"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Topsoil Loss Nears a Million Acres a Year. Deforestation now faster in temperate than tropical forests.
Only 35% of tropical forests left.

The average Indian consumes 200 kilograms of grain a year; the average American, 800 kilograms; the
average Italian, 400 kilograms. The Italian diet was rated best in the world for heart disease.

300 Tons of Weapons-grade Uranium and Plutonium Unaccounted For. High Mutation Rate of
Microorganisms Near Radioactive Waste-treatment Sites. Antibiotics in Animal Feed Reduce Medical
Effectiveness of Antibiotics for Humans. Environmental estrogens suspected in lowest-ever human sperm
counts.

Two Billion Tons of Carbon Added to the Atmosphere This Year. One of the five hottest years on
record. The Fed Hopes U.S. Economy Will Grow by Four Percent in the Final Quarter.
ANNA QUIBLER was in her office getting pumped. Her door was closed, the drapes (installed for her)
were drawn. The pump was whirring in its triple sequence: low sigh, wheeze, clunk. The big suction cup
made its vacuum pull during the wheeze, tugging her distended left breast outward and causing drips of
white milk to fall off the end of her nipple. The milk then ran down a clear tube into the little clear bag in a
plastic protective tube, which she would fill to the ten ounce mark.

It was an unconscious activity by now, and she was working on her computer while it happened. She
only had to remember not to overfill the bottle, and to switch breasts. Her right breast produced more
than the left even though they were the same size, a mystery that she had given up solving. She had long
since explored the biological and engineering details of this process, and had gotten not exactly bored,
but as far as she could go with it, and used to the sameness of it all. There was nothing new to investigate,
so she was on to other things. What Anna liked was to study new things. This was what kept her
coauthoring papers with her sometime-collaborators at Duke, and kept her on the editorial board ofThe
Journal of Statistical Biology, despite the fact that her job at NSF as director of the Bioinformatics
Division might be said to be occupying her more than full-time already; but much of that job was
administrative, and like the milk pumping, fully explored. It was in her other projects where she could still
learn new things.

Right now her new thing was a little search investigating the NSFтАЩs ability to help Khembalung. She
navigated her way through the on-line network of scientific institutions with an ease born of long practice,
click by click.

Among NSFтАЩs array of departments was an Office of International Science and Engineering, which
Anna was impressed to find had managed to garner ten percent of the total NSF budget. It ran an
International Biological Program, which sponsored a project called TOGAтАФтАЬTropical Oceans, Global
Atmosphere.тАЭ TOGA funded study programs, many including an infrastructure-dispersion element, in
which the scientific infrastructure built for the work was given to the host institution at the end of the study
period.

Anna had already been tracking NSFтАЩs infrastructure-dispersion programs for another project, so she
added this one to that list too. Projects like these were why people joked about the mobile hanging in the
atrium being meant to represent a hammer and sickle, deconstructed so that outsiders would not
recognize the socialistic nature of NSFтАЩs tendency to give away capital and to act as if everyone owned
the world equally. Anna liked these tendencies and the projects that resulted, though she did not think of
them in political terms. She just liked the way NSF focused on work rather than theory or talk. That was
her preference too. She liked quantitative solutions to quantified problems.