Some nuclear companies envision reactors in tiny power stations or even
factories. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
Commercial nuclear reactors pretty
much come in two sizes: big and huge.
Companies want to create much smaller,
cheaper reactors. Shawn Allee reports they’re pitching their ideas
to the government this week:
Transcript
Commercial nuclear reactors pretty
much come in two sizes: big and huge.
Companies want to create much smaller,
cheaper reactors. Shawn Allee reports they’re pitching their ideas
to the government this week:
These nuclear companies envision reactors in tiny power stations or even
factories. They expect good sales because nuclear power creates almost no
carbon emissions.
But before they can sell even one reactor, they have to go through a
nuclear gate-keeper. That’d be the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
NRC spokesman Scott Burnell says, today, the government is laying out the
ground rules.
“The NRC has focused on large commercial scale nuclear power plants for
several decades. We have requirements for safety systems, for security
where these small reactor designers need to look at our requirements
closely, to make sure they can meet them.”
Burnell says some small reactor designs include technology the NRC has
never approved before.
He says it could take the government up to ten years to evaluate those
designs.
Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Transcript
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.
And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.
That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.
“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”
That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…
(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.
“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”
With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.
“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”
And he compared mice from before and after 1950.
“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”
Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.
This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.
The next step is to figure out why.
“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”
He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.
“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”
Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.
“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”
Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?
“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”
Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.
A national survey of home builders found 59% are already building smaller homes or planning to build smaller homes in the near future.
(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
This week, the US Department
of Commerce announced new
construction for single-family
homes increased 1.7% since June. Lester Graham
reports… what the announcement
didn’t say is that, on average,
those new homes are smaller:
Transcript
This week, the US Department
of Commerce announced new
construction for single-family
homes increased 1.7% since June. Lester Graham
reports… what the announcement
didn’t say is that, on average,
those new homes are smaller:
For the past 35 years, houses have gotten bigger and bigger. The square footage has increased 53%.
But, starting in the second half of 2008, that changed. And the trend to smaller houses is continuing this year.
Steve Melman monitors trends for the National Association of Home Builders.
He says, during past recessions, new house sizes decreased because smaller was more affordable. As soon as the economy recovered, the trend toward larger homes continued.
He says that might not be the case this time.
“This could be a change in that the homes might incorporate better design, better energy features, green features, but not necessarily increase in size.”
A national survey of home builders found 59% are already building smaller homes or planning to build smaller homes in the near future.
van der Knaap's team tests tomato starts for the SUN gene - the gene they isolated. SUN is responsible for tomato length. (Photo by Julie Grant)
(Photo courtesy of the American Society of Plant Biologists and Esther van der Knaap)
Vegetables can be really odd shapes.
But what if you could alter fruits
and vegetables into just about any
shape you wanted? Some avid gardeners
come up with strange looking hybrids,
but Julie Grant talked with a researcher
who’s taking the shape of produce to
a whole new level:
Transcript
It’s time to start planting your garden this year. But maybe you’re tired of long, thin
carrots, huge watermelons, and round tomatoes. Julie Grant spoke with one researcher
who’s trying to give us some more options in the shape of fruits and veggies:
Ester van der Knaap steps gingerly around the greenhouse.
We’re at the Ohio State Agricultural Research and Development Center in Wooster.
The plants here are as tall as we are.
Van Der Knaap points out short, round tomatoes – and some odd-looking long, thin
ones.
“That’s one gene. One gene can make that difference.”
Van der Knaap’s team discovered that gene and isolated it. They call it the SUN gene.
And they’ve been able to clone it in tomatoes.
“You see this one is pretty round. It does not have the SUN gene. And that first one
makes a very elongated fruit, and it does have the SUN gene.”
Van der Knaap’s research could lead to square-shapes – something she thinks the
tomato industry might like. Square tomatoes fit better into packages. And, overall,
square tomatoes might be easier to work with than the common round tomatoes.
“They are mechanically harvested. So if you have a very round tomato, it would roll off
conveyor belts, it’s not very handy.”
So far money for her research has come from the National Science Foundation – not big
ag.
Van Der Knaap is quick to note – her tomatoes are not genetically modified.
You might remember the Calgene tomato which was made firmer by manipulating the
tomato genes with a gene from chickens. Van der Knapp’s just isolating the genes that affect the
shape of the tomatoes. Turning them on or off alters the shape.
Designer fruit shapes are gaining popularity. Check out any seed catalog, and there’s
a huge variety – some large and segmented, some pear-shaped, some oval, some
resembling chili peppers.
People have been cross-breeding tomatoes to make the shapes they want for a long
time. But this is not the same thing.
“It’s just funny, ‘cause my brother was working with some genetic things with tomatoes in
our attic.”
Dick Alford is a chef and professor of hospitality management at the University of Akron.
The difference between what his brother – and lots of other folks have been doing – and
what van der Knaap is doing is the difference between cross-breeding and locating a
specific gene that affects the shape of tomatoes.
The only other gene like this that’s been found so far was discovered by van der Knaap’s
advisor at Cornell University.
[sound of a kitchen and cutting veggies]
Chef Alford watches students as they cut yellow crookneck squash and carrots.
They’re trying to make uniform, symmetrical shapes out of curvy and pointed vegetables.
There’s a lot of waste. Chef Alford hates to see so much get thrown away. So he’s got
a request of Dr. van der Knaap.
“If we could get square carrots, it would be great. If you could get a nice long, a tomato
as long as a cucumber, where you could get 20 or 30 slices out of it, it would be great.”
In a country that loves hamburgers, Van der Knaap has heard that request before. But
the long, thin tomato hasn’t worked out just yet. She says there’s more genetics to be
studied.
Once we know all the genes responsible for making different shapes in tomatoes, Van
der Knaap says we’ll have a better idea of what controls the shape of other crops, such
peppers, cucumbers, and gourds.
Some nuclear companies envision reactors in tiny power stations or even factories. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
