the lobe of a glacier emanating from Canada.

In the 1950s, the idea that this huge lake had eaten through an ice dam and then coursed downstream with phenomenal power started gaining acceptance, and in 1979, Bretz, age 96, received the highest award from Geological Society of American for solving this great Earth riddle. Today, scientists believe the floods may have recurred every few years or decades as the ice age was waning, around 14,000 years ago.

The evidence for the floods comes in all sizes. Alternating stacks of coarse gravel and fine sand show gravel left by flood currents under sand left by slower water when the floods receded. A dry river bed called the Grand Coulee, in Eastern Washington, was gouged by the astonishing flow of uncorked glacial melt water. The periodic cascades that shaped Dry Falls, now in Sun Lakes State Park are considered the largest known waterfalls in Earth’s history.

The unbearable whiteness of being

The world’s largest field of gypsum dunes, at White Sands National Monument in south-central New Mexico, could arouse anybody’s inner drywaller, as gypsum is the mineral basis for both drywall and plaster. But here, where 275 square miles of gypsum dunes have built a hot, severe and scorchingly beautiful landscape, there’s not a sheet of drywall in sight.

Set aside as a national monument by President Herbert Hoover in 1933, the dunes trace their origin to vast deposits of hydrated calcium sulfate — gypsum — that were laid down on an ancient lake a quarter-billion years ago. After a geological uplift, they were exposed roughly 10 million years ago, and eventually moved to the present site in a geologic eye-blink — the last 7,000 years.

Mammoth tracks have been seen in the dunes, but they could get buried with time: Some dunes are moving 30 feet a year, as the wind piles them up on the windward side and gravity avalanches them down the lee.

The gypsum dunes are said to be the largest in the world, but what’s most amazing is not the geology, but the evolutionary adaptations life has used to survive these harsh conditions. At least seven species of animals, including three lizards, that are closely related to darker varieties living in the surrounding desert have turned white for camouflage in this bleached world. (The drywalling lizard or the plastering mouse must be here somewhere!)

Visiting the Sands? Ponder a trip to Trinity, the site of the first test of the atomic bomb.

Science museums: Try the trifecta!

The Windy City boasts not just one, but three cool science destinations, all next door to each other on the Museum Campus along the shore of Lake Michigan.

To explore some of the world’s biological and cultural wonders, spend the day at the Field Museum of Natural History, a collision of anthropology, botany, geology, paleontology and zoology. The permanent exhibits include the DNA Discovery Center, a journey through four billion years of earthly life, and Sue, the largest (and most expensive?) complete skeleton of the ferocious T. rex. Among the temporary exhibits was a recent one on the horse and its deep relationship with humans (an exhibit that particularly excited one horse-crazy Why Filer).

If your palate is whetted for a wetter world, walk to the Shedd Aquarium to explore underwater life from the Amazon, the Caribbean and both poles. Green sea turtles, beluga whales, moray eels, piranhas and penguins will be among your hosts.

If otherworldly science is more your thing, visit the Adler Planetarium. Chat about the stars with real space scientists at their Space Visualization Laboratory, or just sit back and watch the star show. Adler’s centerpiece is the Doane Observatory, the largest publicly accessible telescope in the Chicago vicinity. While you can only peer through the lens after dark, this could make for a great conclusion to your trip.

Discover a life aquatic

An Australian freshwater crocodile grows in Baltimore. Seriously. The National Aquarium Baltimore boasts more than 660 species of fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals, totaling around 16,500 marine creatures.

In addition to its rich marine menagerie, the aquarium has a collection of special exhibits and interactive oceanic enjoyment. See the world through a dolphin’s eyes at Our Ocean Planet, a show that teaches visitors about dolphins and the connections between people and their seafaring friends. Or soak in ocean sensations with a movie at the 4-D Immersion Theater, where you can experience sea life in multiple dimensions, including the smell and feel of (simulated) mist and wind. Or take an expert-led tour, including behind-the-scenes peek of the sharks’ quarters.

The aquarium is also a center for conservation. For example, its Marine Animal Rescue Program tracks the progress of rescued animals after release. Other conservation projects include restoring wetlands and investigating the impacts of mercury on the marine food chain. After all, protecting the life that sustains the ocean ecosystem benefits everyone—not just aquarium visitors.

An excursion exotic to Melville

What’s more breathtaking than seeing the world’s largest animals in the wild? Whale watching puts you up close and personal with these magnificent marine mammals. Since the 1950s, in a 180° turnaround from Herman Melville’s day, people have been flocking by the boatloads to glimpse whales doing what they do rather than to kill them.

Both the U.S. east and west coasts have whales to watch, though you must catch them in the right season during their migration. There’s no guarantee, but on the western seaboard, you could spot orcas and gray whales. The east is home to the right, fin and sei whales. Humpbacks, minkes, and blue whales troll both coastlines.

Several cetaceans (a scientific category including whales, dolphins and porpoises) are endangered, including the North Atlantic right, blue, fin, sei and gray whales. In any case, marine mammals are heavily protected by law, so whale watching should be done with professionals who obey the rules.

Celebrating, protecting southern nature

With more than 500 full-time employees and an annual budget exceeding $30-million, Audubon Nature Institute sounds more like a business than a private, non-profit organization dedicated to explaining and preserving the wonders of nature with a Cajun flavor. The group operates a zoo, aquarium and assorted parks in and around New Orleans. The Aquarium of the Americas focuses on the Caribbean, Amazon, Gulf of Mexico (complete with oil-drilling replica) and Mississippi River.

A primate exhibit in the Audubon Zoo shows dozens of our opposable-thumbed relatives. Its 360 species of animals include a jaguar shown in a replica Amazon jungle. The “Embraceable Zoo” is devoted to full-contact animal admiration, and you can also eyeball, if not pet, a prickly Indian crested porcupine. Audubon maintains two locations that focus on captive breeding and survival of endangered species; these are closed to the public, but we expect to see you at the new insectarium, located in the old Federal customs house, for the beetle races on Sept. 3.

North Carolina: decapitation capitol

Every summer, vacationers flock to North Carolina’s coast for a beach getaway. But beach vacations would have been a hard sell early in the 18th century, as the coast was the stomping grounds of the South’s most feared pirate, Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard.

Nowadays, the area is proud of its sordid past, attracting pirate-curious tourists and archaeologists alike. In 1996, Blackbeard’s biggest and final ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, was found off the coast of Beaufort, where it had been hiding for more than 270 years. While the dives did not uncover much treasure, archaeologists estimate the wreckage holds up to 750,000 artifacts, some of which are displayed at Beaufort’s North Carolina Maritime Museum.

Blackbeard is a primary local industry. Ocracoke Island, a favored Blackbeard anchorage, was where he met his fate at the hands of what he mocked as a rabble of “cowardly puppies.” Bath has the legendary ball of light, presumed to be Blackbeard’s ghostly severed head.

So why watch Johnny Depp impersonate a pirate at the multiplex when you can check out the history of this famous scoundrel? Like we said, this old, dead, head-free pirate is a godsend for small business…

Tar is my name. Fossils are my fame

If you’re stuck for a scientific sojourn in Southern California, head for the pits. Since long before there was a Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits have been an oozing, 3-D flypaper for animals, now with that all-too-trendy urban accent. Asphalt, we learn, is not just good for roads, but also for trapping live animals and preserving their fossils. Since their first description in a scientific publication in 1875, the pits have produced prodigious prizes for paleontology. The onsite Page Museum houses more than 650 species of plants and animals, all removed from the black goo, and dating back 11,000 to 50,000 years.

The tar pits were a graveyard for thousands of carnivores, including the dire wolf, coyote and saber-toothed cat, and a smaller number of herbivores, including mammoth and bison. In an effort to transcend the “heroic” era of paleontology and flesh out (if we can put it that way) a comprehensive picture of life in the era of ice, researchers have recently shifted their focus to fossils of plants and smaller animals, including millipedes, 31 species of mollusks, and 25 species of beetles.

Listen hard: Hear the galaxies?

Love big? Dig distant, mysterious and unfathomably old? At the Very Large Array, in western New Mexico, you can gawk at 27 giant antennas used by astronomers to “listen” to radio signals from the universe. When you’re done rubber-necking the hardware, check out exhibits at the visitor center.

Then climb an observation tower to get another view of the world’s premier radio telescope zoo. Notice how every single antenna has silently and inexorably changed its orientation, and is now pointing to another invisible spot in the heavens? You are looking at visual proof of our planet’s normally insensible rotation.

It takes a lot of work, and some hefty equipment, to pry loose the secrets of the universe, and here, the scale of the operation is written across the desert. Since 1980, the VLA has, alone or in tandem with other telescopes, been collecting the astrophysical evidence for the formation and destruction of stars and galaxies. The new “enhanced VLA” can “hear” three times as many radio bandwidths as the VLA and is 10 times more sensitive. How sensitive is that? They say it could hear a cellphone calling from Jupiter…

Go under cover in the capital city

Explore life under cover (and the technology that allows a spy to hide in plain sight) at the International Spy Museum, the only public museum of its kind in the United States. With the largest public collection of international espionage artifacts, the museum provides a unique global perspective of this covert profession — said to be the second oldest — and how it has shaped the past and present.

Before you start your mission, you are challenged to adopt a secret identity. As you snoop about, you’ll discover the Secret History of History, which highlights the influence of spies through the ages; gadgets and stories of espionage during the American Civil War, World War II, and Cold War; and a gallery of spy technology. You can even see if you have what it takes to be an agent in the Operation Spy interactive experience, in which you must find a missing nuclear trigger before it ends up in the wrong hands. Just don’t blow your cover!

Visit the “Boneyard”

Warplanes go to the desert to die, and there, for a fee, you can tour thousands of mothballed fighters, bombers and helicopters at the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Center. Bus tours run from the Pima Air and Space Museum, on the outskirts of Tucson, Ariz. With more than 4,200 planes, the “boneyard” is the ultimate in aerial combat nostalgia.

Some of these planes will be scrapped, others may be sold or salvaged for parts, or pressed back into service during future wars. Seldom celebrated, but perhaps more important from a technological point of view, the site also stores 350,000 tools used to make these machines, including, we presume, the one-of-a-kind tools and dies used to shape jet engines, wings and fuselages.

Ogling killing machines may seem macabre, but then, if you are a U.S. taxpayer, you’ve already paid for this stuff… might as well check it out, and witness how the technology of aerial warfare has changed over the decades!

Edison’s Garden of Invention

In 1887, after he had patented the first practical electric light bulb, mega-inventor Thomas Edison invented an inventor’s playground in West Orange, N.J., just outside Manhattan. Edison stocked the lab with every resource needed to crank out movie cameras and projectors, teletypes, recording and playback devices, batteries and countless other electric gadgets for the fast-modernizing nation.

With labs focusing on chemistry and physics, and with shops devoted to woodworking and metal-working, Edison could concentrate on his strong points: cranking out ideas and masterminding publicity stunts that helped ensure his commercial success. During World War I, 10,000 people cranked out electrical devices for the military at the factories clustered around the lab. Edison worked at the West Orange lab until his death in 1931.

Think of Edison as primarily an inventor? Then you have to wonder how his name wound up on the companies selling electricity to New York and Chicago. God may have made the Garden of Eden, but Thomas Edison made the garden of invention in north Jersey, and it awaits your visit.

– David J. Tenenbaum & Jenny Seifert