Sonic Fire, which reveals the shape of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, being demonstrated by Steve Mould earlier this year. Photo Credit: Zoe Cormier

Synaesthesia, Petra Boynton’s intimate places, communicating with the comatose and Marcus du Sautoy all feature at this weekend’s Secret Garden Party, courtesy of Guerilla Science.

It may have been the burlesque freak show temptress who set fire to her skin, the empathic robotic bust of Elvis sitting in the eyeworks laboratory in Blade Runner, or the three metre long tube that reveals the shape of sound with dancing fire – but regardless of the victor, there are many contenders for the title of the quirkiest performers Guerilla Science has featured this year.

This weekend at The Secret Garden Party might find us a new claimant to the title – perhaps Sampa Von Cyborg, who will perform live hangings and hookings in the name of science. Or maybe the giant brain that sings when you show it colours.

Guerilla Science started four years ago, sedately enough, with eight lectures in a grassy field at the Cambridgeshire music festival The Secret Garden Party, with scientists talking about such everyday topics as “Is God a number?” and “Could we live forever?” This year we have found ourselves in the most strange and unlikely settings for science, far more bizarre than an English music festival.

Astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell, accompanied by Guerilla Scientist Louis Buckley clad in a silver spacesuit, took us on an audio tour of the stars at the Stoke Newington International Airport arts festival Distance, where he spoke alongside a performance artist offering free “spoonings”.

Then there was Secret Cinema’s grandiose homage to Blade Runner. To help the audience think about what makes us human, computer scientists Laurel Riek from Cambridge University and Peter McOwan from Queen Mary, University of London, brought robots and surreal visual tests. Seeing them chat about neural networks inside the smoky eyeworks laboratory, while above us strippers danced on platforms, and outside costumed midgets smashed vintage cars with baseball bats, was truly memorable.

At the Lovebox in east London last weekend, burlesque artist Vivid Angel performed live piercings and burnings while hooked up to live biomonitoring equipment while she discussed pain with clinical psychologist Matteo Cella. (Her favourite kind of pain? “A broken heart.”)

And the incredibly talented Vid Warren, who beatboxes while playing the flute, lent us his sonic skills as we amplified his sounds into our Reuben’s tube – a three-metre-long metal tube that reveals the shapes of sound waves with a string of dancing flames, a performance we call Sonic Fire. Our physics maestro Steve Mould (the science presenter on Blue Peter) was on hand to explain the properties of sound. As he said, “Things become more beautiful when you understand how they work.”

There are many groups doing fantastic science outreach events for the public around the world, but we’re pretty sure nobody does it quite like us. We’re especially passionate this year about creating interactive events, to break down the barrier between “expert” and “audience”. As our head of marketing Mia Kukathasan puts it, “The lab is everywhere.”

And so at the Secret Garden Party this weekend near Huntingdon in East Anglia, music psychologist Gianna Cassidy and singer songwriter Eoghan Colgan will discuss the science of musical expression, and festivalgoers will be able to help score a soundtrack for the festival using nifty interactive iPad technologies. Also on music, Cambridge neuroscientist Jessica Grahn will help us understand how babies are better at picking up rhythms than their parents and will lead the crowds with sonic social bonding routines.

Sex scientist Petra Boynton will discuss our intimate places with intimate questions and ask us where we like (and don’t like) to be touched. Boynton and other scientists and philosophers will host small intimate discussions in a boat on the lake.

“I am really excited by the prospect of having festivalgoers being
indulged in a private rowing boat experience chaperoned by a
philosopher of physics musing over the possibility that we may not
exist, or a cognitive neuroscientist chatting about artificial
brains,” says our founder Richard Bowdler, a chemistry graduate from
Oxford who started the science camp four years ago.”

Perhaps most spectacularly, agency of adventure and play Coney has teamed up with scientists who study synaesthesia to produce a game exploring this condition, in which the senses are blended. Some people “hear” colours and “smell” numbers, for example. A giant brain, created by model-maker Roseanne Wakely, will be “fed” visual stimuli and in turn will sing tunes and instructions, leading participants through an elaborate and undoubtedly original game, like “a giant visual Kaos pad” says Bowdler.

There will still be lectures. The current Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy will tell us about the beauty of prime numbers and why David Beckham wears the number 23 shirt.

And neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen will explain how we can speak to people in comas. He made history recently when, after a decade of careful work, he used brain scans to prove that some people in comas are actually conscious and can communicate if asked the right questions in the right way.

We cannot imagine any reason why science would not belong at a music festival, alongside cabaret strippers and crystal healers. The theme this year is “fact or fiction”, and of course we fall into the former category. But we don’t consider this to be a handicap. As our tagline goes: truth is stranger than fiction. Reality provides the mind with incredible fodder for the imagination. Some people just aren’t willing – or lucky enough – to see it that way.

“Why does Guerilla Science exist? Simple: Science is part of our culture, yet often it’s left languishing in the lab or conveyed in dull or patronising ways,” says director Jenny Wong. “We are experimental people by nature, who like new trying new things. So ‘mixing science, art, music and play’ [our motto] reflects all of our interests. By bringing these together and collaborating with interesting people with new ideas, you can’t help but think we’ll produce something amazing. People who think in creative ways and succeed in capturing your imagination only make life more exciting.”

By helping people to experience “science” in new ways, in unexpected places and with the quirkiest of collaborators, we hope to inspire them to reflect on the complexity of their lives and how remarkable it is to exist at all.

You’d think that given the overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is already happening and that humans are to blame, she wouldn’t need to remind (or scold) journalists to not give climate change ’sceptics’ a voice in the media – but unfortunately, she does.

Not just because of the considerable damage that they did in the past to public awareness of the reality of climate change (and thus the political will to deal with it). But because deniers and sceptics are still – amazingly – alive and well, and even seem to be on the increase.

And with the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen just over a month away, they are likely to show up on the media radar more than ever. Expect to see notorious deniers like Christopher Monckton and Steve Milloy, more and more, and especially expect to see media-friendly ‘moderate voices’ like Bjorn Lomborg, who claim that climate change, though real, is simply too difficult or expensive or unimportant to prioritize (and those crazy environmentalists are being hyperbolic and alarmist anyways).

In an unfortunate coincidence of fate, at the precise time when we most crucially need media outlets to responsibly and accurately report on the science of climate change, they are far less likely to do so. According to a feature in The Nation, as mainstream media outlets across the US have made cutbacks, dedicated and experienced science reporters – the very people who could capably report on climate change – are among the first in the firing line. From 1989 to 2005, they report, the number of newspapers in the US that featured weekly science sections dropped to 34 from 95.

‘Here an obvious question arises: if the Internet is most directly responsible for the decline of newspapers, then can science blogs and science-infused websites fill the gap?’ the authors ask. ‘Undoubtedly, one can find excellent science information on the web, but the question is whether most people will find it… Accurate science and the most stunning misinformation thrive side by side… global warming deniers all have highly popular websites and blogs, and there is no reason to think good scientific information is somehow beating them back.’

There is in fact little reason to think good scientific reporting is winning. At the 2008 Weblogs, wattsupwiththat.com – which consistently questions and undermines mainstream climate change science, won by popular vote for Best Science Blog. And according to a Gallup poll conducted this year, 41 per cent of Americans think mainstream reporting of the threat of climate change is exaggerated – a record high, even higher than 10 years ago.

Journalists and major media outlets, not the public, are to blame: for decades they gave climate change deniers and genuine climate change scientists equal air time, leaving the voting public with the impression that the two positions had equal merit. Well-intentioned but scientifically untrained reporters did so in the name of ‘balance’, despite the fact that well over 99 per cent of scientists who actually research the topic asserted that climate change was real – and ‘experts’ who disagreed seldom conducted atmospheric research themselves (and were almost invariably funded by oil and manufacturing interests).

We may never understand the true scope of the damage: scientists have known about the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s, and since the 1980s the scientific consensus has been impossible to deny, but political action has stagnated, our emissions continued to rise, and the pace of climate change has accelerated: every subsequent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has predicted higher temperature increases and higher sea level rises. Armstrong’s documentary paints a dark vision of the future based on the worst-case projections of the IPCC as they stood in 2005 – those worst-case scenarios are now considered medium-case scenarios.

Now the mainstream media (or what’s left of it) is doing a much better job of covering the science accurately, but we have a much more severe situation on our hands to deal with than we would have if they had reported on the science accurately two decades ago.

And with the disappearance of dedicated science beat reporters (and with the economic crisis obscuring the climate crisis in the headlines), there is a serious risk that climate science will again be underrepresented and misreported. In the run-up to the UN conference in Copenhagen, ‘there will be prominent deniers out there undermining the science,’ predicts Jim Hoggan, founder of desmogblog, to ‘clear the PR pollution that clouds climate science’.

‘They will chip away at the science, create doubt over how reliable the science is and the seriousness of the problem, undermining any traction and momentum that would drive public policy.’

Copenhagen is considered to be our last chance to sign a deal that could avert ‘runaway climate change’. How does the momentum to drive public policy look?

Already there are clear signs that whatever is agreed at Copenhagen will not feature ambitious (read: effective) targets – from the UN itself.

We live in a sea of toxic chemicals. Every single person on earth carries in their bodies minute quantities of hundreds to thousands of hazardous chemicals: polyaromatic hydrocarbons from smokestack and vehicle exhaust; pesticides, fungicides and herbicides from industrialized agriculture; methyl mercury from coal-fired plants; dioxins and furans from garbage incineration; hormone-mimicking plasticizers and plastic softeners from polycarbonate bottles, the lining of tin cans, soaps and cosmetics; perfluorochemicals from stain-resistant coatings and non-stick cookware; flame retardants from electronics and furniture. The list goes on.

This chemical contamination is part and parcel of our wasteful use of resources and energy. At its core it’s a sustainability issue, but it is never addressed as such – and this is the problem.

* * *

‘Biomonitoring’ tests measuring chemicals in the US population are carried out by the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta and the results are freely available online. The latest results, released in 2005, cover 148 chemicals.¹Canada is doing similar population-wide testing; those figures will be available in 2010.

Tests consistently flag the same chemical contaminants in the atmosphere, water, soil, animals and people the world over.

Here are a few choice selections:

Lead – known for thousands of years to be toxic to the brain and nervous system and which we now know lowers IQ and causes learning difficulties.

Dioxins – some of the most carcinogenic chemicals known, released by waste incineration.

Phthalates – used to soften plastics, found in thousands of products from shampoo to blood bags. Interfere with testosterone, have been linked to reproductive defects and cancers and are thus banned from baby toys in Europe and may soon be restricted in Canada.

Bisphenol-A (BPA) – used to make hard, clear polycarbonate plastics such as water bottles as well as epoxy resins found in the lining of tin cans. Known to mimic oestrogen, causes cancer and reproductive problems in lab animals. Banned in plastic baby bottles in Canada.

Even chemicals that we have known for decades to be dangerous and which haven’t been used since the 1970s still show up in our blood today. These include organochlorine pesticides like DDT and industrial insulators like polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).

Some of our cleverest chemicals are the most problematic – chemicals used to stop electronics from catching fire and compounds found in grease-proof food wrap and non-stick cookware persist in the environment for decades, maybe even centuries, by virtue of the fact that they are doing what they were designed to do in the first place: never break down.

No surprise then that the fruits of our industry persist in the environment, travel around the world, linger in the soil and find their way into us before we are even born. The Environmental Working Group,² an independent US monitoring organization, found more than 287 chemicals in the umbilical cord blood of 10 American babies – 217 are known to be toxic to the nervous system, 208 can cause birth defects and 180 are proven carcinogens in humans and/or lab animals. Had they the resources to check for all 100,000 chemicals ever approved for use in the US, they would no doubt have found thousands more. What’s worse, the concentrations of chemicals are often higher in newborns than in their mothers. Research by Environmental Defence in Canada³ found some chemicals at levels three times higher in children than in their mothers.

Over and over the story is the same: we design the chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves

We can each of us avoid canned food, bottled soft drinks and lipstick – but total avoidance to exposure is truly impossible. In fact, the highest concentration of PCBs ever detected was in the breast milk of Inuit women, decades and thousands of miles away from their production. All the money, knowledge and seclusion in the world won’t help – it doesn’t matter if you’re living in a wooden cottage on a mountain top, subsisting on twigs and berries; or in a high-tech eco-condo with a diet dictated by a nutritional specialist in Malibu.

Over and over the story is the same: we design a chemical, we use it and it turns up in the environment and in ourselves. Eventually, with enough research, it may be restricted or banned – the whole process can take decades. But even if chemicals are restricted, they persist – all the ‘Dirty Dozen’ pollutants restricted under the Stockholm Convention, including DDT and PCBs, are still a problem.

Moreover, new ones are introduced all the time. Environmental chemists are constantly playing catch-up. The companies don’t tell them what compounds they ought to be looking for. They have to guess, devise tests and hunt. They find new ones all the time, even chemicals that have already been in use for decades.

We still know very little about how these chemicals may be affecting our health, but even the most cursory survey of peer-reviewed scientific studies into the effects on lab animals and in people – even at astonishingly low doses – gives pause for thought. It is difficult to say with confidence that the chemical soup we are all exposed to plays some role in the prevalence of cancers, learning difficulties, reproductive defects and other health problems – but there is certainly good reason to suspect so.

Especially given the problem of ‘mixtures’. Diligent lab studies on mice test each chemical one at a time – even though nobody is ever exposed to just one chemical at a time. So what happens when you are exposed to dozens or hundreds of chemicals that mimic oestrogen? The question is not only scary to contemplate, it also defies statistical scrutiny. Teasing apart the combined (and often synergistic) effects of thousands of chemicals and how they interact is just too complex for our scientific tools to unravel.

* * *

So what are we supposed to do? Consumer advocates applaud the adoption of safe alternatives devised with new chemistry. But in many cases the supposedly safe alternatives turn out to be themselves dangerous. Brominated flame retardants pose the same hazards as chlorinated flame retardants – persistent in the environment, toxic to the nervous system, amplified through the food chain. Other times, solutions come with new hazards – such as fluorescent lightbulbs which have a lower energy footprint but contain toxic mercury.

Technological innovations and ‘green’ chemistry are indispensable and provide many solutions, but ultimately can only go so far. In many cases, it may simply be impossible to create bona fide benign chemicals that can accomplish all the same feats that we desire.

The obvious solution would be to stop using all chemicals that are remotely hazardous – but even if that were possible, would we want to? Would we want to stop producing the hard plastics used for semiconductor chips and sterile medical equipment?

The only solution is this: use these chemicals only when absolutely necessary. This would mean being very careful and calculated about how we use them. But it would also mean creating less. Produce less, make less, buy less, use less. In other words: consume less.

Peruse the pages of any women’s magazine, and you’ll find anxiety-inducing articles about chemicals in lipstick, the hazards of cling film-wrapped broccoli, the perils of certain brands of diet cola, along with advice on where to find them and how to avoid them – without ever suggesting that we could opt to stop using those products altogether. News stories list suspect chemicals, where to find them and what consumer products you could buy instead.⁴ But seldom will you read the unspeakable: buy less.

The onus is put on government to screen, test and regulate chemicals better; on industry to be more compliant in phasing out chemical hazards; and on providing adequate advice to consumers. But none of these solutions will solve the problem.

* * *

No matter which angle you come from, the undeniable conclusion is the same: we need to produce, consume and discard less. The more consumer products we produce, the more energy we use, the more fossil fuels we burn, the more air pollution we create and the more chemicals come back to us in the long run.

Even if we diligently recycle, those chemicals still find their way into the environment – some of the biggest producers of heavy metals are, in fact, recycling companies. Dumping your paper and plastic into the recycling bin does not make heavy metals and petrochemicals vanish into thin air, much as we’d like to believe it.

Our spending habits can have a chain reaction impact over thousands of miles. Take mercury. Coal-fired power plants are the main source of this toxic metal. But the British Government – despite claims to be committed to genuine action on climate change – still plans to build new coal plants. Even if British campaigners are successful in halting the new coal plants, China famously builds one new coal plant every week! And no small portion of what we buy is manufactured in Chinese factories using coal-fired electricity. Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll.

This is not a matter of ideals, of political theory or of principle: this is a matter of common sense, based on scientific evidence. Just as climate change science tells us unambiguously that we are living beyond our means, so does research into toxic chemicals.

Buying a cheap plastic hairband in Brooklyn directly fuels the release of mercury into Asian skies – which eventually winds its way into the oceans, up through the foodchain, and back to us in a maki roll

The affluent or the indifferent may not care about changing weather patterns, crop failures or desertification in far-flung Southern nations. But they can’t escape the ubiquitous chemicals in their homes, shopping malls, drinking water, atmosphere and food.

It is equally indisputable that fossil fuels and petroleum products – though problematic – are incredible, almost magical resources. Without oil we would never have thrown satellites into space, mapped the heavens and visited the moon. Without polymer plastics we would not have recorded music, photographs and movies, semiconductor chips and computers. The 20th century and all its marvels would never have happened without plastic. But instead of preserving this incredible, finite resource for sterile medical equipment, photovoltaic solar panels and laptop computers we waste 40 per cent of it on packaging. Used once and thrown away to leach its cargo from landfills into the environment and back into us.

Every shred of science gleaned from climate monitoring, from estimates of remaining fossil fuel reserves and from ecotoxicological studies points towards the same basic conclusion: we need to consume less. ‘Buy Nothing Day’ is a nice idea, but doesn’t go far enough. This argument has been made for decades and consistently dismissed as naïve, as unfeasible and idealistic, as ignorant of the ‘realities’ of the market economy – as uninformed hippy hyperbole. But it is nothing but unbiased scientific inquiry and the logical conclusions that can be drawn from the physical realities we have measured that prove the fallacies of our economic system. We need to erase the phrase ‘retail therapy’ from our vernacular. Only when we reframe the toxics issue as one of resource depletion and economic sustainability will we start to tackle the root causes of pollution.

Zoe Cormier is a freelance science writer based in London. She also features regularly as our NI ‘alternative science’ blogger.

And yet global production of white asbestos still stands at more than two million metric tonnes a year – the same as in 1960.

So if more than 40 countries have banned the use of white asbestos (also known as chrysotile, the only kind still used), where is it all going? Emerging and fast developing economies like China, India, Thailand, Indonesia, and Brazil. Though disconcerting, this is not surprising: such nations are less likely to have the stringent health and safety codes in place as the developed Western nations that banned asbestos long ago.

But where the asbestos is coming from is far more surprising, and far more interesting: the world’s second largest producer of white asbestos is Canada – a nation that has itself banned the use of the carcinogenic mineral, and is in fact spending millions at this very moment to remove asbestos from the Houses of Parliament in Ottawa.

The scientific consensus is concrete: medical and scientific establishments have long recognized the carcinogenic dangers of asbestos, whose whispy white fibres breed a particularly painful and incurable form of cancer in the linings of the lungs, called mesothelioma. According to the World Health Organization there is in fact no ’safe threshold’ for white asbestos – meaning that exposure to even the most minute dose, potentially just a few fibres, could spawn a cancer. They advocate a global ban on all uses of all forms of asbestos.

And yet in 2006, when international representatives attempted to add white asbestos to the Rotterdam Convention, a UN-kept list of hazardous substances, Canada blocked the vote, even though Rotterdam would not even prohibit the export and sale of chrysotile but would only require that exporting nations inform importing ones that the product in question is dangerous.

But white asbestos remains off the list, and unlabelled sacks of white fluff continue to flood construction sites in countries like India and Sri Lanka, where workers in flimsy face masks mix it into cement, releasing clouds of sparkly dust into the air (and carry it home in their clothes to share with their families). The Canadian Medical Association Journal has called Canada’s opposition to the listing of asbestos as a hazardous substance under the Rotterdam Convention a ’shameful political manipulation of science’.

But according to the Chrysotile Institute in Montreal – formerly known as the Asbestos Institute (re-branded to avoid the stigma associated with the A-word) – white asbestos can be ’safe to use’.

‘The argument that you can use asbestos safely is the lynchpin,’ says Geoff Tweedale, a Reader in Business History at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School and author of Defending the Indefensible: the Global Asbestos Industry & its Fight for Survival. ‘There is a long history of the asbestos industry corrupting science, in particular by censoring unfavourable studies and selectively choosing data. The argument that certain forms of asbestos can be used safely goes right back to the 1930s because being able to “prove” that white asbestos is safe is the way to save the industry.

‘And this argument carries on today – except that now it is being played out in countries like China and India, the main reason being that there is still money to be made.’

And there is also big money to be lost: lawsuits in the US by sickened mechanics against the auto giants who incorporated asbestos into brake pads would run into the hundreds of billions of dollars if successful.

‘Defendant corporations like GM and Chrysler have gone to extraordinary lengths to reshape the scientific literature to defend these cases, debasing and contaminating the research and public health policies that have to be based on science,’ says Barry Castleman, an environmental consultant who has testified before the USEnvironmental Protection Agency regarding the hazards of asbestos. ‘Vested interests essentially hired scientists to create controversy where there wasn’t any.’

The story is an old one: industry-funded scientists will ‘manufacture doubt’ for vested interests seeking to avoid losing (or keep making) money: tobacco companies did it with second-hand smoke, oil companies with climate change, and the asbestos industry with mesothelioma. For example, just as tobacco giants will label ‘light’ cigarettes as ‘less harmful’, the asbestos industry will brand white asbestos as ’safer’.

Cynically, almost comically, the Chrysotile Institute will use the same language as the scientists and medical professionals who oppose its use: ‘Vested interests in the anti-asbestos lobby have deliberately used outdated science and confusion between the different fibres to advocate for a total ban on all asbestos products … The great asbestos scam is based on deliberate confusion.”

‘This misinformation is absurd, and it kills people,’ says Kathleen Ruff, Senior Advisor on Human Rights to the Rideau Institute in Ottawa. Even more absurd, she points out, is the fact that the Chrysotile Institute has been funded with tax dollars by the Canadian Government for the past twenty years, to the tune of $20 million. ‘Our Government should not be funding this manipulation of science – Canadian scientists should stand up because this is scientifically indefensible as well as morally indefensible.’

And increasingly they are. In January the professor emeritus of public health at the Université Laval, Québec, wrote an open letter to Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling for an end to the ‘perversion of scientific information‘. This August the Canadian Medical Association passed a resolution with a 95 per cent vote pushing for the Canadian Government to stop mining and exporting asbestos – and to stop funding the Chrysotile Institute. And last week a Quebec doctor wrote in La Presse that the Government’s actions are paramount to criminal negligence.

‘This is a real example of how we have to safeguard science and not allowed it to be abused,’ says Ruff.
But more than that, we need to each of us be more aware of the potential for science to be abused, to have the basic scientific literacy to understand how it can be abused – and to take the initiative to protect those who can’t.

Sex tests have a long and dubious record in the history of sport: first introduced in the 1960s to prevent men from posing as women, many ‘butch’ women have had their gender assessed, their medals stripped, and their careers and self-identity torn to pieces.

The IAFF has come under a storm of criticism, especially in South Africa where Semenya’s countryfolk have sprung to her defence, denouncing the tests as unjust and racist. The criticism is fair: if they insist on testing, they ought to have done so beforehand, rather than after her victory and publicly humiliating her. But moreover, the IAAF’s approach is deeply flawed because they are trying to determine if Semenya is a ‘boy’ or a ‘girl’, when she could be neither.

The traditional view of gender has been that having an X and a Y chromosome makes one male, and having two X chromosomes female – but this is a gross oversimplification. ‘Hermaphrodites’ have long been known to us – they feature in stories and myths dating back millennia. But over the past several decades scientists have come to recognize up to a dozen different biological states – many of them subtle and identifiable only with genetic tests – that cannot be neatly classified as ‘male’ or ‘female’.

These range from ‘girls’ who hold just one X chromosome, ‘girls’ who carry XYchromosomes but develop physically as female (due to an insensitivity to the effects of testosterone), ‘boys’ that are XX but whose adrenal glands produce so many masculinizing hormones that they develop to look male, and boys that have an extra X chromosome. Sometimes the external genitals of ‘intersexuals’ look like normal vaginas or penises, but sometimes they blur the lines and lie somewhere in between.

According to the Intersex Society of North America an estimated one in 100 births can be considered to be intersexual – and this doesn’t even account for transgendered individuals who are biologically ‘normal’ XX or XY but psychologically identify with the other gender.

There is certainly no evidence that Semenya is intersexual, but it would not be implausible.

Leonard Chuene, the President of Athletics South Africa, was quoted as saying: ‘The only scientist I know, the only scientist I believe in is the parents of the child. Show me a scientist who knows her better than her mother who raised her for 18 years.’

Such a view reflects hostility, suspicion and distrust of modern ’science’ that is widespread. But it is not ’science’ that is to be criticized, but rather the way that it is used. ‘Science’ is not good or bad, racist or sexist, biased or unbiased. People are, and it is people who conduct science.

So much of what is investigated and what is determined by science is dictated by societal context, especially when it comes to human nature. At various and regrettable times in our history medical doctors and scientists have tried to use the tools of their trade to prove that one race was superior to another, or that homosexuality could be ‘fixed’ with the right treatment.

But as society evolves, so does the scientific consensus. While sexual orientation was often ‘blamed’ on parents and upbringing, scientists have since found that homosexuality is not only widespread in other animals, but is also linked to specific genes – reaction in gay communities is often enthusiastic because such studies are seen as validation of their life choice (‘See? I was born this way – it’s perfectly natural.’)

It is becoming more and more apparent that intersexuality is widespread, and that the black and white distinction between male and female is crude. And treatments are evolving: doctors would in the past, as a rule of thumb, assign a gender (usually female) to an intersexual baby with surgery and hormone treatment, but physicians and scientists are now widely questioning this practice: frequently children grow up confused and unhappy because they do not identify with the gender that was chosen for them.

Moreover, modern science can also improve the lives of intersex individuals in new ways: thanks to chromosomal identification, testicles that develop internally in ‘girls’ and breast tissue in ‘boys’ that are highly prone to developing cancer can be removed pre-emptively. Hormone shots can often alleviate cognitive and behavioural problems and improve their overall health. The list goes on.

But physical biology aside, ‘gender’ is still a complex question, and many would still like to believe that it is purely a social construct, with no grounding in our physical makeup: in other words, if we were all raised under equal conditions, we would none of us feel ‘boyish’ or ‘girlish’.

But this idea, as appealing as it may be to our postmodern sensibilities, is not supported by modern scientific findings: neurologists have even documented differences in how our brains are structured and wired. Men and women, simply put, are not the same, and no amount of philosophical theorizing will make us so.

That being said, there are always exceptions: as biologists say, ‘exception is the rule’. Some women have brains that more resemble a typical male brain than a female, and vice versa. Studies have indicated, for example, that the brains of gay men more typically resemble the brains of straight women than of straight men.

And as intersexuality shows, exception is indeed the rule: up to one per cent of us – some even peg the estimate at two per cent – do not neatly classify as male or female, from true hermaphrodites to people with ‘ambiguous genitalia’. For good reason, many intersexuals feel that we should recognize that there is a third category to gender, rather than trying to pigeonhole all of us into one of two strict definitions.

The more we put human sexuality under the microscope, the more we realize that humans come in far more than just two flavours. ‘Gender’ comes in many colours, spreading across a broad spectrum – not a black and white ying-yang. The more we learn, the more we realize how diverse we really are.

Competitive sports has gleaned so much from the tools and findings of science, from high-tech equipment and apparel to highly sophisticated nutrition and training regimes (and of course, doping).

Sports associations like the IOC and the IAAF are more than willing to use the tools of modern science to single out and disqualify athletes, and yet are so reluctant to recognize the natural diversity that modern science has revealed. Rather than cherrypicking what they like from biological studies, to the humiliation and denigration of talented women like Semenya, they could accept that the question of gender is far too complex to be determined by a few tests – and perhaps come up with a new set of rules to accommodate and celebrate people who don’t fit neatly into our outdated notions of gender.

More than 15 years in the making, with a price tag of almost $4 billion, the National Ignition Facility in California is in hot pursuit of the energetic holy grail: nuclear fusion. Instead of splitting heavy atoms of elements like uranium to release energy, as in conventional nuclear fission power stations, nuclear fusion would squish hydrogen atoms together to create heavier helium atoms and release astronomical amounts of energy – the exact same process that goes on in the centre of our sun.

By channelling the world’s most powerful laser through the largest optical instrument ever built, scientists at the NIF will try to recreate the reactions found in the hearts of stars by focusing 192 lasers onto a match head-sized pellet of hydrogen isotopes dropped into a 10-metre-wide chamber. If they get it right, the pellet will compress, the hydrogen atoms will fuse, and our energy supply will be ‘revolutionised’. Plus, fusion does not run the risk of running out of control, à la Chernobyl, and the waste leftover is far less radioactive and dangerous. For good reasons scientists have pursued the dream of commercially viable fusion for half a century, and it is hoped that they will finally achieve it next year.

But though it is not well-known, the main purpose of the NIF is not actually to produce clean energy. It says so right on their website:

‘To ensure the continuing reliability of the nuclear stockpile, [by] developing sophisticated supercomputer simulations to determine the effects of aging on nuclear weapons components as part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program.’

Though the NIF is designed to surrogately produce climate-friendly energy and host peaceful scientific research (it will be used 10 to 15 per cent of the time for non-weapons related research, according to the National Research Council), the main purpose of the facility is to preserve and design weapons ‘of mass destruction’ (as some might like to put it). North Korea infuriated the international community this year by openly testing nuclear weapons, and it is hoped that thawing relations forged by Bill Clinton’s visit last week could lead to a denuclearization of the Asian country – while rich nations pursue new kinds of nuclear weapons that sidestep international treaties.

Because the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (though still not technically in force) has banned all nuclear explosions since 1996, the US military requires another route to research the mechanics of nuclear weapons and how to maintain existing stockpiles. Controlled fusion reactors provide that solution.

What’s more, research at the NIF and other facilities could lead to the development of new kinds of nuclear weapons; in particular, so-called fourth generation nuclear weapons that would be exempt from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.

Yet a recent article from The Guardian makes no mention of the military roots of theNIF. And a piece in the New York Times makes only a passing reference to it. TheNew York Times instead prefers to focus on the doubts surrounding the feasibility of fusion, but states that if successful the NIF ‘might lift civilization to new heights’ – which one can only assume includes the development of weapons of unprecedented sophistication.

Not all media outlets skim over the weapons intentions. The Economist, in a praising editorial titled On target, finally, correctly describes the main purpose of the facility: ‘It is the resemblance to bombs which has saved the project from the budgetary chop. For the NIF provides America with a way to carry out nuclear-weapons tests without actually testing any weapons. Had the NIF been a purely scientific project, it would almost certainly have been cancelled.’

Why then is the main purpose of the facility skimmed over by most news organizations, even when the NIF states its purpose? The prominence of the energy programme on the NIF’s official website, with the seductively pseudo-religious tagline ‘The Power Of Light’, may have something to do with it.

The promise of nuclear fusion for delivering clean and abundant energy is so great, many would argue, that the bellicose branches of its research facilities can and should be overlooked.

However, there is more than one way to crack a nut, and more than one way to combine two atoms: physicists can use magnets and heat rather than lasers in a process called magnetic confinement fusion, such as at the Iter research facility in France. Magnetic confinement fusion not only cannot be used as a surrogate for weapons research the way inertial confinement fusion (using lasers, as at the NIF) can, it also is far more advanced – scientists in Oxford already achieved fusion using this method in 1991 (though without a net gain of energy).

Of course, magnetic fusion won’t allow us to widen our knowledge of how to make thermonuclear weapons. But seeing as how we in the West learned how to unleash the explosive power of the atom more than 60 years ago, and we have since devised thousands of high-tech ways to ‘deter’ other nations from using them in turn, some might argue our research money, time and manpower could be better spent.

Which may explain in part why we find beachings so distressing and confusing: how could animals that are so clever so frequently find themselves helplessly stranded on dry land? Couldn’t avoiding the shoreline be simple enough?

We know that whales and dolphins have always beached themselves, and historical accounts of beachings go back hundreds of years – beaching may be as natural as drowning. And natural, climatic factors can be involved: a 2005 study in the journal Biology Letters found that beachings in Australia and Tasmania are more common every dozen or so years, when normal variations in climate cause cold, nutrient-rich waters from the Antarctic to drift further north, which whales follow in search of food.

But are whales beaching themselves more than they used to? And could we be to blame? The answer to both questions appears to be a resounding yes.

The most well-known culprit: sonar. The US Navy admitted for the first time in 2002that their sonar can cause whales to strand, something biologists had suspected for years – a mass stranding of dolphins last year in Cornwall was also blamed on naval sonar. Whales and dolphins rely overwhelmingly on sound to communicate and to navigate, so loud noises in their midst will make it as difficult for them to find their way around as thick fogs would to us. Autopsies of beached whales have often shown haemorrhaging near the ears. And a study published last month for the first time showed experimentally that sounds in the same frequency range as military sonar can temporarily cause hearing loss in dolphins. Research from 2002 also indicated that sonar can give whales the bends, possibly because they surface too quickly to escape the sonic assault.

Noise may not be the only problem: a study published last year found that dead whales and dolphins on Cornish beaches have indeed become more frequent over the past century, and the researchers blamed the destructive fishing practice of ‘bottom trawling’ for playing a major role, saying that more than 60 per cent of the dead animals had been killed as ‘bycatch’.

Now a new study in the journal Environmental Pollution suggests that we should be looking at another human activity: analysis of a dozen dead dolphins and a seal from the east coast of the US found levels of persistent pollutants known to be toxic to the nervous system – including metabolic byproducts of PCBs, pesticides, and brominated flame retardants – in their cerebrospinal fluid and cerebellum grey matter, some at ‘very high levels’ in the part per million range in the seal, says lead author Dr Eric Montie of the University of South Florida. This is the first survey of such a wide range of toxic chemicals in the brains of dolphins and seals.

The research does not at all prove that these chemicals were responsible for the strandings, cautions Dr Montie. He examined the brains of beached whales because those were the carcasses available to him. Similar analyses on the brains of whales that had not beached would be needed to know if the beached animals had higher than normal levels – and that research might be impossible to do.

‘But it is important to determine whether or not environmental pollutants are having any impact on strandings,’ he says. ‘That’s definitely one of the reasons we are doing this work.’ And they are just starting to scratch the surface.

But the sad truth is that most people don’t see it that way.

To many, science is simply a means to an end, a tool with which to develop more sophisticated technologies, more effective medicines, and more devastating weapons – but not illuminating or enlightening in its own right.

To others, it is seen as cold, meaningless and misguided. It is viewed as the soulless gathering of data, an uninspired reduction of life’s complexities into humdrum mundanities, a means to rob life of its mystery and beauty, and a threat to the very morals and ethics that civil society depends on.

And perhaps the most common misconception of science is the worst of all: that it is boring.

But science gives us a window through which to see just how intricate, inventive, and amazing the universe actually is, and a deeper appreciation for what it means to be alive.

We have learned that the universe is far vaster and older than any of us can even begin to fathom, that most of the elements that make up our planet (and our very own bodies) were born in the heart of exploding stars. That the earth on which we stand is more than four billion years old, life more than three billion, and that our own species has been around for barely a million – a mere speck of galactic time.

But the humbling revelation that our own lives are so brief, and ultimately so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, need not be depressing. Quite the opposite: knowledge of the true age and scope of the universe should make us feel all the more lucky to have been born, all the more appreciative of our own uniqueness, and all the more questioning of what exactly constitutes a meaningful life.

Though we have moved our place in the universe from a special position at the centre of the solar system to being just one of 30 million species on a tiny rock on the fringes of one of millions of galaxies, science has given us a better appreciation for just how extraordinary humans truly are. Inside each of our heads sits the most complicated thing in the known universe, a feat of natural engineering we could never hope to rival. There are more possible connections between the neurons in our brains than there are atoms in the universe, and to them we owe the evolutionary gifts of consciousness, memories, and music.

And with these neurons we are now unravelling the bizarre secrets of particle physics, discovering that the vast majority of matter and energy in the universe is invisible, and coming to understand that free will may actually just be an illusion. Each year we uncover more and more of the marvellous mechanics of living matter, find more and more ways to ease and delay the pain of mortality, and come closer (we hope) to finding life elsewhere in the universe.

The legacy of the scientific method cannot be overestimated, but it is pervasively underappreciated.

One could argue that the mistrust and misunderstanding of science is among the greatest short-comings of the modern era, just as the discoveries and accomplishments of science are some of its greatest achievements.

But as important as its achievements are, science is about so much more than finding cures for the diseases that plague us or ways to make our lives more comfortable with technology and ingenuity.

Science is ultimately about exploring, questioning and celebrating what it means to exist in the first place. Because, truly, nothing else is more remarkable than the fact that you are reading these words at all.

‘You ought to drink more water,’ scold gigantic ads on London’s Underground, a sharp-eyed owl glaring accusingly. ‘Drinking enough water everyday helps keep you properly hydrated which increases alertness and maintains concentration.’ Fail to drink enough water, and you’ll be sluggish and dim-witted, the owl warns.

Fortunately, through this generous public service message, the Natural Hydration Council is here to remind you to drink ‘2 – 3 litres of water a day,’ such as from a clear, shiny plastic bottle of water like the one the owl is clutching.

Who is the Natural Hydration Council? A soothingly nondescript name like that should rouse suspicion, just like the Safe Energy Coalition (funded by the nuclear power industry) or the Foundation for Clean Air Progress (a front for the American Petroleum Institute).

The NHC however is at least honest about its financial backers with a string of logos at the bottom of their ads, including Volvic, Evian and Buxton Springs. The public relations face of the bottled water industry: ‘The Natural Hydration Council is dedicated to researching the science and communicating the facts about naturally sourced bottled water.’

Leaving aside the environmental impacts of bottled water, let’s focus on their main claim: that ‘science’ proves we each require two to three litres of water a day.

Interestingly enough, a review of scientific studies published last year in the Journal of the American Society for Nephrology examined what evidence there is to support the accepted belief that healthy adults should drink eight glasses of eight ounces of water a day and came to the conclusion that: ‘There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.’ So where did the notion that we need to drink two to three litres of water a day come from? ‘Nobody really knows. There is no single study—and therefore no single outcome—that has led to these recommendations.’

Interesting. What is also interesting is that the Natural Hydration Council claims that it ‘was founded in response to growing sales of bottled water and greater public debate over its social and economic impact.’ It is indeed true that the public debates over its impact have grown – though their claim of ‘growing sales’ is not quite as accurate. Research published last year by retail analysts TNS showed sales of bottled water declining, by nine per cent, for the first time in two decades.

But even if solid evidence existed to support the notion that we each need to drink two litres of water a day to stay healthy, what is more likely: that we are all woefully under hydrated in affluent Western cities, requiring the beneficent intervention of the Natural Hydration Council? Or that they are spending millions on a campaign using the pretence of ‘scientific’ evidence to bolster declining sales?

The government of Canada is proposing to ban a controversial flame retardant used in textiles, furniture and electronics, known as deca-polybrominated diphenyl ether (deca PBDE), or simply “deca,” joining the European Union in removing it from the marketplace.

The move comes after years of lobbying by Canadians concerned by the chemical’s accumulation in wildlife and in people (Canadians carry the highest level of PBDEs in their blood and breast milk, second only to Americans), and by scientific studies—including a new one published last month by Swedish researchers—that find it to be toxic to the nervous systems and thyroid glands of mice. Studies on potential health effects of PBDEs in humans are scarce, but there is concern, for children in particular, due to its ability to cause hyperactivity and spontaneous behaviour (often described as “ADHD-like” symptoms) in lab animals.

In fact, the federal government banned deca’s manufacture in Canada in July 2008 and is now moving to ban the chemical’s import in electronics as well. “We see this as a victory,” says Dr. Elaine MacDonald, senior scientist with Ecojustice (formerly the Sierra Legal Defence Fund). “This is a great step forward.”

Where it lurks

About 80 percent of deca used in Canada, she notes, is in the hard plastic casing in consumer electronics such as televisions and computers (where it is added to prevent them catching fire from overheating or during house fires). But because Canada has no system in place to test all imports for flame retardants, there is still no guarantee that your new television or carpet will be deca-free once the import ban is in place. “You may have to just do your own research on specific brands online,” she says.

In fact, some major brands have already pledged to never use deca, such as Apple and Ikea. But areport from Greenpeace last month found that other electronics companies, such as Hewlett Packard and Dell, still use brominated flame retardants, despite pledges to phase them out.

Even so, deca is being phased out, in this country at least. A few U.S. states have also banned deca, but “Canada is way ahead of the U.S. on this. We are lagging behind [here] in America,” says Dr. Arlene Blum, Director of the Green Science Policy Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, who first identified carcinogenic brominated flame retardants called “tris” in the 1970s.

New retardants, same problems?

But while deca is on its way out, other new kinds of brominated flame retardants are being introduced to replace them, such as decabromodiphenyl ethane and brominated phthalates (a name that should ring alarm bells). Phthalates, plasticizers used to soften polymer plastics, are also being targeted for bans for their toxicity to the hormonal system.

“There is now a huge laundry list of new brominated flame retardants, and there are so few toxicology studies done on these chemicals before their approval, its just crazy,” says Dr. Miriam Diamond, a chemist at the University of Toronto who studies flame retardants and other toxic chemicals in household dust and outdoor air pollution, who published a new study last month looking at how they get into household dust. “Environmental chemists are always playing catch up,” identifying the chemicals in the environment and then looking to see what effects they could have on the wildlife and people they accumulate in.

In fact, deca was introduced as what was thought to be a “safe” alternative to two other PBDEs (called penta and octa), which themselves were used as “safe” alternatives to other more toxic flame retardants. Now, new chemicals are being introduced every year to replace deca, and some might prove to be dangerous—decabromodiphenyl ethane has already been found in red pandas in China and seagulls in North America.

All of this begs the question, is it even be possible to design flame retardants that are safe? “I don’t know of any brominated flame retardants that turned out to be safe,” says Dr Blum. “At the end of the day, in many cases the chemicals just aren’t necessary. We now have fire-safe candles and cigarettes that extinguish themselves. It’s much more effective to deal with the sources of ignition than to put fire retardants in everything.”

In the 1950s and the post-war boom of optimism and innovation, the spirit of the times was captured in one simple mantra: better living through chemistry. With boundless faith in the potential of modern science, chemists cooked up new concoctions that promised to make our lives easier, safer and more comfortable. Pesticides that rid our crops of insects. Refrigerators that kept our food fresh. Drugs that eased our pain and suffering. But there was a problem: many of these innovations had unforeseen and disastrous consequences. Pesticides decimated bird populations. CFCs from discarded refrigerators bore a hole in the ozone layer. And billions of tonnes of hazardous-waste by-products were flushed into the environment, with some eventually ending up in our own bloodstreams.

So we started to ban hazardous chemicals, from DDT to PCBs. That process is ongoing – though perhaps not as quickly and thoroughly as we might wish. The federal government undertook a mammoth review of 23,000 chemicals under the Chemicals Management Plan, then decided 4,000 needed further attention. Of those, 200 – the ones identified as being potentially the most hazardous – are under review, with the results to be completed some time in 2009. But say we decided to eliminate every single dangerous chemical we use. Are we really willing to live without all electronics, including computers, because their manufacture requires harsh solvents? Do we really want to eliminate all plastics, including medical supplies? Are we going to scrap research for new cancer drugs because it produces toxic waste?

Enter green chemistry

This new branch of science is allowing us to have our cake and eat it too. By designing new compounds and discovering new ways to make old compounds, chemists are helping us keep our modern innovations while reducing our ecological footprint. “You can look at hazardous emissions and toxic products and examine their impact,” says Beverley Thorpe, the Montreal-based international director for Clean Production Action. “But the ultimate question is how to transform our toxic-chemical economy into one that is safe and healthy, and green chemistry is going to play an absolutely critical role in that.” Although the phrase “green chemistry” has only been around since the early ’90s, scientists have been practising it for many years. Forty years ago, for example, piles of fluffy white foam were a common sight in rivers all over Canada, because industrial and kitchen soaps wouldn’t decompose once we flushed them down the drain.

So chemists rejigged surfactants so they would stay intact long enough to clean our clothes but could be degraded by bacteria once they reached the sewers. Another key example, and one Canadians can be proud of, is the phase-out of CFCs – chemicals that were used as refrigerants and in propellants in cleaning solvents – under the 1987 Montreal protocol. Thanks to global public pressure, industries all over the planet were forced to create new substances that worked just as well as CFCs but wouldn’t destroy the ozone layer. Today, chemists are striving more than ever to green manufacturing operations, by reducing energy use, employing non-toxic solvents, eliminating waste and using renewable resources as ingredients. “We’re fighting on a lot of different fronts at once,” says Professor Audrey Moores, a Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry who teaches the subject at McGill University in Montreal. “So you can’t really say that a new chemical or process is ‘green,’ only ‘greener.’ We’re trying to address a terribly complicated issue, but it’s definitely worth trying – our planet will be in big trouble if we don’t.”

Getting rid of toxins
Challenging as this task may be, by cleverly redesigning things from the atom up, green chemists have discovered new reactions and created new products that are safer and cleaner while being just as effective (if not more so) as the old methods. Take the fire extinguishers developed by Pyrocool Technologies. Many traditional fire extinguishers release toxic fluorine-containing compounds, but Pyrocool’s versions are non-toxic, biodegradeable and, best of all, effective at about one-tenth the concentration of old-school foams. Green chemists have also been able to put a new face on pesticides. The biocide Messenger, made of natural, non-toxic proteins, triggers a plant’s natural defence system to fight off viral, fungal and bacterial diseases. And Serenade – a fungicide containing a natural strain of bacteria – is even approved for use in organic agriculture.

Redesigning chemicals to reduce our use of fossil fuels is another important focus. Bioplastics, for example, are made from plants instead of fossil fuels. They look and feel like normal plastic but will break down in landfill or compost. And the ability to make bioplastics is having an impact. Retail giant Wal-Mart, for instance, is starting to use corn-based bioplastics to package some of its products. And where Wal-Mart goes, other stores will likely follow. Green chemistry can also be used to make green processes even greener. Recycling different kinds of paper can actually damage the environment because harsh solvents are needed to remove adhesives on envelopes and sticky notes. But the synthetic enzyme Optimyze can be used to remove the glues instead. A typical mill in a year can reduce the amount of solvents used by 276,000 litres and save up to $1-million. This is one of the key paradigm shifts in green chemistry and, indeed, in the green movement generally: in the end, it can be much, much cheaper to be green. “If you create pollution, you have to spend money every year for the cleanup and hazardous-waste disposal,” says Professor Philip Jessop, a Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. “But if you invest the money beforehand to minimize your impact, you’re going to spare your pocketbook as well as the environment. The old idea of green chemistry being a waste of money is wrong – it’s a way of saving money.”

Carbon dioxide: from waste to resource

Another way green chemistry is turning conventional chemistry on its head is in coming up with ways to use carbon dioxide (CO2) as a resource. In order to limit our greenhouse-gas emissions and slow global warming, soon we’re going to have to collect CO2 as it spews from industrial smokestacks, rather than vent it into the atmosphere. Some schemes call for it to be stored, perhaps underground. But instead, asks Prof. Jessop, “Is it useful for anything? Can we recycle it like we do with waste paper?” Indeed we can. One of the most important innovations to come out of green chemistry is the use of what’s called supercritical CO2, which is between a gas and a liquid. Coffee beans, for example, used to be decaffeinated using dangerous chlorine compounds. Now most European coffee companies (and a few North American ones) remove caffeine with supercritical CO2. Even more impressive, American company NovaSterilis Inc. has come up with a way to use supercritical CO2 to sterilize biological materials such as graft tissue and vaccines, which previously were kept free of bacteria with ethylene dioxide or gamma radiation, both dangerous as well as ineffective at preserving the integrity of delicate biological tissues. Supercritical CO2 is neither.

Prof. Jessop is researching ways to use CO2, for the manufacture of pharmaceuticals, one of the most wasteful of all industries. Modern drugs contain extremely complex molecules that can require dozens of different reaction steps to produce the final result. “For some drugs, if you take a gram of that medicine, that means as much as six kilograms of waste ended up somewhere,” he says. Looked at on a larger scale, every kilo of drug produced would result in 6,000 kilos of waste. Why? “Because 80 to 90 percent of the waste is solvent. There are so many different steps required, and each step typically needs a different solvent.” Which is why Prof. Jessop is designing so-called switchable solvents, which – if you add CO2 to the mixture – can be changed into a significantly different solvent and used in the next step of drug synthesis.

Looking ahead

Canadian scientists are also working on turning CO2 into biodegradeable plastics, headed by Canada Research Chair in Green Chemistry Professor Chao-Jun Li at McGill. If successful, his research could forever change the way we make plastics, as well as how we deal with CO2 emissions. Prof. Li is also one of a number of McGill researchers who are using water as a solvent in complex reactions where it was previously thought it could never be used. So revolutionary is this chemistry that it netted Prof. Li a 2001 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award, handed out annually by the U.S. government to academic and commercial researchers who have come up with green solutions to chemical problems. Since 1996, the award-winners have collectively eliminated over 426 million kilos of hazardous chemicals and solvents, saved over 2,270 million litres of water and reduced CO2 emissions to the air by 150,000 tonnes. So important is green chemistry for our technological and ecological future, the 2005 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three academics for their work in this field. “All of these success stories represent the tip of the iceberg – we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done,” says Professor Paul Anastas, Director of the Center for Green Chemistry & Green Engineering at Yale University and widely regarded as the father of green chemistry. “Green chemistry is about changing our perspective on environmental and sustainability issues from one of fear to one of action. Rather than focus on the problems, focus on the solutions.”

Zoe Cormier is a writer who specializes in scientific, environmental and health-related stories. Her environmental column appears in The Globe and Mail twice monthly.

A new alternative remedy that proponents say can cure a wide spectrum of emotional conditions – and a few physical ones as well – is going to be offered in Canada for the first time this spring, starting in the first week of May in Montreal, later moving to Toronto and Vancouver.

Called the Phil Parker Lightning Process, because it is intended to cure in just three days, it was designed in the United Kingdom by British psychotherapist Phil Parker for conditions such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and addiction.

Some people say it is the silver bullet that finally cured them. But detractors point out that the Lightning Process is scientifically unproven, have criticized its practitioners for making what they consider extravagant claims, and on occasion labeled the organization as fraudulent.

Origin

“I designed it for people who were stuck – everything I had tried that worked on everybody else didn’t work for them,” Parker said in an interview. “I had run out of tools.”

Parker says this led him to design a technique combining a number of elements from other alternative therapies, such as neurolinguistic programming and hypnotherapy.

The aim is to help patients break out of negative patterns of thinking and behaviour by having them do specific mental exercises in the vein of positive thinking. It is not a treatment or therapy in the traditional sense, but a “training program,” its practitioners say.

“We teach clients to be their own life coach,” says practitioner Maxine Henk-Bryce, a British psychotherapist and hypnotherapist who has trained more than 1,200 people in the process since 2002. She will be offering training sessions in Canada starting in Montreal in the first week of May, in Toronto and Vancouver in July, and later throughout Canada (mostly in Vancouver, where she will be based). Sessions take up to 10 people at a time.

Sunny Sanghera, who lives in England, was trained in the Lightning Process in October 2007 by Henk-Bryce for low self-esteem. She says that not only is she more confident now, but that her entire life has changed.

“It isn’t just counselling, it’s so much more complex than just telling yourself to calm down,” she says. “It changes the way you think about everything. Even that evening, listening to a Prince CD I had played for years, all of a sudden I could hear things in the music I hadn’t heard before.”

CFS controversy

People have trained in the process for a slew of emotional and mental conditions, from stage fright to procrastination to long-term guilt. And Parker says it can also help people with physical conditions like back pain and fibromyalgia (chronic muscle pain).

But the Lightning Process is generating the most attention – and controversy – over its use for chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). About 80 per cent of people who sign up for the Lightning Process suffer from CFS, or myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME) as it is more commonly known in the U.K.

CFS is a debilitating, persistent illness that affects 1.3 per cent of Canadians, according to Statistics Canada. Afflicted individuals experience aches and pains, severe mental impairment and perpetual exhaustion. They frequently remain ill for many years, even decades, and often must scale back their education and employment considerably.

Physicians have no real cure for CFS. Prescription drugs can only help people deal with symptoms, such as insomnia or pain. Doctors say the best sufferers can do is manage their illness with careful rationing of energy and activity – neither too much nor too little – and slowly improve. Alternative health practitioners offer a plethora of herbal and physical therapies, but none have been proven to work.

One reason for the lack of effective treatments is because research was hampered for many decades by a lack of interest in the syndrome. It was long dismissed as psychosomatic, primarily because patients present no visible symptoms.

“CFS is a real illness, it is not just a bunch of hooey in people’s heads,” says Dr. William Reeves, the principal investigator of the syndrome at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Ga. The CDC has a public awareness campaign designed to dispel the psychosomatic stigma that has tainted CFS since the 1980s, when it was widely derided as “yuppie flu.”

Scientific studies have shown that there are clear biological markers in CFS patients, such as altered nervous system activity, lower levels of adrenaline, and specific genetic differences. And it appears that CFS may actually turn out to be an umbrella term for a suite of similar illnesses, with different genetic vulnerabilities set off by different triggers.

Although medical science has yet to complete the puzzle, it appears that the illness generally starts with a viral infection of some kind (mononucleosis is one common trigger that has been studied), followed by natural responses of the immune and nervous systems that, for some reason, fail to “turn off” as they normally would.

Though it is not psychosomatic, these responses are centred in the brain in much the same way that Parkinson’s, a physical ailment, is centred in the brain.

“This is a complex, brain-body illness,” says Reeves, noting that the response by the body to emotional, physical and mental stress appears to be the key. “The brain is central to the body’s response to stress, which is manifested through the nervous system.”

This, says Henk-Bryce, is how a verbal technique like the Lightning Process can be used to treat CFS.

“It teaches you how the brain works, and to train your brain and body to work together to influence your health,” she says. “We look at how the mind influences the body and how the body influences the mind.”

It may sound implausible, but thousands of CFS patients – desperate to recover, and with no real cure available – have decided to try it.

Stephanie Dotto, a 21-year-old from Montreal, is one of them. She was diagnosed with CFS three years ago.

“It’s incredible how tired you are,” she says. “I felt like I had the body of an 80-year-old.”

At her worst, she was spending 15 hours in bed a day, was seeing her doctors at least three times a week, and was taking 26 different supplements and pills every single day. And she wasn’t getting better.

She had heard about the Lightning Process from other CFS sufferers, so she decided to fly to England in November 2007 to try it.

“I was trying to be as open-minded as possible, but it’s hard not to wonder how something like that could physically heal you,” she says.

But Dotto says she made a full recovery and has gone off all her medication. “I’m not sure how it worked. All I know is that it worked, so I am thankful. I feel like they gave me my life back.”

Thousands of other people who were once crippled by CFS also say the Lightning Process has cured them.

But as anecdotal reports have fuelled hope in some, the Lightning Process has also generated controversy. It is scientifically unproven, and not endorsed by any medical authority. And to some CFS support groups, the claim that a verbal method could cure a physical ailment seems to imply that CFS is a psychological manifestation after all, a notion they find offensive.

John Greensmith, a CFS sufferer and campaigner with the British advocacy group ME Free For All, also questions the fact that people who train in the process frequently go on to become practitioners themselves.

“That seems to me like a pyramid scheme,” he says, noting that at a cost of around $1,200, the training program doesn’t come cheap.

“We think their claims are extravagant,” Greensmith adds, pointing out that Lightning Process practitioners assert that the training program should work in all cases so long as patients properly follow instructions.

“If you use it properly you will get the results each and every time,” asserts Henk-Bryce.

Greensmith isn’t sold. “So if patients get better, they claim the success of the treatment – but if they don’t, they say the patient is responsible.”

Isobel Bennett, 49 years old from London, says it didn’t work for her when she tried it last year. In fact, she says it made her worse.

“It encouraged me to push myself beyond my natural limits, and afterwards I crashed badly, becoming housebound. I’m just gradually beginning to pick up now,” she says.

Others recount similar stories of relapses after going through the process.

“I think it is potentially a useful technique,” says Bennett. “But I am bitter that they are not very open to recognizing that it doesn’t work for some people. It needs to be tailored more to individual cases rather than just a ‘one size fits all, so if it doesn’t work for you then tough’ attitude. CFS is so little understood – it’s not the same illness in everybody. For some people, it potentially could be dangerous.”

Research

“We are dealing with a number of disorders, and we are still not able to divide the subgroups carefully enough – we’re looking at apples and oranges and plums,” agrees Dr. Leslie Findley, an expert in Parkinson’s disease and a clinical neuroscientist in Essex, England.

He is conducting a pilot study with CFS patients and the Lightning Process – the first independent study of its kind – and he says so far, his research indicates it benefits about two-thirds of patients. For the other third, there is no change in their illness, and in a small number of cases there can be bad relapses.

While the findings are not as high as the 100-per-cent success rate some practitioners of the Lightning Process claim, it does imply that the training program can help some people, and that a verbal technique can be used as a treatment for this physical illness.

“Do I believe that CFS is psychosomatic? The answer is an emphatic no. It is a disorder of the brain,” Findley says.

But, he adds, he doesn’t think the Lightning Process is going to be the definitive treatment for CFS. “Most patients, if properly managed, will recover on their own. I just see this as another way of helping patients that haven’t responded to much simpler approaches.”

“Talk therapy” takes on chronic fatigue syndrome: coming soon to Canada

“It was very much like being a dead person … I could only lie there.” The victim of an exhausting, little-understood malady, this young woman spent six long years confined to a darkened room. Zoe Cormier describes how a new – and surprisingly simple – therapy brought her back to the light

NORWICH, ENGLAND — Anna Debbage suffers from wanderlust. At this very moment, she is backpacking in Thailand, which isn’t unusual for someone her age, except that she hasn’t exactly lived her 26 years to the fullest. Ms. Debbage has yet to finish high school, has never dated seriously and, until a few months ago, knew precious little about the infamous terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

For almost six years, she was a prisoner in her own bedroom, consigned to a life she now characterizes as “like being dead, like being in a tomb.”

The young woman from Norwich, two hours northeast of London, had fallen victim to a baffling illness that medical science for years refused to recognize and even now has yet to devise an effective treatment. At her worst, she was unable to move her arms or legs and couldn’t tolerate even the tiniest sliver of light or the faintest sound. She kept her blinds drawn tight, her eyes covered and the power indicator on any electronic devices coated with foil. Even the quietest sounds were so painful that her parents added insulation to her walls and bought her industrial headphones.

Ms. Debbage had contracted a case of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) so extreme that she thought she would never get better. And yet, after being robbed of nearly a decade of her life, she has made a full recovery, for which she credits a strange – almost implausible – new treatment that is coming soon to Canada.

“HYSTERICAL NONSENSE”

Chronic fatigue syndrome is a true mystery. Some experts feel the affliction has always been with us, but it first came to the attention of medical science midway through the 20th century as a bizarre, debilitating condition sparked by an initial flu-like illness. Preliminary investigations suggested the fatigue was linked to inflammation in the brain and spinal cord, and the condition was dubbed “myalgic encephalomyelitis” (ME), as it is still known in England.

But no symptoms were visible. All that seemed to unite its victims was their exhaustion. (Even now, there is no diagnostic test for it.) So, in 1970 two psychiatrists writing in the British Medical Journal dismissed the condition as mere hysteria, an assessment that stuck for decades. Young doctors were taught that CFS was “hysterical nonsense, a non-disease,” says Charles Shepherd, medical adviser to the ME Association in Britain. “So it became something that few people were willing to investigate,” and retained its “psychosomatic” status through the 1980s when it was derided as the “yuppie flu” suffered by self-obsessed hypochondriacs.

“But now the research shows that this is undoubtedly not a psychological problem,” Dr. Shepherd says.

CFS researcher Anthony Komaroff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, agrees, pointing to clear evidence of “objective, biological differences” between chronic-fatigue sufferers and the rest of the population.

“The central nervous system and the immune system are measurably different,” Dr. Komaroff says. People with CFS have less grey matter in their brains and abnormal functioning of the hypothalamus, as well as elevated levels of cytokines (proteins released by the immune system), impaired white blood cells and lower adrenalin levels. And now researchers have found genetic differences, which may lead to a gene-based diagnostic test.

CFS is now taken so seriously that Statistics Canada estimates as many as 1.3 per cent of Canadians suffer from it and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has launched a public-awareness campaign to dispel the “psychosomatic” stigma.
Still, there is no “cure.” The few drugs commonly prescribed can only address the symptoms, such as pain and sleep deprivation. And few of the many alternative remedies available offer much relief.

Most sufferers hope that by looking after themselves and pacing their activity, they can manage the illness. But for some that simply isn’t enough.

EXHAUSTED BUT SLEEPLESS

Anna Debbage belongs to this select group. For a few years after she fell ill in 1998, her father, Noel, says, “I read about CFS as much as I could, and I thought, ‘We are getting away lightly with this.’”

But slowly she grew increasingly tired, missed more and more school, and spent more time in bed. A devout Christian, she now says it was almost a blessing that “I had no idea how bad it would get.”

The condition slowly took control. No matter what they tried – vitamins, herbs, medications, magnesium injections, oxygen supplements, gluten-free diets – nothing worked. Any activity exhausted her and, paradoxically, rest didn’t help: In a cruel irony, CFS sufferers are plagued by insomnia. Ms. Debbage went weeks without proper sleep.

At first, she would feel worse in the winter and pick up in the spring, but in the third winter she went down and stayed there. In December, 2001, she lost the use of her legs, followed two months later by her arms and hands. By April, she could no longer see, and by June she could no longer hear.

“One thing that helped me cope was a sense of humour,” she says. “If you try hard enough, you can see the funny side in almost anything.”

But then she started to lose something that made no one laugh: the ability to breathe. She began to panic. “I really thought I might have been dying.” With concentration and the help of her family, she regained control. But almost every minute for the next year was spent focusing on breathing slowly and regularly.

The mental fatigue was just as acute. “It was very much like being a dead person. I couldn’t remember things, I couldn’t imagine, I couldn’t plan. I could only lie there.”

No light. No movement. No music. No visitors. Minimal, whispered conversations with her parents. Her relatives sent her letters and tape recordings. “But nothing held any meaning any more,” she says. “All I needed to hear were the words ‘I love you.’ But so many people just don’t know to say it. Maybe it’s our culture – we’re very reserved in England.”

Most friends abandoned her. “People who would come to see me wouldn’t come back. They just couldn’t take it in.” Life was hell for her parents. (Mr. Debbage says Anna’s mother “hated the fact that light, of all things, would make her ill – there’s something so awful about that.”) By 2002, “the depression broke me,” Anna says. “I felt suicidal.”

Yet her dark, lonely paralysis was interrupted on occasion: In 2003, she managed to listen to a few minutes of music, turned 21, taught herself to whistle, felt God’s presence return and had her depression ease. By November, she says, “I was well enough to cry.”

And then, in the winter of 2004, she really started to improve. She tolerated light a few minutes a day and by March she could listen to the odd track by her favourite singer, Elvis Presley. In April, her eyes were well enough to see her younger brother, now a grown man. By July, she could read Winnie the Pooh, feed herself with a remote-controlled arm and be taken out in a wheelchair. In August, she managed to stand for 10 seconds.

She grew so hopeful that she attended a friend’s wedding in her wheelchair. But it was too much. She relapsed to square one: motionless, silent, super-sensitive to light – unable even to chew.

“But one thing that always brought me courage and hope was the metaphor of a butterfly chrysalis: They spend a lot of time alone in the dark, unable to move, while turning into something beautiful.”

BOLT FROM THE BLUE

The butterfly began to emerge last May when Ms. Debbage underwent a new therapy so unusual that it’s difficult to believe it could possibly work.

Known as the “lightning process,” it was devised by British alternative-health practitioner Phil Parker to help people snap out of negative patterns, such as smoking, depression, anxiety – and CFS. The goal is to strike like lightning: do it all in just three days.

Available in Britain for about seven years, the program combines elements of various alternative therapies, such as osteopathy, hypnotherapy and neurolinguistic programming. The end product is essentially a blend of behavioural therapy, “positive thinking” and a few posture exercises. No injections, no pills, no ointments.

Not that CFS is a figment of the imagination, the London-based Mr. Parker says. “Just because we approach an illness from a partially emotional side doesn’t make the illness purely emotional,” he insists. “This is about neurologically restoring balance from the inside rather than the outside.”

Robert Fulcher, a stroke specialist at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, endorses the notion that the brain can be “rewired.”

“When you are bedridden,” says Dr. Fulcher, who is also trained as a hypnotherapist and who introduced Ms. Debbage to the lightning process, “certain pathways in the brain can become fixed, and a lot of what we do becomes unconscious.”

But those patterns can be broken. Not unlike stroke victims who must build new neural pathways to regain lost brain functions, he explains, “in order to get better, CFS sufferers need to actually establish in their mind that they are not going to be stuck in bed for their whole lives.”

Still, it all sounds a little far-fetched, and critics have called the process unscientific, New Age rhetoric. Ms. Debbage was certainly not very hopeful. “I had already accepted that I wouldn’t have my life back until my 30s, maybe my 40s – I was sick of false hopes.”

She had good reason to be skeptical, says Dr. Shepherd of the ME Association. “Some new alternative miracle cure comes along every two months or so – such as anti-candida diets, multi-vitamin shots, co-enzyme Q-10 pills. Most hang around for a year and disappear from the scene. None has really stood up to scientific investigation.”

Although he believes that CFS is a brain disorder, “I am equally skeptical of ‘talking treatments.’ … They all claim incredible success rates, but they have never been subjected to a proper medical trial.”

The exception, he says, is the lightning process, which is the focus of a small independent pilot study conducted by Leslie Findley, a clinical neuroscientist who has spent decades working with Parkinson’s disease, CFS and other neurological disorders.

Because he feels that CFS sufferers “are vulnerable to exploitation, and there have been all sorts of quackery and bogus treatments,” Dr. Findley is very skeptical. But after tracking more than 100 of his own patients who have undergone the therapy, he feels that there may be something to it.

About two-thirds of his subjects seem to have some benefit. This is quite a bit short of the success rate lightning-process practitioners claim (they say that, done properly, it should work for everybody), but there is a measurable benefit nonetheless.

“Whenever something new comes along,” Dr. Findley says, “I’m keen to see if it has anything to offer – and there’s no doubt that this does.” He believes the key is the way the process helps people manage stress, which accentuates any illness. For example, stress worsens the tremors in Parkinson’s patients.

Does this mean that CFS really is all in the mind?

“No,” Dr. Findley says. “The fact that we are changing the functioning of the stress system by a verbal technique does not imply in any way that this is psychosomatic – only a fool with a superficial understanding of the way the brain works would make this assumption.”

But neither does he feel the tactic – which will reach Canada this spring when psychotherapist Maxine Henk, trained in the procedure by Mr. Parker, moves to Vancouver – is for everyone. “This is a collection of techniques packaged in a way that effectively helps some patients – but not all of them. I see it as another way of managing some patients, mainly those that haven’t yet responded to much more simple approaches – the majority won’t need it.”

And in some cases, it could do more harm than good. “If a patient is offered this with the belief that they will get better because their recovery is entirely up to them,” he says, “if it doesn’t work, they could go off with more guilt and a sense of failure, which just perpetuates their stress and, therefore, their illness.”

There is certainly no shortage of reports online describing how the lightning process has failed and disparaging its cost (about $1,200), principles and claims.

“I myself was by no means convinced that this was going to work,” Noel Debbage says. “But it did. The doctor talked to her, gently asked her if she would try and open her eyes – and she did.”

Being a math teacher, he says, “the idea that you can use language to reach in and switch a button in your head to impact your body is still very hard to believe, even though I saw it happen.” And yet his daughter seems to have made a full recovery.

“She was undoubtedly the worst case I have ever treated,” Dr. Fulcher says. “This girl hadn’t been out of a darkened room for years – and yet by the end of the third day of training, she went to a market with her mother and bought some chewing gum.”

HAPPY TO BE ALIVE

Over the next few months , Ms. Debbage reclaimed her life. She learned to walk again. She started swimming and biking. And she moved back home from the full-time care facility where she had lived since 2004.

Someone who met her today would hardly suspect that she lost almost a decade of her life, although she looks like a teen, having seen so little sunlight for 10 years, and is overjoyed at things others her age take for granted. While warming up for her Thai adventure, she was thrilled to drink “a whole Bailey’s” during her first-ever evening out.

But enormous challenges lie ahead. While she was in the dark, her friends left her behind (most are married or working now), and she has to get to know the world again.

“Anna seems to be walking free,” her father says. “But she can’t just live as though it never happened – it has changed her irrevocably. But as a parent I don’t want to foist my own schemes on her; she has to decide what kind of person she wants to be.”

She’ll make that decision in time. For now, Ms. Debbage is content to bask in rekindled happiness. “I love so much just being able to feel the sun on my face. I don’t know if this will fade – it may – but I think I have an appreciation for life will be with me forever.”

FADED GENES

What makes a person prone to chronic fatigue syndrome?

The answer is written in our genes, researcher Anthony Komaroff says.

“The disease is a consequence of some biological vulnerability that patients are born with,” explains Dr. Komaroff, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, “and then something in their environment exposes that vulnerability.”

Scientists now believe the sequence is something like this: First, a viral infection leads to a flu-like illness – for example, studies have linked CFS to a number of viruses (including those for Type 6 herpes and its cousin Epstein-Barr, a common cause of another exhausting illness, mononucleosis). Although in most cases, the immune system responds and the people recover, for an unfortunate few, the illness persists, and the immune response never shuts down.

It appears that the fatigue becomes chronic because of malfunctions that occur in a number of cranial control centres, but there remains a great deal that doctors don’t know. For example, there is growing evidence that rather than being just one illness, “CFS” may be an umbrella term for several.

- Zoe Cormier

THREE DAYS TO HEALTH

Day 1
Your trainer will help you explore which factors are preventing you from getting what you want. With the chronic fatigue syndrome seminars, this includes an in-depth discussion of the complex physiology of the condition, and especially considers the role of dysfunctional adrenalin levels in the maintenance of the condition.

Your trainer will take you through the key steps of the process, individually tailoring the process to your needs and abilities. The key steps include a series of body movements, postures and core questions to stimulate new neurological pathways.

As the brain has the ability to create new pathways rapidly the changes can be achieved very quickly.

Days 2 and 3
Trains you further in ways to change old established neurological pathways and create and stabilize new more effective ones.

Source: Phil Parker’s website lightningprocess.com

In theory, solar power is ideal. It’s clean, producing no air pollution or green house gases. It doesn’t require flooding huge areas or disrupting river ecosystems, as hydro power often does. And it’s plentiful: in just one hour, enough sunlight falls on the earth to supply the energy needs of everyone on the planet for an entire year.

But it has always been something of a black sheep in the clean-energy family. It can be expensive: a full set of panels for your home can cost tens of thousands of dollars and it isn’t considered very efficient. With typical solar panels, only about 15 percent of the energy that falls on them is converted into electricity (wind turbines average more than 20 percent efficiency, and coal-powered plants 30 percent or more). So while wind farms are sprouting up all over Europe, biofuels are on the rise and hydro is a Canadian staple, affordable solar power has seemed relatively inaccessible.

But that’s changing. Engineers are creating new technologies that are not only cheaper but also more efficient than traditional flat panels, bringing us closer to the solar Holy Grail: producing electricity for the same price as fossil fuels.

Cutting the silicon costs

One of the biggest obstacles to solar power has always been cost. Silicon, used as a semiconductor to create electricity, is expensive and the global shortage of polysilicon — the kind used in most solar panels — isn’t making it any cheaper. So scientists are thinking of clever ways to do more with less of it. One way to get more bang for your buck is to stack solar cells on top of each other, creating what’s called a triple-junction cell. By layering three semiconductors, each capturing a different kind of light (blue, green or red), you can produce more electricity over the same area.

Michigan-based united Solar Ovonic has products we can buy for our homes and/businesses that use triple-junction technology and only a small amount of silicon. Moreover, the solar cells can be mounted onto stainless-steel foil (as opposed to glass) and are virtually unbreakable. It manufactures solar roof shingles, solar battery-chargers that come in sheets that can be neatly folded up, and peel-and-stick laminates that can be stuck onto a metal roof of, say, a shed or warehouse. They are understandably popular. Last year, united sold enough units to power more than 15,000 homes.

Another simple and elegant method is to focus sunlight with lenses and mirrors. Solfocus, a California-based company, has combined mirrors with triple-junction techniques. The curved mirrors in its solar panels concentrate the sunlight by 500 times. And by focusing the already concentrated sunlight onto triple-junction cells that don’t use silicon, Solfocus reduces the amount of semiconductor needed by a factor of a thousand to produce the same amount of electricity. The company is working on its first commercial installation in Spain, and expects to have finished products for the commercial market by late this year.

Prism Solar Technologies, based in New York State, has come up with a colourful way to focus sunlight: holograms. Its solar panels use a form of gelatin sandwiched between panes of glass to create a holographic effect. They aren’t just pretty– they require 20 to 70 percent less silicon than a conventional panel. “We’ve basically displaced much of the expensive component and replaced it with an inexpensive gelatin material — essentially a high-tech Jell-O –and it’s a great way to concentrate sunlight in low light conditions, such as late afternoon,” says Prism Solar CEO Rick Lewandowski. Canadians should be able to buy these rainbow-coloured panels to install on the roofs of our homes by 2008.

The future looks bright

Some solar companies are going even further by sunning silicon altogether. Research groups worldwide, such as Australian company Dyesol, are using inexpensive pigments based on natural compounds, such as green dyes that mimic chlorophyll. Although no commercial products are ready, the industry is buzzing that dye-sensitized cells could be a huge breakthrough.

But by far the biggest buzz is over solar cells that can be painted onto flexible surfaces with the same kind of roll-to-roll manufacturing used in printing presses. This will be much quicker and cheaper than the high-tech airtight labs where the solar panels of yesteryear had to be assembled before being ready for real-world use, and likely won’t contain silicon. And they’re cheap to manufacture.

Meanwhile, New York State-based DayStar Technologies makes thin film from tiny particles of copper, indium, gallium and selenium (CIGS). These films are much lighter and thinner than aluminum foil, and the company anticipates they could be used to cover the wings of airplanes or be draped over satellites. California’s Nanosolar has also been generating an enormous amount of hype recently with CIGS thin films. It is in the process of constructing the world’s largest thin-film factory in San Jose, and should have commercial products ready within the next few years.

Also coming up on the horizon is Massachusetts-based Konarka, which will start commercializing its solar plastics this summer. These can be coloured and printed in virtually any style: brick patterns for walls, camouflage, anything you like. Moreover, the plastic is so light and flexible, the company envisions it could be incorporated onto the surface of just about anything: blinds, awnings, windows, MP3 players, laptops and phones (enabling them to charge themselves) – even clothing. Director of business development Jamie Braman won’t divulge exactly what products carrying this solar technology will be coming out soon, but he says, “We’re going to be like the Intel microprocessor inside a computer – the solar power behind other people’s products. You’ll see stuff popping up on the market soon.”

University of Toronto hotshot engineer professor Ted Sargent is also developing paint-on silicon-free solar cells, except his go one step further: they use light that you can’t even see. His solar paint uses infrared light, and thus can use up to 30 per cent of the sunlight that bathes the earth (as opposed to regular photovoltaic cells, which can only use up to 6 per cent), so the potential for using infrared is huge.

Solar is powerful

Clearly, solar power is on the ascent. “One of the biggest changes I’ve noticed,” says Brian Wilkinson, owner of Montreal-based Matrix Energy, “is that people don’t walk away from you at cocktail parties when you tell them what you do. Twenty years ago, people wanted to talk about anything but solar energy. Now they ask questions. It’s no longer looked down on as something that isn’t proven.”

California is in the middle of installing a million solar roofs on homes and businesses across the state. Huge solar farms are being constructed in the Nevada desert, Spain and Portugal. This spring, several companies, including OptiSolar Farms Canada Inc. and SunEdison Canada LLC, announced new solar farm projects to create power for commercial and residential use in southern Ontario, which will use vast arrays of panels linked directly to the grid. Thanks to new incentives from the Ontario government, purchasing solar energy will cost no more than from any other source of power. And with all the new innovations coming our way, there’s little doubt that solar is going to become more versatile, more powerful and more affordable.

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Home Solar Home

If you want to harness the power of the sun but can’t cover your roof with solar panels, there are other things you can do to capture the sun’s energy and save money at the same time.

“Solar hot water is a far more cost-effective application than solar electric power right now,” says Bill Eggerston of the Canadian Association for Renewable Energies. “About 20 per cent of your annual energy bill goes to heating hot water.”

EnerWorks, a Dorchester, Ont-based company, has been providing solar hot-water heathers to homeowners for he past two years (it was also chosen by The Home Depot to do its residential installations). These systems – which run residential water through pipes placed on the roof and heat it with the power of the sun – can cut your household water-heating bill by anywhere from 50 to 60 percent. The initial installation is high (about $6,000; about $1,000 less if you get an eco-energy audit and apply for government rebates), but, says CEO Ken Arnold, “as a rule of thumb, the system will pay for itself in about five to eight years.”

LONDON — When Al Gore predicted that climate change could lead to a 20-foot rise in sea levels, critics called him alarmist. After all, the International Panel on Climate Change, which receives input from top scientists, estimates surges of only 18 to 59 centimetres in the next century.

But a study led by James Hansen, the head of the climate science program at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and a professor at Columbia University, suggests that current estimates for how high the seas could rise are way off the mark – and that in the next 100 years melting ice could sink cities in the United States to Bangladesh.

“If we follow ‘business-as-usual’ growth of greenhouse gas emissions,” he writes in an e-mail interview, “I think that we will lock in a guaranteed sea-level rise of several metres, which, frankly, means that all hell is going to break loose.”

The scientific basis for this idea – which Prof. Hansen and five co-authors gleaned from geological records, ice core samples and analysis of the sea floor – is outlined in a recent paper published by the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

In stark contrast to estimates put forward by the IPCC, Prof. Hansen and his colleagues argue that rapidly melting ice caps in Antarctica and Greenland could cause oceans to swell several metres by 2100 – or maybe even as much as 25 metres, which is how much higher the oceans sat about three million years ago.

Their argument goes like this: As the atmosphere warms and the ice caps melt, they will not melt in a consistent, gradual fashion. Rather, they will start to melt faster and faster as the century progresses, quickly reaching a point where they could disappear altogether. This is because of “positive feedback” effects – factors that create a loop of exacerbated melting and global warming.

For example, snow and ice reflect sunlight and reduce global warming. But as the temperature of the planet increases and the polar caps melt (as scientists are already observing at both poles), there is less ice to reflect sunlight and more water to absorb it, thus making the planet warmer and increasing ice cap melting further.

Likewise, the mass release of methane from thawing permafrost (happening now in the Canadian Arctic) means that natural greenhouse-gas emissions could be added to man-made emissions – potentially speeding up climate change. And as meltwater from polar caps lubricates the contact points between the ice and the bedrock below it (evidenced by an increase in “ice quakes” in Greenland), ice sheets could be further destabilized and result in increased melting.

So why the radical discrepancies between Prof. Hansen’s predictions and those of the IPCC? Certain positive feedback effects, as well as recent data on the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, were not included in the IPCC’s report. “Because of the cumbersome IPCC review process, they exclude recent information,” Prof. Hansen says, “so they are very handicapped.”

Richard Peltier agrees. A University of Toronto physicist and the director of the Centre for Global Change Science, he works on mathematical models to explain the melting and freezing dynamics of the Greenland ice sheet and has contributed to the IPCC publications – but even he agrees that their assumptions tend to be “extremely conservative.”

“[Prof. Hansen's] basic thesis is undeniable, because the mathematical models, which we have developed to describe the evolution of ice sheets, do not include certain processes that control how quickly an ice sheet could respond to climate warming,” he says. “You need a model that incorporates all physical processes – and no such model exists.”

However, Prof. Peltier does not think that the ice caps are likely to melt as quickly as Prof. Hansen suggests. “We really don’t know what the future has in store. I am incapable of predicting how fast the ice sheets will melt, and so is he. But I don’t think we are going to hell in a handbasket.”

Others are even less convinced of the catastrophic predictions put forward by Prof. Hansen. Andrew Weaver, a physicist at the University of Victoria who works on the dynamics of the polar ice caps and also contributes to the IPCC reports, says he thinks the “upper bound for sea-level rise this century is a metre.

“I don’t disagree with the seriousness of the issue or the importance of these positive feedback effects,” he says, “but runaway feedbacks have extraordinarily low probabilities, which is why they are not given much attention by the IPCC.”

He adds that the Greenland ice sheet will almost certainly melt away completely, but the IPCC predicts that this will take 1,700 years – not a century. “The complete disintegration of the ice sheets cannot happen in 100 years,” he says.

Moreover, although he calls Prof. Hansen his “hero” for speaking out about global warming in the 1980s “when nobody was listening,” he criticizes the tone of his recent paper and the use of words such as “cataclysm,” which he believes move “dangerously away from scientific discourse to advocacy.”

And at any rate, Prof. Weaver says, we have enough to worry about, regardless of what the future holds: The disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers threatens the source of fresh water for about one billion people and climate change is causing severe weather ranging from the droughts in Darfur to the flooding seen in Britain this summer.

Still, Prof. Hansen insists that his predictions are on target – and that the conservative take on climate change put forward by the IPCC and others could result in catastrophe.

“I believe there is pressure on scientists to be conservative. Caveats are essential to science. They are born in skepticism, and skepticism is at the heart of the scientific method and discovery,” he wrote in New Scientist magazine last month. “However, in a case such as ice-sheet instability and sea-level rise, excessive caution also holds dangers. ‘Scientific reticence’ can hinder communication with the public about the dangers of global warming. We may rue reticence if it means no action is taken until it is too late to prevent future disasters.”

Instead, Prof. Hansen urges a swift curb on greenhouse-gas emissions. The last time sea levels rose by almost 25 metres, he points out, was when the greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere were on par with what may happen if fossil-fuel emissions continue unchecked. He believes we should keep the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 450 parts per million. Right now, it stands at about 385 ppm.

“The first step should be a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants until technology is available to capture and store the carbon dioxide,” he says, “and a gradually rising tax on carbon emissions.”

No disrespect to Queen Victoria‚ whose birthday Canadians celebrate this weekend‚ but Swedes are busy toasting a true “class act.”

Next Wednesday is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus.

He is revered as the father of modern taxonomy (the way we classify all living things) and was “by far‚” according to the event’s official website‚ “the most internationally well–known Swede who has ever lived.” (Sorry‚ ABBA.)

Born on a farm in southern Sweden (the founder of IKEA hails from the same district) on May 23‚ 1707‚ Linnaeus was a key inspiration for Charles Darwin and popularized the use of binomial nomenclature‚ the system of giving every plant and animal a two–part Latin name.

For his seminal work‚ Systema Naturae‚ he painstakingly classified more than 15‚000 species‚ which suggests that he was a bit tedious.

In fact‚ Linnaeus was considered quite radical and not because he insisted that hydras‚ satyrs and other mythical creatures truly existed.

Rather‚ he scandalized 18th–century Europeans by classifying plants according to their sex organs‚ going so far as to compare certain parts of the flower to the labia minora and majora. (One entire floral family he named the “Clitoria.”)

This interest in sex went beyond the academic – as a doctor‚ Linnaeus specialized in the treatment of syphilis.

Next week a “festival of love” in his honour will be part of a week–long special celebration in Uppsala‚ the famous university centre where he studied and taught.

Alas‚ although the tercentenary runs all year and features 600 events around the world‚ nothing else seems especially titillating.

Just your garden–variety flower shows‚ picnics‚ seminars and lectures.

Ten years ago‚ Harvard naturalist Edward O. Wilson estimated that 30‚000 species were going extinct every year. Now‚ scientists are taking an even darker view. According to the World Conservation Union’s latest Red List‚ a staggering one in eight birds‚ one in four mammals and one in three amphibians are threatened with annihilation. And by the end of the century (because of climate change) species could disappear at 10‚000 times the natural rate.

But thousands of new species are also being identified each year. A case in point: the clouded leopard of Borneo and Sumatra. This spring‚ biologists examined the DNA of the 40–pound‚ three–foot predator for the first time in 100 years. Previously thought to be members of the same species as clouded leopards from mainland Asia‚ they found that the Borneo feline has at least 40 unique genetic traits – which makes the two cats as different as lions are from tigers.

Borneo‚ in fact‚ is a hotbed of biological discovery. Like the Amazon and the African Congo‚ the “Heart of Borneo” – a plot of rain forest the size of Kansas – is unusually diverse. On 9.7 hectares‚ for example‚ there are about 700 different species of trees‚ as many as exist in all of North America. And in 2006 alone‚ scientists identified 30 new species of fish‚ 16 species of ginger‚ two tree frogs and three new trees in Borneo’s rain forest.

Meanwhile‚ collections manager William Stanley and his colleagues at the Field Museum in Chicago not only discovered a new species – they identified an entirely new genus. Originally‚ scientists classified the kipunji monkey as a kind of mangabey. Then a Tanzanian farmer found one of the monkeys (formerly seen only in photos) dead in a trap. Closer analysis revealed that it was the first new African monkey genus described in 80 years. “It was mind–blowing‚” says Mr. Stanley of his team’s 2005 findings.

And yet discoveries like these merely scratch the surface of life on the planet. In all‚ researchers have named about 1.8 million species – which leaves five million to 30 million species unclassified. Or‚ depending on where in that broad range scientists stake their claims‚ 90 per cent of species to go.

Of course‚ part of the problem is simply finding species that live deep in the ocean‚ on inaccessible land or in erratic (read: elusive) habits. But there is also another big hurdle to cataloguing even the species already known to exist – the tricky nature of taxonomy.

The question of exactly what makes a species a species is a hotly debated topic among evolutionary biologists. The widely accepted definition is that if two creatures can breed and produce fertile offspring‚ then they are members of the same species. For instance‚ horses and donkeys can breed‚ but their offspring – mules – are sterile. Hence‚ donkeys and horses are different species.

But this rule of thumb doesn’t always ring true. Lions and tigers‚ for example‚ can occasionally produce fertile young. And plants and life forms such as bacteria interbreed all the time. “We’ll never have one universal criterion by which all specimens may be unambiguously placed in a single species‚” says Daniel Brooks‚ a parasite taxonomist at the University of Toronto.

Nonetheless‚ Prof. Brooks has personally identified hundreds of new species (he admits he lost count a long time ago). “If I’ve got four or five traits that are different‚ then I feel better about saying this is a new species‚” he says.

But it’s a slow process. It can take years of scrutinizing the creature’s anatomy and comparing it with everything else known to science in order to figure out if something truly distinct has been found. Until then‚ specimens have been known to sit in drawers for more than 50 years before being identified as a new species.

However‚ a new genetic test known as “DNA barcoding” is helping to speed things up. Developed at the University of Guelph by evolutionary biologist Paul Hebert‚ the test allows scientists to quickly –– and cheaply –– create a numerical “barcode” for a species.

The test works by giving a gene known as CO{–1} (found in slightly different forms in all living things) a numerical code about 650 digits long. This can then be easily compared to other species’ “barcodes” for that same gene. A match of 97.5 per cent or less between two specimens generally indicates that they are different species.

Using this method‚ Prof. Hebert and his colleagues found 15 previously unknown North American bird species when they sorted through the 690 known species. In total‚ “we’ve probably revealed about 3‚000 overlooked species‚” he says.

Scientific curiosity aside‚ however‚ exactly why should we go to the trouble of logging every species on Earth? Does it really matter if we know the name and identity of every bug‚ every slime mould‚ every parasitic worm?

“Most people don’t lie awake at night and worry about the species count of the planet – but they do worry about where their tax dollars are spent‚” Prof. Hebert says. We spend billions every year on controlling pest species‚ and combatting the bacteria and viruses that make us sick. The wrong information can mean wasting money trying to kill the wrong insect. Or it could kill a patient by misdiagnosing an illness.

Classification is also key to conservation. For example‚ now that the clouded leopard – Borneo’s top predator – is considered a separate species‚ World Wildlife Federation representatives say it will emphasize the importance of preserving the “Heart of Borneo” – perhaps bolstering an agreement reached in February by Indonesia‚ Malaysia and Brunei to take care of this unique stretch of land.

“No name‚ no information. It’s that simple and that critical. We have to know as many species as possible in order to make rational decisions about how to cope with environmental change‚” U of T’s Prof. Brooks says.

“Unfortunately‚ we’re probably naming new species slower than new species are going extinct.”

YETI CRAB

Official name

Kiwa hirsuta

Official coming out

March‚ 2006

Like many new species‚ this one was found deep in the ocean – 2‚300 metres down‚ to be exact‚ near a hydrothermal vent in the south Pacific. And like most deep–sea animals‚ its a weird one: It has almost completely lost its eyes‚ its claws are covered in blond hairs (hence its nickname)‚ and living in those hairs are bacteria‚ whose purpose remains a mystery. The creature is so unlike any lobster or crab seen before that researchers have placed it in a new family called kiwaidae.

THE SMALLEST FISH

Official name

Paedocypris progenetica

Official coming out

January‚ 2006

Biologists first collected specimens of this fish from the acidic peat swamps of Sumatra more than 10 years ago. But before publishing their findings‚ they wanted to be sure that it wasn’t just a new species‚ but also the smallest fish in the world – beating out the 1.2 centimetre–long dwarf goby. Measuring less than eight millimetres‚ this distant relative of the carp is‚ in fact‚ the planet’s smallest known creature with a backbone.

SNUBFIN DOLPHIN

Official name

Orcaella heinsohni

Official coming out

July‚ 2005

The first new dolphin species to be discovered since 1956‚ the snubfin was previously thought to be a kind of irrawaddy‚ a grey and white dolphin that lives along the coasts and estuaries of Australia and southeast Asia. But researchers had long suspected that they may be a new species‚ because of their unique coloration (white‚ brown and dark grey). They used DNA–typing methods to confirm their hunch.

ROCK RAT

Official name

Laonastes aenigmamus

Official coming out

May 2005

American scientists first encountered the kha–nyou (or rock rat) in the late 1990s on sale as bush meat in rural markets in Laos. And it has still not been seen alive by biologists. With a rat–like body about a foot long and a bushy tail like a squirrel‚ the rodent seemed to defy classification. Biologists at first placed it in an entirely new family. Now‚ however‚ it seems that the rock rat is actually a member of a family of rodents thought to be extinct – making it the latest example of the “Lazarus effect‚” a species that appears to have come back from the dead.

Classification 101

Domain‚ kingdom‚ phylum‚ class … Remember these terms from junior high school biology? All life on Earth can be organized based on this system – which dates back to the work of 18th–century Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus. He recognized that different organisms could be grouped based on shared characteristics. As for the sticky details (and the endless designation of subfamilies and suborders and subphyla)‚ that continues to be a controversial topic among academics. Still‚ this system of classification has been used for hundreds of years as a consistent way to take any species and slot it into the tree of life. Take the clouded leopard of Borneo:

Species: Neofelis diardi – Bornean clouded leopard

Genus: Neofelis – all clouded leopards

Family: Felidae – all cats

Order: Carnivora – dogs‚ cats‚ seals‚ bears and other carnivores

Class: Mammalia – all mammals

Phylum: Chordata – all creatures with some kind of backbone‚ including all vertebrates and a few invertebrates

Kingdom: Animalia – all animals‚ as opposed to plants or fungi‚ etc.

Domain: Eukarya – creatures possessing cells with membrane–bound organelles‚ as opposed to prokarya such as bacteria

His groundbreaking work towards the creation of a light–based internet has practically made him a household name in computer science. His contributions to solar cell technology may be immeasurable. Sargent is a rare breed among scientists: he has gained the deep admiration of both technophiles and environmentalists.

Since he was a graduate student‚ Sargent has worked towards the development of an optical internet – one based on light instead of electricity. An internet that sends information via photons instead of electrons could be up to 100 times faster than today’s internet (and would consume less energy to boot). Sargent and his team have toiled for years to create switches‚ lasers‚ semiconductor circuits and computer chips that will help us get there.

Last year‚ he made international news when his team revealed a new type of solar power cell that can capture light. He and his team “see a huge need to find alternative sources of energy [to fossil fuels]‚” he said – and they found one. Not in nuclear power‚ wind power‚ or even bright rays of sunlight; they found it in heat.

Solar energy is clean‚ but inefficient and expensive. But this may change now that Sargent and his team have created solar cells that can capture infrared light (light that is invisible to us but that we feel as heat). Conventional solar cell can only capture visible light‚ and therefore only harness about 6% of the sun’s energy. Sargent’s technology may be able to capture up to 30%. Even better‚ his solar cells can be painted onto surfaces – walls‚ fabrics and plastics.

Theoretically‚ flexible sheets of solar cells could be cheaply and easily rolled onto our roofs‚ MP3 players could soak up enough energy to run themselves and people could even wear power–generating clothing.

So important is this innovation‚ that‚ in 2005‚ Sargent was named as one of Scientific American’s 50 (a list of 50 individuals and organizations that brighten our future through science and technology) – the only Canadian selected.

Sargent’s lab continues to dazzle. This past July‚ he and his team set a milestone in the prestigious journal Nature with a description of the world’s first “paint–on” infrared detectors‚ proven to be more efficient than conventional ones by up to ten times.

But perhaps even more fascinating than the power of light is “the challenge of harnessing the tremendous creative powers of a diverse research team‚” said Sargent. “Each of the challenges we tackle …relies on innovations in materials chemistry‚ device fabrication‚ and experimental optics and electronics.”

“The process is daunting‚ fascinating‚ and – when it comes together – infinitely rewarding.”

In 1995‚ Hydrogenics was launched with just three employees and a dream: to be at the forefront of a global economy based on hydrogen. Hydrogen eliminates concerns over greenhouse gases and pollutants‚ it can be produced anywhere in the world (so it isn’t subject to price fluctuations or wars) and we will never run out of it.

Although its ultimate dream has yet to be realized‚ Hydrogenics is on its way. The Mississauga–based company now has 300 employees and operations in more than 100 countries. In 2005 it had net sales of $37.6 million. In 2004‚ the World Economic Forum called it a ‘Technology Pioneer’ and‚ in 2003‚ Profit magazine cited it as Canada’s fastest growing company.

Hydrogenics creates products for all levels of the hydrogen economy – generators that create the pure hydrogen gas‚ fuel cells that produce electricity using hydrogen‚ and test systems to assist in the development of fuel cells.

The automobile sector promises the most exciting future‚ including the potential for hydrogen–powered vehicles to generate electricity. To date‚ Hydrogenics has provided fuel cells for buses from Hawaii to Europe. It is also involved in projects with major OEMs and in the construction of fueling stations for California’s eagerly awaited ‘Hydrogen Highway’.

Rivard predicted it will be at least three years before consumers can buy hydrogen cars‚ if not more. In the meantime‚ Hydrogenics already has other fuel cell products in the marketplace – batteries for forklifts (which operate indoors and are therefore subject to emissions regulations)‚ back up AC systems for data server rooms (like those that APC purchased) and back–up DC systems‚ such as telecommunications relay towers for cellular phone companies.

“We’re evolving from a project–based business model to a product–based one‚” said Rivard. “We’ve invested in hiring people with the right skill sets to develop products and in securing agreements with key partners to distribute the products into well–targeted markets.”

At least 30 Hydrogenics employees are UofT engineering graduates – including Chief Technical Officer Joseph Cargnelli and Norman M. Seagram (Eng. Bus. 5T8)‚ Chair of its Board of Directors. “We have a strong history with‚ alignment and allegiance to UofT. This is a key source of pride for us‚” said Rivard.