The Retrun of Science Tuesday!
Some new research on the settlement of The Americas, human and otherwise...
Bees’ Migration Holds Clues to Geologic History
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Two new bee species shed light on Panama’s history as a land bridge between South and Central America, scientists are reporting.
The two sister species, one from Coiba Island in Panama and one from northern Colombia, descend from a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved north over millions of years, eventually to Mexico.
The bees have a limited migration range, since worker bees must build a new nest before a virgin queen will move in to form a new colony.
“It’s really impossible for them to get across a water barrier," said David Roubik, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and one of the researchers who discovered the bees.
So it must have been a land connection, presumably the Panama isthmus. that allowed for this migration, he said. (The findings appear in the journal Systematic Entomology.)
Most researchers believe that the Panama land bridge arose about three million years ago from tectonic and volcanic activity, connecting Central America to South America.
But Dr. Roubik and his colleagues believe the ancestors of the new bees originated in the Amazon about 22 million years ago and moved north into Central America about 17 million years ago.
The bees, as well as other fossil findings, indicate that there must have been an earlier land connection, Dr. Roubik said. And that connection is millions of years older than previously thought.
“There was an earlier chunk of land that linked Colombia to Costa Rica," he said. These are signs of a very old connection.
A Big-Game Hunt by Early North Americans
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 20, 2011
For many years, it was thought that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago.
But recently, evidence has suggested that other settlers arrived earlier, and a new study lends support to that hypothesis.
The study, in the journal Science, finds that a mastodon rib with a bone point lodged in it dates back 13,800 years.
“It’s the first hunting weapon found pre-Clovis," said the lead author, Michael R. Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University. "These people were hunting mastodons."
The fossils had been discovered in the late 1970s at a dig known as the Manis site, near Sequim, Wash., by Carl Gustafson, an archaeologist at Washington State University. At the time, Dr. Gustafson proposed that the skeleton was about 14,000 years old and that hunters had killed the mastodon with a bone point.
His theory was questioned by other scientists. But carbon dating technology has improved since then, and Dr. Waters and his colleagues, including Dr. Gustafson, were able to use mass spectrometry to date the rib, the bone point and tusks that were found at the site.
They also used CT scanning to closely study the embedded bone point to confirm that it was a hunting tool. They found that the point was more than 10 inches long and that it had been sharpened.
“It couldn’t have been anything else," Dr. Waters said.
Like the Clovis people, the Manis inhabitants also probably migrated to North America from northeastern and Central Asia, making their way over the Bering land bridge through present-day Alaska.
“What’s nice about all the pre-Clovis sites is that some had stone tools, and now here we see bone tools, all the rudimentary technologies that we later see in Clovis," Dr. Waters said.
The Clovis used these basic technologies to create a more sophisticated set of tools, he added.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 21, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the place where the mastodon fossils were found. The site, known as the Manis site, after the owner of the land, is near Sequim, Wash., not near Manis, Wash. (There is no such city in Washington.)
And some interesting medical articles:
Mammogram’s Role as Savior Is Tested
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Has the power of the mammogram been oversold?
At a time when medical experts are rethinking screening guidelines for prostate and cervical cancer, many doctors say it’s also time to set the record straight about mammography screening for breast cancer. While most agree that mammograms have a place in women’s health care, many doctors say widespread Pink Ribbon campaigns and patient testimonials have imbued the mammogram with a kind of magic it doesn’t have. Some patients are so committed to annual screenings they even begin to believe that regular mammograms actually prevent breast cancer, said Dr. Susan Love, a prominent women’s health advocate. And women who skip a mammogram often beat themselves up for it.
“You can’t expect from mammography what it cannot do," said Dr. Laura Esserman, director of the breast care center at the University of California, San Francisco. "Screening is not prevention. We’re not going to screen our way to a cure."
A new analysis published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers a stark reality check about the value of mammography screening. Despite numerous testimonials from women who believe "a mammogram saved my life," the truth is that most women who find breast cancer as a result of regular screening have not had their lives saved by the test, conclude two Dartmouth researchers, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Brittney A. Frankel.
Dr. Welch notes that clearly some women are helped by mammography screening, but the numbers are lower than most people think. The Dartmouth researchers conducted a series of calculations estimating a woman’s 10-year risk of developing breast cancer and her 20-year risk of death, factoring in the added value of early detection based on data from various mammography screening trials as well as the benefits of improvements in treatment. Among the 60 percent of women with breast cancer who detected the disease by screening, only about 3 percent to 13 percent of them were actually helped by the test, the analysis concluded.
Translated into real numbers, that means screening mammography helps 4,000 to 18,000 women each year. Although those numbers are not inconsequential, they represent just a small portion of the 230,000 women given a breast cancer diagnosis each year, and a fraction of the 39 million women who undergo mammograms each year in the United States.
Dr. Welch says it’s important to remember that of the 138,000 women found to have breast cancer each year as a result of mammography screening, 120,000 to 134,000 are not helped by the test.
“The presumption often is that anyone who has had cancer detected has survived because of the test, but that’s not true," Dr. Welch said. "In fact, and I hate to have to say this, in screen-detected breast and prostate cancer, survivors are more likely to have been overdiagnosed than actually helped by the test."
How is it possible that finding cancer early isn’t always better? One way to look at it is to think of four different categories of breast cancer found during screening tests. First, there are slow-growing cancers that would be found and successfully treated with or without screening. Then there are aggressive cancers, so-called bad cancers, that are deadly whether they are found early by screening, or late because of a lump or other symptoms. Women with cancers in either of these groups are not helped by screening.
Then there are innocuous cancers that would never have amounted to anything, but they still are treated once they show up as dots on a mammogram. Women with these cancers are subject to overdiagnosis, meaning they are treated unnecessarily and harmed by screening.
Finally, there is a fraction of cancers that are deadly but, when found at just the right moment, can have their courses changed by treatment. Women with these cancers are helped by mammograms. Clinical trial data suggests that 1 woman per 1,000 healthy women screened over 10 years falls into this category, although experts say that number is probably even smaller today because of advances in breast cancer treatments.
Colin Begg, head of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that he supports mammography screening and believes that it does save lives. But he agrees that many women wrongly attribute their survival after cancer to early detection as a result of mammography.
“Of all the women who have a screening test who have breast cancer detected, and eventually survive the cancer, the vast majority would have survived anyway," Dr. Begg said. "It only saved the lives of a very small fraction of them."
The notion that screening mammograms aren’t helping large numbers of women can be hard for many women and breast cancer advocates to accept. It also raises questions about whether there are better uses for the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on awareness campaigns and the $5 billion spent annually on mammography screening.
One of the reasons screening doesn’t make much difference is that advances in breast cancer treatment make it possible to save even many women with more advanced cancers.
“Screening is but one of the tools that we have to reduce the chance of dying of breast cancer," Dr. Esserman said. "The treatments that we have actually make up for a good deal of the benefits of screening."
The Dartmouth analysis comes two years after a government advisory panel’s recommendations to scale back mammography screening angered many women and advocacy groups. The panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, advised women to delay regular screening until age 50, instead of 40, and to be tested every other year, instead of annually, until age 74. The recommendations mean a woman would undergo just 13 mammograms in her lifetime, rather than the 35 she would experience if she began annual testing at age 40.
But the new recommendations have scared many women who believe skipping an annual mammogram puts them at risk of finding breast cancer too late. But Donald Berry, a biostatistician at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said adding more screening is not going to help more women.
“Most breast cancers are not lethal, however found," Dr. Berry said. "Screening mammograms preferentially find cancers that are slowly growing, and those are the ones that are seldom deadly. Getting something noxious out of the body as soon as possible leads women to think screening saved their lives. That is most unlikely."
Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the scientific understanding of cancer has changed in the years since mammography screening was adopted. As a result, she would like to see less emphasis on screening and more focus on cancer prevention and treatment for the most aggressive cancers, particularly those that affect younger women. Roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of breast cancers are deadly.
“There are still 40,000 women dying every year," Dr. Love said. "Even with screening, the bad cancers are still bad."
Still No Relief in Sight for Long-Term Needs
By GARDINER HARRIS and ROBERT PEAR, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
The law that many Americans had hoped would transform the nation’s dysfunctional system of long-term care for the swelling ranks of people with disabilities and dementia quietly died this month, a victim of its own weaknesses, a toxic political environment and President Obama’s re-election campaign focus on jobs.
Its demise came as an intense disappointment to people like Alison Briolat, a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, whose family is staggering under the burdens of caring for her bedridden parents.
“Everybody at work is very glib about how they’ll never be a burden to their children and how I’m such a saint," she said. "But unless you have millions sitting in the bank, there’s no other way."
Unlike the rich, who can afford to pay for services themselves, or the poor, who get help through Medicaid, the federal and state program for low-income people, many members of the middle class have to look after disabled relatives themselves, or pay someone to do it. Polls show that many people believe that Medicare, the federal health program for those 65 and older, pays for such care. Actually, Medicare stops paying nursing home bills after 100 days.
More than 10 million people in the United States already have long-term care needs, and two-thirds of the costs are paid for by government programs, mostly Medicaid. Studies estimate that unpaid family members deliver an even larger share of the care, and the cost of nursing home care averages $72,000 a year.
Ms. Briolat’s parents live in a downstairs bedroom in her home in Lebanon, Ohio. Her father’s decline began eight years ago when he broke his ankle, an injury that failed to heal even after four operations. His foot became infected and was amputated. He went into a nursing home.
Ms. Briolat’s mother, burdened by her husband’s growing needs, soon went into decline as well. By then, five months of nursing home care had already cost the family $60,000. Ms. Briolat moved them both into her home. She pays a home health aide while she and her husband work.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Support program, or the Class Act, was intended to provide a benefit that averaged at least $50 a day, or $18,000 a year. If such a law had been on the books in time for her parents, it would have paid for most of their care.
“We wouldn’t have had to sell their house in Michigan at a fire sale price," she said.
But the Class Act’s ambitions were undercut by an impractical structure that doomed it from the start, experts and government actuaries say. Its failure harks back to an attempt by President Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress to protect the elderly from catastrophic medical expenses and provide a modest prescription drug benefit and somewhat improved nursing home care.
That law, the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, was repealed within months of enactment after a furious response by elderly voters angry that they had to pay for the benefits themselves through a tax mostly paid by the wealthy. In a famous scene, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat who was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was booed and chased down a Chicago street by a group of elderly people, one of whom draped herself over the hood of his car.
The repeal legislation created a commission to examine the issue of long-term care, but it ended the appetite of many in Congress to resolve the issue. The Clinton health plan made another attempt at improving long-term care, but the bill failed. And now the demise of the Class Act is repeating history.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy made passing the Class Act one of his last priorities, and his advocacy was an important reason that the program, despite its flaws, was included in the overhaul of the health law in 2010. But the Class Act was unusually sparse in its details, accounting for just 20 of the bill’s 900 pages. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, succeeded in adding an amendment requiring the administration to certify that the program would be self-sustaining for 75 years before enacting it. The administration concluded that it could not make that certification, killing the program.
Less than 3 percent of Americans now buy private long-term care insurance. The government’s version of long-term care insurance shared a basic flaw with commercial options: It was voluntary, with benefits to be paid entirely by premiums.
The Class Act allowed anyone, even those with serious health problems, to sign up. Policy holders had to pay premiums for only five years and could then get benefits for life. The poor could pay just $5 a month. Both promises all but guaranteed that the program would have needed big government subsidies to avoid going broke, experts said. Internal documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show that officials had doubts about the viability of the Class program before it was signed into law by President Obama. Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote in July 2009 that "36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue."
The Obama administration continued to insist that the proposed long-term care program would be solvent over 75 years. But even some prominent Democrats disagreed. As the Senate considered the health bill in December 2009, 11 Democrats, including the chairmen of the Finance and Budget Committees, supported efforts by Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, to eliminate the long-term care insurance program.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said recently, "Everyone involved in the debate knew the proposal was impossible to deliver, and many of us said so."
If the program had restricted benefits to the healthy, limited payouts to five years and eliminated subsidies for the poor, it might have worked, said Joshua M. Wiener, a fellow at RTI International, a nonprofit research group. But advocates for the disabled were among the program’s biggest backers, and opposed the restrictions.
The program’s chief actuary, Robert Yee, said that limiting initial enrollment to workers at large companies or excluding benefits for 15 years also might have worked. But such fixes would have required new legislation, and the Obama administration concluded that such a bill had no chance of passing the present Congress, with Republicans, who control the House and can frustrate legislative efforts in the Senate, pushing for outright repeal of the entire health care law.
The president’s advisers decided that another fight over the health reform law would be a politically damaging distraction for his re-election prospects and ill timed, given the need to enact the broader health care law, itself under serious legal challenge
Advocates for the Class Act say they have not given up hope for the program. Connie Garner, who helped devise the long-term care program as an aide to Mr. Kennedy, declared: "We don’t see this program as dead. We will not let it die."
The program’s end is a blow to middle-class hopes, though its modest benefit would have covered only about a quarter of nursing home care.
“This was designed to serve as a bridge between the affluent who can care for their own and the poor who get Medicaid," said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group.
Raymond Eriksen of New Providence, N.J., thought he was safe. He moved his in-laws into an assisted living facility because both were suffering memory problems. Fortunately, both had private long-term care insurance that, along with the proceeds from the sale of their house, pays for their care. Then Mr. Eriksen’s wife, Linda, began to decline and was given a diagnosis of early-stage Alzheimer’s.
He kept her at home until August, when caring for her became so overwhelming that he moved her into the same facility with her parents. Although long-term care insurance was offered by his employer, Mr. Eriksen had not purchased it "because we had three kids we had to put through college." Mr. Eriksen was an electrician for a major oil company but retired four years ago because of an injury.
“So we put it off until it was too late," he said.
He is now paying $7,000 per month for his wife’s care, a bill that is likely to rise as her faculties decline. Mr. Eriksen, 61, said that he is unlikely to have any money left by the time he needs care himself.
“I was middle class, but I’ll be impoverished eventually," he said.
Cool stuff!
Smooth Desert Boulders May Be Quakes’ Work
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Across the Atacama Desert in Chile are thousands of peculiar boulders that look as if they were rubbed smooth across their midsections.
How did it happen? Normally rocks become smooth by rubbing against one another in a body of water, but the Atacama is one of the driest places on the planet. Now a team led by Jay Quade, a University of Arizona geologist, has suggested an answer.
At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Dr. Quade and his colleagues Peter Reiners and Kendra Murray reported that the boulders rolled down from the hills above, dislodged by earthquakes.
Over millions of years, the large boulders, each up to 10 tons, accumulated across the desert and began rubbing against one another during earthquakes, resulting in the smooth midsections.
Around the world, earthquakes typically result in water damage, in the form of floods and tsunamis, Dr. Quade said. But because the Atacama is so dry, water does not enter the picture.
“This provides a snapshot into a process we geologists don’t normally recognize the role of seismicity," he said.
The researchers estimate that since about two earthquakes occur in the region every year, it took about a million years for the boulders to gain their smooth belts.
Dr. Quade added that with some searching, similar boulders might be found on the Moon and on Mars and other planets where water is scarce.
The Weight of Memory
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Q. When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?
A. "In principle, the answer is yes," said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
“However," he said, "the amount is very small, on the order of an atogram," or 10-18 grams. "This amount is effectively unmeasurable," he went on, since even the most sensitive scales have a resolution of only 10-9 grams. Further, it is only about one hundred-millionth as much as the estimated fluctuation from charging and discharging the device’s battery. A Kindle, for example, uses flash memory, composed of special transistors, one per stored bit, which use trapped electrons to distinguish between a digital 1 and a 0.
“Although the total number of electrons in the memory does not change as the stored data changes," Dr. Kubiatowicz said, the trapped ones have a higher energy than the untrapped ones. A conservative estimate of the difference would be 10-15 joules per bit.
As the equation E=mc^2 makes clear, this energy is equivalent to mass and will have weight. Assuming that all these bits in an empty four-gigabyte Kindle are in a lower energy state and that half have a higher energy in a full Kindle, this translates to an energy difference of 1.7 times 10-5 joules, Dr. Kubiatowicz calculated. Plugging this into Einstein’s equation yields his rough estimate of 10-18 grams.
And of course, HISTORY!
Next for Newport Preservation: Gilded-Age Beeches
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.
Their favorites were European beeches - green, copper and weeping beeches - trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.
Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. "They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age," said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.
But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant.
Throughout the city, people are practicing what Lillian Dick, president of the Newport Tree Society, calls "geriatric arboriculture," treating ailing beeches with pesticides, keeping people from walking on their shallow roots, or pampering them with water and fertilizer. Often the efforts fail, so in many lawns where mighty trees once grew, replacement saplings stand, as gawky as adolescents at a ball.
One of them, a 20-foot copper beech, grows in the lawn of the preservation society’s headquarters, a three-story Romanesque Revival mansion on Bellevue Avenue, built in 1888 as a summer residence for William H. Osgood, a New York broker and yachtsman. Jeff Curtis, the society’s arborist, removed the sapling’s giant predecessor last year.
“It was over 50 percent dead," he said. Mr. Curtis regularly surveys all 1,800 trees on the society’s grounds, and he finds signs of disease everywhere. One day recently, walking on the lawn of another society property, the Elms, he stopped under the drooping canopy of a weeping beech and stared at its trunk for a moment. "Here," he said, pointing to a patch of dark brown goo oozing from the tree a few feet above the ground.
That ooze is a signature of beech canker, which has been attacking Newport’s trees for more than two decades, according to Brian Maynard, a professor of horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. The canker results from a fungus, phytopthora (pronounced fie-TOP-thuh-ruh), that also attacks the bark of stressed trees.
A second problem is cottony scale, an insect that taps into tree bark, introducing another fungus, nectria. "Nectria kills the bark of the trees," Dr. Maynard said. "The bark falls off, and the tree is in trouble."
Vigorous trees can fight off these two diseases, but they become vulnerable as they age. A tree’s growth occurs in its outer rings, Dr. Maynard said; he added that "the tree gives up on the old wood" in the center, which can rot, spread decay or suffer from injudicious pruning or other injuries.
“Trees are constructed to be able to tolerate some of this," he went on, "but eventually the insults build up to the point that the trees cannot keep overcoming them."
This is particularly true of beeches, whose shallow root systems are ideal for Newport’s thin topsoil but vulnerable to cars, trucks, lawn mowers and even people strolling in the shade. Dr. Maynard said that in their native European habitat the trees can live 300 or even 400 years. In the alien Newport climate, 120 years is more like it.
Mr. Curtis agreed. "They have a life span," he said. "All the treatment in the world is not going to save them."
Still, he spends much of his budget on treatments that can slow the infestations but not remove them.
Mr. Tschirch said serious efforts to monitor the trees began only about 30 years ago. Since then, he said, the preservation society has been working vigorously to treat and replace diseased trees. "We replant in kind," he said. "Where you see small copper beeches, they replaced large copper beeches."
The society supports the effort with donations and a grant from a foundation, the Prince Charitable Trusts. Mr. Curtis said he spent about a quarter of his budget on replacement trees. Recently he bought two good-size beeches for the Elms for about $350 each, "a good deal." In a nursery he operates in what was once a mews and greenhouse for the archetypal Newport mansion, the Breakers, he grows European beeches grafted to rootstock from the American beech. In Newport, the American beech is hardier, but it is far less glamorous. As Dr. Maynard put it, "it only comes in one color: green."
But most of Mr. Curtis’s budget goes to treat diseased trees, which, like all trees on society property, are tagged with quarter-size ID discs. "We have real plans for taking care of every single tree," said Trudy Coxe, the society’s chief executive.
If it were up to him, Dr. Maynard said, the focus would be on replacing the old trees. In the case of beech canker, he said, "by the time you see it, it has usually spread throughout the tree."
He added, "By clinging to these old trees and not developing a plan for their replacement, Newport has hurt itself."
On the Web site of the city’s Tree and Open Space Commission, Scott Wheeler, the city tree warden, makes a similar point. "Do the math," he advises homeowners. "Is it wiser to spend more on this ailing tree or to replace it with a young tree better suited to the surroundings?"
The tree society, a nonprofit group, backs a number of efforts to maintain or replace ailing trees throughout the city, not just in the mansion district. Among other things, the group encourages planting trees on private property to replace ailing municipal trees planted too close to city streets.
The society also produces brochures for a Gilded Age Tree Walk, a map of notable tree specimens along Bellevue Avenue, many of them ailing beeches. "Newport’s landscape, both historically and culturally, would be devastated by the loss of this species," the map says.
In an interview, Ms. Dick called the tree troubles "a crisis," and Mr. Tschirch said the beeches were as important to the Newport landscape as palm trees in Florida. "Beech trees are so magnificent and their branch span is so grand, it is a definite loss," he said.
But he added that the people who planted the European beeches in the first place probably did not live to see them mature. "You have to take the long view," he said.
Still, Ms. Coxe, of the preservation society, said she was heartbroken when she learned that the beech at its headquarters was doomed. "It’s very hard," she said. "It takes me a long time to say goodbye."
How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code
By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.
In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Weiner, he wrote: "One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’"
That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate - and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.
Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.
Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
It began as a weekend project this year, Dr. Knight said in an interview, adding: "I don’t have much experience in cryptography. My background is primarily in computational linguistics and machine translation."
Uncertain of the original language, the researchers went down several blind alleys before following their hunches. First, they assumed the Roman characters and not the abstract symbols contained all of the information.
But when that approach failed, they figured that the code was what cryptographers call a homophonic cipher - a substitution code that does not have a straightforward correspondence between the original and encoded information. And they decided the original language was probably German.
Eventually they concluded that the Roman letters were so-called nulls, meant to mislead the code breaker, and that the letters represented spaces between words made up of elaborate symbols. Another crucial discovery was that a colon indicated the doubling of the previous consonant.
The researchers used language-translation techniques like expected word frequency to guess what a symbol might equal in German.
“It turned out that we can apply a lot those techniques to code breaking," Dr. Knight said.
The work is being praised by other experts. "Cracking the Copiale Cipher was a neat bit of work by Kevin Knight and his collaborators," said Nick Pelling, a British software designer and a security specialist who maintains Cipher Mysteries, a cryptography news blog.
But while the cipher was a notable success, Dr. Knight and his colleagues have been frustrated by other, more impenetrable ciphers.
“There are these books and ancient languages of real historical value that contain historical information that we just can’t get out yet, and that’s of interest to a lot of people," he said in a filmed interview describing the Copiale project.
The work has value to historians who are trying to understand the spread of political ideas. Secret societies were all the rage in the 18th century, Dr. Knight said, and they had an influence on both the American and French Revolutions. He recently shared the decoded Copiale text with Andreas Onnerfors, a historian at Lund University in Sweden and an expert on secret societies.
“When he saw the book and the decoded version, he was very excited about it," Dr. Knight said. "He found a political commentary at the end that talked about the natural rights of man. That was pretty interesting and early."
Modern examples of challenging ciphers include the communications the Zodiac killer sent to the police in California in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Kryptos sculpture, commissioned for the C.I.A. headquarters, which has been only partly decoded.
But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world’s best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.
With a University of Chicago computer scientist, Dr. Knight this year published a detailed analysis of the manuscript that falls short of answering the hoax question, but does find some evidence that it contains patterns that match the structure of natural language.
“It’s been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world," he said. "It’s super full of patterns, and so for somebody to have created something like that would have been a lot of work. So I feel that it’s probably a code."
Bees’ Migration Holds Clues to Geologic History
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Two new bee species shed light on Panama’s history as a land bridge between South and Central America, scientists are reporting.
The two sister species, one from Coiba Island in Panama and one from northern Colombia, descend from a group of stingless bees that originated in the Amazon and moved north over millions of years, eventually to Mexico.
The bees have a limited migration range, since worker bees must build a new nest before a virgin queen will move in to form a new colony.
“It’s really impossible for them to get across a water barrier," said David Roubik, an entomologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and one of the researchers who discovered the bees.
So it must have been a land connection, presumably the Panama isthmus. that allowed for this migration, he said. (The findings appear in the journal Systematic Entomology.)
Most researchers believe that the Panama land bridge arose about three million years ago from tectonic and volcanic activity, connecting Central America to South America.
But Dr. Roubik and his colleagues believe the ancestors of the new bees originated in the Amazon about 22 million years ago and moved north into Central America about 17 million years ago.
The bees, as well as other fossil findings, indicate that there must have been an earlier land connection, Dr. Roubik said. And that connection is millions of years older than previously thought.
“There was an earlier chunk of land that linked Colombia to Costa Rica," he said. These are signs of a very old connection.
A Big-Game Hunt by Early North Americans
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 20, 2011
For many years, it was thought that the Clovis people were the first humans to populate North America, about 13,000 years ago.
But recently, evidence has suggested that other settlers arrived earlier, and a new study lends support to that hypothesis.
The study, in the journal Science, finds that a mastodon rib with a bone point lodged in it dates back 13,800 years.
“It’s the first hunting weapon found pre-Clovis," said the lead author, Michael R. Waters, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University. "These people were hunting mastodons."
The fossils had been discovered in the late 1970s at a dig known as the Manis site, near Sequim, Wash., by Carl Gustafson, an archaeologist at Washington State University. At the time, Dr. Gustafson proposed that the skeleton was about 14,000 years old and that hunters had killed the mastodon with a bone point.
His theory was questioned by other scientists. But carbon dating technology has improved since then, and Dr. Waters and his colleagues, including Dr. Gustafson, were able to use mass spectrometry to date the rib, the bone point and tusks that were found at the site.
They also used CT scanning to closely study the embedded bone point to confirm that it was a hunting tool. They found that the point was more than 10 inches long and that it had been sharpened.
“It couldn’t have been anything else," Dr. Waters said.
Like the Clovis people, the Manis inhabitants also probably migrated to North America from northeastern and Central Asia, making their way over the Bering land bridge through present-day Alaska.
“What’s nice about all the pre-Clovis sites is that some had stone tools, and now here we see bone tools, all the rudimentary technologies that we later see in Clovis," Dr. Waters said.
The Clovis used these basic technologies to create a more sophisticated set of tools, he added.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 21, 2011
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the place where the mastodon fossils were found. The site, known as the Manis site, after the owner of the land, is near Sequim, Wash., not near Manis, Wash. (There is no such city in Washington.)
And some interesting medical articles:
Mammogram’s Role as Savior Is Tested
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Has the power of the mammogram been oversold?
At a time when medical experts are rethinking screening guidelines for prostate and cervical cancer, many doctors say it’s also time to set the record straight about mammography screening for breast cancer. While most agree that mammograms have a place in women’s health care, many doctors say widespread Pink Ribbon campaigns and patient testimonials have imbued the mammogram with a kind of magic it doesn’t have. Some patients are so committed to annual screenings they even begin to believe that regular mammograms actually prevent breast cancer, said Dr. Susan Love, a prominent women’s health advocate. And women who skip a mammogram often beat themselves up for it.
“You can’t expect from mammography what it cannot do," said Dr. Laura Esserman, director of the breast care center at the University of California, San Francisco. "Screening is not prevention. We’re not going to screen our way to a cure."
A new analysis published Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine offers a stark reality check about the value of mammography screening. Despite numerous testimonials from women who believe "a mammogram saved my life," the truth is that most women who find breast cancer as a result of regular screening have not had their lives saved by the test, conclude two Dartmouth researchers, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Brittney A. Frankel.
Dr. Welch notes that clearly some women are helped by mammography screening, but the numbers are lower than most people think. The Dartmouth researchers conducted a series of calculations estimating a woman’s 10-year risk of developing breast cancer and her 20-year risk of death, factoring in the added value of early detection based on data from various mammography screening trials as well as the benefits of improvements in treatment. Among the 60 percent of women with breast cancer who detected the disease by screening, only about 3 percent to 13 percent of them were actually helped by the test, the analysis concluded.
Translated into real numbers, that means screening mammography helps 4,000 to 18,000 women each year. Although those numbers are not inconsequential, they represent just a small portion of the 230,000 women given a breast cancer diagnosis each year, and a fraction of the 39 million women who undergo mammograms each year in the United States.
Dr. Welch says it’s important to remember that of the 138,000 women found to have breast cancer each year as a result of mammography screening, 120,000 to 134,000 are not helped by the test.
“The presumption often is that anyone who has had cancer detected has survived because of the test, but that’s not true," Dr. Welch said. "In fact, and I hate to have to say this, in screen-detected breast and prostate cancer, survivors are more likely to have been overdiagnosed than actually helped by the test."
How is it possible that finding cancer early isn’t always better? One way to look at it is to think of four different categories of breast cancer found during screening tests. First, there are slow-growing cancers that would be found and successfully treated with or without screening. Then there are aggressive cancers, so-called bad cancers, that are deadly whether they are found early by screening, or late because of a lump or other symptoms. Women with cancers in either of these groups are not helped by screening.
Then there are innocuous cancers that would never have amounted to anything, but they still are treated once they show up as dots on a mammogram. Women with these cancers are subject to overdiagnosis, meaning they are treated unnecessarily and harmed by screening.
Finally, there is a fraction of cancers that are deadly but, when found at just the right moment, can have their courses changed by treatment. Women with these cancers are helped by mammograms. Clinical trial data suggests that 1 woman per 1,000 healthy women screened over 10 years falls into this category, although experts say that number is probably even smaller today because of advances in breast cancer treatments.
Colin Begg, head of the department of epidemiology and biostatistics at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, said that he supports mammography screening and believes that it does save lives. But he agrees that many women wrongly attribute their survival after cancer to early detection as a result of mammography.
“Of all the women who have a screening test who have breast cancer detected, and eventually survive the cancer, the vast majority would have survived anyway," Dr. Begg said. "It only saved the lives of a very small fraction of them."
The notion that screening mammograms aren’t helping large numbers of women can be hard for many women and breast cancer advocates to accept. It also raises questions about whether there are better uses for the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on awareness campaigns and the $5 billion spent annually on mammography screening.
One of the reasons screening doesn’t make much difference is that advances in breast cancer treatment make it possible to save even many women with more advanced cancers.
“Screening is but one of the tools that we have to reduce the chance of dying of breast cancer," Dr. Esserman said. "The treatments that we have actually make up for a good deal of the benefits of screening."
The Dartmouth analysis comes two years after a government advisory panel’s recommendations to scale back mammography screening angered many women and advocacy groups. The panel, the United States Preventive Services Task Force, advised women to delay regular screening until age 50, instead of 40, and to be tested every other year, instead of annually, until age 74. The recommendations mean a woman would undergo just 13 mammograms in her lifetime, rather than the 35 she would experience if she began annual testing at age 40.
But the new recommendations have scared many women who believe skipping an annual mammogram puts them at risk of finding breast cancer too late. But Donald Berry, a biostatistician at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said adding more screening is not going to help more women.
“Most breast cancers are not lethal, however found," Dr. Berry said. "Screening mammograms preferentially find cancers that are slowly growing, and those are the ones that are seldom deadly. Getting something noxious out of the body as soon as possible leads women to think screening saved their lives. That is most unlikely."
Dr. Love, a clinical professor of surgery at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, says the scientific understanding of cancer has changed in the years since mammography screening was adopted. As a result, she would like to see less emphasis on screening and more focus on cancer prevention and treatment for the most aggressive cancers, particularly those that affect younger women. Roughly 15 percent to 20 percent of breast cancers are deadly.
“There are still 40,000 women dying every year," Dr. Love said. "Even with screening, the bad cancers are still bad."
Still No Relief in Sight for Long-Term Needs
By GARDINER HARRIS and ROBERT PEAR, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
The law that many Americans had hoped would transform the nation’s dysfunctional system of long-term care for the swelling ranks of people with disabilities and dementia quietly died this month, a victim of its own weaknesses, a toxic political environment and President Obama’s re-election campaign focus on jobs.
Its demise came as an intense disappointment to people like Alison Briolat, a chemist for a pharmaceutical company, whose family is staggering under the burdens of caring for her bedridden parents.
“Everybody at work is very glib about how they’ll never be a burden to their children and how I’m such a saint," she said. "But unless you have millions sitting in the bank, there’s no other way."
Unlike the rich, who can afford to pay for services themselves, or the poor, who get help through Medicaid, the federal and state program for low-income people, many members of the middle class have to look after disabled relatives themselves, or pay someone to do it. Polls show that many people believe that Medicare, the federal health program for those 65 and older, pays for such care. Actually, Medicare stops paying nursing home bills after 100 days.
More than 10 million people in the United States already have long-term care needs, and two-thirds of the costs are paid for by government programs, mostly Medicaid. Studies estimate that unpaid family members deliver an even larger share of the care, and the cost of nursing home care averages $72,000 a year.
Ms. Briolat’s parents live in a downstairs bedroom in her home in Lebanon, Ohio. Her father’s decline began eight years ago when he broke his ankle, an injury that failed to heal even after four operations. His foot became infected and was amputated. He went into a nursing home.
Ms. Briolat’s mother, burdened by her husband’s growing needs, soon went into decline as well. By then, five months of nursing home care had already cost the family $60,000. Ms. Briolat moved them both into her home. She pays a home health aide while she and her husband work.
The Community Living Assistance Services and Support program, or the Class Act, was intended to provide a benefit that averaged at least $50 a day, or $18,000 a year. If such a law had been on the books in time for her parents, it would have paid for most of their care.
“We wouldn’t have had to sell their house in Michigan at a fire sale price," she said.
But the Class Act’s ambitions were undercut by an impractical structure that doomed it from the start, experts and government actuaries say. Its failure harks back to an attempt by President Ronald Reagan and a Democratic Congress to protect the elderly from catastrophic medical expenses and provide a modest prescription drug benefit and somewhat improved nursing home care.
That law, the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988, was repealed within months of enactment after a furious response by elderly voters angry that they had to pay for the benefits themselves through a tax mostly paid by the wealthy. In a famous scene, Representative Dan Rostenkowski, an Illinois Democrat who was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was booed and chased down a Chicago street by a group of elderly people, one of whom draped herself over the hood of his car.
The repeal legislation created a commission to examine the issue of long-term care, but it ended the appetite of many in Congress to resolve the issue. The Clinton health plan made another attempt at improving long-term care, but the bill failed. And now the demise of the Class Act is repeating history.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy made passing the Class Act one of his last priorities, and his advocacy was an important reason that the program, despite its flaws, was included in the overhaul of the health law in 2010. But the Class Act was unusually sparse in its details, accounting for just 20 of the bill’s 900 pages. Senator Judd Gregg, Republican of New Hampshire, succeeded in adding an amendment requiring the administration to certify that the program would be self-sustaining for 75 years before enacting it. The administration concluded that it could not make that certification, killing the program.
Less than 3 percent of Americans now buy private long-term care insurance. The government’s version of long-term care insurance shared a basic flaw with commercial options: It was voluntary, with benefits to be paid entirely by premiums.
The Class Act allowed anyone, even those with serious health problems, to sign up. Policy holders had to pay premiums for only five years and could then get benefits for life. The poor could pay just $5 a month. Both promises all but guaranteed that the program would have needed big government subsidies to avoid going broke, experts said. Internal documents from the Department of Health and Human Services show that officials had doubts about the viability of the Class program before it was signed into law by President Obama. Richard S. Foster, the chief actuary at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, wrote in July 2009 that "36 years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant federal subsidies to continue."
The Obama administration continued to insist that the proposed long-term care program would be solvent over 75 years. But even some prominent Democrats disagreed. As the Senate considered the health bill in December 2009, 11 Democrats, including the chairmen of the Finance and Budget Committees, supported efforts by Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, to eliminate the long-term care insurance program.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said recently, "Everyone involved in the debate knew the proposal was impossible to deliver, and many of us said so."
If the program had restricted benefits to the healthy, limited payouts to five years and eliminated subsidies for the poor, it might have worked, said Joshua M. Wiener, a fellow at RTI International, a nonprofit research group. But advocates for the disabled were among the program’s biggest backers, and opposed the restrictions.
The program’s chief actuary, Robert Yee, said that limiting initial enrollment to workers at large companies or excluding benefits for 15 years also might have worked. But such fixes would have required new legislation, and the Obama administration concluded that such a bill had no chance of passing the present Congress, with Republicans, who control the House and can frustrate legislative efforts in the Senate, pushing for outright repeal of the entire health care law.
The president’s advisers decided that another fight over the health reform law would be a politically damaging distraction for his re-election prospects and ill timed, given the need to enact the broader health care law, itself under serious legal challenge
Advocates for the Class Act say they have not given up hope for the program. Connie Garner, who helped devise the long-term care program as an aide to Mr. Kennedy, declared: "We don’t see this program as dead. We will not let it die."
The program’s end is a blow to middle-class hopes, though its modest benefit would have covered only about a quarter of nursing home care.
“This was designed to serve as a bridge between the affluent who can care for their own and the poor who get Medicaid," said Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group.
Raymond Eriksen of New Providence, N.J., thought he was safe. He moved his in-laws into an assisted living facility because both were suffering memory problems. Fortunately, both had private long-term care insurance that, along with the proceeds from the sale of their house, pays for their care. Then Mr. Eriksen’s wife, Linda, began to decline and was given a diagnosis of early-stage Alzheimer’s.
He kept her at home until August, when caring for her became so overwhelming that he moved her into the same facility with her parents. Although long-term care insurance was offered by his employer, Mr. Eriksen had not purchased it "because we had three kids we had to put through college." Mr. Eriksen was an electrician for a major oil company but retired four years ago because of an injury.
“So we put it off until it was too late," he said.
He is now paying $7,000 per month for his wife’s care, a bill that is likely to rise as her faculties decline. Mr. Eriksen, 61, said that he is unlikely to have any money left by the time he needs care himself.
“I was middle class, but I’ll be impoverished eventually," he said.
Cool stuff!
Smooth Desert Boulders May Be Quakes’ Work
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Across the Atacama Desert in Chile are thousands of peculiar boulders that look as if they were rubbed smooth across their midsections.
How did it happen? Normally rocks become smooth by rubbing against one another in a body of water, but the Atacama is one of the driest places on the planet. Now a team led by Jay Quade, a University of Arizona geologist, has suggested an answer.
At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Minneapolis, Dr. Quade and his colleagues Peter Reiners and Kendra Murray reported that the boulders rolled down from the hills above, dislodged by earthquakes.
Over millions of years, the large boulders, each up to 10 tons, accumulated across the desert and began rubbing against one another during earthquakes, resulting in the smooth midsections.
Around the world, earthquakes typically result in water damage, in the form of floods and tsunamis, Dr. Quade said. But because the Atacama is so dry, water does not enter the picture.
“This provides a snapshot into a process we geologists don’t normally recognize the role of seismicity," he said.
The researchers estimate that since about two earthquakes occur in the region every year, it took about a million years for the boulders to gain their smooth belts.
Dr. Quade added that with some searching, similar boulders might be found on the Moon and on Mars and other planets where water is scarce.
The Weight of Memory
By C. CLAIBORNE RAY, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
Q. When an e-reader is loaded with thousands of books, does it gain any weight?
A. "In principle, the answer is yes," said John D. Kubiatowicz, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.
“However," he said, "the amount is very small, on the order of an atogram," or 10-18 grams. "This amount is effectively unmeasurable," he went on, since even the most sensitive scales have a resolution of only 10-9 grams. Further, it is only about one hundred-millionth as much as the estimated fluctuation from charging and discharging the device’s battery. A Kindle, for example, uses flash memory, composed of special transistors, one per stored bit, which use trapped electrons to distinguish between a digital 1 and a 0.
“Although the total number of electrons in the memory does not change as the stored data changes," Dr. Kubiatowicz said, the trapped ones have a higher energy than the untrapped ones. A conservative estimate of the difference would be 10-15 joules per bit.
As the equation E=mc^2 makes clear, this energy is equivalent to mass and will have weight. Assuming that all these bits in an empty four-gigabyte Kindle are in a lower energy state and that half have a higher energy in a full Kindle, this translates to an energy difference of 1.7 times 10-5 joules, Dr. Kubiatowicz calculated. Plugging this into Einstein’s equation yields his rough estimate of 10-18 grams.
And of course, HISTORY!
Next for Newport Preservation: Gilded-Age Beeches
By CORNELIA DEAN, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
In the Gilded Age, the rich built marble palaces here, surrounding them with exotic trees they acquired with the same ardor they brought to assembling their fabulous collections of art.
Their favorites were European beeches - green, copper and weeping beeches - trees they prized for their dramatic shapes and colors. Soon the streets of Newport’s mansion district were filled with the trees.
Today, many of them tower as high as 80 feet. "They are icons of Newport, the signature trees of the Gilded Age," said John R. Tschirch, an architectural historian who directs conservation programs at the Preservation Society of Newport County, which owns many of the mansions.
But the trees are in trouble. Planted more or less all at once about 120 years ago, they are aging all at once now, a process hastened by insect and fungus infestations they can no longer fight off. Though the mansion district’s main street, Bellevue Avenue, looks almost as elegant as ever, here and there stands a skeleton tree, bereft of leaves, or a stump perhaps five feet across, all that remains of a vanished giant.
Throughout the city, people are practicing what Lillian Dick, president of the Newport Tree Society, calls "geriatric arboriculture," treating ailing beeches with pesticides, keeping people from walking on their shallow roots, or pampering them with water and fertilizer. Often the efforts fail, so in many lawns where mighty trees once grew, replacement saplings stand, as gawky as adolescents at a ball.
One of them, a 20-foot copper beech, grows in the lawn of the preservation society’s headquarters, a three-story Romanesque Revival mansion on Bellevue Avenue, built in 1888 as a summer residence for William H. Osgood, a New York broker and yachtsman. Jeff Curtis, the society’s arborist, removed the sapling’s giant predecessor last year.
“It was over 50 percent dead," he said. Mr. Curtis regularly surveys all 1,800 trees on the society’s grounds, and he finds signs of disease everywhere. One day recently, walking on the lawn of another society property, the Elms, he stopped under the drooping canopy of a weeping beech and stared at its trunk for a moment. "Here," he said, pointing to a patch of dark brown goo oozing from the tree a few feet above the ground.
That ooze is a signature of beech canker, which has been attacking Newport’s trees for more than two decades, according to Brian Maynard, a professor of horticulture at the University of Rhode Island. The canker results from a fungus, phytopthora (pronounced fie-TOP-thuh-ruh), that also attacks the bark of stressed trees.
A second problem is cottony scale, an insect that taps into tree bark, introducing another fungus, nectria. "Nectria kills the bark of the trees," Dr. Maynard said. "The bark falls off, and the tree is in trouble."
Vigorous trees can fight off these two diseases, but they become vulnerable as they age. A tree’s growth occurs in its outer rings, Dr. Maynard said; he added that "the tree gives up on the old wood" in the center, which can rot, spread decay or suffer from injudicious pruning or other injuries.
“Trees are constructed to be able to tolerate some of this," he went on, "but eventually the insults build up to the point that the trees cannot keep overcoming them."
This is particularly true of beeches, whose shallow root systems are ideal for Newport’s thin topsoil but vulnerable to cars, trucks, lawn mowers and even people strolling in the shade. Dr. Maynard said that in their native European habitat the trees can live 300 or even 400 years. In the alien Newport climate, 120 years is more like it.
Mr. Curtis agreed. "They have a life span," he said. "All the treatment in the world is not going to save them."
Still, he spends much of his budget on treatments that can slow the infestations but not remove them.
Mr. Tschirch said serious efforts to monitor the trees began only about 30 years ago. Since then, he said, the preservation society has been working vigorously to treat and replace diseased trees. "We replant in kind," he said. "Where you see small copper beeches, they replaced large copper beeches."
The society supports the effort with donations and a grant from a foundation, the Prince Charitable Trusts. Mr. Curtis said he spent about a quarter of his budget on replacement trees. Recently he bought two good-size beeches for the Elms for about $350 each, "a good deal." In a nursery he operates in what was once a mews and greenhouse for the archetypal Newport mansion, the Breakers, he grows European beeches grafted to rootstock from the American beech. In Newport, the American beech is hardier, but it is far less glamorous. As Dr. Maynard put it, "it only comes in one color: green."
But most of Mr. Curtis’s budget goes to treat diseased trees, which, like all trees on society property, are tagged with quarter-size ID discs. "We have real plans for taking care of every single tree," said Trudy Coxe, the society’s chief executive.
If it were up to him, Dr. Maynard said, the focus would be on replacing the old trees. In the case of beech canker, he said, "by the time you see it, it has usually spread throughout the tree."
He added, "By clinging to these old trees and not developing a plan for their replacement, Newport has hurt itself."
On the Web site of the city’s Tree and Open Space Commission, Scott Wheeler, the city tree warden, makes a similar point. "Do the math," he advises homeowners. "Is it wiser to spend more on this ailing tree or to replace it with a young tree better suited to the surroundings?"
The tree society, a nonprofit group, backs a number of efforts to maintain or replace ailing trees throughout the city, not just in the mansion district. Among other things, the group encourages planting trees on private property to replace ailing municipal trees planted too close to city streets.
The society also produces brochures for a Gilded Age Tree Walk, a map of notable tree specimens along Bellevue Avenue, many of them ailing beeches. "Newport’s landscape, both historically and culturally, would be devastated by the loss of this species," the map says.
In an interview, Ms. Dick called the tree troubles "a crisis," and Mr. Tschirch said the beeches were as important to the Newport landscape as palm trees in Florida. "Beech trees are so magnificent and their branch span is so grand, it is a definite loss," he said.
But he added that the people who planted the European beeches in the first place probably did not live to see them mature. "You have to take the long view," he said.
Still, Ms. Coxe, of the preservation society, said she was heartbroken when she learned that the beech at its headquarters was doomed. "It’s very hard," she said. "It takes me a long time to say goodbye."
How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code
By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, October 24, 2011
It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.
In an oft-cited letter in 1947 to the mathematician Norbert Weiner, he wrote: "One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’"
That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate - and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.
Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. They described their work at a meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Portland, Ore.
Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters. The name comes from one of only two non-coded inscriptions in the document.
Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, collaborated with Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer of Uppsala University in Sweden to decipher the first 16 pages. They turn out to be a detailed description of a ritual from a secret society that apparently had a fascination with eye surgery and ophthalmology.
It began as a weekend project this year, Dr. Knight said in an interview, adding: "I don’t have much experience in cryptography. My background is primarily in computational linguistics and machine translation."
Uncertain of the original language, the researchers went down several blind alleys before following their hunches. First, they assumed the Roman characters and not the abstract symbols contained all of the information.
But when that approach failed, they figured that the code was what cryptographers call a homophonic cipher - a substitution code that does not have a straightforward correspondence between the original and encoded information. And they decided the original language was probably German.
Eventually they concluded that the Roman letters were so-called nulls, meant to mislead the code breaker, and that the letters represented spaces between words made up of elaborate symbols. Another crucial discovery was that a colon indicated the doubling of the previous consonant.
The researchers used language-translation techniques like expected word frequency to guess what a symbol might equal in German.
“It turned out that we can apply a lot those techniques to code breaking," Dr. Knight said.
The work is being praised by other experts. "Cracking the Copiale Cipher was a neat bit of work by Kevin Knight and his collaborators," said Nick Pelling, a British software designer and a security specialist who maintains Cipher Mysteries, a cryptography news blog.
But while the cipher was a notable success, Dr. Knight and his colleagues have been frustrated by other, more impenetrable ciphers.
“There are these books and ancient languages of real historical value that contain historical information that we just can’t get out yet, and that’s of interest to a lot of people," he said in a filmed interview describing the Copiale project.
The work has value to historians who are trying to understand the spread of political ideas. Secret societies were all the rage in the 18th century, Dr. Knight said, and they had an influence on both the American and French Revolutions. He recently shared the decoded Copiale text with Andreas Onnerfors, a historian at Lund University in Sweden and an expert on secret societies.
“When he saw the book and the decoded version, he was very excited about it," Dr. Knight said. "He found a political commentary at the end that talked about the natural rights of man. That was pretty interesting and early."
Modern examples of challenging ciphers include the communications the Zodiac killer sent to the police in California in the 1960s and ’70s, and the Kryptos sculpture, commissioned for the C.I.A. headquarters, which has been only partly decoded.
But the white whale of the code-breaking world is the Voynich manuscript. Comprising 240 lavishly illustrated vellum pages, it has defied the world’s best code breakers. Though cryptographers have long wondered if it is a hoax, it was recently dated to the early 1400s.
With a University of Chicago computer scientist, Dr. Knight this year published a detailed analysis of the manuscript that falls short of answering the hoax question, but does find some evidence that it contains patterns that match the structure of natural language.
“It’s been called the most mysterious manuscript in the world," he said. "It’s super full of patterns, and so for somebody to have created something like that would have been a lot of work. So I feel that it’s probably a code."