THE SECRET OF DOG THINKING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evolving Gifts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going to the Dogs

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

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

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

Foxy Dogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GREEN CAN BE DECEIVING

Scot case was not happy. Vice president of the environmental marketing firm TerraChoice, Case last year sent his researchers into a big-box retail store to evaluate the green advertising claims of some of the products on its shelves. The results were startling: of the 1,018 products TerraChoice surveyed, all but one failed to live up fully to their green boasts. Words like nontoxic were used in meaninglessly vague ways. Terms like Energy Star certified were in fact not backed up by certification.

"I went ballistic," Case says. "I assumed the researchers had butchered the study." He had his team redo the survey, but the results came back the same. "It just shows we're awash in greenwash."

Many consumers may not have heard the term greenwashing, but they've surely experienced it--misleading marketing about the environmental benefits of a product. Greenwashing isn't new--ever since the environment emerged as an issue in the early 1970s, there have been advertising firms trying to convince consumers that buying Brand X is the only way to save the earth. But as going green has become big business--sales of organic products alone went from $10 billion in 2003 to more than $20 billion in 2007--companies appear eager to associate themselves with the environment, deservedly or not.

If you're not yet sick of seeing whirling wind turbines and sun-dappled solar panels on TV, you will be: the new fall season is likely to feature a flood of green advertising. It's gotten so bad that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been holding hearings over the past year to define the difference between genuine environmental claims and empty greenwash. It's not easy--and environmental advocates worry that truly green companies could get lost in all the clamor.

"We have such a challenge ahead of us on climate change," says Kevin Tuerff, a co-founder of the marketing consultancy EnviroMedia. "Greenwashing harms the effort we need to be making."

The first step to cleaning up greenwashing is to identify it, and Tuerff and his partners have hit on an innovative way to spotlight particularly egregious examples. They've launched the Greenwashing Index www.greenwashingindex.com) a website that allows consumers to post ads that might be examples of greenwashing and rate them on a scale of 1 to 5--1 is a little green lie; 5 is an outright falsehood.

It's a simple device, but it shows the power of the Internet to truth-squad misleading ads; with a simple Web search, any consumer can find out if a car manufacturer hyping its fuel-efficient hybrids actually earns the majority of its revenue selling gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs. "We try to make it a little more transparent with the index," says Kim Sheehan, a communications professor at the University of Oregon and a co-founder of the site. "It teaches people to be a little more cautious about the claims they hear."

Googling isn't the only way to take out the greenwashing, however. The TerraChoice website www.terrachoice.com offers a list of what it calls the "six sins of greenwashing"--six simple signs that should tip off consumers to a company that is more interested in selling the earth than saving it. One is the sin of irrelevance, in which, for example, a product trumpets the fact that it is "chlorofluorocarbon free"--even though those ozone-destroying chemicals have been banned for years, meaning the company is asking for applause for just following the law. Another is the sin of the hidden trade-off--the paper towels that come from a sustainably harvested forest but are then shipped to global markets aboard CO2-spewing trucks and planes.

Ultimately, says Case, "if you don't understand where a green claim comes from, check it out. There are a lot of companies trying to relieve people of the green in their wallet."

It's not just consumers in the U.S. who are getting fed up with greenwashing. The Advertising Standards Authority in Britain received 561 complaints about potentially false green ads last year, up from 117 the year before. Norway has banned all car ads from using the terms green, environmentally friendly and clean on the grounds that all cars contribute to global warming.

The laissez-faire U.S. isn't likely to go that far, but the FTC is in the process of updating its Green Guide for consumers, which hasn't changed since 1998. The hope is that eventually we'll be able to define green in advertising the way we've defined low calorie and low fat. That needs to happen soon, before green loses all meaning. "We have better green products but a lot of exaggerated claims," says Case. "That could be enough to capsize the whole green movement"--and that's not a little green lie.

UNFROZEN GREENLAND

From 30,000 ft. in the air, the Greenland ice cap seems impregnable, nearly 800 trillion gal. of frozen water locked safely away. But get closer and the cracks begin to emerge. Dancing by helicopter above the mouth of the Jakobshavn Glacier, near the western coast of Greenland, you can make out veins of the purest blue meltwater running between folds of ice. What you can't see is Jakobshavn's inexorable slide toward the sea at 65 ft. to 115 ft. a day--an alarming rate that has accelerated in recent years. As the glacier nears the coast, it breaks off into the Ilulissat fjord, a stream of churning ice that might have birthed the monster that sunk the Titanic. Those icebergs are spat out into Disko Bay, 20 billion metric tons' worth every year, where they loom above the tiny fishing boats that ply these deep, cold waters. Sail close and you'll find that these seemingly permanent cathedrals of ice, some 200 ft. to 300 ft. high, are leaking water like broken pipes. They're dying.

Greenland is the front line in humanity's battle against climate change. The warming that is easy to dismiss elsewhere is undeniable on this 860,000-sq.-mi. island of fewer than 60,000 people. More and more of Greenland, whose frozen expanses are a living remnant of the last ice age, disappears each year, with as much as 150 billion metric tons of glacier vanishing annually, according to one estimate. If all the ice on Greenland were to melt tomorrow, global sea levels would rise more than 20 ft.--enough to swamp many coastal cities. Though no one thinks that will happen anytime soon, what keeps glaciologists awake at night is that thinking is not the same as knowing--and no one can say with certainty what Greenland's fate will be.

That's why researchers like Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, stationed on a barren speck of land near the heart of Greenland's ice sheet to decode the island's climatic history, is among TIME's heroes for the environment. These scientists, activists, financiers and political and religious leaders--chronicled in the following pages--display a passion for the planet that just might save it.

I got a firsthand look at such heroism this summer when I joined a team of international researchers led by Dahl-Jensen at the NEEM camp in Greenland. NEEM stands for North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (the acronym is Danish, as are the leaders of the project), and the scientists are digging deep into the Greenland ice--more than a mile and a half deep to be precise--to try to understand its pedigree. Depth is time, and the lower you go, the further back in history you travel. As ice formed in Greenland, year after cold year, bits of atmosphere were trapped in the layers. Drilling into the ice and fishing out samples--ice cores--that contain tiny bubbles of that ancient air can reveal the temperature, the concentration of greenhouse gases, even the ambient dust from the year that layer was formed. It's like tree rings but for climatic history. "In order to predict the future, we have to understand the past," says Minik Rosing, a geologist at the University of Copenhagen.

NEEM is focused on the Eemian stage, a period from about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, right before the last ice age, when the world was warm--quite warm, about 9°F hotter in Europe than it is today. Given that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that temperatures could rise 3.24°F to 7.2°F over the coming century, the Eemian could offer a model for the effect such thermometer swings will have on Greenland's ice. A full climatic record of the Eemian has never been constructed, but over the next several summers (scientific work is seasonal on the freezing-cold island), the NEEM researchers hope to harvest cores that will help them track the state of the ice throughout that era, when Greenland was warm enough to actually be green. Dahl-Jensen believes that with enough information, they will be able to project forward and understand just how vulnerable Greenland is to future melting. "With 10 years of intense research, I think we can reach a reliable estimate for that tipping point," she says.

It's that type of confidence that serves as our light in the climatic darkness, living proof that hope hasn't vanished. You need that comfort when you're standing on a rocky hilltop in Greenland, watching the ice disappear. As Jakobshavn gives way to the fjord, a stadium-size iceberg suddenly implodes, disintegrating like a collapsing skyscraper. I watch as a plume of mist fills the air where the iceberg once was, while the fjord churns on. And then I wonder, Just how much time do Greenland and the rest of us have before it's too late? That may be up to us--and the heroes we choose to follow.

GREENHOUSE GASES

The earth will little note nor long remember what we do to it--at least over the course of its own grand time scale rather than our brief, urgent one. Once we stop burning fossil fuels, it could take as long as 100,000 years for the carbon dioxide we've been pouring into the atmosphere to be gone. Most of it will have settled into the ocean, on its way to becoming new limestone beds on the seafloor; the rest will have been absorbed by the land, some of it eventually forming new deposits of coal. Even now, the water and soil are acting like great sponges, soaking up at least some of the carbon our industrial species emits every day and slowing--if not preventing--the climate-changing damage we're doing to our world.

That's why a paper that came out last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences was so alarming. CO2, the scientists concluded, is piling up faster than ever in the air, not only because our emissions continue to rise but also because the ocean and land have quit sopping up as much as they used to. Apparently, they've had enough.

Dialing back emissions now will thus be less effective than we hope, because a growing share of what we still produce will stay in the sky rather than being absorbed by the oceans and land. The answer may be to quit thinking about solving climate change as only a matter of cutting greenhouse gases off at the source and to start considering how to clean up the mess that's already there. After all, when a busted pipe floods your home, you do more than just fix the leak and let evaporation take care of the water. You get out a bucket and start mopping.

In small ways, we've been trying to mop up our CO2 deluge for a while. It's true enough that if you plant a tree, you clean the air, because trees do take carbon out of the sky--but only a little and not for long. The moment a tree dies, it usually begins to release the carbon it absorbed, and logging and burning only accelerate that process. So scientists are thinking bigger thoughts: Is it possible to increase the oceans' capacity to absorb carbon--without making the water so acidic it dissolves corals? Is it possible to scrub the atmosphere itself somehow, extracting CO2 the way a filter cleans the air in a home? Macroengineering like this is a fun thing for scientists to dream about, but it usually does not go much further, the scale and risks being simply too great. But that hasn't stopped big ideas from coming--which is fortunate, because any idea that's going to have much effect on global warming is going to have to be big indeed.

The Iron Ocean

One of the reasons the oceans soak up so much carbon is that phytoplankton--microscopic floating plants--love it, feasting on it and taking it out of circulation. The problem is, there are vast regions where the water is iron poor and plankton languish. The amount of iron the plants need and aren't getting is tiny--less than 20 lb. per sq. mi. (3 kg per sq km) by some estimates. If this were pumped as a diluted slurry into the wake of a ship steaming back and forth like a tractor seeding a field, the plankton would bloom and global CO2 levels--in theory--would fall.

Sometime next year, a California start-up called Climos plans to experiment with the technique, fertilizing about 4,000 sq. mi. (about 10,000 sq km) of ocean. The goal is not to prove that the iron makes the plankton grow but to determine how much carbon this takes out of the atmosphere and for how long. "When we add iron, we create plankton blooms," says oceanographer Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who led an earlier, smaller iron-seeding test, "but a lot of that just dies and decomposes" at the surface. Only when organic matter snows into the deep does CO2 get locked away. Climos is in the process of raising the $12 million or so it will need to run its experiment, which will use rain-gauge-like underwater traps and other techniques to capture and measure this precipitate.

Scientists have plenty of reasons to be skeptical about iron-seeding, not the least being that it will alter the base of the marine food web, with ripple effects that are hard to foresee. Environmental opposition scuttled a similar plan of Climos' chief rival, another California company, Planktos. International law on the matter is murky. In May, the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity called for a moratorium on everything but "small" experiments "in coastal waters." Climos chief science officer Margaret Leinen concedes that even if the idea works, it won't remotely deal with all the planet's excess carbon. But she says it doesn't have to. "We're not thinking of this as solving the problem," she says. "We're looking at this as one of a whole portfolio of techniques."

Another part of that portfolio could focus on a component of the ocean far more plentiful than its plankton: its salt. Sea salt, like table salt, is made of sodium chloride. If you break that compound in two, you create an acid and a base. Remove some of the acid, and you change ocean chemistry in such a way that atmospheric CO2 dissolves into the water, where it is taken up in the shells of marine creatures, which fall to the seafloor and become limestone. Essentially, says Kurt House, a Harvard graduate student who came up with the idea when he was jogging by the Charles River, the ocean "could become a giant carbon dioxide collector."

Easy, right? Well, one part is, yes. Salt-splitting involves old technology--used in manufacturing chlorine--and is done simply by running an electric current through a pure brine solution, causing the positive sodium and negative chloride ions to head toward opposite poles. The technique does not yet work on something as gunky and mineral-laden as seawater, but that could be figured out.

The bigger problem is scale. According to House's calculations, his plan would require 100 seawater-electrolysis plants, each as large as the largest sewage-treatment plant on Earth, built on shorelines around the world. They would draw out 180 billion metric tons of seawater each year, split the salt, keep the acid and pour back the water. And even that would remove just 10% of the more than 30 billion metric tons of CO2 we put into the air annually.

What's more, you'd be left with a lot of hydrochloric acid to get rid of on land, while the changed ocean chemistry would surely kill a lot of fish--though only, says House, in the immediate vicinity of the electrolysis plants. "I would bet against any of this happening in the next half-century," House concedes. Still, he adds, "if global warming gets really bad, we could do it." Harvard has applied for a patent on the process just in case.

For anyone uneasy about messing with the chemistry of the ocean--which is probably pretty much everyone--there is one more way to go, and it's being studied in a warehouse in Tucson, Ariz., by a company named Global Research Technologies (GRT). Developed by GRT president Allen Wright and Columbia University physicist Klaus Lackner, the system consists of 32 hanging plastic panels, each 9 ft. high and 4 ft. deep (2.7 by 1.2 m), spaced about half an inch apart. As air wafts through those spaces, CO2 sticks to the proprietary plastic the panels are made of. The device in Tucson is now scrubbing about 50 lb. (23 kg) of CO2 a day out of the air. "If we built one the size of the Great Wall of China," Wright says, "and it removed 100% of the CO2 that went through it, it would capture half of all the emissions in the world."

What Wright actually envisions is not a Great Wall of proprietary plastic, but fields of much smaller, mass-produced scrubbers, each fitting into a 40-ft.-long (12 m) shipping container. Scatter 20 million of them in remote spots around the world, and you could take care of the emissions from all the vehicles on the planet. And what do you do with the carbon you collect? For starters, you could sell captured greenhouse gasses to, well, greenhouses; farmers pay up to $300 per ton for the stuff to help plants grow. If the scrubbers were deployed on a grand scale, though, lakes of liquid CO2 would need to be pumped into deep underground reservoirs. A more exciting--if more remote--possibility is to combine CO2 with hydrogen and convert it back into fuel that cars could burn again. This would release more CO2, which scrubbers would pull back out of the air, in a closed loop.

Right now, most of the considerable skepticism directed at the idea concerns price and scale. But there's skepticism toward any technology that aims to reinvent the way we produce energy and clean up the mess it makes, whether it's air scrubbers, ocean-seeding, windmills or nuclear plants. The only point of nearly universal agreement is that we can't keep going the way we are now. A little imaginative science just may produce some of the many answers we so badly need.

THE RED PLANET

Never mind the image of Mars as a dead and desolate world. The Red Planet has lately become one of the busiest little places in the solar system. The past decade has been something of a Martian era of space exploration. Since 1996, the U.S. alone has launched no fewer than nine spacecraft Marsward, and seven have arrived in one piece--an extraordinary success rate for a planet that historically had been a bit of a graveyard of failed missions. Currently, six ships--five American and one European--are at work on Mars, and a handful of others sleep peacefully on the surface or orbit silently above, their missions completed and their systems exhausted. While a lot of the work the spacecraft do is the quiet business of spelunking and air-sampling that thrills mostly space geeks, in recent weeks the news from Mars has been compelling.

On Sept. 29, NASA announced that a laser instrument aboard the Phoenix lander, which touched down north of Mars' arctic circle last May, had spotted snow falling through the planet's frigid sky. Martian snowfall isn't like earthly snowfall; this descended from some 2.4 miles (4 km) up and appeared to vaporize before it reached the surface. Still, the picture that Phoenix is painting is of a meteorologically dynamic world, one not only with occasional flurries but also with clouds and fog forming at night in addition to the famed Martian winds.

Two seemingly indestructible Martian rovers have also been busy. Since landing in early 2004, the golf-cart-size Spirit and Opportunity have toddled about on different parts of the planet, dipping into craters, drilling into rocks and sending back data about Mars' makeup and watery past. But the Martian elements have left the rovers increasingly arthritic: Opportunity's robotic arm has stiffened to the point that controllers no longer retract it fully, and Spirit has been forced to drive backward as a result of a bum front wheel.

But even breakdowns can pay dividends. In May 2007, scientists announced the discovery of white silica beneath the Martian soil--a telltale mineral that usually forms in the presence of water--one more bit of proof that Mars was once a wet place. The silica would never have been discovered if Spirit's balky wheel hadn't dug a trench in the soil.

Earlier in September, NASA announced that Opportunity would wander farther than it ever had in the search for more data. The rover is embarking on a long trek to a crater roughly 7 miles (12 km) away. That's about the total amount of ground it has covered since it arrived. Even if it follows a beeline route, its slow speed and the starts and stops it must make along the way limit it to about 110 yd. (100 m) per day--meaning it will need two years to get where it's going. Still, the trip should be easier than it once would have been, thanks to a sister ship, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which arrived in 2006 and can provide eye-in-the-sky guidance.

More ships are on the way, with NASA planning to launch another, larger rover--the Mars Science Laboratory--in 2009 and another orbiter in 2013. The European Space Agency hopes to launch its own rover in 2013. A robotic mission to gather rocks and return them to Earth is a key NASA objective, while the most tantalizing goal of all--a manned landing--remains a remote but credible goal. Until boots are actually on the ground, our robot proxies will have to do the exploring for us. So far, we have no reason to complain about their work.

DYING FOR A DRINK

When the planners of Las Vegas peered into the future in 1950, they projected that the desert city's population--then 25,000--would be lucky to break 100,000 by the end of the century. As it turned out, they were off by a factor of 19, and as you leave the sizzling Strip--the iconic center of this metropolis of 1.9 million people--for the Lake Mead reservoir, 65 miles to the northwest, you can see the source of all that growth. In a city that receives just 4 in. of rain a year, residents in the sprawling housing developments where much of the Las Vegas population lives use an average of 165 gal. of water a day--and 90% of that comes from Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam in 1935. Lake Mead holds Nevada's 130 billion gal. share of the Colorado River's flow, split with six other states in the West--and for decades, says Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, "we'd assumed it was virtually drought-proof."

It's not. Through air that shimmers in the blast furnace of a July day, you can see how far Mead's water level has fallen. White bathtub rings of mineral deposits, measuring high-water marks that grow less high every year, circle the edges of the reservoir. Today Mead's water level is 1,108 ft., down from more than 1,200 ft. in 2000. (The official drought level is 1,125 ft.) If the water continues to decline, says marine geophysicist Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, "buckle up." Barnett co-authored a study estimating a 50% chance that a combination of climate change and increased demand could render Mead effectively dry by 2021. Mulroy doubts Barnett's dire conclusion, but she knows Las Vegas--and the world beyond--faces an existential crisis over water. "This is about being able to survive as a human being," she says.

The reason for the world's growing water woes is evident in the numbers. The planet fairly sloshes with water--326 quintillion gal. of it--but only 0.014% of that is available for human use. The rest is nonpotable ocean water or inaccessible freshwater, most of it frozen in polar caps. And the available water we do have is far from evenly distributed. About 1.1 billion people have no access to clean water, and half the planet lacks the same quality of water that the ancient Romans enjoyed. And while the amount of water on the planet remains fixed, the number of people drawing on it does not. The world's population could grow from 6.7 billion to more than 9 billion by 2050, according to U.N. projections. Much of that growth will be in countries that are already water poor. Not only will those extra billions need to drink, they will also need to eat--and agriculture sucks up two-thirds of the world's water. They will need electricity too, and in the U.S., nearly half the water withdrawn on a daily basis is used for energy production--to turn the steam turbines in coal plants, for instance.

What's more, none of that includes a new X factor: global warming. Some areas of the world will grow wetter as a result of climate change, but others will grow dryer, and so far the drying is winning. The area of the earth's land surface classified as very dry has doubled since the 1970s; by 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes, that trend will worsen. "You do the math, and it gets a little scary," says Stuart Minchin, a water expert with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization. (See pictures of Australia, the driest inhabited continent.)

If the amount of water on the planet can't be changed, the way we use it has to. Water is wasted in rich countries and poor ones, in irrigation and industry, in bottles and pipes. "We're waking up," says Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, an environmental group based in Oakland, Calif. "But not fast enough."

In Australia, the wake-up call can no longer be ignored. Since 2002, the world's dryest inhabited continent has been in the grip of the worst drought in its recorded history. In Melbourne, you're no longer allowed to fill your swimming pool, and in bone-dry Brisbane, residents aren't allowed any external water use without a permit. But the real pain has been borne in the Murray-Darling River Basin in southern Australia, the heart of the country's $30 billion agricultural economy. Even in good times, Murray-Darling receives as little as 10 in. of rain a year, but 70% of the country's irrigation resources flow to the basin, creating a fertile desert able to produce 1.2 million metric tons of water-thirsty rice, among other crops

The good times, however, are gone. Last year the government allocated zero irrigation to the basin's farmers, and they produced just 18,000 metric tons of rice, the lowest yield since 1927. "No one around here has ever seen conditions like this," says rice grower Les Gordon, standing on the cracked ground of his 4,000-acre farm near the town of Barham.

he crisis is more than just Australia's problem. The collapse of the country's harvest contributed to a doubling of the price of rice this past spring, which in turn led to food riots in countries like Indonesia, the Philippines and Egypt. And that's the real impact of water scarcity--food scarcity. It takes 150 gal. of water to grow a pound of wheat, up to 650 gal. for a pound of rice and 3,000 gal. to raise the equivalent of a quarter-pound of beef.

With even the most aggressive plans to reverse global warming likely to take years to produce effects and population growth not likely to slow appreciably soon, the only answer is vastly improved water efficiency. That's where dry Australia is leading the way. In northern Victoria state, the government has launched a five-year, $1.3 billion project that will overhaul the region's century-old irrigation system, using computer-controlled channels that should significantly cut down on water waste, which today can reach 30%. "It's extracting the most benefit we can from the water we have," says Murray Smith, who heads the Northern Victoria Infrastructure Renewal Project. (See pictures of Australia, the driest inhabited continent.)

Still, for all Australia's water worries, citizens there don't yet need to fear that when they turn on the tap nothing will come out. That's not the case in India, even in the capital of New Delhi, which supplies about 200 million gal. a day less than its population requires. Water is a worry, not just for poor Indians but also for middle-class ones, like R.K. Sachdev, a retired civil servant who lives with his wife in an upscale development in the city's southwest. "Every morning when I get up, my main worry is water," his wife Kusum says. Near the entrance to their flat, they keep a 265-gal. storage tank--locked to prevent theft. The couple are awake by 6:30 a.m. to ensure that the municipal supply is running, and they use an ultraviolet filter to purify water intended for drinking or cooking because contamination is constant.

In New Delhi's bursting slums, residents are often left to fight for buckets of water delivered via trucks, a process that is time consuming and expensive. The Sachdevs pay less than 2¢ per 26 gal. of water; the poor might pay that for a single quart from a private truck or even more for bottled water. "The rich end up paying just a fraction of the price to water their lawn than the poor do just to stay alive," says William Fellows, the regional water, sanitation and health adviser for UNICEF/South Asia. Worse, waste of the little water that is available is rampant. New Delhi loses as much as 50% of its water through leakage and other forms of inefficiency. It is a pattern repeated throughout the ill-planned urban areas of the developing world. "These cities are leaking buckets," says Junaid Ahmad of the World Bank.

The probable increase in yearly monsoons related to global warming should provide at least some new water, though out-of-control flooding will pose its own dangers. But the only other alternative comes from underground--and here India may be digging its own grave. There are now 23 million wells across India, up from 2 million 30 years ago, and those wells are draining the country's deep groundwater, or aquifer. Wells that once hit water at 20 ft. now need to go 80 ft. or deeper. New Delhi groundwater levels have declined 15% to 20% over the past several years. With almost no connection between the amount of water used and its cost, there is little incentive for rural farmers to stop drilling wells or for urban residents to conserve. "The price of water is a very important mechanism," says Ahmad.

In parched Las Vegas, Mulroy knows price is one of the best tools at her disposal to control the city's growing thirst. In the spring, officials approved a staggered rate hike that increased prices for low-volume users 17% and for the highest-volume users more than 30%. The city has also unleashed its water cops--officials like Dennis Walker who ride around sprawling new housing developments looking for violations of outdoor-water-use laws. Sprinklers are illegal during the daylight hours, and homeowners have to use a misting system rather than simply hose down the grass. Through ignorance or obtuseness, however, not everyone has gotten the message. At one house, Walker catches a sprinkler spraying a rock garden, the water leaking onto the boiling hot asphalt street. "That's pretty egregious," he notes laconically. He films the incident, with the time and date, and checks the address online to see if there are any prior violations. Fines can exceed $1,000 for multiple infractions.

All these policies are having an effect. From being one of the most wasteful cities in the U.S.--in the 1980s, Las Vegas used almost twice as much water per capita as did far wetter New York--Vegas may now get more economic bang for its water than any other place on earth. Though the city has grown by 300,000 people since 2002, it uses less water today than it did six years ago, and leakage is below 5%. "Failure is not an option," says Mulroy.

The same is true for the rest of us. In the past century, we treated water as if it were inexhaustible. But that illusion has dried up. The only way to thrive in a warmer, thirstier world will be to learn to get more out of less. "We have the time to change," says Scripps' marine geophysicist Barnett. "Do we have the will to change? I don't know."

RECONCILING GOD AND SCIENCE

The pious young scientist had a question about human origins and the attention of one of the foremost geneticists in the world. Standing up in a crowded Hilton-hotel conference room in Alexandria, Va., the inquisitive Ph.D.-M.D. candidate asked Francis Collins, who mapped the human genome, about an attempt to reconcile science and faith: Did Collins think it possible that all species are products of evolution — except for humanity, which God created separately? "Based on everything we know," the young man asked, "would that tie together evolution and [a literal reading of the Bible] and make room for God to intervene?"

Collins showed no surprise that a star scholar poised to contribute to the future of medicine should entertain the idea that evolution might not apply to humans. Indeed, the question was almost predictable, since the room was filled with Harvey Fellows, high-performing young academics devoted to bringing a Christian presence to fields where Evangelicals are underrepresented. And Collins, that rarest of raritiesa superstar evangelical biologistand author of the new book The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free Press; 304 pages), was perfectly qualified to answer. He did. That notion "gets you into a series of real problems," he replied. He sketched one out: the human genome contains nonfunctional elements in the precise spot where they can be found on the chromosomes of lower animals. If God was creating humans afresh, Collins asked, "why would he insert a pseudo-gene that has lost its ability to do anything in the same place that it appears in a chimp?" Barring evolution, "you're forced to the conclusion that God was trying to mislead us and test our faith — and I have trouble with that kind of conjecture." (See the top 10 Jesus films of all time.)

In America's ongoing and sometimes rancorous discussion about science and God, some stock characters have evolved. There are the vocal proponents of creationism and intelligent design who storm school boards in hopes that either science or local government will conform to their beliefs. Then there are academic atheists who claim increasingly aggressively that science is in the process of proving religion a delusion. But few of the polemicists have the authority to preach beyond their own choirs. Most believers don't care to listen to an atheistic scientist calling the idea of God a mythology created to explain what humans don't understand, and academic atheists are just as uninterested in scientific lectures from Bible literalists.

Collins, however, has both the standing and the desire to promote a third way. At 56, he is an unassuming 6-ft. 4-in. stork with a reedy voice, a techie's el cheapo digital Timex and — his one touch of flash — a wide silver ring emblazoned with a cross. "I think the majority of people in the U.S. probably occupy a middle ground but feel under attack by the bombs thrown from either side," he says. "We haven't heard very much about the way these views can be rendered into a very satisfying harmony. And I do hope that both camps are a potential audience for what I have to say."

To some, the mere fact that he is effectively outing himself to the secular world as a man of faith warrants celebration. "Just that he's written the book is important," says Randy Isaac, head of American Scientific Affiliation, a professional group for conservative Christians. "It will help convince Christian young people that science is a viable career, and scientists to recognize that Christian faith is a relevant option."

But Collins has more in mind than being a role model. The last celebrity scientist to suggest a middle path in the creation wars was Stephen Jay Gould, who argued that science and faith could coexist because they are "nonoverlapping" domains with no common ground on which to clash. Yet Collins insists on overlaying and intertwining them. He starts from a very Gouldian premise — "Science is the only reliable way to understand the natural world [but] is powerless to answer questions such as 'what is the meaning of human existence'" — but he tracks it to a different conclusion. "We need to bring all the power of both scientific and spiritual perspectives to bear on understanding what is both seen and unseen," he writes, maintaining that those perspectives "not only can coexist within one person, but can do so in a fashion that enriches and enlightens the human experience." And without seeming particularly immodest, he offers his own experience as Exhibit A. (See people finding God on YouTube.)

Collins' life, although told many times in the press during the genome race, remains appealingly weird and inspiring. He was born on an outhouse-equipped Virginia "dirt farm" — but his Yale-educated parents had earlier returned to the land as part of a rural-community experiment under Eleanor Roosevelt's patronage. Home-schooled and solitary, their brilliant fourth son pursued his inclinations through a Yale dissertation on quantum mechanics — but then swerved, first to an M.D. and next to the field of genetics, whose astonishing precision and lifesaving potential were becoming manifest.

In 1993, Collins' trailblazing work identifying genetic defects that predispose to cystic fibrosis and other diseases led to his succeeding double-helix discoverer James Watson as head of a 2,400-scientist, multination project to map all 3.1 billion biochemical letters that constitute the human blueprint. In 2000, Bill Clinton honored Collins and his private-sector competitor Craig Venter in the White House, crediting their complementary genome work with uncovering "the language in which God created life."

That statement reflected Collins' input. In 1976, during his medical residency, the serene faith of some of his mortally ill patients shocked the self-described "obnoxious atheist" into consulting a local minister, who handed him the book Mere Christianity by the great Christian popularizer and Narnia creator, C.S. Lewis. Struck by Lewis' nuts-and-bolts approach, Collins investigated faith on his own methodical terms. Finally, one morning in 1978, while hiking in the Pacific Cascades, he came upon a massive, frozen, three-stream waterfall. To him it recalled the Trinity. He writes, "I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ."

Reconciling his belief with his service to genetics proved easier for him than for many of his colleagues. Upon discovering the fibrosis flaw, he remembers feeling that "God had rained down his blessing." But in a profession only 8% of whose élite admit to believing in a God who answers prayer, he found that God talk could be something of a taboo. "Bring up faith and there's always a little sense of, Didn't you get the memo?" At least once a month he receives an e-mail from some lonely post-doc asking advice on being an evangelical scientist. As his renown grew, he moved from sharing his Christian conversion with groups of fellow believers to sitting on public panels where, he says, "I've found myself the sole person saying faith was relevant" to science. Thus, he adds, "I've kind of been writing this book for 25 years."

The story of Collins' journey to faith, a description of his evangelical belief and a wrenching examination of God and suffering through the story of his daughter's rape constitute a significant part of his book, resembling in some ways evangelical testimony more than previous scientific arguments for belief. But he also explains why, although he does not believe God is rationally provable, he thinks that natural phenomena — such as the development of conditions favoring life on earth in the face of incredible odds — point toward the divine.

And he provides a pocket description of his preferred synthesis of evolution with Christianity, which he calls BioLogos but which has a previous history under the name theistic evolution. Collins' version sees God as having preplanned the process of mutation and selection at time's beginning, knowing it would produce humanity. It differs from Deism, the "divine clockmaker" theology of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Jefferson, in that many Deists think God signed off once the clock was wound. Collins, on the other hand, thinks the whole point was for God to create a being with whom he could develop an ongoing relationship through prayer, Scripture and what the scientist cheerfully acknowledges as a scientifically inexplicable "divine invasion of the natural world" in the saving person of Jesus Christ.

The Language of God is enlightening but not always convincing. Collins writes at a pace better suited to statements of position than to sustained argument, and he sometimes falls back on familiar polemics by pros like Lewis. His insights on the nature of a God-science overlap, while fresh, are celebratory rather than investigative, budgeting relatively little space to wrestle with instances when the conjunction of the two can induce the philosophical bends (such as faith's understanding of God's place outside human time).

The book seems liveliest when Collins turns his guns from atheists on the left to creationists and intelligent designers on the right, urging the abandonment of what he feels are overliteral misreadings of Scripture. "I don't think God intended Genesis to teach science," he says, arguing that "the evidence in favor of evolution is utterly compelling." He has little patience with those who say evolution is just a theory, noting that in his scientific world the word theory "is not intended to convey uncertainty; for that purpose a scientist would use the word hypothesis." The book is hard on intelligent design, heaping scientific doubt on its key notion of "irreducible complexity" in phenomena like blood clotting, and theological scorn on its ultimate implications ("I.D. portrays the Almighty as a clumsy Creator, having to intervene at regular intervals to fix the inadequacies of His own initial plan ... this is a very unsatisfactory image").

That is not the argument his publisher has chosen to emphasize, or his book's subtitle would be flipped to read A Believer Presents the Evidence for Science. But it may be the one with the best prospects. Students of the debate note that atheists are more dogmatically opposed to God than Evangelicals are to evolution, if only because aggressive creationism is neither a long-standing evangelical position nor a unanimous one. According to Edward Larson, a Pulitzer- prizewinning historian of the evolution debate at the University of Georgia, American support for it, now near 50%, hovered around 30% as recently as 1960. Today, Larson says, "it's a dynamic situation, with no unanimity." Evolution is taught at some Christian colleges.

Even before he wrote The Language of God, Collins was a player in this potentially consequential debate. He has an ongoing dialogue with Chuck Colson, the former Nixon aide who heads the successful Prison Fellowship and influences a significant conservative Christian audience through a daily radio show and a magazine column. Thus far Collins has failed to convince Colson, who says, "I think he's giving away more than he needs to, and he thinks I'm denying science." But Colson adds, "He's a guy I like, admire and appreciate. We're going to have dinner together and get some folks around a table and talk it through."

Evangelist Tony Campolo, whose position on the spectrum is somewhat closer to Collins', offers encouragement of his own. "It's one thing for a scientist to debunk creationism," he says. "It's another when a believer does it." A scientific believer with a serious book may stand the best chance of all.

The Iceland Experiment

Dr. Kari Stefansson can trace his ancestry back 1,100 years. That's almost unheard of in the U.S., but in his native Iceland, where genealogy is a national obsession, it hardly raises an eyebrow. The island nation is a genetic anomaly: settled by a few Norsemen and Celts in the 9th century A.D. and relatively free of later immigration, it is among the most genetically homogeneous countries on earth. And in the late 1990s, when scientists were racing to map the human genome, Stefansson realized that Iceland's genetic isolation and unrivaled genealogical records made it a potential gold mine for isolating genes.

Thus began Iceland's great genetic experiment, an attempt to mine the gene pool of an entire country in search of the root causes of--and potential cures for--some of the world's worst diseases. And after years of controversy, dashed hopes and burst stock bubbles, the effort is finally paying off. Over the past decade, deCODE Genetics, the company Stefansson co-founded in his home city of Reykjavík, has discovered more than a dozen genes linked to diseases ranging from stroke to schizophrenia. Last month, deCODE announced that it had found a gene that boosts the risk of Type 2 diabetes. And within a few weeks, the company will start the final phase of trials for a drug based on a newly identified heart-attack gene that appears to be especially dangerous in African Americans. "I'm very enthusiastic," says Dr. Francis Collins of the U.S. National Institutes of Health and leader of the Human Genome Project. "What deCODE is doing is clearly exciting, and I congratulate them."

In principle, their method is straightforward: to find a disease-related gene, find someone with the disease, then see how his or her DNA differs from the DNA of healthy people. In practice, however, individual genes rarely cause illness on their own; instead, they tend to make people more susceptible. And in places with genetically mixed populations, the complex interaction among genes makes it hard to find the risky ones. But in Iceland, with its uniform population and genealogies that show how everyone is related, risky genes tend to stand out. The country's meticulous medical records provide even more data.

Ingenious as it was, Stefansson's plan quickly ran into problems. In order to build a database of genomes, deCODE needed blood samples from as many Icelanders as possible, as well as access to their health records. Parliament granted permission to tap into those records, along with an exclusive license to assemble, maintain and market the resulting data. Thousands of citizens donated blood, and many bought shares in deCODE as well. But those shares, which rose to a high of $65 in a frenzied run-up in 1999 and 2000, plunged to as low as $2 in the collapse of the dotcom bubble. They're around $9 today--and deCODE still hasn't turned a profit. Investors lost a lot of money, and the firm was forced to lay off scores of employees.

Then in 1998 the U.S. firm Hoffmann--La Roche agreed to pay $200 million for the right to develop drugs based on some of deCODE's data. The idea that a foreign company might profit from their personal information made many Icelanders balk. A woman named Ragnhildur Gudmundsdottir sued to keep her deceased father's medical records from going into the deCODE-run database, citing a right to privacy, and in 2003 Iceland's supreme court ruled in her favor.

Having lost its guaranteed access to every citizen's records, deCODE had to change tactics and approach people one by one. In return, the company promised that Icelanders will get any drug Hoffmann--La Roche develops out of the project for free until the patents run out. According to Stefansson, most have agreed to cooperate. "Ten percent of people have questions about the project," says Asmundur Johannsson, a Reykjavík resident. "Ninety percent approve of deCODE, and I am one of them."

Thanks to people like Johannsson, a huge freezer in the basement of deCODE's gleaming, modern Reykjavík headquarters now holds blood samples from about 100,000 individuals, roughly half of Iceland's adult population. Using those samples, scientists at the company were able to zero in on their new anti-heart-attack compound. It's based on a gene known as LTA4H, first seen in mice, which governs the production of an enzyme called leukotriene A4 hydrolase. The enzyme plays a role in inflammation, a key factor in heart disease, and also encourages the buildup of cholesterol on blood-vessel walls.

And sure enough, Icelanders with a particular variant of the LTA4H gene turn out to be 40% more likely than average to have heart attacks. Looking outside the country, deCODE scientists found the variant gene in other populations--and discovered that in African Americans the increased risk is not 40% but a whopping 250%. That suggests the company's prospective drug--invented by Bayer and licensed by deCODE--could have a correspondingly large lifesaving effect, although even if it works, it could be several years before it reaches the U.S. market. Some critics are worried that insurers and employers might avoid anyone bearing the bad gene, making discrimination even worse than it already is. Stefansson scoffs at that notion: "You guys never needed genetics to discriminate against African Americans," he says. "You've done that completely unassisted by genetic discoveries."

The idea of combing through populations for disease genes isn't unique to deCODE. Britain's UK Biobank, for example, will follow 500,000 volunteers for decades, trying to correlate genes, lifestyle and disease. And two initiatives being put together by the U.S. National Institutes of Health will look for nearly 20 diseases in up to 40,000 people. But with its long head start and Iceland's genetic advantages, deCODE could be hard to catch. So far the company has isolated 15 gene variants for 12 diseases, including stroke, schizophrenia, osteoarthritis and, most recently, diabetes. In addition to the heart-attack drug, it has medications in the pipeline for preventing asthma and atherosclerosis. Even when no drug is available, knowing you have a disease gene can be invaluable. "What it tells you," says Stefansson, "is whether you are at risk, and it gives you the opportunity to respond. This is liberating."

PLUTO

When NASA first considered a mission to Pluto more than 15 years ago, the idea was to visit the last and most distant of the nine planets, an oddball whose icy composition, tilted orbit and tiny size made it unlike anything else in the solar system. But when the New Horizons probe finally takes off from Cape Canaveral—as early as next week, if all goes well—it will be heading for something else entirely. "This little misfit is now central to our understanding of the origin of our solar system," says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead scientist for New Horizons.

Reason: Pluto, astronomers have learned, is no oddball. It's one of thousands of icy bodies in a diskshape swarm known as the Kuiper Belt that orbits the sun in the dark, frigid realm beyond Neptune. Since the discovery last summer of an object called 2003 UB313, Pluto is not even the biggest. And because those little worlds have been in deep freeze since the solar system was formed more than 4 billion years ago, they represent a frozen record of what conditions were like back then.

Those primordial conditions are what Stern and his colleagues will be trying to understand when New Horizons reaches Pluto and its three moons (two were found just this past fall) in 2015. As the probe zips by, cameras will snap pictures of surface features about the size of a football field, analyze Pluto's thin atmosphere and measure its temperature.

All of that will add enormously to our knowledge. But it won't help scientists decide whether Pluto should keep its status as a planet, a debate that only intensified when 2003 UB313 was discovered; if Pluto is a planet, then its bigger cousin must be as well. The International Astronomical Union promises a decision, but Stern doesn't know when it will come. For now, he's not thinking much about that. He has a spacecraft to launch. [The following text appears as part of a complex diagram]

THE MISSION Using Jupiter's gravity to speed it on its way, New Horizons will be the first probe to take close-up images of Pluto and analyze its atmosphere, thus enabling astronomers to understand how the icy bodies of the Kuiper Belt came to be

• SUN • EARTH LAUNCH - Between Jan. 17 and Feb. 14 • SATURN • JUPITER Jupiter gravity assist - February to March 2007 • URANUS • NEPTUNE • PLUTO PLUTO-CHARON ENCOUNTER July 2015. During flyby, the probe will pass within a mere 6,000 miles (10,000 km) of Pluto—40 times as close as the Earth is to our own moon • KUIPER BELT Voyage into Kuiper Belt 2016-2020 What is the Kuiper Belt? Named for Gerard Kuiper, who predicted its existence in the 1950s, it is a vast, disk-shaped cloud of thousands of icy bodies that starts near Neptune and reaches to about 4.5 billion miles (7.5 billion km)from the sun.

ORBIT OF PLUTO • From Pluto, the sun appears about 1,000 times as dim as it does from Earth • Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, are locked in synchronous orbit, always keeping the same face toward each other.

THE SPACECRAFT New Horizons is about the size of a grand piano, packed with highly sensitive instruments.

• Antenna • Heat shield • Thruster • Star tracking cameras • PEPSSI - Detects molecules escaping from Pluto's atmosphere • SWAP - Looks for magnetic fields and measures how fast the atmosphere is escaping • RTG - Powers the craft with a tiny amount of plutonium. Because the probe will travel so far from the sun, solar power was not an option • LORRI - A high-resolution telescope and camera capable of detecting features about the size of a football field • REX - Uses radio waves to analyze the atmosphere and determine night-side temperature • ALICE - Analyzes ultraviolet light to determine atmospheric composition • RALPH - Makes color maps of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon and uses infrared measurements to determine surface composition • SDC - Built by students in Colorado, this instrument will count and measure dust particles in space throughout the journey

MYSTERIES OF AN ICY WORLD • Pluto • Charon • If humans lived by Pluto time, they would never see a second birthday. The planet orbits the sun once every 248 Earth years • And if humans lived on Pluto, they wouldn't have to diet. Pluto's gravity is so weak that a man weighing 300 lbs. (136 kg) on Earth would weigh just 20 lbs. (9 kg) on Pluto • Unfortunately, breathing would be impossible. In addition to being intolerably cold, Pluto has a thin—and temporary—atmosphere of nitrogen molecules, with traces of carbon monoxide and methane. When the planet moves farther from the sun, the atmosphere freezes back onto the surface • Pluto is one of only two planets that rotate on their horizontal axis. Uranus is the other. A day on Pluto is equal to 6.4 days on Earth. • A radio signal moving at the speed of light takes about 4½ hours to reach Pluto from Earth

What's Killing the Sea Otters

Los Angeles They're cute, furry, and when they're not chasing each other around kelp forests, they're floating on their backs like miniature teddy bears. Hunted nearly to extinction for their luxuriant fur--the thickest of any mammal's--the sea otters of California were making a comeback until they started mysteriously dying off. State wildlife officials recovered a record 281 dead otters last year, and this year looks to be even worse. Five or six wash up on California's beaches and rocks each week. In August alone, 28 dead otters were cast ashore, including an alarming number of full-grown females. "When we start losing breeding females," says veterinarian Mike Murray at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, "that's not a healthy population."

What's killing the sea otters? Sometimes the cause is clear: a shark bite, a bullet, an outboard motor. But about one-quarter of last year's fatalities have been traced to a pair of protozoan parasites, Toxoplasma gondii and Sarcocystis neurona, that are known to breed in cats and opossums. Could sea otters be dying because California cat owners are flushing used litter down the toilet?

State legislators were sufficiently convinced of the threat to pass a bill--signed into law last week by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger--that raises the maximum fine for harming a sea otter to $25,000 and requires that all cat litter sold in California carry a warning label advising cat owners not to dump their pet's droppings into toilets or storm drains.

But cat litter is only a small part of the problem. Thorny-headed worms dropped into the ocean by seabirds are known to be killing otters, as are toxic algae blooms triggered by urea, a key ingredient in fertilizer. And sea otters, because they feed on shellfish that tend to accumulate whatever floats their way, are particularly susceptible to PCBS and other man-made pollutants.

Sea otters are not the only species harmed by ocean pollution, of course, but they are easier than most to study. They sit at the top of a food chain that may extend less than half a mile from shore. "The sea otter is the canary in the coal mine for the coastal ecosystem," says Monterey's Murray.

Right now, Murray contends, that mine is looking pretty dark. While the state's otter population is holding steady at nearly 2,700, projections show that number should already have reached at least 13,000. The next step, say scientists, is to pinpoint--then shut down--the sources of runoff that are pouring toxins into the otters' playgrounds.

In this effort, the charismatic sea otter may be its own best friend. Marine mammal experts aren't always as sentimental about the sharp-toothed creatures as the public is--one expert referred to otters eating shellfish on their tummies as "buzz saws in a fur coat"--but no one doubts the value of the "aww" factor. "When you've been bitten by one, you don't think they're so cute," says Michelle Staedler, the Monterey Aquarium's sea otter research coordinator, "but then you look, and they're a big ball of fluff." [This article contains a complex diagram. Please see hardcopy or pdf.] Hunted Nearly To Extinction Russia's Peter the Great declared a monopoly on sable in 1697 and sent hunters to find sea routes to America.When Vitus Bering's expedition was shipwrecked in 1741, his crew killed sea otters instead. They returned with 900 luxuriant pelts, setting off the Great Hunt. When the otters were depleted, Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. SEA OTTER FUR Built for warmth 1 million hairs per sq. in. Guard Hair Underfur Trapped Air HUMAN SCALP 150,000 hairs total Before 1741, there were as many as 300,000 sea otters on the Pacific Coast. By 1900 only a few colonies remained

Historic range

Remnant colonies Now New Threats Emerge Industrial chemicals, algae blooms and other toxins linked to coastal pollution are among the sea otter s new enemies. The threat from feline-borne toxoplasmosis, a common danger to pregnant women, helped trigger California's new law

1 Cat eats rodent or bird infected with Toxoplasma gondii parasite

2 Parasite develops in cat's gut and its eggs are released in scat

3 Eggs travel through runoff or are flushed into sewers

4 Eggs end up in the ocean and are ingested by mussels, clams and oysters

5 Otter eats shellfish; eggs infect the otter's brain and organs and kill it