Uptown Radio

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Every year, New York City dumps billions of gallons of raw sewage into its waterways. Not only is that unpleasant — but the city could face hefty fines if it doesn’t clean up its act. The city has recently come up with a new plan to address the problem — a plan based on so-called “green infrastructure.” It’s not going to stop sewage from overflowing entirely. But as Willow Belden reports, experts and community groups alike hope it will make a major difference.

Interactive graphic by Jonah Comstock.

Story by Willow Belden

Second Avenue in Brooklyn is a noisy, industrial street that dead-ends into the Gowanus Canal. There’s a maze of buses parked at the end of the cul de sac.

Hans Hesselein picks his way around the pot holes and steps out into a small, grassy park on the southeastern bank of the canal. A big green sign warns visitors not to swim. The Gowanus polluted with toxic chemicals, and this spot is a discharge point for sewage.

Hesselein says he was here last summer during a downpour — and he saw sewage pouring into the canal.

“There was just this huge, violent swelling of water rippling the surface,” Hesselein said. “And this pitch black cloud, filled with all kinds of floating debris just spread across the water like an oil slick.”

This spot on the Gowanus Canal is one of hundreds of locations around the city where raw sewage is discharged into the water. (Photo by Jonah Comstock)

Most of it was human excrement.

“And it smelled,” Hesselein said. “Oh my goodness — You can imagine what it smelled like. It was all sewage.”

This spot on the Gowanus is one of more than 450 places across the city where raw sewage is discharged into the water. It happens whenever it rains hard.

Here’s how it works:

Step one: It starts raining.

Step two: The rain runs off of rooftops and streets and sidewalks … and flows into the sewers.

Most of New York City has what are called “combined sewers.” That means rainwater from the street mixes with wastewater from your bathroom and kitchen.

As a result, any time it rains, the sewage treatment plants have to deal with a lot more liquid.

“The systems — the treatment plants — in New York are generally able to treat twice what’s called the dry weather flow,” said Kevin Bricke, the director of environmental planning and protection at the regional office of the EPA.

Even with a moderate rainfall, the city gets significantly more than that.

When the capacity of the system is exceeded, the excess volume — i.e. rainwater mixed with raw sewage — overflows into the waterways around the city.  That’s called “combined sewer overflow” — or CSO. The city’s waterways get about 30 billion gallons of it every year. That’s more than 45,000 Olympic swimming pools full of sewage.

Signs like this one warn visitors about sewage discharge points near parks and beaches. (Photo by Jonah Comstock)

Some of the release points are near beaches, so when it rains, swimming is off limits. And people who live and work near discharge locations say the smell is sometimes nauseating.

But there’s a bigger problem. A legal problem.

The Clean Water Act makes it illegal to dump contaminants — including sewage — into U.S. waters. Cities can get permits allowing them to discharge some waste — but they have to prove that they’re working to remedy the situation.

“The city of New York is already in the process of developing what are called long-term control plans,” said Bricke. “These are their plans to abate combined sewer overflows and achieve the goals of the act. … They’re doing that under an order that they have with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.”

Until recently, the plans focused on increasing the capacity of the sewer system — building more tanks and pipes. That’s what’s called a “gray infrastructure” approach.

It’s expensive, though. A recent upgrade to a plant in Brooklyn cost five billion dollars.

And there’s another problem. Carter Strickland, director of sustainability at the city’s Department for Environmental Protection, says gray infrastructure treats the symptoms — not the disease.

“The fundamental cause of our wet-weather issues in urban areas is the fact that when you build a dense city … you have a lot of impervious areas,” Strickland said. “You cover things with roads and roofs and whatnot. …  So address the fundamental root cause of the problem, we need to make our impervious areas effectively pervious.”

In other words, we need to make New York City more like a natural environment, where the ground — not the sewer system — handles the rainwater.

That’s what the city is trying to do now: Not focus exclusively on gray infrastructure, but instead add what’s called “green infrastructure.” The new plan includes measures designed to stop storm water from entering the sewers in the first place.

“Green infrastructure gets to the root of the problem in a way that gray infrastructure doesn’t,” Strickland said.

There are several different types of green infrastructure.

One is being tested right now on a parking lot in New Jersey. The lot is made out of “porous pavement,” which is designed to let water seep through into the ground below.

Pat Pozzolano is in charge of testing the pavement for the EPA — to see how well it works. He picks up a plastic container with a precisely measured amount of water and empties the bucket onto the porous concrete.

The water disappears into the pavement almost instantly.

“That was 3.6 liters, and that flowed through at a little over five seconds,” Pozzolano says as he scribbles numers in a notebook.

Mike Borst, a chemical engineer with the EPA, says the pavement is tested every month.

“None of these have ever demonstrated runoff,” Borst said. “All the water that has hit it has gone in.”

Up to 960 inches of rain per hour can flow through porous concrete, which Borst says is 100 times more than almost any rain event.

There’s another way to get water to go into the ground: Get rid of the pavement, and replace it with “rain gardens.”

Rain gardens are gardens that are specifically designed to absorb stormwater.

The Gowanus Canal Conservancy is planning to rip out part of the sidewalks on this block and install rain gardens to absorb stormwater. (Photo by Jonah Comstock)

Hans Hesselein, who works for the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, is about to install a series of rain gardens, not far from where he saw the sewer overflow last summer.

He walks up the street away from the Gowanus.Workers bustle around the open doors of warehouses. Vehicles stand idle on the sidewalks. There’s not a tree in sight. Not yet, anyway.

The Gowanus Conservancy is planning to put in seven long, narrow gardens along the edges of the street.

“We hope to absorb all of the rain that falls on the sidewalk and the street itself, and channel it into basic rain gardens with street trees and shrubs,” Hesselein said.

The beds will be slightly lower than the surrounding areas, so water will flow off the pavement and into them. They’ll only take up half the width of the sidewalk. But if Hesselein’s calculations are right, the two and a half blocks where they’re installed  won’t send any water into the sewers.

The city’s Department of Environmental Protection is funding this project and several others that community groups are undertaking.

The city also has more than 30 green infrastructure projects of its own in the works. It’s making green roofs — which are basically rain gardens on top of buildings. And blue roofs — where they essentially turn the roofs into swimming pools.

“We have pretty much every technology that’s practical built on a pilot scale, and we’re starting the monitoring this spring,” Strickland said.

Monitoring — to see how effective green infrastructure is.

The city expects that it will actually work better than gray infrastructure — and cost less.

DEP has estimated that building more tanks and pipes would reduce CSOs by 30 percent. Add in green infrastructure, and they say we’ll reduce sewer overflows by 40 percent.

Environmental experts say that’s plausible.

“Green infrastructure can be very effective in terms of volume reduction for stormwater management,” said Robert Roseen, director of the Stormwater Center at the University of New Hampshire.

Roseen is working on a study about green infrastructure, and he says cities like Chicago and Portland, Oregon are successfully reducing their CSOs — and saving money — through green measures.

“Cost savings for CSO management with green infrastructure are often in the 20 to 30 percent ranges,” Roseen said. “And when you’re talking billion dollar price tags, that’s a lot.”

But green infrastructure isn’t a panacea.

Combined sewer overflows are particularly noticeable on Newtown Creek because the water is nearly stagnant. (Photo by Jonah Comstock)

Porous pavement may be good at keeping water out of the sewers. But Mike Borst, the EPA engineer, says that in the few places where it’s been used on roadways, it’s fallen apart three times as fast as normal pavement.

Some environmental groups also worry that the city’s green infrastructure plan doesn’t go far enough.

Katie Schmid, director of the Newtown Creek Alliance, likes the idea of green infrastructure. In fact, her group is redoing a park in Bushwick to add more soil and trees.

Schmid says the trees will help soak up stormwater in the Newtown Creek watershed. But she’s concerned that initiatives like this won’t be enough to solve the creek’s problems.

“You can make a huge difference with green infrastructure if you commit to it, you make every street tree pit capture stormwater, if you green enough city property as you can,” Schmid said. “But the caveat to that is that we need more than a big difference on Newtown Creek. We are radically under any sort of attainment standards. … And you have decades and decades of sewage just sitting on the bottom of the creek.”

The city’s green infrastructure plan would only keep ten percent of the rainwater out of the sewers. And environmental officials like Kevin Bricke say that even that is going to be hard to achieve.

“It’s much easier to implement green infrastructure measures when you’re doing new development, which you’re not going to find a lot of in New York City,” Bricke said. “When you’re retrofitting in an existing area, you can still achieve some objectives but not the same level of objective.”

The city is trying to encourage private individuals to help out by adding green infrastructure to their property. There’s a tax break for green roofs, and a fee that parking lot owners have to pay if they don’t manage their stormwater runoff.

The DEP is also giving out grants for green infrastructure projects, like the rain gardens by the Gowanus Canal. The deadline for applications is next Friday. And the groups that are selected will have a year to carry out the projects.

Where are the sewer discharge points (and public beaches) near you? Click for a larger map. (Map courtesy EPA).

With a tiny tissue sample, the DMR, can detect cancer cells in an hour and can be interfaced with an ordinary iPhone. Photo by Jonah Comstock/Columbia Radio News.

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Checking for cancer isn’t a quick process. From the time doctors first notice a tumor-like growth, it takes as much as a week before they can be sure of what they’re seeing.  But a new technology could change all that. Doctors at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital have completed clinical trials on what they’re calling a Diagnostic Magnetic Resonance device, or DMR. The machine is smaller than a shoebox, and can diagnose cancer in an hour.

Dr. Ronald Ennis is the director of radiation and oncology at New York’s St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. He says cancer diagnosis usually starts with an MRI or CAT scan, and then a biopsy, which involves taking a lot of cells with a large needle.

“There can be some tissue damage caused by the biopsy itself,” he said. “Those risks are usually low, but in the lung for instance there can be a possibility of causing lung collapse”

But risks like these could soon become obsolete—along with the waiting time for test results. The DMR uses a tiny fraction of the cells a biopsy takes, and can screen them for cancer within an hour.

In Boston, at his lab at Mass General, engineer Hakho Lee showed me to the DMR prototype, which was in three pieces on a table. A metal cylinder in a clear plastic cube, a little smaller than a shoebox, was connected to a plain metal box–like an external hard-drive. That was attached by a jury-rigged cable to an iPhone.  Lee touched the smartphone’s screen, displaying a red chart.

“And this little computer or little electronics is being interfaced with this iPhone here, so, just with a tap, you can start the measurement,” he said.

The “MR” in DMR is the same as in MRI – magnetic resonance.  That’s because the DMR is essentially a scaled down, stripped down MRI machine.  The DMR uses a magnetic field to scan tissue samples for particular proteins, the calling cards of whichever kind of cancer the doctors are looking for.

Cesar Castro–another doctor at Mass General–says that in tests like this one, DMR also detected cancer more accurately than traditional biopsies. But speed and ease of use are where the machine really shines. With a DMR, patients could get an immediate diagnosis at their bed-side, or even from their family doctor.

“It essentially equips the clinician and the researchers with more information about the status and kind of a snapshot of the cancer throughout the course of therapy. We haven’t been able to do that previously with prior technologies,” Castro said.

Cancer may not be the only disease the DMR can detect. By changing the protein markers, engineer Hakho Lee envisions using the device in third-world countries as a near-instant test for tuberculosis. The machine is also cheap to make – about $200 each if they were mass-produced – though Castro says the DMR will still need to be handled by medical professionals.

Dr. Ronald Ennis is cautiously optimistic about this invention. He says the greatest benefit could be to patients, who experience a lot of anxiety waiting to hear about test results.

“If that could be shortened to an immediate procedure instead of you know a week or two of one scan and then a biopsy and then waiting for the results, that would be great in terms of patient experience,” he said.

Ennis warned that technologies that look good in a lab don’t always make it into the real world, and he admits that a cancer detector that’s smaller, faster, cheaper, AND more accurate than current methods sounds too good to be true.  But if the DMR makes it through clinical trials, it may turn out to be just that.

A bacon cheeseburgers like so many whose buns are wasted each year. Photo courtesy of Larry Crowe/AP

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We all feel a tinge of dismay, when we pull a rotting tomato out of the refrigerator, or pop open a foul smelling jar that might have held dinner. But for our commentator, Alex Alper, a returned peace corps volunteer, wasting food is more than a nuisance: it’s the cause of a crusade.
—
I started to notice it not long after returning to the states two years ago. I’d go out to dinner with friends. Everything would be going great, but as the meal would wind down, I would start to get a little nervous.

As everyone took their last sips of coffee or wine, I would stare at the leftovers: Some wilted bits of lettuce, a piece of hamburger bun, some cold French fries saturated in ketchup.

The waiter would come to clear the plates and I would pry the plates from his hand.

“We need just a few more minutes with that,” I’d say.

“Alex, we’re done,” my friends would say, as I frantically ate the rest.

“Me too, I’m stuffed.” I’d confess. “but I can’t help it.”

And I couldn’t.

After three years in Peace Corps West Africa, I’ve had this socially awkward affliction: I cannot let food go to waste.

It’s not impossible to manage: I can walk past an abandoned cheeseburger on an empty table. I can go to a lunch interview and not ask the interviewer if he wouldn’t mind me eating the olives he picked off his pizza. I’ve gotten so much better, I can even let a waiter take uneaten bread or rice from my own plate.

But it’s been a hard road back.

In Guinea, I watched my neighbors struggle through the rainy season. That’s when last year’s harvest of rice and manioc is almost gone. They call it “la saison du souffrance” or the season of suffering.

But suffering in Guinea is year-round: kids have bloated bellies and orange tinged hair: telltale signs of malnutrition.

And the way Guineans treat food is just what you would expect: without refrigerators, women prepare just enough for dinner and the following breakfast. Not a kernel of rice is left in the pot. If the unthinkable happens—a baby tips over a bowl of uneaten food—something will be nourished: a goat, a chicken, or a cow, itself a source of food.

But here, in the US things are really different.

The National Institute of Health says Americans waste 40 percent of their food-from from farm to table to landfill.

And I get it!

Thirty four percent of Americans are obese and the same number are overweight. In a land of supersized sodas and plates the size of trays, leaving food would almost seem healthy.

But on an individual level, I root for the middle ground: take the rest home, order a side, or giving the leftovers to your crazy returned peace corps volunteer friend.

I admit, I’m as embarrassed to be that crazy returned peace corps volunteer on a mission, as I am about the neurosis itself.

But one of the three Peace Corps goals is to share what you learned abroad with other Americans.

So I‘m grateful for that knowledge, and grateful for the opportunity to share it, even if it makes me a somewhat awkward dinner guest.
–
That was Alex Alper, who is currently accepting dinner invitations.

Commentator Sandhya Dirks, playing with her younger brother Ishan. Photo by their father, Nicholas Dirks.

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My little brother is probably the most important person in my life. That’s kind of strange, because I grew up as an only child. But then again, so did he. You see, he was born when I was already 20, to a different mom. We are similar in that we share a father, and we share a culture: both of our mothers are Indian. This is why he calls me Didi; it’s Hindi for older sister.

Last year, at the age of 32, I moved back in with my father, his wife and my brother. I officially became a real, full time sibling…

My brother, Ishan turns twelve this year. He’s entered into that strange in between space when the sweet little boy becomes the awkward, hormone infested TWEEN. He’s still the sweet little boy, he’s just got a little more attitude. But then again, my brother has long enjoyed being the straight man to my loud, crazy and clumsy self.

Like the day after his first middle school dance, I asked him about it, and he said, “I went around and started talking to chickens… Of course I danced!”

So the kid can always make me laugh. But I do think our relationship is affected by the fact that now I am living with him…

I asked him what his least favorite thing about living with me was. His answer was short: “The bathroom.”

“The bathroom?… Why is that?” I asked.

“Because there is hair everywhere,” Ishan said. “Usually there is hair in the sink and in the tub. Didi the bathroom is gross!”

“The bathroom is not that gross,” I shot back.

“That’s why I moved out,” he said.

By gross he means—filled with girl cooties. Still even though he thinks Im gross, I love the kid.

When my brother was 5 days old, just home from the hospital—he turned suddenly blue. His body couldn’t regulate sugar and he became dangerously hypoglycemic. He was in the ICU for six devastating days. And then at 8 months old he had a cyst in his head, fatty tissue growing there, and he had to have brain surgery. Until he was four, every three months my brother had an MRI.

We don’t know if this caused some of the problems later— but my brother grew up with difficulties adjusting. At one point we thought it might be Asperger’s syndrome, later he was diagnosed with sensory integration disorder.

Whatever the technical name—he had problems with his motor skills, he had to be taught to write—to hold a pen in his hand. He would spend twenty minutes washing his hands, getting stuck obsessively repeating a single simple task. He hung back from other people, both kids and adults. He was always removed from social interaction. Sometimes it would seem like he was in his own isolation chamber; he wouldn’t listen to what other people said; often he just didn’t understand what other people said. My brother and I had an instant and deep bond. For some reason, I could always reach him.

Perhaps this was because while he was going through all this, there was something wrong with me too. In my twenties I was diagnosed and re-diagnosed: bipolar disorder and then clinical depression. Just like my brother, sometimes I found myself in an isolation chamber of my own making. But Ishan and I built a bridge between us. And as I grew up and learnt basic coping skills… he did too.

You wouldn’t know his struggles to see him now– the tallest boy in his class, with his sarcastic sense of humor. Our bond is still there, it’s just thathe gets annoyed with me now.  And sometimes I get annoyed with him too. We find each other exasperating and sometimes obnoxious. Just like– just like regular siblings.

Even if I do have cooties, I like to think he still looks up to me. Even if he only does so in third person…. Here he is talking about me:

“You know I once said, every third of her life when that brain of hers is working you could almost see the fumes from her head puffing out from the top of her skull,” he said. “It’s incredible, I mean there it is… it’s going right now.”

In response I said, “But most of the time what you’re actually trying to say is that my brain isn’t working.”

“I didn’t say that,” Ishan said. He paused and then added, “It may have been implied but I didn’t actually say that.”

Okay, so the respect is irreverent. VERY irreverent. But my brother is big on implication these days. Ishan will no longer tell me that he loves me—well not in so many words.

Instead when I tell him “I love you” – he says “you too.” Just “you too.” Its become a code between us, a brother sister lingo. So that’s what we say to each other now: “You too.” And you know what? They’re the best words I hear all day.

By Willow Belden

Linda Marzulla, the director of a crisis pregnancy center in Brooklyn, tells a group of pregnant women that they've made the right choice not to terminate their pregnancies. Photo by Willow Belden.

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The Expectant Mother Care center in downtown Brooklyn is located on a busy street near Borough Hall. It’s looks kind of like a doctor’s office. There are clipboards with medical questionnaires, two rooms with examining tables and a woman in a white lab coat. The waiting area feels more homey. Four young women lounge on leather couches. A video about the development of a fetus is playing. It explains that by the fifth week, the embryo develops hand plates and cartilage.

Down the hall, a 23-year-old woman is getting an ultrasound. She’s nine weeks pregnant, knows she wants to keep her baby, and came for an early ultrasound so she could show her mother a picture of the fetus. Linda Marzulla, the director of the pregnancy center, pokes her head into the sonogram room.

“Here, let me show you,” she says. “This is an ultrasound.”

She swivels the screen toward the expectant mother and the reporter. “We’re going to get his heartbeat now,” she continues, turning up the speakers until a muffled thumping noise is audible.

“This is a human being right here, OK?” Marzulla says. “It has a heart beat. It’s a baby.”

This facility is a “crisis pregnancy center,” or CPC. There are about 15 of them across the city. They offer free pregnancy tests, ultrasounds and counseling. But they’re not medical clinics. They aim to steer women away from abortions.

Marzulla says her center’s agenda is no secret. She walks back into the waiting room and points to a poster above the TV.

“The sign’s up already,” she says. “‘Free Abortion Alternatives.’ Here, look. ‘Pregnant women need support, not abortion.’ ‘Don’t panic, there’s a help line.’ These have been up for years.”

But some people say centers like this one are deceptive. So City Council decided to regulate them. Last week, the Council passed a bill requiring pregnancy centers to post signs saying they’re not licensed medical facilities and that they don’t offer abortions or emergency contraception. They’ll have to mention that on the phone as well, when women call to make appointments.

“It’s designed to be a truth in advertising bill,” said John Moore, a spokesman for Councilmember Jessica Lappin, who wrote the bill. “We’re targeting places that are not doctors offices but are trying to give the impression that they are.”

Some crisis pregnancy centers have a doctor on hand once or twice a week, for prenatal checkups. But the staffers administering pregnancy tests and sonograms aren’t licensed medical professionals. And the pamphlets they hand out include disputed facts about abortion. Moore says women need to know that.

“There’s a real harm in them thinking that they’re going to the doctor when they’re pregnant and not being at the doctor and not getting that medical care,” he said.

But administrators at the crisis pregnancy centers say their clients are getting the services they want.

“Not a single woman in 26 years has filed a complaint against us,” said Chris Slattery, the president of a chain of privately funded CPCs across the city, including the one near Borough Hall. Slattery dismisses his opponents’ criticism.

“They can detest what we say to women in a pregnancy center,” he said. “But our advertising of our centers has been legal and truthful.”

Slattery plans to sue the city over the new legislation. He says it’s a violation of first-amendment rights.

“It only applies to pro-life centers,” Slattery said. “So therefore, it’s regulation based on the content of our viewpoint and the content of our speech.”

Earlier this year, a federal court in Maryland ruled that a similar law was unconstitutional.

But Katharine, an attorney for the New York Civil Liberties Union, says this law is different. She says the Maryland law specifically targeted centers that don’t offer abortions, whereas the New York City bill applies to “entities that appear to be medical facilities — not based on the services they do or do not provide.”

Bodde says she expects the New York bill to withstand a legal challenge, because it applies to any center that looks like a doctor’s office but isn’t one.

“For instance, let’s say a crisis pregnancy center opened up tomorrow in New York City, and it wasn’t an anti-choice center; it was a pro-choice center,” she said. “That center would be covered under the bill.”

But Chris Slattery and the CPCs aren’t giving up without a fight. Slattery has hired a lawyer and plans to file for a restraining order as soon as Mayor Bloomberg signs the bill on Wednesday.

A Tarantula. Photo by Sascha Grabow

Tempura-Battered Tarantula

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“What I do with a tarantula when I’m going to prepare it, the very first thing I do of course is freeze it and defrost it. I don’t want to cook with a live tarantula – that would be a difficult one.

But I also take a sharp knife and I cut off the abdomen, that big round part of the body that’s really full of fluid; that’s pretty much all it is, is fluid. So I take that and I discard it.

And then using either a cigarette lighter or something like that – a crème brule torch – I actually will singe off all the hairs on the tarantula. Usually on the bottom, on the abdomen, there are hairs in particular that the tarantula can shoot – almost like people think about porcupines doing (although that’s a myth). But they can actually release these hairs and they actually create a very itchy sensation if they get lodged in your skin. So singeing off all the hairs is a really good way to prevent that from being an issue.

And then I can take the body, spread the legs out nicely – so you get a nice even spread – drop them into tempura batter, make sure that it’s coated all the way through and then put it into the hot oil and fry it up.
And that’s the basic recipe for tempura-battered tarantula.”

–David George Gordon, a.k.a. The Bug Chef. He is the author of the “Eat-a-Bug” Cookbook.

—–

Orthopteran Orzo

*Orthoptera is the umbrella name for grasshoppers, crickets, locusts and other bugs

Yield: six servings

Ingredients

3 cups vegetable broth

1 cup orzo

1 cup two- or three-week-old cricket nymphs

1 tablespoon butter

1 clove garlic, minced

½ cup chopped onion

½ cup grated carrot

¼ cup finely diced red pepper

¼ cup finely diced green pepper

2 tablespoons chopped parsley

Bring broth to a boil, then stir in the orzo.

Continue boiling the pasta until it is tender (about 10 minutes); drain any extra liquid, then quickly add carrot and red and green peppers. Mix evenly and set aside.

In a separate skillet, melt the butter, adding the minced garlic, onions and crickets. Sauté briefly, until the onions are clear and the garlic and crickets have browned.

Combine cricket mixture, including any liquid, with the orzo and vegetables, top with parsley and serve.

From “The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook” by David George Gordon (Ten Speed Press)

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By Linette Lopez

“10 years is too long!” was the rallying cry at a protest held on the steps of City Hall today. The demonstrators included a small group of parents, advocacy groups, and public officials that are demanding that the Department of Education move faster to remove harmful chemicals, called PCBs, from city school buildings. State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal lead the protest, and has been working on this problem since 2008.

“This whole issue began when there was botched window replacement project in a school in my district, PS 199. We found out that there were high levels of PCBs in the calk. At that time I introduced a bill to test every school for caulk. Right now what we’re focusing on is PBC in light ballasts in schools that were constructed or remodeled between 1950 and 1978,” said Rosenthal.

PCB is short for Polychlorinated Biphinyls. They are toxic chemicals that the government banned them in 1978. Before that, they could be found in a lot of building materials; materials that were used to build city schools. Children are most susceptible to the affects of PCBs. That’s why advocates like Gigi Garzon, from New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, are demanding their immediate removal.

“It can cause disruption to their immune systems, to their development to their reproductive systems, to their respiratory system, neurological, so it’s a whole host of problems particularly with low-level long-term exposure,” said Garzon.

Current EPA safety guidelines set acceptable PCB levels at 50 parts per million. Councilman Erik Dilan, represents parts of Brooklyn. In his district, they’ve found PCB levels of 600,000 parts per million- the highest in the city. That’s 12,000 times the acceptable level. He wants the city to be open about the problem, because his constituents are getting worried.

“Lets uncover the engine of this car and see what’s really under the hood. I attended a meeting on Monday and the staff was sitting there making conscious decisions as to whether they should come to work or not. The parents were doing the same thing with their children,” said Dilan.

The city has presented a plan that would replace all lighting ballasts over the course of ten years. But parents and public officials think that’s too long. JeanAndre Sassine is a father of two from in Queens Village. He thinks the city should listen to the EPAs recommendation that all schools get tested, and that light ballasts are replaced in two years.

“Its still 2 years of children sitting in this environment but it is what it is if that’s the quickest we can do it lets get it done it 2 years and not this 10 year “one light at a time” program that the Mayor’s proposed,” said Sassine.

Most of the opposition to the 2-year plan comes from those concerned with the City’s budget. But Councilmember Vinnie Ignizio, from Staten Island, pointed out that the cost of replacing light ballasts would be covered by the money the City would save by installing greener lighting fixtures that use less energy.

“We agree with doing more with less. There are companies that will come in, change the lighting in our schools, within the 2-year time frame and the city would be on the hook for nothing,” said Ignizio.

An overwhelming majority of the City Council disagrees with the ten-year plan. That means the Department of Education will have to go back to the drawing board. Parents will be watching.

Guacamole with chips and fried grasshoppers at Mexican restaurant Chiles & Chocolate in Park Slope. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek

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By Anna Maria Jakubek

Chiles and Chocolate is a Park Slope restaurant that serves authentic food from Oaxaca, Mexico.

Salmon marinated in orange juice, green pepper stuffed with chicken and cheese and Mole Negro with grilled veggies. But there’s one item that really jumps out: fried grasshoppers. For a dollar you can get a bowl of them to go along with your guacamole and chips.

“Green. Mushy. And bits of tomato. And legs. Grasshopper legs,” said Valente Villarreal, a waiter at Chiles and Chocolate. He was born in Mexico but grew up in Brooklyn. He says the owner gets the grasshoppers from Mexico, already fried and seasoned, and very much dead. Villarreal opens the container and shakes its contents.

“Do you hear that? They’re jumping right now. I’m trying to pick out a big one,” said Villarreal.

And then he sinks his teeth into one.

“Here we go. Crunch. It’s very crunchy,” Villarreal said.

The grasshoppers are about an inch in length and half that wide. They’re spicy and red from the chili seasoning and they taste like the lime juice they were dipped ini. They’re really not bad, not bad at all. Villarreal says grasshoppers are as popular in Oaxaca as potato chips are over here. Bugs are also part of the diet in other countries. In Japan they eat wasps, in South Africa it’s giant caterpillars, and in Bali dragonflies are on the menu.

But in our culture, insects aren’t food. Gabriella Petrick is a food historian at NYU.

“And there are many things – like, you know um a pencil! – Not food. Probably not a good idea to eat a pencil. Or grass. Or you know there are many weeds in your lawn – as long as you don’t put chemicals on it, you could pick and eat, but we don’t do it, because we ascribe a different category to that,” said Petrick.

She says that in the U.S. this practice of eating bugs will never fly. There’s a social hurdle: people judge you on the things you eat.

“So if you’re eating bugs or you know grasshoppers and the people around you think it’s vile and disgusting, you’re going to bealienated. Food is a social expression as well,” said Petrick.

In other words, you are what you eat. And no one wants to be thought of as a pest. Yet, bugs are actually good for you. Really good for you. The sixteen hundred or so edible varieties are rich in protein, minerals, vitamins and other nutrients. They have lots more protein than you’ll find in beef. They’re also better for the environment than other meat. That’s why some scientists and foodies advocate that we Westerners get on the bug diet. Arnold van Huis is a tropical entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He’s been researching edible insects for over a decade and urgently believes they’re the answer.

“We cannot go on like the way we are doing just because of the growing world population and most of people are going to eat more mat and we just don’t have enough agricultural land to make this possible,” said von Haus.

He says all it’ll take is a paradigm shift.

“You often see if people don’t know that they’re eating insects, they may find it delicious. At the moment you tell them it’s an insect, they start vomiting. Just to show that it’s completely psychological,” said von Haus.

In fact, we don’t think about this but we’re actually eating insects already. According to a spokesperson for the FDA, it’s impossible to produce food completely free of pests. The agency publishes a booklet that lists the max number of insect and vermin parts allowable for each type of food. This Defect Levels Handbook, as it’s called, is scary to flip through. 100 grams of chocolate – or just a little over two standard Hershey’s bars – can have 60 insect fragments.

And there are other arguments for why our take on bugs doesn’t make sense. David George Gordon, a.k.a. “The Bug Chef” is a science writer and author of a cookbook of  bug recipes. He routinely does bug cooking shows across the country, and likes to point out how arbitrary our food habits are.

“I always say to people ‘what’s so glamorous about eating one of these? They look kind of like reptiles,” said Gordon.

Gordon remembers an 11-year-old boy who went back for four or five helpings of cricket and orzo pasta at one of the cooking events.

“And I was kind of teasing him – I said, ‘don’t they feed you at home?’ And he said, ‘this is way better than anything my mom ever made.’ So that was kind of, that’s like my greatest testimonial right there,” Gordon said.

The benefits of eating insects are definitely there. But while we may convince our minds, winning over our stomachs is another matter.

Click here for bug recipes.

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Jodie Singer, 13, at home with her iPad. Photo by Gianna Palmer

By Gianna Palmer

When people refer to autism, they’re actually talking about a set of five developmental brain disorders known as autism spectrum disorders. The symptoms of autism and their intensity vary, but often include difficulties with communication and social skills.

Thirteen-year-old Jodie Singer, like many children with autism, is not conversational. She tends to repeat phrases and words over and over. Earlier this morning, before her school bus arrived, Jodie listened to children’s songs on her iPad.

A lanky bundle of energy, Jodie alternates between bites of Cheerios and excited hopping to the tune of Old MacDonald. Her mom, Alison Singer, says the iPad is able to hold Jodie’s attention in ways that other toys haven’t.

“She likes the farm a games, the baking cooking games, the animals games. So there’s certainly  a lot of  things that interest her on the ipad. But I think more importantly is she’s able to be independent. She can listen to music, she can watch youtube videos and she can do this independently. Which with other toys she really needs much more assistance,” said Singer.

Singer is also the founder and president of the Autism Science Foundation and keeps close track of emerging tools for kids with autism. She says the iPad has been a boon to the autism community. Kids really love it, she says, in many ways much more than other devices specially developed for them. Singer also points out that iPads can actually help some children communicate. For example, there are applications where a child can type in words, and the device will read them aloud. But Singer doesn’t see the iPad as a therapeutic in and unto itself.

“Think about it like a workbook. Some children can use workbooks independently, some children love to do workbooks, some children really gain great skills from doing , and some just do it for fun. It’s the same with an ipad. I mean an ipad can be fun, it’s something kids can do independently, and it can also be a very valuable tool in hands of trained, skilled therapist,” Singer says.

Dr. Howard Shane specializes in communication disorders, particularly with children on the autism spectrum,. Though Dr. Shane uses iPads in the autism language program he directs at the Children’s Hospital Boston, he agrees with Singer that  the iPad is not, by itself a clinical intervention.

“The clinical procedure of choice is for the child to be looked at to see what their strengths are and their weaknesses and then try to find apps and hardware that’s going to match those abilities,” says Shane.

Shane says one of the most important things about the iPad is that it doesn’t cost nearly as much as the specialized medical computers that came before it.

“We used to, you know, we could justify suggesting 7,8, 9,000 dollar pieces of equipment that now, you have the same functionality in an iPad,” Shane says.

Shane and his colleagues at the Children’s Hospital Boston use many different technologies in their research into communication disorders. And as for the iPad—

“We think its emerging an tool and its going to be an important one, but its certainly not the only thing that we, the only arrow in the quiver,” said Shane.

Rhonda McEwen is trying to quantify the impact of that arrow. She is a professor at the University of Toronto, and is currently conducting phase two of a study examining touch technologies, including the iPod Touch and iPad. Her studies put these technologies into Toronto classrooms and worked with students with autism.

“We actually did measurements of baseline communication measurements before, during and after the study, and we see increases in their communicative ability over so many categories, but particularly in the areas of social interaction and peer-based interaction” McEwen says.

McEwen says that so far, her research supports putting iPad in classrooms with autistic children.

“The teachers have demonstrated that they have been able to find use for it as a supplement to their curriculum in all of the classes that it was introduced to,” McEwen says.

In the Singer’s Scarsdale home, Jodie is on her way out the door to the bus. After a morning spent playing with her iPad, she wants to take it with her, but her mom has her leave it behind. For now, the iPad is not a part of her school day.

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New York City subway riders. Photo by Shiho Fukada/AP.

Over the past few years, the new York City Department of Health has been running ad campaigns decided to shock people out of bad habits like smoking or over-eating. At the beginning of February, it launched a new campaign online and in the subways; it’s aimed at increasing awareness of HIV prevention among gay and bisexual men. But some activist groups want the city to end the campaign.

The video opens like a French film noir, showing portraits of grave-looking men standing against a black-and-white backdrop of menacing New York City streets.

The narrator’s tone is just as somber.

The video warns that the virus causes diseases like dementia and osteoporosis. Towards the end, a graphic picture of an anal cancer growth briefly appears on screen before the narrator delivers the punch line.

New York City subway riders can now see a follow-up poster, which features that same tagline and pictures of men, some of them African-American and Latino.

Kristin Goodwin is the director of New York City Policy and Organizing at Housing Works, an organization that deals with AIDS and homelessness. She says that’s a problem. “Portraying young black and Latino men who are at risk or who are HIV positive as doomed to get horrible illnesses doesn’t necessarily make people want to get HIV tested.”

Goodwin, along with other advocacy groups for people with HIV and for gay and bisexual men, says that fear doesn’t necessarily lead to behavioral change. She says the ad campaign is sending the wrong message. “With the music, the somber faces and the allusions to other illnesses, it certainly adds a layer of stigma of people at risk,” she says.

The Department of Health declined comments. But in a video posted on YouTube, Monica Sweeney, the assistant commissioner for HIV prevention and control, said the ad was effective and necessary. “These ads are hard hitting and sometimes unpleasant but so is HIV and silence isn’t stopping the spread,” Sweeney said.

She also said the ad specifically targeted men who have sex with men because they represent a growing proportion of the 4000 New Yorkers who are newly infected every year. “This increase in new HIV infections 30 years into the epidemic is unacceptable to me, and should be unacceptable to all of us,” she added.

The HIV campaign is the latest in a series of graphic advertising efforts that tackle health issues. The city released ads against smoking, obesity and lead poisoning among children. All of the ad drives use fear to get their messages across.

Kim Witte is a professor of communication at Michigan State University. She says fear works when it comes to health campaigns, but under certain conditions. “In my studies, I’ve scared the bejeepers out of people and as long as they really believe they can do something to avert that threat, the higher the fear, the more motivated they are to act,” she says. “Fear appeals or scare tactics are extremely effective as long as people feel that they’re able to do something to effectively avert a threat.”

Howard Grossman is an HIV specialist who treats mostly lesbian, gay and bisexual patients. He agrees that scare tactics can be effective and thinks a lot of younger gay men today don’t have any first-hand experience with the potentially deadly effects of the virus. “We have this whole group of younger people who never knew anybody with HIV, who never saw anybody die, and they’re not afraid. To them HIV is just another disease that you take one pill for and in fact that’s not HIV disease, but they’re not scared and they’re not having safe sex,” he says.

The Department of Health says its recent anti-smoking campaign has been effective and it thinks the HIV campaign will be too. But activists say the city has taken concrete steps to prevent smoking: it’s distributed Nicotine patches and banned smoking in public spaces. They say there is nothing comparable to prevent HIV once the scare tactics wear off.

Kristin Goodwin of Housing Works says a lot of these problems with the ad campaign could have been avoided had the Department of Health consulted with them and other advocacy groups in the first place. “There was no mention of expanding the ad campaign into the subway and we found out about it the same day that it got posted. I have concerns that the Department of Health is not listening to the concerns of people who are infected and affected and also people that do prevention and outreach in the community.”

Goodwin says there are more positive ways to get the message across. Like the bus campaign released this month by the Washington DC Department of Health, which involves African American gay men. Goodwin says that instead of inducing fear, the campaign encourages people in relationships to reaffirm their desire to be safe for each other.

But not all gay activists think NYC’s campaign is bad. Larry Kramer is a writer and founder of the organization Act Up, and HIV positive himself. He wrote in an email to friends and fellow activists after seeing the spot that he thought it was honest, true and not nearly as scary as HIV itself.

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Empty shelves at Upper West Side Food Pantry, photo by Sandhya Dirks/ Columbia Radio News

One Upper West Side food pantry is definitely busy. Organizers say they are serving twice the number of people they served before the economic downturn. With cuts to public assistance programs part of the City’ s new budget, the food pantry is trying to close the gap between funding and need.

On a Friday morning, shoppers are standing in line while the clerk tallies up groceries.

But this isn’t the neighborhood Pathmark or the corner bodega… this is the basement of the Church Of St. Paul and St. Andrew on West 86th street between Broadway and West End Avenue. Carter Dyke is packing up his groceries… since he went on unemployment 2 years ago he says he depends on the pantry. “I got canned goods, I got fruit, I got eggs, I got meat, milk, potatoes, onions; this is a very good pantry. How does this help me? It helps keep me alive.”

“We are what we call a customer choice super market style food pantry.” That’s Doreen Wohl, the director of the West Side Campaign against hunger. She says part of what makes this pantry unique is that that it’s structured like a grocery store. “We try and provide as wide a selection of foods, like here we have green beans and red beans and black beans.”

But it is clear that stock is running low. There are only a few bags of beans left.
Doreen Wohl says that they are “seeing empty shelves, and there are empty shelves because there’s enormous increase in the number of people coming for emergency food.” Wohl says the pantry can’t keep up with the increasing demand. Since the economic downturn began, the number of families coming to the pantry has gone up by 46 percent. And despite the recovery, people continue to struggle to find work, unemployment is still around 8 percent in New York. And Wohl says, many people, have by now, used up any nest egg they might have had. “Were serving m ore people now then we ever have in our 31 years of existence… and I’ve never seen the shelves this empty.” Or, Wahl says, the aisles so full.

They are crowded with customers like Wanda Lowe; she comes here once a month, only when she is really desperate. “I’m here because my refrigerator is getting low, I comes here whenever I need it, and I’ve been coming here since 2007-2008.” Lowe’s groceries get packed ups, but she has to put some of her items back, she has taken more than the pantry allows per person. Even with this service, Lowe worries it won’t be enough food to keep her fed for the next week, let alone the next month.

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It has always been problematic for undocumented immigrants to report domestic abuse. But for years, domestic abuse agencies have confidently assured victims that they should feel comfortable reporting violence to the police — regardless of their immigration status. But a new program by U.S. Immigration and Law Enforcement called Secure Communities has advocates changing their message. Yesterday, the nation’s largest domestic violence group formally announced that undocumented victims should be cautious of the police and consider alternate safe havens.

–
When Maryland resident Maria Bolanos called the police on Christmas Eve 2009, getting deported was the last thing she expected. Her husband had beaten her and she wanted protection. The police arrived and they were both arrested and booked. Her fingerprints, along with accused abuser, were scanned. Weeks later, Bolanos found herself back at the precinct. Police arrested Bolanos for selling calling $10 cards without a license. When she pressed her finger to be scanned, her prints from the night of her domestic dispute came up in the biometric system used by Secure Communities. The system calculated she was in the United States illegally from El Salvador. She has been in deportation proceedings since then.

In November, Bolanos attended a conference of immigration advocates at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC. “I thought they would help me. But through this the police turned me over to ICE and now I have a deportation order. And I don’t want to I am not a criminal. I am a hard worker. And I don’t want to be separated from my daughter of 21 months,” said Bolanos.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE, Secure Communities works because it shares arrest information ICE’s database. Secure Communities says the goal is to deport violent criminals from the US. But, immigration advocates say cases like Maria’s are not uncommon.

Currently Secure Communities exists in 39 states. Only two counties in New York, Rockland and Putnam counties have subscribed to the program. But ICE says in two years it wants secure communities to be the standard for local law enforcement – a fear for advocates who protect immigrants.

Safe Horizons is based in New York and is nation’s largest victims’ service agency. It announced yesterday that because of cases like Maria Bolanos, they no longer feel they can refer undocumented victims of domestic violence to the police.

Claribel Jolie Pichardo is a representative for Safe Horizons. She says that “with this new program, if it were to roll out in all the counties in NYC because now it’s just in Putnam, but if it were to roll out here, we can’t say that with the same confidence.”

Reporting domestic abuse is often a difficult emotional task. With the threat of deportation looming for many undocumented women Pichardo says Secure Communities forces victims who are undocumented to hide in the shadows of abuse. “There is already fear in the community. There is great fear. And there is already been a resistance to come forward and talk to the cops. Because they don’t understand that they’re not going to get in trouble for coming forward. Now this is sending out the message that , yes, there are consequences if you ask for help.”

But Pichardo says they are counseling victims to call hotlines and check into underground shelters.

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Food Advertisements at the Associated Supermarket in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek/ Columbia Radio News

The World Bank reports that commodities have jumped in price since last June. Wheat has doubled. Others, like corn and sugar, have gone up more than 70%. In response, food corporations including Kraft and Kellogg announced that they’d be raising prices on as many as half of their products. Grocery shoppers everywhere are already feeling the crunch.

At the Associated grocery store in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, shopper Ida Collazo had heard about the commodity increase. She came for fish sticks and cake.

“Like before I could buy with $10, I could come home with 2 bags 3 bags at most, now it’s one bag. So it went up a lot,” Collazo says.

To keep her grocery bills down, Collazo bargain-shops around the neighborhood.

“Even if you have to walk ten blocks, you know, if they’re selling something cheaper, you’re going over there,” she says. ” You know, just walk. You get exercise too.”

Collazo says she understands that when commodities go up, prices have to as well. Adam Laufer is a Vice President at Associated.

“That’s something that’s not you know under our control,” he says. “ You know, we have to make a living also. It’s not, you know, that you make a fortune just on a can of peas.”

That said, Laufer suggests that buying generics – Associated Cereal, just for example – instead of brand-name products is a way of getting around some of the price hikes.

“You’re just not paying for the packaging, you’re not paying for the tv or cable advertising, or you know big huge billboards over the Holland tunnel, you know, pushing their products,” Laufer says.

Most people don’t realize how little food itself costs, says James Dunn, an agricultural economist at Penn State University.

“If you buy cornflakes for example, the cost of the corn in cornflakes is a very small amount of the price,” he says.

Even so, Dunn says he expects to see a 5% increase in food prices thanks to this commodity hike. He says that means that for every hundred dollars you spend on groceries, you’ll now be spending an extra five.

“Donald Trump will hardly notice it,” he says. “But there are plenty of people who are unemployed right now or just getting by, and they’ll notice it.”

Dunn himself admits he doesn’t have first hand knowledge of this because his wife does the shopping. But even households like his might not be immune. Take someone who earns $50,000 a year and spends $30,000 on rent. In New York City, that’s a big chunk of the middle class, says Joel Berg, who heads the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. He says all New-Yorkers pay a lot for necessities.

“Fuel, your metro card, your clothing, that rare rare entertainment – god knows how much movies cost – you’re definitely going to feel it hard in your wallet that there’s a 5% increase,” berg says.

Berg runs the city’s 1200 soup kitchens and food pantries and says the increased traffic there has been lower-income people. But he says the 5% percent hike in food prices will bring more people in the doors.

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A C letter grade at Gray's Papaya. Photo by Anna Maria Jakubek/Columbia Radio News

It’s been seven months since New York City adopted its new restaurant grading system, and about half the city’s restaurants have gotten letter grades for cleanliness. 13% got Cs, which means MANY violations. But  it’s unclear whether diners are paying attention.

The city’s Health Department introduced the letter grades to make diners more aware of food safety and, in turn, to put public pressure on restaurants to be clean. Health inspectors give restaurants an A for up to 13 violation points, a B for 14 to 27 and a C for more than 28. Bs and Cs can appeal, but once a grade is final, it has to be displayed up front where customers can see it.

Grays’s Papaya at 72nd and Broadway is a New York institution, famous for its cheap hotdogs, political slogans and lots of customers. And…it also has a bright orange C letter grade right in the front window.

“Oh wow,” said Mike Iannuzzi. “Um, no, I didn’t know what that was. I didn’t really pay attention to that when I walked in.”

Iannuzzi just polished off two Gray’s Papaya hotdogs. The restaurant received 35 violation points for problems like roaches, flies and contamination:

“Live roaches, nice,” said Iannuzzi. “Filthy flies on food… uh… not vermin proof that’s kinda scary.”

Iannuzzi says he has a good immune system, but he’ll avoid the Cs from now on.

“Working in the city, you come in contact with germs everyday, but you know it’s good to be able to avoid the germs when you can, so this is great,” Iannuzzi.

Others aren’t as bothered by the grade. Ruiwen Tan, a tourist from Singapore, points to the C and tells his friends the bad news. They go in anyway.

“The food is good and it’s been recommended, so we choose to ignore it,” said Tan.

Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely says this indifference may seem counterintuitive:

“So actually, it looks quite surprising that people are willing to go to restaurants that are so dirty and polluted,” said Ariely.

But he explains the willingness to put one’s head in the sand is actually a part of human nature.

“People over-weight their own experience, even if it’s not a relevant experience,” said Ariely. “You know, because the truth is, that when people experience the food in a restaurant, they don’t really know how to measure its cleanliness.”

He says diners also don’t know what the letter grades stand for. Ariely says a system based on emotion would be better.

“What does an A really mean? What does a B really mean?” asked Ariely. “If I saw maybe picture of it, that says that you know a C means that a rat ran over your plate, it would be much more vivid.”

Getting diners to pay attention is one thing, but then there’s the issue of how they should react. Andrew Rigie is the Director of Operations for the New York State Restaurant Association. The group fought hard against the public grading system. He says there’s just no reason to steer clear of low grades.

“I recognize that that restaurant is safe and sanitary enough to serve the public or the health department would close that restaurant,” said Rigie.

After all, a C is not an F.

“Hypothetically there’s over 1000 points that a restaurant could accrue from issued violations, yet it only takes 14 points to be issued a B and 28 points to be issued a C.” said Rigie.

But consumer advocate Sarah Klein says eating at a B- or C- grade restaurant is not a gamble worth taking. She’s a food attorney with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a non-profit focused primarily on food safety issues.

“I would generally advise people not to eat at a restaurant that received lower than an A,” said Klein. “That restaurant clearly lost points for some significant violations, if they were marked all the way down to a C, and those are very real safety considerations that a consumer should take into account.”

Klein says diners who eat at Cs miss the chance to let restaurants know they need to do better. Just because you don’t get food poisoning, that doesn’t mean you should roll the dice:

“It’s like jaywalking: it’s wonderful when you make it safely to the other side of the street, but everybody agrees that under certain conditions, that could have a much worse outcome,” said Klein.

The Health Department says it will finish grading all of the city’s restaurants by the end of the year.

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During the State of the Union address in January, President Obama said that he knew his budget would require some sacrifices:

“This freeze will require painful cuts,” said President Obama. “Already, we’ve frozen the salaries of hardworking federal employees for the next two years. I’ve proposed cuts to things I care deeply about, like community action programs.”

Those programs are funded in large part by Community Service Block Grants or CSBGs. The grants help groups that provide aid to needy and vulnerable Americans. Under the budget the president proposed on Monday, CSBGs would be cut by 350 Million dollars – or 50 percent. That’s drawn concern from programs that receive the grants.

Every Thursday evening, a group of immigrants crowd a small office space in Washington Heights to study American history.

“We provide free civics classes where we help individuals prepare for the citizenship exam,” said Angela Fernandez.

Until last week, Fernandez was the executive director for the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights. The group gets just under a fifth of its funding in the form of CSBGs. The Department of Health and Human Services gives CSBG money to the state via the Office of Community Service. State governments then decide how to distribute the money to individual groups. Fernandez says the proposed budget would cut funding at a time when groups like hers need it most.

“Not getting funding from the state is something that we’re going to feel,” said Fernandez.

750,000 New Yorkers would feel it, too. According to the New York State Division of Community Services, that’s how many people received support from CSBG-funded programs last year. New York receives the second largest sum of money for CSBGs. Only California gets more.

David Bradley is the executive director of the National Community Action Foundation.

He says CSBGs fund local programs that provide everything from domestic violence protection to weatherization assistance. And so he has one question for the Obama Administration.

“What particular aspect put it over the line to that made it a program to highlight to attempt to make cut to make this cuts in,” said Bradley.

Budget analyst Tad DeHaven from the CATO institute says that the fact that CSBGs do good things isn’t enough to justify them. He says the grants are wasteful and receive too little oversight.  At the end of the day, he says, decisions about CSBSs are made on the basis of politics and not necessarily sound economics.

“That’s where you get into the examples of waste and abuse and funding for wealthy areas the don’t make a lot of sense,” said DeHaven. “So for instance you now have wealthy towns in Connecticut receiving CSBG money to help building upgrades for a wine bar.”

DeHaven also points to a brewery in Michigan that is receiving CSBG funds for expansion. He said he would rather see funding come from the private sector.

For now, class will continue at the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

If the proposed budget cuts to CSBGs are approved by Congress, non-profits could start seeing effects as soon as March of this year.

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Anyone who’s ever flown internationally is familiar with jet lag.  It’s the disorienting feeling of suddenly finding your body in another time zone.  But jet lag isn’t just in your head.

“Jet lag is a disorder of the whole body,” said Justin Blau, a biologist at New York University whose team studies circadian rhythms in the brain cells of fruit flies. “It’s not just your brain telling you to wake up at the wrong time of day, it’s also your liver clock telling you it’s getting ready to deal with food at the wrong time of day.”

Like researchers all over the world, Blau’s team is seeking to better understand what makes cellular clocks tick – how the gears fit together.  At their weekly lab meeting, Blau and his team gathered in his office to talk about a new study by biologists at Blau’s alma mater, Cambridge University.  The upshot, he says, is simple.

“Clocks are more complicated than we thought,” Blau said.

Until now there’s been a general consensus in the field that the DNA in a cell’s nucleus is the spring that drives the clock. But Ahkilesh Reddy and John O’Neill at Cambridge looked for timekeeping in red blood cells – a human cell with no nucleus at all.  What they found was a chemical called peroxiredoxin, which allowed the cells to maintain rhythms for days with no outside stimulus – and no DNA spring.  Reddy says that’s a surprising discovery.

“The status quo for many years has been that although non-transcriptional rhythms – those not requiring DNA – have been seen in very primitive bacteria, no one thought that you’d be able to see the same things in complex organisms,” Reddy said.

Matthew Kayleigh, a post-doctorate student in Blau’s lab at NYU, says the discovery is groundbreaking.

“It’s a bit like you know how a car works, and these people are saying there’s like another motor in a car,” Kayleigh said.

The Cambridge team didn’t just look at human cells.  They found the same chemical, serving the same function, in a species of algae. Ben Collins, another post-doc and the NYU lab’s circadian rhythm expert, says that this kind of circadian rhythm may date back to the very origins of life on earth, because while the genes are different, this newly discovered chemical marker is the same in algae, flies, and humans.

“This is something that links all those sets of genes together, and it suggests maybe the original clock in the first organism was something like this,” Collins said.

But although the clock teaches about the past, it has immediate health implications in the future. And that brings us back to jet lag. If peroxiredoxin turns out to be the body clock’s original spring, Cambridge University’s Ahkilesh Reddy says it could give doctors a new way to wind the human clock – without having to mess with genetics

“Even though gene therapy has been bandied around for many years, affecting gene function is very difficult, whereas things like peroxiredoxin are easy to target with drugs,” Reddy said.

That’s further down the line. In the meantime, scientists are looking at just how many species have this metabolic clock in their cells. That means Blau’s NYU team will keep looking at flies, and keep asking questions.