dongtan 773.34 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

We’ve heard for years how our current way of life is unsustainable and that it shouldn’t be used as a model for developing nations. Well, it appears that China accepts that premise and is prepared to chart its own course – at least for a share of its newly urbanizing masses.

Leaders of the world’s largest population are currently planning the creation of at least 10 eco-cities – large communities where green living will not only be preached but practiced. If any of these cities accomplishes even a fraction of what’s on the drawing board, they will be years ahead of anything in the United States or elsewhere in the West.http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com

Indeed, America’s urban planners may one day be studying at sustainability institutes, like the one to be created in Dongtan, China. At least that’s the lesson Peter Head offered an audience at New York University, Friday night.

Head directs a London-based sustainable-building unit for Arup. This consulting company designs and engineers construction projects around the world. A little less than three years ago, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corp. commissioned Arup to “plan the world’s first sustainable city”. Those are Arup’s words, not mine. But that his eco-city description looks pretty apt, at least on paper, based on Head’s presentations about Dongtan, last week (at events associated with the World Science Festival).

To be sited on the eastern edge of an island associated with Shanghai, Dongtan is supposed to be ready for occupancy within the next two years. Only about four meters above sea level, Dongtan will be surrounded on three sides by water and border prized wetlands.

Plans for the new community – initially with a population of 80,000, but eventually with one perhaps six times that size – call for the sole use of zero-emissions vehicles, which means ones that are all-electric or run on hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Wastes throughout the community will be recycled. Electricity will be powered “entirely from renewables,” Head said –everything from solar energy to the burning of rice husks or trash. Carbon-dioxide emissions from burning will be captured and used to help fuel the growth of food crops. Waste heat from the power plants will be piped throughout the community to warm homes or other facilities. Rainwater and sewage will be captured, cleaned, and re-used.

Foods will be grown close to the town. Everyone’s home or business is supposed to be accessible from public transportation (buses, streetcars, or water taxis) that is no more than a 7-minute walk away. Healthcare centers, cultural venues, leisure parks and greenways are being planned to pepper the community so that people don’t have to leave the island for fun, education, doctors, or employment.

In 1900, Head says, there were eight hectares of land for every person on the planet. Today the patch of land that supports each of us has shrunk by 75 percent, partly owing to pollution and partly due to population growth. Clearly, the fossil-fuel-based lifestyle that characterized the past century can’t be relied upon much longer, he argues.

Apparently, it’s a point that not lost upon Chinese-development officials either. Which is why they’re sinking big bucks into foreign consultants and engineers to help them create a new paradigm for urbanization, Head says. Big Red’s eco-cities will become test beds for new technologies, new systems for delivering goods and services, and catalyzing social change.

Head says Chinese officials believe they can design new urban centers that will take their citizens straight “from the agricultural to the ecological age.”

We’ll see. It’s a bold experiment. There are bound to be big hiccups along the way as good ideas and inflation swell budgets and tax the patience of designers. We’ll also see how comfortable people are becoming guinea pigs for a whole new era of social engineering.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the idea of these eco-cities is long overdue. I might even volunteer to live in one if it were cloned on American soil and Science News would allow me to telecommute. But in China? I don’t know.

Pollution wafts a long way and even if the new eco-cities are clean, their neighbors’ emissions could keep the regional air chokingly dirty for years to come. Moreover, Dongtan is basically out in the sea – courting a drowning if sea levels rise (I didn’t see dike development as a key feature in Dongtan’s landscape).

But I commend China for even getting its feet wet in this arena. And the idea that there will be integrated sustainability institutes to evaluate what’s going right – or wrong – and how things could be improved: That’s just inspired. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com

We don’t have long to wait to see if this concept blossoms or fizzles. Shanghai hosts the world’s fair – or Expo – in 2010 and Dongtan is supposed to showcase green development features for Asia and elsewhere.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

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When Comet 8P/Tuttle passed close to Earth early this year, astronomers took its portrait with the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico. To their surprise, the radar images have revealed that the comet consists of two chunks that appear to be held together by a narrow neck of material.

The portrait suggests that the body is the first known example of a comet that is a contact binary. Researchers aren’t sure how the structure formed.

John Harmon of Arecibo Observatory reported the findings on October 11 in Ithaca, N.Y., at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.

Collisions that might form a binary are much more common among the rocky bodies in the asteroid belt than in the much more remote and sparsely populated regions of the solar system where comets originate.

“To make a [comet] contact binary implies a formation mechanism that we don’t understand, but we’re guessing would be different than that in the asteroid belt,” says study collaborator Mike Nolan of Arecibo.

It’s possible, he says, that 8P/Tuttle broke into pieces sometime in the past when it neared the sun — the comet make its closest approach every 13.5 years — and its surface warmed.

Such fragmenting is well known among comets, but in this case some of the pieces, which travel on similar but not identical orbits, would have had to reassemble. “Our understanding of how you make comets must now include the possibility of making an object” like 8P/Tuttle, says Nolan.

Observations using the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope show that one the comet’s chunks is 5.6 kilometers in diameter and the other is 2.4 kilometers in diameter, Philippe Lamy and Olivier Groussin of the Astrophysics Laboratory in Marseilles, France, reported.

hybrid 883300.33e Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. A gene of mixed evolutionary pedigree may have transformed mammalian reproduction, leading to the evolution of apes and humans.

Analyses of genetic data from a variety of mammals show that this gene, called Tre2, occurs only in apes and people, say graduate student Charles A. Paulding and geneticist Daniel A. Haber, both of Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center in Charlestown, and anthropologist Maryellen Ruvolo of Harvard University. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

Although other investigators first identified Tre2 about 10 years ago, the gene's evolutionary origins were unknown. Tre2 represents a hybrid, or so-called chimeric version, of two genes that fused together, Paulding and his coworkers assert in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The DNA sequence of roughly half of Tre2 closely corresponds to an evolutionarily ancient gene still possessed by many species of mammals, the scientists hold. The rest of Tre2's sequence matches a more recently evolved gene found only in monkeys, apes, and people.

Fusion of the two genes must have occurred after the arrival of a common ancestor of apes and humans, between 21 million and 33 million years ago, the scientists theorize.

Although Tre2's two precursor genes both translate into proteins that act on many tissues, Tre2's corresponding protein affects only the testes, Paulding's group finds. If further research implicates Tre2 in sperm function, it will support the possibility that the gene's emergence created reproductive barriers between ancient creatures that did and didn't have it.

In other words, Tre2 may have influenced the evolution of species ancestral to modern apes and humans. http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com

"Tre2 by itself isn't a magic bullet that explains the evolution of ape and human ancestors," says Ruvolo. "This is the beginning of a new line of research into many chimeric genes that characterize different primate species."

Chimeric genes apparently form as part of a DNA-reshuffling process. Many genes contain two or more segments that produce specific proteins.

For instance, unlike its genetic precursors, part of Tre2 codes for a protein that influences cell proliferation, even in animals that don't possess Tre2.

"Many genes have hybrid histories," comments geneticist Pascal Gagneux of the University of California, San Diego. "This interesting new finding is the beginning of an avalanche of information from different laboratories searching for genes specific to humans and apes." When the complete sequence of the chimp genome becomes available later this year, scientists will be able to expand their hunt for hybrid genes, Ruvolo adds.