In my house, if I don't write it down then it doesn't get done. Period.

Day-dreaming during work often means you miss out on what is going on around you while your mind drifts, but a new study suggests that day-dreaming may also impair your ability to retain information acquired just prior to embarking on your mental mini-journey.

Peter Delaney, a professor of psychology at the Univ. of N.C.-Greensboro, led a team of researchers in probing what’s called the “amnesic effect” of day-dreaming by doing two simple experiments with college students.

In the first experiment, the team asked the students to memorize word lists, then they asked them to day-dream about their parents’ house or about their own house. In the second experiment, they asked them to memorize word lists and then day-dream about either an international or a domestic vacation. In each experiment, the disparity in the cognitive meanderings was set up to test whether mental distance had any effect upon the mind’s ability to recall the word lists.

The results are intriguing because the students whose thoughts dawdled on long-distance vacations performed much worse at recalling the word lists than those that thought of domestic getaways. Likewise, the students who lingered on thoughts of their parents home tended to also fare worse at the memory recall tasks than those who day-dreamed about their own homes.

What might explain this disparity? According to the authors, the experiment did not test only physical distance. Rather, it was set up to test mental distance from the reality of a moment, whether that distance was induced by geography, time or even cultural context. Psychologists dub this the “context-change account” of directed forgetting. The authors explain, “The context-change account proposes that shifting one’s thoughts to something different such as a diversionary thought sets up a new mental context in which subsequent items are encoded.” And this mental-context shift causes your mind to peter out at recalling the information acquired from the previous mental context.

Because past research shows that physically moving from one environment to another can produce forgetting, the researchers wanted to look at what happens when people travel through mental space and time. They hypothesized that merely imagining a change in physical location might induce forgetting because people tend to “immerse themselves in the context of that event.” And they figured that the more difference there was between the reality of where a person is in space and time, and where they travel to mentally, then the greater degree of recently encoded information that might be nixed.

With the amount of day-dreaming that I do daily, this makes me wonder how I manage to remember anything at all. Oh yes, post-it notes. Lots of post-it notes.

Moral of the story? If you day-dream at work, and wish to keep your job, try to anchor that drifting mind closer to your cubicle.

NOTES:

Peter F. Delaney, Lili Sahakyan, Colleen M. Kelley, and Carissa A. Zimmerman. 2010. Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming. Psychological Science. 21(7) 1036–1042. DOI: 10.1177/0956797610374739.

Paul Goldberg

Dr. Anil Potti, the Duke University cancer researcher whose resume and research are under scrutiny, is the ideal target for Paul Goldberg, the editor of The Cancer Letter. Goldberg, who has an uncanny sense for hubris, is building a reputation for outing bad apples among cancer researchers, and he has dug up some interesting documents about Potti.

I met Goldberg a year ago at a training course the National Institutes of Health put on for science writers. He was one of the speakers and talked about a lunch cancer researcher whose research was flawed and who failed to disclose the $3.6 million she had received from a cigarette maker.

After I read The Cancer Letter’s special issue about Potti, I called Goldberg and got his permission to link to the documents supporting the stories.

There is:

• A copy of the letter more than two dozen biostatisticians wrote to Dr. Harold Varmus, newly appointed director of the National Cancer Institute, urging for a public inquiry.
• A copy of the American Cancer Society letter that notified Dr. Sandy Williams, vice chancellor for academic affairs at Duke’s Medical Center, that payments were being halted on a $729,000 grant Potti had been awarded.
• Three versions of Potti’s resume. One version that includes his now disputed claim of being a Rhodes scholar, a second version that also includes the claim and a third version that doesn’t. Potti used the two versions that include the claim while he was a research fellow at Duke. At the time of the third version, he was already an assistant professor in Duke’s department of medicine and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy.
• A copy of Potti’s residency application at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine, which includes his educational history in India, a transcript from his medical college in India and a personal statement.
• A faculty profile of Potti, which was published in 2007 in Genome Life, a newsletter of Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. The profile calls him a Rhodes scholar.

Resume padding to gain academic stature is nothing new.

A few months ago, a former Harvard students was indicted for falsifying the resume that got him into the Ivy League school and several scholarships. Last year, California regulators found out that a new law to regulate air pollution was based on statistical work done by a researcher who hadn’t earned a doctorate in statistics from the University of California at Davis as he had claimed. Three years ago, the dean of admissions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had to resign when it became clear she had inflated her resume with degrees she never received.

Dr. Anil Potti

But Duke has bigger problems than suspected resume padding by a rising star. The Lancet Oncology, a British medical journal, and the American Cancer Society are investigating potential errors in Potti’s research, because other researchers have been unable to independently replicate breakthrough statistical findings that promised to predict which chemotherapy is best for each cancer patient.

Questions about possible statistical errors in Potti’s research came up last year. Duke halted three clinical trials Potti was involved in and investigated, but didn’t allow outsiders to double-check the data in question, according to Goldberg.

Being able to repeat an experiment and come up with the same results is a basic tenet of research. It’s the litmus test to separate fact from fiction in science.

Duke has had problems with basics before.

• In 2003, Jesica Santillan, a 17-year-old Mexican immigrant, died after receiving a heart-lung transplant at Duke University Hospital. The transplant was from a donor with the wrong blood type.
• In 2005, surgical instruments at two hospitals in the Duke University Health System were washed in used hydraulic fluid instead of detergent. The mixup wasn’t detected for weeks, because administrative staff failed to heed multiple complaints by staff.
• In 2008, research of Homme Hellenga, a Duke professor of biochemistry known for his work with designer enzymes, came under fire and he had to retract two research papers because other researchers who repeat his experiments cannot get the same results. According to a story in the magazine Nature, a student in Hellinga’s lab had raised questions about the experiments before the results were published.

Dr. Anil Potti, a Duke cancer researcher, was suspended last week after his claim to have been a Rhodes scholar could not be confirmed. Duke also halted enrollment in three clinical trials that Potti lead. The trials used gene-based test results of drug sensitivity to predict cancer patients’ responses to chemotherapy drugs.

Potti and colleagues at Duke also did the statistical analysis for a report published in the Lancet Oncology three years ago. The report was based on results from a clinical trial involving breast cancer patients. The published report was titled, “Validation of gene signatures that predict the response of breast cancer to neoadjuvant chemotherapy.”

The report, which had 19 co-authors, was an important step toward personalized medicine.

But the Lancet Oncology today expressed concern over errors that two of the report’s authors detected in the statistical analysis by Potti and his Duke colleagues.

Here it is: S0140673610701856

The Lancet investigation goes way beyond potentially false claims of one Duke researcher being a Rhodes scholar. Questions of research methods and errors reach beyond one possibly rogue researcher and potentially put patients’ lives at risk.

Sheila Kannapan, a UNC physics and astronomy professor, and a few of her students are using SOAR to measure the mass of large objects and star clusters in the universe. Their work is part of a survey that, for the first time, will allow astrophysicists to determine the mass of the universe and better understand dark matter.

During a visit to the UNC campus Thursday, where scientists access the telescope from a remote control room, David Stark and David Hendel, two of Kannapan’s students, explained some of the survey work they do.

David Hendel, an astrophysics student at UNC, talks about his work with SOAR.

Kannapan’s students use a spectrograph, an instrument that measures the light from an object.

Standing in front of a board that showed a drawing of the spectrograph and a measurement chart, Hendel and Stark said the measurements allow assessments about what the light is made of and how far away an object really is.

On a television screen nearby, I and my fellow science writers could watch telescope operators in Chile working their shift and watching us through a Web cam mounted on the screen.

The computer screen below the TV showed a rendering of the Sombrero Galaxy, which is visible through amateur telescopes. Hendel showed us the bright speck on the lower edge of the galaxy that is a new object UNC astrophysicists are studying.

As part of our visit, which was organized by the Triangle-based group of science writers SCONC, we also listened to a presentation by Gerald Cecil, a UNC physics and astronomy professor who teaches students how to build stargazing instruments.

Gerald Cecil

Cecil, who helped design and build SOAR, hopes to this year finish an instrument made with fiberglass cables that would provide a grid of light measurements rather than just a thin slice.

But now the bad news about SOAR, as laid out by Cecil, a wiry, hands-on teacher who’s frustrated by the difficulty of getting funding. (On the bottom of his Web site, Cecil has a running account of the costs of U.S. oil imports and the Iraq war.)

UNC astrophysics, a small department of about half a dozen professors, can get on SOAR 60 nights of the year. That’s fairly unique access to a telescope like SOAR, which is designed to produce the best quality images of any observatory in its class in the world.

To gain this access for 20 years, UNC paid $8 million up front, which did not include ongoing maintenance costs. That’s another $80,000 to $100,000 every year.

Fund-raising efforts have begun to continue the SOAR project, which is also funded by Michigan State University, the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory and Brazil. But money is tight at public universities like UNC and Michigan and federal stimulus money to boost research and development isn’t available for a telescope on top of a Chilean mountain.

Cecil worries that in 2016, when access to SOAR must be renewed, UNC astrophysicists will lose the 60 nights in the sky that now allow them to complete research in a couple of weeks that otherwise would take a year.

U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt

He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.

Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines,  making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.

“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. 

Gov. Beverly Perdue, mayors and economic development officials from across the state attended the event, which was meant as a first step to build grassroots support for Gephardt’s to-do list.

At stake is the global leadership position the U.S. built in the past 30 years in discovering new medical treatments, improving quality of life and advancing health care, according to a report the Battelle Technology Partnership Practice released June 10. The Council for American Medical Innovation, or CAMI, an advocacy group Gephardt chairs, commissioned the report.

Experts, investors and bright minds from industry, universities and foundations whose brains the Battelle researchers picked, pinpointed several risk factors that the U.S. is in danger of losing its medical innovation edge.

Among those factors is the declining number of novel medicines that have come to market in the past decade. Between 2005 and 2008, the FDA approved on average 19 per year compared to an average 31 per year during the 1990s. A nearly 29 percent decline in venture capital that set emerging biomedical companies back during the recession was also troublesome. So were the science scores among 12th graders, which declined almost 3 percent from 1996 to 2005.

Health care and research to find new treatments have long been among Gephardt’s interests. What caught his attention was a novel triple cancer therapy that saved his son’s life nearly 40 years ago, he said. Gephardt supported a form of universal health care and helped double the NIH’s budget to support basic research to about $30 billion in 2003.

The unprecedented increase in NIH funding several years ago and a $10 billion boost the NIH received in stimulus funds last year benefited research institutions across the Triangle, including Duke University, RTI International and the University of North Carolina.

But Gephardt’s agenda to spur medical innovation and create more R&D jobs in the U.S. will face a Congress and a White House trying to gain control over a ballooning federal deficit. Gephardt didn’t think the NIH’s budget will be cut, but he acknowledged the belt-tightening mood in Washington by saying that his to-do list isn’t a “big ticket item. Yes,” he added, “this costs money, but the payoff is enormous.”

Here’s the background. Hog production is one of the cornerstones of North Carolina’s agricultural economy, with more than 10 million hogs produced annually in the state, or roughly one pig per person. In recent years, most of these hogs have been raised in indoor operations known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs.

But consumer demand is driving a movement back to pasture-raised pork, and about 100 farmers in the state are responding to the call for hogs raised in natural conditions that many people consider more humane.

Consumers are driving the market for pasture-raised pork. Photo by Lisa M. Dellwo

There’s no doubt hogs raised outdoors are happy, says Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni, research associate at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems’ (CEFS) Alternative Swine Production unit. “Outdoor pigs can express their natural behavior,” including foraging, exploring, wallowing, roaming, and rooting, she says, resulting in less stress and therefore stronger immune systems. “Pigs are social animals and in these kinds of systems, they can interact and establish social relationships,” she says.

Silvana Pietrosemoli-Castagni researches ways of mitigating the environmental impact of raising hogs outdoors. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Raising pigs in pastures also avoids some of the environmental hazards that indoor facilities are notorious for—noxious odors, air pollution, and risks of spills from waste lagoons.

But those happy hogs have the potential to damage the environment, too. The biggest danger is that nutrients from hog waste will reach waterways, causing water quality problems and changing aquatic habitats. This can happen when excessive nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen leach through the soil into the ground water or when the hogs’ natural rooting behavior causes erosion.

According to Jennifer Curtis, who heads NC Choices, a CEFS initiative that promotes sustainable food systems, there is no legal definition of “pasture,” and consumers might be shocked to see the moonscape left behind when mature hogs are removed from a field. Hogs will dig up plants by their roots, while grazing cows would merely mow them.

So how can farmers respond to consumers’ demand for hogs raised humanely while still protecting the environment and remaining profitable? Responding to requests from farmers for better management practices, Pietrosemoli-Castagni and her colleagues are exploring several alternatives:

• reducing stocking density, or the number of pigs raised in a particular paddock.
• using pigs as part of a rotation system in which crops are grown on fields formerly occupied by hogs, to trap and utilize the nutrients in the soil.
• creating buffers between hogs and waterways to protect against runoff.
• moving water and food stations to reduce soil compaction and distribute nutrients from hog waste more evenly.

With their natural rooting behavior, hogs will eventually denude a pasture. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

Rotating hogs with crops helps freshen pastures, keeping hog waste from waterways. Photo by Jennifer Curtis

The research is being conducted at CEFS’s 2000-acre Cherry Research Farm facility near Goldsboro. The farm and CEFS are jointly operated by N.C. State University, N.C. A&T University, and the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. CEFS researchers include soil scientists and veterinarians as well as agricultural specialists studying organic cropping, best practices for small farms, pasture-based dairy farming, and even alternative energy sources for farmers.

The swine unit has been operating since 2004 and also conducts research on raising pigs in hoop houses, a common practice in Europe and in Iowa, the largest hog-producing state. In addition to research, they provide extension services, educating farmers on the best practices they’ve discovered.

So the next time you buy pork, ask your farmer: what steps are you taking to be a good steward of the land?

I interviewed Vanessa after the 2008 event and blogged (scroll down to the second half of the post) about her 2009 session ‘Blogging adventure: how to post from strange locations’. At the 2010 conference, she was one of the five storytellers at the ScienceOnline Monti on Thursday night (and did another stint at The Monti in Carrboro a couple of months later). I have since then also met her husband Brian Hare and we instantly hit it off marvelously.

I have read Vanessa’s previous book, ‘It’s every monkey for themselves‘, but never reviewed it on the blog because I felt uneasy – that book is so personal! But it is an excellent and wonderfully written page-turner of a book so I knew I was in for a treat when I got a review copy of her new book, Bonobo Handshake (amazon.com). I could not wait for it to officially come out so I could go to the first public reading (where I took the picture) at the Regulator in Durham on May 27th, on the day of publication.

Vanessa recently moved her blog to a new location on Psychology Today network and had a few interviews in local papers, more sure to come soon.

Vanessa will also soon read/sign the book at Quail Ridge Books on June 9th at 7:30pm, and at Chapel Hill Borders on June 12th at 2pm (also June 22 at Barnes & Noble on Maynard in Cary, June 30 at The Country Bookshop in Southern Pines, and Aug. 10 at Broad Street Café in Durham, in-between readings in other cities on the East and West coasts) and I hope you can make it to one of these events as they are fun, especially the way she tries to talk about a species renowned for its sexual behavior by using language that is appropriate for the kids in the audience

The book weaves four parallel threads. The first is Vanessa’s own life. Bonobo Handshake starts where ‘Each monkey’ leaves off. And while the ‘Monkey’ covered the period of her life that was pretty distressing, this book begins as her life begins to normalize, describing how she met Brian, fell in love, and got married – a happy trajectory.

The second thread is the science – the experiments they did on behavior and cognition in bonobos and chimps, and how the results fit into the prior knowledge and literature on primate (including human) nature.

The third thread reports on the conservation status of great apes, especially bonobos, and all the social, cultural, financial and political factors that work for or against the efforts to prevent them from going extinct.

The fourth thread is the country of Congo, where all the bonobos in the wild live, especially its recent history of war and its effects on the local people.

The four threads are seamlessly intervowen with each other, but it takes some time into the book to realize that there is, besides the fact that Vanessa was there and did the stuff and wrote about it, another unifying thread – the question of cooperation vs. competition. Vanessa and Brian sometimes love, sometimes fight: what determined one behavior at one time and the opposite at another time?

For the most part, chimps compete and bonobos cooperate: why is that? And what accounts for occasional exceptions to that rule? When threatened, or perceiving to be threatened, animals become insecure. Chimps deal with that insecurity by lashing out – becoming violent and aggressive, or at least putting out a great show of machismo. When bonobos feel insecure (including when they are very young), they solve the problem (and release the tension) by having sex with each other. If chimps won the national elections in the USA, they would probably rule by fear and force, investing mightily into the military, the police and the prison system, going around the world bombing other countries, declaring various internal “Wars on X”, and generally trying to keep the population fearful, subdued and obedient. Bonobos in such a position would always first try to find out a diplomatic solution: how to turn a stranger, or even an enemy into a friend and ally? Share something! Whatever you have: food, shelter, sex…. Everyone is safer that way in the end.

Of course, there are reasons why chimps are one way and bonobos the other. Food is scarce where chimps live, thus there is competition for it, thus the strongest individual wins, and the winner takes all. The position in the hierarchy is the key to survival. Individualism rules. On the other hand, there is plenty of food where bonobos live, enough to share with everyone, eat enough to get bloated, and still plenty left over to just let rot. Why fight over it? Thus, communitarian spirit rules, and if a big strong male starts to feel his oats a little too much, the females will get together and gang up on him as a sisterhood and beat the crap out of him – a rare exception to their usual non-violence, but an act that restores harmony to the group as a whole.

What can we learn from it? That, being equally related to both species, as well as being smarter, we are quite capable of switching between the two modes of reaction to perceived threats: competitive or cooperative. Some people (probably due to the social environment in which they were raised) tend to respond more like chimps, others more like bonobos, but all are capable of behaving both ways. Thus, all are capable of making choices how to react. And the society as a whole can teach people about the exictence of this choice and, in some general ways regarding different kinds of issues, suggest which of the two reactions is condoned by the society and which one will lend you in jail. Studying both chimps and bonobos, comparing them to each other and to humans, can help us understand this choice better, and what it takes to make one or the other reaction to a perceived threat. And even how to study, as researchers, competitions versus cooperation, something that was historically colored by the social upbringing of individual scientists.

[An aside: this is not really relevant to the book as whole, but if I remember correctly it occurs once in the book, and Vanessa sometimes mentions it in her public speaking and on her blog. She mentions the old trope that we are about 98% identical to both chimps and bonobos. That number denotes the identity of sequences of DNA that is expressed in adult, sexually mature individuals at a particular time of year and particular time of day. It ignores all the unexpressed DNA, individual differences, seasonal/daily changes in expression, and effect of the environment. It also ignores the fact that the sequence is not what really matters - it is how the developing organism (from zygote, through embryonic and post-embryonic development, through metamorphosis, growth, maturation, puberty, adulthood and senescence) uses those sequences to effect the development of traits and the day-to-day response of the organism to the environment. It is not the sequence that matters, but which gene is expressed in which cell at what time and in conjunction with which other genes that matters. The number "98% equal" reeks of genetic determinism, which originates with Adaptation and Natural Selection, the 1966 book by George Williams which corrupted generations of biologists, and 'The Selfish Gene', the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins which ruined generations of lay readers and science journalists. It peaked in late 1990s (I wrote this in 1999) with the hype over Human Genome Project ("Holy Grail", "Blueprint of Life"!) and currently survives only in the realm of that abomination of science we all know as Evolutionary Psychology. There is a lot of literature explaining the poverty of the genocentric and deterministic view of biology, most notably the entire opuses of Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, their numerous students and proteges and fans, and an entire generation of evo-devo researchers (the field was spawned/inspired by Gould's 1977 book 'Ontogeny and Phylogeny') and Philosophers of Science (e.g.., Bob Brandon, Bill Wimsatt) who spent some years proving it wrong and, successfully done that, have since moved on to more fertile topics. Actually, one of the easiest-to-read books on the topic for lay audience is titled - What it Means to be 95% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and their Genes. Saying that humans and bonobos are 98 (or 95, or 99, different numbers are thrown out) percent identical to us is like saying that an airplane and a house are identical because both are built with identical sizes, shapes and colors of Lego blocks - except that one propeller-piece that the airplane has and the house does not. So, Vanessa, drop it. Bonobos and humans are similar because our development is similar, leading to similar phenotypes - not much to do with the sequences of c-DNA libraries. Aside over.]

Conservation of Great Apes depends on humans cooperating to make it happen, but also has to take into account the instrinsic proclivities of different species (chimps, bonobos, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons are all different) towards violence vs. collaboration which dictate the sizes and shapes and organizational schemes of their sanctuaries and eventual wild refuges.

Finally, civil war in Congo is an enormous example of violent competition, but what were its causes? Who chose to compete in this way and why? What was the competition about? Did the end of the Cold War sufficiently weaken the Non-Aligned Movement in a way that reduced the national pride of the people of its member-nations (allowing tribal instincts to take over), reduced the economic cooperation between the member countries (thus sending some of their economies into a downward spiral leading to hopelessness which often leads to lashing out at perceived enemies), or reduced the military cooperation between the members that would scare any potential leader of a tribal movement, or reduced the authority and thus ability of the Movement’s leadership to intervene and prevent wars between the members?

Why did some people come out of war utterly changed – the “living dead” – while others emerged hopeful, energetic and optimistic, full of life and love? How did collaboration of some people help save some of them from murder, and save their psyches from lifelong scars?

Vanessa weaves these four threads expertly and, at the end of the book, you cannot help but care about all four! It is a fast and easy read, you never feel bored or inundated by information, yet you end the book with vastly more knowledge than when you began. And once you know about something enough, you start caring.

I remember as a kid, before the Internet, trying to find something to read after I have finished all 20 library books I took out and still having a couple of weeks of boring vacation ahead of me. Stuck somewhere outside of civilization, with nothing else to do, there was nothing else but to explore the enormous leather-bound classics, each thousands of pages long, each unabridged – stuff that every home has. So I read, slowly and carefully as there was no need to rush, such books as David Copperfield, Pickwick Papers, Teutonic Knights, Moby Dick, Les Miserables, The Road to Life and Martin Eden and others. Being a kid, I did not know anything about any of those topics, and these ancient authors LOVED to write lengthy treateses on various topics over many pages, yet, by getting informed about them, I got to care about Victorian England, Medieval Religious Wars in Poland, classification of whales (and how Melville got it horribly wrong), Paris sewers, educational reforms, and the hard life of becoming a writer. Once, when I contracted something (rubella? scarlet fever?) that made me sick for a couple of days but contagious for another three weeks, with nothing to do at home, I read the unabridged five volumes of War and Peace – at the beginning I did not, but at the end I did care about Russian aristocracy and military strategy (or “how to lose a land war in a Russian winter, part I”).

I don’t know about you, but before I picked up ‘Bonobo Hanshake’ I cared about Vanessa, being a friend, and was thus interested to see what happened after the ‘Monkeys’ book was published. I was interested in bonobo behavior (as we discussed it a lot back in grad school – I did my concentration in Animal Behavior and was a part of the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology) especially as I did not follow the scientific literature on it over the past 6-7 years. I had no idea how endangered bonobos were, nor did I know anything about the civil war in the Congo (and how it is related to the civil war in Rwanda). And while Vanessa did not emulate the 19th century writers, and instead of long chapters on each topic she intertwined brief updates on each of the four threads within each short chapter, I still learned a lot – enough to start caring about the apes, about the people of Congo, about the primatologists working in dangerous places, about individual bonobos and individual Congolese people whose lives intersected Vanessa’s over the past few years. More you know, more you care. So, even if the four themes of this book do not automatically excite you, I suggest you pick up the book – a couple of hours later, you will deeply care about it, know more, want to know even more, and will feel good about it.

Higher concentrations of carbon dioxide are pumped into four of the experimental rings. Photo: Will Owen

Late in 2010, an epic ecological experiment in the Triangle will begin drawing to a close when carbon dioxide stops pumping from four massive rings of towers in the Duke Forest. Since 1996, more than 250 scientists at Duke and dozens of other institutions have measured the response of this forest ecosystem to the elevated amounts of carbon dioxide expected in the Earth’s atmosphere in the future. They’ve measured tree and plant growth, photosynthesis, leaf size, soil composition, root growth, and water use in the plots bathed in elevated carbon dioxide and in three other “ambient” control plots.

The first, prototype ring was built in 1994; six more came in 1996 (three controls and three experiments). Each ring consists of 16 metal towers in a 30-meter diameter. Computer-controlled instruments in the experimental rings bathe the interior of the plot in carbon dioxide. It’s called Free-Air CO2 Enrichment, or FACE. As opposed to “chamber studies,” in which plants are studied in carefully controlled growth chambers or greenhouses, the rings are open to nature. That means that mammals and insects can circulate freely and that natural events like hurricanes, ice storms, and droughts affect the research site.

Shannon LaDeau, who studied seed and pollen production at the site as a Ph.D. student, fondly calls it the EcoCircus, referring to both the ring-shaped sites and the riot of instruments, leaf-collection baskets, and colored flags staking out individual research groups’ claims to a particular layer of soil or stand of plants. LaDeau is one of at least 25 scientists who conducted Ph.D. research at FACE. “One of the really big bonuses of that site and others like it,” she says, “is that people are coming at it from different directions—biogeochemistry, biology, and so on.” There was an integration of ideas, she says, that “doesn’t happen naturally when scientists go out and choose their own site and do their own thing.”

Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

I talked recently with Ram Oren, Nicholas Professor of Earth System Science at Duke and co-principal investigator for the project since 1998. He explained that the Department of Energy–funded project will enter a final phase this fall when the carbon dioxide is turned off. A scientific team will follow the trees for two more years to see how they respond to the “severe diet” that will be imposed on them when they are no longer receiving the added carbs.

Oren reminded me that when the experiment began, it was already well documented that trees grew faster under higher levels of carbon dioxide, especially when they were well nourished and watered. Retired Duke ecologist Boyd Strain and his students and colleagues had already established this in studies in which trees were isolated in growth chambers and treated with different regimes of carbon dioxide, nutrients, and water.

The FACE experiment was intended to test how entire ecosystems, not just trees, responded to additional carbon dioxide. In particular, researchers wanted to know if trees and soils would store or sequester extra carbon dioxide, keeping it from the atmosphere where it would contribute to a warmer climate.

The early major findings of the experiment were that, similar to the chamber studies, plants in the forest did indeed grow faster when exposed to extra carbon dioxide, especially in the presence of plentiful water and nutrients. And the ecosystem did store more carbon, but mostly in plant stems, not in soil as had been predicted.

Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

A second wave of findings showed that the continuing growth response of plants to a “high-carb” diet depended on the native fertility of the site. Trees in fertile areas responded strongly to the carbon dioxide treatment and continued a higher growth rate, but trees in infertile areas didn’t retain their original growth response.

That’s important in the real world, because our most fertile soils tend to be cultivated for agriculture, leaving forests in less fertile areas. So we cannot expect trees to retain extra carbon in the forests of the future, says Oren.

While some scientists were studying tree growth and soils, others were finding that poison ivy has a remarkable response to higher CO2 conditions. Not only did it grow two times as fast as poison ivy in ambient conditions, but it produced much more toxin per leaf.

Shannon LaDeau, who conducted pollen studies, told me that the trees exposed to extra CO2 reached reproductive maturity at a younger age and smaller size. For those of us who suffer allergies, that is a bit ominous. While pine pollen—the yellow-green stuff that bathes the Triangle every spring—is not technically considered an allergen, other trees with true allergy-causing pollen may well have the same response as the pines, LaDeau says.

In 2004, when this photo was taken, the towers were still higher than the treetops. Now the trees have outgrown the towers. Photo: Lisa M. Dellwo

When the Department of Energy announced two years ago that it would cease funding the FACE project in Duke Forest—and similar projects elsewhere—Oren said that the project had not reached its true conclusion. He still believes that. But funding aside, there is a technical reason the project is drawing to a conclusion: the trees have outgrown the towers. When the experiment began, anyone who entered the site or who happened to fly over it could see the rings of towers clearly above the canopy. Now, trees that measured ten meters in 1996 are 21 meters high, and the towers have receded into the canopy.

In addition to the generation of ecological scientists trained at the site and the more than 250 papers reporting on the response of the ecosystem to elevated CO2, Oren believes that an important legacy of the FACE experiment will be the data gathered there over 17 years. Very few experiments last that long, and the accumulated data from FACE is being made available to computer modelers who will use it for years into the future to test and extrapolate responses to future climate change on a larger scope.

I have interviewed Vanessa last year so you can learn more about her there.

I received a review copy recently and am halfway through. Once I finish I will post my book review here.

From Publishers Weekly:

Devoted to learning more about bonobos, a smaller, more peaceable species of primate than chimpanzees, and lesser known, Australian journalist Woods and her fiancé, scientist Brian Hare, conducted research in the bonobos’ only known habitat—civil war–torn Congo. Woods’s plainspoken, unadorned account traces the couple’s work at Lola Ya Bonobo Sanctuary, located outside “Kinshasa in the 75-acre forested grounds of what was once Congo dictator Mobutu Sese Seko’s weekend retreat. The sanctuary, founded in 1994 and run by French activist Claudine André, served as an orphanage for baby bonobos, left for dead after their parents had been hunted for bush meat; the sanctuary healed and nurtured them (assigning each a human caretaker called a mama), with the aim of reintroducing the animals to the wild. Hare had only previously conducted research on the more warlike, male-dominated chimpanzee, and needed Woods because she spoke French and won the animals’ trust; through their daily work, the couple witnessed with astonishment how the matriarchal bonobo society cooperated nicely using frequent sex, and could even inspire human behavior. When Woods describes her daily interaction with the bonobos, her account takes on a warm charm. Woods’s personable, accessible work about bonobos elucidates the marvelous intelligence and tolerance of this gentle cousin to humans.”

NCSU's EcoCAR

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.

The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.

On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities.

Ali Seyam, student team leader

“We lost so many nights together,” said Ali Seyam, one of three graduate student leaders on the NCSU team. To get the car ready, team members sacrificed spring break, he said, and worked until 6 a.m. Saturday.

The EcoCAR Challenge is a three-year competition that was established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center for science and engineering near Chicago, manages the competition.

Teams spent the first year designing the technology to build their EcoCAR. The second year was dedicated to rebuilding a GM-donated Saturn View. Following a week of tests in the Arizona desert and three days of presentations in San Diego, Calif., students then optimize and promote their entries during the third year.

The lithium-ion battery pack

At the end of the competition, which is broken down into multiple milestones and deadlines, teams with the best scores in the different categories can win hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But not just the winners benefit. Participating students interact with mentors in the industry and learn cutting-edge skills. Sponsorships and donations to complete an entry, including the car, parts and software, are worth more than $1 million per team, Terry Gilbert, the faculty advisor for the NCSU EcoCAR team, estimated.

Once the competition is over, the NCSU EcoCAR will become part of the university’s pool of vehicles.

More information about the NCSU EcoCAR team is here and here.