Marijuana waste helps turn pot-eating pigs into tasty pork roast

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• Pigs are seen at a farm in Indiana
  

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - With Washington state about to embark on a first-of-its-kind legal market for recreational marijuana, the budding ranks of new cannabis growers face a quandary over what to do with the excess stems, roots and leaves from their plants.

Susannah Gross, who owns a five-acre farm north of Seattle, is part of a group experimenting with a solution that seems to make the most of marijuana's appetite-enhancing properties - turning weed waste into pig food.

Four pigs whose feed was supplemented with potent plant leavings during the last four months of their lives ended up 20 to 30 pounds heavier than the half-dozen other pigs from the same litter when they were all sent to slaughter in March.
"They were eating more, as you can imagine," Gross said.

Giving farm animals the munchies is the latest outcome of a ballot measure passed by Washington voters in November making their state one of the first to legalize the recreational use of pot. The other was Colorado. Both were among about 20 states with medical marijuana laws already on their books.

The federal government still classifies cannabis as an illegal narcotic, and the Obama administration has not yet said what actions, if any, it will take in answer to the newly passed recreational weed statutes.

Matt McAlman, the medical marijuana grower who provided the pot leavings for Gross' pigs, says he hopes the idea expands with the likely impending expansion of Washington state's marijuana industry.

"We can have pot chickens, pot pigs, grass-fed beef," he said.

Draft regulations issued last week to govern the burgeoning recreational-use industry seem to leave open that possibility. The rules dictate that marijuana plant waste must be "rendered unusable prior to leaving a licensed producer or processor's facility," adding that mixing it with food waste would be acceptable.

Gross' pigs were butchered by William von Schneidau, who has a shop at the famous Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. In March, von Schneidau held a "Pot Pig Gig" at the market, serving up the marijuana-fed pork as part of a five-course meal.
He quickly sold out the remaining weed-fed meat at his shop but plans another pot-pig feast later this summer, he said.
"Some say the meat seems to taste more savory," he said.
The results beg the question of whether pot-fed pork contains any measurable traces of THC, the mind-altering chemical ingredient in cannabis.
The European Food Safety Authority reported in 2011 that "no studies concerning tolerance or effects of graded levels of THC in food-producing animals have been found in literature."
The agency also noted that "no data are available concerning the likely transfer of THC ... to animal tissues and eggs following repeated administration."
(Editing by Steve Gorman and Bob Burgdorfer)

 http://news.yahoo.com/marijuana-waste-helps-turn-pot-eating-pigs-tasty-184633031.html

A Dream of Trees Aglow at Night. replace street lights?

Antony Evans, left, and Kyle Taylor show E. coli with jellyfish genes.

By ANDREW POLLACK

Hoping to give new meaning to the term “natural light,” a small group of biotechnology hobbyists and entrepreneurs has started a project to develop plants that glow, potentially leading the way for trees that can replace electric streetlamps and potted flowers luminous enough to read by. 

 

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Mr. Taylor, left, is lead scientist of the glowing plant project, and Mr. Evans its manager.

The project, which will use a sophisticated form of genetic engineering called synthetic biology, is attracting attention not only for its audacious goal, but for how it is being carried out. 

Rather than being the work of a corporation or an academic laboratory, it will be done by a small group of hobbyist scientists in one of the growing number of communal laboratories springing up around the nation as biotechnology becomes cheap enough to give rise to a do-it-yourself movement. 

The project is also being financed in a D.I.Y. sort of way: It has attracted more than $250,000 in pledges from about 4,500 donors in about two weeks on the Web site Kickstarter. 

The effort is not the first of its kind. A university group created a glowing tobacco plant a few years ago by implanting genes from a marine bacterium that emits light. But the light was so dim that it could be perceived only if one observed the plant for at least five minutes in a dark room. 

The new project’s goals, at least initially, are similarly modest. “We hope to have a plant which you can visibly see in the dark (like glow-in-the-dark paint), but don’t expect to replace your light bulbs with version 1.0,” the project’s Kickstarter page says. 

But part of the goal is more controversial: to publicize do-it-yourself synthetic biology and to “inspire others to create new living things.” As promising as that might seem to some, critics are alarmed at the idea of tinkerers creating living things in their garages. They fear that malicious organisms may be created, either intentionally or by accident. 

Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Earth and the ETC Group, have written to Kickstarter and to the Agriculture Department, which regulates genetically modified crops, in an effort to shut down the glowing plant effort. 

The project “will likely result in widespread, random and uncontrolled release of bioengineered seeds and plants produced through the controversial and risky techniques of synthetic biology,” the two groups said in their letter demanding that Kickstarter remove the project from its Web site. 

They note that the project has pledged to deliver seeds to many of its 4,000 contributors, making it perhaps the “first-ever intentional environmental release of an avowedly ‘synthetic biology’ organism anywhere in the world.” Kickstarter told the critics to take up their concerns with the project’s organizers. The Agriculture Department has not yet replied. 

Antony Evans, the manager of the glowing plant project, said in an interview that the activity would be safe.

“What we are doing is very identical to what has been done in research laboratories and big institutions for 20 years,” he said. Still, he added, “We are very cognizant of the precedent we are setting” with the do-it-yourself project and that some of the money raised would be used to explore public policy issues.

Synthetic biology is a nebulous term and it is difficult to say how, if at all, it differs from genetic engineering.

In its simplest form, genetic engineering involves snipping a gene out of one organism and pasting it into the DNA of another. Synthetic biology typically involves synthesizing the DNA to be inserted, providing the flexibility to go beyond the genes found in nature. 

The glowing plant project is the brainchild of Mr. Evans, a technology entrepreneur in San Francisco, and Omri Amirav-Drory, a biochemist. They met at Singularity University, a program that introduces entrepreneurs to futuristic technology. 

Dr. Amirav-Drory runs a company called Genome Compiler, which makes a program that can be used to design DNA sequences. When the sequence is done, it is transmitted to a mail-order foundry that synthesizes the DNA. 

Kyle Taylor, who received his doctorate in molecular and cell biology at Stanford last year, will be in charge of putting the synthetic DNA into the plant. The research will be done, at least initially, at BioCurious, a communal laboratory in Silicon Valley that describes itself as a “hackerspace for biotech.” 

The first plant the group is modifying is Arabidopsis thaliana, part of the mustard family and the laboratory rat of the plant world. The organizers hope to move next to a glowing rose. 

Scientists have long made glowing creatures for research purposes, including one or more monkeys, cats, pigs, dogs and worms. Glowing zebra fish have been sold in some aquarium shops for years. 

These creatures typically have the gene for a green fluorescent protein, derived from a jellyfish, spliced into their DNA. But they glow only when ultraviolet light is shined on them. 

Others going back to the 1980s have transplanted the gene for luciferase, an enzyme used by fireflies, into plants. But luciferase will not work without another chemical called luciferin. So the plants did not glow unless luciferin was constantly fed to them. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University reported in the journal Plos One that they had created a tobacco plant that glowed entirely on its own, however dimly. They spliced into the plant all six genes from a marine bacterium necessary to produce both luciferase and luciferin.

Alexander Krichevsky, who led that research, has started a company, BioGlow, to commercialize glowing plants, starting with ornamental ones, since it is still impractical to replace light bulbs. 

“Wouldn’t you like your beautiful flowers to glow in the dark?” he said, invoking the glowing foliage in the movie “Avatar.” 

Dr. Krichevsky declined to provide more about the products, timetables or the investors backing his company, which is based in St. Louis. 

Whether it will ever be possible to replace light bulbs remains to be seen and depends to some extent on how much of the plant’s energy can be devoted to light production while still allowing the plant to grow. Mr. Evans said his group calculated, albeit with many assumptions, that a tree that covers a ground area of 10 meters (nearly 33 feet) by 10 meters might be able to cast as much light as a street lamp. 

While the Agriculture Department regulates genetically modified plants, it does so under a law covering plant pests. 

BioGlow has already obtained a letter from the department saying that it will not need approval to release its glowing plants because they are not plant pests, and are not made using plant pests. The hobbyist project hopes to get the same exemption. 

Todd Kuiken, senior research associate at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, who has been studying the governance of both synthetic biology and the do-it-yourself movement, said the glowing plant project was an ideal test case. 

“It exposes the gaps and holes in the regulatory structure, while it is, I would argue, a safe product in the grand scheme of things,” Dr. Kuiken said. “A serious look needs to be taken at the regulatory system to see if it can handle the questions synthetic biology is going to raise.” 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/08/business/energy-environment/a-dream-of-glowing-trees-is-assailed-for-gene-tinkering.html?ref=earth&_r=0

Pro-Environment Light Bulb Labeling Turns Off Conservatives, Study Finds

When light bulbs are compared side-by-side, some consumers are turned off by labeling that stresses the environmental benefits of efficient choices, a study finds.

How many conservatives does it take to change a light bulb? A more intriguing question might be, "How many conservatives can you persuade to switch to energy-efficient light bulbs?" New research suggests that fewer will buy such bulbs when they're labeled as being good for the environment, largely because the issue of carbon emission reductions is so politically polarizing in the United States. 

"I think we've shown the negative consequences of environmental messaging," explained Dena Gromet, of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, lead author of a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "In particular, you can lose significant portions of people who would otherwise be interested in these products when you use that environmental labeling. So it indicates that different messages can reach different groups." (See related interactive: "Light Bulb Savings Calculator.")

The United States is one of many countries forcing a switch to more efficient light bulbs. In January, new efficiency requirements went into effect for 75-watt incandescent bulbs, following new standards on 100-watt bulbs a year earlier. (See related story: "U.S. Bids Farewell to the 75-Watt Incandescent Light Bulb.") The changes are driving a projected 857 kilowatthour-per-household reduction in energy used for U.S. residential lighting by 2040, a greater cut than for any other area of household energy use. But consumer complaints have been persistent, and Congress cut funding to enforce the standards.  (See related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Energy-Efficient Lighting.")

The Importance of Price

Gromet and colleagues from Wharton and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business first queried 657 volunteers to find out whether their opinions on energy-efficient products were split along a political divide. They were, she reported, and the issue of emissions reductions explained much of that ideological distance.
Then, a set of 210 potential buyers were armed with information on the benefits of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), which last 9,000 hours longer than incandescent bulbs, and cut energy costs by 75 percent. They were asked to choose between lower efficiency and higher efficiency options; efficient bulbs were offered, labeled with a "protect the environment" sticker in some cases, and at other times with a blank sticker.

Political divisions appeared in purchasing choices—but not until price became an issue. When all bulbs were priced the same, every participant save one chose the energy-efficient option regardless of political persuasion.

"That indicates that people recognize the greater economic value of the bulb when there isn't a higher up-front cost," Gromet explained. But when the study represented retail realities, that more efficient options carry a higher up-front price tag (though consumers save money in the long run through lowered utility bills), fewer conservatives were willing to pay the extra cash for bulbs labeled as good for the environment.
"Our results demonstrated that a choice that wasn't ideologically polarizing without a ("protect the environment") label became polarizing when we included that environmental labeling," Gromet said. "We saw a significant drop-off in conservative people choosing to buy a more expensive, energy-efficient option."
The explanation, Gromet suggests, could lie in labeling a consumer choice to represent values that simply aren't shared by all buyers—in this case the environmental issue of reducing carbon emissions.
"So it makes that choice unattractive to some people even if they recognize that it may be a money-saving choice. When we asked afterward, those consumers identified the CFL bulbs as providing greater monetary savings over time. But they would forgo that option when that product was made to represent a value that was not something they wanted to be identified with." (See related: "Missing the Chance for Big Energy Savings.")

The study also suggested that pro-environmental messages don't have much of a positive influence on liberal consumers at the other end of the political spectrum. "We didn't see a significant boost among political liberals when we used the environmental message in our study," Gromet added. "We'd need a lot more data, but one possibility stemming from that is that you're not necessarily getting that much of a boost on the liberal side."


Jacquelyn Ottman, a marketing consultant specializing in sustainability who wrote The New Rules of Green Marketing, said she wouldn't expect green labeling to provide a big consumer boost for liberals or conservatives. People buy green products for the value they represent and because they work, she explained. Environmentally aware consumers do appreciate health benefits, and hope to protect the future for their families, but they aren't entirely swayed by green messaging, she said.

"Green marketing I lump in with things like 'made in America' or 'the union label.' They are nice for some people to think about when purchasing and maybe they add a little value are not really game-changers in terms of swaying decisions. Some people conclude that Americans don't care about the environment because if they did they'd be buying more green products. But by that logic you'd say Americans don't care about America because if they did they'd be buying more 'made in America' products also."
As for the possible negative implications of green labeling, Ottman said other factors are likely at work besides politics. Some green offerings still battle stereotypes from decades ago, she said, when many were viewed as "alternative" products that simply didn't work as well and weren't produced by the larger brands consumers had come to trust. "There is a lingering misconception about green products that they don't work and that they are overpriced because they are gouging people based on their sentiments about saving the planet," she said.

Some recent market research suggests that a different factor might be at work: Consumer dislike for CFLs may be a far greater problem than price or messaging. Sales of solid-state LED lighting are growing rapidly, even though this high-efficiency choice is more costly than CFLs. The Wharton-Duke study did not test attitudes on LEDs.  (See related post: "LED Holiday Lights Boost the Season's Energy Efficiency.")
Ottman added that some marketers might be more interested to learn about how short-term versus long-term savings factor into consumers' decision making, especially vis-à-vis premium pricing for many environmentally preferable products—including light bulbs.

That's an issue Gromet hopes to explore as well, along with energy independence and other benefits of efficient products unrelated to the environment.

"It's an open question whether emphasizing those other aspects of energy-efficiency might have different appeal to different (political sensibilities) and a different impact on consumer decisions," she said.
Editors' note: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that household energy use for lighting was projected to decrease by 857 percent. It has been corrected to reflect the reduction is 857 kilowatthours.
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2013/04/130430-light-bulb-labeling/

America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

New research finds Pb is the hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and even the ADHD epidemic. And fixing the problem is a lot cheaper than doing nothing.

 

Illustration: Gérard DuBois

 

When Rudy Giuliani ran for mayor of New York City in 1993, he campaigned on a platform of bringing down crime and making the city safe again. It was a comfortable position for a former federal prosecutor with a tough-guy image, but it was more than mere posturing. Since 1960, rape rates had nearly quadrupled, murder had quintupled, and robbery had grown fourteenfold. New Yorkers felt like they lived in a city under siege.

• Is There Lead In Your House?
• An Interview With Pioneering Toxicologist Howard Mielke
• How Dangerous Is the Lead in Bullets?
• Does Lead Paint Produce More Crime Too?
• How Your Water Company May Be Poisoning Your Kids

More MoJo coverage of the dangers of lead.

Throughout the campaign, Giuliani embraced a theory of crime fighting called "broken windows," popularized a decade earlier by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in an influential article in The Atlantic. "If a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired," they observed, "all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." So too, tolerance of small crimes would create a vicious cycle ending with entire neighborhoods turning into war zones. But if you cracked down on small crimes, bigger crimes would drop as well.Giuliani won the election, and he made good on his crime-fighting promises by selecting Boston police chief Bill Bratton as the NYPD's new commissioner. Bratton had made his reputation as head of the New York City Transit Police, where he aggressively applied broken-windows policing to turnstile jumpers and vagrants in subway stations. With Giuliani's eager support, he began applying the same lessons to the entire city, going after panhandlers, drunks, drug pushers, and the city's hated squeegee men. And more: He decentralized police operations and gave precinct commanders more control, keeping them accountable with a pioneering system called CompStat that tracked crime hot spots in real time.

The results were dramatic. In 1996, the New York Times reported that crime had plunged for the third straight year, the sharpest drop since the end of Prohibition. Since 1993, rape rates had dropped 17 percent, assault 27 percent, robbery 42 percent, and murder an astonishing 49 percent. Giuliani was on his way to becoming America's Mayor and Bratton was on the cover of Time. It was a remarkable public policy victory.
But even more remarkable is what happened next. Shortly after Bratton's star turn, political scientist John DiIulio warned that the echo of the baby boom would soon produce a demographic bulge of millions of young males that he famously dubbed "juvenile super-predators." Other criminologists nodded along. But even though the demographic bulge came right on schedule, crime continued to drop. And drop. And drop. By 2010, violent crime rates in New York City had plunged 75 percent from their peak in the early '90s.
All in all, it seemed to be a story with a happy ending, a triumph for Wilson and Kelling's theory and Giuliani and Bratton's practice. And yet, doubts remained. For one thing, violent crime actually peaked in New York City in 1990, four years before the Giuliani-Bratton era. By the time they took office, it had already dropped 12 percent.

The PB Effect

What happens when you expose a generation of kids to high lead levels? Crime and teen pregnancy data two decades later tell a startling story.

Second, and far more puzzling, it's not just New York that has seen a big drop in crime. In city after city, violent crime peaked in the early '90s and then began a steady and spectacular decline. Washington, DC, didn't have either Giuliani or Bratton, but its violent crime rate has dropped 58 percent since its peak. Dallas' has fallen 70 percent. Newark: 74 percent. Los Angeles: 78 percent.
There must be more going on here than just a change in policing tactics in one city. But what?

There are, it turns out, plenty of theories. When I started research for this story, I worked my way through a pair of thick criminology tomes. One chapter regaled me with the "exciting possibility" that it's mostly a matter of economics: Crime goes down when the economy is booming and goes up when it's in a slump. Unfortunately, the theory doesn't seem to hold water—for example, crime rates have continued to drop recently despite our prolonged downturn.
Another chapter suggested that crime drops in big cities were mostly a reflection of the crack epidemic of the '80s finally burning itself out. A trio of authors identified three major "drug eras" in New York City, the first dominated by heroin, which produced limited violence, and the second by crack, which generated spectacular levels of it. In the early '90s, these researchers proposed, the children of CrackGen switched to marijuana, choosing a less violent and more law-abiding lifestyle. As they did, crime rates in New York and other cities went down.
Another chapter told a story of demographics: As the number of young men increases, so does crime. Unfortunately for this theory, the number of young men increased during the '90s, but crime dropped anyway.
There were chapters in my tomes on the effect of prison expansion. On guns and gun control. On family. On race. On parole and probation. On the raw number of police officers. It seemed as if everyone had a pet theory. In 1999, economist Steven Levitt, later famous as the coauthor of Freakonomics, teamed up with John Donohue to suggest that crime dropped because of Roe v. Wade; legalized abortion, they argued, led to fewer unwanted babies, which meant fewer maladjusted and violent young men two decades later.
But there's a problem common to all of these theories: It's hard to tease out actual proof. Maybe the end of the crack epidemic contributed to a decline in inner-city crime, but then again, maybe it was really the effect of increased incarceration, more cops on the beat, broken-windows policing, and a rise in abortion rates 20 years earlier. After all, they all happened at the same time.
To address this problem, the field of econometrics gives researchers an enormous toolbox of sophisticated statistical techniques. But, notes statistician and conservative commentator Jim Manzi in his recent book Uncontrolled, econometrics consistently fails to explain most of the variation in crime rates. After reviewing 122 known field tests, Manzi found that only 20 percent demonstrated positive results for specific crime-fighting strategies, and none of those positive results were replicated in follow-up studies.

Did Lead Make You Dumber?

Even low levels have a significant effect.

So we're back to square one. More prisons might help control crime, more cops might help, and better policing might help. But the evidence is thin for any of these as the main cause. What are we missing?
Experts often suggest that crime resembles an epidemic. But what kind? Karl Smith, a professor of public economics and government at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, has a good rule of thumb for categorizing epidemics: If it spreads along lines of communication, he says, the cause is information. Think Bieber Fever. If it travels along major transportation routes, the cause is microbial. Think influenza. If it spreads out like a fan, the cause is an insect. Think malaria. But if it's everywhere, all at once—as both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and the fall of crime in the '90s seemed to be—the cause is a molecule.
A molecule? That sounds crazy. What molecule could be responsible for a steep and sudden decline in violent crime?
Well, here's one possibility: Pb(CH₂CH₃)₄.

In 1994, Rick Nevin was a consultant working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might be missing something. A recent study had suggested a link between childhood lead exposure and juvenile delinquency later on. Maybe reducing lead exposure had an effect on violent crime too?
That tip took Nevin in a different direction. The biggest source of lead in the postwar era, it turns out, wasn't paint. It was leaded gasoline. And if you chart the rise and fall of atmospheric lead caused by the rise and fall of leaded gasoline consumption, you get a pretty simple upside-down U: Lead emissions from tailpipes rose steadily from the early '40s through the early '70s, nearly quadrupling over that period. Then, as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline, emissions plummeted.

Gasoline lead may explain as much as 90 percent of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

Intriguingly, violent crime rates followed the same upside-down U pattern. The only thing different was the time period: Crime rates rose dramatically in the '60s through the '80s, and then began dropping steadily starting in the early '90s. The two curves looked eerily identical, but were offset by about 20 years.
So Nevin dove in further, digging up detailed data on lead emissions and crime rates to see if the similarity of the curves was as good as it seemed. It turned out to be even better: In a 2000 paper (PDF) he concluded that if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America. Toddlers who ingested high levels of lead in the '40s and '50s really were more likely to become violent criminals in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.
And with that we have our molecule: tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive invented by General Motors in the 1920s to prevent knocking and pinging in high-performance engines. As auto sales boomed after World War II, and drivers in powerful new cars increasingly asked service station attendants to "fill 'er up with ethyl," they were unwittingly creating a crime wave two decades later.
It was an exciting conjecture, and it prompted an immediate wave of…nothing. Nevin's paper was almost completely ignored, and in one sense it's easy to see why—Nevin is an economist, not a criminologist, and his paper was published in Environmental Research, not a journal with a big readership in the criminology community. What's more, a single correlation between two curves isn't all that impressive, econometrically speaking. Sales of vinyl LPs rose in the postwar period too, and then declined in the '80s and '90s. Lots of things follow a pattern like that. So no matter how good the fit, if you only have a single correlation it might just be a coincidence. You need to do something more to establish causality.
As it turns out, however, a few hundred miles north someone was doing just that. In the late '90s, Jessica Wolpaw Reyes was a graduate student at Harvard casting around for a dissertation topic that eventually became a study she published in 2007 as a public health policy professor at Amherst. "I learned about lead because I was pregnant and living in old housing in Harvard Square," she told me, and after attending a talk where future Freakonomics star Levitt outlined his abortion/crime theory, she started thinking about lead and crime. Although the association seemed plausible, she wanted to find out whether increased lead exposure caused increases in crime. But how?

In states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime declined slowly. Where it declined quickly, crime declined quickly.

The answer, it turned out, involved "several months of cold calling" to find lead emissions data at the state level. During the '70s and '80s, the introduction of the catalytic converter, combined with increasingly stringent Environmental Protection Agency rules, steadily reduced the amount of leaded gasoline used in America, but Reyes discovered that this reduction wasn't uniform. In fact, use of leaded gasoline varied widely among states, and this gave Reyes the opening she needed. If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly. And that's exactly what she found.
Meanwhile, Nevin had kept busy as well, and in 2007 he published a new paper looking at crime trends around the world (PDF). This way, he could make sure the close match he'd found between the lead curve and the crime curve wasn't just a coincidence. Sure, maybe the real culprit in the United States was something else happening at the exact same time, but what are the odds of that same something happening at several different times in several different countries?
Nevin collected lead data and crime data for Australia and found a close match. Ditto for Canada. And Great Britain and Finland and France and Italy and New Zealand and West Germany. Every time, the two curves fit each other astonishingly well. When I spoke to Nevin about this, I asked him if he had ever found a country that didn't fit the theory. "No," he replied. "Not one."
Just this year, Tulane University researcher Howard Mielke published a paper with demographer Sammy Zahran on the correlation of lead and crime at the city level. They studied six US cities that had both good crime data and good lead data going back to the '50s, and they found a good fit in every single one. In fact, Mielke has even studied lead concentrations at the neighborhood level in New Orleans and shared his maps with the local police. "When they overlay them with crime maps," he told me, "they realize they match up."

Location, Location, Location

In New Orleans, lead levels can vary dramatically from one neighborhood to the next—and the poorest neighborhoods tend to be the worst hit.

Maps by Karen Minot

Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century.

When differences of atmospheric lead density between big and small cities largely went away, so did the difference in murder rates.

Like many good theories, the gasoline lead hypothesis helps explain some things we might not have realized even needed explaining. For example, murder rates have always been higher in big cities than in towns and small cities. We're so used to this that it seems unsurprising, but Nevin points out that it might actually have a surprising explanation—because big cities have lots of cars in a small area, they also had high densities of atmospheric lead during the postwar era. But as lead levels in gasoline decreased, the differences between big and small cities largely went away. And guess what? The difference in murder rates went away too. Today, homicide rates are similar in cities of all sizes. It may be that violent crime isn't an inevitable consequence of being a big city after all.
The gasoline lead story has another virtue too: It's the only hypothesis that persuasively explains both the rise of crime in the '60s and '70s and its fall beginning in the '90s. Two other theories—the baby boom demographic bulge and the drug explosion of the '60s—at least have the potential to explain both, but neither one fully fits the known data. Only gasoline lead, with its dramatic rise and fall following World War II, can explain the equally dramatic rise and fall in violent crime.

 http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline

The Case Against Species Revival

Conservation of species still alive should take precedence, the author argues.

The spotted owl's habitat is threatened by the logging of old-growth forests—an industry that has lawmakers inquiring about more high-tech measures to save the birds in an effort to justify more deforestation.

Photograph by Joel Sartore, National Geographic

Stuart Pimm

Editor's note: Stuart Pimm is the Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology at Duke University, and the 2006 laureate of the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences awarded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Check out our coverage on species revival, the topic of a Friday TEDx talk at National Geographic.

In the movie Jurassic Park, a tree extinct for millions of years delights the paleobotanist. Then a sauropod eats its leaves. This movie later shows us how to re-create the dinosaur but not how to grow the tree, which at that size would be perhaps a hundred or more years old, or how to do so metaphorically overnight. To sustain even a single dinosaur, one would need thousands of trees, probably of many species, as well as their pollinators and perhaps their essential symbiotic fungi.
Video: Should We Resurrect Extinct Species?

De-extinction intends to resurrect single, charismatic species, yet millions of species are at risk of extinction. De-extinction can only be an infinitesimal part of solving the crisis that now sees species of animals (some large but most tiny), plants, fungi, and microbes going extinct at a thousand times their natural rates. (Related: Photos of Nearly Extinct Species.)

"But wait"—claim de-extinction's proponents. "We want to resurrect passenger pigeons and Pyrenean ibex, not dinosaurs. Surely, the plants on which these animals depend still survive, so there is no need to resurrect them as well!" Indeed, botanic gardens worldwide have living collections of an impressively large fraction of the world's plants, some extinct in the wild, others soon to be so. Their absence from the wild is more easily fixed than the absence of animals, for which de-extinction is usually touted.

Perhaps so, but other practical problems abound: A resurrected Pyrenean ibex will need a safe home, not just its food plants. Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list: Where do we put them? Hunters ate this wild goat to extinction. Reintroduce a resurrected ibex to the area where it belongs and it will become the most expensive cabrito ever eaten. If this seems cynical, then consider the cautionary tale of the Arabian oryx, returned to Oman from a captive breeding program. Their numbers have declined so much that their home, designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, was summarily removed from the register. (Pictures: Extinct Species That Could Be Brought Back.)

Yes, the set of plants alive a century or so ago when the passenger pigeon went extinct are probably still here. Is the pigeon's habitat intact? Surely not: The land use changes since then have been far too extensive.

See More Species-Resurrection Images and Insights

In every case, without an answer to "where do we put them?"—and to the further question, "what changed in their original habitat that may have contributed to their extinction in the first place?"—efforts to bring back species are a colossal waste.

De-extinction is much worse than a waste: By setting up the expectation that biotechnology can repair the damage we're doing to the planet's biodiversity, it's extremely harmful for two kinds of political reasons.
Fantasies of reclaiming extinct species are always seductive. It is a fantasy that real scientists—those wearing white lab coats—are using fancy machines with knobs and digital readouts to save the planet from humanity's excesses. In this fantasy, there is none of the messy interaction with people, politics, and economics that characterizes my world. There is nothing involving the real-world realities of habitat destruction, of the inherent conflict between growing human populations and wildlife survival. Why worry about endangered species? We can simply keep their DNA and put them back in the wild later.

When I testify before Congress on endangered species, I'm always asked, "Can't we safely reduce the spotted owl to small numbers, keeping some in captivity as insurance?" The meaning is clear: "Let's log out almost all of western North America's old-growth forests because, if we can save species with high-tech solutions, the forest doesn't matter."

Or I'm asked, "Can't we breed in captivity the Cape Sable seaside sparrow?"—an obscure little bird whose survival requires the water in Everglades National Park to be the right amount in the right place at the right time. "Let's accommodate the sugar growers and damage large areas of the Everglades. Let's tolerate a high risk of extinction because our white-lab-coated science rock stars can save the day!"

The second political problem involves research priorities. I work with very poor people in Africa, Brazil, and Madagascar. Rich only in the diversity of life amid which they eke out their living, they generate no money for my university. Too many other universities equate excellence with funds generated, not with societal needs met. Over my career, molecular biologists flourished as university administrators drooled over their large grants and their expensive labs. Field-based biology withered. Many otherwise prominent universities have no schools of the environment, no ecology departments, no professors of conservation. It was all too easy to equate "biology" with molecules and strip faculty positions and facilities from those who worked in the field. De-extinction efforts can only perpetuate that trend.

Video: Recipe for Resurrection

Conservation is about the ecosystems that species define and on which they depend. Conservation is about finding alternative, sustainable futures for peoples, for forests, and for wetlands. Molecular gimmickry simply does not address these core problems. At worst, it seduces granting agencies and university deans into thinking they are saving the world. It gives unscrupulous developers a veil to hide their rapaciousness, with promises to fix things later. It distracts us from guaranteeing our planet's biodiversity for future generations.

 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/03/130312--deextinction-conservation-animals-science-extinction-biodiversity-habitat-environment/

Nascar green flags 'e-scrap' recycling program

The sophisticated electronic components in race cars, fleet vehicles and the big rigs used for NASCAR are expected to be fodder for an e-waste program the racing organization is starting this season.

NASCAR plans to work on the initiative with Creative Recycling Systems, based Tampa, Fla., in the latest addition to the racing organization's recycling program, which already claims bragging rights as the largest and most diverse in pro sports.

NASCAR and CRS recently announced that the recycling firm has become one of the racing group's Official Green Partners. The company was introduced as a new green partner Friday in Daytona as fans and drivers prepared for the first race of the 2012 season in NASCAR's Sprint Cup Series.

The new relationship has huge potential for expanding the scope and volume of recycling by NASCAR and its business-to-business partners, said Mike Lynch, the managing director of NASCAR Green Innovation. "The real impact of these folks is pretty cool," he said.

Creative Recycling provides collection, recycling and recovery solutions for e-waste -- typically business equipment, personal gadgets and household electronics. The firm also contends with banking, financial and medical technology that has reached the end of its useful life in its original state.

Now, Creative Recycling will also recycle office equipment from NASCAR and its many business partners, including venues and race teams, said Lynch.

CRS also is to become the go-to firm for recycling electronic components in all the vehicles that make NASCAR possible, Lynch said. That ranges from the showpieces of the industry that speed around the tracks to the workaday vehicles -- the business cars used in fleets as well as the caravans of semis that haul NASCAR's portable media operations center, race cars, and driver and team equipment from venue to venue.

And CRS will work with NASCAR on fan engagement events, including collection drives, to promote the idea of e-waste recycling.

CRS will start with recycling the organization's business electronics and computer equipment, and then will expand the program to other materials and the promotions for fans as the two green partners develop their new relationship, Lynch said. He said he anticipates further news on the initiative, along with details on some activities for fans, this spring in time for Earth Day.

Boosting E-Scrap Recycling

The likely tonnage of e-scrap from NASCAR and its business partners can help expand the scope and reach of CRS's services, and NASCAR's broader recycling program, said the recycling company and the racing organization. And promoting the concept to the audience of America's No. 1 spectator sport, whose following is estimated at 75 million, is expected to raise the awareness of recycling personal and household electronics, computers and gadgets -- items that range from cell phones and laptops to TVs and stereo systems.

In business, e-cycling has become an expectation, Lynch said. "Companies are realizing that it is no longer acceptable for this material to go into landfill," he said.

More and more consumers are realizing it as well but are often stymied because it's not as easy to deal with e-waste as it is to recycle a newspaper or a bottle. Users have to find a place that accepts e-scrap and, often, must bring their material to a collection site. Bigger items, like televisions, can be problematic. And it's not always clear whether the items will be processed responsibly or domestically.

"And so, people will often just put their items into the trash and cringe," said Lynch. NASCAR focused on CRS because of its credibility as a responsible recycler, he said.

 http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2012/02/25/nascar-gives-green-flag-e-scrap-recycling-program

Responsible Recycling: My E-Waste Odyssey

 

 

Stuart Isett for The New York Times Circuit boards removed from old computers and televisions at Total Reclaim, a recycler in Seattle.

Most Americans know that e-waste is supposed to be recycled. Items like cellphones, batteries, televisions, digital clocks, video game systems and broken computers shouldn’t be tossed in the trash because they contain dangerous chemicals and heavy metals that could end up in landfills that way, experts warn.

Computer boxes exhort you to “Please Recycle.” Battery containers carry pictures of little trash bins with an emphatic red “X” drawn across them. But admonishing consumers to recycle their e-waste in cute little cartoons is far easier than properly disposing of it as a consumer. Unlike the universal recycling bin that is usually close at hand for disposing of a soda can, systems for e-waste recycling vary greatly from place to place. Rules also vary depending on the kind of gadget involved.

Laws now govern e-waste recycling. In New York City, it is illegal to throw rechargeable batteries into the trash; in New York State, wireless providers must take up to 10 cellphones from a customer or provide free shipping to a recycler. More laws are in the pipeline. But these regulations are even harder to enforce than pooper-scooper laws, and for now are routinely broken.

I make a living writing about the environment and have reported on the dangerous traffic in electronic waste, which can end up poisoning children in Africa and Asia who eke out a living picking apart our children’s old computers. Which is why over the last few years my family gradually accumulated a veritable graveyard of broken and outdated electronic equipment in our small apartment that I could not throw away or quickly figure out how to recycle: laptops, old cellphones, Game Boys, Xbox equipment, batteries and used printer cartridges.


Well this fall, the jig was up: we were moving to a different Manhattan apartment, and I resolved to figure out how to get rid of the junk. The process took considerable investigation — the answer was not always easy or obvious. After all, stores want to sell you new things, not take back your old stuff. Here are some tips gathered on my e-waste recycling odyssey. Please share yours!

• Printer cartridges. Some office supply stores will accept these, most notably Staples, where my spent cartridge collection ended up. You can even get a small store credit for each cartridge turned in as an incentive. (Note to those with dozens of cartridges: you only get credit for 10 cartridges per visit.)

• Cellphones, chargers and batteries. Many electronics stores collect these, although few advertise the service (as in, “Drop Off Your Broken Phones Here!”). Some will take old equipment as partial payment for new purchases. Others have a box somewhere in the store where old equipment can be deposited. My items ended up in a small unmarked brown box at a Radio Shack in the Morningside Heights area. They barely fit into the box, and certainly no one thanked me. But at least it wasn’t in my apartment.

• Computers. This turned out to be the hard one. Some environmental groups and computer stores organize e-waste recycling collection drives. In New York City, the Lower East Side Ecology Center and Tekserve, a computer store on 23rd Street, organize four collection days a year, but I don’t have a car and it was hard for me to get three old computers to the location at the prescribed time. (The store will also accept your old computer for recycling when you purchase a new one.)

Because the three old computers in my home were Macs, I stopped by the local Apple store. I discovered that old iPods can be turned in, and the customer gets 10 percent off the purchase of a new one. But it’s more complicated to offload computers, which the stores will not accept directly. Instead you must go to the Apple site, where you provide information about the type of equipment you want to turn in.

PowerOn, the California company that takes back the material, will send you a box with packaging material. You pack up the computer and peripherals and take it to the nearest FedEx store. Shipping is free. In theory, you even get some profit for your trouble since PowerOn promises to send you an Apple gift card (I was promised $70 to $80 for each laptop) as compensation for the merchandise sent.

So for a brief blessed interlude, my home is free of e-waste.

Or was. This week my son’s laptop died and could not be fixed. It’s a Sony. At its Web site, Sony proudly describes its national “e-recycling” dropoff points. But there are none near my ZIP code. Here we go again …
How is e-waste recycled where you live?

 http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/responsible-recycling-my-e-waste-odyssey/

Meet California's 10-year-old recycling tycoon

With his bike (and occasionally a ride from his dad), Vanis Buckholz has started his own recycling business in Corona Del Mar.

His story, and President Obama's pick to succeed Lisa Jackson at the U.S. EPA and a look at Heil Environmental's truck doctor, all top this week's "Curbside Live."

Watch video......

 http://www.wasterecyclingnews.com/article/20130310/VIDEO/130309922/meet-californias-10-year-old-recycling-tycoon

What do I do with a dead UPS?

Question: My UPS is dead and I need to dispose of it. Is there any kind of special consideration here (is it dangerous?), or can I just dump it into the trash?
 
The answers to those three questions are yes, it can be, and no. Most of the batteries used in UPS systems are lead-acid, the same technology used in a car battery, so most of the things you've heard about those apply here. The batteries are sealed, and as long as that seal remains intact, the biggest danger—exposure to the sulfuric acid within—is minimal. Hit it with the compaction used by most garbage trucks, however, and you run the risk of giving someone an acid bath.

Even if the acid weren't an issue, however, you wouldn't want to just dump the battery into the local municipal waste stream. Lead is a potent toxin, with both immediate and chronic effects, so it needs to be disposed of properly. That's also true of cadmium, an ingredient of the primary alternative to lead-acid batteries, the Ni-Cd. So, no matter which type of UPS you've got, the contents of its battery are toxic. Try to avoid eating it, and don't just dump it in the trash.

Because they have toxic ingredients, disposal of batteries is regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The rules there are rich in bureaucratese (an example: "Batteries, as described in Sec. 273.9, that are not yet wastes under part 261 of this chapter, including those that do not meet the criteria for waste generation in paragraph (c) of this section."), but the EPA has also provided some human-readable advice. The feds are not the only ones with regulations; most states and a number of municipalities have their own rules governing how spent batteries are handled. The end result of this regulation is that the manufacturers of batteries that contain toxic waste are responsible for recycling them once they're no longer in use.

Notice that's "recycled," and not "disposed of." The rules require that the batteries get recycled, and many major manufacturers have banded together to form a non-profit company that collects the batteries and sends them into a single recycling stream; the vast majority of the lead and cadmium reclaimed from batteries ends up right back in other batteries. Many companies have their own programs in place for returning the spent batteries to them (APC's program, for example, lets you download a prepaid shipping label online).
If your manufacturer is not so generous, you may still be in luck, as the non-profit mentioned above also helps collect the batteries from consumers. A trip to its homepage lets you enter a zip code and find a battery drop-off location.

The EPA also recommends a similar resource.

If that's too much work, your state may make life even easier. In New York, for example, any place that sells batteries is required by law to accept them. As a result, the battery can be taken to any office supply, home improvement store, or drugstore.

So, in summary: your UPS's battery contains toxic ingredients; although these don't present a danger as long as the battery is intact, it's illegal to to dispose of it in the trash. Fortunately, you have plenty of options for getting rid of it safely, and with the knowledge that the toxic chemicals will be recycled.

 http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2011/02/ask-ars-what-do-i-do-with-a-dead-ups/