Running short of worries? Then ponder the super-volcanoes — earth-bombs that can vomit 10 or 100 or 1,000 cubic kilometers of molten rock. Super-volcanoes can change history by creating rivers of red-hot ash moving at highway speed, spreading dust across hundreds of kilometers and spewing vapors that block the sun, destroy crops and start famines.

A volcano may go dormant for thousands of years after such a huge eruption, so they may be even harder to predict than smaller ones — which are also unpredictable at this point…

But this week, Nature published a new analysis of Santorini, a Mediterranean monster, that shows the movement of molten rock that preceded the eruption.

Santorini’s sudden release of 40 to 60 cubic kilometers of rock and ash was followed by a giant collapse that left a characteristic ring of hills called a caldera. Thousands may have died in the eruption, which laid down a 60-meter layer of ash and rock.

Eruptions of this general size happen about every 300 years, says Timothy Druitt, a volcanologist at the Université Blaise Pascal in France, who lead the current study. The most recent was in 1815 at Tambora, in Indonesia.

Druitt’s new analysis of crystals within the frozen magma offers a rough schedule for the entry of molten magma into a holding tank — the magma chamber — below the volcano, which is a precursor to eruption.

Caldera-forming eruptions rival earthquakes and tsunamis as the deadliest natural disasters. “People who work in the field know these volcanoes are not rare, even on a human time scale,” says Druitt, but “we have never been able to monitor one of these big eruptions during the long buildup phase, so we are not really sure how that happens.”

The crystal analysis detects microscopic changes in chemical composition, offering a unique, after-the-fact picture of the gestation of eruption.

In the crystals

As crystals grow in the cooling magma, atoms of trace elements diffuse within them, and both growth and diffusion are affected by conditions within the hot magma, says Druitt. “These crystals grow progressively, and as they do, their chemical composition changes according to the composition of the magma around them, and the temperature and amount of water in the magma.”

The crystals revealed that a big gob of magma — perhaps 10 percent of the magma chamber’s total contents — entered in the decades before the eruption. “Looking at the crystals in this magma, we were able to reconstruct very crudely events taking place in the last few decades prior to the eruption,” Druitt says.

That final addition probably made the magma chamber unstable, leading to the eruption, Druitt explains.

If such a late, large magma movement proves typical of super-volcanoes, that could contribute to a distant early warning system for mega-eruptions, based on more conventional methods, such as seismic monitoring.

Distant early warning

But the findings also carried a caution, Druitt says, since Santorini was apparently dormant for about 18,000 years before the last apoplectic outburst. “That is a slightly alarming result. There are lot of these big caldera systems, but most are in a stage of repose.”

The upshot is more proof that a dormant volcano can still be a dangerous one, he adds. “We can imagine that a big caldera in a remote region of the world, such as the Andes, which is not monitored very well, could reawaken pretty quickly on a human time scale.”

The crystal method gives after-the-fact data on an eruption. Current attempts to anticipate eruptions rely on data about earth shaking, deformation of the crust, and release of gases.

“It’s a very timely topic, and solid science in terms of the measurements and observations,” says Bradley Singer, a volcanologist and professor of geoscience at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “They admit that there are issues about the time scales,” largely because the diffusion of strontium and titanium is imperfectly understood in the hot magma.

The study’s title, however, specifies that the final growth of the magma chamber occurs on “Decadal to monthly timescales,” Singer notes. “It could be centuries or even longer, which implies that we’d have a longer time prior to the eruption” to worry about the effects of the rising magma.

Singer concurs on the importance of understanding the relationship of magma flows, instability and eruption, and says the crystal analysis is gaining traction in volcanology.

That’s just as well, since giant caldera-forming volcanoes may be frighteningly common. The one at Yellowstone, for example, released 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock 640,000 years ago. Wouldn’t you want to know if something like that was building on your continent?

2010 marked the completion of a bizarre telescope composed mainly of ancient ice. One billion tons of ice.

Buried a mile deep in the ice at the South Pole, IceCube is the world’s strangest telescope. Composed of water, it’s looking for the neutrino, nature’s most unusual particle. Eighty years after the neutrino was “invented” to balance a physics equation, it remains ultra-difficult to detect, measure and understand.

IceCube is focused mainly on particles that come all the way through the Earth. In other words, this telescope looks down.

Scientists say neutrinos can pass unscathed through a long bar of lead. How long? Say, one light year long — about 10 trillion kilometers. Because neutrinos can slip through everything in their path, including stars, galaxies and vast clouds of dust, they are unrivaled tattle-tales of ancient explosions in the deep universe.

The bad news is that the same property makes neutrinos extremely difficult to see.

But if you can somehow observe the neutrino’s insanely rare interaction with matter, you could learn something about the universe, and the gargantuan energy released by exploding stars.

Roots of a frozen telescope

That is the promise and the premise of IceCube, a $271-million project intended to solve a problem posed in 1930, when physicist Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new and rather odd particle. Tiny, energetic, with no electric charge and not necessarily any mass, it would be virtually undetectable.

Pauli himself admitted “I have done a terrible thing. I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.”¹

The “now-you-don’t-see-it-and-you-never-will” neutrino was tailor-made for controversy; scientists detest what they can’t detect. Pauli’s idea was mocked² as “simply wrong” or “crazy.”

Today, scientists are sure nature is full of these shadowy characters: Rough calculations say a hundred trillion neutrinos whistle through your body every second.

Why make a big deal about neutrinos, which are, after all, less offensive than campaign ads? Because that ability to pass through all manner of interstellar crud allows neutrinos to carry messages from the far reaches of the universe.

Moreover, some neutrinos carry more punch than the wildest gamma ray. And just as you can’t pull a hot coal from a cold fire, you shouldn’t get “hot” neutrinos from “cool” sources like ordinary stars. These neutrinos, in other words, may deliver signals of some hip, blazingly hot stuff — neutron stars, active galactic centers, and exploding stars.

Finally, according to some scenarios, lower-energy neutrinos may comprise a small proportion of the mass — the stuff — of the universe, but they played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

In astronomy, as in love and antiques, “hard-to-get” translates into “most-wanted.” “The hope is that the particle that is almost nothing will tell us almost everything about the universe,” says Francis Halzen, a theoretical physicist at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Halzen directs IceCube, and did the same at IceCube’s predecessor, AMANDA, the Antarctic Muon and Neutrino Detector Array.

Search strategy for an elusive character

Neutrinos may be shy, but once in a great while, they actually hit an atom and produce a subatomic particle called a muon, which is easier to see.

Because the odds of a neutrino hitting anything are so dismal, physicists require bigger targets. It’s the same principle that lottery players use to “beat” the tiny odds of winning by buying hundreds of tickets.

Previous neutrino targets have included tubs of oil or dry-cleaning fluid and 5,000 tons of steel plates salvaged from battleships. To block spurious signals due to cosmic rays rather than neutrinos, these detectors have been sunk in the ocean or placed inside deep mines.

IceCube relies on a two-step detection sequence: First, the tiny percentage of neutrinos that interact with atomic nuclei in the ice produce muons. Second, these muons create Cherenkov light when they interact with matter.

When the detectors see Cherenkov light, they digitize the data and send it through electric cables to the surface for analysis. The detectors are housed inside 5,160 crush-proof glass spheres placed in holes drilled through the ice, and located 1450 to 2450 meters deep.

Another 324 detectors at the surface detect muons made by cosmic rays arriving from the Southern sky.

The Antarctic ice also has little radiation, and the detectors are so deep that air bubbles have been squeezed out, ensuring great optical clarity. Yet while the detectors are shielded from damage, they are under crushing pressure, and if they go bad, they will be busted forever.

IceCube will only look at muons that trigger at least eight detectors, says Halzen, and is most interested in muons moving upward — coming from the Northern Hemisphere. Downward signals can be confusing, as most of them are due to cosmic rays or lower-energy neutrinos, which Earth blocks.

Data from IceCube should suggest where the neutrinos originated and what sort of cosmic engine started them on their journey.

This desire to concentrate on neutrinos rather than cosmic rays explains why this frozen telescope, oddly but logically, looks downward.

What can these neutrinos tell us?

Neutrinos, “invented” to balance a physics equation, have grown to fascinate astrophysicists, galactic voyeurs seeking signals from astonishingly energetic structures and events in the deep universe. The direction and energy of neutrinos from each source should offer clues about the origin:

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/CXC/SAO

Located 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Cassiopeia, Cassiopeia A is the remnant of a massive star that died in a violent supernova 325 years ago. The dead star (turquoise dot in center) became a neutron star surrounded by a shell of junk blasted away in the explosion. Image is a composite from three orbital telescopes: Infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope is red; Visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope is yellow; Chandra X-ray Observatory data is green and blue.

Although supernova neutrinos have low energy and are hard to detect, a nearby supernova could light up IceCube enough to overwhelm the system. To prep for a supernova, Reina Maruyama, an assistant professor of physics at University of Wisconsin-Madison, is working to ensure that IceCube can handle this once-in-a-lifetime chance to get good data on a stellar explosion.

If something like the 1987 supernova exploded nearby in our galaxy, Maruyama says, “there would be so many neutrinos, the whole ice would glow. We expect that a few supernovas will occur each century in the galaxy, if one goes off, IceCube has to be ready. We stand to learn a whole lot about how they explode, and about the particle nature of neutrinos.”

Dark matters

Even weirder than neutrinos, IceCube may explore dark matter, a type of, well, something, that comprises 23 percent of the overall universe. A measly 4 percent of matter, including the galaxies, stars and planets, is visible. The balance is an even stranger quantity called dark energy.

The first inkling that some matter is invisible came in the 1930s, when a physicist noticed that galaxies rotate too fast: their visible mass would create too little gravity, and thus they should spin themselves into oblivion.

The explanation for that increased gravity is now called dark matter, and the race is on to detect it.

Since dark matter affects gravity, Maruyama says it must gather in the sun and the galaxies. When dark matter particles collide, they are expected to release a type of neutrino called muon neutrinos. But IceCube found no muon neutrinos coming from the sun and the Milky Way, using a technique that was 1,000 times more sensitive than previous ones.

Does absence make the heart grow fonder?

It depends on your perspective whether that’s good or bad, says Halzen. “There was a big celebration when we published, because we placed limits on that particular type of dark matter, but I looked at it another way: We had gone 1,000 times deeper, and it was very disappointing not to see dark matter.”

However, an experiment in Italy may have seen dark matter interacting with a hunk of sodium iodide, based on an annual variation in the signal. If Earth indeed orbits through a cloud of dark matter, the detector would register alternating downstream and upstream motions that could account for that annual cycle.

The cycle could, however, be due to something unrelated to dark matter.

To answer that riddle, Maruyama wants to place a similar detector deep in the Antarctic ice, and has already piggybacked two prototypes onto IceCube strings. The prototypes are working well enough to justify a larger, more expensive detector, Maruyama says.

If and when the experiment is replicated in Antarctic Ice, Maruyama says, “A positive result would be interesting, and a negative result would be interesting. If we can see a signal with the same timing, that confirms the [Italian] results. If we don’t see a signal, the source must be something aside from dark matter.”

Lurking behind the IceCube project is the tantalizing prospect of learning more about the bizarre particle it detects — the neutrino. We already know that neutrinos have a tiny amount of mass, and that they range in energy through at least 30 orders of magnitude — an unimaginable range of energies. There have been recent — and controversial — reports that neutrinos can travel faster than light — breaking a basic law of physics.

Why so weird?

That’s another indication that neutrinos exist at the edge of the standard model that attempts to explain everything by gravity, electromagnetism, and two nuclear forces, Halzen says. “We are measuring the properties of neutrinos any way we can, and extrapolating to see what the standard model predicts, and looking for variations. The simple way to describe the experiment is that we collect muons and neutrinos, and everything you don’t understand is a discovery, either it’s physics beyond the standard model, or it’s new astrophysics.”

Halzen anticipates spotting an extremely high-energy particle called the GZK neutrino. “These are predicted by theory, and if one hits the detector, we won’t have to do any analysis, we will be able to look at the event display and know that we have made the discovery.” GZK neutrinos are, according to theory, made by cosmic rays that strike photons in the microwave background, Halzen says, and thus could finally reveal the origin of the cosmic rays, one century after their discovery.

Neutrinos are slippery characters; shy, coming in incomprehensible numbers, being emitted by sources we cannot pinpoint. Maruyama notes that neutrinos seemingly change to a different “flavor” without any apparent cause, and says this “oscillation” from one state to another is the strangest part of the neutrino story. “Oscillation could have implications on how the universe evolved to have matter, and not anti-matter,” she says. “These tiny particles could have such an influence on the universe.”

So what?

Why should non-scientists worry about neutrinos? Halzen, who has answered this question many times, says “I have a personal answer. The reason we know our place in the universe is not because of French philosophers, it’s because of physicists. With dark matter and dark energy, we know most of the universe is not made of the same material we are made of. … Is that important to know? I think so.”

IceCube is not intended to produce technology or solve today’s problems, Halzen acknowledges. “This is total curiosity-driven science, and you are allowed not to care. But if you don’t do fundamental research, we’re going to be a developing country, that is clear.”

Particle physics proves that theoretical pursuits can have results that are unpredictable, yet practical and profitable, Halzen says. “My previous job was at CERN [the European particle-physics lab], where people discovered the Web in 1989, to enable collaboration among remote scientists. I think we have paid for all theoretical physics with that one discovery.”

Astronomers have just discovered two Earth-size, rocky planets around a nearby star. Though the planets are way too broilsome for life, they suggest that steady improvements in telescope technology has made the discovery of habitable planets just a matter of time.

But as astrobiologists continue to search for life in space, geo-biologists (ok, we coined that) continue to find bizarre life in strange places on Earth: in the dark ocean depths, between grains of sand, and at roasty-toasty temperatures once considered deadly.

Hot, humid, and totally alive!

Fifty years ago, nobody believed organisms could survive near the boiling point of water. When Thomas Brock started probing the hot springs in Yellowstone in the 1960s, he was not looking to overthrow a ground rule of biology. Instead, the University of Wisconsin-Madison professor, then at Indiana University, sought to study bacteria in a simplified, real-world environment.

At the time, and even today, precious little was known about how bacteria live their lives — unless they cause disease.

As Brock sampled his way up a hot stream, he approached its source in a hot spring, and the water temperature rose steadily.

At the time, biologists thought life would not tolerate temperatures near 80° C. But Brock kept finding bacteria, so he kept looking. Eventually, he found some that could live and reproduce near the temperature of boiling water — 100° C.

The prize of his collection was a bacterium he named Thermus aquaticus (for its hot-water habitat) and placed in a public repository for study by other scientists.

Over the years, T. aquaticus proved interesting indeed. For one thing, it was the first of more than 50 species of thermophilic bacteria known to tolerate or require temperatures near water’s boiling point.

For another, it was the first of the Archaea (ancient ones), primitive microorganisms that scientists now regard as a separate and highly primitive kingdom of life.

Deep roots indeed

Because thermophiles are Archaeans, and prefer the steamy conditions typical of early Earth, many scientists think they may tell us about the origin of life itself.

To any basic scientist, those contributions would be enough. But because their enzymes work in high temperatures, where chemical reactions are faster, the thermophiles have proven to be extraordinarily useful.

Today, enzymes derived from thermophiles are used to convert millions of pounds of corn (maize) into sugar to sweeten soft drinks.

But more important, at least to scientists who don’t guzzle fizzy pop at the lab bench, T. aquaticus supplied TAQ polymerase, the essential enzyme for polymerase chain reaction, AKA PCR.

PCR is an artificial technique that does what living critters do every day — replicate DNA. But PCR is the rocket ship of replication, since it allows you to multiply a piece of DNA a billion times in a few hours. That produces enough DNA to analyze to your heart’s content — for genetic engineering, biotechnology and forensic purposes.

PCR depends on TAQ polymerase.

Aware that PCR and soda pop are both billion-dollar industries, corporations and scientists around the world have frantically searched for other thermophiles that may have equally useful enzymes. They’re looking in odd places — not just hot springs and volcanoes, but also deep-sea vents, hot petroleum-bearing rock, the outflow of geothermal power plants, and smoldering piles of garbage.

Prowling for glow-in-the-dark squid

Call me Bob.

Short for bobtail squid. (Did I mention that I’m a 3-4 centimeter cephalopod, formally Euprymna Scolopes?)

Anyway, I hang out in shallow waters around Hawaii. Save your crocodile tears — somebody’s got to live in the sunny, tropical ocean. Anyway, here’s my problem: Even though I have 10 tentacles, I don’t have spines, poisons, or any other decent defense.

So I spend my days burrowed in sand at the ocean bottom, trying to keep out of mischief. Still, a fellow’s got to eat, don’tcha know, so I cruise at night, looking to grab a bite.

Here’s the snag: All sorts of nocturnal predators seem to have this thing about calamari sushi.

Light before flashlights

A long time ago, my ancestors evolved a nifty defense against their big teeth: stealth. Even their tiny squid brains figured out that predators could see them from below, as tasty dark blobs against the bright ocean surface.

Since this was before flashlights, my relatives had to improvise. So they press-ganged billions of luminescent bacteria into making light for them. The idea was to make us just as bright as the ocean surface — and hence invisible.

At least, this is how my great-aunt Tentacla tells it. To tell the truth, I think it had more to do with the evolutionary advantage of being hard to see.

Anyway, my ancestors fed the bacteria, and gave them a home in two specialized light-emitting organs. These “photophores” have a reflective membrane to shine all their light down, toward the hungry predators. They use a diaphragm to control brightness, and even have a lens to spread the light.

The photophore reminds me of a backwards eye — one that makes light rather than detects it.

My folks even figured out how to switch the bacteria “on” when needed.

In return, the bacteria got room and board, in the biological deal they call “symbiosis” or “mutualism.” Sometimes I think people could learn from this cooperative spirit….

But that’s enough thinking for today. My squid brain is squashed.

As I burrow into the sand for another daytime nap, permit me to introduce somebody who considers me almost as fascinating as I do.

Seriously speaking…

Margaret McFall-Ngai, a biologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, says the bobtail squid may pretend it’s cooperating in a symbiosis with those light-making bacteria, but the reality is more ominous.

She says there’s evidence that this may be slavery, not symbiosis, since the squid, “inhibits the growth of the bacteria to enhance their luminescence.” The bacteria, Vibrio fischeri, could make a better living drifting in the ocean, or in the gut of another marine animal, McFall-Ngai observes.

The concept of bacterial enslavement broadens our perspective on the many possible relationships in the living world.

Most people, if they think about bacteria at all, conjure up disease and decay, but people would be dead without bacteria, since the little critters play essential roles in producing vitamins and preventing disease.

Since the bacteria in our guts vastly outnumber the cells in our bodies, it helps that they’re helpful!

Nevertheless, and for understandable reasons, bacteriologists have traditionally focused on disease-causing organisms, and, for simplicity, on one species at a time. But that skews our view of how bacteria actually live, says McFall-Ngai.

Three cheers for complexity!

Complexity and subtlety may be the hallmarks of these interactions, and the complexity begins by recognizing that V. fischeri is closely related to V. cholerae, which causes the human intestinal disease, cholera.

Cholera is caused by a V. cholera toxin similar to a toxin produced by the light-emitting bacterium. But far from harming the poor little bobtail, that toxin signals it to secrete food for V. fischeri, so the toxin is really a chemical “dinner bell.”

And this raises the intriguing notion that a cholera bug secretes toxins not to kill its host but to discuss its menu. If so, our whole notion of pathogenesis may need rewriting, McFall-Ngai suggests. “Maybe when we’ve been studying cholera pathogenesis we’ve been studying an aspect of a normal conversation that’s gone wrong.”

Indeed, the traditional bacteriological view of bacteria as pathogens to be studied in pure culture may be “like trying to understand the complexity of all the cultures that lived in Paris by studying the activity of the Nazi occupiers,” McFall-Ngai suggests. “You are studying groups that don’t belong there, and have disrupted the normal activities.”

Want more on how the flashlight squid bullies its bacterial brethren?

Between the grains

(1996 story, only photos have been updated)

To zoologist Robert Higgins, small is beautiful. His infatuation with small creatures — “meiofauna” — dates to a student job in a biology lab that paid 35 cents an hour. Instead of quitting for more lucrative work, Higgins was intrigued.

He’d heard about tiny, amazingly diverse creatures, and put grains of sand and muck through a fine mesh, and used a microscope to find hundreds of organisms.

Forty-four years later, Higgins has retired from the Smithsonian Institution, but he’s still goggling at meiofauna — a complex group of animals found in most Earthly environments.

Indeed, a handful of wet sand could contain more biological diversity than a whole rain forest, Higgins says.

In the course of peering through countless microscopes, Higgins has discovered hundreds of species. With Danish biologist Reinhardt Kristensen, he found an entire phylum, called Loricifera.

Phyla are the broadest categories of organisms, based on structure, and according to the International Association of Meiobenthologists, “The majority of recognized phyla have meiofaunal representatives. Currently, 20 phyla considered to be meiofaunal from the 34 recognized phyla of the Kingdom Animalia. Out of these 20 phyla, five are exclusively meiofaunal in size.”

Photo: Giulio Melone, department of biology, Milan University.

A bdelloid (a type of meiofauna) shrinks when it undergoes anhydrobiosis. The dormant, dehydrated bdelloid has greater resistance to environmental stress but is ready to spring back to the active form in conducive conditions.

Meiofauna living between grains of sand have made some fancy adaptations to their harsh environment. Some have hooks on their feet, used to grab the sand. Others have hooked mouthparts, also useful for locomotion.

Beyond freeze-dried

To survive a difficult environment, meiofauna called tartigrades have evolved an amazing adaptation called “anhydrobiosis.” In this form of suspended animation, the animals replace water in their cell membranes with sugar, protecting the membrane from destruction through radiation and freezing. Microorganisms die when their cell membrane ruptures.

During anhydrobiosis, organisms are rather like plant seeds or bacterial spores, Higgins explains. “They can dry up for 100 years, and be rewetted, and come right back to active metabolism.”

Fun is fun. But what is the practical importance of studying stuff that can hardly be seen, doesn’t seem to cause disease, and is — at least to some — utterly ugly?

In other word, who cares about microscopic beach crud?

Meet the beach-cleaning crew

Anybody who likes to hang on the sand should be interested, Higgins says. “This is the system that helps keep our beaches clean.” Plankton, bacteria, all sorts of dead material is continually washing ashore, and a lot of people love to sit on beaches.

There’s a public-health angle here. Hookworms occur on beaches where dogs defecate, but meiofauna may consume hookworms, along with other nematodes. “So if we upset that, we could upset beach cleanliness,” Higgins says.

Higgins notes that meiofauna comprise a basic part of the food web, and disturbing them could have unforeseen consequences for the entire system.

Still, it’s hard to escape the notion that most of the motivation here is the pure scientific urge to discover, to classify, to understand. Meiofauna, Higgins notes, were seen under the microscope Anton van Leeuwenhoek invented in 1683.

The key to finding these things, Higgins indicates, in patience, technology, curiosity — and institutional support. “If you stare through a microscope for hour after hour, you have a chance of finding these things, but if you need to get out a certain number of papers each year, you have to take shortcuts and you won’t find as much.”

Fantastic freak show

If you’ve hung around a big-city park, you may think that pigeons are countless — or uncountable. But according to scientists from New Zealand, pigeons now join the short list of animals that can count — or at least, can places images containing two countable items in numerical order.

It’s blue news for those who think only humans deserve human capacities. From empathy and altruism to murder and war, animals seem to have caught on to some of our best — and worst — tricks.

Now Damian Scarf, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Otago, with his colleagues, has taught three pigeons to order pairs of numbers in the range from one through nine.

This is not exactly counting, but it certainly is a sign of numerical awareness in birds.

More important, the researchers have taught these retired racing pigeons the concept of smaller-to-larger, Scarf says. “Previously, this number abstraction was only known in primates, and now we have shown that it is not unique to primates.”

Serious screen-time serves science

The experiment began with a year-long training period, during which the birds were shown pairs of images, each containing one, two or three countable items. If the birds pecked at both images, smaller number first, they were rewarded with some wheat. (Although the images never contained a numeral, we refer to the “number” they contain for brevity.)

To prevent the birds from focusing on color, shape or other non-numerical details, the images showed a range of items, so that the only correct answer would reflect their number rather than other distinctions.

“The training time reflects how difficult it is for them to abstract,” Scarf says. “It’s such a foreign situation, number is not the first port of call when presented with a stimulus to discriminate. That’s why we had so many shapes, colors, surface areas.”

Even if the birds originally made their judgments based on color, “we pushed them to use a different strategy, to break away from that. Number is not the default discrimination mechanism” for pigeons, says Scarf, who worked under advisor Michael Colombo of Otago.

A genius for abstraction?

This does not mean that the birds are counting, says Scarf. “It’s more a fuzzy representation in the brain of what ‘three’ is. We can apply this verbal label to three, but they cannot. Pigeons, and animals in general, don’t have a definite idea of a number, that’s why they don’t perform perfectly, and why we see the distance effect.”

When the numbers on the test pair are further apart, Scarf found, “the fuzziness overlaps a little less.”

A greater distance between the numbers produced a quicker response and greater accuracy. For adjacent numbers, like four and five, the birds scored about 66 percent accuracy, compared to more than 95 percent for numbers separated by at least six. Once the difference rose to at least three, the pigeons did as well as monkeys in a path-breaking 1998 study that opened the field of numerical “thinking” in animals.

Scarf stresses that the birds were not just regurgitating what they had learned, but were learning numerical rules. “The goal was to find out whether they could acquire an abstract rule. We were just training for one through three, but they learned some flexibility, an abstract, ascending rule for ordering numbers” that would apply to other numbers on the screen.

Rooted in evolution, but where?

Being able to recognize that one thing is more numerous than another could help an animal survive, Scarf says. “When food is available in multiple places, an animal has to develop an optimal strategy for figuring out where the most food is, and I think we have subverted that capacity for this task.”

Where this capacity arose is anybody’s guess at this point. The evolutionary lineage of mammals and birds divided about 300 million year ago, Scarf says. “If this derived from a common ancestor, it’s very old. It’s also possible that primates and birds have evolved this independently.”

“I do think it’s important, just as our study of mirror self-recognition in monkeys, from the fundamental standpoint of how these abilities come about,” says Luis Populin, a professor of anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has found that, under certain conditions, monkeys can recognize themselves in a mirror. “It’s very nice and is yet another step toward understanding how our cognitive functions develop.”

You have to hand it to these birds, which have set a new standard for avian aptitude. “The new part is the idea that this abstraction of numbers is not tied to training,” says Scarf. “Most numerical tests with animals involve training and testing with the same numbers, but we were training with a limited set of numbers and testing them with numbers outside the range. They learned an abstract rule, and that’s what makes this study unique.”

Forget that secret childhood crush, forget those teenage indiscretions you posted on Facebook and cannot escape.

Is this your deepest secret — that you actually look forward to the holidays?

Lucky you. For the rest of us, we’re stuck on those holiday-stress media fretlines: over-drinking, under-sleeping and indecent exposure to idiotic in-laws.

Not to mention getting mauled at the mall.

These “Beware: awful-holidays ahead” warnings make little sense to us. Sure, there’s relentless pressure to consume — material goods, foods and alcohol alike. And even if the buy! pressure has intensified (did 24/7 coverage of Black Friday mean it was more important than killing Osama Bin Laden?), those holiday-stress headlines are nothing new.

And if the holidays are so horrid, why do we still have them?

In other words, what have Christmas, Hanukah and New Year’s and Kwanzaa done for us lately?

Maybe not so awful after all?

Because holidays are not (yet?) considered psychological disorders, they get less study than, say, post-traumatic stress disorder or autism. Still, The Why Files rounded up some experts — mainly positive psychologists — to discuss the upside of the holidays.

Holidays can be a spur to beneficial changes, says Robert McGrath, coordinator of student mind/body wellness services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  ”The disruption to routine that they create can serve as an opportunity to change.  For example, if you’ve been meaning to catch up with a friend for months, the holidays may help bring that deeper priority to the surface.”

The tradition of cooking and distributing sweets can serve as an excuse to walk over to see neighbors we always intend to visit. And New Years resolutions can become a socially sanctioned reason to make beneficial changes to diet, exercise, social involvement or volunteerism.

Rituals, religious and otherwise

However, much of the power of holidays is embodied in things that don’t change, says Lee Ann de Reus, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University in Altoona. “One thing we know about healthy families is that they incorporate rituals, and that certainly comes with holidays, no matter what your tradition.”

Rituals, she says, can range all over the map, from attending religious services like midnight mass to holding ceremonial feasts at the same house, or eating the same foods, prepared by the same family cooks.

De Reus solicits examples from her students, and says, “Some open all their gifts on Christmas eve, some open one on Christmas eve and everything else next morning. Families may have traditions about who they invite for Hanukah or who takes part in ceremonies around the dinner table.”

Many traditions are unique and whimsical, de Reus adds. “In one family, everybody gets a new set of pajamas, and wears them to open gifts. They may watch a specific film or stay up all night playing Trivial Pursuit. And a lot of traditions revolve around food preparation.”

Reading ritual

Rituals are not just about repetition, de Reus says. “We know that ritual gives multiple things. It’s a way to transmit values, it’s a way to reconnect in a meaningful way, and it brings families together, even families that don’t necessarily get along outside the holidays.”

After a divorce, she says, tradition can temporarily trump animosity. “The parents may put their differences aside; they may come together for the sake of the children.”

College students from families that have split up “often can work it out, spending Christmas eve with one part of the family, and Christmas day with the other part,” says McGrath “But when it has not been worked out, they must choose to be with one parent, and the other one can feel very hurt.”

Ritual also provides a chance for a family to reconnect with its history, de Reus says. “If I ask college age students about their favorite memories about growing up, you can bet the majority are going to talk about some sort of event, memory, probably involving a ritual, often around a holiday or a birthday.”

Ritual, de Reus says, “tells us what are we about, helps a family to regain its center. Maybe they have strayed from these values, are too caught up in consumerism, materialism. It takes an assertive parent to push back against the larger societal pressures that exist around holidays: drinking, overindulgence, mass consumerism. I think we totally underestimate the value and importance of ritual in family life.”

Total togetherness

Holidays bring together many of the most important people in our lives, and, as McGrath points out, researchers regularly find a strong relationship between happiness and time with family and friends, “especially if the gathering is for positive reasons rather than to deal with problems. In terms of the positive experience, just being with people is the key. I don’t know that people come back from the holidays and say, ‘I did not get a good present.’”

The good-will that comes from these gatherings need not end with the holidays, McGrath says. “A positive note is to realize that you can enjoy those same activities daily: eat meals mindfully and enjoy them, have fun with friends and family, share stories, and practice giving often.”

What do you expect?

Part of the holiday-blues problem may exist in excessive expectations, says Leaf Van Boven, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Colorado. “There are very clear cultural stereotypes for what ought to happen at the holidays, for how people will behave, for gifts that will be exchanged. For most people, the holidays don’t meet that expectation, so there can be a sense of disappointment, but that is very different from saying we don’t actually enjoy ourselves.”

And while holidays can be times of reduced stress, “That’s not to say no stress, which is often the expectation,” says Van Boven. “For most people, holidays involve spending time with close others, family and friends.” Sure, those relationships can carry their own challenges, “but most people enjoy spending time with friends and family more than they do spending time at work.”

Money can’t buy me love

The pressure to buy, Buy! BUY!! can be a major source of holiday stress, but a growing body of evidence shows that ’tis truly “better to give than to receive.” In a 2008 study, Elizabeth Dunn, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, gave college students either $5 or $20, and directed them to spend it on themselves, or on a charitable donation or a gift by 5 p.m.

That night, the students who gave away the money reported a higher level of happiness, and the real kicker was being with the beneficiary, Dunn adds. “We did not say you have to give it and walk away. A lot of people took a friend for lunch or bought a toy for a younger sibling.”

The curious thing is that this preference does not operate at the conscious level, Dunn says. Most people think that it make them happier to receive $20 to spend on themselves, she says. “It’s not that they love to give, but when we give them those amounts to spend on someone else, they are more happy.”

For a 2010 study,¹ Dunn put players through a game that allowed them to donate money to another player, and found that the stingy players had less positive emotions, more negative emotions, and higher levels of both shame and stress hormones.

Not so bad after all?

If we’re getting the picture that giving reasonable gifts and hanging out with friends and family make the holidays less painful than medieval dentistry, that’s the message we got from a rare study of Christmas happiness. In 2002, Tim Kasser of Knox College (Illinois) found that a 57 percent of a small sample said Christmas was not stressful.

That, Kasser told us by email, is still a “reasonably high level of stress … around the midpoint of the scale.” Women and people who focused on spending had higher levels of stress.

Yet Christmas may still be “merry,” Kasser wrote. “While levels of life satisfaction and negative emotions were more or less the same as what people report at other times of the year, people do report somewhat higher levels of pleasant emotions during Xmas.”

The study² found more satisfaction among people who focused on family time and took part in religious activities, and less among those who focused on consumption.

“It seems that connecting with others and with something ‘bigger than yourself’ promotes higher levels of well-being; that’s consistent with past research, as is the finding the materialism undermines well-being,” Kasser wrote. “It is not much fun to be fighting the crowds and most research shows that shopping is rarely an inherently engaging and interesting activity.”

(You’ve got to) Accentuate the positive

All of these observations seem to explain why the winter holidays have survived the headlines about holiday horrors. “The big three holidays are good ways of maximizing those things that we tend find most enjoyable, and probably go a long way toward explaining why they are so powerful emotionally, why they persist,” says Van Boven.

One way to cut holiday stress, Van Boven says, “Is to think about what we value in the holidays, what really matters, and then try to behave in way that reflects those values. Often that kind of exercise can be extremely transformative, will get you out of the gift-giving rat race, and more toward the development of social engagement.”

Dunn adds that giving can be more emotionally satisfying when it involves personal contact. “When you have the opportunity to give so you can see the positive impact, that’s when the potential happiness benefit of Christmas giving is greatest. If your mother-in-law loves pedicures, you could buy her a gift certificate, but I think the research shows that it’s better to make the appointment and go with her. That’s the critical piece. If you can turn the gift into an opportunity for social connection, that’s going to maximize the benefit.”

What causes your brain to switch from the quiet focus needed to read (or write) these words to the frantic, goggle-eyed arousal needed to confront a frothing dog or rabid boss?

That hyper condition, popularly called the fight-or-flight response, is a hormonally inflicted surge of stress that puts all systems on alert, raises the heart rate and blood pressure, and shifts blood from the gut to the muscles.

This is not when you want to be translating Latin or solving equations, but fight-or-flight certainly fulfills its evolutionary role of allowing the body and brain to survive threatening circumstances.

After the transition, the brain regulates attention differently: A person studying Japanese woodcuts is unlikely to notice someone prowling on the other side of the art library. A person cranked up on stress hormones is unlikely to miss the lurker.

Neuroscientists long ago fingered two “stress” hormones — cortisol and noradrenaline — as playing key roles in fight-or-flight and today, a study in Science helps confirm that noradrenaline, not cortisol, triggers the transition to a different level of attention. “Many people thought cortisol would have an effect on the attention process in the early phase, but our study shows cortisol probably is not as important” as noradrenaline, says first author Erno Hermans, of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour at Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Center in Holland.

Putting the stress on stress

Image: Irréversible

According to some film critics, Irréversible was one of the most disturbing films of 2002. No wonder it stressed-out the study subjects!

To study the mental effects of stress, Hermans and colleagues put 80 subjects in a magnetic resonance imager and tracked the usage of oxygen in the brain to show which structures were active at any moment. Then the subjects watched parts of a French movie containing what Hermans calls “particularly horrific” scenes of violence.

The scans revealed changes in what’s called the salience network, which “is active in a general state of hyper-arousal, vigilance,” Hermans says. “It scans the environment for things that might be important, and allows you to redirect your attention.” The result is not just a change of focus, “but a switch to a state where a change of your focus becomes more likely.”

To confirm that the violent movie clip was triggering the stress response, the researchers measured heart rate and chemicals in the saliva.

Counting on cortisol

Long-term stress can lead to many problems, including the disabling post-traumatic stress disorder, and cortisol, which makes memories more vivid and plays a major role in the constant arousal and intrusive memories of PTSD, has long been considered a major player in stress in general.

“Stress research in humans has been very focused on cortisol for very good reason,” says Hermans, “as it’s linked to a number of very important features of stress in the body and also in the brain.”

In a second phase of the experiment, Hermans and his colleagues used drugs to block either cortisol or noradrenaline. Blocking cortisol did not prevent the changes in brain networks, but blocking noradrenaline did. “Because blocking noradrenaline results in a reduction in the salience network, this shows that noradrenaline is important for this reorganization of the brain,” Hermans says.

Courtesy Erno Hermans

This animation shows which areas of the brain are switched on by a stressful situation.

Stress or distress?

The new study helps explain our world, says Christopher Coe, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert in cortisol and stress. “As we all have subjectively experienced, a fearful stimulus can exert a galvanizing influence on us. It can reorient our attention and, when sufficiently provocative, make us feel more alert, energized and focused. This change in state is facilitated by the type of coordinated brain reaction described in this Science paper. We and our brains are mobilized in order to better analyze the situation, to quickly interpret and utilize incoming information … and to respond adaptively.”

Coe adds that although “it is reasonable to conclude” that cortisol is not initiating the change in salience, “nevertheless, because of cortisol’s widespread effects and potency, if its release into the blood stream is sustained, it may ultimately exert a more protracted effect on both the brain and other physiological functions.”

Changes in the mode of attention are a fact of life, Hermans says. “We are really selective about accepting information while doing a focused task,” but a threat “requires a switch so your brain can respond to significant things in the surroundings. The brain becomes more responsive to stimuli, the eyes are wide open, the pupils become larger, everything is focused on having more sensory intake.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Among all animals, amphibians are in the worst shape; fully 30 percent are classified as threatened or endangered. Amphibians – including frogs, toads and salamanders — are under attack by a deadly fungus. They are losing habitat to farms and cities, and collected as food or pets. Amphibians are suffering from chemical pollution and the warming climate.

The present is harsh enough, but the future seems worse.

This week, Nature publishes the first global attempt to forecast the impact of three big threats to amphibians by 2080 – a year chosen to be one century after the study’s baseline data.

By comparing areas with plenty of amphibian species with projections of climate change, land use change and the chytridiomycosis fungus, the researchers forecast a grim future for these cold-blooded, four-legged vertebrates. “The bad news is that more than two-thirds of all high-richness regions will probably be affected, to a high intensity, by one of these three threats,” said lead author Christian Hof, who did the work as a Ph.D. student and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen.

The geographic study of data on 5,527 amphibian species found little overlap between the cool, moist areas afflicted by fungal serial killer chytridiomycosis, and the places likely to suffer the worst effects of changes in climate and land use.

And the losers win!

In forecasting the future of amphibians, the study coined two technical terms: “losers” — species that are expected to suffer due to disease or changes in climate or land use, and the less numerous “winners,” which are expected to prosper by 2080.

The projection hinged on whether an expected change would make a habitat more or less suitable to the species, says Hof, who’s now at the Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Frankfurt, Germany. “We ran a number of climate-change models and based on them, calculated a change in climate suitability for each region across the globe.”

Based on these changes in suitability due to climate, land use and disease, Hof adds, “We calculated the number of species that would probably decline due to a decline in habitat suitability. We classify the species as a loser in a particular region, but that does not mean it will decline across its whole range.”

Overall, the researchers found an increasingly dire future for amphibians. For example, 54 percent of frogs are likely to be “climate losers” in the average grid cell of their model. And heavy impacts are projected for about two-thirds of the regions with the highest species richness in frogs and salamanders.

In fact, the future could be even worse, since the study ignored a number of potentially damaging factors, including chemical pollution from cities, factories and agriculture.

Photo: Robert Fletcher, Ohlone Preserve Conservation Bank

Tougher times might await this prowling California tiger salamander, an endangered California native.

Going down!

It’s frustrating but understandable that the study could not predict rates of decline among amphibians. “For many species, we are not sure about the actual distribution, many have tiny ranges and we don’t know where they occur, so we can’t relate historic changes to, say, climate change. We were very careful not to predict extinctions, based on these uncertainties.”

Data are scarce in the study of amphibians, agrees Anna Pidgeon, an assistant professor of forest and wildlife ecology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s frustrating, amphibians are out at night, often in remote areas, they are small and many are cryptic, so it’s a huge challenge” to understand their populations and ecologies. “We work with the best data we have all the time … and try to make inferences from what we know about close relatives.”

Pidgeon, an expert on habitat needs of vertebrates, says predicting 70 years into the future is always dicey, but that the study’s analysis of multiple threats and global scope are major accomplishments. “They did a lot of things to make sure they were using consensus data, and that makes it a pretty solid approach.”

Although the study looked at overlapping threats, it did not actually look at interactions between those threats, Hof says. “What needs to be done, and we could not do that with our model, is to look at, for example, how climate change would affect susceptibility to the fungus. How would habitat fragmentation affect susceptibility to climate change?”

Although the study does not suggest practical changes that could sustain amphibians in the short run, “The general conclusion is that it’s very important, when thinking about the future for amphibians, to consider different threats together,” says Hof. “Just looking at one threat will not give us the whole picture.”

– David J. Tenenbaum

Seven viewpoints

Introduction

Katharine Hayhoe

Richard Alley

John Nielsen-Gammon

John Williams

Michael Notaro

Kent McGregor

Kevin Trenberth

Drought and searing heat in Texas: Is this the face of global warming?

Courtesy Eric Bruning, Texas Tech University Atmospheric Science

The cold front that blew through Lubbock, Texas on Oct. 17 raised a dust storm not seen since the 1930s Dust Bowl. The dust storm, seen in this movie, is called a “haboob,” an event more common to Saudi Arabia than Texas.

On Oct. 17, a cold front blowing through Lubbock, Tex. raised a red dust cloud that recalled the awesome Dust Bowl of the 1930s, an epoch of drought, enormous dust storms, poverty and social upheaval that depopulated the Great Plains.

The 2011 dust storm served as an exclamation point on a cruel Texan summer, with drought, wildfires, and temperature records that would not quit. On Oct. 19, the Lower Colorado River Authority, source of much water in the Southwest, warned customers that the drought was likely to force another 20 percent cut in water supplies.

On Oct. 18, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst instructed the state legislature to study drought-related problems like helping homeowners protect against fire, and ensuring that utilities would get enough water to cool their generators.

As far as we could tell, the multi-pronged assignment did not mention something that many observers think contributes to heat waves, fires and droughts: climate change.

Many recent “natural” disasters have raised the same question: Is the no-sense-denying-it-any-longer human-caused planetary warming intensifying devastating hurricanes, giant rainfalls and snowfalls, or the deadly heat waves in Europe (2003) or Russia (2010)?

Despite political skepticism in the United States, the scientific study of changing climates has grown exponentially for 20 years. In 2009, almost 14,000 research reports focused on climate change, and 20 scientific journals are devoted to the issue.

UPDATED NOV. 18: Today, the New York Times reported that a United Nations panel has concluded that “At least some of the weather extremes being seen around the world are consequences of human-induced climate change and can be expected to worsen in coming decades. It is likely that greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity have already led to more record-high temperatures and fewer record lows, as well as to greater coastal flooding and possibly to more extremes of precipitation, the report said.”

Enough introductory blather. Let’s ask some experts: Is the hot, dry weather in Texas a reflection of global warming? Or is it just proof that the essence of weather is its natural variability? The Why Files talked to seven climate scientists. Peruse their viewpoints in the box above.

With little notice until recently, a shortage of medicine is starting to impair treatment at America’s hospitals. Common, cheap and necessary drugs needed to fight bacteria or cancer, to ease pain or to nourish premature infants are running out.

Many of these meds are injectables, which must be made under sterile conditions. All are generics, which sell for pennies compared to the buck-buster drugs that feed the bottom lines at the big-name drug companies.

Most shortages are unnanounced until a wholesaler’s shipment arrives lacking an ordered drug. “It’s unbelievable,” says Sara Shull, manager of the drug policy program at the University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics in Madison. “Today I was trying figure out alternatives to papaverin,” an old drug used to prevent spasm in the many surgeries that involve grafting a blood vessel. “We have identified some alternatives, and I am now I working with the surgeon to figure out how to dose them, how to apply them. Is it bathed on? Sprayed on? He’s busy, we’re all busy, and sorting this all out takes a lot of time. The continual need to find replacements gives me a headache.”

Shortage-induced substitution played a role in Alabama, where nine hospital patients were killed by intravenous nutrients this summer, says Allen Vaida, executive vice president of the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a non-profit that targets medicine hazards. “Because of a shortage, this compounding pharmacy was making a product from raw material, and it got a bacterial contamination.” (The maker of the nutrient solution, Meds IV pharmacy in Birmingham, Ala., is apparently out of business.)

Medications on this rack will restock a robot that fills individual patient envelopes that will be sent tomorrow to nurses’ stations in the hospital. Actually, the robot restocks itself in its 24/7 delivery of thousands of prescription drugs.

Photo: The Why Files

ENLARGE

Source: U.S. House of Representatives

Shortages are growing, especially for injectable medicines.

Running long on shortages

Pharmacists have always had to find substitute medicines, as patients keep coming through the door, but Vaida cites Food and Drug Administration numbers to argue that shortages are now at “crisis” proportions. “The FDA shows 70 shortages in 2006, 129 in 2007 and last year, there were 211. So far this year, we are already above 200 shortages, and the year isn’t done. Shortages have been around forever, but they have never reached this number.”

Some drugs can be substituted, says Vaida, but “especially with chemotherapy and nutritional products, it’s not like are three alternatives for some medications, as there are with blood-pressure drugs. Some chemotherapies are specific for certain cancers, and if they are not available, you may have no alternative or [you] may have to use a third-line alternative.”

The pharmaceutical situation has never been more complicated, with more than 45,000 prescription drug products on the market, from about 1,400 manufacturers. Although we could not easily find numbers, drug shortages are also rising in the United Kingdom, where the supply situation is complicated by the restriction on exports within the European Union.

Shortages have many possible causes, but because manufacturers tend to be closed-mouthed, it’s not clear which problems are most momentous or easiest to solve:

How short is short?

A drug is considered “short” if a specific dosage and formulation is unavailable, and in some cases, a similar item can be substituted. But Shull says that’s still a problem in a big hospital. If a product that is normally purchased in a pre-loaded syringe is only available in a vial, University of Wisconsin Hospitals and Clinics can no longer send a “unit of dose” to the nurse, and “that’s what the nurses are expecting,” Shull says.

Changing procedures complicate care and raise costs, Shull adds. “All our people are working in a complex system, with lives on the line. These shortages can be a recipe for increased errors.” Her hospital must dedicate one staffer to securing supplies of the common blood-thinner heparin, she says. Searching for alternate sources is less rewarding than studying the efficacy of various medication treatments, she adds. “It’s not what I was taught in pharmacy school, but when your back is up against the wall, you have no other options.”

Beyond impairing patient care, shortages have also become a major burden in medical research. Tests of new medicines, often set up to run at several hospitals nationwide, must give standardized meds to the treatment and control groups, and chaos can result when the drugs become unavailable. “These shortages are now affecting clinical trial options for patients with cancer,” Robert DiPaola, director of the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, told the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health on Sept. 23. “Due to the uncertainty of being able to obtain many of these drugs, enrollment of patients on clinical trials has been delayed or stopped in several of our trials.”

Howard Koh, assistant secretary of health and human services, reinforced that message to the committee: “Many of the cancer drugs in short supply … are mainstays of the anti-cancer arsenal, and were largely developed through federally funded research begun 20, 30, even 40 years ago. They are still essential to treatment and research,” he said. The National Cancer Institute is currently sponsoring 349 clinical trials that require these drugs, Koh added. “Taken together, these studies represent thousands of patients, as well as a significant federal investment in clinical trials research.”

At the same hearing, Mike Alkire, chief operating officer of Premier healthcare alliance, told Congress how widespread the shortages have become. In a recent Premier survey, 53 percent of hospital pharmacists said they had faced at least six shortages “that had the potential to cause a medication safety issue or an error in patient care.” And 34 percent of respondents said at least six shortages had “resulted in a delay or cancellation of a patient-care intervention.”

Premier estimates that the 2,500-plus non-profit U.S. hospitals in its membership pay an extra $66 million per year due to these shortages — which translates to $415 million at all U.S. hospitals.

Market going gray?

When the usual sources run dry, hospital pharmacists often get emails, faxes and phone calls from the “gray market,” sources outside the usual supply chain. In the summer of 2011, the Institute for Safe Medication Practices surveyed 549 hospitals and found that:

Alkire, of the Premier alliance, told Congress that the gray market is “appalling,” with an average markup of 650 percent. Forty-five percent of the offers were marked up at least 1,000 percent above normal price, and drugs for leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma were marked up 4,000 percent. “We saw similar markups for medicines for sedation during surgeries; to dilate veins and prevent brain or heart spasms; and to prevent damage during a heart attack,” Alkire said.

For these reasons, University Hospital at UW-Madison does not buy gray, says Shull, although it does buy from a wholesaler that seems to have supplies of drugs when nobody else does.

The gray market arouses suspicion: How do some firms know about shortages before anybody else? How do they obtain drugs when normal sources are short?

“There is speculation going on,” says Vaida. “Some secondary wholesalers may try to buy up some available drugs and sell them for higher prices. Often times, they are looking for people who need the product, and try to obtain it from whatever sources. Some are playing it almost like Wall Street, anticipating what may go on shortage — if two manufacturers have just consolidated, and there’s a generic product that is only going to be made by one of them.”

Cures for missing meds

Many measures have been proposed to ease the medication shortage:

Photo: Armin Kübelbeck

Generic, injectable drugs comprise the majority of shortages.

The FDA seems to be getting the message. In testimony to the subcommittee on Sept. 23, Koh claimed that the agency had already headed off 99 looming shortages in 2011, compared to 38 for all of 2010. But Koh added that today’s shortages “include standard therapies for the treatment of lung, breast, ovarian, testicular and colorectal cancers, as well as several types of lymphomas and leukemias.”

Sometimes, Koh said, common-sense, proven measures can sidestep shortages. “… the FDA was able to mitigate a shortage by allowing the use of a filter to safely remove foreign particles contained within vials of injectable drugs, averting the obvious risk to patients of having metal shavings or other particulate matter injected into their veins.”

A pessimist, of course, could say the higher number of averted shortages simply reflects the greater number of shortages overall.

At any rate, organizations concerned with shortages say they are in a vise. “From our members’ perspective, it’s become [a] crisis,” says Hill. “We are seeing shortages nationwide. We have been tracking this for about 10 years, but in the last few years, we’ve seen a spike in the numbers.”

Given the problem’s multiple and sometimes obscure, roots, Hill sees “no single solution, and that’s the troublesome part. Unfortunately we will be dealing with this for a while. But there are some things we can do. We’d like to establish a mandatory early-warning system, so a manufacturer that has a problem has to notify the FDA. The FDA says it has avoided 99 shortages in the past year when it had that information. When there are multiple sources, the FDA can reach out to other manufacturers and urge them to ramp up production.”

David J. Tenenbaum

Burning of the Alaskan tundra can release massive amounts of carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas, according to a study published in Nature this week. The Arctic is warming faster than the rest of the planet, causing scientists to wonder what will happen to the carbon that plants have stored in Arctic soils and plant matter, both living and dead.

The new study looked at the aftermath of the Anaktuvuk River wildfire, which burned more than 1,000 square kilometers of tundra on Alaska’s North Slope in 2007. Anaktuvuk burned for almost three months, and by itself, accounted for two-thirds of the total area burned in Alaskan tundra since 1950.

The immediate cause was lightning, but weather played a major role. Between July and September, 2007, the North Slope had the hottest weather in a 129-year record. When the fire was really roaring, daily highs were 5°C to 10°C above average. The Slope also received less than 20 percent of the average rainfall that summer, leaving the tundra abnormally arid.

In 2008, Michelle Mack, an associate professor of biology at the University of Florida and her colleagues visited the area and took samples from 1-square-meter quadrants both inside and outside the fire zone. Mack was in the field in Alaska, alas, and did not answer our emails, but her group calculated that the fire oxidized more than 2 million tons of carbon, which entered the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Accounting for carbon

The movement of carbon through soils, ecosystems, waters and the atmosphere is critical to the issue of global warming. Releasing carbon to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide speeds warming; and storing carbon compounds can slow or potentially reverse warming.

The moist acidic tundra under study covers as much as one-third of a billion square kilometers of the global Arctic – making it a major “sink” for carbon dioxide. The 2 million-ton release of carbon was equal to at least 50 percent of the amount of carbon stored annually in the Alaskan tundra, meaning this one fire almost cancelled the anti-warming benefit of photosynthesis in the region.

Chilling news about a burning issue

The link between global warming and fire also appeared in a new analysis of Yellowstone National Park. “Large, severe fires are normal for this ecosystem,” said Monica Turner, a Yellowstone expert and professor of ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Historically, the entire Yellowstone landscape has burned every 100 to 300 years, but Turner and company calculated that current trends toward hotter, drier summers, mean fires could consume the entire area every 30 years by 2050.

Wildfires are also becoming more common in the normally fire-resistant tundra of Alaska, and for reasons related to permafrost, reflectivity and feedback, the consequences could be dire:

And feedback moves us from the additive realm to the multiplicative one. In the Arctic, feedback also plays a central role related to the release of methane, which has even more warming potential than carbon dioxide. Many warming Arctic habitats have started releasing larger amounts of methane, which could warm the planet, feed back, and stimulate the release of yet more methane.

This feedback, like the one that may be affecting burning tundra, paints a darker picture of what could happen if we ignore the atmosphere and blithely assume that the future will be just like the present.

– David J. Tenenbaum