Environmentalists praise fed ruling on San Onofre

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? A federal panel Monday sided with environmentalists who have called for lengthy hearings on a plan to restart the ailing San Onofre nuclear power plant ? a decision that further clouds the future of the twin reactors.

The plant between San Diego and Los Angeles hasn't produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.

The NRC has been considering whether to allow Unit 2 to restart and run at reduced power, which engineers from plant operator Southern California Edison believe will stop vibration that damaged tubing.

Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group critical of the nuclear power industry, argued that the plan to restart San Onofre's Unit 2 reactor is a change to the plant's operating license, which requires an extended, court-like hearing.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board agreed. The three-member board concluded that the restart would allow Edison "to operate beyond the scope of its existing license."

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., praised the board's move, saying in a written statement that it was a "sound ruling setting a legal framework for a full public hearing before any final decision on the restart of the San Onofre nuclear power plant is made."

"It is a comfort to me that the safety board stood up for what is right," Boxer said.

There was disagreement, however, over the reach of the ruling, which came amid a series of complex investigations at the plant.

Friends of the Earth spokesman Damon Moglen said in a statement that the ruling is "a complete rejection of Edison's plan to restart its damaged nuclear reactors." The group said the reactors cannot be restarted until NRC "holds a formal license amendment proceeding with full public participation."

But a statement issued by the NRC characterized the ruling by the panel, an independent arm of the agency, as only a partial win for the environmental group.

NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said the board found that the group hadn't provided enough information for the three-member panel to initiate a hearing and, accordingly, concluded its role in the case.

"They didn't give enough meat for the board to chew on," Burnell said. "At the same time the board says, 'Yes, there should be a hearing,' ... they said the hearing is terminated."

Burnell said a separate proceeding by NRC staff reviewing the restart plan will continue.

The board's ruling can be appealed.

Edison had no immediate comment.

Last month, SCE's parent, Edison International, raised the possibility of retiring the plant if it can't get one reactor running later this year. The company also disclosed that costs tied to the long-running shutdown had hit $553 million.

With mounting costs and questions about whether the plant can restart and who picks up the tab, "there is a practical limit to how much we can absorb of that risk," Edison Chairman Ted Craver Craver told Wall Street analysts.

Edison wants to run the Unit 2 reactor at no more than 70 percent power for five months, which it projects will stop damage to tubing in its steam generators. However, the board's ruling called the plan an "experiment."

The problems at San Onofre center on steam generators that were installed during a $670 million overhaul in 2009 and 2010. After the plant was shut down, tests found some generator tubes were so badly eroded that they could fail and possibly release radiation, a stunning finding inside the nearly new equipment.

The generators, which resemble massive steel fire hydrants, control heat in the reactors and operate something like a car's radiator. At San Onofre, each one stands 65 feet high, weighs 1.3 million pounds and has 9,727 U-shaped tubes inside, each 0.75 inch in diameter. Hundreds of the tubes have been taken out of service because of damage or as a preventative step.

The trouble began Jan. 31, 2012, when the Unit 3 reactor was shut down as a precaution after a tube break. Traces of radiation escaped at the time, but officials said there was no danger to workers or neighbors. Unit 2 had been taken offline earlier that month for maintenance, and investigators later found unexpected wear on hundreds of tubes inside both units.

In June, a team of federal investigators announced that a botched computer analysis resulted in design flaws that are largely to blame for the unusual tube wear. Overall, investigators found wear from friction and vibration in 15,000 places, in varying degrees, in 3,401 tubes inside the four generators.

Decaying generator tubes helped push San Onofre's Unit 1 reactor into retirement in 1992, even though it was designed to run until 2004.

San Onofre is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/environmentalists-praise-fed-ruling-san-onofre-224603708.html

venus williams Freeh Report direct tv wimbledon ray allen Savages Home Run Derby 2012

Drug manufacturer agrees to $500 million penalty

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A subsidiary of India's largest pharmaceutical company has agreed to pay a record $500 million in fines and penalties for selling adulterated drugs and lying to federal regulators in a case that is part of an ongoing crackdown on the quality of generic drugs flowing into the U.S.

Federal prosecutors said Monday the guilty plea by Ranbaxy USA Inc. represents the largest financial penalty against a generic drug company for violations of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which prohibits the sale of impure drugs.

It concludes a years-long federal investigation into Ranbaxy's manufacturing deficiencies. The Food and Drug Administration had earlier barred from the company from importing more than 30 different drugs made at factories in India and struck a deal that required the company to ensure that data on its products is accurate and to improve its drug-making procedures.

The subsidiary of Ranbaxy Laboratories Limited admitted that it made and sold impure drugs at two manufacturing sites in India. Prosecutors said the batches of adulterated drugs, whose strength, purity or quality differed from the specifications, included generic versions of an antibiotic and other medications used to treat severe nodular acne, epilepsy and nerve pain.

It's not known whether the problems with the drugs led to any health issues. The problems were largely revealed by a whistleblower in a federal lawsuit. The federal allegations against the company make no claims that the drugs harmed anyone.

The company admitted to a wide range of deficiencies, including improperly storing drug samples waiting to be tested, continuing to sell a drug even after it had failed purity tests and waiting months to voluntarily recall medication that it knew would not maintain its expected shelf life.

Ranbaxy also admitted making false statements to the FDA in 2006 and 2007 annual reports about dates of tests. In some cases, the tests were done months after the company said they'd been performed. Or the tests were done on the same day ? or within days of each other ? instead of months apart, the prescribed interval.

The company said it fully cooperated with the investigation, which it said involved actions from several years ago, and expects "future growth in the U.S. and around the world."

"While we are disappointed by the conduct of the past that led to this investigation, we strongly believe that settling this matter now is in the best interest of all of Ranbaxy's stakeholders; the conclusion of the DOJ investigation does not materially impact our current financial situation or performance," Ranbaxy CEO Arun Sawhney said in a statement.

The company had faced scrutiny in recent years. In November, Ranbaxy halted production of generic cholesterol drug Lipitor while it investigated how tiny glass particles got into dozens of recalled batches.

The case comes as federal regulators and prosecutors focus attention on the quality of ingredients of generics and other drugs manufactured overseas, said Alan Couckell, an expert on drug safety at The Pew Charitable Trusts. He said the 2008 deaths linked to tainted heparin, a blood thinner produced in China, served as a "wake up call" about just how much of the nation's drug supply comes from overseas.

"Over the last few years, the FDA and others have been increasingly focused on the risks associated with global drug manufacturing. The agency now has new authority and new resources which should result in an increased scrutiny on the highest-risk facilities," he said.

The company agreed as part of Monday's deal to a fine and forfeiture of $150 million as well as an additional $350 million penalty to settle civil claims that it submitted false statements to Medicaid, Medicare and other government health care programs. About $49 million of that penalty will go to a former Ranbaxy executive, Dinesh Thakur, who acted as a whistleblower by filing a federal lawsuit accusing the company of knowingly submitting false information to the Food and Drug Administration, prosecutors said.

Thakur said in a statement that the company had been notified of the problems, and "when they failed to correct the problems, it left me with no choice but to alert healthcare authorities."

"He was the source, the original source, of the information to the government that ultimately led to the government's earlier actions," said Andrew Beato, one of Thakur's lawyers.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/f70471f764144b2fab526d39972d37b3/Article_2013-05-13-Drug%20Company-Penalty/id-81adf77adff24605820859b17448e245

babe ruth new jersey nets nba playoff schedule rondo morris claiborne clippers lisa lampanelli

Chris Hadfield, Space Poet

Commander Chris Hadfield returns to Earth tonight after five months on the ISS. During that time, he went from 20,000 Twitter followers to more than 825,000.

By tweeting celestial images, explaining the finer details of life in space on YouTube, and participating in one of Reddit's most popular Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions, the outgoing ISS commander has become a social network rock star. By performing live with a earthbound Canadian band Barenaked Ladies, and posting a slightly modified rendition of David Bowie's Space Oddity to mark the end of his stay on ISS, he has proven himself an actual rock star.

Hadfield is an advocate for manned space travel to Mars: "It is the next logical step for man, and obviously I would love to be a part of that." And for self-preservation: "Last night's Russian meteorite strike is a good reminder that detecting asteroid threats is good for our health." He also takes the best selfies in the universe.

But perhaps Hadfield's most overlooked quality is his penchant for lyrical observations. To illustrate this, I crafted a poem entirely from the commander's more romantic tweets.

"Good morning, Earth!" As tweeted by ISS Commander Chris Hadfield (click the * for original tweets). Good morning, Earth! [*] 750,000 people are seeing the world from this perspective. [*] Just here, tears don't fall. [*] A view to put the mind at ease. [*] The wondrously wildly beautiful surface of our world. [*] An angry thunderstorm stands out against infinity. [*] A two-dimensional fountain, a river spurting and fanning into the sea. [*] The river hiccups like a zipper on an old coat. [*] The sun glint turns this river to liquid silver. [*] The beautiful and violent ugliness inside a naked volcano. [*] An island like splatter. [*] The gentle earthlights twinkle, the bright ones are clear. [*] The Earth bubbled and spat like boiling porridge, long ago. [*] An African river perpetually vomiting into the Indian Ocean. [*] Sand and water playing hide and seek on the African east coast. [*] The dry folded skin of the Sahara desert, looking like the crust of a pie. [*] Ancient Saharan stone, burnished by eternal sand and wind. [*] Manila in the night, like a vase full of flowers. [*] The Greek islands, like delicate shattered eggshell pieces. [*] The yin and yang of ice and land at Lake of the Woods. [*] Gasp? like a giant beast, sloughing off the last of the winter's snow. [*] Dubai, the Palm Island like a trilobite in the night. [*] A heraldic spring dragon of ice roars rampant off the coast of Newfoundland. [*] The Galapagos?just far enough apart to give Darwin something to think about. [*] Ships waiting their turn at the Panama Canal's western mouth. One amazing feat of engineering viewed from another. [*] This is what happens when engineers turn to agriculture. [*] The ethereal wisp of cloud over water, white on blue, to the eternal blackness of the universe [*]; a blackness like endless velvet. [*] In proportion, our atmosphere is no thicker than the varnish on a globe. Deceptively fragile. [*] Our Moon, tinted blue, made so by the wisp of Earth's atmosphere. [*] Our Sun is immensely, unfathomably powerful. [*] The first light of the rising sun turns our solar arrays to woven gold. [*] A wondrous experience; [*] Life in a cosmic shooting gallery. [*] Spacewalk at the end of Station, the furthest reach of any human in existence. [*] But I do believe we're not alone in the universe. [*] It's not easy putting on the Sokhol pressure suit - a tight squeeze. Like being born in reverse. [*] We undock for our fiery fall back to Earth [*] ?a human meteorite. [*]

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/chris-hadfield-space-poet-15465863?src=rss

etch a sketch romney sean payton saints bounty program toulouse france ny jets ny jets the situation

Same musicians play a brand new tune: Unusual interplay of signaling pathways shapes critical eye structure

May 14, 2013 ? A small ensemble of musicians can produce an infinite number of melodies, harmonies and rhythms. So too, do a handful of workhorse signaling pathways that interact to construct multiple structures that comprise the vertebrate body. In fact, crosstalk between two of those pathways -- those governed by proteins known as Notch and BMP (for Bone Morphogenetic Protein) receptors -- occurs over and over in processes as diverse as forming a tooth, sculpting a heart valve and building a brain.

A new study by Stowers Institute for Medical Research Investigator Ting Xie, Ph.D., reveals yet another duet played by Notch and BMP signals, this time with Notch calling the tune. That work, published in this week's online issue of PNAS, uses mouse genetics to demonstrate how one Notch family protein, Notch2, shapes an eye structure known as the ciliary body (CB), most likely by ensuring that BMP signals remain loud and clear.

In vertebrates, the CB encircles the lens and performs two tasks essential for normal vision. First, it contains a tiny muscle that reshapes the lens when you change focus, or "accommodate." And it also secretes liquid aqueous humor into the front compartment of the eye where it likely maintains correct eye pressure. Understanding CB construction is critical, as excessive pressure is one risk factor for glaucoma.

Eye development is a relatively new field for Xie, a recognized leader in the study of adult stem cells in the fruit fly: only recently did he branch out into mouse studies. "A few years ago I was asked to participate in a think tank-type meeting to discuss the potential application of cell therapy to treat glaucoma," he says. "I became interested in using retinal progenitor cells to treat diseases like glaucoma or macular degeneration. But I realized that first we needed to understand eye disease at the molecular level." The new study is an important step in that direction.

Previously, investigators knew that once cells that form the CB are established in an embryo, the BMP pathway drives their "morphogenesis," the term used by developmental biologists to describe the process of expanding and then sculpting a committed population of cells into a unique structure. "The Notch2 receptor was previously shown to be expressed in the developing mouse eye," explains Chris Tanzie, M.D., Ph.D., a former graduate student in the Xie lab and the study's co-first author. "But its function was unknown, and no one connected how various signaling pathways direct CB morphogenesis."

To determine what Notch2 was doing in the developing eye, the Stowers team constructed a conditional knockout mouse, meaning that the Notch2 gene is deleted from the genome only in eye cells that give rise to the CB. In normal newborn mice a series of cellular "folds" that characterize the CB emerges over the first 7 days of life. But the mutant knockout mice showed a complete absence of folds, dramatic evidence that Notch2 is required to elaborate a CB.

Furthermore, in normal mice a protein called Jagged-1, which activates Notch2, was expressed in cells adjacent to Notch2-expressing CB cells during the same developmental period. Strikingly, the team's collaborators in Richard Libby's laboratory at the University of Rochester Medical Center, were able to demonstrate that just like the Notch2 mutants, Jagged-1 conditional knockout mice showed almost total loss of CB fold structures, a major hint that Notch2 was switched on by Jagged1 to drive CB formation.

Biochemical and microarray analysis provided further explanation for defects observed after Notch2 loss. Comparison of normal and Notch2-mutant eye cells revealed that not only did cells of mutant mice lose BMP signaling but that expression of two proteins known to interfere with BMP increased in those cells.

"Up-regulation of BMP antagonists following Notch2 loss is an important observation," says Xie. "In other systems people often observe that Notch and BMP cooperatively regulate common targets by transcription factor collaboration at the transcriptional level, but this is a unique mechanism. We find that Notch2 keeps BMP signaling active by inhibiting its inhibitors."

The study's second co-first author is Yi Zhou, a University of Kansas Medical Center graduate student earning his Ph.D. in Xie's lab. "Our work reveals a novel link between Notch and BMP pathways potentially involved in the pathogenesis of glaucoma," says Zhou, noting one more tantalizing implication of the paper. "In addition, mutations in Jagged-1 and Notch2 are thought to underlie the human genetic disease known as Alagille Syndrome. Our work may lead to a better understanding of both."

Alagille Syndrome is an inherited childhood disorder causing defects in organ systems including liver, heart and the skeleton. Xie is equally intrigued by potential connections between his group's observations in the mouse eye and Alagille outcomes in humans. Nonetheless, he remains focused on nailing down how perturbation of the Jagged1-Notch2-BMP axis might cause eye disease.

"We now know how to build better mouse mutants to study CB development. In this work we show that Notch regulates BMP signaling but have not yet determined whether alterations in CB structure actually change interocular pressure," he says. "Answering that question is our future goal."

Other members of the Stowers team were Shuyi Chen, Ph.D., Michael Duncan, M.D., Karin Gaudenz, Ph.D., Christopher Seidel, Ph.D., Hua Li, Ph.D., Brandy Lewis, and Andrea Moran. Also contributing were Zhipeng Yan, Ph.D., Richard T. Libby, Ph.D., and Amy E. Kiernan, Ph.D, of the University of Rochester Medical Center. The study was funded in part by the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, the March of Dimes, and a Research to Prevent Blindness Career Development Award.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/Lm2HYSulChI/130514135419.htm

whitney houston has died whitney houston death the vow the voice season 2 ron paul maine safe house jay z and beyonce baby

Bangladesh rescue operation near end; collapse death toll at 1,127

By Ruma Paul

DHAKA (Reuters) - Bangladeshi salvage workers on Monday neared the end of their search for victims of the collapse of a factory building, scouring the basement of the complex that crumbled in on itself and killed 1,127 people.

A series of deadly incidents at factories, including a fire in November that killed 112 people, has focused global attention on safety standards in Bangladesh's booming garment industry.

The toll of 1,127 - the world's most deadly industrial accident since 1984 Bhopal disaster in India - could be the final one as no more bodies were found on Monday, a spokesman at the army control room coordinating the salvage operation said.

"The rescuers have reached the basement where the chances of finding more dead bodies are very low," said Captain Tazul Islam.

The site would be handed over to the district administration on Tuesday on completion of salvage work, according to army spokesman Shahinul Islam.

The cabinet approved an amendment to Bangladesh's labor laws on Monday, paving the way for parliament to allow garment workers to form trade unions without prior approval from the factory owners.

International labor and human rights groups had long campaigned for workers to be able to form establish unions without such approval.

The amendment was endorsed a day after the government decided to form a wage board to consider pay increases for readymade garment workers.

Average monthly minimum wages now stand at the equivalent of $38 after an increase of about 80 percent in 2010 in response to months of violent street protests.

UNREST

Worker unrest prompted authorities to shut down more than 300 garment factories for indefinite periods in the Ashulia industrial belt, on the outskirts of the capital Dhaka, that accounts for nearly 20 percent of total exports.

"Owners decided to close their factories on safety grounds after workers went on a rampage almost every day after the collapse of Rana Plaza," said Mohammad Atiqul Islam, president of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association.

Eight people were killed in a fire at a factory last week That an industry association said may have been arson.

About 2,500 people were rescued from the Rana Plaza, in Savar, a commercial suburb of Dhaka, after the April 24 collapse. Many survivors suffered serious injuries.

The disaster, believed to have been triggered when generators were started up during a blackout, has raised questions about the use by Western retailers of the impoverished South Asian nation as a source of cheap goods.

Nine people have been arrested in connection with the disaster, including the building's owner and bosses of the factories it housed.

The government has accused the owners and builders of the eight-storey complex of using shoddy building materials, including substandard rods, bricks and cement, and of not obtaining the necessary clearances.

Bangladesh's garment industry accounts for 80 percent of its exports. Low wages have helped lift Bangladesh to number two in the global ranking of exporters, behind China.

Bangladesh ranked last in minimum wages for factory workers in 2010, according to World Bank data, behind Cambodia.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/bangladesh-rescue-operation-near-end-collapse-death-toll-114953868.html

mohamed sanu chris polk rueben randle mike trout ryan broyles st louis blues bulls

To Ease Small Screen Nesting, Pinterest Mobile Adds Search Suggestions, Mentions, And Notifications

Pinterest works best on the web, with its big images and pinning from other browser tabs. But mobile is the future and Pinterest needs to play catch up there. Today Pinterest mobile added search suggestions to make single screen pinning easier. Its iOS and Android apps also got basics like notifications and mentions. Pinterest will need to add value, not just port its website, to win on mobile.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/mndjyzXrJq4/

jim yong kim michael bush the host trailer whitney houston cause of death marquette city creek center hilary duff

Project aims to track big city carbon footprints

Riley Duren, the chief systems engineer for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL) demonstrates on the laser radar designed to measure carbon dioxide in the air at Caltech's Linde + Robinson Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Friday, April 12, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Riley Duren, the chief systems engineer for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL) demonstrates on the laser radar designed to measure carbon dioxide in the air at Caltech's Linde + Robinson Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Friday, April 12, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Riley Duren, the chief systems engineer for the Earth Science and Technology Directorate at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory(JPL), shows the global map of carbon dioxide at Mount Wilson, Calif., Friday, April 12, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Palm trees are seen through an observatory door at Caltech's Linde + Robinson Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., Friday, April 12, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

This April 15,2013 photo shows the hazy skyline of Los Angeles seen from Mount Wilson, Calif., Monday, April 15, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

Senior research scientist Stanley Sander stands on the rooftop of the California Laboratory for Atmospheric. Remote Sensing (CLARS) facility at Mount Wilson, Calif., Friday, April 12, 2013. A mile above this city, sensors gaze down on the basin from atop Mount Wilson the way a satellite fixates on Earth, collecting pieces of information about Los Angeles' carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Every time Los Angeles exhales, odd-looking gadgets anchored in the mountains above the city trace the invisible puffs of carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that waft skyward.

Halfway around the globe, similar contraptions atop the Eiffel Tower and elsewhere around Paris keep a pulse on emissions from smokestacks and automobile tailpipes. And there is talk of outfitting Sao Paulo, Brazil, with sensors that sniff the byproducts of burning fossil fuels.

It's part of a budding effort to track the carbon footprints of megacities, urban hubs with over 10 million people that are increasingly responsible for human-caused global warming.

For years, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse pollutants have been closely monitored around the planet by stations on the ground and in space. Last week, worldwide levels of carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million at a Hawaii station that sets the global benchmark ? a concentration not seen in millions of years.

Now, some scientists are eyeing large cities ? with LA and Paris as guinea pigs ? and aiming to observe emissions in the atmosphere as a first step toward independently verifying whether local ? and often lofty ? climate goals are being met.

For the past year, a high-tech sensor poking out from a converted shipping container has stared at the Los Angeles basin from its mile-high perch on Mount Wilson, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains that's home to a famous observatory and communication towers.

Like a satellite gazing down on Earth, it scans more than two dozen points from the inland desert to the coast. Every few minutes, it rumbles to life as it automatically sweeps the horizon, measuring sunlight bouncing off the surface for the unique fingerprint of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

In a storage room next door, commercially available instruments that typically monitor air quality double as climate sniffers. And in nearby Pasadena, a refurbished vintage solar telescope on the roof of a laboratory on the California Institute of Technology campus captures sunlight and sends it down a shaft 60 feet below where a prism-like instrument separates out carbon dioxide molecules.

On a recent April afternoon atop Mount Wilson, a brown haze hung over the city, the accumulation of dust and smoke particles in the atmosphere.

"There are some days where we can see 150 miles way out to the Channel Islands and there are some days where we have trouble even seeing what's down here in the foreground," said Stanley Sander, a senior research scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

What Sander and others are after are the mostly invisible greenhouse gases spewing from factories and freeways below.

There are plans to expand the network. This summer, technicians will install commercial gas analyzers at a dozen more rooftops around the greater LA region. Scientists also plan to drive around the city in a Prius outfitted with a portable emission-measuring device and fly a research aircraft to pinpoint methane hotspots from the sky (A well-known natural source is the La Brea Tar Pits in the heart of LA where underground bacteria burp bubbles of methane gas to the surface.)

Six years ago, elected officials vowed to reduce emissions to 35 percent below 1990 levels by 2030 by shifting to renewable energy and weaning the city's dependence on out-of-state coal-fired plants, greening the twin port complex and airports and retrofitting city buildings.

It's impractical to blanket the city with instruments so scientists rely on a handful of sensors and use computer models to work backward to determine the sources of the emissions and whether they're increasing. They won't be able to zero in on an offending street or a landfill, but they hope to be able to tell whether switching buses from diesel to alternative fuel has made a dent.

Project manager Riley Duren of JPL said it'll take several years of monitoring to know whether LA is on track to reach its goal.

Scientists not involved with the project say it makes sense to dissect emissions on a city level to confirm whether certain strategies to curb greenhouse gases are working. But they're divided about the focus.

Allen Robinson, an air quality expert at Carnegie Mellon University, said he prefers more attention paid to measuring a city's methane emissions since scientists know less about them than carbon dioxide release.

Nearly 58 percent of California's carbon dioxide emissions in 2010 came from gasoline-powered vehicles, according to the U.S. Energy Department's latest figures.

In much of the country, coal ?usually as fuel for electric power ? is a major source of carbon dioxide pollution. But in California, it's responsible for a tad more than 1 percent of the state's carbon dioxide emissions. Natural gas, considered a cleaner fuel, spews one third of the state's carbon dioxide.

Overall, California in 2010 released about 408 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air. The state's carbon dioxide pollution is greater than all but 20 countries and is just ahead of Spain's emissions. In 2010, California put nearly 11 tons of carbon dioxide into the air for every person, which is lower than the national average of 20 tons per person.

Gregg Marland, an Appalachian State University professor who has tracked worldwide emissions for the Energy Department, said there's value in learning about a city's emissions and testing techniques.

"I don't think we need to try this in many places, but we have to try some to see what works and what we can do," he said.

Launching the monitoring project came with the usual growing pains. In Paris, a carbon sniffer originally tucked away in the Eiffel Tower's observation deck had to be moved to a higher floor that's off-limits to the public after tourists' exhaling interfered with the data.

So far, $3 million have been spent on the U.S. effort with funding from federal, state and private groups. The French, backed by different sponsors, have spent roughly the same.

Scientists hope to strengthen their ground measurements with upcoming launches of Earth satellites designed to track carbon dioxide from orbit. The field experiment does not yet extend to China, by far the world's biggest carbon dioxide polluter. But it's a start, experts say.

With the focus on megacities, others have worked to decipher the carbon footprint of smaller places like Indianapolis, Boston and Oakland, where University of California, Berkeley researchers have taken a different tack and blanketed school rooftops with relatively inexpensive sensors.

"We are at a very early stage of knowing the best strategy, and need to learn the pros and cons of different approaches," said Inez Fung, a professor of atmospheric science at Berkeley who has no role in the various projects.

___

Follow Alicia Chang at http://twitter.com/SciWriAlicia

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/495d344a0d10421e9baa8ee77029cfbd/Article_2013-05-13-US-SCI-Megacities-Carbon-Footprint/id-d95d0bd464a243f78658a562035fc0f8

mohamed sanu chris polk rueben randle mike trout ryan broyles st louis blues bulls