36,000 Iowans homeless as floodwaters recede

Marie Welton figures her daughter will have to bulldoze her flooded home here. She worries about the survival of her own business, a children's hair salon, as people recover from epic flooding that put 1,000 blocks underwater.

"They say we're going to be resilient. They say we'll overcome this," Welton, 52, said Sunday, but Iowans' can-do spirit "is going to keep going down before it comes up."

Floodwaters began to recede Sunday in Iowa's two largest cities, Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and the Iowa River crested in Iowa City after swamping part of the University of Iowa, but many communities face daunting cleanup and recovery efforts as the waters still threaten communities elsewhere in the region. Downstream Iowa communities such as Wapello, Burlington and Keokuk are braced for record flooding. Davenport put out an urgent call Sunday for volunteers to fill sandbags to reinforce two levees.

The National Weather Service predicts record flooding on the Mississippi River on Wednesday and Thursday at Canton, Hannibal and Louisiana, Mo., and Quincy, Ill. Authorities in Alexandria and Canton called for voluntary evacuations Sunday. Workers rushed to add 3 feet of sandbags to Canton's 27.5-foot levee. The river is forecast to crest there at 28 feet — 14 feet above flood stage.

"We're preparing for crests that are coming Wednesday through Friday that will rival the all-time records of 1993," Missouri Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder said.

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A Quiet Progress in New Orleans

At night, Genevieve Bellow's house is a lantern on a lonely block. After sitting under 3 feet of water from Hurricane Katrina, her modern two-story home in the affluent African-American neighborhood of New Orleans East has been gutted and put back together with new wood floors and a pool shimmering in the backyard. But while Bellow's house is back, her neighborhood is not. From her window, Bellow looks out at boarded-up homes and weeds bristling in the yards. Most area stores are shuttered. Debris chokes drainage canals, raising anew the fear of water.

Throughout much of New Orleans, recovery from Katrina has been hindered by the city's many prestorm weaknesses and delayed by false starts. Doors to ruined homes still creak in the breeze. Whole city blocks of the Lower Ninth Ward closest to the Industrial Canal breach are now a field of prairie grass pockmarked with concrete-slab foundations and driveways ending in wildflowers. Community anchors are boarded up or abandoned, and in the case of Gentilly's Provincial House convent, scarred by fire and rotting from water.

All this and more has people like Bellow wondering when, or if, evacuees still in cities like Houston and Atlanta will return and what will happen to all the empty shells that dot New Orleans.

Now, almost three years after Katrina, the answers are starting to come—and with them, a glimmer of promise. The federally funded Road Home program, the largest housing recovery program in U.S. history, has doled out $6.4 billion to storm victims looking to sell or rebuild their homes. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority will begin acquiring rights to as many as 7,000 properties that homeowners sold, often at a loss, to the program. Armed with these property rights, the city can now begin the emotionally fraught and painstaking process of weaving the properties back into the tattered fabric of New Orleans. Some will be kept for parks, community centers, and the like. Others will be sold to neighbors, new homeowners, or developers—largely distrusted here—to bundle together for large projects.

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The Couch Isn't Making You Fat

Today's couch potato lifestyle has been blamed for skyrocketing rates of obesity, but the cause of this trend may have more to do with the potato than the couch. An analysis of 20 years of published data on people's daily energy expenditure indicates that overeating, rather than a sedentary existence, is the major cause of the industrial world's obesity epidemic.

What is certain about obesity is that it is ultimately caused by an imbalance in people's energy budgets. When you take in more calories than you burn, your body squirrels the excess away as fat. The imbalance can stem from too much food, too little physical activity, or a combination of the two. Studies of self-reported exercise and eating habits have suggested that daily physical activity has decreased in recent decades, while daily caloric intake has remained steady. But people's accounting of their own behaviors is notoriously inaccurate.

To get more reliable data, biologists Klaas Westerterp of Maastricht University in the Netherlands and John Speakman of the University of Aberdeen in the U.K. turned to a technique called the doubly labeled water (DLW) method. Over 2 weeks, subjects are given trace amounts of water molecules whose hydrogen or oxygen atoms contain extra neutrons. The body draws on the oxygen atoms for metabolism, expelling some of them in carbon dioxide. By tracking the ratio of heavy hydrogen and oxygen in the urine, researchers can estimate a person's overall rate of metabolism.

The researchers analyzed published data from a 20-year DLW public health study of 366 Maastricht residents led by Westerterp. They compared these data with results from published studies conducted in the United States and the developing world. DLW "is the gold standard," says Speakman, "so we pooled all the data available."

The results indicate that people are burning just as many calories as they ever did. The daily expenditure of energy was similar across all studies throughout the period, whether the subjects were in Europe, the United States, or the developing world. Over the same 20-year period, obesity prevalence has doubled in the Netherlands and more than tripled in the United States. "We're not saying that exercise doesn't make a difference," says Speakman. "If you train for marathons, then of course you'll get fitter. But for average people, the daily physical activity hasn't changed. In the time we spend watching television today, people probably listened to radio in the 1950s and read books in the 1920s," he concludes. "This work suggests that the obesity epidemic has been largely driven by increases in food intake.”

"The study is provocative," says Loren Cordain, a physiologist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. "But I wouldn't hang my hat on it," he says, because the DLW studies used different experimental procedures, making them hard to compare. Cordain also worries that the 366 people studied in Maastricht might not be representative of the entire country. Speakman counters that "we know of no reason they wouldn't be representative."

from Science

Corn Ethanol Goal Revives Dead Zone Concerns

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 calls for the production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, including 15 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol, a tripling of current production that would require a similar increase in corn production. Yet scientists are coming to understand that biofuels, which originally sounded like a sensible response to the twin problems of climate change and dependence on foreign oil, create environmental problems of their own. One such problem is an increase in nitrogen runoff as farmers rush to plant more corn to meet growing demand for ethanol. According to the National Corn Growers Association, rising corn prices prompted farmers to plant 92.9 million acres of the grain in 2007, a 19% increase over the prior year.

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Mass transit demand rises, costs soar

In Seattle, transportation officials plan to add to their daily schedule another three round-trip trains to nearby Tacoma.

In Washington, D.C., commuters on the Metro will soon see many trains expand from six cars to eight.

In New York City, the transportation agency is spending millions of dollars to modernize the subway system's antiquated signaling system, so significantly more trains can travel through its underground tunnels at one time.

Across the US, public-transit officials are scrambling to accommodate a record number of people who are leaving their cars at home and hopping the bus or the train to work.

More than 90 percent of public-transit officials report that their ridership is up over the past three years, according to a survey released this week by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). And more than 90 percent credited the sky-high gasoline prices.

At the same time, many transit agencies find themselves squeezed by the higher fuel prices and smaller local government subsidies, which are shrinking because of the economic downturn. Almost 70 percent have had to raise fares, and some have even been forced to curtail services to cope with the high energy prices, even as the demand is increasing.

"You've got a time in history where these agencies could be tapping a new market and attracting the suburban people who, heretofore, have been less likely to ride [public transit]," says Stephen Reich, director of the Center for Urban Transportation Research at the University of South Florida in Tampa. "Some agencies are even contracting service because of fuel costs and decreasing government support."

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Warming study takes look at Gulf Coast region

A new government report offers a grim forecast of global warming's long-term impact on the Gulf Coast, warning that "a vast portion ... from Houston to Mobile may be inundated in the future."

The report comes as the Senate today is set to take up landmark legislation aimed at gradually rolling back the United States' emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

The predicted flooding, resulting from rising sea levels and sinking land surfaces, would occur within the next 50 to 100 years, according to the report, released last month by the National Science and Technology Council, a federal advisory body.

While the effects would fall outside the lifespans of most adults today, they could be felt by their children and grandchildren.

Titled "Scientific Assessment of the Effects of Global Change on the United States," the report is essentially a round-up of previous work on climate change. The section on the Gulf Coast is an adaptation of a separate study released earlier this year.

Although rising seas will threaten coastal areas around the country, the Gulf Coast "is facing much higher increases" because much of the region is subsiding as the result of soil compaction, the researchers concluded.

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