Cross Country
Pulling Punches on Climate Change
A congressional committee is investigating charges that the Smithsonian Institution toned down language in a climate exhibit to raise doubts about the link between human activity and global warming.
Robert Sullivan, a former museum director, told the Associated Press that the script for Arctic-A Friend Acting Strangely was rewritten so it would not anger the White House or Congress. Sullivan said that officials omitted scientists' interpretation of some research, instead leaving it to visitors to the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., to draw their own conclusions. He told the AP that graphs were changed "to show that global warming could go either way."
Smithsonian officials called the claims "an erroneous allegation made by a former Smithsonian employee who was neither a scientist nor a curator."
But the charges were enough to spark the interest of some members of Congress, including Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He requested E-mails, letters, and meeting minutes from those who produced the exhibit.
Museum spokesman Randall Kremer said the Smithsonian will cooperate with Markey's request.
Trading In the Big Yellow Taxis
Those famous yellow New York City taxis are going green. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a plan last week to transform the city's entire fleet of more than 13,000 taxis to hybrid vehicles by 2012. The move will have the same pollution-reducing benefit, the mayor said, as removing 32,000 privately owned cars from the streets. New York taxis now are Ford Crown Victorias, which get just 14 miles per gallon. After October 2008, the Taxi and Limousine Commission will boost emission standards to require all new vehicles to get 25 miles per gallon; the year after, they will have to get 30 mpg.
The city will phase in 1,000 hybrid taxicabs by October 2008 and add several thousand each year thereafter. Already 375 of the city's taxis are hybrids; by 2012, the mayor has pledged, every taxi will be.
The plan is expected to cut emissions from taxis and other for-hire vehicles by half in the next decade. It's part of the mayor's PlaNYC, a set of 127 proposals to decrease city carbon emissions by 30 percent by 2030.
'A Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish.'
A hammerhead shark born in captivity in Omaha in 2001 had only one parent, a team of researchers announced last week after several tests confirmed that the infant shark had no traces of male DNA. This bizarre biological phenomenon, known as "parthenogenesis"—virgin birth—had previously been observed in insects, birds, and some smaller fish but never in so complex an organism. And now it has scientists asking: "Exactly how far will a genome go to save itself?"
"If the biological is in danger of extinction, other mechanisms turn on," says Prof. Thomas Savage, a poultry scientist at Oregon State University who has studied parthenogenesis in turkeys. "It's much more common in birds."
Because virgin births are often associated with an organism's last-ditch effort to reproduce when males aren't present, cases like this raise difficult questions about the interaction between genes and the environment. It also has scientists asking what triggers an organism that is capable of reproducing sexually to "turn on" the ability to conceive on its own.
Coaxing Back the Wayward Whales
In a sign of just how impoverished human-whale communications remain, a team of marine biologists was largely frustrated in its attempts to cajole two wayward humpbacks out of the Sacramento River Delta and back into the ocean last week.
The mother whale and her calf are believed to have taken a wrong turn during a northward migration in the Pacific, ending up 90 miles down the river. Early last week, biologists had succeeded in coaxing the whales about 20 miles back in the right direction, but by week's end the cetacean pair was still circling in the river about 70 miles down the delta.
Because humpbacks are highly sensitive to sound, biologists have been trying to lead the whales with friendly noises, like fellow humpbacks, and not-so-friendly noises, like killer orcas coming from behind. They did not respond to the natural noises but showed some aversion to a human-made cacophony. Next up: using firehoses to herd them along.
A Major Upgrade in Accommodations
Just days after he is released from prison this week, the larger-than-life former mayor of Providence, R.I., "Buddy" Cianci, will start a new job in sales and marketing at the fashionable Fifteen Beacon Hotel in Boston.
Cianci has been behind bars since 2002, after being convicted on one count of racketeering. The colorful Cianci won accolades for revitalizing downtown Providence during the second of two decade-long stints as mayor, but he resigned in disgrace after being accused of overseeing widespread corruption. He still has a few weeks left on his sentence, which he will serve in a halfway house while working at the Beacon.
A party that the Beacon had planned for its newest employee was canceled late last week after the Bureau of Prisons indicated that it would not look kindly on such a celebration.
With Nikki Schwab and Chris Wilson
This story appears in the June 4, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.