Memories of 21, 42, 63 ... the 84th meandering

Monday, Sep. 21, 2009
The Secrets Inside Your Dog's Mind
By Carl Zimmer

Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.

"Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit. See Pictures of Dogs Learning New Tricks.

"You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit. See a video on how dogs think like us.

Henry could find the biscuit by sniffing the cups or knocking them over. But Hare does not plan to let him have it so easy. Instead, he simply points at the cup on the right. Henry looks at Hare's hand and follows the pointed finger. Kivell then releases the leash, and Henry walks over to the cup that Hare is pointing to. Hare lifts it to reveal the biscuit reward. See TIME's photoessay " Puppies Behind Bars".

Henry the schnoodle just did a remarkable thing. Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought. Henry, as Kivell affectionately admits, may not be "the sharpest knife in the drawer," but compared to other animals, he's a true scholar. See TIME's photoessay "Color My Dog!"

It's no coincidence that the two species that pass Hare's pointing test also share a profound cross-species bond. Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example--the probable ancestors of dogs--live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they've adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs--the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives--spring from those social skills. Hare and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal's remarkable abilities.

Trying to plumb the canine mind is a favorite pastime of dog owners. "Everyone feels like an expert on their dog," says Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College and author of the new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. But scientists had carried out few studies to test those beliefs--until now.

This fall, Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he is going to test hundreds of dogs brought in by willing owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently opened his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe.

The work of these researchers won't just satisfy the curiosity of the millions of people who love their dogs; it may also lead to more effective ways to train ordinary dogs or--more important--working dogs that can sniff out bombs and guide the blind. At a deeper level, it may even tell us something about ourselves.

See pictures of Presidents and Their Dogs.

Evolving Gifts

Hare suspects that the evolutionary pressures that turned suspicious wolves into outgoing dogs were similar to the ones that turned combative apes into cooperative humans. "Humans are unique. But how did that uniqueness evolve?" asks Hare. "That's where dogs are important."

The first rule for scientists studying dogs is, Don't trust your hunches. Just because a dog looks as if it can count or understand words doesn't mean it can. "We say to owners, Look, you may have intuitions about your dog that are valuable," says Hauser. "But they might be wrong." See TIME's video "The New Frugality: Doggie Day Care."

Take for instance the kiss a dog gives you when you come home. It looks like love, but it could also be hunger. Wolves also lick one another's mouths, particularly when one wolf returns to the pack. They can use their sense of taste and smell to see if the returnee has caught some prey on its journey. If it did, the licking often prompts it to vomit up some of that kill for the other members of the pack to share. The kiss dogs give us probably evolved from this inspection. "If we happened to spit up whatever we just ate," says Horowitz, "I don't think our dogs would be upset at all." See TIME's video "The March of TIME: Hunting Dog Field Trials."

Horowitz and other scientists are now running experiments to determine what a behavior, like a kiss, really means. In some cases, their research suggests that our pets are manipulating us rather than welling up with human-like feeling. "They could be the ultimate charlatans," says Hauser.

We've all seen guilty dogs slinking away with lowered tails, for example. Horowitz wondered if they behave this way because they truly recognize they've done something wrong, so she devised an experiment. First she observed how dogs behaved when they did something they weren't supposed to do and were scolded by their owners. Then she tricked the owners into believing the dogs had misbehaved when they hadn't. When the humans scolded the dogs, the dogs were just as likely to look guilty, even though they were innocent of any misbehavior. What's at play here, she concluded, is not some inner sense of right and wrong but a learned ability to act submissive when an owner gets angry. "It's a white-flag response," Horowitz says.

While this kind of manipulation may be unsettling to us, it reveals how carefully dogs pay attention to humans and learn from what they observe. That same attentiveness also gives dogs--or at least certain dogs--a skill with words that seems eerily human.

Juliane Kaminski of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, began exploring the verbal gifts of dogs when she saw a television show about a border collie named Rico--an animal that to all appearances could fetch dozens of different objects in response to their names. Kaminski put Rico to a rigorous test and confirmed that the dog could learn names for more than 200 toys, balls and other items. "I think Rico is a highly talented dog," says Kaminski, "but we've also found new dogs that do what Rico did."

That doesn't mean that the dogs understand the words the way we think they do. When they hear "Frisbee," they may think only, Get the Frisbee. Unlike us, they may not be able to recognize that Frisbee is a word for a distinct object that can be combined with other words to create sentences like "Run away from the Frisbee."

Going to the Dogs

Some scientists acquired their fascination with dogs directly, but Hare's grew out of his research on chimpanzee cognition in the late 1990s, when he was part of a team of primatologists led by Michael Tomasello, now at Max Planck. A chimp can follow the gaze of other chimps and figure out what they can and cannot see. That's a skill that seems to be limited to great apes and humans. Tomasello and his team wondered if such a rare ability extended to hand gestures and tested chimps to see if they could understand pointing. To their surprise, the chimps did badly, able to learn the meaning of a pointed finger only after lots of training.

The apparent explanation for these results was that pointing--and the social smarts behind it--required a humans-only level of intelligence and evolved in our ancestors only after they branched off from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 7 million years ago. When Tomasello suggested this idea to Hare, however, Hare demurred. "I said, 'Um, Mike, I think my dogs can do that,'" Hare recalls.

Hare's later research revealed that while chimps and even wolves lack an innate ability to understand what pointing means, dogs come by the knowledge naturally. They're not limited to reading hands and fingers alone. Dogs understand what Hare means if he points with his foot or sets a piece of wood on top of a container with food inside. Even puppies understand, which means it can't be a skill they need to learn. "This is something that dogs just do," says Hare.

Foxy Dogs

To understand how dogs evolved this skill, Hare traveled to Siberia. In the 1950s, Soviet scientists set up an experiment on a farm outside the city of Novosibirsk to understand how animals were domesticated. They decided to study foxes, which are closely related to wolves and dogs.

The Russians began by breeding a group of foxes according to one simple rule: they would walk up to a cage and put a hand on the bars. Foxes that slunk back in fear and snapped their teeth didn't get to breed. Ones that came up to the scientists did. Meanwhile, the scientists also raised a separate group of foxes under identical conditions, except for one difference: they didn't have to pass a test to mate.

More than 40 generations of foxes have now been bred in Novosibirsk, and the results speak for themselves. The foxes that the scientists bred selectively have become remarkably doglike. They will affectionately run up to people and even wag their tails. In 2003, Hare traveled to Novosibirsk and ran his pointing test on baby foxes. The ordinary ones failed miserably. As for the doglike ones, "they did just as well as puppies right out of the box," Hare says. As the animals were bred for their affability, a new side of their social intelligence was apparently awakened.

If foxes are a guide, dog evolution may have begun with a similar shift in personality. Ancestors of dogs could cooperate to hunt, but the cooperation had limits. Wolves are fiercely competitive, as each one tries to claw its way to the top of the pack. Hare proposes that aggressive wolves evolved to have an easygoing personality thanks to a new opportunity: trash.

As humans became better at hunting, they left scraps around their gathering spots. When they departed, the ancestors of dogs could move in. At first, when humans and wolves came into contact, many of the animals ran away. Others lashed out and were killed. Only the affable animals had the temperament to become camp followers, and their new supply of food let them produce affable puppies. "They selected themselves," says Horowitz.

Once dogs became comfortable in our company, humans began to speed up dogs' social evolution. They may have started by giving extra food to helpful dogs--ones that barked to warn of danger, say. Dogs that paid close attention to humans got more rewards and eventually became partners with humans, helping with hunts or herding other animals. Along the way, the dogs' social intelligence became eerily like ours, and not just in their ability to follow a pointed finger. Indeed, they even started to make very human mistakes.

A team led by cognitive scientist Josef Topál of the Research Institute for Psychology in Hungary recently ran an experiment to study how 10-month-old babies pay attention to people. The scientists put a toy under one of two cups and then let the children choose which cup to pick up. The children, of course, picked the right cup--no surprise since they saw the toy being hidden. Topál and his colleagues repeated the trial several times, always hiding the toy under the same cup, until finally they hid it under the other one. Despite the evidence of their eyes, the kids picked the original cup--the one that had hidden the toy before but did not now.

To investigate why the kids made this counterintuitive mistake, the scientists rigged the cups to wires and then lowered them over the toy. Without the distraction of a human being, the babies were far more likely to pick the right cup. Small children, it seems, are hardwired to pay such close attention to people that they disregard their other observations. Topál and his colleagues ran the same experiment on dogs--and the results were the same. When they administered the test to wolves, however, the animals did not make the mistake the babies and dogs did. They relied on their own observations rather than focusing on a human.

One question the research of Topál, Hare and others raises is why chimpanzees--who are in most ways much smarter than dogs--lack the ability to read gestures. Hare believes that the chimps' poor performance is one more piece of proof that the talent is rooted not in raw intelligence but in personality. Our ape cousins are simply too distracted by their aggression and competitiveness to fathom gestures easily. Chimps can cooperate to get food that they can't get on their own, but if there's the slightest chance for them to fight over it, they will. For humans to evolve as we did, Hare says, "We had to not get freaked out about sharing."

Deeper understanding of the mind of the dog will come with more testing, and Hare and other researchers are planning it--on a grand scale. They're designing new experiments to compare different breeds and to search for genes that were transformed as the animals' social intelligence evolved. Plenty of dog owners are signing up for the studies Hare will be launching this fall. "We'd be happy with thousands," he says.

The biggest challenge to the new experiments, Hare says, will be not the giant pack of dogs he'll be studying but their anxious owners. "When a puppy does badly, people get upset," says Hare. "You have to emphasize that this is not the SATs."

Perhaps that's the most telling sign of just how evolved dogs are. They have us very well trained.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/science/earth/23climate.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

UN meeting on climate change. China sounds serious and plans on planting a forest the size of Norway.

UN climate summit puts China, India in spotlight
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer John Heilprin, Associated Press Writer 19 mins ago

UNITED NATIONS " China laid down a significant plan for curbing greenhouse gases on Tuesday, outlining ambitious goals of planting enough forest to cover an area the size of Norway and generating 15 percent of its energy needs from renewable sources within a decade.

Chinese President Hu Jintao also promised at the opening of the United Nations climate summit that the communist nation would take "determined and practical steps" to boost its nuclear energy, improve energy efficiency and reduce "by a notable margin" the growth rate of its carbon pollution as measured against economic growth.

Experts were watching the Chinese closely because it had in the past largely ignored global efforts to diminish emissions. The goals Hu outlined also were held in contrast to the United States, where the Senate has yet to take up climate legislation and likely will not have produced a new law by the time world leaders gather this December in Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto pact.

"At stake in the fight against climate change are the common interests of the entire world," Hu said. "Out of a sense of responsibility to its own people and people across the world, China fully appreciates the importance and urgency of addressing climate change."

Much attention also was fixed on U.S. President Barack Obama's first U.N. speech, where he said the United States is "determined to act."

"The threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing," Obama said, after receiving loud applause. "And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out."

China's more specific ambitions topped the lofty speechmaking as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called on presidents, prime ministers and other leaders "to accelerate the pace of negotiations and to strengthen the ambition of what is on offer" for a new global climate pact at Copenhagen, Denmark in December.

"Failure to reach broad agreement in Copenhagen would be morally inexcusable, economically shortsighted and politically unwise," Ban warned. "The science demands it. The world economy needs it."

Actor Djimon Hounsou of Benin helped open the summit by quoting late astronomer Carl Sagan and showing his "Pale Blue Dot" photo of Earth taken in 1990 from Voyager 1 within the larger cosmos.

Tuesday's U.N. summit and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh later this week seek to add pressure on rich nations to commit to a deal in Copenhagen for mandatory greenhouse gas cuts starting in 2013, and to pay for poorer nations to burn less coal and preserve their forests.

But China and some other major fast-developing economies will not agree to binding greenhouse-gas cuts. Developing nations "should not ... be asked to take on obligations that go beyond their development stage," Hu said.

Leaders said that with only about three weeks left for negotiations the likelihood was fast-growing for something less than a full-blown treaty at Copenhagen.

"We are on the path to failure if we continue to act as we have," French President Nicolas Sarkozy cautioned.

Obama said the U.S. is doubling the generating capacity from wind and other renewable resources in three years, launching offshore wind energy projects and spending billions to capture carbon pollution from coal plants.

Obama has announced a target of returning to 1990 levels of greenhouse emissions by 2020, but action awaits Congress passing legislation to make those goals the law of the land.

The United States, under former President George W. Bush's administration, stayed away from international commitments citing inaction by China and India.

China and the U.S. each account for about 20 percent of all the world's greenhouse gas pollution created when coal, natural gas or oil are burned. The European Union is next, generating 14 percent, followed by Russia and India, which each account for 5 percent.

The EU is urging other rich countries to match its pledge to cut emissions by 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020, and has said it would cut up to 30 percent if other rich countries follow suit.

But the Paris-based International Energy Agency expects global carbon emissions will drop by 2.6 percent this year, the biggest such decrease in more than 40 years, because of the world's recession that is slowing industrial activity, according to projections first reported Monday by The Financial Times.

Even with the economic slowdown, the dangers of climate-altering heat waves, droughts, melting glaciers, loss of the Greenland ice sheet and other calamities are fast approaching, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore in 2007.

"The science leaves us with no room for inaction now," he said.

Pachauri said major greenhouse gas cuts must be made by 2015 to avoid many of these dangers.

Japanese's prime minister, whose nation generates more than 4 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, said his nation will seek a 25 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020.

"I will now seek to unite our efforts to address current and future climate change with due consideration of the role of science," said Yukio Hatoyama, six days after taking office. "I am resolved to exercise the political will require to deliver on this promise."

Hatoyama also said Japan is ready to contribute money and technical help for poorer countries to cut emissions. He called for a "fair and effective international framework" that allows all countries to make cuts.

Thanks gang - that "poor doggie" convinced me. Also that sentence in Sumac's article
I'll write a draft and post it here without names - elections are approaching and the mayor's office may be more interested than usual. Plus I'll ask that he forwards a copy of my letter to the police dept so the officer can be commended for taking the time - it was a young man who obviously cared about the misery inflicted on the Malamute but assured me he couldn't do any more at that point. It was September 10 and we had all kinds of terrorist warnings, to boot. Copies to a couple of local papers, the ASPCA, and anyone else I can think of - it's just a few stamps, and if you had seen the pleading look in that dog's eyes you wouldn't sleep much either until you wrote the letter. I'll be back on or before this weekend.

September 23, 2009
Momentum on Climate Pact Is Elusive
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade " after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s " is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public " and to policy makers " can be frustrating, they say.

Mojib Latif, a prize-winning climate and ocean scientist from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel in Germany, wrote a paper last year positing that cyclical shifts in the oceans were aligning in a way that could keep the next decade or so relatively cool, even as the heat-trapping gases linked to global warming continued to increase.

But Dr. Latif, who gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and officials each year, said he had been met with confusion and even anger when he tried to describe this normal variation in climate while at the same time conveying the long-term threat of global warming.

“People understand what I’m saying, but then basically wind up saying, ‘We don’t believe anything,’ ” he said in a telephone interview.

Other climate researchers dispute Dr. Latif’s forecast, saying that climate cannot be reliably predicted on such a short-time scale, though even they agree that sooner or later, cool stretches are inevitable.

Underscoring just how little clarity there is on short-term temperature fluctuations, researchers from Britain’s climate change office, in a paper published in August, projected “an end to this period of relative stability,” with half the years between now and 2015 exceeding the record-setting global temperatures of 1998.

Whatever the next decade may hold, critics of global warming have lost no time in using the current temperature plateau to build their case.

“I think it supports the arguments of those who’ve said, ‘What’s the rush for policy on this issue?’ ” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist affiliated with George Mason University and the Cato Institute, a group opposing most regulatory solutions to environmental problems.

The recent stability of global temperatures makes regular appearances in blog postings disputing the reality of global warming and is frequently invoked by pundits who oppose the climate bill that passed the House this year and is pending in the Senate.

Advocates of such regulatory measures are equally vehement. In a post last week on his blog, Climate Progress, Joseph Romm, a physicist and energy expert affiliated with the liberal Center for American Progress, wrote that statements by climate skeptics about planetary cooling were “nonsense.”

“We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get given that humans are not like slowly boiling frogs, we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs,” he wrote.

The recent spate of relatively cool years is particularly noticeable because it followed a seesawing from unusually cool temperatures to unusually hot ones in the 1990s, said Vicky Pope of Britain’s climate agency, called the Met Office.

The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines had a cooling influence, as the volcano threw off veil-like emissions. Then, in 1998, an El Niño episode in the Pacific Ocean set off a record-setting hot spell.

The global average temperature is now only an imperceptible .01 degree Fahrenheit higher than it was in 1999, according to the British meteorology office. A series of unremarkable storm seasons followed the string of destructive storms in 2004 and 2005 that included Hurricane Katrina. And in the Arctic, an extraordinary summer retreat of sea ice in 2007 has been followed by less substantial losses and projections by some researchers of a possible, if temporary, recovery.

Most climate scientists stand firm in their projections of centuries of rising seas and other disruptive effects of a warming planet if humans take no steps to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases.

In an address to world leaders at the climate summit meeting on Tuesday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has advised the world’s nations on climate issues for 20 years, described the mounting risk and said, “Science leaves us no space for inaction now.”

A clearer view of whether the recent temperature plateau undermines arguments for dangerous climate change in the long run should come in a few years, as the predictions made by the British climate researchers are tested. Their paper appeared in a supplement to an August issue of The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

While the authors concluded that there was a 1 in 8 chance of having a decade-long pause in warming like the current plateau, even with rising concentrations of greenhouse gases, the odds of a 15-year pause, they wrote, are only 5 in 100. As a result, the next few years of observations could tip the balance toward further concern or greater optimism.

Meanwhile, social scientists who study the way people understand and respond to environmental problems say it is not surprising that the current temperature stability has created confusion and apathy. Getting people to care about a climate threat that is decades away is hard enough, they say, without adding in the vagaries of natural climate cycles.

At best, said Robert J. Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University, global warming remains an abstraction for many people .

“It does not have the direct visual or emotive impact of seeing seabirds covered in oil from the Exxon Valdez oil spill,” he said.

September 23, 2009
Square Feet
After a Tornado, a Kansas Town Rebuilds Green
By KEITH SCHNEIDER

GREENSBURG, Kan. " Even if it were the only one of its kind, Mike Estes’s brand-new, energy-efficient, wind-powered, water-conserving, environmentally sensitive John Deere dealership here would attract considerable attention in Kansas. This is a state that consistently ranks among the top 10 in oil and natural gas production, and routinely elects to Congress skeptics on matters of energy conservation and environmental regulation.

But in July, Mr. Estes’s 28,500-square-foot, $3 million BTI Greensburg dealership (BTI stands for Bucklin Tractor and Implement, the name of the original store, which has since expanded to four locations) earned the United States Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design platinum certification, the highest designation, Six other buildings anticipate LEED certification.

While many of the nation’s biggest cities do not have a single platinum development, BTI was not even the first building in Greensburg to receive it. That distinction goes to the 1,670-square-foot Arts Center at the center of town, designed, built and opened a year ago by graduate students of the University of Kansas School of Architecture. The center is powered by windmills and a bank of solar photovoltaic panels, and heated and cooled by a state-of-the-art geothermal system. It was the first LEED-platinum building in Kansas.

That such visionary development is occurring in this sun-washed, wind-whipped agricultural community of 900 residents can be attributed to a single event: a monstrous tornado in May 2007 that killed 11 people.

In the weeks after, as federal and state officials assessed the damage and estimated the cost of rebuilding, business and civic leaders gathered with residents to come up with a reconstruction plan. The most important goal, city leaders said in interviews, was to build a sense of economic dynamism that would generate new businesses and jobs and persuade Greensburg’s talented young people not to leave.

“We had the chance to start over,” Mr. Estes said. “What do you do when you start with a clean slate? You want to build it better. Right?”

And so his company decided to incorporate in the new dealership " the old one was wrecked in the tornado " design features like skylights and electrical systems that cut energy use by half, plumbing fixtures that save almost 40,000 gallons of water a year, and two wind turbines out back that spin in a steady wind and generate a part of the dealership’s electricity.

The first gatherings after the tornado produced a surprising civic consensus in a community where “green roofs” and the “heat island effect” were foreign concepts. As Dea Corns, a real estate agent who manages the Greensburg State Bank with her husband, Thomas V. Corns, recalls, “We decided to put the ‘green’ in Greensburg.”

These days, the technical language of the green building world is in everyday use as Greensburg sets out to achieve the distinction that the former Kansas governor, Kathleen Sebelius, now the secretary of Health and Human Services, described in a news conference two years ago. "We have an opportunity of having the greenest town in rural America,” she said.

Last year, leaders approved a redevelopment plan drawn up by the architectural firm BNIM, based in Kansas City, Mo., that called for Greensburg to be a “truly sustainable community that balances the economic, ecological and social impacts of development,” and “a laboratory for research on sustainable design and community development.”

Greensburg also approved an ordinance requiring that all municipal buildings larger than 4,000 square feet be built to LEED-platinum standards, putting it in the forefront among communities in the United States in energy conservation standards.

BTI’s John Deere dealership is a small part of a bustling panorama of development whose total cost is expected to reach $100 million. Financing comes from a mix of federal, state and local sources, and to a surprising degree, private donations.

In April, for example, the city’s 10,000-square-foot $3.4 million business incubator opened on Main Street. Financing for the office building, which offers temporary space at low rents for 10 small businesses, was provided by Frito-Lay, the federal Department of Agriculture and the actor Leonardo DiCaprio.

The 4,700-square-foot $2.9 million City Hall, designed to achieve LEED platinum designation, is about to open at the center of town.

A block away, the 18,800-square-foot Kiowa County Courthouse, built in 1914, is being renovated at a cost of $5 million. The reconstruction includes highly insulated walls, geothermal pumps for heating and cooling, high-performance lighting and controls and other environmental and clean energy features that qualify for LEED gold designation.

Along United States Route 54, the Kiowa County Memorial Hospital, a 48,500 square-foot, $25 million medical building, is under construction and scheduled to open next year.

According to Kiowa County, the new hospital is seeking to become the first LEED platinum critical-access operation in the country. The building incorporates natural light; high-performance insulating glass; light-sensing dimmers; motion sensors; an on-site wind turbine to generate electricity; a bio-swale filtration system to process all waste water from the laundry, showers and lavatories; and a system to capture rain water to flush toilets. Those and other energy conservation features mean that it will not need fuel oil boilers to back up its heating and cooling systems, drastically reducing costs.

“People saw that a terrible tragedy could be made into something valuable and durable and better,” said Daniel Wallach, founder and executive director of Greensburg GreenTown, a nonprofit organization that has provided technical assistance and organizational support for the reconstruction. “They said, ‘Look what we can do when we think about this in a new way.’ ”

Not everybody in town is so sure. Some residents and business owners, particularly in the months after the tornado, expressed concerns that the green plan would increase costs and slow the process of getting construction permits.

But Mr. Estes and others who have added energy-saving designs and equipment report that the higher initial installation costs have been more than offset by significantly lower operating costs. Mr. Estes said he was saving the equivalent of $25,000 to $30,000 annually in energy and water costs compared to his old building.

Greensburg’s green showcase also includes a 32-unit LEED-certified town house complex, comprising 40,000 square feet and built at a cost of $4 million, and 200 new homes, most of which were built with energy efficiency, water conservation and other environmental values in mind.

The National Renewable Energy Lab, a unit of the federal Department of Energy that advised the city in green development, tested 100 of Greensburg’s recently built homes and found that, on average, they consumed roughly 40 percent less energy than those they replaced.

Greensburg is also among the first in the nation to light its streets with LED lamps, which focus their beams on the ground and make it possible to see the stars. The new lamps also save 70 percent in energy and maintenance costs over the old sodium vapor lights, and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 40 tons a year, city leaders say.

And Greensburg is planning to generate all of its electricity from the wind. Outside of town, John Deere Renewable Energy, an Iowa-based unit of the equipment maker that has built wind farms in other Midwest states, is planning to break ground on a 12.5-megawatt wind farm that consists of 10 turbines capable of supplying electricity to 4,000 homes.

Mr. Estes is so enthusiastic that he embraced a new clean energy business plan that responds directly to the city’s goal of generating new jobs.

BTI is now the national distributor of Canadian-built Endurance Wind Power turbines capable of powering homes and businesses. “Two years ago, the whole town needed to be rebuilt,” Mr. Estes said. “And we needed industry. We are learning that green makes sense.”

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hooray! happy autumn to the WildClickers!

Happy spring from the southern hemisphere, WildClickers!

(Still reading along & following your clicking progress.)

waving to mzolga...

have a super day, widlclickers

http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

U.S. scientists net giant squid in Gulf of Mexico
By Jasmin Melvin Jasmin Melvin Mon Sep 21, 4:28 pm ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) " U.S. scientists in the Gulf of Mexico unexpectedly netted a 19.5-foot (5.9-meter) giant squid off the coast of Louisiana, the Interior Department said on Monday, showing how little is known about life in the deep waters of the Gulf.

Not since 1954, when a giant squid was found floating dead off the Mississippi Delta, has the rare species been spotted in the Gulf of Mexico.

The squid, weighing in at 103 pounds (46.7 kg), was caught July 30 in a trawl net more than 1,500 feet underwater as it was pulled by a research vessel.

The giant squid, which did not survive the rapid change in water depth when brought to the surface, was preserved and sent to the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History for further study.

Scientists aboard -- from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service -- were participating in a pilot study on the diets of sperm whales.

"As the trawl net rose out of the water, I could see that we had something big in there ... really big," Anthony Martinez, a marine mammal scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the chief scientist on the research cruise, said in a statement.

Remnants of giant squid have been found in the stomachs of its predators in the waters of the Gulf, Caribbean and Florida Keys so scientists were aware of their presence in the Gulf.

The squid discovered by the researchers is significant because the species are difficult to catch, leaving much to be learned about them.

Michael Vecchione, director of NOAA's Fisheries Service's National Systematics Laboratory, the squid was an important addition to the worldwide study of squids.

"This find illustrates how little we know about what is swimming around in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico," he said.

Giant squid, which can be 40 feet long, are usually found in deep-water fisheries, such as off Spain and New Zealand.

"This is the first time one has actually been captured during scientific research in the Gulf of Mexico," he said.

The joint NOAA-MMS pilot study responsible for the find is part of a two-year, $550,000 study to determine the abundance and diversity of the type of fish and squid that sperm whales seek as prey.

(Editing by Bill Trott)

Hello all Wildclickers............

We are back and tired. Thank you, ehBeth for my clicks. There I was enjoying myself and you were slaving away clicking for me. Thanks. Will post some pics later.

Welcome home danon!

I hope you had some extraordinary views and meals.

It's always a pleasure to be your back-up.

Hi Dan, welcome back...

A friend of the family wrote a lovely piece for our national newspaper about mrs. hamburger.

http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20090924.LIVES24/BDAStory/BDA/deaths

((((Bethie)))) ((((hbg))))

That is a lovely tribute to your Mom. Thanku for sharing that with us girl. Love you Beth x



Dan
the man
is back
and whacked
Patti
How's She?
You had fun
by the ton?
Rest up
Pouring a cup
Tea for two
Welcome back YOU!


<waves to Stradeeeeeeee 'elllo, Sumac and MzOlgz et al>





clickign



<Iz'a off to the Emerald Isle - doing a Irish jig for the clickivisisisisssitiitisiiss>

Clicked, and welcome back, Danon and Patti.

These kinds of finds always excite me.

Largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon treasure found in UK
By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer Raphael G. Satter, Associated Press Writer 56 mins ago

LONDON " An amateur treasure hunter prowling English farmland with a metal detector stumbled upon the largest Anglo-Saxon treasure ever discovered, a massive seventh-century hoard of gold and silver sword decorations, crosses and other items, British archaeologists said Thursday.

One expert said the treasure would revolutionize understanding of the Anglo-Saxons, a Germanic people who ruled England from the fifth century until the Norman conquest in 1066. Another said the find would rank among Britain's best-known historic treasures.

"This is just a fantastic find completely out of the blue," Roger Bland, who managed the cache's excavation, told The Associated Press. "It will make us rethink the Dark Ages."

Bland said the hoard was unearthed in what was once Mercia, one of five main Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and is thought to date to 675-725 AD.

A total of 1,345 items have been examined by experts and and 56 lumps of earth were found to contain metal artifacts detected by an X-ray machine, meaning the total will likely rise to about 1,500.

"I think wealth of this kind must have belonged to a king but we cannot say that for absolute certain," Bland said.

The Anglo-Saxons were a group of Germanic tribes who gradually invaded England by sea starting in the fifth century in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Originally, they came from what is now the coastal region of northwest Germany.

Their artisans made striking objects out of gold and enamel and they also created poetry that still amazes people today. Their best-known literary work is "Beowulf," an anonymous epic poem about a warrior who does battle with monsters and a dragon.

Their language, Old English, is a distant precursor of modern English. It supplies many of the structurally important words such as pronouns and prepositions as well as words for everyday concepts.

Unfortunately, much of their literature and artwork have been lost through warfare, looting, upheavals and the passage of time. Scholars must deduce what their culture was like using often scanty evidence.

Leslie Webster, the former curator of Anglo-Saxon archaeology at the British Museum, said the amount of gold uncovered " about 11 pounds (5 kilograms) " suggested that early medieval England was a far wealthier place than previously believed.

She also said the crosses and other religious artifacts mixed in with the mainly military items, such as sword pommel caps, might shed new light on the relationship between Christianity and warfare among the Anglo-Saxons.

The seventh-century hoard found by 55-year-old Terry Herbert in western England, consists of at least 650 items of gold and 530 silver objects weighing more than 2.2 pounds (1 kilo), along with some copper alloy, garnets and glass.

Most of the objects are ornaments for weapons and other military artifacts, some inlaid with precious stones.

Herbert, from the town of Burntwood, found the gold on a friend's farm on July 5 and spent the next five days scouring the field for the rest of the hoard.

Herbert recovered the first items before professional archaeologists took over the excavation.

"Imagine you're at home and somebody keeps putting money through your letterbox, that was what it was like," Herbert said. "I was going to bed and in my sleep I was seeing gold items."

One of the most intriguing objects is a small strip of gold inscribed with a warlike Latin quotation from the Old Testament, which translates as: "Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face."

Most of the other treasures unearthed in the hoard appear to be military-related, and the strip may have been fastened to a shield or a sword belt.

The hoard was officially declared treasure by a coroner, which means it will now be valued by a committee of experts and offered up for sale to a museum. Proceeds would be split 50-50 between Herbert and his farmer friend, who has not been identified. The find's exact location is being kept secret to deter looters.

Bland said he could not give a precise figure for the worth of the hoard, but he said the treasure hunter could be in line for a "seven-figure sum."

Herbert said the experience had been "more fun than winning the lottery," adding that one expert likened his discovery to finding Tutankhamen's tomb.

"I just flushed all over when he said that. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up," Herbert said.

The hoard is in storage at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Some of the items are due to go on display starting Friday.

"The quantity of gold is amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate," said archaeologist Kevin Leahy, who catalogued the find. "This was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do, and they were very good."

Leahy said there was still much to learn about the treasure, its purpose, and its origins.

"It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and highly successful military career," he said. "We also cannot say who the original, or the final, owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. It will be debated for decades."

Bland agreed, saying that archaeologists were still baffled by the function of many of the pieces they found.

"There's lots of mystery in it," he said.

___

Very nice, Beth. Sending good thoughts and hugs to you & mr. h.

Iz, me dear, more pics!

sue, what a surprising and fabulous find!


http://rainforest.care2.com/i?p=583091674

I'll have to tell Set about this one. He'll be very interested.

Hoft - http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/series/rescue-ink-unleashed/all/Overview?source=banner_kwngc_112#tab-Videos/07104_00

NY animal rescue organization that rocks!

Wildclickers, please check out the link and watch ng's video.

Tks, Stradee, appreciate it. Letter over the weekend. Incredibly the man was spotted again today (I told my security man and he passed the word to friends of his to be on the lookout) but outside the subway, on the street. Since he wasn't begging, and not pretending to be blind - just dragging the Malamute behind him - he couldn't be ticketed for anything. But that's good news, means he's gone back to his subway scam so he should be easy to spot - there's a definite law against bringing dogs on subways unless escorting blind persons and another law against panhandling. Both misdemeanors far as I can tell, but they may help in getting the dog away from him and into a good home.