Oxygen

Oprah Winfrey and Maryland-based Discovery Communications will team up to launch a cable channel next year that could eventually become the new home of The Oprah Winfrey Show. In announcing the deal yesterday, Winfrey was purposely vague about the kind of programs she planned for the channel that will reach 70 million homes. But she said it was possible that her long-running talk show could move to her new channel in 2011, when her syndication contract expires. If her show does move, the change will rock the world of daytime TV, where her program not only dominates all other talk shows but also drives viewers to early-evening newscasts on the broadcast channels that carry it. "Anything's possible," she said during a news conference yesterday.

When Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett damaged his spinal cord during a football game Sunday afternoon, his only hope was the state-of-the-art medical treatment he received within a remarkably short time. Despite grim initial assessments of his chances for recovery, there were signs yesterday that aggressive treatment might have worked. The surgeon who operated on Everett said that his patient had voluntarily moved his arms and legs and that he was optimistic that Everett will walk again.

The Chesapeake Bay ranks among the most polluted estuaries in the nation, and conditions are expected to worsen as the area's population grows, according to a report released yesterday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The study looked at pollution from nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus, in five regions in the country and concluded that the Mid-Atlantic region, which stretches from Cape Cod to the Chesapeake, was the most impaired. More than one-third of its estuaries register more pollution now than they did in the 1990s.

Low oxygen levels kill 15,000 fish in Weems Creek More than 15,000 fish were killed this week when the oxygen levels in an Annapolis creek dipped too low. Toxins released from decomposing algae likely caused the low oxygen levels in Weems Creek, Maryland Department of the Environment spokesman Robert Ballinger said. "Over the years, scientists have not been able to identify a bacteria or disease causing these kills, so I think it has to be a sudden low-oxygen event," Severn Riverkeeper Fred Kelly said of Thursday's fish kill.

Russian cosmonauts restored several key computers aboard the International Space Station yesterday, resolving a problem that had bedeviled flight and ground crews from the U.S. and Russia for four days. Still, the orbiting craft's Russian-operated computer system - apparently knocked out by a power glitch when an American solar panel array was connected this week - reminded the world that the lofty ambitions of manned space exploration can rise or fall on technology as mundane as a power cable or a software malfunction.

To the tourists pushing strollers around the Inner Harbor, the water looks fine -- a little green and murky, but nothing like a few days before, when thousands of dead fish floated on the surface after a huge algae bloom. Allen R. Place knows better. A biochemist who spends much of his time studying the waters that flow in front of Baltimore's premier tourist attractions, Place paces the dock, looking nervous. The water is too green, he says, bending over near Houlihan's Restaurant at one of his makeshift water-quality monitoring stations.

Thousands of dead fish, along with decomposing algae, are causing a stench to emanate from the Inner Harbor and the waters off Canton, and a state official said yesterday that it might take at least a week to clear. The stink - and the dead fish - are the result of an algae bloom, or a "brown tide." State environmental officials have been investigating the fish kill since Sunday. The nutrient-rich harbor had a recent large bloom of microscopic algae that turned the water rust brown, said Charles Poukish, environmental program manager for Maryland Department of the Environment.

HONOLULU -- Kalma Wong has tried almost everything for her two autistic children: special diets, intense behavioral therapies, flying in experts from the U.S. mainland at exorbitant costs. Some efforts have yielded modest success. Others have done next to nothing. But like other parents of the more than 1.5 million autistic children in the U.S., Wong has vowed to keep trying until she pinpoints the treatment that most helps her kids. Her latest attempt is one of the most long-shot therapies yet, a protocol some doctors praise but that others call a waste of time that gives desperate parents false hope and exploits them financially.

Online reader Polly McIlrath writes from frigid Detroit to ask about light and heat from the sun and stars: "If there is no oxygen in space, how do they keep burning?" Actually, there is oxygen in space, but that's another story. Fire does require oxygen, but fire's not what keeps stars (or the sun, our nearest star) gleaming. The light and heat come from thermonuclear fusion - the merging of hydrogen atoms at the sun's core to form helium. Think of the sun as your friendly neighborhood hydrogen bomb.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An overheated Russian oxygen generator caused a momentary fire scare aboard the International Space Station yesterday. Flight controllers briefly declared an emergency and told the station's three crew members to trip a smoke alarm after the astronauts smelled fumes from a melted rubber gasket. The crew donned surgical masks, goggles and gloves as a precaution against the possible release of chemicals from the oxygen unit. A small amount of potassium hydroxide, a mildly toxic substance that can irritate the skin and eyes, is suspected of having leaked from a vent on the generator.