As the third Spring since hurricane Katrina approaches, officials at the Centers for Disease Control today urged FEMA to move the 114,000 people who still live in "temporary" travel trailers as quickly as possible. The problem? Dangerously high levels of formaldehyde—a known carcinogen and respiratory irritant—which will only increase as the heat takes its toll on unstable building materials.

Scientists from Tulane University and the University of New Hampshire have concluded that the severe damage Hurricane Katrina inflicted on five million acres of forest has led to a large release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As many as 320 million large trees were killed or severely banged up in Gulf Coast forests. When healthy, these trees act as carbon sinks, pulling the stuff out of the air. Without them around, that carbon dioxide is free to travel up into the atmosphere. On top of that, the decomposition process releases still more carbon dioxide.

Lead author Jeffrey Chambers, a biologist at Tulane, had this to say: "The loss of so many trees will cause these forests to be a net source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere for years to come." The work is in the latest issue of Science.—Gregory Mone

I'm in San Francisco for the next few days, bringing you regular reports from the Web 2.0 Summit on some of the most interesting ideas and innovations at the leading edge of the Internet.

One of this evening's most interesting presenters was Marissa Mayer from Google, who introduced a new application called Google Health, which will allow users to search for and create pages that aggregate all sorts of medical information, from symptoms and conditions to x-rays to personal medical records to Google Maps mashups that locate nearby doctors by specialty, and figure out whether they have appointments available and how other patients have rated them. The new app will also incorporate searches from Google Co-op, a feature that categorizes Web pages hand-selected by known experts in various health fields.

The idea of opening up your medical records and putting them online sounds scary, but Google plans to keep private information private with the same security that keeps snoopers out of your Gmail.  Clearly there are advantages and disadvantages to online record archiving, but Ms. Mayer made a compelling argument by describing the loss, during Hurricane Katrina, of thousands of medical records in that could have been safeguarded if they were digitized and Web-accessible. She also mentioned the fact that x-ray data in North America, which is not centrally archived anywhere, currently numbers in the petabytes and could become a valuable research tool for physicians if properly tagged and organized. This, of course, is another part of the plan for Google Health.

The launch date for the beta site has not yet been made public, but as I'm one of those hypochondriacal people who constantly searches symptoms and treatments anyway, I'm particularly excited about the potential of this app. —Megan Miller

See an animated movie illustrating New Orleans's latest stormproofing strategy here.

Its no secret that major world events send ripples of collective emotion through communities—witness the outpourings of grief and charity after 9-11, the Southeast Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina—but what if those ripples could be felt without the aid of TV broadcasts and Web news reports?  What if such events made a psychic impression independent of any sort of human communication? Sounds like a bunch of New-Age hooey, but researchers at Princeton University, and one graduate of NYUs Interactive Telecommunications program, are exploring the possibility with the help of random number generators.

Without going into too much detail about the Princeton project (you can read more about it at the link below), researchers found, over the course of a 30-year project, that during significant global events, random number generators present statistical anomalies that could conceivably be chalked up to changes in the collective human consciousness.

Even if youre skeptical about this hypothesis, NYU grad Rob Sewards thesis project, the Consciousness Field Resonator, is worthy of attention. Seward built a random-number generator (housed in a handsome copper box) that hangs on the wall and alerts users of statistical anomalies with a series of bright lights. When the lights flash, youre left to wonder whats causing the alert. Is it the bombing in Lebanon or Iraq? A World Cup victory? Shiloh Jolie-Pitts birthday? Whole new systems of superstition could be built around this thing. Sure, its art first and foremost, but its also a really interesting use of technology and a kick-ass DIY project. Download instructions for making your own here. —Megan Miller

Link via robseward.com
Link via Princeton University

Doing business in the Big Easy just got easier. In an effort to make living and working in post-Katrina New Orleans as appealing as possible, the city is experimenting with an Internet network that is free for all users. The system-which uses wireless Internet routers mounted on streetlights to beam signals throughout the city-marks the first time that municipally-owned and -operated Wi-Fi has been offered to the public without restriction or cost.

When Hurricane Katrina roared through the U.S. Gulf Coast on August 29, devastating New Orleans, it shut down a major NASA facility, bringing the space agency's seemingly endless struggle to resume shuttle flights to a swift halt. The Michoud Assembly Facility, located about 15 miles east of the French Quarter, manufactures and repairs the space shuttle's giant external fuel tank-the same tank whose shedding insulation led to the destruction of Columbia in February 2003 and grounded the shuttle fleet last July.