voosen.me

The Nuclear Frack

2011-04-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

Scared of hydraulic fracking? Try atomic fracking.

Reading through Charles Seife's excellent history of fusion power, published a few years back, I found an amazing nugget: One of the Atomic Energy Agency's more, ah, successful attempts to use atomic bombs for peaceful purposes -- Operation Plowshare -- involved detonating a small bomb deep underground, in shale layers, causing one colossal frack.

Reader, they did it. In 1967, a government-industry collaboration detonated a 26 kiloton bomb some 4,000 feet beneath New Mexico, in a shale formation called the San Juan Basin, 55 miles east of Farmington in the Carson National Forest. Before the test, called Gasbuggy, the government had high hopes, according to an IAEA summary:

"The US Bureau of Mines has estimated that nuclear stimulation, if proved feasible, could more than double present natural gas reserves from fields located in the Rocky Mountain area alone. Another estimate, related to oil shale, is that 400 billion barrels of oil are potentially recoverable from a formation in Colorado and that nuclear explosives might be a way of reaching a source at present untappable."

The test proved a dud, writes Wade Nelson, a science reporter:

"Perhaps because of the project’s five million dollar pricetag, geologists and scientists involved with Gasbuggy were reluctant to declare the test a failure. Yet it didn't create nearly as much fracturing of the shale as geologists had hoped. Nor did Gasbuggy stimulate the levels of increase in gas production needed (10-20X) to pay for the half-million dollar nuclear bomb. What gas it did produce, customers wouldn’t buy."

Mostly, the test added to the Energy Department's long list of nuclear cleanups. The site included "radioactive contamination of the deep bedrock around the shot cavity," possible surface radiation released by gas flaring and whole bunch of radioactive water. A plaque now sits above the subsurface detonation site, warning: "NO EXCAVATION, DRILLING, AND/OR REMOVAL OF MATERIALS TO A TRUE VERTICAL DEPTH OF 1500 FEET IS PERMITTED WITHIN A RADIUS OF 100 FEET OF THIS SURFACE LOCATION."

When considering the relatively mild environmental concerns and hyperbole raised by hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, you have to think: We've come a long way.

Image courtesy of Los Alamos National Lab.

The Stir of Waters

2011-03-26T02:13:00.000-07:00

I'm thrilled to announce that late this week, Amazon selected and published my long-form narrative about low-dose radiation and the world's oldest radon spa, "The Stir of Waters," as one of their Kindle Singles. I had the idea for "Stir" some four years ago, while working in Prague, and devoted most of my time at Columbia to it. It's deeply gratifying to see it published.

The story, 8,000-words strong, is available for purchase now.

Until the past weeks, few editors ever thought about ionizing radiation, let alone wanted a narrative delving into an uncertain science. Given the events in Japan, I thought readers could benefit from an accessible introduction to radiation; fortunately, Amazon agreed. Singles are a fascinating experiment, providing a home for stories too long for magazines, but too short for books. The piece can be downloaded on any device that runs Kindle software -- Kindles, of course, but also computers, iPads and nearly any variety of smartphone.

Complimenting the story's publication, I'm going to add some additional content from its reporting to the blog. The first piece appears below ("Radiation and the Linear Hypothesis"), fleshing out the long policy and scientific history behind current radiation standards. Future posts will reflect on the New York Times' coverage of radiation since its discovery, and an interview with a former political prisoner forced to work at Jachymov's mines.

For my day job, I've also been covering the radiation stemming from the Fukushima nuclear crisis. After laying out basic radiation mechanics, I dispelled fears about the plume proving dangerous to the United States, and probed deeper, more than a week ago, into why we fear radiation and the lasting psychological damage caused by nuclear panics like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The latter pieces appear in the Times; get 'em before subscriptions kick in!

Radiation and the Linear Hypothesis

2011-03-15T13:33:00.000-07:00

A couple years ago, while on a science journalism fellowship at Columbia University, I took an introductory course in nuclear physics. I bombed the calculus, but produced a historical piece looking at why modern radiation safety standards seem so distant from proven safety risks. Given the crisis in Fukushima, it seems worth posting. The Fukushima workers, and perhaps a broader public, are facing real, dangerous radiation levels, but some perspective is also needed. Radiation used to be parceled into "safe" and "unsafe" zones, a comforting, but perhaps false, distinction. Now, it is evaluated on a linear scale, laden with ineffable risks.

This is why:

"Rise of the Linear No-Threshold Hypothesis"

Radiation is everywhere. Since the twin discoveries of William Conrad Roentgen and Henri Becquerel over a century ago, scientists and the public alike have been aware that the world is awash in a sea of ionized particles. For the early part of the 20th century, this was considered more a curiosity than danger. All that changed after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the rise of atomic weapons: radiation was a killer, a fear—invisible.

Billowing out of the mushroom clouds of the atmospheric nuclear testing race between the United States and the Soviet Union, public fear of radiation, in the form of fallout, peaked in the early 1960s, until the bombs moved underground. After, while the profile of radiation slackened, the fear among scientists of the effect of low doses gradually stiffened, leading to widespread acceptance of the linear no-threshold (LNT) hypothesis and ALARA protection standards. Even before Three Mile Island, there was a majority consensus that radiation, in even the minutest amounts, was harmful, putting human cells at unacceptable risk of malformation.

By the early 1990s, after Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and the revelation of radon gas creeping into the basements of everyday Americans, the fact that the epidemiological studies and other science supporting the linear no-threshold hypothesis were shaky and often criticized—well, it almost seemed beside the point. LNT, though still a hypothesis, had filled a void and become a provisional truth, informing, rightly or wrongly, cancer-risk studies and special-interest groups, who then published alarming reports warning of radiation, hyping the public into worsening fear.

How did it come to this?

DISCOVERY AND THE TOLERANCE DOSE

While Roentgen and Becquerel were the pioneers of radiation, it was the Curies, Marie and Pierre, who made the public and scientists stand up and take notice of radioactivity with their discovery of radium in 1898. By 1900, the tireless couple was displaying glowing vials of the element in Paris; in 1903, the Museum of Natural History in New York City "put a speck of radium on display … [and] one of the largest crowds the museum had ever admitted swarmed in, squeezing and elbowing, to stare at the dull pinch of powder."

By the time of the Museum of Natural History display, it had become apparent that radioactivity came with accruing dangers. After Becquerel’s discovery, X-rays became a public fad: X-ray Boy’s Clubs were established and slot machines were built in Chicago and Lawrence, Kansas, that allowed the examination of your hand’s interior with the drop of a coin. With such widespread use, scattered reports of skin burns surfaced, and by 1902, Thomas Edison—who was an early adopter of the technology, selling X-ray kits—was ready to abandon experimenting with X-rays. He “took the evidence of his own sore eyes and skin rashes very seriously and did not hesitate to tell … [reporters] that he had too much more to accomplish in his lifetime to risk his health with X-rays.” By 1911, more than 50 cases of X-ray damage had been documented, though the public was largely unconcerned with this toll.

One little acknowledged pioneer looking at the effects of X-ray radiation was William Rollins, a Harvard-trained dentist living in the suburbs of Boston. Months after learning about X-rays, which he liked to call “X-light,” in 1896, he had published rough, initial studies of their use for dentistry. And in 1901, Rollins published an article titled “X-light Kills” in the Boston Medical Surgical Journal. The article, as told by Ronald L. Kathren, described “an experiment in which [Rollins] exposed two guinea pigs to X-rays two hours per day, noting how one died on the eighth day of the experiment and the other on the eleventh without external manifestation of trauma or pathology.” A simple conclusion for a simple experiment: X-rays can kill, and kill quietly. Rollins continued his experiments for several years, eventually publishing them in the combined volume Notes on X-Light. By this time, Kathren writes, Rollins had “elucidated all of the fundamental principles of radiation protection, some of which would not be implemented for decades.”

Radiation continued to claim occasional victims each year, many of whom were scientists. (“At a meeting of radiologists in 1920,” the historian BettyAnn Kevles writes, “the menu featured chicken—a major faux pas because almost every one at the table was missing at least one hand and could not cut the meat.” ) It was clear that some sort of standard needed to be set for radiation doses, but questions remained as to what these levels should be.

Many of the earliest considerations of radiation doses were based on the idea of “tolerance”—that as long as you were only exposed to a certain level of radiation, your body would feel no long-term health effects. This led to the idea of the tolerance dose, the amount of radiation one can be exposed to without damaging health. The most prominent proposal of the tolerance dose was made by Arthur Mutscheller to the American Roentgen Ray Society in 1924. From this reasoning, several scientists in the 1920s proposed annual radiation doses between 25 to 50 rems for the tolerance dose.

These fears were echoed in Weimar Germany, where, like the United States, scientists began to tie skin cancer to radiation exposure in the first decade of the century; in 1919 and 1923, reports were published linking radiation to breast and cervical cancer, respectively. Concern that radiation could cause genetic damage began to gain traction in the 1920s, and “fears were especially strong among German eugenicists, terrified that radiation might harm the German germ plasm.”

On both sides of the Atlantic, it was clear that a standard had to be set, and impetus was growing for an international conference to start to settle the matter. And then, into this time of unrest, buzzed a most unexpected development: Herman J. Muller and his fruit flies.

INFINITELY SMALL GRENADES

Herman J. Muller was a native of New York City, growing up in Harlem and attending university at Columbia College thanks to a fortuitous scholarship. By the 1920s, Muller was a biology professor at the University of Texas in Austin and an expert in genetics and evolution, with his research focused on mutations. After formulating what are to this day the chief principles of spontaneous gene mutation, Muller turned his attention to X-rays. Moving into radiation was a natural development, writes Spencer Weart:

When [Muller] turned his mind to radiation in the mid-1920s, it was because people had long been fascinated with its potential to reshape living things. Scientists had subjected the eggs of simple creatures to X-rays and radium, finding that if the damaged embryo did not die it might grow up a monstrosity. People who worked with radiation had naturally begun to worry about their own offspring. What about hidden changes in the genes, they wondered, the kind that might be inherited and show up in a later generation?

Perhaps prompted by these fears, in late 1926 Muller bombarded the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster—that great worker of scientific research—with X-rays, clearly demonstrating that the X-rays caused genetic mutations, which resulted in the flies giving birth to broods of genetically deformed offspring. As stated in the introduction to Muller’s 1946 Nobel Prize lecture, the X-ray radiation “could be likened in general to a shower of infinitely small … but highly explosive grenades, which explode at different spots within the irradiated organism. The explosion … tears the structure of the cell to pieces or disturbs its arrangement.” Most importantly, Muller demonstrated—and it was subsequently confirmed—that these mutations occurred in a linear progression with the dose. This relationship, which was seen across species, was to play a vital and overpowering role in health physics in decades to come.

While Muller’s research made an immediate splash in the public imagination—one magazine reported “that rays could be used to alter creatures ‘exactly as physicists bombard the atom in order to change its composition’” —its influence on radiation standards would not play out fully until after World War II.

From 1925 to 1945, radiation protection professionalized and saw the emergence of regulating societies: in 1928, the International X-ray and Radium Protection Committee, forerunner of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP); and in 1929, the U.S. Advisory Committee on X-ray and Radium Protection, which evolved into the National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements (NCRP). By 1941, the Americans set the threshold dose at the equivalent of 5 rem—a level that is “almost universally accepted for regulatory purposes today.” That these dose levels were arbitrarily decided and that no one knew what such doses meant was beside the point. The public had scientific-sounding quantification, and the numbers sent a false message of safety.

Perhaps the most prescient statement of this two-decade period came in a report by Hermann Wintz and Walther Rump to the League of Nations in 1931:

[Wintz and Rump] noted that it was impossible to exactly determine a dose incapable of damaging cells, or “exercising any stimulating action,” and thus wrote in terms of a so-called harmless dose which would result in no effect detectable by clinical examination … leaving the door open at least a crack for effects … inferred from radioepidemiological studies of human populations.

While radiation protections were tightened, radiation remained aloof from the lives of everyday people, who were plenty distracted by the Great Depression and World War II. But soon enough, in the waning days of the war—as physicists perfected their “gadget” in Los Alamos, New Mexico—radiation protection would become a worldwide concern, indeed.

A NUCLEAR ATMOSPHERE

By the time that the first journalist—William L. Laurence of the New York Times—was allowed to visit the Trinity nuclear test site in New Mexico, in early September, 1945, the concept of the tolerance dose was so ingrained that Laurence would report that “only in the center of the [blast] saucer, over a radius of about fifty yards, were the radiations higher than the standard tolerance dose for continuous exposure.”

But within a decade, the tolerance consensus was beginning to crumble, as seen in a story filed by Laurence in 1955 announcing a study of radiation by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). What changed? As Laurence writes:

Atomic radiations of all kinds have increased greatly from the testing of nuclear weapons in Nevada and the Pacific, and from the operations of nuclear reactors. The effect of the radiations have [sic] been a subject of increasing controversy among scientists. Geneticists and biologists, particularly, have expressed concern about the possible long-range genetic effects on living organisms, plants as well as the higher animals and human beings.

The Americans, Soviets, and Europeans were exploding atomic and thermonuclear bombs in the atmosphere, and people were beginning to get nervous. As the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), a joint venture of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate, stated as preface to a hastily convened 1955 hearing on the health safety of atomic explosions, “There is a great deal of public misapprehension and unwarranted concern about the radiological effects of the Nevada test explosions. … But regardless of the small radioactivity from Nevada test fallout, there are those who believe that the Nevada tests bring on changes in weather; that they … cause longtime hazards by leaving lingering radioactivity in the atmosphere or in the ground.”

One of the loudest opponents of the tolerance dose was Herman Muller, drawing on his research into the genetic effects of radiation. Muller was denied an opportunity to speak at the Atomic Energy Commission’s Atoms for Peace conference in 1955 and instead, using his fame, made his case to the world press, warning “that each bit of radioactivity [from fallout] would add to the ‘erosion’ of our precious genetic material.” The following year, the NAS published its report on radiation, its experts declaring that low-level radiation doses from atomic tests posed no risk of cancer; the group’s genetics branch, however, allowed that “any amount of radiation, no matter how small, would cause some genetic damage” —a fact newspapers around the world published on their front pages.

Even before Muller’s warnings, though, the shift to the linear no-threshold hypothesis had been signaled by a NCRP report in 1954, which changed from recommending a tolerance dose to the concept of the maximum permissible dose. Inextricable from this concept was “the idea of acceptable risk, and hence a nonthreshold model, the bases for which were the observations of linearity in genetic mutations … which, for protection purposes, were assumed to also apply to somatic mutations.” It was convenient for scientists to elide the differences between genetic and somatic damage, especially as public concern over fallout continued to escalate, with the JCAE holding more high-profile hearings on fallout in 1957 and 1959.

By the 1959 hearing, a new advisory body had come on to the scene: the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiation (UNSCEAR), which issued an influential report in 1958 giving credence to both the linear no-threshold and threshold hypotheses: If no threshold exists, the report states, then up to 2,000 people may have contracted leukemia from fallout; but if there is a threshold, then no leukemia cases could be attributed to fallout. The report makes especially clear that present knowledge did not allow the UNSCEAR “to evaluate with any precision the possible consequence to man of exposure to low radiation levels.” Subsequent reports by the UNSCEAR in 1962 and 1964 used LNT to calculate risks from low-level radiation, partially explaining the use of LNT due to its mathematic simplicity and conservatism. Or, as Weart puts it, “most experts realized they had no sure knowledge about the effects of low levels of radiation. But just to play it safe, they began to choose the no-threshold hypothesis.”

The JCAE, which had evolved to become one of the Congress’ most powerful committees , continued to hold hearings on radiation standards well into the 1960s. The Soviets’ and then Americans’ resumption of atmospheric testing provided the impetus. In these sessions, held each year from 1960 to 1963, influential testimony was given by Edward B. Lewis, a biologist at the California Institute of Technology. Lewis made a strong case for LNT and laid the groundwork for the radiation protection concept of As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA). As he told the committee in his 1960 testimony, assumptions should be made:

There remains, however, uncertainty as to the exact shape of the dose effect curve at relatively low doses, say under 50 rads. However, as far as the practical matter of developing radiation protection criteria is concerned, it now seems only prudent to assume that there is no threshold. The ad hoc committee report to which I referred stresses that it is prudent to assume also that the dose effect relationship may be linear. In making that assumption, the report stresses that it is clearly an unproved assumption.

In the 1970s, the assumptions of scientists like Lewis would gain far more support with the arrival of the first BEIR report.

LNT, ALARA, AND THE NEW CONSENSUS

In 1964, the NAS began a committee to study the biological effects of atomic radiation, which was subsequently named the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) by the time it issued its first report in 1972. In its report, the BEIR committee sought a comprehensive review of the literature on low-level radiation up to the time of publication, providing a group view of where the risk assessments of radiation protection stood. This same pattern has followed for the committee’s remaining reports, the most recent of which (BEIR VII) was published in 2005.

Notably, the 1972 BEIR report provided estimates of cancer risk—a somatic effect—at low doses based on linear extrapolation from the high-dose mortality data of the Japanese survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The report, therefore, clearly implied there was no threshold with respect to low-dose response. This break from a somatic threshold went unnoticed in the press, which focused, reasonably, on the report’s conclusion that “excess deaths and illnesses accompanied increases in the national level of radiation exposure and that society’s needs could be met with more stringent radiation exposure limits than the guidelines suggest.”

The BEIR report was significant, and part of the reason for its influence may have been the declining standing of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which since World War II had overseen almost every aspect of the country’s nuclear program. In 1970, a major controversy erupted from within the AEC on to the front page of the Wall Street Journal when it was reported that John Gofman and Arthur Tamplin, two scientists at the AEC-funded Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, were charging that the AEC was risking “genocide” by its current radiation protection standards. Gofman, who went on to become a famed antinuclear activist, was heavily criticized by scientists at the time, and historical accounts validate the position that Gofman’s influence depended on scant scientific arguments.

Despite having what seemed to be the weight of scientific evidence behind it, the AEC badly fumbled its debate with Gofman and Tamplin, as Weart writes:

[Gofman and Tamplin] said repeatedly that if everyone in the United States got a dose at the maximum level the AEC would permit reactors to emit, there could be 32,000 excess cases of cancer every year. Nuclear industry spokesmen replied that the calculation was not only speculative but grossly unfair, since most members of the public got only a minute fraction of the maximum permitted dose. Very well, said Gofman and Tamplin, then why not set the rules so that public exposure would remain low when the reactor industry expanded?

In the end the AEC, which was soon to have its regulatory duties portioned off into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), conceded the point and adopted ALARA as its standard for radiation protection in 1972; Lewis’ proposal to the JCAE had grown into an industry-wide standard, defined by the Health Physics Society as “making every reasonable effort to maintain exposures to ionizing radiation as far below the dose limits as practical.” And, like BEIR’s use of LNT, the AEC’s adoption of ALARA carried the implication that no threshold exists for adverse radiation effects.

With the imprimatur of the BEIR report and the AEC, the no-threshold hypothesis was well on its way to becoming the standard for radiation protection, despite the lack of scientific evidence behind it. (This was, notably, before public opinion of radiation and nuclear power nosedived after the triple punch of Three Mile Island, the radon basement scare, and Chernobyl.) Further BEIR and ICRP reports refined the genetic understanding of low-level radiation and employed the LNT hypothesis, while calling for further scientific study.
With little evidence to support either side of the debate, it is no wonder that LNT remained dominant, Kathren writes: “It is a conservative, mathematically simple, and satisfying philosophy” that has a touch of Occam’s razor to it.

THE WAY IT IS

In the past thirty years, little has changed in the debate over the use of LNT for low levels of radiation. Some scientists regard it as a tool, useful for protection purposes due to its simplicity; others see it as a scientific model that accurately describes the incidence of radiation-induced cancer at low doses. Though not as many scientists as may be thought: A recent poll of 1,737 scientists from the Department of Energy’s national laboratories and the Union of Concerned Scientists found that a majority said that they question the validity of present low-dose standards; and only 18 percent thought LNT should be used as the basis of regulation. And, according to the writer Gwyneth Cravens, “Even people in the LNT camp I met are dismayed at the way the LNT hypothesis can be misapplied by special interest groups and the media, exaggerating risks about what is in reality a weak carcinogen.” Indeed, in the policy realm radiation protection seems to have taken on a life of its own. For example, European airlines are now asked to monitor the exposure of their pilots and crew to cosmic radiation if their annual doses are expected to exceed 100 millirems, an incredibly low amount.

Dissent against LNT’s use at low levels has the backing of several prominent scientific organizations, as seen in position papers from both the Health Physics Society and the American Nuclear Society. The Health Physics paper, published in 1996, recommended against quantitative estimation of health risks below 5 rems in one year, saying risks should be qualitatively described, with emphasis on a likely risk of zero. The American Nuclear Society pointed at the caveats littering a 1995 report by the NCRP, adding that “if this is the best that can be said in defense of [LNT], then research yielding contradictory evidence should be encouraged and given very careful attention.”

So why hasn’t science been able to definitely prove or disprove the LNT hypothesis? Largely this is due to the weakness, for low doses, of the epidemiological data stemming from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, as well as other additional studies. As the ICRP reported in 2006: “It is true that there is no direct, credible epidemiological evidence of a radiation-related risk associated with exposures of the order of 1 mGy … [but] failure to detect a risk that (if it exists) is very small is not evidence that the risk is zero.”

Two other studies on low-level radiation were published in 2005: BEIR VII and a report by the French Academy of Sciences. BEIR VII reaffirmed the use of LNT for cancer incidence, judging it “unlikely that a threshold exists for the induction of cancers.” BEIR VII also stated that current evidence does not favor hormesis, the controversial theory that low levels of radiation can be good for you, saying in its typical dry prose, “the assumption that any stimulatory hormetic effects from low doses of ionizing radiation will have a significant health benefit to humans that exceeds potential detrimental effects from the radiation exposure is unwarranted at this time.”

Provocatively, the French Academy report rejected the use of LNT for doses below 2 rems, saying that it was unjustified and should be discouraged. To support this assertion, the report argued that there is no convincing data demonstrating an increase in cancer for doses below 10 rems in infants, children, or adults. Cell transformation, it argues, is a very complex process and oversimplification—which the French see in the BEIR VII report—can be misleading.

While on either side of the LNT discussion, what both reports made clear is that a telling epidemiological answer won’t be found, and only by identifying biological mechanisms—understanding how well DNA repair and planned cell death mitigate damage done by low-level radiation—can the field move past the threshold debate. As always, the answer is more science.

UNCANNY RAYS

It is natural to fear ionizing radiation. Invisible, silent, and methodical, emitted in a meter both random and regular, nothing can seem more lethal or alien, despite its fundamental importance. Fire, floods, plague—those we can grapple and understand. But, as seen in the fear spasms following fallout, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and radon in homes, radiation stands on its own. As Kai Erikson writes, radiation’s “invisible contaminants remain a part of the surroundings—absorbed into the grain of the landscape, the tissues of the body and, worst of all, into the genetic material of survivors. An ‘all clear’ is never sounded. The book of accounts is never closed.”

Combine these fears of an invisible killer unleashed by scientists with the vast uncertainty that typifies radiation at low levels, and you have a perfect storm of public mistrust. Even in the 1930s, Weart writes, “most people vaguely associated radioactivity with uncanny rays that brought hideous death or miraculous new life; with mad scientists and their ambiguous monsters; with cosmic secrets of death and life … and with weapons great enough to destroy the world.” And by the 1960s, the public was no longer given the luxury of thinking about radiation in binary terms: at high levels it hurts; at low levels it’s harmless. They were thrust instead into the linear scale, the realm of risk—which, as any observer of the human condition can tell you, is a terrifying place to be.

While the threshold dose model had many, many flaws, its primary virtue may have been its promise of false certainty. With the rise of LNT came the rise of possibly false uncertainty—doubt. And once doubt creeps in, the only solution, the only way to begin to redeem radiation’s name, the only way out of this mess, is to find a biological mechanism; to break open the black box; to eliminate belief from the debate.

The fall

2011-02-22T02:54:00.000-08:00

Ever since I began reporting out a series on what a bio-based economy could begin to look like in the coming decades, one frequent truism I've heard has been that, while gene sequencing prices have been steadily declining over the past decade, they have fallen off a cliff in the past two years. Thanks to NIH, we can finally visualize that plunge, above. Damn.

The National Human Genome Research Institute has been tracking sequencing costs for years, but they will now publish and interpret that data at a handy site, subject to frequent revision. One bit of analysis that jumps off the page: starting in January 2008, sequencing experienced a "sudden and profound out-pacing of Moore's Law." That's a log scale on the Y axis.

Of course, just because scientists can cheaply sequence bacteria genomes and, soon, human genomes, doesn't mean they'll understand gene function. But it will enable the type of comparative work that, for example, allowed LS9 to discover enzyme families for alkane production in cyanobacteria. Let's see what they do with it.

Hat tip: Genetic Future

Cofferdam

2010-08-27T01:57:00.000-07:00

There's an enjoyable and well-written reconstruction today in the Times of some of the more off-the-radar mishaps and tensions behind capping the Macondo well. From a reporting standpoint, one of the best things about the spill has been that it gave Henry Fountain a chance to sneak out of Science Times and really flex his ability to report and translate engineering for the layperson. Nearly every one of his articles is a treat.

Also, it's hard not to see this article as a paean to having genuine intellectuals and scientists in cabinet positions. Steven Chu comes across as meticulous bad ass:

At the Houston command center, officials assembled to monitor the top kill. A BP technician called out pressure readings. Dr. Chu, in shirtsleeves, performed his own calculations with paper and pen. [...]

The next day, Dr. Chu, concerned about putting too much pressure on the well, ordered an end to the operation. It was a turning point: the government was now in charge, and with greater frequency, Energy Department officials and scientists were conferring with Exxon Mobil and Shell engineers, asking for advice about what to do next. [...]

"Chu raised his concerns about the subsea geology with the BP people and they couldn’t answer his questions," an aide to the energy secretary said. "The result was that the plan to conduct the integrity test was halted for 24 hours."

Prior to Chu, past energy secretaries have included politicians and lawyers -- Bill Richardson, Spencer Abraham, Federico Peña, Hazel O'Leary -- with only W's second appointee, Samuel Bodman, holding an advanced science degree, from MIT, though even Bodman largely worked in the financial sector. Granted, I realize political appointees are hardly the first place to look for technical expertise, but it was deeply assuring to this science reporter's heart that someone with Chu's pedigree was keeping BP honest in its work.

Dilution

2010-08-24T10:06:00.000-07:00

News finally broke today of Terry Hazen and co.'s study of the microbial response to one of the invisible, deepwater mists of oil-tinged water that stretched out from the Macondo wellhead for, in all likelihood, months during the leak. Given the shoddy, overwritten coverage we saw of last week's WHOI report, which did an admirable job detailing the boundaries and environment of the same plume in June, it's no wonder much of the media has been perplexed into silence. The loudest banger of the plume drum, the Times, has yet to post a full-fledged story about Hazen's study, seven hours after the embargo ended.

I've been aware of Hazen's work since late May, when I began writing an explanatory series on the promise and limits of biodegradation in the gulf. He wouldn't talk with me then, giving priority to his research. That's fair, though his voice could have added gravitas to initial reports on the gulf's ability to break down light Mississippi crude. Now that his research has been added into the fray -- the Post had a very good survey, by David Brown, a bona fide science reporter -- perhaps the media can hit the right balance of resilience and fear in future coverage of the spill. Maybe. Probably not.

As a comment to myself, I was reluctant to lead my story with news that Hazen's team had been unable to locate the plume for three weeks, a result likely driven by biodegradation *and* dilution. There seems to be a general incoherence right now in evaluating what diluted oil components mean for the gulf. (This is behind issues with the oil budget, too.) How much benzene is too much, when dilute? Alkanes? Asphaltenes? This isn't polonium we're talking about here, but neither is it nitrogen.

We're witnessing, in real-time, the press' inability to convey scale. If I was the New York Times right now, I'd order a front page Week in Review on dilution, the meaning of parts per million, the dose makes the poison, etc. I'd love to write it, but my publication won't pay for it.

Anyway, I look forward to more real science coming forward, and less daily press coverage of the same. I want to see if Hazen can prove the mechanisms of his bug's degradation, rather than relying on strong correlations. I want to see how oil has infiltrated the food web, if it has, and if there's any chance the hype behind dispersant fears can match scientific reality. I want to know what happened to those deepwater corals, and the overall grisly census. It should make good reading. I hope there are real science reporters out there to cover it.

Two Parts Per Million [scroll down]

2010-07-25T06:18:00.000-07:00

This past Friday, I was writing up a quick brief on the government's most recent analysis of the undersea "plumes" of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This was hot topic about a month and a half ago, when reporters could speculate wildly about how the oil, trapped about 1,000 meters down in the water column, would devastate marine life, floating about in diffuse clouds that some -- not all -- compared to salad dressing, or even globules. I like that word, globule.

Since there was little in the way of existing hydrocarbon monitoring in the gulf's deep waters, scientists had very little data to cite as reporters pounced on the story. Since then, we've moved on, but the scientists have continued their work, in ocean expedition after expedition. And lab tests have found oil in concentrations of 1-2 parts per million near the wellhead, with a possible high range of 7 parts per million.

This is a beautiful example of how language breaks down in rendering reality. There is no great way, in writing, to portray the scale of this low concentration. (An amount, by the way, that could still be problematic for marine life.) For an example of what 2 ppm looks like, just see the image above, two red pixels in a field one million pixels strong. Far from salad dressing.

In the past, newspapers have had limited recourse in getting around scale problems. But the digital transition can give us options in visualizing data for the public, right? (It has to be about more than, "Hey, integrated video can save us!") And they can be even more robust than simple in-line additions like Edward Tufte's sparklines.

I'm not a designer, but couldn't someone like the Wall Street Journal lead the way and add a small graphical link after citing a statistic like this, with a mouse over that reads, "See this number in perspective"? Follow through, and a floating box opens, portraying a more elegant, and possibly dynamically rendered, illustration of my crude chart above.

We can make this happen, can't we? Can't we?

Babel

2010-03-08T23:21:00.000-08:00

Reading the front page of the New York Times today, I couldn't help but notice that two of the stories carried echoes of pieces I had written in the past. First there is Elisabeth Rosenthal's "Solar Industry Learns Lessons in Spanish Sun," looking at how Spain's subsidies paying higher energy rates for solar power went awry; my story about the Spanish solar bust appeared last August ("Spain's Solar Market Crash Offers a Cautionary Tale"), though without the luxury of talking to local farmers.

Also in the Times, Miguel Heft highlights Google's employment of statistical machine translation, which uses brute-force computing power to apply code-breaking algorithms to language translation. My take on the tech, replete with Tower of Babel and Douglas Adams references, appeared in the Prague Post two years ago ("Codebreakers").

I write this only slightly out of pique -- everything has always been written before, I understand, and I remain early in the journalism game. But it is good to know that you're on the right track.

Boots on the Ground

2010-02-17T05:41:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a McCloy Fellowship, I'm spending the month in Germany and Holland reporting on CO2 capture and storage for Greenwire. (Not giving too much away to say: It's about economics and geology.) I've been reading John McPhee's Annals of the Former World for inspiration, as I search for my own rhapsodies on the North German basin.

Unfortunately, much of the color I encounter on the trip won't make the final cut. A chance encounter with mineralized CO2 while stumbling on Heidelberg University's Minerals Museum? The jury-rigged, innovative mess of a materials testing lab in Aachen? The suck of Vattenfall's massive oxygen-purifying system at their pilot capture plant? Maybe these could appear as motes in a long-form narrative, but not a wire series.

So I have to hold on to those moments; anecdotes for a magazine life. I'm grateful for the opportunity. Most of my time is spent behind a desk, and then suddenly, for a few weeks, I'm meeting geologists in their labs and prowling around the largest chemical plant in the world. Or I'm sitting over a coffee with a source -- invariably German scientists have been accommodating hosts -- who takes the time to draw an off-the-cuff cross section of German geological history (above). And I realize: While the color may not make it in, these are sources I'll hold on to for my entire career.

United States of Ambition

2010-01-29T05:43:00.000-08:00

There's a line from President Obama's recent State of the Union that put me on recall. It went: "We were sent here to serve our citizens, not our ambitions." Even most of our longest-serving legislators in the Senate have now come through a political system that has fundamentally changed over the past 40 years, moving away from machine politics to individual, career politicians. And that shift, along with moribund parliamentary tactics, has distorted Congress' ability to govern for decades.

The best survey I have ever read on the topic remains Alan Ehrenhalt's The United States of Ambition: Politicians, Power and the Pursuit of Office. It's been five years or more since I read it -- and the book, published in 1991, is long out of print -- yet I find myself invoking it to this day. Here's what the political scientist Alan Wolfe had to blurb about it:

Looking at politicians as they are and not as we expect them to be, the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt showed that people increasingly run for office not so much for power or gain, but because they have chosen to devote their lives to the weird calling called politics. Liberals and conservatives both believe in causes to such an extent that they are willing to put up with the small talk, long hours, and bad food that campaigns demand. And those who make good candidates, therefore, do not make good leaders, since they lack the primary skills for achieving success in a divided government: the ability to bargain and compromise. Beautifully written, with telling examples, Ehrenhalt's book is a classic in political science that rivals another great work in the field written in another era by a journalist, Samuel Lubell's The Future of American Politics (1952).

Worth picking up for $0.01 on Amazon's used-books site.

Vital Engineering Schematics

2010-01-22T03:10:00.000-08:00

I've about finished my haphazard redesign of this site. It's been an interesting effort, reconnecting with CSS design skills that have been dormant for a decade or so. The mushroom background is an improvement on the weirdly religious-seeming seal from before; the articles page has a better structure for the future; and the whole shebang is more intuitive.

In celebration of the redesign and the approaching weekend, I give you the above, an engineer's take on cocktails (found via Flowing Data). I wouldn't mind that Bloody Mary right now. See the full version here. Na zdraví!

Here Be Monsters

2009-11-02T12:03:00.000-08:00

Robert Rines died yesterday. Rines was a classic type, the intelligent, oddball inventor seized by a singular dream that came to run roughshod over the rest of his life. So why was Rines famous? Because his white whale was the Loch Ness Monster.

"There are few of us willing to risk our reputations on something as improbable as this, judged with such ridicule," he told Boston Magazine in 1998. "Scientists think there are other things to do for fame and fortune than something this crazy. So we do it quietly as a private venture and don't have to hear that we're 'crazy people chasing monsters and wasting public funds.' "

I never met Rines, but I have been inspired by a disciple of his, Ivan Mackerle, a Czech crytozoologist whom I profiled several years ago. (Read it.) Mackerle met Rines in the 1970s at Loch Ness, after receiving rare permission to go to Scotland from the Czechoslovak government. Mackerle was poor and young; he and his friends rigged a boat of tubing and rubber.

Mackerle then returned to Prague and spent his time as a freelancer, lecturing about his trip to Loch Ness and this man, Rob Rines, who was devoting fantastic equipment to the search for Nessie. Mackerle devoted the rest of his life to cryptozoology, despite the stubborn refusal of monsters to exist. Such dedication in the face of constant, unrelenting failure? Pure romance.

Conflicts Deep in the Sea

2009-10-05T13:36:00.000-07:00

Last week's Science Times had a great, unusual piece of science journalism in it, by Bina Venkataraman, about "Lagrangian coherent structures," the hidden skeletons that guide the flow of water and air. Read it. It makes a perfect counterpoint to an article by Rachel Carson, published in the New Yorker almost 60 years ago. It's an ode to tide and currents, and all that was mysterious in Carson's time and is (somewhat) explicable now. It stirs the imagination, picturing the sweep of the tides when the Earth was young and the moon was close. Plus, learn about the real Norwegian maelstrom. She writes:

Swedish scientists say that herring are carried into some of the fiords of Sweden when the internal waves roll in over the submerged rims of these deep basins. In the open ocean, the boundary between water masses of different temperatures or salinities is often a barrier that may not be passed by the living creatures, delicately adjusted as they are to certain conditions. But do these creatures move up and down with the roll of the internal waves? And what happens to the bottom fauna of the continental slopes, which are adjusted to water of unvarying warmth? What is their fate when internal waves move in from a region of arctic cold, rolling like a storm surf against those dark slopes? We do not know. We can only conjecture that in the turbulent recesses of the sea are hidden mysteries far greater than any we have solved.

I should note this was an excerpt from Carson's The Sea Around Us, also out in 1951. One more quote; it's the last paragraph, so beware:

But possibly the most memorable link between tide and living creature is a very small marine worm, flat of body and with no distinction of appearance yet with one astonishing quality. The name of this worm is Convoluta roscoffensis, and it lives on the sandy beaches of northern Brittany and the Channel Islands. Convoluta has entered into a remarkable partnership with a green alga, whose cells inhabit the body of the worm and lend their green color to its tissues. The worm lives on the starchy products manufactured by its plant guest; indeed, it has become so dependent upon this means of nutrition that its digestive organs have degenerated. In order that the algal cells may carry on their function of food manufacturing, which requires sunlight, Convoluta rises from the damp sands of the intertidal zone as soon as the tide has ebbed, and the sand is spotted with large green patches composed of thousands of the worms. For the several hours while the tide is out, the worms lie in the sun and the plant cells manufacture their starches and sugars, but before the tide returns, the worms must sink into the sand, to avoid being washed out into deep water. So the whole lifetime of the worm is a succession of movements conditioned by the stages of the tide—upward into sunshine on the ebb, downward on the flood. What is most unforgettable about Convoluta is this: Sometimes it happens that a marine biologist, wishing to study some related problem, transfers a colony of the worms to a laboratory and establishes them in an aquarium, where there are no tides. But twice each day Convoluta rises out of the sand on the bottom of the aquarium into the light of the sun, and twice each day it sinks into the sand. Without a brain, or what we would call a memory, or even any very clear perception, Convoluta continues to live out its life in this alien place, remembering in every fibre of its small green body the tidal rhythm of the distant sea.

Bruttosozialprodukt

2009-09-16T14:45:00.000-07:00

Last week, I covered an announcement by the European Union on its plans to launch an environmental indicator as a supplement to gross domestic product (or Bruttosozialprodukt in German, translated only because I'm studying the language). The commission, the E.U.'s executive arm, says the indicator will measure environmental stress -- as the common example goes, all that ecological and social damage caused by Hurricane Katrina? It counts as positive growth in GDP. What?

Elizabeth Kolbert over at the New Yorker picked up the theme this week in a post on their site, and linked to the NYT version of my article -- the first weak publishing connection I've had to that august body. The Times story includes a correction, unfortunately, which displays how thin the editorial layer at online publications has become: I knew GNP was not an antecedent of GDP, but in jamming out the article, slipped in describing Robert F. Kennedy's famous speech. And it got through because my talented, overworked editors have too too much copy to churn through. Journalism without a net, this brave web world.

What I really wanted to get out, though, was RFK's full quote:

Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

The entire speech, mostly about Vietnam, is worth a read. An audio clip, accompanied by overwrought imagery, is also on YouTube. Will we ever allow our leaders to be so eloquent again?

Copenhagen

2009-09-05T11:32:00.000-07:00

A prediction* of what will be what post-Copenhagen: The U.S. Senate will pass cap-and-trade legislation, which will be somewhat further watered down from the House version, maybe something like a 10 percent reduction in CO2 levels from 1990. To mollify the Europeans, the U.S. will then commit to a sharp decrease in CO2 post-2020 and will kick in a bunch of cash to fight deforestation, etc. China and India will sign the deal with no hard caps on emissions, but they will have quantified efforts to mitigate emissions. Funds for third-world adaptation will be in the low end of the 25-50 billion euros proposed by the E.U. Everyone will be unhappy.

And, yes, it likely won't be enough to limit the Earth's warming to an additional 2 degrees Celsius. And in the future, what will bridge that gap, as it all grows more dire? I'm guessing technology to absorb CO2 directly from the atmosphere, one of the more innocuous form of geoengineering. In New York, the cheeks of my former professor Klaus Lackner, who has agitated for these "artificial trees," must be rosy.

* I have no inside knowledge of the negotiations beyond the public record. Just my hunch.

Also, I can only imagine how many times the play "Copenhagen" will be invoked during the summit. Ooooh, uncertainty! Like the treaty! Journalists are suckers for quantum theory. Me, too.

Ode to Terminus

2009-05-19T07:20:00.000-07:00

While fishing about the other day for a poem to inscribe in a book to a mentor, I had a find: "Ode to Terminus" by W.H. Auden. It appeared in the New York Review of Books on July 11, 1968. Terminus was the Roman god who protected boundaries; as I near another commencement tomorrow, it seems appropriate. Plus, such language! Here's to always fearing the tall stories of poets or scientists.

The High Priests of telescopes and cyclotrons
keep making pronouncements about happenings
on scales too gigantic or dwarfish
to be noticed by our native senses,

discoveries which, couched in the elegant
euphemisms of algebra, look innocent,
harmless enough but, when translated
into the vulgar anthropomorphic

tongue, will give no cause for hilarity
to gardeners or housewives: if galaxies
bolt like panicking mobs, if mesons
riot like fish in a feeding-frenzy,

it sounds too like Political History
to boost civil morale, too symbolic of
the crimes and strikes and demonstrations
we are supposed to gloat on at breakfast.

How trite, though, our fears beside the miracle
that we're here to shiver, that a Thingummy
so addicted to lethal violence
should have somehow secreted a placid

tump with exactly the right ingredients
to start and to cocker Life, that heavenly
freak for whose manage we shall have to
give account at the Judgement, our Middle-

Earth, where Sun-Father to all appearances
moves by day from orient to occident,
and his light is felt as a friendly
presence not a photonic bombardment,

where all visibles do have a definite
outline they stick to, and are undoubtedly
at rest or in motion, where lovers
recognize each other by their surface,

where to all species except the talkative
have been allotted the niche and diet that
become them. This, whatever micro-
biology may think, is the world we

really live in and that saves our sanity,
who know all too well how the most erudite
mind behaves in the dark without a
surround it is called on to interpret,

how, discarding rhythm, punctuation, metaphor,
it sinks into a driveling monologue,
too literal to see a joke or
distinguish a penis from a pencil.

Venus and Mars are powers too natural
to temper our outlandish extravagance:
You alone, Terminus the Mentor,
can teach us how to alter our gestures.

God of walls, doors and reticence, nemesis
overtakes the sacreligious technocrat,
but blessed is the City that thanks you
for giving us games and grammar and metres.

By whose grace, also, every gathering
of two or three in confident amity
repeats the pentacostal marvel,
as each in each finds his righteous translator.

In this world our colossal immodesty
has plundered and poisoned, it is possible
You still might save us, who by now have
learned this: that scientists, to be truthful,

must remind us to take all they say as a
tall story, that abhorred in the Heav'ns are all
self-proclaimed poets who, to wow an
audience, utter some resonant lie.

The Control of Nature

2009-04-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

Geo-engineering has been in the news recently and became the subject of my carbon capture course with Klaus Lackner this afternoon. Lackner -- a brilliant guy who is not beholden to his own ideas -- advocates capturing CO2 straight out of the air, rather than at power plants. He took exception to those that found air capture to be geo-engineering -- with its connotations of presumption and the defeat of nature -- while saying agriculture or fossil-fuel power plants are not examples of such hubris. This breaks down into an argument of semantics and intentionality I don't want to get into.

Most interesting to me, the reporter, were previous geo-engineering plans that bit the dust. Several decades ago, geologists in California wanted to pump water into seismic faults to stimulate minor earthquakes, thereby avoiding major seismic disaster down the road. Liability concerns killed that. Another example: an engineer that wants to use a 50-kilometer-long plane to churn the ocean water standing between islands and hurricanes approaching at acute angles. Hurricanes are fed by warm water and, glancing off the stirred up cold water, could change direction. But then, again, hurricanes no longer become an act of god; they are an act of man. No one addressed this conundrum of engineering better than McPhee in his article, "Atchafalya."

Eminence grise

2009-04-28T09:49:00.000-07:00

The science seminar was fortunate enough, through the dauntless efforts of our professor, Marguerite Holloway (recent winner of CU's teaching award!), to spend the morning with Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author. I won't go over his resume. He was an enchanting fellow, once he got warmed up, resembling an aged British gnome. Due to allergies, I didn't ask many questions and focused on listening and not blowing snot. Sacks circulates around Columbia as a kind of resident sage when he's not traveling to see subjects or writing. That's what he lives for, he confessed, and there are many ways he keeps this focus: for instance, he eats oatmeal for breakfast and lunch, every day, and then has sardines and tabouli for dinner. He's writing now about hallucination, both musical and visual. He described a cellist who hears other musical numbers when she performs, or a cartoonist in Australia who, startled from sleep, hallucinates vicious varieties of monsters. Religion came up frequently, and he seems a fan of William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. No surprise there. I wanted to ask Sacks about Richard Powers' The Echo Maker but didn't have the heart. Sacks' work with patients may raise qualms, but he seems very aware of that, now. Anyway, finding Sacks to be a target of Powers seems a mistake.

Scanners, Brightly Burning

2009-03-09T08:44:00.000-07:00

Last week, the Times had a story ("Good or Useless, Medical Scans Cost the Same") by Gina Kolata that looked at how medical imaging -- X-rays, CT scans, MRIs -- has "ballooned into a $100-billion-a-year industry in the United States." That's all well and good. Most scientists will agree that we're overdosing in our use of medical scans. But, while ostensibly a health article, the story avoided the scientific implications of the imaging increase and instead focused on the health care costs.

It's astounding to me that the article made no mention -- not even a paragraph -- about the huge uptick in ionizing radiation exposure the increase in CT scans and X-rays has caused. As the radiobiologist David Brenner told me, in the past 25 years our average yearly dose of radiation has doubled solely due to the increase in medical imaging. Now, whether radiation at this level has any true health effects is a whole separate debate (and the subject of my thesis), but shouldn't this increase at least be noted?

Plague in the prairies

2009-01-24T05:45:00.000-08:00

In the Feb. 2009 issue of Scientific American you can find my first story for the magazine, "Plague in the Prairies." The article grew out of an assignment written for the MA program about a team of European scientists studying the dynamics of plague spread in the giant gerbils of Kazakhstan. Turns out, plague is also being passed around the prairie dog colonies of the Midwest, literally decimating the species and threatening the rare black-footed ferret (left). Someday, the giant gerbil data could help scientists model how plague travels between burrow systems, bolstering containment strategies. At least, that's the idea.

In a happy coincidence, the issue's top feature is teased as "Naked Singularities," which, in addition to be being a astronomical phenomenon, is also the name of the college lit journal I ran once, a long time ago. I took a self-indulgent breeze through PDFs of Naked Singularity's 2002-03 issues -- I archive everything -- and was pleased to recall the faux Shakespearian play I wrote in Oct. 2002 about the potential (then) invasion of Iraq. I turned Tony Blair into an Iago-type villain, stealing the love of Condi Rice from Cheney and Powell. His final soliloquy, after Bush, with his advisers absent, stumbles into war, still holds up:

BLAIR.

To you I may seem quite an evil villain,
To lie, to shame, to steal a fine woman.
But judge not too harshly, for I might ask:
Better not to pursue love than that war task?
And so do all campaigns ill-thought and done,
Turn on those whom thought wars easily won.
Mayhaps I know not what I say, merely
Am I a fool. But blind accord may dearly
Cost those who think not on what they may do. [Exeunt.

The full version, with many warts of youth, can be found here.

Incoming! Incoming!

2008-11-01T04:56:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning to find, on A1 of my print copy of the Times (one of the luxuries of living in New York), an article by C.J. Chivers, "A Warning, a Blast, a Fight to Save an Afghan Life." It is one of the best narrative newspaper stories I've seen a long, long time, eschewing the nut grafs and broad focus that so often bloat international news for a yarn tightly focused on one day at an eastern outpost in Afghanistan and the fight to save a cook's life after an attack by insurgents. Rarely do I slog through a guns-and-politics article to the end; Chivers' article left me wanting more and just a bit moved. Bravo in particular for sounding the staccato beat of "Incoming! Incoming!" throughout the piece.

Chivers came to my attention a few years ago, when he was covering the school hostage crisis in Beslan. A quick googling reveals he was a captain in the U.S. Marines before attending Columbia's J-school. (Go Lions!) Goes to show how second-career journalists like Chivers can really have a leg up when reporting stories touching on their first lives. Lucky.