The Bad Astronomer’s secret media project has been revealed… Phil will have his own Discovery Channel show called Bad Universe–and I can’t wait to watch!! Check this out:

The summer of our government’s discontent (with personal genetics tests) continues. Yesterday an investigator with the Government Accountability Office reported back to Congress on its undercover investigation of the tests on the market, saying that testing the DNA of GAO staffers returned frequently contradictory and confusing answers.

“Consumers need to know that today, genetic testing for certain diseases appears to be more of an art than a science,” said GAO investigator Gregory Kutz [CBS News].

Here at 80beats, we’ve gone over some of the potential problems with these tests. DISCOVER blogger Ed Yong covers them in great detail in a post he wrote this week after getting his genes tested by 23andMe, including the dearth of data appropriate for interpreting results if you’re of Asian rather than European descent, and deciding whether to peek into the data that says whether you have a much higher than average risk for Parkinson’s disease.

The federal government began to worry about the same things this summer after Walgreens announced plans to sell tests by Pathway Genomics in its drug stores. Then, last month, the FDA announced that it intended to regulate these tests, whereas before they existed in a cloud of regulatory uncertainty—Pathway had told Walgreens the tests didn’t require the government’s OK. Congress got in on personal genomics, too, which led to this GAO investigation.

The GAO report suggests the companies still have a long way to go in drawing accurate conclusions. The agency submitted DNA samples from five staffers to four different genetic testing companies. When considering the same disease, the companies’ results contradicted each other nearly 70 percent of the time, according to GAO. In response to the same patient’s DNA, one company claimed he was at above-average risk for prostate cancer, a second said he was below average and two others said his risks were average [AP].

The FDA is holding meetings this week, trying to decide how it will regulate the tests.

Related Content:
Not Exactly Rocket Science: How I Got My Genes Tested
80beats: FDA: We’re Going To Regulate Those Personal Genetics Tests, After All
80beats: 5 Reasons Walgreens Selling Personal DNA Tests Might Be a Bad Idea
Discoblog: Welcome, UC Berkeley Freshmen! Now Hand Over Your DNA Samples
Discoblog: 23andMe To Customers: Oh Wait, Those Are Somebody Else’s Genes

Image: flickr / nosha

There will be no carbon cap-and-trade provision in this summer’s energy legislation in the Senate. Nor will there be a renewable energy standard (RES)—a mandate that a certain percentage of national energy come from renewable sources. Those are the two major losses for climate-watchers today as Senator Harry Reid and other Democrats announced they would drastically scale back their energy proposals in the face of what looks like an non-winnable fight before the 2010 midterm elections.

Instead, the Senate will consider a much smaller bill before the August recess.

The measure would include money for home energy-efficiency retrofits, for encouraging natural-gas-powered vehicles and for land and water conservation, Reid said [Los Angeles Times].

So what now for the more ambitious ideas to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adopt renewable energy technologies?

Compromise

David Moulton, director of climate policy at the Wilderness Society, said renewable energy supporters and companies desperately want the shot in the arm an RES could provide. But they might not get it without a compromise proposal.

One way to win additional votes for the measure could be to develop a “big tent bipartisan approach” that would expand the renewable electricity standard to a “clean electricity standard” including nuclear, carbon capture and storage and natural gas [The New York Times].

Push in other directions

Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have produced separate bills that specifically target power utilities for emissions reductions, and that bill might continue.

Reid left open the possibility that efforts to cap carbon emissions in the electric power sector could resume this fall. Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), an architect of Senate climate policies, vowed to continue pushing. “Harry Reid, today, is committed to giving us that opportunity, that open door over the next weeks, days, months, whatever it takes to find those 60 votes,” Kerry said. “The work will continue every single day” [The New York Times].

Use the EPA

Obama has pushed the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to take unilateral action if Congress fails to pass a bill. The EPA has begun issuing rules to cut emissions from cars and requiring power plants to have permits to emit carbon dioxide [Reuters].

However, given that EPA leadership changes from administration to administration, the unclear limits of its authority, and the feeling that Congress ought to make the rules on this important issue, most people see this as an unsatisfying answer. Congressional Republicans even tried to explicitly block the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse emissions, which the 2007 Supreme Court case Massachusetts v. EPA upheld. That effort last month fell short, but members of Congress may try to revive the issue, fearing the EPA will act now that the legislative branch has failed to do so.

Related Content:
80beats: Skip the Political Babbling: Here’s What the Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill Says
80beats: Climate Bill Passes in the House, Moves on to Senate
DISCOVER: It’s Getting Hot in Here: The Big Battle Over Climate Science, interviews with Judith Curry & Michael Mann
DISCOVER: The State of the Climate—And of Climate Science

Image: Wikimedia Commons

One of the marvels of Comic-Con is that when a panelist asks the people in the room whether they’d be willing to risk a fatal mechanical failure for the chance to go into space, everyone raised their hands. It’s the kind of place where nerds roam free, geeks can be both predator and prey, and the answer to the question, “How about going to space?” is foreordained.

The panel I’m referring to focused on the question of whether private companies are better suited to taking humanity into space, or whether NASA is doing awesome work and we, as a society, should just keep on keepin’ on. To help answer the question, the panel featured Mark Street (from XCOR), John Hunter (Quicklaunch), Chris Radcliff (San Diego Space Society), Dave Rankin (The Mars Society), Molly McCormick (Orbital Outfitters) and was moderated by Jeff Berkwits (editor and writer).

The group did praise NASA for the Mars Rovers and the Hubble space telescope (referring to the beautiful Hubble pictures, Rankin said, “let it not be said the federal government doesn’t fund the arts”) but generally they brought the hammer down on NASA and its private counterparts like Boeing and Lockheed Martin: NASA is too big, too old, and is constantly trying to perfect old ideas rather than introduce new ones.

And the group praised small “new-space” companies for being willing to fail and try, try again as they strain to bring space tourism to everyone.

But perhaps most interesting was the almost uncontested assertion that space flight will never really be profitable.

“Ninety percent of mass is propellant in space, and it’s $5000 a pound with rockets, SpaceX is is $2000 a pound,” Hunter said. “Going to Mars, that’s one million pounds per person. Each person is going to cost $5 billion in propellant alone.”*

But for all that Hunter threw cold water on the proceedings, he also said money really isn’t why we go into space.

“The only thing that makes money in space is communications satellites. Mining doesn’t pan out,” he said. “You have to go to space for manned exploration for the human spirit. You’re not going to make money there.”

And the members of the panel sagely nodded their heads. For all that these folks recognize the challenges of space flight, and the amount of money and smarts that will be required, they’re generally optimists: Every single one said they expect space tourism will become reality…eventually.

* This quote added later to correct a paraphrase of mine. Thanks to commenters Jadon and eyesoars for the correction.

They were perfectly lovely, the beets Surendra Pradhan and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski grew: round and hefty, a rich burgundy, their flavor sweet and faintly earthy like the dirt from which they came. Unless someone told you, you’d never know the beets were grown with human urine.

Pradhan and Heinonen-Tanski, environmental scientists at the University of Kuopio in Finland, grew the beets as an experiment in sustainable fertilization. They nourished them with a combination of urine and wood ash, which they found worked as well as traditional mineral fertilizer.

“It is totally possible to use human urine as a fertilizer instead of industrial fertilizer,” said Heinonen-Tanski, whose research group has also used urine to cultivate cucumbers, cabbage and tomatoes. Recycling urine as fertilizer could not only make agriculture and wastewater treatment more sustainable in industrialized countries, the researchers say, but also bolster food production and improve sanitation in developing countries.

Urine is chock full of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, which are the nutrients plants need to thrive—and the main ingredients in common mineral fertilizers. There is, of course, a steady supply of this man-made plant food: An adult on a typical Western diet urinates about 130 gallons a year, enough to fill three standard bathtubs. And despite the gross-out potential, urine is practically sterile when it leaves the body, Heinonen-Tanski pointed out.
The nutrients in urine are also in just the right form for plants to drink them up, said Håkan Jönsson, a researcher at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala who was not involved in the beet study but has researched urine recycling for over 15 years. Food gives us nutrients like nitrogen as parts of complex organic molecules, but our digestive system strips them down into the basic mineral form that plants need—so “we have done half of the job,” Jönsson said.

A small but dedicated contingent of organic gardeners in the United States and Europe already fertilize with urine at home, and researchers in Scandinavia have run pilot projects to recycle locally collected urine on small farms. But urine recycling may never become a part of large-scale farming in industrialized countries, because implementing it would mean drastically remodeling the sewage system in order to collect and transport liquid waste.

It would also mean swapping regular flush toilets for separating toilets, where a divided bowl and independent set of pipes sort the urine out from everything else. This detail is a roadblock, Jönsson said, because many people don’t want a toilet that looks strange. “Acceptance is a big problem for this kind of system.”

For the recent experiment with beets, the urine was obtained from specialized toilets in private homes. Heinonen-Tanski’s group planted four plots of beets and treated one with mineral fertilizer, one with urine and wood ash, one with urine alone, and one with no fertilizer as a control.

After 84 days, about 280 beets were harvested. The beetroots from the urine- and urine-and-ash-fertilized plants were found to be, respectively, 10 percent and 27 percent larger by mass than those grown in mineral fertilizer. By grinding some beets to powder and subjecting them to chemical analysis, the researchers determined that all the beets had comparable nutrient contents—and according to a blind taste-testing panel, the taste was indistinguishable. The results are published in the February 10 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Effective fertilization isn’t the only benefit of recycling urine, Heinonen-Tanski suggested in a review paper in the January 2010 issue of the journal Sustainability. The separating toilets that collect urine use less water than flush toilets, she writes, and the simplified waste stream requires less energy in sewage treatment.

“Agricultural and health organizations should encourage people to use human urine as a fertilizer,” Heinonen-Tanski concluded in that paper, especially in areas where wastewater treatment is unavailable or ineffective.

Though he’s skeptical that it will ever happen on a large scale, Jönsson does practice urine fertilization himself: He and his wife use what they collect from their separating toilet to nourish their garden at home in Sweden. The urine one person produces can fertilize about ten square feet of soil a day, Jönsson said—but there’s been less to go around since his three children left home.

“It’s enough for the vegetables and the flowers,” he said, “but I can only fertilize very lightly on the lawn. Otherwise I run out of urine.”

By Mara Grunbaum. This article is provided by Scienceline, a project of New York University’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program.

Image: flickr / B.D.’s World