At the Printer, Living Tissue

By Jeffery DelViscio, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Kriston Lewis, Abe Sater, Robin Lindsay and David CorcoranBeing Printed, Living Tissue: At labs around the world, researchers have been experimenting with bioprinting, but there are many formidable obstacles to overcome.

SAN DIEGO — Someday, perhaps, printers will revolutionize the world of medicine, churning out hearts, livers and other organs to ease transplantation shortages. For now, though, Darryl D’Lima would settle for a little bit of knee cartilage.

Darryl D'Lima, an orthopedic specialist, worked with a bioprinter in his research on cartilage at Scripps Clinic in San Diego.

Dr. D’Lima, who heads an orthopedic research lab at the Scripps Clinic here, has already made bioartificial cartilage in cow tissue, modifying an old inkjet printer to put down layer after layer of a gel containing living cells. He has also printed cartilage in tissue removed from patients who have undergone knee replacement surgery.

There is much work to do to perfect the process, get regulatory approvals and conduct clinical trials, but his eventual goal sounds like something from science fiction: to have a printer in the operating room that could custom-print new cartilage directly in the body to repair or replace tissue that is missing because of injury or arthritis.

Just as 3-D printers have gained in popularity among hobbyists and companies who use them to create everyday objects, prototypes and spare parts (and even a crude gun), there has been a rise in interest in using similar technology in medicine. Instead of the plastics or powders used in conventional 3-D printers to build an object layer by layer, so-called bioprinters print cells, usually in a liquid or gel. The goal isn’t to create a widget or a toy, but to assemble living tissue.

At labs around the world, researchers have been experimenting with bioprinting, first just to see whether it was possible to push cells through a printhead without killing them (in most cases it is), and then trying to make cartilage, bone, skin, blood vessels, small bits of liver and other tissues. There are other ways to try to “engineer” tissue — one involves creating a scaffold out of plastics or other materials and adding cells to it. In theory, at least, a bioprinter has advantages in that it can control the placement of cells and other components to mimic natural structures.

But just as the claims made for 3-D printing technology sometimes exceed the reality, the field of bioprinting has seen its share of hype. News releases, TED talks and news reports often imply that the age of print-on-demand organs is just around the corner. (Accompanying illustrations can be fanciful as well — one shows a complete heart, seemingly filled with blood, as the end product in a printer).

The reality is that, although bioprinting researchers have made great strides, there are many formidable obstacles to overcome.

“Nobody who has any credibility claims they can print organs, or believes in their heart of hearts that that will happen in the next 20 years,” said Brian Derby, a researcher at the University of Manchester in Britain who reviewed the field last year in an article in the journal Science.

For now, researchers have set their sights lower. Organovo, for instance, a San Diego company that has developed a bioprinter, is making strips of liver tissue, about 20 cells thick, that it says could be used to test drugs under development.

A lab at the Hannover Medical School in Germany is one of several experimenting with 3-D printing of skin cells; another German lab has printed sheets of heart cells that might some day be used as patches to help repair damage from heart attacks. A researcher at the University of Texas at El Paso, Thomas Boland, has developed a method to print fat tissue that may someday be used to create small implants for women who have had breast lumpectomies. Dr. Boland has also done much of the basic research on bioprinting technologies. “I think it is the future for regenerative medicine,” he said.

Dr. D’Lima acknowledges that his dream of a cartilage printer — perhaps a printhead attached to a robotic arm for precise positioning — is years away. But he thinks the project has more chance of becoming reality than some others.

“Printing a whole heart or a whole bladder is glamorous and exciting,” he said. “But cartilage might be the low-hanging fruit to get 3-D printing into the clinic.”

One reason, he said, is that cartilage is in some ways simpler than other tissues. Cells called chondrocytes sit in a matrix of fibrous collagens and other compounds secreted by the cells. As cells go, chondrocytes are relatively low maintenance — they do not need much nourishment, which simplifies the printing process.

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Bare Trees Are a Lingering Sign of Hurricane Sandy’s High Toll

Chunks of dried bark had fallen, lying on the ground like driftwood. Trees that had stood tall and strong for decades leafed into twisted creatures, part green, part scorched. Well into the height of summer, hundreds of branches remained dark and barren.

In storm-damaged neighborhoods throughout the city, where homes have been repaired, furnishings have been replaced and millions have been spent on recovery, another toll of Hurricane Sandy is becoming starkly clear. Trees, plants and shrubs are dying by the thousands.

Since the spring, the city parks department has inspected nearly 48,000 trees in flood zones, including coastal areas like south Queens, south Brooklyn, the Rockaways, Coney Island, Staten Island, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. More than 6,500 trees have shown signs of stress and abnormal leafing. Roughly 2,000 have been presumed dead. And those numbers do not include trees on private property. The city plans to take the dead trees away by the end of the year and have most of them replaced, said Liam Kavanagh, the first deputy commissioner of the parks department. The total cost is hard to estimate, said Mr. Kavanagh, until contractors’ bids come in.

The extent of the damage was unanticipated, he said. “These are trees that last year for the most part were completely healthy, normal city trees,” said Mr. Kavanagh. “To see so many of them with little or no leaf coverage, and at this time of year, it is surprising.”

On the Lower East Side, ghostly branches arch over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. In nearby East River Park, there are dozens of trees, with few or no leaves, some seemingly with only a single strand of garland. One afternoon last week, a toddler played at a sprinkler, a woman read on a bench, and joggers trudged by under trees that evoked winter.

In Howard Beach, trees in full bloom stand next to lifeless ones. “It does leave a mark,” said Roger Gendron, president of the Hamilton Beach civic association. “You go down certain streets, every other tree looks half dead or dead.”

Residents in Mill Island, now a sick ward of weeping cherries, withered maples, washed-out shrubs and ailing plants, are worried about the costs to replace the trees they own, some or all of which are not covered by insurance. There is also the loss of the leafy canopies that cooled the streets, and the increased threat of falling limbs. “You had the green branches and the trees just covered the street,” said Sol Needle, president of the Mill Island Civic Association. “And who knows if they’re coming back?”

Mr. Sinesi, a 52-year-old dentist who works out of his home office on East 66th Street, has so far thrown away about a dozen bronze-colored shrubs.

The replacement plantings have already died. He has kept the evergreen that he and his father planted years ago. And he holds out hope for two towering trees in his backyard that have sprouted a few wayward leaves. “In theory, some of it is still alive,” Mr. Sinesi said. “The question is how much is still alive, and next year whether they will come back worse or better.”

For now, he said of the grim landscape, “it’s a constant reminder that we’ve still not recovered from the storm.”

Saltwater is thought to be the culprit. Salt can damage plants, said Bill Logan, a Brooklyn-based arborist, by drying out the root systems.

Why some plants survived and others did not remains a mystery. Mr. Logan says it depends on the species, and how much stress a plant was under before the storm. Where privately owned plants may be coddled, “a street tree has to fend for itself, and they’re very resilient,” he said. “Until something like this happens.”

It is hard to say which of the ailing plants and trees might recover. “We’re in the position that perhaps medical doctors were in the Civil War, we don’t have a lot of things we can do,” Mr. Logan said. “It depends how much resilience is left in them.”

The city will monitor thousands of trees through next year, giving them more time to heal before they make a decision on their condition.

“God bless, but what’s the tree population?” asked Mr. Needle, referring to the city’s plan.

Trees that are outside the flood zones, like those in parts of Mill Basin, the neighborhood adjoining Mill Island, have not been inspected. Mr. Kavanagh said that anyone with a concern about a tree should call the city information line, 311.

Sissy Lief, who had four feet of water pour into part of her home, spent about $45,000 to rebuild, she said, much of which she had to borrow from her brother.

Ms. Lief, whose husband of 43 years died last year, recently got an estimate to remove the dead shrubs and trees from her lawn. Fifteen hundred dollars. “I can’t do that,” she said, standing in her doorway overlooking the patchy lawn landscape with its carriage-shaped flower box. “The way it has been for the last year, I can’t cry no more.”

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Copper Facts Quiz

People have been living with copper for thousands of years. Ancient man pounded bits of native copper out of rocks to make tools and jewelry. Eventually we learned to smelt copper from ore and changed civilization enough to start the 'Copper Age' and we were on our way.

Today, copper is in our water pipes, house wiring, cookware and even coins. Test your knowledge of our friend copper with this fun ten question quiz.

Copper Facts Quiz

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Drain Cleaner Can Dissolve Glass

Just about everyone knows many acids are corrosive. For example, hydrofluoric acid can dissolve glass (a chemical you do not want to mess with). Did you know strong bases can be corrosive, too? An example of a base sufficiently corrosive to eat glass is sodium hydroxide (NaOH), which is a common solid drain cleaner. You can test this for yourself by setting a glass container in hot sodium hydroxide, but you need to be extremely careful. Sodium hydroxide is perfectly capable of dissolving your skin in addition to glass. Also, it reacts with other chemicals, so you have be certain you perform this project in a steel or iron container. Test the container with a magnet if you are unsure, because the other metal commonly used in pans, aluminum, reacts vigorously with sodium hydroxide.

The sodium hydroxide reacts with the silicon dioxide in glass to form sodium silicate and water:

2NaOH + SiO2 ? Na2SiO3 + H2O

Dissolving glass in molten sodium hydroxide probably won't do your pan any favors, so chances are you'll want to throw it out when you are done. Neutralize the sodium hydroxide with an acid before disposing of the pan or attempting to clean it. If you don't have access to a chemistry lab, this could be achieved with a whole lot of vinegar (weak acetic acid) or a smaller volume of muriatic acid (hydrochloric), or (since it's drain cleaner, after all), you can wash the sodium hydroxide away with lots and lots of water.

You may not be interested in destroying glassware for science, but it's still worth knowing why it is important to remove dishes from your sink if you are planning to use solid drain cleaner and why it's not a good idea to use more than the recommended amount of the product.

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Observatory: Software That Exposes Faked Photos

Using algorithms designed to sniff out suspicious shadows, computer scientists from Dartmouth and the University of California, Berkeley, say they have developed software that can reliably detect fake or altered photos.

The technique could be useful in the emerging field of photo forensics, said Hany Farid, a Dartmouth computer science professor and developer of the software. In the age of Photoshop, detecting manipulated photos is a growing priority for lawyers, journalists and people involved in law enforcement and national security.

To determine an image’s authenticity, the software uses geometric formulas to detect and analyze shadows that are invisible to the naked eye, then lines them up with a potential light source. If it cannot do so, it deems the image to be physically implausible.

Analyzing shadows is a common technique in photo forensics, said the study, being published in the September issue of ACM Transactions on Graphics. But the eye simply cannot compete with the sophistication of today’s image-manipulation software.

“Perceptual studies show that the brain is largely insensitive to gross inconsistencies in shadows,” Dr. Farid said. “That means that an analyst may not be very good at determining whether shadows are real or not. But more importantly, it means a forger may not notice when he or she places an incorrect shadow on an image.”

To demonstrate the software, the researchers ran an analysis of a picture of the 1969 moon landing. They determined that the image was not a fake. 

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This Day in Science History - August 19 - John Flamsteed

August 19th is John Flamsteed's birthday. Flamsteed was an English astronomer and the first Astronomer Royal. He was the primary force behind the construction of the Greenwich Observatory and was responsible for gathering precise measurements of nearly 3,000 star positions to aid navigators with the determination of longitude while at sea.

He used his own money to equip the observatory and perform his task of creating the star catalog. This would later cause a rift between himself and the Royal Society's president, Issac Newton. Newton wanted access to Flamsteed's data on lunar orbits for his Principia. Flamsteed did not want to release his data until it was complete but gave Newton the information with the understanding it was to be for his use only. Newton got Edmund Halley to publish Flamsteed's star catalog without his knowledge. Newton felt that any data gathered by the Royal Observatory belonged to the Royal Society and he could publish without Flamsteed's consent. Flamsteed felt the data belonged to him since he did the work with his instruments and the tables were incomplete. Flamsteed managed to collect 300 of the 400 copies of Halley's publication and publicly burned them.

Flamsteed would eventually release his tables before his death in 1719. It was later determined his tables contained a star he named 34 Tauri which would be the earliest observation of the planet Uranus. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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Crowdsourcing, for the Birds

Mr. Martinka, a retired state wildlife biologist and an avid bird-watcher, is part of the global ornithological network eBird. Several times a week he heads into the mountains to scan lakes, grasslands, even the local dump, and then reports his sightings to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, a nonprofit organization based at Cornell University.

“I see rare gulls at the dump quite frequently,” Mr. Martinka said, scanning a giant mound of bird-covered trash.

Tens of thousands of birders are now what the lab calls “biological sensors,” turning their sightings into digital data by reporting where, when and how many of which species they see. Mr. Martinka’s sighting of a dozen herons is a tiny bit of information, but such bits, gathered in the millions, provide scientists with a very big picture: perhaps the first crowdsourced, real-time view of bird populations around the world.

Birds are notoriously hard to count. While stationary sensors can measure things like carbon dioxide levels and highway traffic, it takes people to note the type and number of birds in an area. Until the advent of eBird, which began collecting daily global data in 2002, so-called one-day counts were the only method.

While counts like the Audubon Christmas Bird Count and the Breeding Bird Survey bring a lot of people together on one day to make bird observations across the country, and are scientifically valuable, they are different because they don’t provide year-round data.

And eBird’s daily view of bird movements has yielded a vast increase in data — and a revelation for scientists. The most informative product is what scientists call a heat map: a striking image of the bird sightings represented in various shades of orange according to their density, moving through space and time across black maps. Now, more than 300 species have a heat map of their own.

“As soon as the heat maps began to come out, everybody recognized this is a game changer in how we look at animal populations and their movement,” said John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab. “Really captivating imagery teaches us more effectively.”

It was long believed, for example, that the United States had just one population of orchard orioles. Heat maps showed that the sightings were separated by a gap, meaning there are not one but two genetically distinct populations.

Moreover, the network offers a powerful way to capture data that was lost in the old days. “People for generations have been accumulating an enormous amount of information about where birds are and have been,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said. “Then it got burned when they died.”

No longer: eBird has compiled 141 million reports, or bits, and the number is increasing by 40 percent a year. In May, eBird gathered a record 5.6 million new observations from 169 countries. (Mr. Martinka’s sighting of 12 herons at once, for example, is considered one species observation, or bit.)

The system also offers incentives for birders to stay involved, with apps that enable them to keep their life lists (records of the species they have seen), compare their sightings with those of friends (and rivals), and know where to look for birds they haven’t seen before.

“When you get off the plane and turn your phone on,” Dr. Fitzpatrick said, “you can find out what has been seen near you over the last seven days and ask it to filter out the birds you haven’t seen yet, so with a quick look you can add to your life list.”

The system is not without problems. Citizen scientists may not be as precise in reporting data as experienced researchers are, like the ones in the Breeding Bird Survey. Cornell has tried to solve that problem by hiring top birders to travel around the world to train people like Mr. Martinka in methodology. And 500 volunteer experts read the submissions for accuracy, rejecting about 2 percent. Rare-bird sightings get special scrutiny.

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Has Voyager 1 Left The Solar System?

This artist rendering provided by NASA shows Voyager 1 at the edge of the solar system.

AP This artist rendering provided by NASA shows Voyager 1 at the edge of the solar system.

AP

The Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 on a mission to Jupiter and Saturn. It kept on going. Today it's billions of miles from Earth, and scientists have been predicting it will soon leave the solar system.

NPR has been on Voyager watch since at least 2003, when longtime science correspondent Richard Harris provided this warning of Voyager's impending departure.

But now Marc Swisdak, a physicist at the University of Maryland, says the spacecraft may have already left. "Late July 2012 is when we think it [left]," he says.

How did we miss that? As it turns out, it wasn't entirely our fault. Researchers thought the solar system was surrounded by a clearly marked magnetic field bubble.

This NASA diagram shows the two Voyager spacecraft inside the magnetic bubble around the sun. But Marc Swisdak believes it's already crossed the heliopause into interstellar space.

NASA This NASA diagram shows the two Voyager spacecraft inside the magnetic bubble around the sun. But Marc Swisdak believes it's already crossed the heliopause into interstellar space.

NASA

"There's one at the Earth, there's one at Jupiter, Saturn — many planets have them. And so just by analogy we were expecting there to be something like that for the solar system," Swisdak says.

Scientists were waiting for Voyager to cross over the magnetic edge of our solar system and into the magnetic field of interstellar space. But in a paper in the September issue of Astrophysical Journal Letters, Swisdak and his colleagues say the magnetic fields may blend together. And so in July 2012, when Voyager crossed from the solar system into deep space, "Voyager just kept cruising along," Swisdak says. All scientists saw was a change in the field's direction.

But not everyone thinks Voyager has left. Ed Stone is NASA's chief scientist for Voyager. He thinks there is a magnetic edge to the solar system, and until Voyager sees a change in the magnetic field, it hasn't left the solar system. He's hoping that change will come in the next few years.

"I think that there is a very good chance before we run out of electrical power that we will be demonstrably in interstellar space," he says.

Until Voyager's power goes out or the magnetic field flips, the scientific debate will continue. So will Voyager's journey, Swisdak says: "Basically it's just happily heading out toward ... pretty much nowhere."

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Q&A: The Wild Past of Domestic Cats

A. A 2007 study of genes from 997 individual cats, both wild and domestic, points to common ancestors of domestic cats among the Near Eastern wildcat, Felis sylvestris lybica, one of the five subspecies of wildcat still found around the Old World.

The other subspecies are Felis silvestris silvestris, the European wildcat; Felis silvestris ornata, the Central Asian wildcat; Felis silvestris cafra, the sub-Saharan African wildcat; and Felis silvestris bieti, the Chinese desert cat. Domestic cats and feral domestic cats can still interbreed with wild subspecies.

The domestic cats’ genetic profiles most closely resembled those of the Near Eastern wildcat, the study found. The authors theorized that domestication occurred in the region where these cats are still found and coincided with the emergence of agriculture there and the need for rodent control for stored grain.

The article, published in the journal Science, said that the domestic cats in the study shared at least five matriarchal lineages, as traced by mitochondrial DNA. The earliest evidence found of cats living with humans was a cat burial in Cyprus from about 9,500 years ago, reported in 2004.

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This Day in Science History - August 20 - Werner Forssmann

August 20th is Werner Forssmann's birthday. He was a German physician who first inserted a catheter into a person directly into the heart. He was also the first person to have this procedure done. As an intern in cardiology he believed drugs could be administered directly to the heart with a catheter without killing the patient. To prove it could be done, he inserted a catheter in his own antecubital vein and, catheter dangling from his arm, proceeded to climb two flights of stairs to get an x-ray to document the catheter's position in his right atrium.

This stunt earned him the ire of his superiors and he faced disciplinary action and changed his internship to urology. During World War II, he served in the German army as a doctor until he was captured and sat out the war in a prisoner of war camp. After the war, he worked as a lumberjack and country doctor until in 1956 he was surprised to receive part of the 1956 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his medical school "stunt".

Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

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Why Carbon Dioxide Isn't an Organic Compound

If organic chemistry is the study of carbon, then why isn't carbon dioxide considered to be an organic compound? The answer is because organic molecules don't just contain carbon. They contain hydrocarbons or carbon bonded to hydrogen. The C-H bond has a lower bond energy than the carbon-oxygen bond in carbon dioxide, making carbon dioxide more stable/less reactive than the typical organic compound. So, when you're determining whether a carbon compound is organic or not, look to see whether it contains hydrogen in addition to carbon and whether the carbon is bonded to the hydrogen. Make sense?

Intro to Organic Chemistry | List of Organic Compounds

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How One Plus One Became Everything: A Puzzle of Life

It's one of life's great mysteries ...

Four billion years ago, or thereabouts, organic chemicals in the sea somehow spun themselves into little homes, with insides and outsides. We call them cells.

They did this in different ways, but always keeping their insides in, protected from the outside world ...

... surrounded by walls or skins of different types ...

... but letting in essentials, nutrients. Some even learned to eat sunshine, capturing energy ...

... which gave them a pulse of their own ...

... so they could move ...

.... and glow ...

Over time, they became more complicated ...

But though all this began 4 billion years ago, for some reason, and nobody knows why, all these cells, billions, trillions of them, didn't do the next obvious thing. They didn't link up.

It seems so simple. There's one of you. Why not join with another? Multicellular life has so many advantages; it not only makes you bigger and stronger, it allows you to do several things at once, complicated things like seeing or swimming or ... eventually, thinking and loving.

"More complexity was possible," writes Richard Fortey in his classic book Life, but for a puzzlingly long time — more than 70 percent of life's history on earth, all living things did was stay alone and divide. Why did it take so long for 1 plus 1 to begin? Why did it start? What changed?

The truth is, we don't know.

The mystery persists.

I asked digital artist Paolo Ceric to let me appropriate his elegant gifs for this essay. Paolo is currently a student in Zagreb, studying information processing at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing in Croatia and if you go to his blog, Patakk, you can see a full bouquet of his latest creations. Some of them — the ones I use here to talk about biology — are his invented forms elegantly looped; he's also got some that spring out of nowhere, others that play with already existing images, making them shudder, scramble, break apart. He says he's relatively new to digital art and animation, mostly self-taught it seems, and feeling his way, but with every month, he just gets better and better and better.

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What's My Real Cancer Risk? When Online Calculators Don't Compute

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Dot Earth Blog: A Closer Look at the Technical and Behavioral Barriers to Action on Global Warming

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Printing Out a Biological Machine

Part Gel, Part Muscle: Researchers at the University of Illinois have created tiny biological machines called "biobots" using heart cells from a rat and gel, merged by a 3-D printer.

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Incredibly Shrinking Avocados: Why This Year's Fruit Are So Tiny

We found lots of avocados being sold six or 10 to a $1 bag in the San Francisco area. Some weighed less than 3 ounces.

Alastair Bland for NPR We found lots of avocados being sold six or 10 to a $1 bag in the San Francisco area. Some weighed less than 3 ounces.

Alastair Bland for NPR

What's thick-skinned and leathery, about the size of an egg, essential for guacamole and sold eight for a dollar?

No, not limes. Hass avocados. This year, anyway. These pear-sized fruits usually weigh half a pound or more. In the summer of 2013, though, hundreds of thousands of trees in Southern California are sagging with the tiniest Hass avocados in local memory — some just the size of a golf ball.

The main reason for the lemon-sized fruits, sources say, is a very unusual growing year that consisted of low winter rainfall in early 2012 (avocados spend more than a full year developing on the tree), erratic bee activity during the late spring bloom period, and lots of unseasonably cool and cloudy weather in the year since.

"I can't ever remember a season when all the avocados were this small, and that's over 30 years in the business," says Charley Wolk, a farmer with orchards in San Diego and Riverside counties. He cites a lack of rain and late pollination back in the spring of 2012 as main factors in the little avocados.

By most accounts, the fruits are about 30 percent smaller than usual. "That means less per pound wholesale," Wolk says.

Avocados larger or smaller than what is considered normal are generally less attractive to consumers, he says, and, therefore, command less money per pound. He says about 8 ounces is the optimal — and average — weight of a California Hass. A 25-pound case of such fruits usually draws $1.20 per pound, according to Wolk. With each ounce less in average fruit size, the per-pound rate can drop by 30 cents, he says.

But the positive trade-off is that this year's crop consists of more individual fruits than usual and, in fact, will probably weigh in at more than usual. Wolk says a half-billion pounds of fruit are expected by the end of October. Most years, the California avocado harvest — 95 percent of which is of the Hass variety — tips the scales at around 400 million pounds.

Gary Bender, a University of California avocado specialist and farm adviser in San Diego County, says that most years, several months after pollination, high July temperatures cause many fruits to drop off the branches. That didn't occur in the summer of 2012. The resulting abundance of individual fruits on each tree, combined with low rainfall, cool temperatures and sluggish photosynthesizing, has likely caused the stunting. Bender says that in 29 years on the job he has not seen such tiny avocados as those being picked this year.

Several growers told The Salt that 2013's avocados are weighing mostly 5 to 6 ounces — but that could be a generous overestimate. We collected avocados at several randomly selected grocery stores in San Francisco, and at each location — all independent, Asian-American owned shops — we found numerous avocados, being sold six or 10 to a $1 bag, that weighed in at less than 3 ounces, and several less than 2.

"That's just ridiculous," Bender notes.

This season's avocados are the smallest in memory. We found some that were as tiny as 47 grams.

Alastair Bland/for NPR This season's avocados are the smallest in memory. We found some that were as tiny as 47 grams.

Alastair Bland/for NPR

Jim Donovan, with the Mission Produce Company, a fruit wholesaler in Oxnard, says that harvesting 2-ounce fruits is likeliest to occur toward the end of the picking season, which wraps up in the fall.

Some growers, he explains, may selectively harvest bigger avocados all season and meanwhile wait for the smaller ones to grow larger. Avocados, unlike other fruits, can continue to gain size for months until they are picked.

"But eventually the farmer can't wait any longer because the tree will drop the fruit, so they do what we call a 'strip-pick,' and take every avocado left hanging," Donovan says. These tiny fruits may draw less than half the wholesale price of normal-sized avocados. Cases of exceptionally large avocados — sometimes 14 or 16 ounces each — can also draw less per pound, he says.

Elisabeth Silva, San Diego County's agricultural crime prosecutor who deals every year in a number of avocado theft cases, says there could be foul play behind the sudden flood of tiny avos. She describes a sly method of insider theft by which harvesting crews sometimes receive orders to pick only fruits larger than a certain size.

"So, sometimes they'll put those bigger fruits in the bins and they'll skim off the undersized fruits for themselves and sell them on the side," Silva says. These, she adds, can get "laundered into legitimate commerce." She says that while tiny avocados, sold in unmarked bags, could very well be stolen, grocers generally have no role in, or knowledge of, such illicit activity.

Farmers and other fans of bigger avocados may get relief next year when industry experts expect this spring's relatively low number of newly set fruits to result in fewer but larger avocados. Meanwhile, the little avocados of 2013 won't hurt you a bit. Donovan at Mission Produce points out that size and price may be down, but that quality is just fine.

"If you're willing to cut 10 pieces instead of two to make your guacamole, then you've got a bargain," he says.

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The Week: Progress in Quest for a Reusable Rocket, and Teleporting Data

Developments

Engineering

A Reusable Rocket

The history of space travel is littered with disposable rockets. But the scientists at Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as SpaceX, have been working to develop one that can land safely and then be used again. In its latest test run, a 10-story rocket known as the Grasshopper lifted off and briefly flew sideways, then landed smoothly on the spot from which it came, remaining upright throughout. SpaceX is still a long way from producing a practical reusable rocket, but the one-minute flight represented a significant step forward, and made for the week’s coolest science video.

Space

Big, Fussy Eater

There is an enormous black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and, given its size, scientists have long wondered why it doesn’t grow faster and consume more than it does. Now, radio astronomers have discovered an elderly, rapidly rotating star known as a pulsar in the vicinity of the black hole, called Sagittarius A, that is providing some clues, reported Nature. By observing the pulsar’s behavior, researchers have deduced that Sagittarius A generates a surprisingly strong magnetic field that may slow its intake of stellar material.

Biology

An Evolutionary Tail

Evolution isn’t supposed to be predictable. But a common, single-tailed microbe, left alone to feed on sugar, consistently produced future generations with multiple tails that were better suited to eating and reproducing. The experiment, conducted by Joao Xavier of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, not only defies conventional wisdom, it suggests a path for disease research. The microbe in question can cause infections in the lungs, and clues to its behavior could help counter its natural defenses.

Physics

Quantum Leap

Two teams of physicists have successfully teleported tiny bits of information from one computer chip to another, reported National Geographic. The process involved two quantum bits, one on the sender side of the chip, and one on the receiving end. Because the bits were “entangled,” to use a quantum physics term, what happened to one happened to the other. So when data was written to the sender side of the chip, it would leap to the receiving side without passing through the space between. The research could potentially improve computing and encryption speeds.

Environment

A Familiar Thaw

The modern melting of the Antarctic Ice Sheet may be following a familiar pattern, says a study published in Nature. The middle of West Antarctica has warmed by about 4.4 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958, but East Antarctica has warmed barely at all. The study, based on new ice records, suggests that the same pattern played out during the thaw from Earth’s last big ice age. The ice sheet over West Antarctica started heating up 20,000 to 22,000 years ago, earlier than previously thought. But East Antarctica, which was higher and colder, was in a deep freeze until 18,000 years ago.

Coming Up

Astronomy

New Careers in Space

NASA is asking astronomers to help it find a new mission for Kepler, the celebrated spacecraft that broke down in May when a wheel that controls its telescope failed. Launched in 2009, Kepler collected a trove of data as it searched for Earthlike planets across the galaxy. That data will keep researchers busy for years, but without that wheel, the telescope is just too wobbly for its intended mission.

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Gulf Spill Sampling Questioned

The lead author, Paul W. Sammarco of the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, said that dispersants used to break up the oil might have affected some of the samples. He said that the greater contamination called into question the timing of decisions by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to reopen gulf fisheries after the spill and that “it might be time to review the techniques that are used to determine” such reopenings.

Eleven workers died and roughly 200 million gallons of crude oil gushed into the gulf after a blowout at an exploratory well owned by BP caused the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig to explode on April 20, 2010. Nearly two million gallons of Corexit, a dispersant, were sprayed on the surface or injected into the oil plume near the wellhead.

In all, more than 88,000 square miles of federal waters were closed to commercial and recreational fishing. Some areas were reopened before the well was capped three months after the blowout; the last areas were reopened a year after the disaster.

Like other studies after the spill, the new analysis, published last week in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin, found that components of oil were distributed along the Gulf Coast as far west as Galveston, Tex. — about 300 miles from the well site — and southeast to the Florida Keys.

But the study found higher levels of many oil-related compounds than earlier studies by NOAA scientists and others, particularly in seawater and sediment. The compounds studied included polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, some of which are classified as probably carcinogenic, and volatile organic compounds, which can affect the immune and nervous systems.

“When the numbers first started coming in, I thought these looked awfully high,” Dr. Sammarco said, referring to the data he analyzed, which came from samples that he and other researchers had collected. Then he looked at the NOAA data. “Their numbers were very low,” he said, “I thought what is going on here? It didn’t make sense.”

Dr. Sammarco said that a particular sampling method used in some earlier studies might have led to lower readings. That method uses a device called a Niskin bottle, which takes a sample from a specific point in the water. Because of the widespread use of dispersants during the spill — which raised separate concerns about toxicity — the oil, broken into droplets, may have remained in patches in the water rather than dispersing uniformly.

“Sampling a patchy environment, you may not necessarily hit the patches,” he said.

The plastic that the bottles are made from also attracts oily compounds, potentially removing them from any water sample and leading to lower readings of contaminants, Dr. Sammarco said.

Riki Ott, an independent marine toxicologist who has studied effects of the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska as well as the BP spill, said she was “totally shocked” when she read the high numbers in Dr. Sammarco’s study.

“To see NOAA doing this, that’s inexcusable,” Dr. Ott said, referring to the use of Niskin bottles. “It has been known since Exxon Valdez that this spotty sampling does not work.”

A spokesman for NOAA said the agency would not comment because it was involved in a legal review known as a Natural Resource Damage Assessment to determine how much BP must pay for restoration work. But BP, in a statement, noted that tests on seafood by NOAA and other agencies consistently found levels of contaminants 100 to 1,000 times lower than safety thresholds set by the federal Food and Drug Administration.

Dr. Sammarco suggested that more continuous monitoring of oil spills should be undertaken before fisheries are reopened. “It’s a good idea to follow these things long term, to make sure the runway is clear so people are safe and the food is safe,” he said.

Julia M. Gohlke, a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who conducted an independent review of seafood safety after the spill, said that while decisions to reopen fisheries are currently based on fish samples only, “it seems like it would definitely be important to keep looking at water samples as well.”

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Rome’s Start to Architectural Hubris

Most historians agree that early Rome had nothing to compare to the sublime temples of Greece and was not a particularly splendid city, like Alexandria in Egypt.

Any definitive insight into the formative stages of Roman architectural hubris lies irretrievable beneath layers of the city’s repeated renovations through the time of caesars, popes and the Renaissance. The most imposing ruin of the early Roman imperial period is the Colosseum, erected in the first century A.D.

Now, at excavations 11 miles east of Rome’s city center, archaeologists think they are catching a glimpse of Roman tastes in monumental architecture much earlier than previously thought, about 300 years before the Colosseum. They have uncovered ruins of a vast complex of stone walls and terraces connected by a grand stairway and surrounded by many rooms, a showcase of wealth and power spread over an area more than half the size of a football field. They say this was most likely the remains of a public building in the heyday of the city-state Gabii, or possibly an exceptionally lavish private residence.

The discovery was made last summer by a team of archaeologists and students led by Nicola Terrenato, a professor of classical studies at the University of Michigan and a native of Rome. At the end of this summer’s dig season, Dr. Terrenato said last week in a telephone interview from Rome, about two-thirds of the complex had been exposed and studied to “tell us more about how the Romans were building at that formative stage” — between 350 B.C. and 250 B.C.

Dr. Terrenato noted that the findings appeared to contradict the image of early Roman culture, perpetuated by notables like Cato the Elder and Cicero, “as being very modest and inconspicuous.” It was said that this did not change until soldiers returned from the conquest of Greece in the second century B.C., their heads having been turned by Greek refinements and luxuries.

“Now we see the Romans were already thinking big,” he said.

The Gabii dig site is a gift to archaeologists. Not only was the city close to Rome, with many ties, but most of its ruins were buried and never built over after the city’s decline in the second and third centuries A.D. The building complex is on undeveloped land in modern-day Lazio.

At the time, Rome had surpassed Gabii in size, but some historians think the neighboring city could have exerted an influence on the Romans. Previous excavations by the Michigan group, beginning in 2007, had uncovered a significant part of the city, including private houses, wealthy burials, city walls and a temple. Of possibly more importance, Dr. Terrenato suggested, the recent research shows that people were practicing some degree of urban planning at Gabii.

Scholars of ancient history and other archaeologists were either unfamiliar with the Gabii findings or cautious in their comments. Richard J. A. Talbert, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and scholar of ancient geography in the Mediterranean world, visited the Gabii excavations last year. Dr. Talbert noted that in later Roman tradition, Gabii was seen as “a source of ideas and culture.” But he added, “We really don’t have enough evidence yet to say how influential Gabii was on Rome in these early periods.”

Christopher Ratté, the director of the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at Michigan, said the excavation was part of a concentrated examination of the social environment in central Italy before the rise of Rome as a world power. “It has been quite a surprise,” he said, “to find that it was still possible to break new ground like this in a region that has been so well researched.”

The Gabii Project, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and in collaboration with the Italian Archaeological Service, had explored and mapped the more than 170 acres of the ancient city, which was built on the slopes of an extinct volcano where the crater had become a lake. Then the archaeologists encountered the elaborate building complex. Dr. Terrenato said he was immediately struck by the size of the stone blocks in the retaining wall on the slope inside the complex. Each one weighed thousands of pounds.

“This was like Lego construction,” he said. “They were stacked one on top of each other without any glue binding them together. This is the only technique they had access to, and it must have been the desire for this kind of grand construction that drove them to the invention of mortar about 125 years later.”

The researchers also admired some of the architectural details: rows of stone pillars, courtyards and terraces covered in mosaic tiles in geometric patterns, a 21-step staircase cut into bedrock. They said this showed that the people were beginning to experiment with modifying their natural environments — cutting back the natural slope and creating a retaining wall.

“All this only whetted our appetites,” Dr. Terrenato said as he looked ahead to next summer’s continued excavations and a hoped-for extension of the project beyond 2014.

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Lyme Disease Far More Common Than Previously Known

Black-legged ticks like this can transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

CDC Black-legged ticks like this can transmit the bacterium that causes Lyme disease.

CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 300,000 Americans are getting Lyme disease every year, and the toll is growing.

"It confirms what we've thought for a long time: This is a large problem," Dr. Paul Mead tells Shots. "The bottom line is that by defining how big the problem is we make it easier for everyone to figure out what kind of resources we have to use to address it."

Mead, who directs Lyme disease surveillance for the CDC, presented the new "preliminary" estimate at an international conference in Boston on Lyme and other tick-borne diseases.

The CDC says only a 10th of Lyme disease cases — fewer than 30,000 — are reported. And to make it more complicated, an unknown number of people are being diagnosed with Lyme disease who don't really have it.

The new estimate comes from three different ways of looking at the problem. CDC scientists analyzed insurance claims for 22 million people over six years. They surveyed labs that test for Lyme disease, and they did surveys asking people if they'd had the disease.

The result adds up to a vexing public health problem, all caused by a tick that's about the size of the period on the end of this sentence.

A generation ago there was no such thing called Lyme disease, though it may have been lurking undetected in nature. Scientists first reported it in 1977 and named it after the location of the first cases, in Lyme, Conn.

Now it's the most prevalent tick-borne infection — concentrated in 13 states in the Northeast and upper Midwest, but expanding both northward (to upper New York state and Maine) and southward (to Virginia).

In many areas where Lyme disease is entrenched, Mead says, up to 30 percent of black-legged or deer ticks carry the Lyme disease spirochete. That translates to a substantial risk of infection for humans who venture outdoors, especially in grassy and woodsy areas.

Getting Lyme disease is no picnic. Symptoms resemble the flu ­— fatigue, headache, mildly stiff neck, joint and muscle aches, and fever. But if not treated with an antibiotic within about 72 hours, the infection can disseminate throughout the body, causing neurologic, cardiac and joint disease for weeks or months.

An unknown proportion of Lyme disease patients become chronically ill with fatigue that can be debilitating. Mead says the CDC recognizes chronic Lyme disease as a real problem. "The question is whether it's due to persistent infection or some immunologic effect, and what's the best way of treating it," he says.

People often don't know when they have gotten Lyme disease. One tell-tale sign is a bulls-eye rash around the tick bite. But Mead says 20 or 30 percent of people don't get the rash — or don't recognize it because it's on their scalp or somewhere they can't see.

"So it's important for physicians to have a high level of suspicion" when they see someone with flu-like symptoms in summer, when there's not much real flu around, Mead says.

It's mainly up to residents of Lyme disease hot spots to avoid getting it — by using insect repellents, covering up when going outdoors and checking themselves for ticks when they get back inside.

Before 2002, humans could get vaccinated against Lyme disease (dogs still can). But the manufacturer discontinued it for lack of demand.

Mead acknowledges it's pretty hard to spot an insect that's no bigger than a poppy seed — much smaller than the common dog tick. "That's one of the reasons we encourage people to shower after being in a tick-infested area," he says. Studies show that showering within two hours after being outside sharply reduces the risk of infection.

One thing in humans' favor: The deer tick has to suck your blood for around 36 hours before the Lyme disease organism is transmitted. So gently removing the tick with tweezers, or — better yet — washing it off before it sinks its tiny fangs into your skin is the best way to win this game.

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Observatory: 160-Million-Year-Old Fossil of an Omnivore

The fossil, found in Liaoning Province in northeastern China, is the earliest known skeletal fossil of a multituberculate, and offers new insight into this mammal group’s incredible success. Multituberculates thrived alongside dinosaurs for more than 100 million years and then outlived them for 30 million years before becoming extinct, making way for rodents.

The newly described species, Rugosodon eurasiaticus, had highly ornamented teeth, with many wrinkles and creases. This is a sign that multituberculates started out as omnivores, researchers said.

“It has lots of small ridges and grooves that are densely packed,” said Zhe-Xi Luo a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and one of the study’s authors. “In modern rodents this is related to a diet supplemented by small insects and small vertebrates.”

Over time, many multituberculates evolved to become herbivores, an adaptation that helped them thrive. The researchers also discovered that the rodentlike animal had mobile and flexible anklebones, suggesting that it was a fast runner that primarily lived on the ground.

“We paleontologists have always been puzzled by how some of the later multituberculates could jump from the ground and climb up in trees,” Dr. Luo said. “Lo and behold, in this early skeleton we have all those features already.”

The well-equipped ankle also helped multituberculates thrive, he said.

Rugosodon is described in the current issue of the journal Science. 

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Chemical Composition of Urine

While researching the chemical composition of urine, I came across an interesting story:

Allied troops in World War I were supplied with masks equipped with cotton pads soaked in urine because it was believed the ammonia in the urine would neutralize the chlorine gas used by German soldiers. Chlorine dissolves in the water portion of the urine, reacting with urea to form dichlorourea. While I'm sure you'd rather have an actual gas mask in the event you are exposed to chlorine, now you know how to make your own emergency filter.

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Plan to Ban Oil Drilling in Amazon Is Dropped

The plan won applause from environmentalists, and international luminaries like Bo Derek and Leonardo DiCaprio opened their wallets. The plan was backed by the United Nations, but governments generally balked at contributing, and only $13 million was collected.

“The world has failed us,” President Correa said as he withdrew the offer in a nationally televised news conference on Thursday night. “With deep sadness but also with absolute responsibility to our people and history, I have had to take one of the hardest decisions of my government.”

The pioneering effort was administered by the United Nations Development Program. It was originally set up after potential reserves of nearly 800 million barrels of oil were found in the Yasuni national park, which is inhabited by two isolated Indian tribes.

Its goal was not only to protect a pristine rain forest with a rich mix of wildlife and plant life but also to ease future climate change by preventing more than 400 million tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. The park was designated a world biosphere reserve by Unesco in the late 1980s.

Local and international environmentalists expressed disappointment with President Correa’s decision, and hundreds of protesters gathered outside the presidential palace in Quito, the nation’s capital.

“It could have been used as a model for other sensitive areas,” said Matt Finer, a scientist with the Center for International Environmental Law, referring to the fund. “But now that it has failed, there is really no alternative model that is attractive to governments unable or unwilling to forgo drilling solely on ecological grounds.”

Oil pollution in the Ecuadorean jungles has been highlighted by two decades of lawsuits against Chevron, whose predecessor, Texaco, worked as a partner with Petroecuador, the state oil company, in the 1970s before it was acquired by Chevron.

Chevron lost a case in an Ecuadorean court two years ago, but it has refused to pay more than $18 billion in damages. It argued that Texaco had done a cleanup and that most of the pollution that was left was caused by Petroecuador after Texaco left. Enforcement proceedings are at various stages in several countries since Chevron has no assets in Ecuador.

President Correa has publicly sided with Amazon residents who complain that their homelands were spoiled. But the Ecuadorean government still relies on oil for one-third of its tax revenue, and the government is running a large budget deficit. Ecuadorean oil production is about 500,000 barrels a day, making it the fifth-largest producer in South America. Although President Correa is a frequent critic of the United States and its foreign policy, most Ecuadorean oil exports go to the United States.

The three oil fields in the park represent roughly a fifth of the country’s 7.2 billion barrels of oil reserves and could generate more than $7 billion in revenue over a 10-year period, according to Ecuadorean oil experts.

China, which has become the largest source of financing for the Ecuadorean government as it seeks to secure more oil supplies from Latin America, is a likely beneficiary of any increased Ecuadorean production. In July, Ecuador obtained a $2 billion loan from the China Development Bank in exchange for nearly 40,000 barrels a day of oil from Ecuador to PetroChina over two years.

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Star of NASA Planet Hunting Falls Idle With Broken Parts

The disappointing news brings to an end, for now, one phase of the most romantic of space dreams, the search for other Earths among the exoplanets of the Milky Way. NASA has already asked astronomers for ideas on how to use the hobbled spacecraft, whose telescope is in perfect shape.

Even as they mourned the end of Kepler, astronomers said its legacy would continue as they worked their way through a trove of data the spacecraft has gathered.

At last count, Kepler had discovered 3,548 possible planets, and 135 of them — some smaller than the Earth — have been validated by other observations, including earthbound telescopes. But hundreds or thousands more are in the pipeline, said William Borucki of NASA’s Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, Calif., Kepler’s originator and principal investigator.

“The most exciting discoveries are going to come in the next few years as we search through this data,” Mr. Borucki said on Thursday in a telephone news conference. “In the next few years we’re going to be able to answer the questions that inspired Kepler: Are Earthlike planets common or rare in the galaxy?”

Kepler was launched into an orbit around the Sun in March 2009. Its official mission was to determine the fraction of stars in the galaxy that harbor Earthlike planets by carrying out a survey of some 150,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra, looking for the dips in starlight caused by planets passing, or transiting, in front of their suns.

Three dips, or transits, are considered the criteria for a planet candidate, which means the Earth or a planet in a similar orbit that was habitable would take three years to show up. Accordingly, Kepler was designed to operate for four years, but other sunlike stars turned out to be more jittery in their output than expected, making the detection of Earth analogues more difficult. Since astronomers could learn a lot more from Kepler if it went on collecting data, the decision was made last year to extend the spacecraft’s mission for three more years, until 2016.

So far Kepler’s mission has cost $600 million, and its budget for the 2013 fiscal year is about $18 million.

Among its finds were a planet nicknamed Tatooine, after the “Star Wars” planet with two suns, otherwise known as Kepler 16b, the first one found that orbits two stars at once. Another was the so-called Styrofoam planet, which is again half as large as Jupiter but so puffed up by the heat of its star that it is only one-tenth as dense.

The closest Kepler has come to finding another Earth was in April, when the team discovered a pair of planets about half again as big as the Earth orbiting a yellow star, now known as Kepler 62, that is 1,200 light years away. Both planets reside in the “Goldilocks” zone where temperatures should be lukewarm and suitable for liquid water and thus life as we imagine it.

By then, however, Kepler was already in trouble.

In order to do its job of precisely monitoring starlight, Kepler has to keep pointing accurately enough so that each star in the field of view stays on the same pixel in the detector, equivalent to pinpointing a soccer ball in Central Park as seen from San Francisco.

Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, essentially gyroscopes, of which three are needed to keep it pointed. Last summer, one wheel showed signs of too much friction and was shut down. A second wheel failed in May, putting the spacecraft into safe mode and jeopardizing the exoplanet search.

Astronomers began to sing dirges. Geoffrey W. Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, dashed off a poem, which said, in part, “Let jet airplanes circle at night overhead/ Sky-writing over Cygnus: Kepler is dead.”

NASA engineers spent several months trying to resurrect Kepler’s pointing ability. “We had very little hope it was actually going to be recoverable,” said Charles Sobeck, a Kepler deputy project manager, who compared the problem to a stuck wheel on a supermarket shopping cart.

They managed to get both faulty reaction wheels spinning again, but with too much friction. Last week, when they tried to make the spacecraft point, it went into safe mode after a few hours, making it clear that Kepler’s planet-hunting days were over.

“I believe they left no stone unturned,” said Paul Hertz, NASA’s director of astrophysics, in the news conference announcing the end of the rescue effort.

NASA is now pondering ways in which the telescope can be used with two reaction wheels. In one mode, stars would drift across the detector “like a lost nomadic tribe migrating across the Sahara,” in the words of Dr. Marcy.

Letters looking for ideas have gone out to astronomers, and NASA might eventually convene a review panel to consider future Kepler operations in competition with other science projects, Dr. Hertz said.

Meanwhile, astronomers continue to pore over the flood of data that is still in the Kepler pipeline. Mr. Borucki — speaking with the relentless optimism of a man who spent 20 years getting Kepler designed, approved and into space — said that Kepler could still perform its prime directive of measuring the frequency of Earthlike planets in the galaxy, albeit with poorer statistical certainty than he would have liked. It would take about three more years of data analysis, he said.

“We’re going have to dig down hard to find those planets — we know we can do it,” Mr. Borucki said.

When he conceived the mission 20 years ago, he said, no one knew if there were any planets out there in the galaxy. “Now at the completion,” he said, “we know our galaxy is filled to the brim with planets. When you look up at the sky and see it filled with stars, most of those stars have planets.”

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Chevrolet’s Cheap Minicar, the Spark, Is a Surprisingly Strong Seller

The Spark, made in South Korea, seats four, has room for groceries — and starts at $12,170, significantly less than the Fiat 500’s starting price of $16,100. It’s also inexpensive to run, getting about 35 miles to the gallon.

In July, sales of the Spark increased 163 percent over the previous year, its introductory month, to a record 3,847, showing that a stripped-down minicar can succeed in a market crowded with costlier rivals like the Fiat 500 that have more features and technology. Its July sales outpaced the Fiat 500’s 2,821, which was a 24 percent decline from a year earlier. Through July this year, Spark sales were 21,435, behind only the Fiat 500’s 23,892 among minicars.

“To me, it’s an appliance,” said William Wortman of Ohio City near Cleveland, who in April bought a Spark with manual transmission for his weekly 250-mile commute to his job as a toolmaker. The Spark’s 1.2-liter, four-cylinder engine makes it the smallest in the Chevrolet lineup.

“It gets me back and forth,” he said. “All I wanted was a radio.”

Even G.M. did not expect it would resonate this way with consumers. “We’re very surprised with how well the vehicle has been selling,” said Cristi Landy, Chevrolet marketing director.

Beyond its cost, what separates the Spark, buyers say, is that it’s the only minicar sold in the United States with four doors.

“The ability to get four adults in a minicar like that is what sells the vehicle,” said Andy Lilienthal, of Portland, Ore., who has run a blog on small cars, called Subcompact Culture, since 2008.

G.M.’s decision to market a minicar like the Spark was a logical one, analysts said. With gasoline routinely topping $4 a gallon, many Americans are seeking better mileage. But automakers also need to make their fleets more efficient to meet strict new federal fuel economy standards that take effect in 2016, said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst for Edmunds.com.

“Everybody’s going in that direction,” Ms. Krebs said, “but no one expected G.M. to do it as well as they have.”

More broadly, minicars and subcompacts, which like the Chevrolet Sonic are slightly bigger, now make up 5.9 percent of overall vehicle sales, according to Edmunds.com. That is compared with 3.1 percent in 2007.

For the automakers, smaller cars have become a profitable niche in an area where they have often been outdone against foreign competition.

“There was skepticism in general that Detroit could not make small cars and compete with the Japanese market, but we’re over that,” Ms. Krebs said.

Beyond better fuel economy and cost savings, the styling and technology are helping change the perception of cars like the Spark, known as “penalty boxes” in the 1980s, implying that the driver was being punished for not affording a larger car. In the 1980s and ’90s, junkyards across America quickly became littered with duds like the Yugo GV, Daihatsu Charade and Geo Metro.

“You were basically buying these slow, underpowered vehicles with the only advantage being that they were cheap,” Mr. Lilienthal said.

The Spark and its competitors, including the best-selling Nissan Versa subcompact and No. 2 Kia Soul — which are slightly bigger and have four doors but cost about the same — come with features that were never included in subcompact cars, from air conditioning and power locks to Bluetooth and smartphone navigation.

Now, buyers ask themselves, “Do I need to buy a full-size sedan, or can I get away with a Nissan Versa?” Mr. Lilienthal said.

Automakers have also taken a different tack in marketing the cars, promoting them as fun to drive and easy to maneuver around the city, as well as the cost advantage.

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Arid Southwest Cities’ Plea: Lose the Lawn

At least the lawns are still legal here. Grass front yards are banned at new developments in Las Vegas, where even the grass medians on the Strip have been replaced with synthetic turf.

In Austin, Tex., lawns are allowed; watering them, however, is not — at least not before sunset. Police units cruise through middle-class neighborhoods hunting for sprinklers running in daylight and issuing $475 fines to their owners.

Worried about dwindling water supplies, communities across the drought-stricken Southwest have begun waging war on a symbol of suburban living: the lush, green grass of front lawns.

In hopes of enticing, or forcing, residents to abandon the scent of freshly cut grass, cities in this parched region have offered homeowners ever-increasing amounts to replace their lawns with drought-resistant plants; those who keep their grass face tough watering restrictions and fines for leaky sprinklers.

These efforts are drastically reshaping the landscape, with cactuses and succulents taking over where green grass once reigned.

“The era of the lawn in the West is over,” said Paul Robbins, the director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. “The water limits are insurmountable, unless the Scotts Company develops a genetically modified grass that requires almost no water. And I’m sure it’s keeping them up at night.”

City officials across the region have hailed turf removal as vital, given the chronic water shortages.

In Mesa, Ariz., the city has paid to turn nearly 250,000 square feet of residential lawn into desertscape.

More than one million square feet of grass has been moved from Los Angeles residences since the rebate program began here in 2009. New parks provide only token patches of grass, surrounded by native plants. Outside City Hall, what was once a grassy park has been transformed into a garden of succulents.

The first five months of this year were the driest on record in California, with reservoirs in the state at 20 percent below normal levels. The lawn rebate program here will save approximately 47 million gallons of water each year, according to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

But some residents worry that turf removal has already gone too far, robbing children of play spaces.

“It’s getting to the point where kids live in apartments, and they don’t even see grass, except in magazines,” said Betty Humphrey of Los Angeles. She raised her son with an expansive lawn, and said her family would not be pulling up its grass no matter how much money the city offered.

The city is already short on green space, said Ms. Humphrey, 63. “I don’t want to end up like New York or Chicago, with no grass.”

Las Vegas presents a model of how quickly the landscape can change when a city moves aggressively. In 2003, after a drought wiped out the city’s water resources, the Las Vegas Valley Water District offered what officials believe was the first turf removal rebate program in the country.

Since then, the water district has paid out nearly $200 million to remove 165.6 million square feet of grass from residences and businesses.

In the winter, watering is allowed only one day a week. Homeowners who take advantage of the city’s rebate must sign a deed restriction stating that even if the property were to be sold, grass could not be reinstalled unless the new owner paid back the rebate, with interest.

Residents of the country’s driest city take the rules seriously. “Neighbors turn each other in if they see a sprinkler running,” said Patricia Mulroy, the general manager of the Las Vegas Valley Water District.

The city’s investment has paid off, Ms. Mulroy said. In the last decade, 9.2 billion gallons of water have been saved through turf removal, and water use in Southern Nevada has been cut by a third, even as the population has continued to grow.

“The landscape in Southern Nevada has changed dramatically,” she said. “If you had driven through a single-family development in the 1990s, it would have had grass all the way around. Today, you find desert landscaping. You see very little grass.”

Residential neighborhoods without lawns would have been considered downright heretical just two decades ago, said Diana Balmori, a landscape architect and an author of “Redesigning the American Lawn.”

“Americans were ultra-lawn people, and the lawn industry applied them to every part of the country, regardless of climate,” she said. “The lawn was seen as good for children. It’s one of the only plants that can take traffic on it. It’s a very soft surface. Frankly, it has no equal.”

But the idea that extensive grass lawns are wasteful has now taken hold with many people in this region, especially the young and environmentally conscious.

And municipalities, hoping those savings can be expanded, have tried to entice more residents to dig up their lawns by offering more money. Last month, Los Angeles raised its rebate to $2 from $1.50 a square foot of grass removed. Long Beach now offers $3 a square foot.

Jessica Seglar and her fiancé had considered getting rid of their grass in Long Beach for years. But it was an expensive proposition. Once they heard about the rebate, they decided to replace the lawn with Ceanothus, a lilac native to California, and other drought-tolerant plants.

“It’s absolutely the responsible thing to do,” said Ms. Seglar, 30. “Right now, it’s a space we’re not using much that’s just sucking up water.”

The Scotts Miracle-Gro Company, one of the most prominent players in the turf-grass industry, is in fact working to develop varieties of grass that require less water, but that also maintain the soft feel and durability of Kentucky bluegrass. Mike Sutterer, the company’s vice president for marketing in the Southwest, listed more environmental benefits a lawn offers: it cools the air, provides oxygen and prevents erosion and storm water runoff, a major problem in Los Angeles.

“We want to give consumers an option,” Mr. Sutterer said. “That way, they still get the benefits of grass while also using less water.”

And many people, even those who recognize the importance of conserving water, are not yet ready to abandon the traditional American front lawn. While Ms. Seglar was excited about putting in her drought-tolerant yard, she acknowledged that it would not be very child friendly, and she and her fiancé want to have children. “A backyard is a nice place to throw a ball and run around,” she said. “Someday, we plan on moving to a place with a more usable lawn.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 14, 2013

An article on Monday about communities across the Southwest that offer incentives to homeowners to replace their lawns with drought-resistant plants misstated the rebate prices in Los Angeles per square foot of grass removed. The city raised its rebate to $2 from $1.50 a square foot, not $2.50 from $2.

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Dot Earth Blog: A Nuclear Submariner Challenges a Pro-Nuclear Film

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Dot Earth Blog: ‘Liberated Carbon, It’ll Turn Your Night to Day’

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Latest SpaceX Rocket Test Successfully Goes Sideways

The SpaceX Grasshopper: On Aug. 13, the Falcon 9 test rig, also known as Grasshopper, completed a successful lateral fight maneuver.

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World Briefing | The Americas: A Mammal Long Overlooked, but Now Embraced

Lawmakers are lining up for a chance to take money from the banks — and do their bidding.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a fan of opera, which, like the court, wrestles with questions of crime and punishment.

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How to Share Scientific Data

A deluge of digital data from scientific research has spawned a controversy over who should have access to it, how it can be stored and who will pay to do so.

The matter was the subject of discussion after the journal Science published a paper on Thursday by Francine Berman, a computer scientist at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who is a leader of a group that focuses on research data, and Vinton Cerf, the vice president of Google.

The paper calls for a different culture around scientific data based on acknowledging that costs must be shared. It also explores economic models that would involve the support of various scientific communities: public, private and academic.

In an interview, Dr. Cerf said storing and sharing digital information was becoming a “crucial issue” for both public and private institutions.

The debate is likely to accelerate next week when federal agencies are expected to file proposals for how they would “support increased public access to the results of research funded by the federal government.” The plans were requested by John P. Holdren, director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a memorandum in February.

But Dr. Holdren also directed that plans be carried out using “resources within the existing agency budget.”

That is likely to be a formidable challenge. While the cost of data storage is falling rapidly, the amount of information created by data-based science is immense. In addition, many agencies have complicated arrangements providing favorable access to corporations that then resell federal data. The agencies also must overcome the hurdle of developing systems that will make the data accessible.

Still, the federal guidelines underscore the importance of digital information in scientific research and the growing urgency to resolve the problems.

“Data is the new currency for research,” said Alan Blatecky, the director of advanced cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation. “The question is how do you address the cost issues, because there is no new money.”

Dr. Berman and Dr. Cerf argued in their paper that private companies, as well as academic and corporate laboratories, must be willing to invest in new computer data centers and storage systems so that crucial research data is not irretrievably lost.

“There is no economic ‘magic bullet’ that does not require someone, somewhere, to pay,” they wrote.

Dr. Berman is the chairwoman of the United States branch of the Research Data Alliance, an organization of academic, government and corporate researchers attempting to build new systems to store the digital data sets being created, and to develop new software techniques for integrating different kinds of data and making it accessible. “Publicly accessible data requires a stable home and someone to pay the mortgage,” she said in an interview.

Google initially promised to host large data sets for scientists for free, and then killed the program in 2008 after just a year, for unspecified business reasons.

It may have been that the company was taken aback by the size of scientific research data sets. For example, the Obama administration’s proposal to eventually capture the activity of just one million neurons in the human brain (the human brain has about 85 to 100 billion neurons) for a year would require about 3 petabytes of data storage, or almost one third the amount generated by the Large Hadron Collider during the same period.

Dr. Berman said she was heartened to see a growing international recognition of the scope of the problem. The Research Data Alliance, begun last August with an international telephone conference of just eight researchers, now has more than 750 academic, corporate and government scientists and information technology specialists in 50 countries.

In their paper, she and Dr. Cerf argue that coping with the explosion of data would require a cultural shift on the part of not just the government and corporate institutions, but also individual scientists.

“The casual approach for many scientists has been to ‘stick it on my disk drive and make it available to anyone who wants to use it,’ ” Dr. Cerf said.

They argued that the costs need not be prohibitive. “If you want to download a song from iTunes, it’s not free, but it doesn’t break the bank,” Dr. Berman said.

Even those who feel that information should be free and open acknowledge that easy availability to data from government-subsidized projects gives an unfair and unnecessary advantage to private firms.

And some scientists argue that there would be advantages to charging for data. “Paying a small fee for downloads in the aggregate would also act as an incentive for providing the needed infrastructure,” said Bernardo A. Huberman, a physicist at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.

In his memorandum, Dr. Holdren told the federal agencies that the release of research papers could be delayed for up to a year; the reasons were not explained. That has angered activists who favor immediate and broad availability of publicly financed research.

“In scientific fields, a year is a very long time,” said Carl Malamud, the founder of Public. Resource.Org, a nonprofit group that attempts to make government information freely available online. Meanwhile, he said, corporations could sell the information. “It’s a sop to the special interests that publish this stuff.”

Dr. Berman said there were models that could provide ideas for the new infrastructures needed to store the data and make it accessible. One is the Protein Data Bank — a database of biological molecules — that is heavily used by the life sciences community and is publicly supported.

That data is freely available. However, she also pointed to the social science database Longitudinal Study of American Youth, which is maintained by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the University of Michigan. Users are charged a subscription fee.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 15, 2013

An article on Tuesday about the challenges of storing and making vast amounts of scientific data, much of it publicly financed, readily available referred incompletely to instructions from John P. Holdren, director of the federal Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a memorandum sent to federal agencies in February. While the memo said a guideline for making research papers publicly available would be an embargo period of a year after publication, it also stipulated that individual agencies could tailor their plans to release papers on a different time frame.

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Thriving in Cape Cod’s Waters, Gray Seals Draw Fans and Foes

He did not know then that the sweet-faced creatures would eventually become a Cape Cod ubiquity like the harbor-side clam shack, mountainous hydrangea and sightings of Kennedys. These days, they emerge by the thousands on sandbars or pop up in small groups along the shoreline. They delight visitors who watch their heads bob above the waves. But they invade fishermen’s nets, draw sharks closer to the shore and are rankling those who make their living by the sea so much that some are calling for blood.

“I guarantee those seals have caught a hell of a lot more cod than the port of Chatham has,” said John Our, a fisherman who, like others, thinks it is time to consider controlling the population. “Think about it — we cull everything else,” he said. “You have harvests of deer, farmers get to kill the locusts.”

The return of the gray seals to Cape Cod is a dramatic success story for animal protection. Before the early 1980s, gray seals were mostly absent from North American waters, their numbers low in part because of the bounties in Massachusetts and Maine that researchers estimate killed up to 135,000 before the last was lifted in 1962. Ten years later, the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed seal hunting. With new protections also in place in Canada, the gray seal population slowly began to grow and thrive in Maine and on Cape Cod’s sandbars and long stretches of protected beach, where they face few predators.

A survey in 1994 spotted 2,035 seals in Cape Cod waters. In 2011, surveyors counted more than 15,700, according to the National Marine Fisheries Service. Some scientists suggest the number of gray seals in United States waters may now be at its highest point in history.

Local businesses have capitalized, offering seal tours, while the National Park Service has posted volunteers meant to educate the public about the hundreds of seals they can see from parts of the National Seashore on the Cape’s eastern edge, thrilling tourists like Jen Mitchell, a computer programmer from Worcester, Mass., who used her phone to take a picture of hundreds of seals on a sandbar in Truro one afternoon this summer.

“I’ve been coming here for decades, and I’ve never seen this many,” she said while the seals howled, almost mournfully. “Wonderful!”

But many fishermen here wonder if the price of seal protection may be their own extinction. One gray morning this summer, Ernie Eldredge pulled up a small boat alongside his fishing weir, a huge, bowl-shaped net strung between wooden posts that jut out of the water here like crooked teeth. A gray seal bobbed inside, its wide eyes belying its intruder status, while Mr. Eldredge’s daughter, Shannon, examined part of the net that had been shredded by seal claws.

“They drive the fish away from the weir before they even have a chance to go in,” said Mr. Eldredge, who extracted a measly catch of several dozen menhaden and squid that day, a far cry from the 30,000 pounds of fish he once caught daily. “We can’t catch anything because of the seals.”

Mr. Eldredge and many of his colleagues acknowledge the role overfishing and environmental change have played in the paucity of fish in the Gulf of Maine, but they say seals have prevented fish stocks from rebounding even as stiff new quotas are imposed on the fishermen’s activities. Seals eat up to 6 percent of their body weight each day — which, for an 800-pound male, could be about 50 pounds of food, including prized fish like cod and flounder.

“It’s devastating,” said Tom Smith, who has been gill netting bluefish out of Provincetown and Hyannisport since 1981. “They’re eating our fish we’re trying to catch, they’re eating them out of the nets.”

Rick Thompson, a seafood distributor who works on Chatham’s fish pier, is among many here who would like to see a return of the bounties, or at least of some kind of controlled harvest.

“I’m not a murderous kind of guy or whatever,” he said. “It’s not going to be done in front of the harbor or whatever. You’re going to go out in open water and try to get them.”

Many researchers contend that seals have not invaded, but are a natural part of the ecosystem that humans have not had a chance to understand fully.

“Gray seals have literally been absent from the Gulf of Maine for the entirety of modern ecology,” said Dave Johnston, a research scientist at Duke University, who worked this summer with a team to tag gray seals in Cape Cod. “Since they’ve been absent for so long, they’re also absent from the memory of the people here. It’s a really hard thing to communicate to people who have spent their whole lives in a place and know it really well.”

Gray seals’ federally protected status means an act of Congress would be required for any seal harvest. “You have a better chance of running over a busload of children than clubbing or shooting a seal, let’s be realistic,” Mr. Our said.

That does not mean seals are never killed. In 2011, about half a dozen seals were shot in the head, their bodies found bloodied on Cape Cod beaches. But illegal hunting is rare and, apparently, difficult.

“I know guys that have shot at them,” Mr. Our said. “If you shoot at them, they’ll never come back. They’re not stupid. “

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