Charles Darwin's work evolves on Web

CNN.com; 10/19/06
CAMBRIDGE, England -- Charles Darwin's work has evolved into cyberspace with the launch of an online archive on Thursday.

The creators of www.darwin-online.org.uk say that the archive is not yet complete, and manuscripts and other material will be added over the next two years.

Much of the material comes from the Darwin Archive housed at Cambridge University.

"The idea is to make these important works as accessible as possible; some people can only get at Darwin that way," said project director John van Wyhe, a researcher at Christ's College, Cambridge.

"Most of the materials provided are appearing online for the first time," he added.

These include the first edition of the "Journal of Researches" (1839) (or "Voyage of the Beagle"), "The Descent of Man" (1871), "The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle" (1838-43) and the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the "On the Origin of Species."

The site also includes manuscripts and notebooks.

"One of these, the notebook in which Darwin recorded his immediate thoughts on the Galapagos, was stolen in the early 1980s and is still missing, but the text has been transcribed from microfilm," van Wyhe said.

The Web site also includes the largest Darwin bibliography yet produced, and the largest catalogue of manuscripts with over 30,000 entries, van Wyhe said.

"As vast as the collection now is, there is much still to come," he added.

"The site currently contains about 50 percent of the materials that will be provided by 2009, the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of 'The Origin of Species."'

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Disney to Cut Back on Junk-Food Marketing
Theme Parks to Serve More Healthful Items; Critics Call for Additional Changes

By Annys Shin
Washington Post, October 17, 2006

These days, the first stop a blockbuster movie makes after the box office is a supermarket shelf. Johnny Depp's mug peers out from a "Pirates of the Caribbean" cereal box. In the next aisle, the Incredibles hawk Incrediberry Blast Pop Tarts. But they may not be there next year.

The licensing rights for "Pirates of the Caribbean" and "The Incredibles" belong to the Walt Disney Co., which said yesterday that it plans to change its policy and use its characters to market foods to children only for products that meet certain nutritional guidelines.

In doing so, Disney joins food and beverage makers in addressing concerns that they contribute to higher rates of childhood obesity by encouraging children to eat unhealthful foods. Last year, Kraft Foods Inc. said it would stop advertising less-nutritious products on television, radio and in magazines aimed at kids under 12. Earlier this month, Kraft joined several snack food makers in an effort to sell more healthful treats in schools.

"These are the first steps in an initiative that will evolve over time," Disney president and chief executive Robert A. Iger said in a written statement.

At least one other media conglomerate has made similar efforts. Nickelodeon Networks, part of Viacom Inc., licenses characters to sell less-nutritious items such as ice cream and cookies. About a year ago, it began partnering with produce companies, putting SpongeBob SquarePants on spinach packages and Dora the Explorer on bags of organic soybeans, spokesman Dan Martinsen said.

Under the new guidelines, Disney characters will be used to market foods only in which fat does not exceed 30 percent of the calories in main dishes; saturated fat does not exceed 10 percent of calories; and added sugar does not exceed 10 percent of calories for main and side dishes, and 25 percent for snacks.

The guidelines will apply to 60 percent of Disney-licensed products, said finance chief Thomas O. Staggs. The company made an exception for special-occasion sweets, such as birthday cakes and seasonal candy, but plans to eliminate trans fats from such products and to limit the number of indulgence items to 15 percent of its licensed products by 2010.

The guidelines were developed with the help of child-health experts James O. Hill, director of the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Colorado; and Keith Thomas Ayoob, associate professor of pediatrics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Starting this month, Disney is also changing children's meals at its theme parks by including water or low-fat, 100 percent fruit juice with side dishes such as applesauce or carrots in place of soft drinks and french fries. Parents who want soda or fries will have to request them.

Disney test-marketed 20,000 of the more healthful meals and found that as many as 90 percent of parents stuck with the more nutritious option, Staggs said.

Disney also plans to eliminate trans fats from all food served at its parks by 2007, including food served by outside chains, such as McDonald's. Trans fats would also be removed from all licensed and promotional products by 2008. The timing is dictated by contractual agreements, the company said.

Critics of children's advertising largely praised Disney but said the company could do more.

"The mouse has made a major step forward," said David Britt, former chief executive of Sesame Workshop, who contributed to a 2005 Institute of Medicine report that said food and beverage advertising enticed children to eat poorly.

While praising Disney, Britt added that the company did not address its presence on the Internet or radio. Other critics said the company needs to stop running ads for unhealthful foods on ABC, which airs cartoons on Saturdays and on its cable networks.

"It's a great first step, but it can't be their last. They also need to address their television advertising," said Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

"They need to stop advertising junk food on their television stations and on ABC," said Susan Linn, co-founder of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Disney officials said before it makes any changes to its advertising, it is awaiting guidelines being developed by the Children's Advertising Review Unit of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, an industry self-regulatory group.

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Mexican Bats Find Cross-Border Benefactors

By Ceci Connolly
The Washington Post, October 16, 2006

MEXICO CITY -- Shortly before sundown they make their first foray, cruising up to 5,000 feet aboveground in search of mosquitoes, moths and other tasty treats. A few hours later, they return home to rest and feed their young before heading out again around midnight.

By daybreak, when Mexican free-tailed bats finally return to their cave, named Cueva de la Boca, the colony will have traveled as far as 62 miles and gobbled some 12 tons of bugs out of the skies near the U.S. border. And in cornfields from Texas to Iowa, farmers are giving thanks.

Or at least they should be.

Sure, bats are creepy. They hang upside down, squeal at high decibels and turn up in movies as blood-sucking fiends. Some even spread rabies. But, it turns out, that in the global ecosystem, bats are humanity's allies.

Every night, all night, as humans sleep, the flying mammals work feverishly. They pollinate plants such as the agave, the source of Mexico's iconic tequila. Their excrement, called guano, is a valuable fertilizer. And bats eat up to one-quarter of their body weight in insects every night, making them one of the simplest, safest, most cost-effective forms of pest control available.

Somehow, that message has not reached most people. For decades, intentionally or otherwise, property owners, hikers and sightseers have trampled habitat, dumped garbage and set fires, decimating the bat populations in many parts of the world.

"We scientists missed a chance to give farmers the right information in the right way at the right time," said A. Nelly Correa, a bat expert at the Center for Environmental Quality at the Monterrey Institute of Technology in Mexico. "Most of us were too busy giving the information to our peers in journals and not to the people who could be our partners."

Bat Lovers Take Action

Now, in a unique cross-border alliance, bat lovers have embarked on a multiyear effort to quantify the damage and replenish the bat population of northern Mexico. The project, being spearheaded by the nonprofit Texas-based Bat Conservation International (BCI), includes detailed mapping of hundreds of present and former bat roosts, educational programs for farmers and even purchases of land to protect the most vulnerable colonies.

In late September, armed with BCI data, the Mexican environmental group Pronatura Noreste bought the Cueva de la Boca cave outside Monterrey for about $500,000. It is believed to be the first purchase of a bat cave by Mexican conservationists, said Magdalena Rovalo, a biologist and director of the organization. Access is now limited to researchers, and plans are underway to build an observation tower in the hopes of generating tourism revenue at the cave, which takes its name from the Spanish word for "mouth."

"If we had a healthy population of bats, we would have pest control and healthy crops at no cost to society and no bad effects on health," Correa said. "And it would be a plus for the economy as bats can become a tourist attraction."

Scientists have identified more than 1,000 species of bats worldwide, representing about one-fourth of all mammal types. Latin America is home to 290 species, 140 of them in Mexico, making the region one of the most diverse bat habitats on the globe. Of all those bats, just two species feed on wild bird blood and only one eats cattle blood, said Correa, who tries at every opportunity to disabuse the public of those blood-sucking stereotypes.

"They have given all bats a bad image very unfairly," Correa said. "Bats are really great guys!"

Cueva de la Boca caught the attention of conservationists after researcher Arnulfo Moreno surveyed 10 major publicly accessible caves in northern Mexico and found that the bat population had fallen by 90 percent in five of them.

"They are especially vulnerable when they are concentrated in a single place and only produce one pup a year," said Moreno, who is based at the Technological Institute of Victoria City in Monterrey. In addition, Boca is a "maternity cave," where young pups were being suffocated to death by smoke from the torches that hikers fashioned with halved plastic bottles and old rags.

"If you're an adult bat and you cannot breathe, you just fly away," Correa said. "If you are a newly born baby bat waiting for your mom to feed you, you just fall down and die."

A Shrunken Population

At one time, Cueva de la Boca was home to an estimated 20 million Mexican free-tailed bats, known to scientists as Tadarida brasiliensis . By last year, the colony had shrunk to 600,000. Pug-nosed, with a wrinkly lower lip and long, loose tail, the bats prefer warmer climes, choosing to live along the border from April to early November. There is evidence they continue south through the winter, but details of their migratory patterns are not well known.

Three other species live in the cave in smaller numbers, including the ghost-faced bat, which has folds of skin below its chin and eyes that appear to be tucked inside its ears, and the naked-back bat, so named for its smooth, almost rubbery-looking skin.

But Boca became a high priority because of the Mexican free-tailed bat and its proclivity to eat the corn earworm, a vicious moth that devours corn crops as it migrates and lays eggs all the way from Winter Garden, Tex., to the Canadian border. As a pest control, bats are more attractive than chemicals because they cost little, pose almost no risk to human health and target specific bugs, leaving the rest of nature undisturbed, Correa said. And because of their location along the border, Mexican free-tailed bats are well-positioned to eliminate earworms before they strike vital crops.

"These bats are of enormous ecological and economic benefit on both sides of the border," Merlin Tuttle, founder and president of Bat Conservation International, said in an e-mail. BCI and Fondo Mexicano, a private organization focused on biodiversity projects, have commissioned assessments of an additional 150 hard-to-reach caves along the border. The bat population in those has fallen from about 55 million to 15 million, Moreno said.

Though modest in size, the 20-acre Boca property offers conservation opportunities beyond bats. It is home to a pair of endangered peregrine falcons, a threatened cypress species and a few endangered American beaver, according to Pronatura. From a single location, visitors can take in an entire ecosystem -- the insects feeding on the plants, the bats eating the bugs and the falcons feeding on the bats.

Since Pronatura began informing visitors about the fragile residents of Cueva de la Boca last year, the number of Mexican free-tailed bats has doubled to about 1.2 million, Correa said. It is quite a sight, she marveled, when the colony departs for another night of hunting and dining. When they emerge in one burst, their presence in the skies shows up on Doppler radar.

She can only imagine what 20 million or so would look like.

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The Vegetable-Industrial Complex

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America's Population Set to Top 300 Million
Immigration Fuels Much of Growth

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 12, 2006; A01

Clicking upward at a rate of one person every 11 seconds, the U.S. population will officially surpass 300 million in the next week or so.

The milestone is a reminder that the United States remains a remarkable demographic specimen, 230 years old (since the Declaration of Independence) and still in a growth spurt.

Behind only China and India, it is the planet's third most populous nation. For a rich, highly developed country, it is anomalously fertile, with a population that is increasing briskly, in sharp contrast to anemic growth or decline in Western Europe and Japan. Some demographers say this continued growth is essential to support an aging population in retirement and a sign of the continued allure of the United States even at a time when its image around the world has been sullied by the war in Iraq.

Yet, how will the momentous 300-million marker be celebrated in Washington?

"Those plans, believe it or not, are still being finalized," said Robert B. Bernstein, a Census Bureau spokesman. "I don't yet know what, if anything, we are going to do in the way of an event."

When the U.S. population surpassed 200 million on a census clock in 1967, cheers rang through the lobby of the Commerce Department, and applause interrupted President Lyndon B. Johnson's celebratory speech.

Four decades later, however, 300 million seems to be greeted more with hand-wringing ambivalence than chest-thumping pride.

"When we hit 100 million, it was a celebration of America's might in the world," said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. "When we hit 200 million, we were solidifying our position. But at 300 million, we are beginning to be crushed under the weight of our own quality-of-life degradation."

One reason for anxiety may be that U.S. population growth is fueled in large measure by immigrants and their children, a circumstance that increasingly worries native-born Americans and makes politicians jumpy, especially four weeks before an election.

Immigrants, legal and illegal, account for about 40 percent of population growth. Immigration is also an important reason the "natural increase" in the population -- excess of births over deaths -- is significantly higher in the United States compared with Europe or Japan. Hispanics from Latin America, by far the largest share of recent immigrants, are driving the natural increase here. On average, Hispanic women have one more child than non-Hispanic white women.

Three hundred million is also a discomfiting reminder of a nation that, on its east and west coasts, at least, is running noticeably low on elbow room. More humanity is stirring up more traffic, more sprawl, more rules against growth, more protests against anti-growth rules, and more of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming. A surging population in the arid Southwest is also straining the supply of water. The growth is adding to a country that represents 4 percent of the world's population but consumes 25 percent of the planet's oil.

"We are not the wide-open spaces anymore," said Martha Farnsworth Riche, who headed the Census Bureau in the mid-1990s and is now a research demographer at Cornell University. "Our choices are constrained."

In Los Angeles, the nation's most densely populated metropolitan region and its most heavily Latino area, 300 million will be yet another confirmation that congestion is out of control, Myers predicted.

"I don't think people view population growth as a plus anymore," he said, noting that Angelenos are punished by it "every single day" when they go out in freeway traffic.

The 300-million milestone, it should be noted, is an educated guess by the Census Bureau, not an actual people count. It emerges from a formula that crunches births and new immigrants against deaths. The 300-millionth person, therefore, will never win a trip to Disneyland because he or she will not be identified.

The 100-million markers are also coming more quickly. From the Declaration of Independence in 1776, it took the country 139 years to get to 100 million in 1915, then 52 more years to reach 200 million in 1967 and 39 more years to hit 300 million. The 400 million mark, according to census projections, will be reached in about 37 years. That, of course, could change if the current anxiety about immigration were to result in the closing of the country's borders. Without immigration, the U.S. population could go into a European-style stall.

It was a change in immigration law in 1965, when Congress abolished a national-origins quota system, that unintentionally reignited immigrant-led population growth, according to William H. Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution. "It made family reunification an important criteria for immigration and it led to a chain reaction of higher fertility," he said.

The relative presence of immigrants, about 12 percent of the total population, is more than double what it was when the population topped 200 million. Immigrants are also more visible than ever, having fanned out from gateway cities such as New York and Los Angeles to parts of the rural South and Midwest where they had not been seen in substantial numbers before. Still, the foreign-born share of the population remains lower than between the melting-pot years of 1860 and 1920, when it was about 14 percent.

Many demographers believe it is shortsighted to be anxious about the 300-million marker. They regard it as a symbol of an economically dynamic democracy that remains popular in much of the world.

"As almost nothing else can, immigration-led growth signals the attractiveness of the American economy and polity," said Kenneth Prewitt, a former head of the Census Bureau and now professor of public affairs at Columbia University. "You don't see large numbers of immigrants clamoring to move to China."

Indeed, lots of good news is embodied in the lives of the 300 million. Longevity has jumped from 55 years in 1915, to 71 years in 1967, to 78 years now. Over that time frame, the percentage of the adult population with a high-school diploma has jumped from 14 percent to 85 percent. Homeownership has risen from 46 to 69 percent. The death rate from tuberculosis has fallen from 140 to 0.2 per 100,000 people. While houses are 4.5 times as expensive (in constant dollars) as they were in 1915 and twice as expensive as in 1967, a gallon of milk in 2006 costs less than half what it went for in 1915 and in 1967.

After this year's election rhetoric cools, Frey hopes that Americans will see a silver lining in immigration: Foreign-born residents and their children will surge into the workforce, and their payroll taxes will help reduce funding shortfalls for Social Security and other social programs that benefit older people.

"So many middle-aged baby boomers who oppose immigration may be biting the hand that could feed them," Frey said.

This assumes, though, that immigrant children, especially Hispanics and blacks, will be educated well enough in American schools to find competitive jobs in the global economy.

Poverty rates for children have exceeded poverty rates for the elderly for more than 40 years, according to Linda A. Jacobsen, director of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group.

Hispanic and black children are between three and four times as likely to live in poverty as whites, so their growing numbers may not translate into growing national wealth. In addition, the divide between aging baby boomers in retirement and the younger workers who are supporting them with payroll taxes will have a racial, as well as a generational, dimension.

"Unless we can reduce age, racial and ethnic disparities in poverty," Jacobsen warns, "children from minority groups may be less able and less willing, as they grow up, to support the predominantly white elderly population."

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Mean Vegetables

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October 4, 2006; NY Times

Studies of Transcription of DNA Bring Nobel Prize
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- American Roger D. Kornberg, whose father won a Nobel Prize a half-century ago, was awarded the prize in chemistry Wednesday for his studies of how cells take information from genes to produce proteins.

The work is important for medicine, because disturbances in that process are involved in illnesses like cancer, heart disease and various kinds of inflammation. And learning more about the process is key to using stem cells to treat disease.

Kornberg, 59, a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine, said medical benefits from his research have taken root.

''There are ... already many therapies, many drugs that are in development in trials or already available and there will be many more,'' he said. ''Significant benefits to human health are already forthcoming. I think there will be many many more.''

Kornberg's award, following the Nobels for medicine and physics earlier this week, completes the first American sweep of the Nobel science prizes since 1983.

Americans have won or shared in all the chemistry Nobels since 1992. The last time the chemistry Nobel was given to just one person was in 1999.

Kornberg's father, Arthur, shared the 1959 Nobel medicine prize with Severo Ochoa for studies of how genetic information is transferred from one DNA molecule to another.

The younger Kornberg said he remembered traveling to Stockholm with his father for the Nobel Prize award ceremonies.

''I have always been an admirer of his work and that of many others preceding me. I view them as truly giants of the last 50 years. It's hard to count myself among them,'' he said.

''Something so remarkable as this can never be expected even though I was aware of the possibility. I couldn't conceivably have imagined that it would become reality.''

The Kornbergs are the sixth father and son to both win Nobel Prizes. One father and daughter -- Pierre Curie and Irene Joliot-Curie -- won Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, respectively. Marie Curie -- Irene's mother and Pierre's wife -- won two Nobel prizes, for chemistry and physics.

Roger Kornberg's prize-winning work produced a detailed picture of what scientists call transcription in eukaryotes, the group of organisms that includes humans and other mammals, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in its citation.

Kornberg shed light on how information is taken from genes and converted to molecules called messenger RNA. These molecules shuttle the information to the cells' protein-making machinery. Proteins, in turn, serve as building blocks and workhorses of cells, vital to structure and functions.

Since 2000, Kornberg has produced actual pictures of messenger RNA molecules being created, a process that resembles building a chain link by link. The images are so detailed that individual atoms can be distinguished.

''In an ingenious manner Kornberg has managed to freeze the construction process of RNA half-way through,'' the Nobel committee said. That let him capture the process of transcription in full flow, which is ''truly revolutionary,'' the committee said.

''Kornberg realized ... that to get to the chemical details of the (process) was fundamental,'' said Anders Liljas, a member of the Nobel Committee in Chemistry. ''Because if you don't really see it on a molecular, atomic level, then you don't really understand it.''

Kornberg's breakthrough was published in 2001, remarkably recent for honoring by Nobel prize standards. But it followed a decade of researching yeast cells -- whose similarity to human cells Kornberg called ''perfectly astounding'' -- in search of a method to reveal the transcription process.

In those 10 years, Kornberg was allowed to continue his research without publishing a single major finding -- a rare luxury in the world of science where funders often want instant results, said Hakan Wennerstrom, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry.

''I guess it helps to have a father who is a Nobel laureate,'' Wennerstrom said. ''But he also had previous publications of the highest level.''

Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in Bethesda, Md., which has supported Kornberg's work for more than 20 years, called Kornberg's prize ''fantastically well-deserved.''

The question of how information from genes is turned into RNA is fundamental, Berg said, and Kornberg ''started working on it when it seemed somewhere between ambitious and crazy'' to figure out the detailed structure and functioning of the cell's machinery for doing the job, he said.

''The last five years have been really breathtaking in terms of the details of the structures that he's been producing and what they're revealing about the mechanism, as well as laying the groundwork for future studies of how gene regulation works,'' Berg said.

Kornberg is the the fifth American to win a Nobel prize this year. So far, all the prizes -- medicine, physics and chemistry -- have gone to Americans.

Last year's Nobel laureates in chemistry were France's Yves Chauvin and Americans Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, who were honored for discoveries that let industry develop drugs and plastics more efficiently and with less hazardous waste.

Alfred Nobel, the wealthy Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the prizes, left only vague guidelines for the selection committee.

In his will, he said the prize should be given to those who ''shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind'' and ''have made the most important chemical discovery or improvement.''

This year's Nobel announcements began Monday, with the Nobel Prize in medicine going to Americans Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for discovering a powerful way to turn off the effect of specific genes, opening a potential new avenue for fighting diseases as diverse as cancer and AIDS. Their work dealt with how messenger RNA can be prevented from delivering its message to the protein-making machinery.

On Tuesday, Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot won the physics prize for work that helped cement the big-bang theory of how the universe was created and deepen understanding of the origin of galaxies and stars.

Each prize includes a check for $1.4 million, a diploma and a medal, which will be awarded by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony in Stockholm on Dec. 10.

Associated Press Writer Karl Ritter in Stockholm and AP science writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

Nobel Prizes: http://www.nobelprize.org

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October 3, 2006; NY Times