By Sharon Begley

NEW YORK, June 24 (Reuters) – The old adage, “it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity,” will come into play more often and in more places because of climate change, with life-altering results in southern U.S. cities from Miami to Atlanta to Washington and even northern ones such as New York, Chicago and Seattle.

“As temperatures rise, toward the end of the century, less than an hour of activity outdoors in the shade could cause a moderately fit individual to suffer heat stroke,” said climatologist Robert Kopp of Rutgers University, lead scientific author of the report. “That’s something that doesn’t exist anywhere in the world today.”

That result emerges from the heat-and-humidity analysis in “Risky Business,” the report on the economic consequences of climate change released on Tuesday. The analysis goes beyond other studies, which have focused on rising temperatures, to incorporate growing medical understanding of the physiological effects of heat and humidity, as well as research on how and where humidity levels will likely rise as the climate changes.

The body’s capacity to cool down in hot weather depends on the evaporation of sweat. That keeps skin temperature below 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 Celsius). Above that, core temperature rises past 98.6F. But if humidity is also high, sweat cannot evaporate, and core temperature can increase until the person collapses from heat stroke.

“If it’s humid you can’t sweat, and if you can’t sweat you can’t maintain core body temperature in the heat, and you die,” said Dr Al Sommer, dean emeritus of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University and author of a chapter on health effects in the new report.

The highest heat-plus-humidity reading in the United States was in 1995 in Appleton, Wisconsin, when the outside temperature was 101F. While the Upper Midwest is not known for tropical conditions, climate research shows that it will experience more warming than lower latitudes as well as more humidity.

As a result, the deadliest heat-and-humidity combinations are expected to center around that region, with threads reaching to the Eastern Seaboard and islands of dangerous conditions along the northwest Pacific coast.

If climate change continues on its current trajectory, the report concluded, Midwesterners could see deadly heat-and-humidity pairings (which meteorologists call “wet-bulb temperature”) two days every year by later this century.

“It will be functionally impossible to be outside, including for things like construction work and farming, as well as recreation,” said climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University.

Even without killer humidity, heat waves are expected to take a larger and larger toll.

The Southeast is expected to be hit with an additional 17 to 52 extremely hot days per year by mid-century and an additional 48 to 130 days by 2100. That could prove deadly for thousands: “Risky Business” projects an additional 15 to 21 deaths per 100,000 people every year from the heat, or 11,000 to 36,000 additional deaths at current population levels. (Editing by Douglas Royalty)

LONDON (Reuters) – Scientists studying the effects of the psychedelic chemical in magic mushrooms have found the human brain displays a similar pattern of activity during dreams as it does during a mind-expanding drug trip.

Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms can profoundly alter the way we experience the world, but little is known about what physically happens in the brain.

In a study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, researchers examined the brain effects of psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, using data from brain scans of volunteers who had been injected with the drug.

“A good way to understand how the brain works is to perturb the system in a marked and novel way. Psychedelic drugs do precisely this and so are powerful tools for exploring what happens in the brain when consciousness is profoundly altered,” said Dr Enzo Tagliazucchi, who led the study at Germany’s Goethe University.

Magic mushrooms grow naturally around the world and have been widely used since ancient times for religious rites and also for recreation.

British researchers have been exploring the potential of psilocybin to alleviate severe forms of depression in people who don’t respond to other treatments, and obtained some positive results from early-stage experiments.

In the United States, scientists have seen positive results in trials using MDMA, a pure form of the party drug ecstasy, in treating post-traumatic stress disorder.

DREAM-LIKE STATE

People who use psychedelic drugs often describe “expanded consciousness”, including vivid imagination and dream-like states.

To explore the biological basis of these experiences, Tagliazucchi’s team analyzed brain imaging data from 15 volunteers who were given psilocybin intravenously while they lay in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.

The volunteers were scanned under the influence of psilocybin and when they had been injected with a placebo, or dummy drug. The researchers looked at fluctuations in what is called the blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal, which tracks activity levels in the brain.

They found that with psilocybin, activity in the more primitive brain network linked to emotional thinking became more pronounced, with several parts of the network – such as the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex – active at the same time. This pattern is similar to when people are dreaming.

They also found that volunteers on psilocybin had more disjointed and uncoordinated activity in the brain network that is linked to high-level thinking, including self-consciousness.

“People often describe taking psilocybin as producing a dreamlike state and our findings have, for the first time, provided a physical representation for the experience in the brain,” said Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College London’s department of medicine, who also worked on the study.

“I was fascinated to see similarities between the pattern of brain activity in a psychedelic state and the pattern of brain activity during dream sleep, especially as both involve the primitive areas of the brain linked to emotions and memory.”

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Mark Trevelyan)

Turning off the mind could be as easy as flicking a switch.

That’s what doctors at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., inadvertently discovered while evaluating a 54-year-old woman with epilepsy. The researchers realized that by using electrodes to deliver tiny jolts of electricity to a particular region of the woman’s brain, they could control her consciousness almost as if they had an on-off switch.

While neurologists have in the past used electrodes to evaluate the function of various brain regions, this was the first time such a reaction had been observed.

Dr. Mohamad Koubeissi and his team observed the phenomenon while mapping electrodes implanted in the woman’s brain as part of an attempt to determine the origin of her seizures. They activated the electrodes one by one, sending a pulse of electricity to various brain areas. When they stimulated a sheet-like area of neurons called the claustrum, Koubeissi noticed something odd: rather than responding to commands, the woman was just staring blankly into space.

“The patient had a complete arrest of volitional behavior,” Koubeissi told The Huffington Post, adding that when they stopped stimulating the region, “she had absolutely no idea what had happened.”

To confirm that the patient had indeed lost consciousness rather than just temporarily losing her ability to talk and move, the team asked the patient to repeat a word and snap her fingers before the stimulation began. Each time the electrode was turned on, the team observed the same result — the woman slowly lost consciousness and became unable to recall what had just happened.

“Whatever we stimulated is a key component in the networks that constitute consciousness,” Koubeissi told HuffPost Science.

Koubeissi said he’d like to do more research on this brain region but acknowledged that that’s difficult to do because implanting electrodes into the brain solely for the purpose of research is out of the question unless a specific clinical trial has been approved.

Koubeissi said he hoped to do similar studies on other patients with epilepsy who have electrodes implanted near the claustrum. In the meantime, he’s using the knowledge he’s gained from the case study to investigate whether stimulation of the claustrum, or a neighboring region, reduces seizures in animals.

The research was published online and is scheduled for publication in the August 2014 issue of Epilepsy & Behavior.

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Lincoln may be famous for Husker football, but Nebraska’s capital city also welcomes visitors with free attractions for history buffs and families on a budget.

Here are five free things to see and do in Lincoln.

THE NEBRASKA CAPITOL

Few places speak to Nebraska’s independent spirit as well as the state Capitol. Home to the nation’s only one-house, nonpartisan Legislature, the Capitol is famous for its unusual design: It was the first to break from the traditional, “federal dome” look that most state capitols adopted. The 400-foot (122-meter) tower stands high over the Plains, with an observation deck that offers sweeping views of Lincoln. It’s the second-tallest state capitol in the nation, behind Louisiana’s.

The Capitol was built in stages between 1922 and 1932, but the work was halted because of the Depression. Just this year, lawmakers approved $2.5 million to place a fountain in each of the Capitol’s four open-air courtyards — the final, unfinished feature envisioned by architect Bertram Goodhue. The project is set for completion by 2017, when Nebraska celebrates its 150th anniversary a state.

THE RAILYARD

Amid the restaurants and bars, Lincoln’s new entertainment district offers free entertainment for families and young professionals.

Admission is free for the district’s new, outdoor ice-skating rink that’s open during the winter months (there’s a fee to rent skates). In warmer seasons, the rink is converted into a public courtyard. Visitors can watch movies, television shows and sporting events on the Cube — a set of digital screens perched on a building over the courtyard. The larger, 35-by-15-foot (10-by-5-meter) screen faces the courtyard, while a second 14-by-15-foot (4-by-5-meter) screen faces Canopy Street.

The Railyard sits across the street from the new Pinnacle Bank Arena, in the city’s popular Haymarket District. The Haymarket also hosts a regular Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings, usually from May to mid-October. It’s all less than a mile from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s main campus and Memorial Stadium, where the Husker football team plays.

PIONEERS PARK NATURE CENTER

Bison, elk and white-tailed deer roam the grounds at the Pioneers Park Nature Center. The 668-acre (270-hectare) park in southwest Lincoln surrounds visitors with nature and a sense of life on the Plains: Eight miles (13 kilometers) of hiking trails weave through a mixture of prairie, woodlands, wetlands and streams. A wildlife preserve gives visitors the chance to see owls, wild turkeys, a bald eagle, and other animals.

The park also includes hands-on exhibits for children and a variety of gardens. Admission is free, but donations are encouraged. Fees are charged for birthday parties and special events.

NICHE MUSEUMS

Lincoln offers a surprising mix of free museums, exploring everything from roller skates to the history of Germans from Russia.

Consider the Frank H. Woods Telephone Museum, which appeared briefly in the 2008 movie, “Yes Man,” with Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel. The museum features more than 500 telephones and related items, in a collection that stretches back to the early 1900s.

Or swing by the National Museum of Roller Skating, which chronicles the history of skates from the 1800s to the modern roller derby. The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia provides a look into the lives of German settlers in the Russian empire and their descendants.

HOMESTEAD NATIONAL MONUMENT OF AMERICA

The Homestead National Monument of America pays tribute to the 1862 law that helped populate the western United States. Located near Beatrice, Nebraska, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) south of Lincoln, the monument includes some of the first acres successfully claimed under the law. The site also offers a heritage center that explores the law’s impact on America, a tall grass prairie, a restored cabin from 1867 and the Freeman School, which provides a look at historic schools on the frontier.

By Lisa Baertlein

Aug 3 (Reuters) – McDonald’s Corp CEO Don Thompson sure could use a break.

The head of the world’s biggest restaurant chain, who for much of his two years at the helm has been battling to spark sales growth in the United States and Europe, got battered by headline-grabbing bad news in late July.

In the final days of the month, its China business was hit with a food-safety scare involving a key supplier; the chain got ensnared in the West’s sanctions standoff with Russia; burger flippers at U.S. restaurants claimed an incremental win from the National Labor Relations Board in their fight to hold McDonald’s responsible for the actions of franchisees; and, a Texas jury slapped the company with a $27 million verdict. Add to all that its results showed second-quarter profit dropped more than expected.

“They’re under siege on three continents,” said Howard Penney, restaurant analyst at Hedgeye Risk Management, an investment research firm.

To be sure, the company’s famous name and the ubiquity of its restaurants worldwide help to fuel the media storm, said Penney: “McDonald’s is a pawn in many instances around the world. It’s an easy target.”

Such upheavals are not uncommon for McDonald’s and other global power houses, including Coca-Cola Co and Wal-Mart Stores Inc, experts said, though perhaps not quite so many in such a short period.

In a statement a McDonald’s spokeswoman said: “In the last few weeks, we’ve seen issues in various parts of the world which directly or indirectly affect our brand and others. We have 35,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 120 countries, and skilled professional communications teams in every area of the world.”

She said that dealing with a 24/7 news cycle around the world is par for the course, and the communications teams address such issues so that the company can keep its focus on serving customers.

Thompson was not made available for comment.

DEFAULT BRAND

Analysts and investors said the latest, largely external events appear to pose manageable risk to McDonald’s profits, but they are a headache at a time when the company is grappling with intense competition, shifting consumer tastes and service slow-downs stemming from the menu additions of everything from salads and wraps to lattes and smoothies aimed at broadening its audience and boosting sales.

Branding expert Robert Passikoff, said McDonald’s needs to find a way to stand out from the crowd.

“McDonald’s has reached the point where it’s become a default brand. It’s there. That’s it,” said Passikoff, president of Brand Keys.

Shares in McDonald’s are up less than 7 percent since Thompson took the helm on July 1, 2012, lagging the S&P 500’s gain of nearly 42 percent in that period.

Investors, analysts and franchisees are clamoring for the company to stop trying to be “all things to all people”. They want it to simplify its unwieldy menu and point to the success of rivals like Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc and In-N-Out Burger, which have won passionate fans by selling just a few items.

McDonald’s was caught up in the latest China food safety scare after a July 20 television expose showed workers allegedly mishandling meat at Shanghai Husi Food Co Ltd, a factory owned by OSI Group LLC, a major supplier to the chain.

When the story broke, McDonald’s China business had been rebounding from the double whammy of a food safety scare and a bird flu outbreak that crushed sales in 2013.

McDonald’s roughly 2,000 restaurants in China suffered meat shortages after it ended its relationship with OSI China. Executives from the chain’s long-struggling Japanese unit, McDonald’s Holdings Co Ltd, who were forced to find alternate chicken McNugget supplies, said the scare sent sales down as much as 20 percent.

RUSSIA CONCERN

Seattle-based portfolio manager Bill Smead, whose firm Smead Capital Management holds nearly 516,000 shares in McDonald’s, took news of the China food scandal in stride.

“We assume that something is going to go amazingly haywire with companies in China,” said Smead, who added that he has ceased adding to McDonald’s holdings while the company works through its “tribulation” period.

About 15 percent of McDonald’s operating profit comes from the Asia/Pacific, Middle East and Africa unit that includes China and Japan, said Bernstein Research analyst Sara Senatore.

The bigger concern, she said, are McDonald’s troubles in Russia, where the company has about 400 restaurants.

Against the backdrop of the political tussle over U.S. sanctions imposed on Russia because of Moscow’s intervention in Ukraine, Russia’s chief sanitary inspector Anna Popova on July 25 accused the company of violations “which put the product quality and safety of the entire McDonald’s chain in doubt.”

Europe contributes about 35 percent of McDonald’s operating profit. The company does not break out country-specific contributions, but Russia “up until recently had been one of the stronger markets for them in Europe,” Senatore said.

Meanwhile at home, the troubles also piled on.

McDonald’s workers’ union-backed fight for better wages and working conditions scored points when the general counsel for the U.S. National Labor Relations Board said in a letter made public on July 29 that McDonald’s, not just its franchisees, can be held liable in complaints that the company violated employee rights.

David Hess, associate professor of business law at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said the NLRB attorney’s finding is just an early step in what is usually a long process.

As for the $27 million jury verdict awarded to family members of two teenagers who died following a beating in a McDonald’s restaurant in Texas, legal experts said that is expected to fail on appeal.

McDonald’s executives have promised to boost sales over the next 12 to 18 months by doing things like focusing on value, digital advertising and the quality of its food.

As for Thompson, Penney predicted that he will survive the current crises and gets more time to fix the longer-term problems, at least into 2015. “I don’t think he’s going anywhere. It’s too soon,” he said. (Reporting by Lisa Baertlein in Los Angeles; Editing by Jilian Mincer and Martin Howell)

Tiny amounts of lead, chemical flame retardants and organophosphate pesticides, among other toxins, course through the blood of nearly every American. But just how much worry is a little poison worth?

A lot, especially when considering the cumulative effects of this chemical cocktail on children, warns a video unveiled Thursday during an environmental health conference in Ottawa, Canada. The seven-minute project, “Little Things Matter,” draws on emerging scientific evidence that even mild exposures to common contaminants can derail normal brain development — lowering IQs and raising risks of behavioral conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

“The chemical industry argues that the effect of toxins on children is subtle and of little consequence,” co-producer Bruce Lanphear, an environmental health expert at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, states in the video. “But that is misleading.”

Drop a few tablespoons of sugar into an Olympic-size swimming pool, and you have the sort of minuscule concentration of a toxin that researchers are finding can wreak havoc on the brain. The drug Ritalin is designed to temper symptoms of ADHD at about the same level in the blood.

Children are most vulnerable to neurotoxins while in the womb and during the first years of life. “Things are happening very fast in terms of brain development, especially in the third trimester of gestation,” David Bellinger, an expert in children’s environmental health at Harvard University, told The Huffington Post. “Neurons are being born and migrating to where they are supposed to end up in the brain, differentiating into different types of cells, establishing connections with other neurons.

“Those processes are very sensitive. Everything has to happen in right order at the right time,” added Bellinger, whose research has associated lead, methylmercury and organophosphate pesticides to nationwide drops in IQ of 23 million, 17 million and 300,000, respectively.

Lanphear focused on six brain toxins in the new video: lead, mercury, organophosphate pesticides, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), bisphenol A (BPA) and polybrominated dipenyl ethers (PBDEs), a chemical flame retardant that his research team this year linked to IQ deficits and hyperactivity. This list of chemical brain-drainers, according to a study published in February, may be just the tip of the iceberg.

The chemical industry is critical of the new video and defends the safety of chemical products.

“Exposure to trace levels of a chemical does not signal impending harm to health,” said Kathyrn St. John, a spokeswoman for the American Chemistry Council. “This video and other communications like it hope to muddy the waters about the safety of various chemistries.”

Lanphear conceded one point. “It’s true,” he said. “Not all chemicals are bad.”

It’s also true that today, compared with decades ago, fewer children are exposed to high levels of some toxins, such as lead — concentrations that in previous generations may have been known to produce obvious, devastating effects such as seizures or death. But even if it goes unnoticed, a little lead exposure today may leave a child a little slower to learn, a little shorter of attention and a little less successful on tests and at work. Economists estimate that bit of lead may mean a loss of $90,000 in lifetime earnings.

Most IQ losses due to lead exposure fall outside of the federally established threshold. (Bruce Lanphear)

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other national and international health agencies, has declared that there is no safe level of lead in a child’s blood. However, due to limited resources, the CDC focuses on just 2.5 percent of children with the highest blood lead levels. Lead exposures among these 500,000 children, Lanphear explained to HuffPost, are estimated to have trimmed IQs by an average of more than 5 points.

Still, Lanphear emphasized that more needs to be done. With the heavy metal, and possibly with other toxins, there is actually a proportionally greater decrement in IQ at the lowest levels of exposure. In other words, the first 100 parts per billion of lead in the blood cuts IQ by an estimated 6 points. When blood lead concentrations rise to 200 and 300 parts per billion, respectively, estimates suggest another 2 points and 1 point of IQ are lost.

As a consequence of not addressing the lower-level exposures, added Lanphear, “we’re failing to protect over 80 percent of IQ points lost from lead exposure.”

In the new video, Lanphear illustrates another striking way widespread exposures to a toxin like lead can affect the next generation. A 5-point reduction in average IQ results in fewer than half as many children considered “intellectually gifted,” 50 percent more “intellectually impaired,” and billions of dollars of productivity lost.

A 5-point drop in average IQ among U.S. children would result in an additional 3.4 million children who are considered intellectually disabled or mentally retarded. (Bruce Lanphear)

For every $1 spent to protect kids from lead, according to study published in 2009, society saves $17 to $220, thanks to reduced costs of health care, special education, crime and lost lifetime earnings for those with IQ losses or disorders such as autism and ADHD.

And that’s just one toxin. Impacts from multiple chemicals may simply add up, amplify one another’s effects, or — although less likely — cancel each other out, noted Harvard’s Bellinger.

“The evidence is really mounting that industrial chemicals have some contribution to neurodevelopment problems,” said Tracey Woodruff, director of the University of California, San Francisco Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment. “And we’re seeing more kids with these problems.”

Experts agree that changes in diagnosis and surveillance contribute, but are unlikely to fully explain the large rise in such disorders. Bellinger suggested that the “first place to look” may be the chemicals that have increased in everyday life in recent decades, such as flame retardants and BPA.

Experts also agree on one big problem: We’re not really looking. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has only required toxicity testing for around 200 of the more than 80,000 chemicals permitted for use in the U.S.

“By allowing children to be exposed to toxins or chemicals of unknown toxicity, we are unwittingly using our children in a massive experiment,” says Lanphear in the video.

While suggesting that the “ultimate solution” is to “revise how we regulate chemicals,” Lanphear offered a few suggestions for consumers navigating toxins: Eat fresh or frozen foods, choose fish low in mercury, avoid the use of pesticides in and around the home and check for lead in older homes.

He also recommended writing government representatives and urging them to support regulation that reverses the burden of proof to require companies prove a chemical isn’t toxic before it enters the market. In the U.S., an overhaul of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 remains hotly debated.

“This emerging evidence that there is no threshold for some of the most well-established toxins strongly supports the urgent need to revise” the toxic substances act, Lanphear told HuffPost.

And while the time is ripe for that federal move, Lanphear added that it is “exactly the wrong time to terminate the National Children’s Study.” The future of the U.S. study, long-planned to follow children from birth to adulthood, tracking factors such as exposure to toxic chemicals, now looks uncertain.

“I firmly believe that until mothers and the public become more familiar with this science not much will happen,” said Lanphear. “The hope is that videos like this will help people understand this emerging pattern of toxicity.”

The reaction from Woodruff’s son, Xavier Woodruff-Madeira, 16, to the video is just the kind Lanphear hopes to spark: “I didn’t know that tiny little amounts of chemicals can add up to make a big difference in kid’s attention — and affect all those kids.”

Social mobility is a myth.

That is the depressing conclusion — or, if you’re already part of the social elite, the great news — of a new study by economists Gregory Clark of the University of California, Davis, and Neil Cummins of the London School of Economics. The hope that we can claw our way up from our low station to someplace fancier is a delusion for most of us, according to this study. We inherit social status from our parents just as much as, if not more than, our physical traits.

And this social status often persists across many, many generations. The title of the study — “Surnames and Social Mobility in England, 1170–2012″ — gives you some idea of just how many generations we’re talking about here: 28 generations of 30 years each. The study looked at centuries of data on the social statuses of English families. It found that many of the families who were socially elite landowners in 1170 — your Montgomerys, Nevilles, and Percys — were still socially elite in 2012.

“Strong forces of familial culture, social connections, and genetics must connect the generations,” the authors wrote. “There really are quasi-physical ‘Laws of Inheritance.'”

The study used attendance at Oxford and Cambridge Universities (“Oxbridge”) as a proxy for high social status; typically only elite students go to those schools. Across generations, the “correlation coefficient” — a number that shows the strength of the correlation between two things, with a 0 meaning not correlated at all and 1 meaning perfect positive correlation — was between 0.7 and 0.9 for generations of the same family going to Oxbridge. In comparison, the correlation coefficient for height between generations is just 0.64, according to one study cited by the researchers.

Hang on, you might be saying, isn’t England notorious for low social mobility? Isn’t it the land of Downton Abbey-style snooty inherited wealth? Sure. But guess what? The United States is really not much better. A 2013 study by Miles Corak of the University of Ottawa found that the U.K. and U.S. were two of the least socially mobile countries in the developed world. Here’s a chart that puts this in perspective:

Note that, according to Corak’s study, low levels of social mobility — meaning it’s hard to move from one social level to a higher one — are also associated with high levels of income inequality.

This is the kind of world that French economist Thomas Piketty warns could become increasingly common — one in which inherited wealth just keeps growing while incomes stagnate. It’s the sort of the world we’re living in today, come to think of it.

Most worryingly, the Clark-Cummins study found that social mobility hasn’t really improved significantly in recent decades, despite social programs aimed at boosting it, such as higher tax rates on wealth and programs to help lower-class students get into Oxbridge.

Maybe we just haven’t given such programs enough time to work, though. And given the many economic risks created by widening inequality, we shouldn’t stop trying to boost social mobility.

GALVESTON, Texas, Nov 24 (Reuters) – When Hurricane Ike hit this city on the Gulf of Mexico, William Merrell found himself trapped in a second-floor apartment as storm waters coursed eight feet deep through the floor below. “I had time to think,” said the professor and chair of marine sciences at Texas A&M University Galveston.

One thing he thought about was the Dutch Delta Works, a vast coastal protection system he had seen several years earlier on a trip to the Netherlands.

That led to his big idea: build a 60-mile-long, 17-foot-tall dike that would guard against the next hurricane that hits the long, thin barrier island on which Galveston sits. Like its Dutch inspiration, his idea included massive gates that would swing shut as a storm approached, blocking the 1.7-mile-wide entrance to Galveston Bay. The gate would protect low-lying parts of metro Houston, home to hundreds of thousands of people and an oil and petrochemicals complex essential to the U.S. economy.

Ike hammered Galveston and its 57,000 inhabitants, funneling a surge of water around an existing seawall and into the bay. Eighty percent of Galveston’s homes were damaged or destroyed, including Merrell’s apartment building. The hurricane killed 112 people in the U.S., including 36 in the Houston-Galveston area alone, and caused nearly $30 billion in damage.

The toll left little doubt that something was needed to defend residents and the U.S. economy against the next big storm. “It’s a national security issue,” said Bob Mitchell, president of the nonprofit Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership.

Six years on, Galveston and Houston, the nation’s fourth largest city, are as vulnerable as when Ike hit. No major projects are under way to fend off surging seas.

Instead, Merrell’s “Ike dike” remains the leading proposal for coastal defense. Nineteen cities and towns lining Galveston Bay back it, but with an estimated cost of $6 billion, the Ike dike is far from a done deal. It has no big money behind it. For the Ike Dike to evolve beyond wishful thinking, Texas would have to get funding from Congress and support from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the go-to federal agency for coastal protection.

But the corps has been sidelined by new spending limits, and Texas’s advocates in Congress have been silent. Major local powers – the city of Houston and the oil and petrochemicals industries – have yet to weigh in on Merrell’s plan or a competing idea pushed by Rice University.

“It’s absurd it’s been so slow,” Merrell said.

POLICY VACUUM

The paralysis in Texas reflects a troubling truth: The United States lacks a unified national response to the threat posed by rising sea levels. The policy vacuum leaves vulnerable communities to come up with their own self-defense plans and then hope to snag federal dollars before the next big storm.

“Without some sort of national perspective on this, it pits parts of the country against each other  And Houston is stuck right in the middle of it,” said Richard Luettich Jr, a marine scientist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and chairman of a National Research Council panel on coastal risk. The panel in July said U.S. government agencies have “no central leadership or unified vision” on reducing coastal risk – a failure that extends even to towns that are literally washing into the sea.

As previous articles in this series showed, the threat of rising seas is not an alarmist prediction. It is already a reality, resulting in increased tidal flooding and worsening storm damage along much of the U.S. coast. And even as the water has risen, subsidies for flood insurance, utilities and disaster bailouts are encouraging development along some the nation’s most at-risk shores.

For places like the Texas Gulf coast, which on average gets slammed with a major hurricane every 15 years, higher waters mean a storm today will tend to be much more dangerous than one of equivalent strength several decades ago.

“Sea level is not going to kill you today,” said Larry Atkinson, a professor at the Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. “It’s the storm surge that comes on top of the sea level rise.”

The probability of a flood in New York like the one that accompanied Hurricane Sandy in 2012, while still low, has increased about 50 percent since 1950, and tripled for parts of the New Jersey shoreline, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said in a September 2013 report.

That adds up to a lot of people and property at increasing risk.

At least $1.4 trillion worth of property – homes and businesses – sits within about one-eighth of a mile of the U.S. coastline. That number comes from a Reuters analysis of data provided by RealtyTrac. Incomplete data for some areas means the actual total is probably much higher.

More than 40 counties have coastal property worth $10 billion or more, the analysis found. In Miami-Dade County alone, about $94 billion worth of property lies along tidal waters.

Despite so much at stake, Washington shies away from large-scale action to defend the coast. Instead, it focuses on holding the line with smaller, temporary measures – dumping sand on eroded beaches, or building seawalls, breakwaters and berms to protect scattered sections of populated shoreline.

The price of these piecemeal measures is high: New seawalls average $36 million per mile, and a new levee is $10 million per mile, according to a 2010 study by Old Dominion. That doesn’t include maintenance.

But failure to act carries a high cost, too. In Galveston County, nearly 70 percent of businesses and 75 percent of jobs are in hurricane flood zones, according to a Reuters analysis of data compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The picture is similar in other parts of the country: In Norfolk, 76 percent of jobs are in hurricane flood zones. In Charleston, South Carolina, it’s a little more than half.

The federal government has typically waited to take major preventive action until after a disaster, when public awareness provides political impetus.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, emergency congressional action gave Louisiana $14.5 billion to build a comprehensive system of levees, dikes and floodwalls to safeguard the New Orleans area. This year, the levee system was accredited as safe enough to allow residents to get cheaper flood insurance.

Similar moves after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 provided much of the $20 billion New York City needs over the next decade to build 250 projects to protect against storm surges.

Many other cities with tens of billions of dollars in assets at risk have no recent storm to point to. They remain vulnerable. Norfolk’s mayor says his city needs a billion dollars for flood gates, raised roads and storm water improvements to protect its shoreline.

THAT OTHER DISASTER

Ike was the third most destructive storm in U.S. history after Katrina and Sandy. It would seem to have justified action on behalf of metro Houston.

But two days after Ike hit, investment bank Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, triggering a global financial crisis that quickly overshadowed Texas’s natural disaster. The state didn’t ask for any money for prevention, just for relief to clean up the mess. Galveston was represented in Congress at the time by libertarian Republican Ron Paul, who voted against any Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster aid anywhere. Paul declined to comment.

“All the coverage Katrina got and Sandy got, Ike just didn’t get,” Merrell said. Now, years later, “it’s hard to get someone’s attention when there’s not a hurricane.”

Most of the post-Ike disaster relief FEMA gave Texas has been spent to rebuild in the same places, as required by federal law. The agency is also offering subsidized flood insurance, another incentive to rebuild in harm’s way. Last year, Houston and Galveston officials and homeowners joined a nationwide rally to prod Congress to maintain below-market rates on flood insurance.

Galveston, like many cities along the nation’s imperiled shores, continues to encourage development. Over the past two years, the Galveston planning commission approved 81 of 85 applications to build even closer to the beach than normally permitted by state law, records show. New development is rising along the disappearing shore. Many of the expensive homes are perched on stilts.

Galveston and hurricanes have long shared a singular notoriety. On Sept. 8, 1900, an unnamed hurricane nearly wiped the city off the map, killing more than 6,000 people. To this day, it remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history.

Within a couple of years, construction was under way on a seawall to protect the city at the northeastern end of the island. It now stands 17 feet high. Originally about three miles long, it was extended over the ensuing decades to its current 10-mile length.

But Galveston Island is nearly three times longer than that. Most of its Gulf-facing shore remains exposed. Ike’s storm surge didn’t top the existing seawall, but it did go around it. A 20-foot-high surge shot into the bay, wreaking havoc.

Even without storms, rising seas are chewing away at the island’s unprotected beaches at a rate of two to 11 feet a year. The tide gauge at the city’s Pier 21 has shown a rise in relative sea level of 25 inches since 1908 – the largest increase over the past century at any of the scores of gauges monitored by NOAA.

About one-third of that rise was from oceans rising globally as water warms and polar ice melts. The remaining two-thirds resulted from land sinking due to subsidence, which happens when the removal of underground water, oil and gas causes the land to pancake.

Galveston Island is far from the only thing at stake. Between it and the mainland is Galveston Bay, connected to Houston by the 50-mile Houston Ship Channel, home to one of the world’s busiest ports. The entire area, once marshy wetlands, is lined with suburbs and at least $100 billion in oil refineries, chemical plants and related infrastructure. Metro Houston accounts for about 26 percent of U.S. gasoline production, 42 percent of base chemicals production, and 60 percent of jet fuel output.

A 25-foot storm surge pushing into the bay and up the ship channel would cause “economic catastrophe” to the nation and poison the bay in “the worst environmental disaster in United States history,” according to Rice University’s Severe Storm Prediction, Education, and Evacuation from Disasters Center. The Ike surge was just shy of that scenario.

“We do think we have a strong case for a national strategic asset,” said Robert Eckels, a Houston lawyer, businessman and former chief executive of the Harris County government. Eckels was appointed a month after Ike to chair the Governor’s Commission for Disaster Recovery and Renewal.

A RIVAL APPEARS

The commission first heard Merrell’s pitch four months after Ike. Members liked what they heard and recommended a feasibility study. In early 2010, the commission created a six-county “recovery district,” a non-profit also headed by Eckels, to look at ways to protect metro Houston. It promptly ran out of money: The $4 million for the study got tangled in a legal dispute over funding for rebuilding public housing in Galveston.

For the next three years, the recovery district was dormant.

Meanwhile, Rice University’s Sspeed Center in Houston had come up with a rival plan – and it didn’t include a wall along the gulf.

Instead, the Rice team proposed building what it called the Centennial Gate farther inland, at the entrance to the Houston Ship Channel. The gate’s two metal walls would swing shut to block any storm surge threatening the area. The cost, about $1.5 billion, could be at least partly covered by bond issues backed by taxpayers or industry, the Rice team said.

Merrell rejected the Rice plan as “a waste of money.” Any effective protection for the entire area would, like the Dutch Delta Works, have to armor the outermost shore, not the inner bay, he said.

Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law at Rice’s engineering school, helped develop the Sspeed Center’s plan. He criticized the Ike dike for protecting shoreline that should be left in its natural state. “Perhaps the coast should just be a place to visit,” Blackburn told reporters in 2009.

Galveston Bay has lost a third of its wetlands to development since the 1950s, removing a natural buffer against flooding and storm surge. The Rice plan would set aside about 225,000 acres of low-lying land and undeveloped coast around the bay to reduce storm risk. This proposed national recreation area would also draw in birdwatchers, kayakers and other tourists. “A no-brainer,” Blackburn said.

But communities around Galveston Bay hit hard at the Rice plan for leaving them unprotected outside the Centennial Gate.

“Collateral damage,” is how a LaPorte City Council resolution described their city’s fate under the plan. A blogger complained: “They have already drawn us off the damn maps.”

Past attempts to protect vulnerable shores have run into the same problem.

The new levees around New Orleans don’t protect towns just to the north, south and west. Residents of LaPlace, a town of 32,000 people northwest of New Orleans, blamed the improved levees protecting their neighbors for their own unprecedented flooding by Hurricane Isaac in 2012.

A centerpiece of New York’s plan – 10 miles of berms and floodwalls forming a “Big U” around lower Manhattan – would safeguard Wall Street. But some people complain it would push more water onto New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens shores.

Merrell’s Ike dike plan elicited similar complaints. Initially, he suggested that the dike simply trace a path from the end of the existing seawall along a highway that weaves beside the shoreline to the southwestern tip of the island. The highway would be raised atop the new wall.

But the strip of land that would lie between highway and beach contains $810 million in real estate, 11.2 percent of the island’s total, according to the county appraisal office. And if it were left outside the Ike dike, it could be washed away.

“If it’s on the highway side, it’s going to leave us underwater,” said Tom Booth, a retiree who lives with his wife in a condominium between the highway and the breezy shore where pelicans patrol the sky.

PLUGGING AWAY

As a solution, Merrell would build the wall right along the beach and cover it with sand and salt-resistant plants to emulate a dune line. That revision still raised issues of cost, lost views and restricted beach access, among other things.

Merrell continued to refine and tout the Ike dike plan. He talked frequently with engineers he met through connections at Delft University of Technology, which helped design the Dutch Delta Works. In September 2012, he helped lead a group of two dozen Texas business people, academics and engineers on a tour of the Netherlands’ flood and erosion projects. Many of these were started after the North Sea flood of 1953 killed nearly 2,000 people.

For now, his Ike dike idea and the competing Rice concept are staying alive on local grants – $4 million here, $3 million there. Area politicians have been pressing the two camps to unite. And recently, the Rice team modified its plan so that it resembles something very close to the Ike dike: In addition to the gate on the Houston Ship Channel, it now has sea gates and raised highways along the Gulf shore, eliminating the major objection that it left too many communities exposed.

But with no agreed-upon proposal to evaluate, the all-important Army Corps of Engineers has remained out of the picture. Sharon Tirpak, the corps’ project manager for a Texas coastal flooding study, stopped looking at Galveston Bay earlier this year after Congress imposed a three-year, $3 million limit on feasibility studies. Those caps are too strict to allow for the large studies required for the type of big fix metro Houston needs.

Only a congressional waiver can get around those limits, and as Tirpak told the Galveston City Council in April: “The political support, you don’t have it in Texas.”

She had a point.

Governor Rick Perry hasn’t commented publicly on the Ike Dike or any other storm protection plan. The state’s two U.S. senators, Republicans Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, are noncommittal, as is the U.S. congressman who replaced Ron Paul.

The oil and petrochemical industries, whose multibillion-dollar facilities would be protected by both competing plans, is in a delicate position: Texas leads the nation in emitting greenhouse gases, which are at the heart of the debate over human-induced climate change and thus rising sea levels. The industry’s powerful lobby said it is still evaluating the rival proposals. Edited by John Blanton

(Edited by John Blanton)

Text and photography by Lee F. Mindel for Architectural Digest.

Whenever I visit Paris, I make a point of strolling through the Luxembourg Garden, which–along with the accompanying palace–was commissioned in 1612 by Marie de Médicis, widow of France’s King Henry IV. The grand residence, modeled after Florence’s Pitti Palace, now serves as home to the French Senate, and the garden, which has undergone many changes over the years, is one the city’s most beloved public parks.

Luxembourg Garden has a mix of features, including French- and English-style layouts, fountains, and over 100 statues. It has appeared in plays, paintings, and novels, including Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, John Singer Sargent’s In the Luxembourg Gardens, and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Although it is famous for its spring flowers and a pond where children sail model wood boats in the summer, I have come to appreciate how beautiful–and dramatically different–the park is throughout the year.

See more images of Luxembourg Palace.

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In the hours following the announcement of the grand jury’s decision on Monday night to not indict Darren Wilson, the Ferguson cop who shot and killed unarmed black teen Michael Brown, news outlets focused on the destruction and looting overtaking the Missouri town.

But while “Ferguson on Fire” and “Jury Fury” dominated headlines, reactions to the decision were hardly all violence and chaos.

Across the country, activists took to heart the urgings of President Obama and Brown’s grieving parents to react to the decision with calm.

“I join Michael’s parents in asking anyone who protests this decision to do so peacefully,” Obama said on Monday. “Let me repeat Michael’s father’s words: ‘Hurting others or destroying property is not the answer. No matter what the grand jury decides, I do not want my son’s death to be in vain.'”

Thousands of supporters paid heed and partook in peaceful protests, marches, prayers and moments of silence as a call for justice for the slain 18-year-old.

Protesters Join Hands at the White House

About 100 protesters mobilized at the White House on Monday evening to join hands and sing, “We Shall Overcome.” Smaller groups also chanted, “The people, united, will never be divided!” and stood in silence for four-and-a-half minutes, paying heed to Michael Brown’s parents’ request.

“On CNN and all the other networks, they’re gonna show people burning things or flipping over a car,” Jevon Myles, a 27-year-old computer programmer, told Bloomberg. “But they’re gonna cover that before they cover anything like this. Peaceful.”

Supporters Urge Action on Supreme Court Steps

The growing group marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., snaking through Union Station, the Capitol and finally up the steps of the Supreme Court.

“Obama says, ‘I support Trayvon Martin’s parents, I support Michael Brown’s parents,'” one speaker announced into a microphone, according to Bloomberg. “He should support us. He sent us a cease and desist. He should say, ‘This is wrong!'”

Community Gathered in North Philadelphia

A photo posted by Anjana Rajan (@anjanarajan) on Nov 11, 2014 at 2:39pm PST

A crowd of protesters congregated at Temple University on Tuesday and marched through north Philadelphia. Supporters held signs reading, “We Are Michael Brown” and “Black Lives Matter,” and chanted, “No Justice, no peace, no racist police.”

One supporter Anjana Rajan told The Huffington Post that it was “super, super peaceful, just songs and drums and marching.”

Ohio State University Holds Prayer Vigil

About 100 Ohio State University students gathered to react to Monday’s decision with a prayer vigil, praying for the town’s safety and security, the Columbus Dispatch reported.

Bostonians Corral for Justice

About 75 to 100 people gathered in Boston on Monday night to march from City Hall to the State House, chanting “Justice for Mike Brown.” The group dispersed at around 1 a.m., according to CBS.

Protesters “Die-In” for Police Accountability

“Die-ins” were held throughout D.C., representing the death of Mike Brown, NBC4 reported. Various groups participated in the peaceful protest, demanding justice and police accountability. One group took the symbolic protest a step further.

“We did the ‘die-in’ for four and a half minutes to represent the four and a half hours they let Michael Brown lay in the street dead, unattended,” protest organizer Angie Brilliance, who planned a die-in in front of the Metro Police headquarters told NBC4.

Duke University Students Rally Together

Students at Duke University partook in a prayer circle on Monday night and then proceeded to march across campus, according to the Duke Chronicle.

“It was really a spirit of the moment,” Ciera Echols, a senior who organized the event, told the paper. “People say you can’t make a difference marching, but just coming together expressing ourselves — it was just really beautiful to see everyone come out tonight.”

Portlanders Send Message of Hope, Healing

Community leaders helped organize a calm protest in downtown Portland, Oregon, at the Justice Center on Monday night, where supporters chanted “No Justice, No Peace,” according to KATU.

“The situation in Ferguson did not occur in a vacuum,” Mayor Charlie Hales said in a statement. “All of our community is hurting today. And, together, all of our community must begin healing. We, as a society, have a lot of work to do addressing the systemic inequities history has left us.”

Thousands of New Yorkers Take to Streets

More than 1,000 protesters marched from Union Square to upper Manhattan holding signs that read “Black lives matter” and “Jail killer cops” and chanted, “No justice, no peace.”

Other groups walked across the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, which connects Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, and eventually crossed back into Harlem early Tuesday, according to NBC New York.

Virginia Commonwealth University Students Sing, Chant and March

Students at Virginia Commonwealth University chanted and marched through the heart of Richmond on Broad Street after the grand jury handed down its decision on Monday evening, according to CBS 6. After holding a moment of silence for the teen, the students sang “Amazing Grace.”

Floridians Call For Peace

In St. Petersburg, protesters including a number of families, walked around in a circle shouting slogans such as “No justice. No peace,” the Tampa Bay Times reported.

Rep. Darryl Rouson summed up the mood by telling the news outlet:

“I think people have the right to protest. There’s a lot of disappointment and frustration across the country and they are just expressing frustration and disappointment. There are appropriate ways to do it and I’m glad that the community is not seething.“

Volunteers Help Restore a Sense of Security

Amid the unrest, the people of Ferguson came together to help their fellow townspeople in this time of need.

Hundreds of citizens, from college students to local nuns, joined the effort to repair their town, proving that through all the chaos, they can still maintain their sense of community.

Online Donations Support Ferguson Library

With local schools canceled following the grand jury decision, the Ferguson Public Library stayed open and provided lunch for students. The Internet responded by sending the library a “staggering” amount in donations, Talking Points Memo reported. As early as Tuesday afternoon, the library said about 1,200 people had send donations through PayPal.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly referenced Ohio University, the prayer vigil took place at Ohio State University.

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Astronomers have apparently discovered the first of a class of strange hybrid stars, confirming theoretical predictions made four decades ago.

In 1975, physicist Kip Thorne and astronomer Anna Zytkow proposed the existence of odd objects that are hybrids between red supergiants and neutron stars — the collapsed, superdense remnants of supernova explosions.

These so-called Thorne-Zytkow objects (TZOs) likely form when a red supergiant gobbles up a nearby neutron star, which sinks down into the giant’s core, researchers said. TZOs look like ordinary red supergiants, like the famed star Betelgeuse in the constellation Orion, but differ in their chemical fingerprints, the theory goes. [Top 10 Star Mysteries]

“Studying these objects is exciting because it represents a completely new model of how stellar interiors can work,” study leader Emily Levesque, of the University of Colorado Boulder, said in a statement.

“In these interiors we also have a new way of producing heavy elements in our universe,” she added. “You’ve heard that everything is made of ‘star stuff’ — inside these stars we might now have a new way to make some of it.”

And now Levesque and her team say they have probably found the first TZO — a star called HV 2112 in the Small Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that lies about 200,000 light-years away.

The researchers used the 6.5-meter Magellan Clay telescope in Chile to study the light emitted by HV 2112. They found the starlight to be highly enriched in rubidium, lithium and molybdenum, just as theory predicts for TZOs. (Normal red supergiants produce these elements as well, but not in such abundance, scientists said.)

The new data, while suggestive, do not represent a slam-dunk discovery for TZOs quite yet, researchers said.

“We could, of course, be wrong,” co-author Philip Massey, of Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, said in a statement.

“There are some minor inconsistencies between some of the details of what we found and what theory predicts,” he added. “But the theoretical predictions are quite old, and there have been a lot of improvements in the theory since then. Hopefully our discovery will spur additional work on the theoretical side now.”

The find means a lot to Zytkow, who is a co-author of the new study.

“I am extremely happy that observational confirmation of our theoretical prediction has started to emerge,” said Zytkow, who is based at the University of Cambridge in England. “Since Kip Thorne and I proposed our models of stars with neutron cores, people were not able to disprove our work. If theory is sound, experimental confirmation shows up sooner or later. So it was a matter of identification of a promising group of stars, getting telescope time and proceeding with the project.”

The study has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters.

Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.

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Alan Turing would have been proud. Or would he have been terrified?

For the first time ever, a computer reportedly has passed the math genius’s iconic Turing Test, The Guardian reported. The achievement came at the Turing Test 2014 competition held at The Royal Society in London on Saturday, which was the 60th anniversary of Turing’s death.

Turing proposed his test in 1950 as a means of determining whether a machine could think on its own. He argued that if a machine could be mistaken for a human being more than 30 percent of the time during a series of keyboard conversations with actual humans, then it just might be “thinking.”

Now, a computer program named Eugene Goostman has met the challenge, convincing more than 33 percent of the judges at this year’s competition that ‘Eugene’ was actually a 13-year-old boy. The program came close to passing the test in a 2012 competition, fooling the judges 29 percent of the time.

“It’s a remarkable achievement for us and we hope it boosts interest in artificial intelligence and chatbots,” Dr. Vladimir Veselov, one of the researchers who developed Eugene Goostman, said in a written statement. “Going forward we plan to make Eugene smarter and continue working on improving what we refer to as ‘conversation logic.'”

Is Eugene really thinking? Actually, the computer program is a sophisticated simulator of human conversation run by scripts, io9.com reported.

In any case, competition organizer Dr. Kevin Warwick, a professor at the University of Reading in the U.K., said that the achievement has serious implications for modern-day society.

“Having a computer that can trick a human into thinking that someone, or even something, is a person we trust is a wake-up call to cybercrime,” Warwick said in the statement. “The Turing Test is a vital tool for combatting that threat. It is important to understand more fully how online, real-time communication of this type can influence an individual human in such a way that they are fooled into believing something is true…when in fact it is not.”