Hello there! I'm Paul, a reporter covering the sciences for the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'm at paul.voosen@chronicle.com or voosen@gmail.com.

With Jim Brewbaker, left, legendary breeder
Before you go any further, here's some of my best work:
» A Conservationist, and Movement, Enter the Age of Man
ARLINGTON, Va. -- Peter Kareiva had come to answer for his truths. Settling at the head of a long table ringed by young researchers new to the policy world, Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest environmental organization, cracked open a beer. ...
» Cascading species shift looms in fire-starved Eastern woods
BIG PINEY RANGER DISTRICT, Ark. -- It was a rare patch of sunlight in a dark forest. On a hot spring morning, foresters and scientists tromped through the charred understory of a burned patch of the Ozark National Forest. They had recently wrapped their work, dripping fire ...
» Geologists drive golden spike toward Anthropocene's base
MAINZ, Germany -- The man who named the Anthropocene has had a change of heart. Twelve years ago, Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate and atmospheric chemist, coined the term "Anthropocene" as shorthand, an argument wrapped in a word. Geology had long relegated humanity ...
» Provoked Scientists Try to Explain Lag in Global Warming
MAUNA LOA OBSERVATORY, Hawaii -- At nightfall, 11,000 feet up, under the summit of a looming volcano, the black lava moonscape cools as the sun's tropical heat escapes upward. Settling, subsiding, some of the world's purest air -- a sample of the entire central Pacific atmosphere -- descends ...
» No Eurekas in Long Campaign to Crack Cellulosic Code
Down on a farm in Illinois, his forearm stuck inside the noisome gut of a living and otherwise unperturbed brown cow, Matthias Hess, a German-born microbiologist and geneticist, felt far removed from the white hum of his biology lab. Hess had been fishing in the cow's rumen ...
» Hiroshima Casts Long Shadow Over Radiation Science
Nori Nakamura's mother, who lived near Hiroshima, had a rule for when her son went out to play. "My mother did not want me to wear colored shirts in the summer," said Nakamura, a radiation biologist, born the year after the atomic bomb fell. "Only white." ...
» Gulf of Mexico's Oil Industry Is Built on Pillars of Salt
Not so long ago -- at least, in geological time -- many in the oil game thought the Gulf of Mexico was tapped out. Financiers called it "the Dead Sea." A century of production had run its course. Well after deeper well turned up dry, many drilling into thick layers of salt. And where there was salt ...
» Biodiversity a Bitter Pill in 'Tropical' Mediterranean Sea
They had a rich catch that night on the research vessel Shikmona. Spilling from the nets were pucker-faced dragonet fish, sprawling octopuses and brown crabs, snapping their claws. On the examination table, it seemed a display of the sea's bounty. Unfortunately, it was another sea's bounty. ...
MEYRIN, Switzerland -- It's looking a bit less cloudy at the end of the atom smasher. A stately half-century-old particle accelerator, the Proton Synchrotron at CERN -- the European high-energy physics center just north of Geneva -- is used to being outclassed. ...
KARLSRUHE, Germany -- Standing in the shadow of the cloud machine, his tall frame dwarfed by its three stories, Ottmar Mohler looks around, leans over and spits in a can. ...
Aboard a cargo ship steaming from Los Angeles to Honolulu, his radars spinning 70 feet above a dark sea, Ernie Lewis filled another latex balloon with a whoosh of helium and let it fly. The balloon rose 15 miles, swelling in thin air, a fat white disc disappearing against the Milky Way. And then, as always, it popped. ...
JUNGFRAUJOCH, Switzerland -- On a clear day at the Sphinx, a legendary atmospheric observatory 11,000 feet up in the snowed-in peaks of the Bernese Alps, the blue sky runs down green hills and white glaciers toward seemingly all of Europe beyond. On a lucky day here, though, there's only gray. There are only clouds. ...
The United States has a debt, etched in stone, to pay back to the sea. ... as the surge sloshed into New York Harbor last week by Superstorm Sandy made clear, sea-level rise is also a deeply local phenomenon. There is no average ocean. There are only particular coastlines, shaped by geology, currents and gravity. The past matters. And in few places does it matter more than the United States. ...
In recent years, it's gone from whisper to refrain in environmentalism: Welcome to the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch dominated by man. Coined a decade ago, the idea does much in little space, uniting climate change, resource use and species loss -- and, scientifically, it might even be true. But whether that's the case is now in the hands of a small group of geologists who are poised to find out how their conservative and sometimes internecine field reacts to the global stage. Has Earth entered the Anthropocene? It's time for the stratigraphers to have their say. ...
It's a big fuss for a small, blind fly. To little fanfare, Eduardo Moreno, a University of Bern geneticist, has created what he calls the world's first "synthetic" animal species, a crippled, bioengineered fruit fly that, while failing to breed with its natural peers, freely gets down with its own kind -- a trait that cuts straight to the classical definition of a species. ...
Jon Krosnick has seen the frustration etched into the faces of climate scientists. For 15 years, Krosnick has charted the rising public belief in global warming. Yet, as the field's implications became clearer, action has remained elusive. Science seemed to hit the limits of its influence. ...
Running the Energy Department is no easy job. There are nukes to manage and, oh yes, the country's contentious move toward clean energy. Yet despite all these demands, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who has never shied from expanding his academic reach, is nearing publication of an economics paper -- his first ever -- that could upend ideas of how energy efficiency works. And he sat down with Greenwire to say what exactly he's found. ...
In China, at least, the predators are back. But no one knows for how long. ...
While planetary boundaries have been seen as a successor to global warming, climate change or biodiversity as a top-level message, some scientists have questioned the United Nations' rapid embrace of the concept. For example, instead of boundaries, the scientific focus should rest on "planetary opportunities," a high-profile group of scientists argues ...
From Arkansas to New England, many of the forests of the eastern United States -- woods shaped by humans for thousands of years -- are now enmeshed in a near-unstoppable, decades-long shift in character. Growing dark and moist, they are shedding species, turning into sparse biological deserts. These woods rebounded even after the clear-cutting of the 19th century, only to be laid low by a generation of zealous protection. And to survive, scientists say, they must burn. ...
Jane Lubchenco and Marcia McNutt have reached the limits of science. As the oil surged up, week after week, from the Gulf of Mexico's renegade well two years ago, McNutt, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, and Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found themselves far removed from the stately pace of their past academic careers. ...
Peter Kareiva, chief scientist of the Nature Conservancy, the world's largest conservation group, has some hard truths for environmentalists. The movement is at a crossroads. Science has unraveled its founding ethic -- the protection of a pristine nature into perpetuity -- at both ends. If conservation is to survive, it will have to abandon its cherished myths. There will no return to Eden. Some species will not survive.
It is time, Kareiva says, to enter the Age of Man. And he is not alone. ...
Sept. 11, 2001, brought peace to few in the world -- except whales. ...
In the Earth's frozen extremes, it appears, the future is now. For some time, it's been thought in climate science that the glaciers and ice caps crowning mountain ranges from the Andes to the Himalayas are the canaries of the cryosphere. ...
Restoring the post-spill Gulf Coast will be like no other environmental recovery effort in U.S. history. It will confuse notions of how restoration works and what it can do. It will test the resolve of politicians presented with a bounty of cash, and the limits of scientists seeking ways to compensate for damage done miles below the sea surface. ...
Rather than flowing in a tidy path to the southwest, pulled along by a steady current, the Deepwater Horizon plume was a mess of swirl and slosh. Virgin water exposed to the spill, rather than whisking away permanently, would return after weeks, carrying with it microbes already primed to chew hydrocarbons ...
WAIMALU, Hawaii -- As the midday sun baked his four-bedroom home in the Honolulu foothills, George Hayashi watched two workers, with drills whirring, install 18 gleaming solar panels on his garage. ...
One of the world's leading energy companies, Norway's Statoil, is going public this month with a scientific innovation that it says will drastically reduce the costs and risks of discovering new deposits of fossil fuels. ...
Hydraulic fracturing may be in for a bumpy ride. A previously unreported study out of the Oklahoma Geological Survey has found that hydraulic fracturing may have triggered a swarm of small earthquakes earlier this year in Oklahoma. ...
MAUNA LOA, Hawaii -- At nightfall, 11,000 feet up, under the summit of a looming volcano, the black lava moonscape cools as the sun's tropical heat escapes upward. Settling, subsiding, some of the world's purest air -- a sample of the entire central Pacific atmosphere -- descends on the dusk, cloaking Mauna Loa in stillness.
That's when John Barnes flips on his emerald-tinged laser and shoots it into the sky. ...
PUNA, Hawaii -- His shoes crunching through volcanic grit on the Big Island's eastern shore, Dennis Gonsalves walks into a grove of juvenile papaya trees. A renowned plant pathologist, Gonsalves eyes the bulbous green fruit stacked up the trees' trunks. In a few months, harvest will arrive, each tree shedding two or three papayas a week. ...
KUNIA RESEARCH FARM, Oahu, Hawaii -- On a furrowed hillside suspended between alternate takes on paradise, with rugged, green mountains above and the placid waters of Pearl Harbor below, Hawaii's plantation legacy is constantly re-emerging. ...
A few years back, several New Zealand scientists began tinkering with petunias, the elegant flowers blooming in many gardens. Playing with pigment genes, they developed biotech varieties with lush dark leaves, their funnel-shaped flowers popping against a midnight backdrop. ...
Down on a farm in Illinois, his forearm stuck inside the noisome gut of a living and otherwise unperturbed brown cow, Matthias Hess, a German-born microbiologist and geneticist, felt far removed from the white hum of his biology lab. ...
In a decision set to upturn the biotech industry and outrage its opponents, the Agriculture Department announced late last week that it does not consider a lawn grass genetically engineered to resist a weedkiller within its regulatory domain, ratifying a pathway for certain classes of bioengineered plants to bypass federal regulation. ...
A multinational group of scientists has developed farm-ready wheat resistant to a virulent and devastating plague that has slowly spread from Africa into the Middle East, carrying with it the threat of famine. ...
Amyris, perhaps the hottest biofuel company around, seems like the model American startup.
Few can match its pedigree. Several years ago, Amyris helped create a landmark achievement in medicine, engineering microbes to produce an expensive antimalarial drug. Related tricks, it later found, can create a liquid fuel similar to diesel. Well-heeled partners lined up at its door. The company went public last fall, and its stock has only risen since. ...
For decades, it has been an open secret among conservationists. An elegant equation widely used to calculate how many species will go extinct from deforestation and habitat destruction -- one of the "laws" of ecological theory -- was a little shaky. ...
The oil was lucky to last as long as it did.
As it began to rush out of the Deepwater Horizon's bent pipes and busted caps 5,000 feet beneath the sea's surface, the oil and gas unleashed last year by BP's Macondo well discovered a dangerous, exotic environment. The Gulf of Mexico was full of reactive chemicals, voracious wildlife and splitting pressure. Dangers lurked at every corner. ...
Surfactants are mongrel compounds. They resemble elongated keys, with a bulbous head that favors water and a skinny tail that loves plunging into oil and fats. When not made out of petroleum, their tails are stewed out of palm or coconut oil, hardly standard-bearers for sustainable chemistry, given their tendency to replace rainforest. ...
Nori Nakamura's mother, who lived near Hiroshima, had a rule for when her son went out to play."My mother did not want me to wear colored shirts in the summer," said Nakamura, a radiation biologist, born the year after the atomic bomb fell. "Only white." The rule wasn't about fashion, he said. It came from a lesson well-learned. ...
BOSTON -- Bioengineer Jeff Way has seen what happens when the claims of algae biofuel companies get ahead of the science, when their promises of "renewable diesel" slam into the realities of engineering. ...
Overnight, Tokyo transformed into the world's largest psychological laboratory. ...
It's long been a vexing issue in the scientific community, spurred in large part by public panic over nuclear power, waste and radiation: Why the terror? ...
When considering the current troubles at three nuclear reactors of Japan's Fukushima Daiichi power plant, two words must be promptly defined: radiation and meltdown. The former carries fears of spreading, invisible poison; the latter seems one step away from an atomic blast. Neither is quite what it seems. ...
The Department of Agriculture's decision to fully deregulate biotech alfalfa will delay, but not forestall, a day of reckoning between the rising organic industry and the coalition of farmers, agribusinesses and biotech firms that support the widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops ...
A core ingredient of the dispersant injected deep underwater at BP's runaway oil well remained trapped in an undersea plume of oil, methane and other hydrocarbons, resisting decay even as it became vanishingly dilute ...
Several decades ago, the town dump was a nasty place where drums of chemicals, oil cans, rusting metal, food debris and pesticides were haphazardly tossed into crude pits. ...
Thanks to global warming, North American wheat production is set to move back in time. ...
The Department of Agriculture is considering the imposition of geographic restrictions and isolation distances on the cultivation of a genetically modified crop, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced today, a stark reversal of the agency's previously laissez-faire policies. ...
Polar bears may be threatened, but they aren't yet doomed. While Arctic sea ice will continue to retreat under the glare of rising global temperatures, the ice is unlikely to collapse in spectacular fashion, causing hope that, with aggressive greenhouse gas emissions cuts and wildlife management, polar bears may retain viable habitat into the next century ...
Microbes have long done the world's dirty work. They gobble up oil spills. They defend our guts against disease. And even in rugged northern latitudes, hosts of bacteria filter through the soil, feeding on falling leaves and decay, freeing carbon and nutrients for each spring's renewal. ...
This herbicide-tolerant canola is likely to be the first in a wave of crops created by targeted mutation, a long-sought technique that allows tailored changes in plant genes, down to single pairs of DNA. The technology is poised to upend the debate on modified crops, forcing regulators and the public to face a simple question: What does "genetically engineered" mean? ...
Even on a high, dry plateau in central Oregon, it's hard not to find a riot of grass. Farmers grow Kentucky bluegrass for the seed, and lining irrigation canals are wild varieties of rabbit's foot and water bent, along with stubby lawn grasses that, grown thick, would make an excellent putting green.
And recently, a new variety has joined the scene: feral, genetically engineered bentgrass. ...
Perhaps it should have been called the Gulf of Mexico gas spill. ...
Simmered out of eucalyptus, charcoal is being hoed into the degraded soils of former forests in western Kenya. Roasted out of chicken manure, it is spurring the growth of malting barley in Australia. And in Iowa, researchers are plowing charcoal into corn rows, hoping to limit the tons of fertilizer that saturate the state's fields each year. ...
The Gulf of Mexico's undersea oil plume is no more.
For nearly a month, scientists sampling the site of a deepwater plume stretching southwest from BP PLC's failed well in the Gulf have been foiled. Their sensors have gone silent. Where once a vibrant -- if diffuse -- cloud of oil stretched for miles, 3,600 feet below the surface, there is now only ocean, and what seems to be the debris of a bacterial feeding frenzy. ...
A new study confirming the existence of a massive plume of oil trapped deep underwater in the Gulf of Mexico defies notions that bacteria, while they are degrading the oil, will make as quick work of petroleum lingering in the water's cold depths as they have on the surface. ...
The Gulf Coast has long been home to a small fleet of scientific consulting firms that use ancient fossils to date rock formations buried deep beneath the ocean. Rather than hunting for the big bones of dinosaurs, these industry scientists have an eye for truly small fry, the fossils of plankton, microns in width, that once bobbed in the Gulf's ancestral waters. ...
Not so long ago -- at least, in geological time -- many in the oil game thought the Gulf of Mexico was tapped out. Financiers called it "the Dead Sea." Nearly a century of production had run its course. Well after deeper well turned up dry, many drilling into thick layers of salt. And where there was salt, most believed, all hope of oil was lost. ...
As crude washes into marshes and beaches along the Gulf of Mexico, several small businesses have been barnstorming to sell local and state officials on what seems like a dream scenario. Douse the oil with our compound, they say, and your contamination problems will likely vanish -- all through the miracle of microbes. ...
Microbiologists are unsure which bacteria, feeding off the oil, are already growing exponentially in the Gulf. They are curious how long the bacterial growth will last once the oil's hard remnants drift down into ocean sediment. And no one seems certain how the surge in microbial life will alter the intricate, disentangling web of the Gulf's already weakened ecology. ...
Five years ago, before the money dried up, oceanographer Robert Weisberg had 14 buoys bobbing up and down off the West Florida coast. The buoys were vital scientific instruments, recording salinity, temperature and current speed. They granted real-time insight into the unruly stew of the Gulf of Mexico's shifting flows. Ocean models were tested, and improved.
Those good times are over. ...
A large rotating cyclone of cold water is pushing into the southern body of the Gulf of Mexico's Loop Current and now appears likely to destabilize or even sever the current and the oil it contains from its connection to Florida, scientists said today. ...
A thin stem of oil stretching east from BP PLC's spill is increasingly likely to enter the Loop Current, a powerful Gulf of Mexico flow that runs past the Florida Keys and up the Atlantic Seaboard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief said today. ...
Genetically engineered crops are becoming victims of their own success. ...
BARENDRECHT, the Netherlands -- Kees Pieters has had enough. When the Dutch computer consultant abandoned city life to settle here 30 years ago, Barendrecht was a true village with 15,000 people. Weeping willows lined the canals and, in nearby fields, farmers grew sprouts and potatoes. ...
Atrazine, watch out: There's a killer from the future tracking you down. ...
An undersea conveyor belt to Florida is approaching the Gulf Coast oil spill, and should it stretch past its typical bounds, oil from the BP accident, blobbing placidly off the Louisiana coast, could soon stream into the Florida Keys and up the United States' Eastern Seaboard. ...
UTRECHT, the Netherlands -- The Dutch used to discover new worlds across unexplored seas. Now, they are beginning to trace the edges of a new undiscovered country, and it is right beneath their shores. ...
BERLIN -- The Stuttgart Formation may just be the most important hunk of rock in the world. Buried some 2,000 feet down 25 miles west of here, the saltwater-flush sandstone has seen its eons-old life disturbed recently by clanging seismic probes, electrical currents and drills as geologists examine its every pore and flaw. ...
AACHEN, Germany -- Scientists here in the academic heart of Germany's coal-mining region are readying what they say is a disruptive model for the electric utility industry. Leave the coal deep underground, they say, and forget the death and expense that come with mining. Instead, put a drilling hat on. ...
NIEDERAUSSEM, Germany -- Europe's biggest carbon dioxide emitter has no plans to stop burning coal. Johannes Heithoff, the research chief for the German utility RWE, said his company's goal is to burn through its 3.4 billion metric tons of brown coal reserves, a supply that could last for decades. ...
FREIBERG, Germany -- Climate regulations pushed electricity generators and chemical manufacturers into each other's arms. As oil and carbon prices soared in Europe a few years ago, these two behemoths found themselves in a flush of mutual discovery. ...
BRANDENBURG, Germany -- Vattenfall wants someone to take its CO2. Please.
The first electric utility in the world to launch a coal-fired power plant designed from the ground up to capture its carbon dioxide emissions, Vattenfall has found that building the complicated pilot plant may have been the easy part. Finding a home for its captured gas? Now that's hard. ...
The European Union today approved the first new genetically modified (GM) crop for domestic growing in more than a decade, ending what has been a long stalemate over a backlog of GM crops awaiting cultivation approval. ...
Two industry giants, International Paper Co. and MeadWestvaco Corp., are planning to transform plantation forests of the southeastern United States by replacing native pine with genetically engineered eucalyptus, a rapidly growing Australian tree that in its conventional strains now dominates the tropical timber industry. ...
Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.
Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden. ...
Using advanced biotechnology, long hidden in the background and only now starting to pay dividends, scientists are changing crops without tapping foreign genes -- and often without the regulatory oversight that is given to GM crops. ...
Could nuclear power plants last as long as the Hoover Dam? ...
When the Berlin Wall fell, 20 years ago today, and the crowds pushed through -- first in a trickle and then a flood -- few could then imagine that one of the most lasting, if abstract, legacies of the popular revolt against communist governments across Europe would be a marked decline in CO2 emissions. ...
Europe can't feed its pigs -- at least, not by itself. Meat-hungry and short on animal feed, European nations have relied for years on protein imports, such as the ground meal of soybeans from the United States, to sustain their cattle and pig farms. While this complex chain of trade has worked reasonably well, it has started to be threatened by a microscopic foe: the dust of genetically modified crops. ...
Just as other scientific issues, such as climate change and evolution, faced politicization in the United States, some European countries have politicized scientific evaluations of GM crop safety. Trying to ban the politically unpopular crops, the countries have invoked a science-based protection clause using what some scientists, policymakers and businesses say is flimsy evidence. ...
These days, there is no rarer commodity in farming than trust.
Take Oregon's Willamette Valley, which for generations has been the germ of the U.S. sugar beet industry, producing nearly all the country's seeds. Such breeding is complicated when neighbors grow genetically similar crops and stiff Pacific winds, baffled by the Coast Range mountains, shove pollen every which way. ...
Two weeks ago, a group of marine biologists from Israel's National Institute of Oceanography set sail from the country's central coast. Under a full moon, with the lights of hectic Tel Aviv a band on the horizon, they cast their nets into waters that have sustained civilization for millenia in the Levantine Basin, the eastern branch of the Mediterranean Sea.
They had a rich catch that night on the research vessel Shikmona, according to Bella Galil, a senior scientist at the institute. Spilling from the nets were pucker-faced dragonet fish, sprawling octopuses and brown crabs, snapping their claws. On the examination table, it seemed a display of the sea's bounty.
Unfortunately, it was another sea's bounty. ...
Yesterday, the European Union announced plans to launch an indicator this year to measure environmental stress. The index will reflect the pollution and environmental harm within the bloc's member states, including aspects of climate change, biodiversity, air pollution, water use and waste generation. ...
Every robot has its limit. For the famous Roomba vacuum, it's two to three hours. For the several thousand robots deployed in Iraq, about the same. For the warehouse robots sorting our sneaker orders, eight hours. And the Energizer Bunny? Forget about it -- a few minutes, tops. ...
For a brief, shining moment, Spain was the best solar market in the world. Unlike in cloudy Germany, the sun bakes Spain's southwestern provinces -- the brown, hard-packed Extremadura and Andalusia -- on the Mediterranean coast. And the Spanish government, eager to fulfill its commitments to renewable energy, guaranteed generous subsidies for any company that met its aggressive deadlines. ...
The first U.S. industry to face a cap on its greenhouse gas emissions is not, as may be expected, the coal-burning power utilities. It's not the oil refineries, churning through crude. It's not the automakers, manufacturing again.
It's the airline industry. ...
Long left in the dust by their peers in climate research, a small group of soil scientists is spearheading an effort to apply rigorous computer analysis to the ground beneath our feet. Their goal: to produce a digital soil map of the entire world. ...
There is little certainty why the DNDO went off the rails in its procurement efforts. There are theories: the lure of a silver-bullet technological solution, fears that the current monitors were deeply flawed, a need for the office to prove its place in the bureaucracy, and the eagerness of defense contractors to expand into a well-funded new field. ...
For centuries, Mediterranean countries have found countless ways to disagree -- over religion, ethnicity, colonialism and trade. But there are signs the region might yet unite in pursuit of a common goal: renewable energy. ...
Plague conjures images of Gothic horror -- rough wooden carts piled high with pestilent bodies -- but it is more than a medieval memory. The disease, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, kills several hundred people every year by attacking the lungs, lymph nodes or blood. Less obviously, plague also ravages wildlife around the world. ...
MEYRIN, SWITZERLAND -- Located on the outskirts of Geneva and in sight of the Alps, Meyrin is likely the only town in the world that decorates its traffic circles with inactive, high-powered superconducting magnets.
Such decorations are only logical when buried beneath this bucolic Swiss canton and extending well into France is the biggest traffic circle of them all: the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider, the most powerful particle accelerator ever built, set to come online Sept. 10. The launch of the multibillion-euro machine is expected to receive much fanfare, including live coverage on Eurovision. ...
Algorithm by algorithm, Google is bringing us back to the days of the Tower of Babel. ...
There are papier-mache horses and dragons and a Dionysus with wreathed head and a chain of sausage cycling through his mouth. There's a Genghis Khan; a man as a Christmas tree, his date a present; children in fairy-tale costumes; and bears, for scaring the children. In the courtyard's corner, a man sells sausages smoking in a trash can with stove pipe, a foreshadowing of other pig parts soon to come. ...
PLZEN, WEST BOHEMIA -- People often ask Vaclav Berka how he knows that the beer he brews, Pilsner Urquell, is the same as it was 150 years ago, when it was first created by a Bavarian named Joseph Groll.
Sitting in his office on the grounds of Plzensky Prazdroj, Berka, the brewery's senior trade brewmaster, eases his bulk from his chair and walks to a glass cabinet. He pulls out two thick, musty books and puts them on the table. ...
Sixteen years ago, Alexandr Flek lay upon the floor of the church where he worshipped, and he was in agony.
It had been four years since he converted to Christianity and became a preacher, and two years since the Velvet Revolution. And still, there was no project under way to translate the Bible into Czech. In the past 400 years, there had been only two Czech translations -- one archaic if revered, and the other denuded of its figurative force by the taint of communism. ...
I wasn't too nervous when the young boy standing at the other side of camp hoisted a German anti-tank missile launcher onto his shoulder and aimed in my general direction.
Boys will be boys, I thought. And the Panzerfaust -- as the World War II weapon is called -- was decommissioned. I was pretty sure of that. At the least, its blowback would throw the kid's shoulder open, sending the warhead streaking into the clear, blue sky. ...
Maybe he found it in the Gobi desert as his explosives concussed beneath the dunes, sussing out a legendary worm. Or perhaps it was while hacking through the thick of Madagascar's jungles in search of a man-eating death blossom, or scuba diving beneath the blue waters of a remote Micronesian island, sure he'd discover a mausoleum filled with platinum coffins.
Wherever and whenever it was, Ivan Mackerle, the noted Czech adventurer and seeker of apocryphal creatures, has finally found a sense of skepticism. ...
ROZNA URANIUM MINE, WEST MORAVIA -- Gazing up at the primary shaft of this massive uranium mine, 800 meters beneath the surface of the Czech-Moravian Highlands, Pavel Zinkler, the mine's manager and an employee of 25 years, is waiting for an elevator. After a few minutes stuck on the 16th level, he opens up. ...
Stepping into one of the steel lifts, its white paint rusting off in flakes, there is a calm, the only sound that of rainwater rushing hundreds of meters below. Then several staccato bell rings, reverberating through the metal, and a plummet into black. The lift bucks and shakes against the speed of descent, tossing its complaints into the air like a robotic banshee, shrill and consuming. ...
Joe Sixpack is bored. Savvy to marketing and unimpressed with traditional domestic beers -- and large brewers' attempts at innovation -- Americans are increasingly looking to imported beer to slake their thirst, with a 10 percent growth in that market segment in the first three quarters of 2006. Domestic brewers are getting the message, and Anheuser-Busch, maker of Budweiser and the world's largest brewer, is aggressively expanding its portfolio of imports. ...
In 1993, a mason doing demolition work at a house in the small town of Barcarrota, Spain, near the Portuguese border, put his pickaxe through a wall and into a hidden trove of 16th-century texts. The cache included a Spanish picaresque novel, Italian pornography, and a palm-reading manual. It also contained a previously unknown edition of Alborayque, a long-popular polemic against Spain's conversos, the Jews who converted to Christianity under duress during the Middle Ages. ...
As an exhausted Poehler, friends, and family walked through the twilight to a closed reception in Burns Library, William Poehler, who frequents the campus for football and basketball games, was contemplative at the head of the pack. Stressing his pride in both his children -- his son Greg is a '96 BC graduate -- he said of the day's large and exuberant crowds, "It's mind-blowing. They're all here to see Amy." ...
Wikipedia was begun in January 2001, but its first article on Boston College did not appear until June 4, 2003. At a mere 214 words, it contained two errors (placing BC in Boston rather than Chestnut Hill and six miles south, instead of west, of downtown). Since then, there have been 446 user edits -- each logged and archived to discourage abuse and promote discussion -- and the Boston College entry has grown to three articles of a combined 10,500 words. ...
WITH ITS THICK fur, the eastern coyote is often mistaken for a wolf, which is larger. But eastern coyotes more aptly resemble medium-sized dogs, with long snouts, triangular ears, and pelts the variegated colors of rust. ...
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.

Called one of the top environmental journalists working today by Andy Revkin of the New York Times, Paul is given license to go beyond the latest embargoed paper and dive into what researchers truly know when it comes to the climate, environment and energy. That has led to features on conservation's move into the Anthropocene and the science behind the decade lag in global warming -- the two most-read stories in company history -- to work revealing unknown aspects of the gulf oil spill and the Fukushima accident. His reporting has also included series on the new normal of biotech crops; incipient carbon capture research in Europe; and the ways synthetic biology will be used to replace oil.
Paul is a Massachusetts native who, on encountering the Standard Model, decided to migrate from physics to journalism. His career began reading slush at the Atlantic Monthly, and eventually led to several years at the Prague Post, the Czech newspaper, as an editor. There he interviewed evangelicals, lonely in a god-forswearing country, finishing a grassroots translation of the Bible into Czech; profiled cryptozoologists who failed to ever find a new species; and visited the LHC in Geneva, before the accident.
A graduate of the M.A. science journalism fellowship at Columbia University, Paul has taken graduate-level courses in geoscience and nuclear physics. Those helped lead to a return to the Czech Republic, where he visited the world's oldest radon spa. Several years later, that story — “The Stir of Waters: Radiation, Risk, and the Radon Spa of Jachymov” — became one of the first of Amazon's Kindle Singles to focus on science.
Science Reporter, Greenwire – E&E Publishing (June ’09 – Present, Washington, D.C.)
Cover energy, environmental science, and biotechnology. Report and write double-truck features, analysis, and breaking news, with intellectual scoops on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and the Fukushima crisis. Pitch, investigate, and package enterprise reports, including series on the new normal of biotech crops; the uses and misuses of synthetic biology; and the shifty uncertainty of cloud science. Organize reporting trips, domestic and international. Edit, on occasion, daily briefs. Interview top scientists, industry insiders, and policymakers, including exclusives with federal agency heads. Acquire art and write cutlines to accompany features.
Business Editor, The Prague Post (Feb. ’07 – July ’08, Prague, Czech Republic)
Oversaw, from conception to publication, business, technology, and sports sections of English-language weekly newspaper. Managed two full-time reporters, interns, and freelancers, fielding pitches, assigning stories, and editing copy, on deadline. Conducted and edited weekly interview segment with CEOs and other managers. Consulted with design and photo editors on layout and art. Proofed pages. Briefed editor-in-chief in morning meeting.
Staff Writer, The Prague Post (Sept. ’06 – Feb. ’07, Prague, Czech Republic)
Conceived, reported, and wrote stories for business desk. Topics ranged from revival of Europe’s last underground uranium mine to rise of statistics-based language translation.
Editorial Assistant, Boston College Magazine (May ’04 – Aug. ’06, Newton, Mass.)
Assisted with all aspects of publishing a quarterly alumni magazine, including: Reported and wrote articles. Composed sidebars, charts, captions, and headlines. Copyedited all articles to in-house style. Fact-checked articles. Tracked copy through editorial chain and coordinated edits of proofreader and authors. Prepared online edition of magazine for publication.
Editorial Intern, The Atlantic Monthly (Jan. ’04 – May ’04, Boston, Mass.)
Fact-checked articles. Did directed research for magazine editors and contributing writers on a variety of topics for future articles. Evaluated book manuscript for possible excerption. Critiqued unsolicited fiction submissions.
Education:
Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (Aug. ’08 – May ’09, N.Y., N.Y.)
• Master of Arts in Science Journalism
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow in Health and Science Journalism
• Coursework included graduate-level physics and environmental science
Boston College College of Arts & Sciences (Sept. ’99 – May ’03, Newton, Mass.)
• Bachelor of Arts in English, Cum Laude
• Additional coursework in film production, physics, and computer science
Radboud University (Jan. ’02 – July ’02, Nijmegen, The Netherlands)
• University Exchange Program
Skills:
Computer-assisted reporting; Adobe InDesign, InCopy, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop; Quark Xpress; Final Cut Pro; HTML and CSS. Experience with WordPress, Adobe Illustrator, and MySQL; Javascript, Perl, and C programming languages.