Rainbow Fire Jack-o-Lantern Idea

Several readers have asked how I achieved the rainbow fire effect with this Halloween jack-o-lantern. It's very simple! Here are written step-by-step instructions for you, plus a video.

Make a Rainbow Fire Jack-o-Lantern | Watch the Video

You'll get the best success if you apply the alcohol liberally. Glop on the hand sanitizer. Drizzle extra methanol all over everything. The alcohol will pool around the base of the pumpkin, so you need to expect fire on your surface. It's an alcohol fire, so it burns off quickly. Just make sure you don't perform this project near anything flammable.

Feel free to experiment with colorants. You could add copper sulfate, borax, lithium or strontium salts, calcium or even storebought smoke bombs or sparklers for added panache.

If you are lighting the pumpkin indoors, I recommend setting it on a cookie sheet, which in turn rests on a potholder. If you are setting the pumpkin alight outdoors, avoid placing it on dry grass. I filmed the video with the pumpkin sitting directly on my kitchen countertop. I'm not saying you should do the same -- just pointing out that the project is not particularly hazardous if you exercise caution and control. Have fun!

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Beloved Brazilian Monkey Clings To A Shrinking Forest

The wild population of the golden lion tamarin, which lives only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, fell to just 200 in the 1970s. Conservationists have helped the species rebound, but the monkeys are still at risk as development encroaches on their remaining habitat.

Andrea Hsu/NPR The wild population of the golden lion tamarin, which lives only in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, fell to just 200 in the 1970s. Conservationists have helped the species rebound, but the monkeys are still at risk as development encroaches on their remaining habitat.

Andrea Hsu/NPR

The tiny, copper-hued golden lion tamarin is so beloved in Brazil that its image graces the country's 20-real bank note. But this lion-maned monkey is in peril.

There's only one place on earth where the golden lion tamarin lives in the wild: in Brazil's Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlantica, just north of Rio de Janeiro. Deforestation in the region has reduced the monkey's habitat, once a massive ecosystem stretching for a half-million square miles, to just 2 percent of its original size.

By the 1970s, the total golden lion tamarin population in the wild had plummeted to just 200 individuals. Conservationists have brought the monkey back from the brink — barely. Through captive breeding programs in zoos, the tamarin population grew until biologists were able to release tamarins into the wild.

At first, the zoo tamarins didn't know how to survive. Some were eaten by predators; some starved. But others managed to reproduce, and subsequent generations have thrived. Today, there are 1,700 of them living in patches of forest along the Atlantic Coast.

But that comeback may be short-lived. The monkeys need even more forest for their population to grow.

Power lines, roads and agricultural development in Rio de Janeiro state have isolated golden lion tamarins in forest fragments, leaving them vulnerable to inbreeding and other threats.

Mehgan Murphy/Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Power lines, roads and agricultural development in Rio de Janeiro state have isolated golden lion tamarins in forest fragments, leaving them vulnerable to inbreeding and other threats.

Mehgan Murphy/Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution

Seventy percent of Brazil's human population lives in what was once the Atlantic Forest. Cities are ballooning and huge oil reserves have been discovered just north of here. A highway that cuts through this region is currently being doubled in size, from two lanes to four.

"We have very [little] forest left, and forest we have is absolutely fragmented," Luis Paulo Ferraz, head of the Associacao Mico-Leao Dourado, or Golden Lion Tamarin Association, tells NPR's Melissa Block. That fragmentation leaves the tamarin populations isolated in small forest patches, hurting the species' genetic diversity.

"That's why we have to create corridors" linking forested areas, Ferraz says. In the case of the highway, "the right thing to do is to create an artificial connection between both sides of the road. ... The tamarins need to cross over the road and need to have something that makes them feel protected."

Ferraz's group's idea is to create a sort of "tamarin bridge" stretching across the highway. It would require tree cover so the monkeys aren't exposed to bird predators, and it must be sturdy enough to withstand wind and the movement of trucks below.

Such a bridge has never been tried before, but the association, with support from its U.S.-based partner organization, Save The Golden Lion Tamarin, has been working on creating ground-level corridors for years, planting seedlings to connect the patches of forest habitat in a golden lion tamarin reserve.

A few miles away, a team from the group Agro Jardim, which works with the Golden Lion Tamarin Association on the reforestation effort, is planting trees that will eventually be home to a small group of tamarins.

Carlos Alvarenga, a forestry engineer, is in charge of the reforestation effort here. Does he ever feel mismatched, planting saplings while cities and roads grow around him?

"It takes a big effort," Alvarenga says. "But you can't just give up now. I'm certain that this work will succeed."

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Metric Prefixes Quiz

I consider myself to be comfortable using metric units. I know the standard prefixes and how to convert between units. Having said that, I did not get a perfect score on this quiz the first time I took it. You know how you can talk yourself out of the right answer? Yeah... I did that. Let's see if you will too. You might want to review the metric prefixes or you can just be bold and take the quiz. If you score perfectly, no gloating is allowed.if(zs>0){if(zSbL250)gEI("spacer").style.height=Math.floor(e[0].height/12)+17.5+'em';else{var zIClns=[];function walkup(e){if(e.className!='entry'){if(e.nodeName=='A'||e.style.styleFloat=='right'||e.style.cssFloat=='right'||e.align=='right'||e.align=='left'||e.className=='alignright'||e.className=='alignleft')zIClns.push(e);walkup(e.parentNode)}}walkup(e[0]);if(zIClns.length){node=zIClns[zIClns.length-1];var clone=node.cloneNode(true);node.parentNode.removeChild(node);getElementsByClassName("entry",gEI("articlebody"))[0].insertBefore(clone,gEI("spacer"))}}}};zSB(2);zSbL=0

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Books of The Times: Richard Dawkins’s ‘Appetite for Wonder,’ a Memoir

This first installment reads like the work of a man who has already written abundantly about himself. He often tells stories that, he acknowledges, he has told before. He includes the texts of speeches he has made. And he puts particular emphasis on the evolution — yes, he’d approve of that word — of “The Selfish Gene,” the 1976 genetics book that established his reputation (and put the word “meme” on the map).

With the benefit of hindsight, and with a dearth of other compelling material, he wonders if “The Immortal Gene,” a title suggested to him by a London publisher, might have been better than the one he used. “I can’t now remember why I didn’t follow his advice,” he writes. “I think I should have done.”

Anyone expecting an incisive account of Mr. Dawkins’s growth as a scientist may be surprised by the meandering path he takes here. True, his lineage is impressive, and his boyhood was uncommonly adventurous, so both warrant attention. He takes his time explaining that his great-great-great-grandparents eloped more cleverly than most couples do. Henry Dawkins and Augusta Clinton made their getaway in a coach, but not before the groom-to-be had planted half a dozen decoy coaches near Augusta’s home so that her father, Sir Henry Clinton, could not prevent the marriage. As the British commander in chief in America, he could not win the Revolutionary War, either.

The family history also includes Clinton George Augustus Dawkins, son of the eloped couple, who earned his place in family lore during the Austrian bombardment of rebel Venice in 1849, when a cannonball hit his bed.

“A cannonball penetrated the bed covers and passed between his legs, but happily did him no more than superficial damage,” reads the inscription that accompanies a cannonball in Mr. Dawkins’s possession. The story may not be 100 percent true, but it does underscore this family’s staying power.

Mr. Dawkins’s forebears had scientific leanings of all kinds. Since many were posted to remote corners of the British Empire, those leanings are more exotic than most. One cousin wrote major books about the birds of Burma and Borneo. Other relatives held the post of chief conservator of the forests in India and Nepal. Another relative is credited with persuading Aldous Huxley to take mescaline and open the doors of perception. As Mr. Dawkins has already written in a brief and more obscure memoir: “For generations, sun-browned Dawkins legs have been striding in khaki shorts through the jungles of Empire.”

He himself was born in 1941 in Nairobi, Kenya. Growing up in Nyasaland (now Malawi), he led what sounds like a charmed early life. This book includes a lovely, whimsical painting, made by his mother, illustrating the family’s idyllic-looking African life, which included a pet chameleon and a pet bush baby, a squirrel-size, big-eyed mammal. Mr. Dawkins recalls his father’s bedtime stories (“often featuring a ‘Broncosaurus,’ which said ‘Tiddly-widdly-widdly’ in a high falsetto voice”) and reading about Doctor Dolittle, whose love of animals made him one of the great fairy tale naturalists.

But the tone turns sharper once this budding atheist is sent to a school where the pupils are compelled to say a good-night prayer. He says this was learned in “parrot fashion” and evolved into “garbled meaninglessness,” then adds tartly, “Quite an interesting test case in meme theory, if you happen to be interested in such things — if you are not, and don’t know what I’m talking about, skip to the next paragraph.” This is not a book that runs on charm.

The second half of “An Appetite for Wonder” follows Mr. Dawkins back to England, and into an educational system that he harshly denounces. He writes about bullying, mortifying embarrassment, sadistic punishment and an absence of critical thinking, which, by his lights, is worst of all. He still bristles at having unimaginatively been called “a very inky little boy” when forced to have an open ink pot on his desk and keep dipping a pen into it.

Mr. Dawkins’s memories briefly take him to Berkeley, Calif., where he lived long enough to protest American involvement in the Vietnam War. They finally arrive at Oxford, and to the beginning of his serious career in science. He presents detailed descriptions of some of his early experiments in animal behavior, like an analysis of newborn chicks’ pecking patterns.

Then he moves on to what appeared to be his calling, computer science and the creation of computer language. He sought computer-based methods of analyzing hierarchical patterns in nature, and the specifics of such material, like his Mutual Replaceability Cluster Analysis Program, are not for amateurs. We’re a long way from the sun-browned little boy who caught butterflies.

Mr. Dawkins treats the publication of “The Selfish Gene” as the dividing line between the first and second installments of this memoir. It’s a good place to pause, and it suggests strongly that the second volume will be heftier and more focused than this one. Mr. Dawkins’s memory for his work is much more vivid than his more personal stories. And the work has been far-ranging enough to support autobiographical study.

But, for now, we have the kindling of Mr. Dawkins’s curiosity, the basis for his unconventionality and some very odd glimpses of professorial behavior. Mr. Dawkins describes one teacher who would begin by saying, “Oh, dear” and “I can’t hold it” and “I’m going to lose my temper,” before warning his students to hide under their desks. And then the ink pots flew.

“He was a kind gentleman provoked beyond endurance — as who would not be in his profession?” writes Mr. Dawkins, himself no stranger to provocation. “Who would not be in mine?”

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[News & Analysis] Water Resources: Kenyan Find Heralds New Era in Water Prospecting

Science 20 September 2013:
Vol. 341 no. 6152 p. 1327
DOI: 10.1126/science.341.6152.1327 Water Resources Researchers have discovered five major new aquifers deep under the arid northwestern corner of Kenya, a U.N. program announced last week. The find boosts Kenya's known groundwater reserves by 17% and could be a game-changer in a nation hit hard by droughts over the last several decades. It also highlights advances in the field of water prospecting. By melding traditional geology with data from space- and ground-based sensors and powerful software, researchers are revealing hidden reservoirs in sometimes surprising places. Finding the water is just the first hurdle, however; drilling for it and managing it properly remain major challenges.

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Examples of Ionic and Covalent Bonds

If you are studying types of chemical bonding, you will need to be able to recognize compounds containing ionic bonds, those consisting of covalent bonds and compounds that contain both types of bonds. Here are some examples of the two types of bonding.

Examples of Ionic Bonds
Examples of Covalent Bonds
Compounds with Ionic and Covalent Bonds

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[News of the Week] Random Samples

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[News & Analysis] Space Exploration: India Aims a Probe at Mars—And at Earthly Prestige

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Conservative Lobbyist Derails Bipartisan 'Science Laureate' Bill

Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov The U.S. Capitol at sunrise.

Jason Reed/Reuters/Landov

No one who's been paying attention for, say, the past few decades, needs to be reminded of how extremely polarized Washington is.

So it's usually good news when Democrats and Republicans can come together on an issue, as they did recently to support the idea of creating the new honorary position of "Science Laureate of the United States."

We have had poet laureates, and they seem to have worked out well to promote poetry to the masses, haven't they? (Though I bet you can't name the current one. Me, either. Google says it's Natasha Trethewey.)

So why not a science laureate to sing the praises of scientific discovery, a science ambassador who could get more young people considering science careers?

Legislation was drafted, and it gained bipartisan sponsors. The proposal was seen as so self-evidently noncontroversial that House leadership planned to have members vote on it through the same expedited "suspension" process used for naming post offices.

If this were a movie, right about now you'd hear a loud skidding car sound, like someone had suddenly slammed the brakes. That someone would be Larry Hart, legislative director of the American Conservative Union, who happened to notice the science laureate bill on the House legislative calendar.

Hart, who back in the day was an aide on the House Science Committee, saw plenty wrong with the bill. He was troubled by how the bill "never saw the light of day" until 24 hours before it was scheduled to be speedily approved (although the bill was introduced four months ago).

And, he told me in an interview, "I found the bill to be very oddly written."

According to the bill's language, the laureate would be appointed by the president, unlike the poet laureate, who is appointed by the Librarian of Congress. The bill would also allow for the naming of as many as three laureates, whose terms could be constantly renewed, another difference from the poet laureate.

"What I couldn't understand," Hart told me, "was why [Republican] folks who constantly give speeches saying that they're upset with President Obama's appointments would give him the power for new appointments, particularly in the area of science, which he has a particular view of — in my opinion — a very politicized view of science. And his appointments in that area, on the regulatory side, have been very political."

Hart said that the administration's stance on global warming and climate science is part of what he sees as Obama's "very politicized view."

"I couldn't understand why the Republican House would take this bill up without any discussion," said Hart.

Neither could the House leadership after Hart made his objections known. The bill was pulled from the calendar and sent to committee for debate and revision.

ScienceMag.org's "Science Insider" blog quotes an unnamed aide for a House Republican co-sponsor of the bill, who says Hart is wrong in his suspicions that the bill would let Obama push a certain agenda.

But the House Republican leadership already has enough fights with its conservative base. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that House GOP leaders are trying to keep one more issue from spinning out of control.

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Dot Earth Blog: More on Population Growth and Planetary Prospects

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Administration to Press Ahead With Carbon Limits

The proposed regulations, announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year. The regulations are certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s “war on coal.”

In her speech, Ms. McCarthy unveiled the agency’s proposal to limit new gas-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt-hour and new coal plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide. Industry officials say the average advanced coal plant currently emits about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour.

“The president’s Climate Action Plan calls on federal agencies to take steady, sensible, and pragmatic steps to cut the harmful carbon pollution that fuels our changing climate, to prepare our communities for its unavoidable impacts, while continuing to provide affordable and reliable energy for all,” Ms. McCarthy said.

Opponents of the new E.P.A. rule quickly vowed to take measures to stop it. Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader who is from coal-dependent Kentucky, promised to use his legislative skills to prevent the measure.

“The president’s decision today is an escalation of the war on coal and what that really means for Kentucky families is an escalation of his war on jobs and the Kentucky economy,” Mr. McConnell said. “I will file a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act to ensure a vote to stop this devastating E.P.A. rule.”

Ms. McCarthy also announced a yearlong schedule for an environmental listening tour — a series of meetings across the country with the public, the industry and environmental groups as the agency works to establish emissions limits on existing power plants — a far more costly and controversial step. Mr. Obama has told officials he wants to see greenhouse gas limits on existing and new power plants by the time he leaves office in 2017.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said in January. But he acknowledged that “the path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.”

On Friday, Ms. McCarthy said: “We have proven time after time that setting fair Clean Air Act standards to protect public health does not cause the sky to fall. The economy does not crumble.”

She also said: “The overwhelming judgment of science tells us that climate change is real, human activities are fueling that change, and we must take action to avoid the most devastating consequences. We know this is not just about melting glaciers. Climate change — caused by carbon pollution — is one of the most significant public health threats of our time. That’s why E.P.A. has been called to action. And that’s why today’s action is so important for us to talk about.”

The limits unveiled on Friday are a slightly more relaxed standard for coal plants than the administration first proposed in April 2012. Officials said the new plan, which came after the E.P.A. received more than 2.5 million comments from the public and industry, will give coal plant operators more flexibility to meet the limits over several years.

The rules on new power plants will soon face a 60-day public comment period, likely to be followed by intensive industry and environmental lobbying and possible court challenges. Officials said the rules could be finalized by the fall of 2014.

Once the rules are in place, coal power plants will be required to limit their emissions, likely by installing technology called “carbon capture and sequestration,” which scrubs carbon dioxide from their emissions before they reach the plant smokestacks. The technology then pumps it into permanent storage underground.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 20, 2013

An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from the average advanced coal plant. It is 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour, not 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per hour.

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These Smartphone Apps Track Every Step of Your Day

"Quantified self" apps know where you are, how you got there (by foot, bike, or train), who you're with — even how well you slept last night. Ellis Hamburger, a reporter at The Verge, reviews a handful of apps that track your daily movements, such as "Human" and "Moves."

Copyright © 2013 NPR. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

JOHN DANKOSKY, HOST:

Up next, smartphone apps that track your every move. I guess the smarter your smartphone gets, the more it can learn about you, and you don't even have to take it out of your pocket. All that data adds up to what is called the quantified self, a snapshot of your life based on the steps you take, the miles you run, where you go, who you meet, even how you sleep.

So what do you think about all this? Do you use quantified self apps? Does this sound more like your personal privacy nightmare? You can call us at 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. Here to talk about it with us is Ellis Hamburger, who's a reported at the Verge here in New York. He joins us at SCIENCE FRIDAY. Ellis, welcome to the show.

ELLIS HAMBURGER: Thanks for having me.

DANKOSKY: So which one of these do you use?

HAMBURGER: I actually use a combination of a few of them, and there are a few we can talk about. Some of them have more explicit goals for you, and some of them simply track you. So, the first one we can talk about is Moves. And you open it, you install it for the first time, and then you might just forget about it. You might check it at the end of every day. But as you move around every day, as you take a bike ride, go on the subway, it records what you're doing, how fast you're moving, decides if you're in the car or on a bike, and then, at the end of the day, you can actually see how many miles you've walked, how many miles you've biked, how many calories you've burned.

DANKOSKY: So, first of all, let's just - I want to understand this. How does it know if I'm walking or biking or riding the train, or in my car?

HAMBURGER: They use a lot of signals. It's a combination of triangulation from cell towers, GPS, whether you're connected to your Wi-Fi at home or at work, and it decides how fast you're moving using a combination of those signals.

DANKOSKY: So you download this app and you put it in your pocket, and at the end of the day, what's it going to tell you? I mean, what's the report on you at the end of the day on Moves?

HAMBURGER: The interesting thing about Moves is that it provides the tools to measure yourself, but it doesn't necessarily ask you to do anything with it. So you could see how many calories you've burned or how many miles you've walked. But there's another app that just came out a few weeks ago called Human that actually has a premise, a philosophy behind it, that 30 minutes per day of any kind of activity - whether you're walking or biking or running - can dramatically decrease your risk of just about any malady you can think of. So I think a goal like that is a little more accessible.

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky, and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR. So, Human, this app, it has this very explicit goal, but it's not really giving you much more information than that. It's saying I want you to move around for 30 minutes a day, and essentially once you're done, yay, I've done it. Is that the point?

HAMBURGER: That's the point. So, the premise of Human is based on this talk by Dr. Mike Evans. It was called "23 and 1/2 Hours," and he was saying: What is the best thing you can do for your health? And his thesis was that it was 30 minutes of activity. And so Human tracks you the same way that Moves does, and at the end of the day, it says, hey, you only did 24 minutes a day. Maybe you should take a walk after dinner.

And I think the habit-making, the changing your own behavior is what can matter the most here. Maybe tomorrow, you'd get off one subway stop early just so you hit your daily 30, as they call it.

DANKOSKY: So, look, I pretty much am aware of what I'm doing every day. Why do I need to download an app to tell me what I'm doing every day?

HAMBURGER: Are you sure you know what you're doing every day?

DANKOSKY: Well, I think I know what I'm doing every day.

HAMBURGER: I thought I did.

DANKOSKY: OK.

HAMBURGER: And once I installed a couple of these apps, I realized I was only walking 17 or 18 minutes a day. And that's what was most interesting to me, is that in your effort to move closer - especially in an urban area like New York, you want to move closer to the subway for work and for at home. And I realized I was walking three minutes to the subway in the morning, three minutes at night, a couple minutes to the office. I wasn't doing anything except walking to the bathroom during the day. And it helped me realize that maybe I should get off at Union Square and walk the rest of the way home.

DANKOSKY: And you think these apps are better than some of the other devices that you can wear on your wrist or around your neck? They're - it's more convenient for you?

HAMBURGER: I think convenient is the key word. If you look at something like the Jawbone Up or the Fitbit or the Nike Fuelband, you wear them, but you also have to recharge it every night. It's one more thing to maintain, even though the batteries last pretty long. And I think for most people, they love downloading apps onto their iPhone, and they love trying them out. And having it on your phone means that there's no upkeep. It's always there. And it can hurt your battery life a little bit, but on the whole, it's easier to try out, I think, than buying a $100 gadget.

DANKOSKY: Tell us about - what is Memoto?

HAMBURGER: Memoto is a little, square camera that you attach to your lapel - and this is a little more progressive. And it takes a photo every 30 seconds. And then, at the end of the day, it uploads the photos to the cloud, where you can review them on your computer or on your phone and see a 30-minute snapshot of every time you were meeting with somebody in the bathroom, at lunch, what have you. And the goals of that one are a little more abstract. It's kind of getting a window into recording everything you do and trying to remember all of it.

DANKOSKY: So whether it's an app or a device that's taking pictures of you all the time, or one that's tracking your every movement, I would guess that there are a lot of people out there - perhaps myself included - who might think, well, this is pretty scary. I'm uploading this into the cloud. Somebody's got this information. I mean, what if my insurance company gets it? What if my boss gets it? I mean, what are the concerns here?

HAMBURGER: I think there are definitely concerns. The utmost importance to most of these companies is keeping your data private. And a lot of these guys are on Amazon servers, the same way that big companies like Dropbox are. So this is industry-level. This is - sorry, government-level, like, encryption. And so you can worry about that, but I think that the benefits are greater.

If you look at some of what some of these companies are doing, let's say Foursquare, which tracks the places that people go, there is so much to learn by all of this anonymized data - if we all decide to share it - about our health. That was one of the things that I learned when I was writing about Human, is that there have been so few long-term studies about something as simple as moving every day, and some of the ones they were citing were in the '90s from a company in China that was trying to create healthier lives for their workers. And they're really...

DANKOSKY: Ah, but whenever somebody says I want to create a healthier life for you, I guess I'm worried about what they're doing - not that somebody's going to steal my data, but that the company I'm giving it to is going to do something I don't want them to do with it.

HAMBURGER: Certainly a cause for concern, but I think that when you look at the level of transparency that some of these apps and gadgets give you, you can hopefully become healthier and make some changes in your life. But you're right. In the wrong hands, who knows what could happen?

DANKOSKY: A last thing for you: Is there anything new that's coming out, anymore of this quantified self that we should be looking for?

HAMBURGER: I think something that people don't always consider quantified self, but that's going to become more pervasive in our society is when you look at something like Google Glass, where you have the ability - not yet, because of the constraints of the battery on Google Glass. But some day, we're going to be able to record every minute of our lives. And I think people need to start thinking about what that means for them, and how that's going to affect their life and how they live it and what type of changes they might make based on what they can learn. Or maybe it's just sharing with your kids, here's what it was like when I was walking around every day.

DANKOSKY: Well, we've run out of time. I'm going to go check to see how many calories I've burned during this interview. Thank you so much for joining us, Ellis Hamburger.

HAMBURGER: Thanks for having me, John.

DANKOSKY: Ellis Hamburger is a reporter at The Verge, here in New York.

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Letters: Science Education for All

Re “Learning What Works” (Sept. 3): While bringing more students to STEM fields is important, it cannot and should not be the major goal. All students benefit from learning science, especially science as process rather than rote memorization. Understanding and employing the critical thinking skills involved in the scientific method can help inform anyone’s life.

Furthermore, we are all consumers of science. We use medicines, we vote for legislators who decide which scientific endeavors get government funding. We face issues like climate change, antibiotic resistance and genetically modified organisms. Don’t all of us deserve to really understand what we are debating?

Jennifer Zinman

Glen Ridge, N.J.

TO THE EDITOR:

I heartily agree with Salman Khan’s desire to position creativity and invention as the foci of STEM courses. To begin to address how we can do this, there are several critical success factors to consider. The most important of these is failure, since it is critical to figuring things out about the natural world or to creating a new design. Repeatedly reiterating the process used while making small changes, approaching the problem from multiple perspectives, or working backwards from the desired outcome — these are examples of strategies that we use in a wide variety of contexts, including STEM exploration.

Our assessment of students needs to reward thoughtful detours and dead-ends if we want to encourage a culture of creativity and innovation in STEM classrooms.

Koshi Dhingra

Dallas

The writer is the former assistant director of the Science and Engineering Education Center at the University of Texas, Dallas.

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Mama Mia, Mama Mia! A Canadian Bohemian Rhapsodizes About String Theory

Let me confess right off that I didn't understand anything Tim Blais sings in this video, except that it's hard — very hard — erase-the-blackboard-constantly-in-frustration hard — to find a mathematical theory that explains everything in the universe. That's OK. I'm not a physicist, so this isn't my problem. But when Tim produces an Albert Einstein sock puppet having a high-tenor tantrum, I found myself doing a little happy dance.

With no apologies to Queen, this is Tim's "A Capella Science" take on String Theory set to Bohemian Rhapsody. He calls it "Bohemian Gravity." He's 23. He wrote this. He sang this. He designed this. He's amazing.

A year ago Tim's college paper, The McGill Daily, sat him down and asked "who are you?" He says he grew up not too far from Montreal, that he's been a science nerd all his life, or for as much of it as he can remember. When he was about 3 or 4, he says ...

a kid in my preschool introduced me to "Bill Nye The Science Guy," which became the only TV I watched for about six years. After kindergarten I didn't go to school until Grade 10, but was homeschooled by my parents. We had a very multifaceted way of learning [...] that I think allowed me to see the big picture of things without getting bogged down in the horrible little details that are often the stumbling block when you start learning something. That gave me a fascination with science that's essentially carried me through a science DEC and one-and-a-half university degrees. But my parents have always been super cool about not pressuring us kids to be anything in particular, and now to show for it they've got an emerging rock star — my brother, Tom; a dedicated speech pathologist — my sister, Mary-Jane; and me, researcher in incomprehensible physics and recently popular internet fool. I think they did alright.

Me too. And if you liked this video, you should know he's got a few others. Last year, his A Capella Science version of the Higgs boson, sung to Adele's "Rolling in the Deep" was a monster success. The McGill paper asked him if he considered himself a singer or a scientist and he answered, "I don't really know what I am. I'm a person with varied interests." I think that's kind of obvious.

Thanks to Jacquie Lowell for sending this video my way.

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Matter: New Approach to Explaining Evolution’s Big Bang

Humans have a skull, too. This and a number of other traits we share with Myllokunmingia reveal it to be one of the oldest, most primitive vertebrates yet found. It is, in other words, a hint of where we came from.

Myllokunmingia emerged during one of the most important phases in the history of life, an evolutionary boom known as the Cambrian explosion (named for the geological period when it took place). Over the course of about 20 million years, the oldest known fossils of most of the major groups of living animals appear, revealing a rapid diversification of life that led directly to humans.

“It’s rapid in geological terms, but it’s probably not rapid to anyone who’s not a geologist,” said Paul Smith, the director of the Oxford Museum of Natural History.

By some estimates, the first animals evolved about 750 million years ago. But it’s not until around 520 million years ago that many major groups of living animals left behind their first fossils. For decades, scientists have searched for the trigger that set in motion this riot of diversity in the animal kingdom.

Recently, Dr. Smith and his colleague David Harper of the University of Durham took a look at the hypotheses that have been offered about what caused the Cambrian explosion. “It became apparent just how many hypotheses there were out there,” Dr. Harper said. “Thirty-plus over the past 10 years.”

The scientists found that many of those explanations had boiled the cause down to just one trigger. Geologists suggested geological causes. Ecologists proposed ecological ones. Many of those ideas have merit, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue in a commentary in this week’s Science, but it’s a mistake to search for a single cause. They propose that a tangled web of factors and feedbacks were responsible for evolution’s big bang.

Long before the Cambrian explosion, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, one lineage of animals had already evolved the genetic capacity for spectacular diversity. Known as the bilaterians, they probably looked at first like little crawling worms. They shared the Precambrian oceans with other animals, like sponges and jellyfish. During the Cambrian explosion, relatively modest changes to their genes gave rise to a spectacular range of bodies.

But those genes evolved in bilaterians tens of millions of years before the Cambrian explosion put them to the test, notes Dr. Smith. “They had the capacity,” he said, “but it hadn’t been expressed yet.”

It took a global flood to tap that capacity, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper propose. They base their proposal on a study published last year by Shanan Peters of the University of Wisconsin and Robert Gaines of Pomona College. They offered evidence that the Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks.

“There’s a big kick that correlates with the sea level rise,” Dr. Smith said of the fossil record. He and Dr. Harper propose that this kick happened thanks to the new habitats created by the sea level rise. These shallow coastal habitats were bathed in sunlight and nourished with eroding nutrients like phosphates. Animals colonized these new fertile habitats, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, and evolved to take up new ecological niches.

But these great floods also poisoned the ocean. The erosion of the coastlines released calcium, which can be toxic to cells. In order to survive, animals had to evolve ways to rid themselves of the poison. One solution may have been to pack the calcium into crystals, which eventually evolved into shells, bones, and other hard tissues. Dr. Smith doesn’t think it’s a coincidence that several different lineages of bilaterians evolved hard tissues during the Cambrian explosion, and not sooner.

These shells and other hard tissues sped up animal evolution even more. Predators could grow hard claws and jaws for killing prey, and their prey could evolve hard shells and spines to defend themselves. Animals became locked in an evolutionary arms race.

This new ecological food web grew even more complex. Bigger predators evolved that could eat smaller predators. Meanwhile, some bilaterians burrowed into the sea floor for the first time, allowing oxygen-rich seawater to flow into the sediment. Those first burrowers profoundly transformed the world’s oceans, creating yet another habitat that other oxygen-breathing animals could also invade. “That drives the diversification onward,” said Dr. Smith.

Kevin Peterson, a biologist at Dartmouth, praised Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper for pointing to the right way to study the Cambrian explosion. “We are long past identifying single triggers for the event,” he said. Dr. Peters agreed that taking a holistic view of the Cambrian explosion would lead to a better understanding of it. “It’ll be a fun next decade,” he predicted.

But Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol does not think the links Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper use in their hypothesis are tight enough yet. Questions still remain, for example, about how long vertebrates and other animals groups already existed before they left behind fossils like Myllokunmingia. If animals diversified earlier, then scientists will need to look at earlier causes.

“Timing,” said Dr. Donoghue, “is everything.”

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Candace Pert, 67, Explorer of the Brain, Dies

The cause was cardiac arrest, said her sister, Deane Beebe.

Dr. Pert was working at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the 1970s when a team she was on found one of the most sought-after objects in brain research: the receptor in the brain that opiates like morphine fit into, like a key in a lock, allowing the drug’s effects to work.

The discovery of the opioid receptor would, in 1978, earn the coveted Albert Lasker Award, often a precursor to the Nobel Prize. The award went to Solomon H. Snyder, who headed the lab. Neither Dr. Pert nor any of the other lab assistants was cited.

Such omissions are common in the world of science; the graduate student in the lab rarely gets credit beyond being the first name on the papers describing the research. But Dr. Pert did something unusual: she protested, sending a letter to the head of the foundation that awards the prize, saying she had “played a key role in initiating the research and following it up” and was “angry and upset to be excluded.”

Her letter caused a sensation in the field. Some saw her exclusion as an example of the burdens and barriers women face in science careers.

In a 1979 article about Dr. Pert in the The Washington Post, Dr. Snyder, who had lauded Dr. Pert’s contributions in his Lasker acceptance speech, argued that “that’s the way the game is played,” adding that today’s graduate students will be tomorrow’s lab chiefs, and that “when they have students, it will be the same.”

The two later reconciled. In an e-mail interview on Wednesday, Dr. Snyder, now a professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, called Dr. Pert “one of the most creative, innovative graduate students I had ever mentored.”

Dr. Pert continued her career at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she continued to do pioneering work on receptors and the peptides that correspond to them, coming to conclusions that steered her toward alternative medicine.

She became a leading proponent of the unity of mind and body, and the ability of emotions to affect health. When Bill Moyers, in a 1993 PBS special, “Healing and the Mind,” asked her, “Are you saying that the mind talks to the body, so to speak, through these neuropeptides?” she answered, “Why are you making the mind outside of the body?” She was also featured prominently in the 2004 film “What the #$*! Do We Know!?” which attempted to bridge science and spirituality.

In her best-known book, “Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine,” published in 1997, Dr. Pert advocated a more holistic approach to understanding health.

“I’ve come to believe that virtually all illness, if not psychosomatic in foundation, has a definite psychosomatic component,” she wrote. The “molecules of emotion,” she argued, “run every system in our body,” creating a “bodymind’s intelligence” that is “wise enough to seek wellness” without a great deal of high-tech medical intervention.

The author Deepak Chopra, who wrote the foreword to “Molecules of Emotion,” called the book a “landmark in our understanding of the mind body connection.” Dr. Miles Herkenham, a former colleague at the National Institute of Mental Health, said that it may seem odd to an outside observer that a scientist of Dr. Pert’s training would go into what he called the “squishy world” of alternative medicine. But “the common theme that underlies all of her work is her knowledge as a pharmacologist of ligands — peptides — and how they work through receptors,” he said, adding, “She followed her own passions.”

Her work led Dr. Pert to team up with her husband, Dr. Michael Ruff, an immunologist, to investigate another protein, peptide T. They hoped that it would be effective in fighting H.I.V. by blocking the entry of the virus into cells. While the drug showed promise, it has not led to a successful treatment. Dr. Pert published more than 250 scientific papers on peptides.

In more recent years she and Dr. Ruff founded a company, Rapid Pharmaceuticals, that is developing peptide-based drugs to treat Alzheimer’s, cardiovascular disease and other diseases by fighting the inflammation that underlies many chronic medical conditions.

Candace Beebe was born on June 26, 1946, in Manhattan. Her father, Robert, was a commercial artist, and her mother, Mildred, worked in the courts as a clerk typist. She graduated with a degree in biology from Bryn Mawr College and earned a doctorate in pharmacology from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She also became interested in psychology but ultimately sought a more solid scientific basis for behavior.

“I wanted there to be a field that looked for the biochemical substrate of psychology,” she said. “That field didn’t really exist at the time. But I began to search for it, and it began to exist.”

Her first marriage, to Agu Pert, a fellow researcher, ended in divorce; they had three children, Brandon, Evan and Vanessa Pert Haneberg, all of whom survive her. Besides her sister, Ms. Beebe, and Dr. Ruff, she is survived by a grandson.

One of the friends scheduled to speak at Dr. Pert’s memorial service, planned for late October, is Solomon Snyder.

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Life on Mars? Well, Maybe Not

The conclusion, published in the journal Science, comes from the fact that Curiosity has been looking for methane, a gas that is considered a possible calling card of microbes, and has so far found none of it. While the absence of methane does not rule out the possibility of present-day life on Mars — there are plenty of microbes, on Earth at least, that do not produce methane — it does return the idea to the realm of pure speculation without any hopeful data to back it up.

The history of human fascination with the possibility of life on Mars is rich, encompassing myriad works of science fiction, Percival Lowell’s quixotic efforts to map what turned out to be imaginary canals, Orson Welles’s panic-inducing 1938 “War of the Worlds” radio play, and of course Bugs Bunny’s nemesis, Marvin the Martian.

But Marvin apparently did not emit enough methane for Curiosity’s sensitive instruments to find him.

“You don’t have direct evidence that there is microbial process going on,” said Sushil K. Atreya, a professor of atmospheric and space science at the University of Michigan and a member of the science team.

But NASA scientists are going strictly by their data, and they are leery about drawing broader implications to the question once posed by David Bowie, “Is there life on Mars?” John P. Grotzinger, the project scientist for the Curiosity mission, would go only so far as to say that the lack of this gas “does diminish” the possibility of methane-exhaling creatures going about their business on Mars.

“It would have been great if we got methane,” Dr. Atreya said. “It just isn’t there.”

Curiosity, which has been trundling across the planet for a little over a year, made measurements from Martian spring to late summer, coming up empty for methane.

Scientists have long thought that Mars, warm and wet in its early years, could have been hospitable for life, and the new findings do not mean that it was not. But that was about three and a half billion years ago. Methane molecules break apart over a few centuries — victims of the Sun’s ultraviolet light and of chemical reactions in the atmosphere — so any methane in the air from primordial times would have disappeared long ago.

That is why reports of huge plumes of methane rising over Mars in 2003 fueled fresh hopes for Martian microbes. Those findings, based on data from telescopes on Earth and a spacecraft orbiting Mars, set off a surge of speculation and scientific interest.

On Earth, most of the methane comes from micro-organisms known as methanogens, but the gas is also produced without living organisms, in hydrothermal vents. Either possibility would be a surprising result for Mars.

After the 2003 methane readings, “a lot people got excited and started working on it,” said Christopher R. Webster of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the lead author of the paper in Science. “It was a very important result, because of the magnitude of methane.” The fresh data from Curiosity brings the earlier claims into question.

Not everyone is daunted. Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society, a nonprofit group dedicated to the planet’s exploration and settlement, said he was still convinced that Martian life was waiting to be discovered in underground aquifers.

“If it had found methane, that would have been killer,” Dr. Zubrin said, referring to Curiosity. “Yes, it’s disappointing in that we didn’t get a pony for Christmas. But it doesn’t mean there aren’t ponies out there.”

One of the scientists who found the methane plumes in 2003, Michael J. Mumma, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in an interview this week he was certain that his earlier measurements were still valid. He said he now believed that methane on Mars was episodic — released in large plumes and then quickly destroyed. He suggested, half-jokingly, that there could be huge colonies of methane-eating microbes on Mars that eliminated the gas from the air.

Dr. Mumma acknowledged that he could not identify any phenomena that would explain why methane plumes spurted out that year but not more recently, or how methane could be destroyed much more quickly on Mars than on Earth.

“Mars may not be operating the same way,” he said. “It’s a puzzle.”

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Can Mass Transit Solve City Sprawl?

Commuters in Los Angeles spend some 60 hours a year stuck in traffic. But that could change, some experts say, as the city ramps up its mass transit. Guest host John Dankosky talks with a panel of city planners about how to add mass transit to L.A. and other urban areas — and get people to ride it.

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JOHN DANKOSKY, HOST:

Commuters in Los Angeles spend about 60 hours a year stuck in traffic. In D.C., San Francisco, New York and a lot of other American cities, it's not much different. Now, that is a lot of time to catch up on your SCIENCE FRIDAY podcasts, of course, but wouldn't you rather be home already, out of the gridlock? As the congestion gets worse and worse, cities are turning to mass transit. But how do you transform a city built for cars into one where commuting by bus and train is just as common?

That's what we're going to be talking about this hour: bringing mass transit to your city. Have you already switched from morning drive to metro ride? Give us a call. Tell us what's happening where you live: 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. Yonah Freemark is an associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago. He's also the writer of the Transport Politic blog. He joins us from WBEZ. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY, Mr. Freemark.

YONAH FREEMARK: Thanks for having me.

DANKOSKY: Stefanos Polyzoides is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He's also an architect at Moule and Polyzoides in Pasadena, California, and he joins us from KPCC today. Welcome to SCIENCE FRIDAY.

STEFANOS POLYZOIDES: Thank you, John.

DANKOSKY: And Ian Carlton's a doctoral candidate in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. He was also an expert consultant on the mayor's Transit Oriented Development Cabinet in L.A. Welcome, Ian Carlton.

IAN CARLTON: Pleasure to join you.

DANKOSKY: We're going to start with you, Yonah Freemark. And the big buzzword when we talk about mass transit planning today is transit-oriented development. Can you explain what it is?

FREEMARK: Yeah, the general idea behind transit-oriented development - which we sometimes call TOD - is that we have these assets. We have these built assets in the form of frequently running rail and bus lines in many of the cities around the country, and some cities like Los Angeles are building more lines. But in order to attract people onto those systems, we have to create new developments, new housing and offices and retail spaces that are located right around the stations, so that people have an incentive to walk to the transit lines and take them every day. And that's what we call transit-oriented development.

DANKOSKY: Now, when we come back from a break, we're going to talk more about how TOD, transit-oriented development, is happening in L.A. Of course, you can join us: 1-800-989-8255 here on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

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DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY, from NPR.

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DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky. We're talking this hour about adding mass transit to urban areas like L.A. What's the best way to do it, and how do you actually get people to ride it? If you want to join us: 1-800-989-8255, 1-800-989-TALK. We're joined by Yonah Freemark, Stefanos Polyzoides and Ian Carlton. Stefanos, you designed the Delmar Gold Line Station in Pasadena, California, what many people consider to be the prime example of the transit-oriented development we were talking about just before our break. Tell us a bit more about what this station is.

POLYZOIDES: It is a project that is located just south of the center of Old Pasadena. It involves a train station on the Gold Line, and its program is 347 units of housing, and about 15,000 square feet of retail. And underneath it, there are approximately 1,200 cars, cars for the residents, cars for commuters who come to this point from other places in the region, and also cars for people who want to reach Old Pasadena and park there on a park-once basis.

DANKOSKY: So, it's interesting. There are spaces for all these cars. I thought the whole idea behind transit-oriented development is we were going to try to eliminate the cars. Why is there so much parking there?

POLYZOIDES: Well, because this is one of the prime nodes for parking in Old Pasadena. But the idea of transit-oriented development is not to eliminate parking. It's to seriously reduce it, so that, for instance, a family could live in a location like this, in a building like this and have a choice of having or not having a car. And if they would use a car to commute to a location which is not accessible by rail, somebody in their family might be able to use it to get, say, to downtown or to some other place it is.

And, of course, evenings and weekends, they could walk to all kinds of destinations in the immediate commercial districts.

DANKOSKY: Yonah Freemark, could you pick up on that a little bit, this idea of how cars integrate into transit-oriented development? It's not really about eliminating the car, but certainly it's about giving people other options to get around, mass transit options that aren't just hopping in your car all the time.

FREEMARK: Right. I think, at heart, the idea behind transit-oriented development is that we're giving people another choice. Effectively, in most of U.S. developments since the 1950s, we've built all these suburban areas and often even urban areas with no access to strong mass transit options. In other words, people have to drive to be able to get around. With TOD, we're talking about creating communities where it's easy to walk around, and therefore easy to jump on the train or bus that's available frequently into and out of the community.

DANKOSKY: Ian Carlton, now, you worked on the transit report for former L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. What was the take-home idea there? Do you need this sort of development that is being built in Pasadena around transit to actually make this successful, in your mind?

CARLTON: Well, to make transit successful for the transit agency, they need riders for the city. They need to achieve the vision that they hope to see. And with the city of L.A., we stepped away from the concept of transit-oriented development and began to think more about transit orientation more broadly. We produced a list of 200 tactics that the city could begin to implement to bring about more transit orientation in their city. And we found that only about 10 percent of them are related to new development.

Only 30 percent of the tactics that the city of L.A. suggested that we found in their own policies, that we found in best-practice case studies from around the world, only 30 percent of those were related to the physical planning and the planning department within the city of L.A., which is sort of the world that Stefanos lives in, and building new buildings.

DANKOSKY: Are developers resistant to building in certain places? Are they somewhat resistant, do you think Ian, to the idea of building around a brand new train station, say?

CARLTON: Absolutely not. Developers are resistant to losing money. And I would say if they can make money building around transit, they certainly will. I think what we face in the United States is that we are building transit for many reasons. And building TOD, or building new buildings around transit, is but one of many objectives that we have for building our transit systems.

Therefore, we often locate our transit stations in places that are already built up, that are low-income neighborhoods where it's difficult to make a project pencil. A developer might lose money if they were to build something there. We even build our transit along freight rail lines, and for good reason. It's inexpensive long, linear corridors that are available in built-up cities. But those aren't the best places for a developer to come in and make money. So they may be reluctant to do so.

Therefore, we've focused a lot of our energy on subsidizing development and focusing our energy on putting affordable housing - which is subsidized development - near these transit nodes, so that those citizens can be served by this amenity of transit.

DANKOSKY: Stefanos, of course, L.A. is well-known for its car culture, but it has lots of small urban centers. It's actually a place that's very, very ripe for connecting with transit, right?

POLYZOIDES: I think the beginning of the urbanization of Southern California was based on the Transcontinental Railroad, so that in Los Angeles County, where we have five million people living in the core of a region, there are 88 different cities, each one of them with its own center, with its own downtown, in effect. So that in the first 30 or 40 years of the 20th century, and as the city was evolving, transit was the key driver behind this growth. The centers were connected with each other, and people had remarkable choices moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, and from neighborhoods to districts and town centers.

And the freeway phenomenon is really a phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century to overlay the structure of the transit system. And it is a well-known fact that the transit system was destroyed in the 1960s, as the freeway system was being built, to the extent that up to about 20 years ago, the region - the Los Angeles region - was entirely dependent of the car, which is currently another case, of course, because so much more rail is being built.

DANKOSKY: What do you think about cities that are truly sprawling right now in America, places like Atlanta or Houston or Phoenix? Places that have sprawled in a much different way than L.A. has?

POLYZOIDES: It would be much more difficult to operate in a similar way there than it is in Los Angeles. Los Angeles, of course, has also the outer suburbs in the outer counties, where the same problem is very much in evidence. In places like that, introducing TOD as a strategy of augmenting existing centers, one would have to introduce it as a strategy of off-generating the centers from scratch at, of course, various densities, because TODs don't operate at one density only. They are fit to their context in terms of program.

But nonetheless, it is much easier to introduce a complex urban setting in a place where the ingredients of urbanism have been in evidence for decades. It's much more difficult to do it in a suburban setting, where one has to regenerate the setting in its entirety.

DANKOSKY: We're talking about big ideas in mass transit here on SCIENCE FRIDAY today. Maya - or Maya - is calling from Portland. Hi, there. You're on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

MAYA: Hi.

DANKOSKY: You're on the air. Go ahead.

MAYA: Oh, hi. I was just going to say that Portland has a really dense transit system, and it's partly because of what you were talking about earlier, the density in Portland. And not only that, but we've got a really well-integrated biking system. So you can get anywhere within an hour between the buses and the bikes. And we have separate maps for both the transit system and the biking system. And not only that, but we prioritize the bikes and the pedestrians over the cars.

And as more and more people have been moving to Portland over the last few years, the highway system just isn't built to accommodate that. So more and more people are turning to transit.

DANKOSKY: This is interesting, and thanks for your phone call. Yonah Freemark, this is something we've heard for years and years about Portland, about the great public transit system. And our caller is essentially saying, because so many people are riding the rails and getting around by bike, the highway system's sort of falling apart, maybe. And that means more people are riding transit.

FREEMARK: Well, I think Portland has been seen nationally as a pretty good example. There are other places that have invested tremendously in new transit lines and seen some commiserate new development. I mean, you can look at Arlington in Virginia, Cambridge in Massachusetts, Charlotte, North Carolina, and even Phoenix and Houston have seen some considerable new investment in projects built by the market around transit areas. Now Portland has been particularly interesting because they've worked so hard to encourage biking and walking. But Portland interestingly, has not been as successful in changing the regional mode share towards transit. Which is to say that the percentage of people commuting to work by transit in Portland has not increased nearly as much as it has in places like Arlington or Cambridge, that I mentioned before. And one reason for that is that more people are biking and walking, so they're not taking the train and they're not taking a car. But another reason is that Arlington and Cambridge have done a great job attracting jobs into areas right by transit and ultimately jobs are really the generator for, you know, people deciding to take the train or the bus to work.

DANKOSKY: What about the idea of actually taking out highways? Is this something that city planners Yonah, are thinking about to encourage more transit, you just get rid of the cars altogether?

FREEMARK: Well, the goal in any sort of city is not to say to people, you know, we don't want you to drive. It's more like we want to give you the option to take the train or bus, and we want to make it easier for you to walk or bike. Now there have been plenty of cities across the country that seen big highways built especially a longer waterfronts. Portland is one example, but also San Francisco, Milwaukee and other cities like that. Those highways that were built along the waterfront destroyed the beauty of those cities and made it more difficult in those places to walk and bike around, and to even take transit. So those cities actually went ahead and tore down their freeways. They decided not to reconstruct them. They decided to create new parks in the spaces that formerly been used by highways. And they've created a better living environment for the people who live there. And in fact, those cities have actually seen an increase in the people who choose to walk around and bike and take trains.

DANKOSKY: Hm. Now, Ian Carleton, you've said in the past that L.A., for instance, is a place that does actually have lots of public transit. But the key is to actually get people to use it. So how do you get people to decide, I want to take the bus or I want to take the train today?

CARLTON: Well, certainly we're talking about one strategy, which is to build your city around the transit system. But L.A. has many opportunities and actually, they're doing it now. They are the third largest transit system in the United States by ridership. We just don't think of them as a rail city, but they're running up a bus system that's, you know, incredible. And people in L.A. are just first of all, unaware of the transit that exists and bringing about that awareness is very important.

The next thing is making it attractive. And it's all about relative attractiveness, as Yonah was mentioning. It's more about getting people can attractive option relative to driving their car. And making transit attractive can be things such as making it safer to walk to and from, making the frequency of transit faster or more frequent. Therefore, maybe you wait less at a station and you wait less when you transfer between a bus and a train. There are other things that can really level the playing field in Los Angeles, and when I say level the playing field, level the playing field between cars and transit, so that when someone is making a decision they feel like they actually have a choice. And you can charge people for parking. You could put in more shuttles. L.A. has a great system of DASH shuttles that are typically around the employment centers and bringing people to and from transit, but expanding those shuttle systems so that you can go two miles on a shuttle from your home to a transit system. There are a lot of ways. And, as I said, you know, of the tactics that we found in L.A., 90 percent of them were not related to development. They were these other tactics that one could take to bring about more ridership and more transit orientation.

DANKOSKY: I'm John Dankosky and this is SCIENCE FRIDAY from NPR.

Now Ian, of course, one of the things though, is we've seen this all around the country. It seems as though with business commuters, trains are more attractive for some reason than buses. Do you find this to be true? Is there some way to make the bus, I don't know, sexier so people would get on it?

CARLTON: Well, there's been considerable attention paid to a new form of bus called bus rapid transit, one where you put in stations where you brand the bus, you create a line, so to speak, so that it shows up on your map. L.A. has done this with the Orange line. Other cities are pursuing this. And that idea of making a bus more like train is one way of doing it. But I think that we may be facing just a fundamental perception issue, where there are a lot of people who are incentivized to make trains more attractive than buses. For instance, those people who build these very expensive infrastructure projects.

Also, we have a history in the United States - which is incredibly unfortunate -where civil rights played out - our changes in civil rights as a person from the Southeast, I've seen this play out in our culture in the Southeast, where buses are something that have become associated with that civil rights movement and we still hold onto these negative opinions that are race-based, class-based about buses and we really need to move past that for buses to be an attractive option.

DANKOSKY: Steve is on the line from Orlando, Florida. Hi there, Steve. Go ahead.

STEVE: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my call.

DANKOSKY: Yeah.

STEVE: Yes. I'm in Orlando, Florida, which is considered the Los Angeles of the East. And having grown up in the Los Angeles area, I'm very familiar with what's going on there. Orlando is a little bit behind the curve as far as transportation planning is concerned. But we do have something that is being implemented right now, it'll be operational next May, and that's a system called the SunRail, in which commuters will have the option of taking on regular train tracks, park their car at strategically located train stations and commute by this SunRail train. It was demonstrated a couple of weeks ago here in Orlando and everybody was impressed. I was impressed. And even though we don't have the best bus system in the world, it's better than nothing. And yet, all these people take it, it's a good system, in my opinion, it could be better. But the SunRail system I think is going to be the forerunner of something that's going to make it even better by expanding into a city that is traditionally noted as a car culture city. And I think that it's just one step in a series of steps that we need to take nationally. I liked the comment of a lady from Portland when she said that they have their system in place and that it's, it works. People like it and they're using it.

DANKOSKY: Well, and hopefully, people will start using it. I've not heard Orlando refer to as the Los Angeles of the East before, Steve.

(LAUGHTER)

STEVE: Well, we've got Universal Studios, MGM is here. The Disney studios are here and that's why and that's why they call it that.

DANKOSKY: There you go. And a little bit of a change in car culture perhaps, as well. Steve, thank you very much for your phone call.

We've got to take a break. When we come back, lots more on urbanization, mass transit, transit-oriented development. Please stay with us.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

DANKOSKY: This is SCIENCE FRIDAY. I'm John Dankosky. We're talking this hour about mass transit and how to build it in car centric cities, like L.A. in other places with my guest. Yonah Freemark is an associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago. He's also the writer of the Transport Politic blog. Stefanos Polyzoides is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He's also an architect in Pasadena, California. And Ian Carlton is a doctoral candidate in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley, an expert consultant on the mayor's Transit-Oriented Development Cabinetin Los Angeles. You can join us at one 800-989-8255 or one 800-989-TALK.

So Stefanos, how do you think we can make a city more pedestrian and more bike friendly, like we were hearing from our friend in Portland?

POLYZOIDES: Well, I think that the possibility of building around stations is part of the story. It seems to me that in a lot of places transitory-oriented development implemented as a building or two or three. And the most important thing to think about is how to build in a manner that is neighborhood-based, that actually affects a larger number of places beyond the immediate station in such ways that people can walk to the station, can bike to the station and can, and perhaps, be brought to the station by some form of vehicle in use among a variety of people. And it is really through this process of focusing on particular places and attending to the larger picture - mix of uses, the variety of uses, the compactness of uses around walkable space, and the design of buildings in a way that generate not only buildings themselves, but also the spaces between them that attract people than to live in this new nodes and regenerate the life of not only suburban settings, but also urban settings indeed, of all possible settings, where growth can happen in cities, avoiding the conflict with established neighborhoods, which was very much the parted partner of development in the United States in the '60s and '70s and '80s, to major cities in conflict and NIMBYism.

DANKOSKY: Ian Carlton, it's all those other things that Stefanos was talking about that I think are important for us to talk about here. It's not just about where you live and where you work and getting between those two places. But it's where you shop, whether or not you can get to the grocery store, do all the other things in your life. Is that part of how this transit-oriented development needs to grow around the country, where you actually have all the things right at your fingertips, maybe within walking distance?

CARLTON: Certainly. And research has showed that there are places, new urbanist places - like Stefanos designs - that do not have transit that still allow people to walk and bike and opt not to drive. Building our cities in that way is certainly a positive thing. But we can also retrofit, so to speak, our existing environments. We can provide sidewalks. We can provide safer streets, lower speed limits. We can put some paint on the ground and build out crosswalks. And all of these things are critical to making livable environments. Transit is just one of those tools that can help bring about a more livable environment. So I certainly believe that there are many other factors that we should be looking at as we consider transit orientation broadly.

DANKOSKY: Oh, let's go to Phillip. Phillip is calling from Oakland California. Hi, there. You're on SCIENCE FRIDAY.

PHILLIP: Hi. Thanks so much for taking my call. One of the I think the major difficulties I have with how this critical mass of people using transit that will make it so that the money will be there and people will use it, is the interstitial connection between cities and those nodes. Because people, when they want to go from their town to visit a cousin in an adjacent town, inevitably need to have a car or rent a car. So one of the thoughts that I've had is that in the '50s, we put in the interstate freeway system. Those connect all the cities, most of the major cities and almost all the small cities in the United States. This has an interstitial piece of real estate that is free to place mass transit that would connect it everywhere. And as soon as people can go, hey, I want to go from San Francisco to L.A., or I want to go to Stockton, I can go to wherever the nearest interstate is, get on something and go there. As soon as that frequency occurs, the convenience, the necessity of having a car will start to go away.

And I just wondered if anybody has been approaching this. I mean, some of the things you could do is you could design - in fact, I've worked on this myself. You could design systems where the gravitational force of the mass transit where it's, you know, freeway systems were set to about 70 to 80 miles an hour. If you wanted to go 120 or so, you would rotate the rail system itself in the tracks, so that force of gravity would be perpendicular to your body's spine.

DANKOSKY: Well, I've - that is one that I've not actually heard about. Something, Yonah Freemark - thank you very much for the phone call. Something I have heard about, Yonah, is using these interstate systems. And in building all these rights of way, how much are we looking into doing this right now?

FREEMARK: Well, I think there are two ways of thinking about this. One is whether or not we want to invest in improving the transportation links between our cities, and I think certainly the answer to that must be yes. But, unfortunately, we've seen considerable opposition to making those kind of investments from, quite honestly, the Republican Party over the past four years.

President Obama has been a big advocate of increased investment in inner-city rail, some of which might go on corridors that parallel interstate highways, but Republicans have gone out of their way to make that impossible. Now, when it comes to using interstate highways for transportation within metropolitan areas, in general, I think we should steer away from that, because when you think about it, nobody wants to get off at a station that's located in the middle of a highway, and the reasons for that are obvious.

You don't want to be standing in the middle of a highway waiting for a train. You don't want to be walking over a bridge on top of a highway to get to that train. And if you want to increase real development around stations, you probably don't want to build the corridors in the middle of the highway.

DANKOSKY: So, Stefanos, last thing for you: These interstate highways that we're talking about that gave rise to the car culture, gave rise to all of this suburban sprawl, one of the things that's happened over the course of the last 50 years or so is a lot of people like these suburbs. If, in a push for more density, how do we change people's minds enough to get them to want to buy in dense urban hubs if they've got their little backyard and everything that they like already?

POLYZOIDES: I don't think transit-oriented development is a one-shoe-fits-all recipe. In fact, where trams and trains and heavy rails stop - because there are all kinds of different modes that one can consider when thinking about transit-oriented development. Where they stop, there is always a context. Sometimes this context is a very dense urban center, like in downtown Los Angeles. Sometimes there it is regional subsidy centers, like in Pasadena. Sometimes they stop in neighborhoods, and some - that are urban and relatively dense. And sometimes they stop in neighborhoods that are not dense at all. And I think the idea of developing these nodes, developing them at the general quality and character of what is there in place, and changing them marginally in such a way so that they are not - they're not perceived as being of a kind that doesn't fit their current condition in play.

So that people living in those other suburbs or in the center cities can make appropriate choices and choose to use the train, because their way of life is fully accommodated by not only the single two or three or four buildings around the station, but their neighborhoods as a whole, wherever these neighborhoods may be.

DANKOSKY: Stefanos Polyzoides is a founding member of the Congress for the New Urbanism. He's also an architect at Moule and Polyzoides in Pasadena, California. Thank you so much for joining us.

POLYZOIDES: Thank you for having me, John, very much.

DANKOSKY: Thank you also to Yonah Freemark, an associate at the Metropolitan Planning Council in Chicago. He's also the writer of the Transport Politic Blog. Thank you, Yonah.

FREEMARK: Thanks.

DANKOSKY: And thanks to Ian Carleton, a doctoral candidate in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkley and an expert consultant on the mayor's Transit Oriented Development Cabinet in L.A. Thank you, Ian.

CARLTON: Thank you, John.

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World Briefing | Europe: Russia: Greenpeace Members Held at Arctic Oil Rig

Room for Debate asks whether the Man Booker Prize should be open to all English-language writers.

The Social Democrats saved Germany. Can they save themselves?

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The Texas Tribune: Texas, Where Oil Rules, Turns Its Eye to Energy Efficiency

As the state’s population keeps surging, demand is expected to grow, prompting leaders to think about how it will meet its long-term needs.

Now, a diverse coalition, which includes renewable energy advocates, city officials, bankers and others, is racing to institute a plan to increase energy and water efficiency upgrades that supporters say could help Texas improve its conservation record and become a model for other states.

“We’re such a big energy user,” said Kip Averitt, a former Republican state senator who is part of the effort. “That means our opportunity to be efficient is huge as well.”

Supporters acknowledge the challenge of avoiding pitfalls that have tripped up similar efforts elsewhere.

The approach, known as Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, addresses the biggest barrier to efficiency investments: initial costs that can take years to recoup. A law allowing cities and counties to set up programs passed this year with overwhelming support in the Legislature.

PACE allows the owners of commercial and industrial property to use a property tax lien to finance energy efficiency upgrades like solar panels and water recycling systems. PACE programs bill an owner through the lien and forward payments to a private lender. Under a smooth-running program, property owners pay less than what they save on their energy bills. If a property is sold, the new owner would inherit the debt — a rule meant to further reduce the risks of investment.

Tony Bennett, the president of the Texas Association of Manufacturers, said that after scrutinizing PACE, his group was backing the plan. “We don’t like subsidies,” he said. “We don’t like picking winners and losers.” But PACE is different, he said, and it would spur investments that could help his group’s 450 businesses cut costs.

Thirty other states allow similar financing plans, though most apply only to energy, unlike in Texas. Most of the states have stumbled, largely because of the objections of mortgage regulators, who feared that PACE liens would take precedence over mortgages if a homeowner defaulted. And in California, one of a few states that has had investment under PACE, observers say, a patchwork of rules across cities has discouraged investors from financing projects statewide.

“We have some baggage to overcome,” said Charlene Heydinger, a lawyer leading the Texas coalition, called Keeping PACE in Texas. But she and her colleagues say they benefit from their state’s late entry to the movement and ability to learn from others’ stumbles.

The coalition is devising what it calls “PACE in a Box,” a model it hopes many of Texas’ 254 counties and more than 1,200 cities will adopt, encouraging consistency in a state that values local power. It plans to unveil the program by the end of the year, and it is raising money to travel and make pitches to local governments.

Many PACE supporters would prefer the program to apply to home upgrades as well. But by focusing solely on commercial and industrial properties, advocates have garnered support from bankers.

In a state where industry guzzles more than half of the energy used and makes up close to 20 percent of all the industrial consumption in the United States, the narrowed focus could have an impact on energy demand.

“The scale here is so much bigger, said Doug Lewin, the executive director of the South-central Partnership for Energy Efficiency as a Resource, based in Austin. “I think Texas could be a leader in energy efficiency.”

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EPA Wants To Limit Greenhouse Gases From New Coal Power Plants

Mississippi Power's Kemper County energy facility near DeKalb, Miss., seen under construction last year. Carbon dioxide will be captured from this plant and used to stimulate production of oil from existing wells.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The Environmental Protection Agency's second stab at a proposal to set the first-ever limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants would make it impossible for companies to build the kind of coal-fired plants that have been the country's biggest source of electricity for decades.

Under the proposal, released Friday, any new plant that runs on coal would be permitted to emit only about half as much carbon dioxide as an average coal plant puts into the air today.

EPA administrator Gina McCarthy tells NPR the steps the EPA is proposing in the rule to address climate change "can actually form the basis for a sound economy, while at the same time we can begin to tackle what is essentially the most significant public health challenge of our time."

The gasifier facility, still under construction last year at the energy plant. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP The gasifier facility, still under construction last year at the energy plant. Under the EPA's proposed rules, new plants that run on coal would have to find ways to emit less than half the carbon dioxide current coal plants emit.

Rogelio V. Solis/AP

The EPA proposal aims to help the White House meet its plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions by attacking the largest single source in the United States: Power plants pump out 40 percent of the nation's greenhouse gases.

The EPA's new proposal sets a limit for future power plants of 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour for large electricity generators that are powered by natural gas. And it sets a slightly higher limit of 1,100 pounds of CO2 per megawatt hour for small natural-gas generators and for coal-fired generators.

Although the EPA says its rule is legally sound, electric utility companies are already arguing that it goes further than the law allows.

The only technologies that exist to make coal plants clean enough to meet this proposed standard, industry executives say, are far too expensive and haven't been proved at a commercial scale. Making coal plants clean enough, they say, would add hundreds of millions of dollars to the already steep price tag of coal plants.

"Our customers have to agree to foot that bill," says Nick Akins, president and CEO of American Electric Power, one of the country's largest utilities.

Akins says his customers won't go for it.

A few years ago, American Electric Power built a temporary, small-scale project that successfully captured carbon and stored it deep underground at its massive Mountaineer coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. The company proposed building a larger version at the same site and passing the costs on to consumers. But state regulators rejected that project in the end because it would increase electricity costs.

If the EPA's proposal goes forward, Akins says, companies won't build coal plants; natural gas plants are cheaper. But that strategy would make companies and their customers vulnerable to future spikes in natural gas prices, he says.

The revised proposal comes after loud complaints from industry about the first version of the proposed rule, which was released 18 months ago. That initial version proposed one standard for all power plants, regardless of their size or the type of fuel they use.

Greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity industry already have declined because economic considerations have led utility companies to start turning away from coal. These days, utilities are building natural gas plants and wind farms instead. New technologies for drilling into deep shale deposits have opened up abundant supplies of relatively low-cost natural gas. And subsidies and technological improvements have made wind farms competitive.

Electricity companies fought hard against the EPA's first proposal largely because they see it as a bad precedent for upcoming regulation of greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that already exist.

President Obama has told the EPA to come up with a proposal by June to clean up the older plants. (Even though companies are already developing fewer new coal-fired plants, they're likely to rely on many of the existing coal plants for decades to come.)

Environmental groups, too, are closely reading Friday's proposal, hunting for clues to how stringent the administration is likely to be when it turns in 2014 to developing new rules for existing plants.

"The sooner we get these protections in place," says Vickie Patton, general counsel of the Environmental Defense Fund, "the clearer the signal [will be] that new power plants must do their fair share in addressing the heavy burden of carbon pollution on human health and the environment."

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Fluorescent Light and Plasma Ball Demo

Can you light a fluorescent bulb without plugging it in? Yes! One way to do this is to use a plasma ball to supply energy to the fluorescent tube. You can control the illumination using your hand. This is a dramatic science demo... Try itif(zs>0){if(zSbL250)gEI("spacer").style.height=Math.floor(e[0].height/12)+17.5+'em';else{var zIClns=[];function walkup(e){if(e.className!='entry'){if(e.nodeName=='A'||e.style.styleFloat=='right'||e.style.cssFloat=='right'||e.align=='right'||e.align=='left'||e.className=='alignright'||e.className=='alignleft')zIClns.push(e);walkup(e.parentNode)}}walkup(e[0]);if(zIClns.length){node=zIClns[zIClns.length-1];var clone=node.cloneNode(true);node.parentNode.removeChild(node);getElementsByClassName("entry",gEI("articlebody"))[0].insertBefore(clone,gEI("spacer"))}}}};zSB(2);zSbL=0

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Administration Presses Ahead With Limits on Emissions From Power Plants

The proposed regulations, to be announced at the National Press Club by Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, are an aggressive move by Mr. Obama to bypass Congress on climate change with executive actions he promised in his inaugural address this year. The regulations are certain to be denounced by House Republicans and the industry as part of what they call the president’s “war on coal.”

In her speech, Ms. McCarthy will unveil the agency’s proposal to limit new gas-fired power plants to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per megawatt hour and new coal plants to 1,100 pounds of carbon dioxide, according to administration officials who were briefed on the agency’s plans. Industry officials say the average advanced coal plant currently emits about 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour.

“New power plants, both natural gas and coal-fired, can minimize their carbon emissions by taking advantage of modern technologies,” Ms. McCarthy will say Friday, according to her prepared remarks. “Simply put, these standards represent the cleanest standards we’ve put forth for new natural gas plants and new coal plants.”

Aides said Ms. McCarthy would also announce a yearlong schedule for an environmental listening tour — a series of meetings across the country with the public, the industry and environmental groups as the agency works to establish emissions limits on existing power plants — a far more costly and controversial step. Mr. Obama has told officials he wants to see greenhouse gas limits on both existing and new power plants by the time he leaves office in 2017.

“We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Mr. Obama said in January. But he acknowledged that “the path toward sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.”

The limits to be unveiled Friday are a slightly more relaxed standard for coal plants than the administration first proposed in April 2012. Officials said the new plan, which came after the E.P.A. received more than 2.5 million comments from the public and industry, will give coal plant operators more flexibility to meet the limits over several years.

Still, environmental groups are likely to hail the announcement as an important step in targeting the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the country. Forty percent of all energy-related emissions of greenhouse gases in 2012 came from power plants, and most of that came from coal-burning power plants, according to the Energy Information Administration.

“We are thrilled that the E.P.A. is taking this major step forward in implementing President Obama’s climate action plan,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, a senior vice president at the League of Conservation Voters, in anticipation of Ms. McCarthy’s announcement. “It’s a great day for public heath and a clean energy future.”

But Republican lawmakers and industry officials have already attacked the expected proposal. Opponents of the new rules argue that the technology to affordably reduce carbon emissions at power plants is not yet available and will drastically increase the cost of electricity.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader and a fierce advocate for coal in a coal-dependent state, said in an interview Thursday that he expected “the worst.” Although he had not seen the administration’s latest proposal, Mr. McConnell said it was likely to alarm people in his state.

“It’s a devastating blow to our state, and we’re going to fight it in every way we can,” Mr. McConnell said.

Scott Segal, the director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, which represents power companies, said the details he had heard about the rules suggested that the administration would drive investment away from a plentiful source of power.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be illegal, counterproductive from an environmental perspective and contrary to our long-range interest in creating jobs, holding down costs and producing reliable energy,” Mr. Segal said.

The rules on new power plants will soon face a 60-day public comment period, likely to be followed by intensive industry and environmental lobbying and possible court challenges. Officials said the rules could be finalized by the fall of 2014.

Once the rules are in place, coal power plants would be required to limit their emissions, likely by installing technology called “carbon capture and sequestration,” which scrubs carbon dioxide from their emissions before they reach the plant smokestacks. The technology then pumps it into permanent storage underground.

Industry representatives argue that such technology has not been proven on a large scale and would be extraordinarily expensive — and therefore in violation of provisions in the Clean Air Act that require the regulations to be adequately demonstrated and not exorbitant in cost.

“I think the agency has real problems” meeting both of those standards, Mr. Segal said.

But E.P.A. officials argue that the carbon capture technology has been used in several locations and that a review of the industry over the past year proves that owners of new coal-fired power plants can meet the new standards as required by the act.

Senator Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement that the proposed rules would begin a new era in which the United States began real efforts to control “climate-altering pollution” from the nation’s power plants.

“These rules are reasonable,” Mr. Markey said. “They are feasible. And they should soon be expanded to include standards for existing power plants.”

In one concession to the industry, officials said the agency would provide some flexibility. Plants that could install the technology within 12 months would be required to meet the 1,100-pound limit, officials said. Owners of coal plants would also have the option of phasing in the limits over a seven-year period, officials said. But those plants would be required to meet a stricter standard of 1,000 to 1,050 pounds per megawatt hours, averaged over the seven years.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 21, 2013

An article on Friday about the Obama administration’s plans to enact the first federal carbon limits on the nation’s power companies referred incorrectly to the amount of carbon dioxide emissions from the average advanced coal plant. It is 1,800 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour, not per hour.

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