In May, with more than four months of professional baseball left to be played, there are plenty of fans of hapless teams hanging on to hope that this year is finally their year.

Those thin threads of hope have an analog on the field: The fortunes of teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars hang on the soft tissue holding together the elbows and shoulders of a couple dozen twenty-somethings who can heave a baseball nearly 100 miles per hour.

What better way then to protect those fortunes — not to mention the lucrative salaries paid directly to players — than to set pitchers to a training program that applies the best scientific research on the wear and tear of repeated throwing and teaches the sort of proper form that can prevent injury?

Because information to guide those decisions is available.

“Using biomechanics, we can identify a pitcher whose, say, arm is too high or too low and in a dangerous position,” said Glenn Fleisig, research director at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala. “And we can tell them how to change to reduce the likelihood of injury.”

Of course, you can lead a coaching staff to science, but you can’t make them change.

If these young players grow up to coach, they’ll likely be passing down to their players the wisdom they’re learning now, from their coach. Photo: The Suss-Man (Mike)

“If you think about how the decisions get made on when and how guys work out, for the most part, it’s folklore,” said Will Carroll, a sportswriter who specializes in injuries from mundane to traumatic. “It’s hand-me-down wisdom that coaches learned from their coaches. It’s not what they’re reading in sports medicine journals.”

Not that there is any shortage of research in sports medicine journals.

Since the Major League Baseball season started in early April, Fleisig and collaborators have published studies on elbow tendon replacement surgery, six-week throwing programs for high school-aged baseball players and shoulder nerve injuries particularly prevalent in volleyball players.

When elbow ligaments and tendons are repeatedly moved in a unnatural way, injury is common. Surgery is often required for players to continue playing without pain and further injury. Photo: Magnus Manske

“He’s a busy guy,” Carroll said. “I know him well, and it’s my business to know what he’s up to. But I don’t even know all the stuff that Glenn’s done.”

For his part, Fleisig continues to churn out scientific studies, expecting a new breed of coach will make use of it.

“When we set up ASMI, it was as a research center,” said Fleisig, a biomedical engineer. “We’re not coaches. We’re scientists. We try to supply the coaches with useful information.”

A complex motion

For all the hitting, running, catching and sliding that electrifies fans, nothing can happen in a baseball game until a pitch is thrown. And describing the thrown ball in terms of biomechanics slows the pace of the game to a crawl. In fact, it took Duquesne University athletic training professor Peggy Houglum more than 1,200 words to describe the process for a book on musculoskeletal injuries.

Standing 60 feet, 6 inches from the plate and the batter, the pitcher begins the action — which generally takes place in one smooth and unbroken motion — with a windup that lines up the body parts for the synchronized movements that propel the ball toward the catcher. This often involves starting with the throwing hand and ball in the glove, joined in front of the pitcher, and progresses with a slight step backwards against the “pitching rubber,” a slab of white rubber that marks the point atop the mound from which pitchers must work.

“The body winds up so that all segments of the body from the legs to the arms are able to contribute to the ball’s propulsion,” Houglum wrote.

It’s an action Carroll sees reaching back into our distant past.

“There’s a physiologist, William Calvin, who wrote a book about it, suggesting our brains grew and our speech centers evolved alongside the center that coordinates throwing,” Carroll said. “Throwing a spear straight and hard once, and then going to pick it up, is a completely natural thing.

“What isn’t natural is throwing a baseball 100 times over a couple hours.”

The high speed of a player delivering a pitch requires high-speed, sensor-aided imaging to sort out all the moving parts. Photo: ASMI

Set atop the rubber, a right-handed pitcher ends up facing to their right, toward third base. The pitcher’s hands separate as a stride forward begins. The throwing hand and the ball reach back, while the glove hand moves toward the target.

The striding foot strikes the ground, and “that’s when the pelvis rotates toward the batter,” Fleisig said. “And the pitcher’s trunk follows it, rotating, but there’s some lag in the shoulders.”

It takes a brief moment for the shoulders to turn to match the pitcher’s waist and trunk, for the flexed arm to straighten and whipsaw toward the plate, and it makes all the difference in the world.

“This is a fraction of a second. It’s not even clear on much video,” Fleisig said.

To much lag focused a great deal of the acceleration on the ligaments in the elbow. Too little lag means asking too much of the shoulder in creating the acceleration require to throw with impressive speed.

“It’s the difference between a good pitcher and a great pitcher, or a pitcher with or without too much stress on the arm,” Fleisig said.

And it’s measurable. Or, at least, it is now.

Coaching by feel

“The old-timers — the men who coached pitchers decades ago — just watched,” he said. “They put in their time as players, watched a lot of baseball and tried to describe their experiences to the players they coached.”

But there’s only so much that can be gleaned from observing at real speed.

“They could see whether a pitcher was taking a long or short stride as they threw, and where the arm slot was — whether a pitcher was throwing with their hand high up above their shoulder or lower and to the side,” Fleisig said. “They could talk about how to grip the ball, but the rest was just guessing.”

The first major stress on coaching came with the introduction of video as a coaching tool.

“It was eye-opening,” Fleisig said. “They saw things they couldn’t understand.”

To throw a curveball — which drops faster toward the plate than the arc of a normally thrown ball thanks to a great deal of spin imparted by the pitcher — coaches believed the pitcher’s hand needed to be situated on the side of the ball. Their fingers, led by their little finger, pulled down on the front of the ball. Or so it was thought.

“The first coaches to watch a curveball thrown on video were probably cursing their players out for doing it wrong, because they’re seeing each curve thrown with the hand on the back of the ball and the thumb coming down first,” Fleisig said.

Video revealed that the pitcher’s hand was behind the ball on pretty much every pitch, whether it was a garden-variety fastball or a pitch with funky spin that made it fall or slide sideways. But the pitcher — and the coach who had no other way to describe the proper way to throw — understood only how it felt to throw a curveball.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“And it feels like you’ve got your hand on the side, and you’re pulling with your pinky first,” Fleisig said. “So once they figure out that it looks different than it feels, they’ve got a dilemma: How do you teach ideal technique? Do you teach it like it feels, or like it looks on this new video tool?”

ASMI’s work is presenting coaches with a new dilemma. The Institute has a library of more than 2,000 athletes from little league-aged kids to elite professional pitchers.

“We put two dozen reflective markers on them, and they throw from the pitcher’s mound in our laboratory while our cameras and computers record all the movements from windup to the follow-through after the release the ball,” Fleisig said.

The result is a complicated stick figure, which is compared by ASMI “biomechanists” with advanced degrees in ergonomics and biomechanical engineering against the range of other recorded pitchers.

“We’re watching the angle of their forearm to upper arm as they stride, where their front foot lands, the way their trunk swivels around to help generate speed as the arm moves through the throwing motion,” Fleisig said.

The American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI) biomechanically evaluates this pitcher by placing white censors on his joints and ligaments, and monitoring his pitch. Photo: American Sports Medicine Institute

Timing and angles are crucial to a pair of the most important factors of a pitcher’s success: throwing hard and keeping the throwing arm in good working order.

“We know the biomechanics of proper pitching, the combination of good ball velocity without excessive stress on the elbow and shoulder,” Fleisig said. “We also know the difference in adults and children throwing fastballs and curveballs. The current challenge is to spread the science to the field.”

That’s the new dilemma.

“The questions have been out there. The need has been out there. This science hasn’t always been out there,” Fleisig said. “When major league teams come to us, they bring the best pitching coaches. And those coaches are in the same position the last generation was in. How do I translate these new scientific findings into things I can teach to pitchers?”

If this young pitcher is guided by a well-informed coach, he can take steps to avoid injury very early in his career. Photo: Paul-W

An ounce of prevention

And how does that knowledge get applied to prevent injury?

“In most cases, I don’t think it does,” said Carroll, whose baseball season workday is spent writing about pitchers who have torn a ligament or loosen the capsule of tissue around the shoulder that keeps the arm bone from pulling slightly free of its socket during the powerful whip of the pitching motion.

On Monday Kansas City Royals pitcher Danny Duffy was diagnosed with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in the elbow on his throwing arm.

It’s no small thing that many baseball fans are well-acquainted with the UCL, and no small thing that the tear was not a career disaster for Duffy. He’ll just have a surgical repair known as “Tommy John surgery,” named for a Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher who was the first patient to have his UCL replaced with a piece of tendon from elsewhere in his body.

“The thing about these Tommy John surgeries nowadays, they’re so efficient at doing them. Danny is going to come back even better, even stronger,” Royals manager Ned Yost told the Associated Press. “It’s just missing out on Danny’s development for a year and Danny’s production for a year which is what hurts.”

Rehabilitation following Tommy John surgery is so refined that almost all patients recover completely, according to Carroll, and often within nine or 10 months (compared to 18 months before John began pitching again).

Click here to view the embedded video.

“What’s bothering most people a bit is that there are surgeons doing 500 of these surgeries, and we’re seeing the number of high school kids in the operating room growing,” Carrol said.

While the odds say Duffy will return without losing his skills, the Royals have lost the services of a young pitcher working for the (relatively) low price of just under $500,000.

The Washington Nationals spent much of last season without young phenom Steven Strasburg, who still made several million dollars. The Boston Red Sox are paying pitcher John Lackey, who is rehabbing from a Tommy John procedure in November and out of commission for most or all of this season, more than $15 million in 2012.

Major League Baseball pitchers Danny Duffy of the Kansas City Royals, John Lackey of the Boston Red Sox, and Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals all underwent Tommy John surgery to correct a problem caused by the unnatural repetition of the pitching motion. Photos: Duffy: Keith Allison from Owings Mills, USA, Lackey: Keith Allison, Strasburg: dbking

“How much is a year worth?” Carroll asked. “For teams without so much money, who are relying on one guy, they could be screwed.”

And with so much money at stake, Carroll wonders why a trip to a place like Birmingham for a morning-long session with a researcher like Glenn Fleisig isn’t a must for every pitcher on every major league roster.

“There are clues that teams can look for to decide whether a pitcher’s throwing motion is bad, but why look for clues?” Carroll said. “We can do the examination, look at the science and say here’s how much force there is on your shoulder. Here’s how much force there is on your elbow. And we know these are the norms.

“For what you have at stake, why not just spend a couple thousand dollars to send them to Glenn?”

In a study posted online May 9, Nathan Bridges and colleagues analyzed data from an eye-in-the-sky called Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Using a high-resolution telescope, the researchers measured the movement of sand dunes over a 105-day span.

The fine-grained images showed that the dunes are indisputably on the move, says Bridges, a senior scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. “Even though Mars has a very thin atmosphere and high-speed winds are rare, the dunes are moving.”

The research group saw movement both in entire dunes, and in the ripples on their surface. Across one meter of dune front, they calculated an annual sand movement totaling about 2.3 cubic meters. “If you had a children’s sandbox, that would fill it with sand in a year,” Bridges says.

On Mars, as on Earth

And that, he adds, is within the range of movement seen in some Earthly dune fields. “We are not making the case that Mars has the fastest dunes, but they do move like some on Earth. Mars is an active planet, maybe not as active as Earth, but we are seeing significant movement.”

How much wind is needed to move sand when the atmosphere is less than one percent as dense as Earth’s? The grains would start moving in a wind of about 20 to 30 meters per second (40 to 50 miles per hour, measured at a height of 1 meter), Bridges says. “That is about 10 times what you need on Earth, due to the atmospheric density difference.”

Such winds do blow — rarely — on Mars, but once the sand starts moving, it’s easier to keep it rolling, he says. “Recent research by my colleagues has found … a lower-speed wind can sustain the movement.” Under the reduced gravity of Mars, a grain stays aloft longer, giving the wind more time to accelerate it. When the high-speed grain hits the sand bed, a high-energy collision impels more sand grains into motion.

Mars: A moving planet

At any rate, the discovery proves that wind needs no help from water in moving dunes, Bridges says. “We have seen dunes in images since the 1970s, but there was a question, were they currently active, moving? Mars has a very thin atmosphere and it would need high-speed winds to move sand, and those are very rare. So it’s been an open question, how much sand is moving now, and was more moving in the past?”

On Earth, water is highly erosive, but Mars has no liquid water, “so one agent of erosion on Earth is lacking,” says Bridges. “There is a lot of evidence for erosion — craters that appear to be filled in with dirt, and the primary mechanism is wind.”

And lasting sandblasting

Wind does not just move sand — it also creates sand, Bridges says. His group calculated that the natural Martian sandblaster sand would erode 1 to 50 microns off rock per year, about the same rate as in Victoria Valley.

That sandblasting would provide a source of the sand that litters so much of the red planet, Bridges says. “Erosion is occurring today, so wherever you have sand, and moderate winds, you are likely to get significant amount of erosion from rocks.” That could then create silt or more sand.

When we see all these eroded terrains, “you don’t have to evoke any past climate to explain this,” he says. “It’s a current process, and it was likely occurring for billions of years.”

Starry sky with green haze above a moss covered cliff, with waterfall on bottom right and chromatic bow along bottom

The Skogafoss is one of the biggest waterfalls in Iceland, and is especially beautiful in this stunning image under the aurora borealis. The Northern Lights are shining against a great sea of stars, including the constellation Ursa major, or Great Bear, home to the asterism — a recognizable cluster of stars — the Big Dipper. And then there’s the rainbow that’s not really a rainbow.

This colorful arch is actually a moonbow, created by the light of the full moon refracting and reflecting in the water droplets that have drifted away from the waterfall.

Rainbows are created by sunlight refracting in, and reflecting from, raindrops or mist, even if the light and water source are different. The light is first refracted when it enters a water droplet, as the light wave changes direction because it is slowed more on one side than another. Next, it is reflected off the back of the droplet, and finally it is refracted again on its way out.

Upon entering the droplet, the sunlight is separated into different wavelengths, an effect called dispersion. Different wavelengths of light are each different colors. The shorter wavelengths, like blue and purple, are refracted at a greater angle than longer wavelengths, like red and orange. This variation in bending gives rainbows and moonbows their shape.

Photo: Stephane Vetter (Nuits sacrees)

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.”

Duhigg’s new look at human behavior analyzes some fascinating issues: the birth of the modern Civil Rights movement, the use of data-mining to suck another buck from the customer, the techniques for building a mega-church, and even the methods a corporate titan who started his highly successful tenure by distributing his home phone number to the entire work force.

The guiding princilpe here is habits — defined as “behavioral patterns” containing a cue, a routine and a reward. Habits are things we do or think without thinking about them, says Duhigg, a New York Times reporter. “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meal we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise and the way we organise our thoughts and work routinse have enormous impart on our health, productivity financial security, and happiness.”

Habits rule, Duhigg says, but they can be broken — or more accurately, replaced with better habits, and his book covers personal habits, corporate habits, and “social habits.”

There’s just a small flaw. It’s not a book about habits so much as an exploration of learning, motivation, relationship and social customs. It’s a grab bag of insight about the human condition that Duhigg fails condense into his simple title.

I was snared by the story of Paul O’Neill, a number-cruncher who became president of struggling Alcoa, the aluminum maker, in 1987. In his meet-and-greet with Wall streeters, O’Neill announced that his initial focus would be, not the bottom line, not productivity, growing market share or profits, but (gasp) safety! “I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America,” he told the investors and analysts. I intend to go for zero injuries.” A habit of safety, he said, would be an indication that a culture of excellence was being instilled.

That focus was soon tested when an employee was killed while trying to repair a machine. Within hours, O’Neill told assembled executives “We killed this man,” and began a thorough review of dozens of steps that would be taken to prevent a recurrence.

O’Neill told employees to phone him at home if they knew of safety hazards, and the result, Duhigg says, was revolutionary — the simple offer to take the workers seriously released a cascade of suggestions related to processes, products and efficiency.

Behavioral patterns are everywhere, Duhigg insists, but one could argue that this had as much to do with morality as habits.

Later, Duhigg quotes — with apparent approval — pastor Rick Warren of the mega Saddleback Church: “All of us are simply a bundle of habits.” I heard an ominous echo of B.F. Skinner, the behaviorist who reduced human behavior to a bag of “conditioned responses.”

Duhigg may be no Skinnerian, but by attempting to corral so much of human existence into the rubric of “habit,” he comes perilously close.

Although I’m not in the habit of recomending books that have such sustained arguments with their own title, but “The Power of Habit” is worth every minute.

Scientists have thought for a decade that iron-bearing structures in the homing pigeon’s beak help the bird find its location by “reading” Earth’s magnetic field. Now, it turns out that this iron occupies cells that battle infection, rather than nerve cells.

Oops!

The new results leave a chasm in our understanding of bird navigation, says Charles Walcott, an expert on the subject at Cornell University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s astonishing that we have what seems like a terribly simple-minded problem. Take a homing pigeon any direction, and after circling a couple of times, it heads for home … and we don’t understand how these animals do this?”

Study leader David Keays, of the Institute for Molecular Pathology in Vienna, did not set out to debunk a beautiful theory, but rather to explore the nerve cells in the beak that supposedly register magnetism. “My background is in molecular biology and genetics, and I thought there must be some incredible biology involved. I wanted to get a handle on the molecules and create an artificial receptor.”

Because the “magnetic neurons” in the beak contained iron, Keays applied a blue stain that gloms onto iron. Christoph Treiber and Marion Salzer generated one-quarter million slices for microscope slides, each one-hundredth of a millimeter thick.

(Makes us dizzy … Didn’t they outlaw slavery?)

A fly in the ointment!

Although the magnetic neurons were said to number just six, iron-rich cells showed up all over the beak. One beak had about 108,000 blue-stained cells while another had just 200, Keays says. “This did not make sense. If these were magnetoreceptors, we would expect a similar number in birds of the same age and sex.”

When the scientists treated the samples with stains that attach to neurons, there was almost no overlap with the iron-bearing areas.

As questions accumulated, the researchers got a lucky break. One bird’s infected beak attracted blue cells that resembled macrophages, immune cells that fight infection (and also process iron). “You could see the cells’ tentacles engulfing other cells,” Keays says.

Stains that attach to immune cells overlapped heavily with the iron stain, Keays says; further evidence that the iron was inside macrophages, not neurons.

The study is “quite interesting and convincing,” says Walcott, and it explains why scientists have found no connection between the iron crystals and the nervous system. “If this is going to be seen as a sense organ, I think the two ought to be connected.”

Paradigm paranoia

Although the new study overthrows the accepted explanation for the pigeon’s magnetic mastery, Walcott says magnetism isn’t the whole story in navigation; birds also use vision, memory and smell.

Looking at the sun can help the bird figure out direction, but magnetic methods are needed to find a location on the globe.

Confusingly, birds seem to have a mechanism in the eye that detects Earth’s magnetic field. But because this works only when the sun is shining, it’s unlikely to explain nighttime navigation.

Keays says attitudes have changed since he “released a cat among the pigeons” at a conference a year ago. “Half of the audience wanted to hug me, they had been very skeptical, but the other half wanted to kill me.”

Since then, however, “We were able to persuade some big players in the field that the original reports were wrong. I think the great thing about science is that it is a self-correcting enterprise. If we get it wrong, somebody is going to come along and work out what the truth is.”

At this point, though, mystery rules. “It’s absolutely clear that birds, pigeons, can detect magnetic fields,” Keays says, “but the way they do that is the mystery.”

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.”

As honeybee colonies in the United States and Europe continue to suffer from a mysterious syndrome called colony collapse disorder (CCD), scientists are scrambling for answers. Another answer arrived this week, with a publication¹ that implicates a widely used insecticide.

CCD endangers many crops, but none more than almonds, which are pollinated by bees in more than a million hives trucked to California during the flowering season. Trucking stresses the bees, and stress is one of several likely contributors to the collapse syndrome.

Indeed, CCD could be several conditions lumped under one name, but here’s the trademark: The bees die away from the hive, obscuring the cause or causes of the collapse.

In the new study, scientists in France glued radio frequency identification tags to bees. Half were fed non-lethal doses of thiamethoxam, a common insecticide, then all the bees were released 1 kilometer from the hive. At the hive, the scientists used a radio-frequency gizmo to count how many flew home.

The tags did not affect the results, says Mickaël Henry, a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, in Avignon. “Previous studies have shown that they do not impair movement or behavior of bees, or their time budgets for foraging activity.”

In any case, the control bees also sported tags.

What’s wrong?

How did the insecticide reduce the return rate so significantly? Most likely by causing difficulties with orientation, or locomotor activity, or both, Henry says.

When the experiment was repeated over a distance of just 70 meters, 92 percent of exposed and 98 percent of control bees returned, so both sets of bees were able to fly. The major impairment of exposed bees on the unfamiliar, longer route suggests that the insecticide was most damaging to the ability to learn a new route.

The neonicotinoid insecticides, the category that includes thiamethoxam, trigger nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, which are normally excited by a signal from a neurotransmitter. According to the new study, “Effects of sublethal neonicotinoid exposures in honey bees may include abnormal foraging activity, reduced olfactory memory and learning performance, and possibly impaired orientation.”

These insecticides make bees stupid, in other words.

The experiment was designed to count how many bees failed to return rather than pinpoint the reasons for that failure, Henry stresses. “The next step is to go into deeper detail about the behavior, with time-activity budgets, and looking at their foraging.”

Not the whole story

“This is a nice study, and it does clarify something that a lot of people have pointed to in the disappearance of bees,” says Phil Pellitteri, a faculty associate in entomology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Insecticides have been known to cause bees to get lost, that’s one symptom of collapse. But colony collapse is a complex thing, and you can’t hang it all on one factor.”

Honeybees have long been attacked by viruses, protozoans and mites, Pellitteri says, and pesticides may decrease immunity, thus increasing susceptibility to pathogens. These, combined with the stress of long-distance travel and the scarcity of natural foraging grounds “are the general direction a lot of CCD research is pointing to. It’s a number of things, and their interactions.”

Henry and colleagues fed their data on return rates into a mathematical model, which predicted a perilous slide in colony populations. “The disappearances we observed may cause the colony to reach a population size low enough to be sensitive to other stressors,” he says. “Most bees are exposed to pesticides, and this confirms that exposure can put the colony at risk of collapse; this is the take-home message.”

You’d think — okay, I’d think — that there’s little new to write on the subject of global warming. To anybody who can read a scientific study, the human role in burning things that make carbon dioxide is clear enough.

Likewise, the trajectory of rising temperatures and sea levels is clear and accelerating.

But Mark Hertsgaard, a veteran environmental reporter who lives in California, pivots the focus from slowing greenhouse-gas pollution to the need to adapt and respond to changes wrought by the steady accumulation in heat-trapping gases.

We have just endured the warmest decade in history, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says temperatures could rise 5° C by 2100. If that happens, “The Earth would be hotter than at any time in the past 50 million years,” Hertsgaard writes.

Although a few insurance companies, stung by colossal payouts for floods and hurricanes, have responded, most businesses have failed to come to grips with the ongoing warming. “True sustainability is not just about being nice to people and nature,” as one business leader told the author. “It’s about dealing with environmental threats that can put you out of business.”

Sea level is a rising concern in the near future, and Hertsgaard contrasts New Orleans, flooded and ruined by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, with the Netherlands, which is largely below sea level.

The record of injustice, corruption and incompetence in New Orleans augurs poorly for the difficult task of restraining the sea, while the Dutch have resolved to survive as a nation and are building massive sea defenses based on communitarian principles. If some land cannot be saved, those who must sacrifice for the common good are compensated without being allowed to block measures needed for national survival.

The time for discussion is past, Hertsgaard says, and given the momentum in the climate system, he argues that we must prepare now for inevitable warming and flooding.

That action should not just benefit rich people in the rich countries that have created the lion’s share of global warming pollutants, Hertsgaard says. He visits poor, low-lying Bangladesh, threatened by typhoons and floods and observes that a father in Bangladesh loves his daughter just as much as a father in California.