Study: Living in poor neighborhood can hurt health

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Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Vickie Webb poses for a photograph at her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb checks her blood pressure in her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb stands in the door way of her apartment after checking her blood pressure in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds)eval("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP) — Back in the 1990s, the federal government tried an unusual social experiment: It offered thousands of poor women in big-city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods.

A decade later, the women who relocated had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity — differences that are being hailed as compelling evidence that where you live can determine your health.

The experiment was initially aimed at researching whether moving impoverished families to more prosperous areas could improve employment or schooling. But according to a study released Wednesday, the most interesting effect may have been on the women's physical condition.

About 16 percent of the women who moved had diabetes, compared with about 20 percent of women who stayed in public housing. And about 14 percent of those who left the projects were extremely obese, compared with nearly 18 percent of the other women.

The small-but-significant differences offered some of the strongest support yet for the idea that where you live can significantly affect your overall health, especially if your home is in a low-income area with few safe places to exercise, limited food options and meager medical services.

"This study proves that concentrated poverty is not only bad policy, it's bad for your health," Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But no one believes the deficit-plagued federal government is going to expand the program and start moving low-income women to better neighborhoods en masse.

"It's not enough to simply move families into different neighborhoods," Donovan said. Instead, new ways must be found to help families "break the cycle of poverty that can quite literally make them sick." He did not mention specific proposals.

Public health experts have long thought that living in poor neighborhoods could ruin a person's health, but this study put the idea to a rigorous test.

Here's how it worked: Women believed to be about the same in most respects were randomly assigned to one group or another and then followed through time, in a model customarily seen in pharmaceutical studies. That makes it more scientifically rigorous than most research linking health problems to a social environment.

The study's good design "provides a basis to infer cause and effect" between poverty and bad health, said Dr. Robert Califf, a noted Duke University cardiologist who is leading a massive study on neighborhoods and health outcomes.

The research was led by Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor of public policy. It was published in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The experiment started as a $70 million HUD project in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It morphed into a health study after a variety of other government agencies and private foundations pitched in with an additional $17 million more.

"In terms of scale, it's not soon or ever to be repeated," said Dr. Robert Whitaker, a Temple University pediatrician who was a study co-author.

The study involved women living in public housing in neighborhoods where 40 percent or more of residents were poor — areas like many of those on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bronx in New York City. The women all had children and were considered heads of households.

From 1994 to 1998, nearly 1,800 of them were offered vouchers to subsidize private housing, but the vouchers were only good in higher-income neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of the people were considered poor. They were required to live there at least a year.

The rest of the women were divided into two groups. One group got vouchers they could use in any neighborhood. The other women did not receive vouchers, with the expectation that they would stay put.

Ten years later, women in the study were weighed and gave a blood sample to check for diabetes.

The women who moved to richer areas had the lowest rates of extreme obesity and diabetes. The difference suggests that moving to a better neighborhood could help at least 1 in 25 women. Or, in other terms, a person's risk of diabetes or extreme obesity dropped by about 20 percent by moving to a higher-income neighborhood.

(However, even the women who moved were not exactly models of health. About 14 percent of them were extremely obese, which is twice the national average for women.)

The study has some notable flaws.

Because it did not start out looking at health, the women's medical condition and weight were not checked at the outset. The researchers believe the women in the different groups were about the same, because they matched up on more than 50 other indicators, such as age, race, employment and education. But that is an assumption.

Also, only about half the women offered a chance to move to a more prosperous zip code did so. And many who did move left after a year.

What's more, the study was not designed to answer what it is about more affluent neighborhoods that would cause someone to be healthier. But the authors listed four theories:

— The availability of healthier food is worse in lower-income neighborhoods.

— Opportunities for physical exercise are scarcer, and fear of crime can make people afraid to jog or play in parks.

— There may be fewer doctors' offices and other medical services.

— The long-term stress of living in such an environment may alter the hormones that control weight.

Some of those theories were supported by some women who live in the kind of situation targeted in the study.

Vickie Webb lived in the projects in Durham, N.C., for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood.

"There was too much violence, too much going on in the 'hood. It wasn't safe," said Webb, who was not part of the study.

Annie Ricks, who lives with her 14-year-old son and two grandchildren in a public housing unit on Chicago's South Side, was not involved in the study either. But she said efforts like the HUD experiment should be expanded.

Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements. But Ricks lost her child-care job after the move, and says her new neighborhood is worse.

At her old building, Ricks could walk across the street to a supermarket. In her new neighborhood, without a car, she has to take public transportation to get groceries or go to the doctor, and Ricks says there's more crime.

"I feel like it would be a blessing" to be able to move to a wealthier area, she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Living near fast food joints may not up weight

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By Amy Norton

NEW YORK | Tue Oct 25, 2011 4:16pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Adults who live close to fast food restaurants may not weigh any more than the rest of us, a new study suggests.

The findings, from a 30-year study of Massachusetts adults, add to a conflicting body of research. A number of studies have suggested that people living in fast food-heavy neighborhoods have a higher rate of obesity, while a few have failed to find a link.

But most of those studies have had limitations -- like only studying people at one time point, making it impossible to tease out whether easy access to fast food could be blamed for the extra pounds.

In this latest study, researchers used data from more than 3,100 adults who entered a heart-health study back in 1971. And they found no consistent relationship between participants' driving distance to fast food joints and their weight over the next 30 years.

There was some evidence of a link among women. On average, for each kilometer (0.6 miles) women lived from the nearest fast food place, they showed a slightly lower body mass index (BMI).

The translation: A woman of average height would weigh about a pound less for every additional kilometer she lived away from a fast food place.

"It was a very small effect," said lead researcher Dr. Jason P. Block, of Harvard Medical School in Boston.

"We interpret that as being not a very important association," Block told Reuters Health.

That is not to say that people's neighborhoods do not matter when it comes to health, Block said.

But, he added, the findings suggest that fast access to unhealthy food is not the key issue in the battle of bulge. "Maybe proximity is not the thing we should be focusing on," Block said.

It may be more important to look at why people make the choices they do at restaurants, grocery stores and other food places, according to Block. In theory, he noted, "you can make healthful choices wherever you go."

The findings, reported in the American Journal of Epidemiology, are based on 3,113 Massachusetts adults who enrolled in the study in 1971, when they were about 38 years old, on average.

Over the next 30 years, the participants were interviewed and had physical exams seven times.

Block's team collected information on all restaurants, grocery stores and other food outlets in the region over that time period. Then they calculated the study participants' driving distance from home to the nearest restaurant or store.

With that level of detail, and the long-term follow-up, the study "makes a significant contribution," said Lisa M. Powell, a senior research scientist at the Institute for Health Research and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Powell, who was not involved in the research, has studied the relationship between neighborhood food options and people's weight.

And the current findings do not mean that neighborhood food options are unimportant -- especially for lower-income Americans, according to Powell.

In their own research, Powell and her colleagues have found that while there is no link between neighborhood food options and BMI overall, the picture was different in low-income areas. For low-income families, having a good-quality grocery store nearby -- rather than relying on convenience stores, for example -- may make a difference in weight.

If a higher-income person doesn't live close to a supermarket, Powell noted, he or she can probably drive to one fairly easily. For a low-income person, who would possibly be relying on public transportation, distance from quality food options could be a big obstacle.

The current study lacked data on people's incomes, so it wasn't possible to break the findings down that way.

And when it comes to fast food places, specifically, Block pointed out that they are now "ubiquitous." So the relative proximity of your house to the nearest McDonald's may simply not be a big deal.

Both Powell and Block noted that the interplay between people's environment, their personal behavior and their weight is complicated.

So the research questions go on. For Block's team, the next question is whether driving by fast food temptations on your way to and from work is related to the number on your bathroom scale.

SOURCE: bit.ly/t955fW American Journal of Epidemiology, online September 30, 2011.

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'Living Fossils' Just A Branch On Cycad Family Tree

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Enlarge Maggie Starbard/NPR

A cycad stands at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19. The 300 "modern" cycad species burst onto the scene about 12 million years ago, though the lineage of cycads extends back 300 million years.

Maggie Starbard/NPR

A cycad stands at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 19. The 300 "modern" cycad species burst onto the scene about 12 million years ago, though the lineage of cycads extends back 300 million years.

Although dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, there are still thought to be a few species left over from those days. Plants called cycads are among these rare "living fossils" — they have remained pretty much unchanged for more than 300 million years, but a study in Science magazine suggests that glamorous title may not be deserved.

Enlarge Maggie Starbard/NPR

Sarah Mathews, a botanist at Harvard University, says a changing climate on the planet about 12 million years ago led to a burst of new plant species, including cacti and agave.

Maggie Starbard/NPR

Sarah Mathews, a botanist at Harvard University, says a changing climate on the planet about 12 million years ago led to a burst of new plant species, including cacti and agave.

There's no time machine in Washington, D.C., but Harvard botanist Sarah Mathews leads me to what's arguably the next best thing — a room made of glass in the U.S. Botanic Garden, just downhill from the U.S. Capitol.

The sign says "The Garden Primeval — The First Land Plants."

Right away we see something that looks like a fern growing out of the top of a palm trunk. But it's not a fern or a palm. In fact, it's more closely related to a pine tree. Cycads produce seeds but not flowers. They evolved along with dinosaurs, which presumably munched them for lunch. So they've earned the title "living fossil."

But "that assumption began to break down as we began sequencing DNA," Mathews says.

What's the difference between old, older and very old, and very, very old? I mean, they're all still very old.

- Bart Schutzman, editor of the Cycad Society's journal

She and her colleagues — notably Nathalie Nagalingum from the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney — have used that DNA to reconstruct the "family tree" of cycads. They find that the "trunk" of the family tree may reach back 300 million years, but the "branches," today's 300 species, actually burst onto the scene about 12 million years ago.

"And then it looks like around the world on multiple continents, cycads became more species-rich," Mathews says.

What caused that sudden burst of new species?

"That's the really fun puzzle, of course," she says.

Enlarge Maggie Starbard/NPR

A giant dioon, seen at the United States Botanic Garden, is part of the cycad family and can be found growing in Mexico and Central America.

Maggie Starbard/NPR

A giant dioon, seen at the United States Botanic Garden, is part of the cycad family and can be found growing in Mexico and Central America.

It's probably not a coincidence that other plants also put forth a burst of new species around that time, including cacti, ice plants and agave. Mathews suspects climate change played a role.

"There was drying out and cooling going on, globally," she says.

This research is part of a broader effort to understand how all plants — most notably flowering plants — evolved. That story is gradually taking shape as scientists study more and more of the DNA from plants.

Of course, you might argue that this research has some broader philosophical repercussions as well. By finding that these species of cycads are just 12 million years old — and so were not survivors from the days of the dinosaurs — has Mathew's team demoted these species from their lofty status as living fossils?

Enlarge Maggie Starbard/NPR

A natal grass cycad grows in the greenhouse at the United States Botanic Garden.

Maggie Starbard/NPR

A natal grass cycad grows in the greenhouse at the United States Botanic Garden.

She says no.

"I think that we've actually found some interesting patterns for people who didn't think much about cycads before," she says.

What about people who think a lot about cycads? Bart Schutzman edits the Cycad Society's journal (global circulation: 500 copies). He's attracted to these plants because he feels a primal bond with this ancient species. And he says the news does not rock his world. Today's cycads still predate human species, and by a lot.

"What's the difference between old, older and very old, and very, very old? I mean, they're all still very old," he says with a chuckle.

As for the "living fossil" moniker?

"It won't stop people from glamorizing the cycads as the living fossils because their lineage extends so far back," Schutzman says.

So here's a little good news from Washington: A walk through the "Garden Primeval" greenhouse still offers a reasonable glimpse of foliage from the days of the dinosaurs, though the species themselves don't have quite the same bragging rights.

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Study: Living in poor neighborhood can hurt health

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Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Annie Ricks, 55, poses in her public housing apartment Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, in Chicago. Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements, but Ricks says her new neighborhood is worse. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing given a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Ricks was not part of the study, but says such efforts should be expanded. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green) Vickie Webb poses for a photograph at her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb checks her blood pressure in her apartment in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds) Vickie Webb stands in the door way of her apartment after checking her blood pressure in Durham, N.C., Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Webb, 43, lived in the projects in Durham, N.C. for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood. According to a study released Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011, poor women in big city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods. had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity. Webb was not part of the study. (AP Photo/Jim R. Bounds)eval("var currentItemd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 1;");eval("var nextd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;");eval("var previousd57851005a80479aaeeb90a12c70b9ff = 0;"); ATLANTA (AP) — Back in the 1990s, the federal government tried an unusual social experiment: It offered thousands of poor women in big-city public housing a chance to live in more affluent neighborhoods.

A decade later, the women who relocated had lower rates of diabetes and extreme obesity — differences that are being hailed as compelling evidence that where you live can determine your health.

The experiment was initially aimed at researching whether moving impoverished families to more prosperous areas could improve employment or schooling. But according to a study released Wednesday, the most interesting effect may have been on the women's physical condition.

About 16 percent of the women who moved had diabetes, compared with about 20 percent of women who stayed in public housing. And about 14 percent of those who left the projects were extremely obese, compared with nearly 18 percent of the other women.

The small-but-significant differences offered some of the strongest support yet for the idea that where you live can significantly affect your overall health, especially if your home is in a low-income area with few safe places to exercise, limited food options and meager medical services.

"This study proves that concentrated poverty is not only bad policy, it's bad for your health," Shaun Donovan, secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

But no one believes the deficit-plagued federal government is going to expand the program and start moving low-income women to better neighborhoods en masse.

"It's not enough to simply move families into different neighborhoods," Donovan said. Instead, new ways must be found to help families "break the cycle of poverty that can quite literally make them sick." He did not mention specific proposals.

Public health experts have long thought that living in poor neighborhoods could ruin a person's health, but this study put the idea to a rigorous test.

Here's how it worked: Women believed to be about the same in most respects were randomly assigned to one group or another and then followed through time, in a model customarily seen in pharmaceutical studies. That makes it more scientifically rigorous than most research linking health problems to a social environment.

The study's good design "provides a basis to infer cause and effect" between poverty and bad health, said Dr. Robert Califf, a noted Duke University cardiologist who is leading a massive study on neighborhoods and health outcomes.

The research was led by Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor of public policy. It was published in Wednesday's New England Journal of Medicine.

The experiment started as a $70 million HUD project in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York. It morphed into a health study after a variety of other government agencies and private foundations pitched in with an additional $17 million more.

"In terms of scale, it's not soon or ever to be repeated," said Dr. Robert Whitaker, a Temple University pediatrician who was a study co-author.

The study involved women living in public housing in neighborhoods where 40 percent or more of residents were poor — areas like many of those on the South Side of Chicago or in the Bronx in New York City. The women all had children and were considered heads of households.

From 1994 to 1998, nearly 1,800 of them were offered vouchers to subsidize private housing, but the vouchers were only good in higher-income neighborhoods where fewer than 10 percent of the people were considered poor. They were required to live there at least a year.

The rest of the women were divided into two groups. One group got vouchers they could use in any neighborhood. The other women did not receive vouchers, with the expectation that they would stay put.

Ten years later, women in the study were weighed and gave a blood sample to check for diabetes.

The women who moved to richer areas had the lowest rates of extreme obesity and diabetes. The difference suggests that moving to a better neighborhood could help at least 1 in 25 women. Or, in other terms, a person's risk of diabetes or extreme obesity dropped by about 20 percent by moving to a higher-income neighborhood.

(However, even the women who moved were not exactly models of health. About 14 percent of them were extremely obese, which is twice the national average for women.)

The study has some notable flaws.

Because it did not start out looking at health, the women's medical condition and weight were not checked at the outset. The researchers believe the women in the different groups were about the same, because they matched up on more than 50 other indicators, such as age, race, employment and education. But that is an assumption.

Also, only about half the women offered a chance to move to a more prosperous zip code did so. And many who did move left after a year.

What's more, the study was not designed to answer what it is about more affluent neighborhoods that would cause someone to be healthier. But the authors listed four theories:

— The availability of healthier food is worse in lower-income neighborhoods.

— Opportunities for physical exercise are scarcer, and fear of crime can make people afraid to jog or play in parks.

— There may be fewer doctors' offices and other medical services.

— The long-term stress of living in such an environment may alter the hormones that control weight.

Some of those theories were supported by some women who live in the kind of situation targeted in the study.

Vickie Webb lived in the projects in Durham, N.C., for several years before a housing agency helped relocate her and her husband to a better neighborhood.

"There was too much violence, too much going on in the 'hood. It wasn't safe," said Webb, who was not part of the study.

Annie Ricks, who lives with her 14-year-old son and two grandchildren in a public housing unit on Chicago's South Side, was not involved in the study either. But she said efforts like the HUD experiment should be expanded.

Local housing authorities paid for her to relocate to the South Side last year as part of its demolition plans for high-rise tenements. But Ricks lost her child-care job after the move, and says her new neighborhood is worse.

At her old building, Ricks could walk across the street to a supermarket. In her new neighborhood, without a car, she has to take public transportation to get groceries or go to the doctor, and Ricks says there's more crime.

"I feel like it would be a blessing" to be able to move to a wealthier area, she said.

___

Associated Press writers Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Lindsey Tanner in Chicago contributed to this report.

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Living In A Geodesic Dome Home

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Kevin Shea is a retired New York City firefighter with an unorthodox home. He lives in a 93,000 cubic-foot-geodesic dome, equipped with solar panels, a wind turbine, and a geothermal system. The home is on the grid, but outside the box.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

IRA FLATOW, host: Up next, Flora Lichtman is here with our Video Pick of the Week. Hi, Flora.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hi, Ira.

FLATOW: What have you got going for us today?

LICHTMAN: We are not in your backyard. This is a home tour like you've never seen before...

FLATOW: All right.

LICHTMAN: ...I'm pretty sure. We go to Long Island, Calverton, Long Island, which is near Riverhead and visit Kevin Shea, who built himself a geodesic dome to live in. This dome is a home.

FLATOW: A dome home. And he built it out of a kit, is that right?

LICHTMAN: Yeah, he built it out of a kit. So he's...

FLATOW: Is that the way you...

LICHTMAN: In 1993, he says, he is thumbing through Popular Science magazine and he gets to the back, and there are these ads in the back. And he sees an ad for a geodesic dome kit.

FLATOW: Right.

LICHTMAN: And for $11,000, you can build a dome that is 44 feet tall, 70 feet in diameter, and that's like 93,000 cubic feet. It's huge. It's very hard to get a sense of the scale until you actually see him climb the rope that he has going from the floor to the ceiling in the middle of the dome, which you can see on our website.

FLATOW: At SCIENCE FRIDAY. Go to our website. There's a Video Pick of the Week at sciencefriday.com. His neighbors were not very happy.

LICHTMAN: His neighbors were not happy. I mean, he's - the best part is we drive in with Kevin down his driveway. And that before we turn in, it's just - it looks like regular sort of white picket fence suburbia. And then you get to his driveway and it's this kind of mushroom-shaped, forest green, windowless, from the back anyway, dome. And they were, ,you know, this house does not belong here was the vibe from the neighbors.

FLATOW: But - and he's also made it very energy efficient, right?

LICHTMAN: I mean, Kevin Shea amazed me. You - he takes green to another level. So we've got here a solar array, a wind turbine, geothermal system inside he's brewing biodiesel in a shed in the backyard. There wasn't even time to get into that.

FLATOW: Wow.

LICHTMAN: And then, you know, just he reuses materials. He's got a garden made of 800 tires and fiber optic cables crushed up and turned into an artificial lake. He's really come up with these neat solutions and neat uses of stuff.

FLATOW: Unless you think he was some sciencey geek, he was a firefighter for 20 years, right? New York City firefighter?

LICHTMAN: Yeah. I mean, this is the makings of a full-length feature, I think. But he's a firefighter in New York City and when - and was injured in 9/11 and so ended up retiring. And actually, his firefighter buddies helped him build this. And he said, you know, the interesting thing about getting a kit for a geodesic home is it's made of these triangles, right? So if any of the wood is slightly off, warped, you have a big problem once you get around to the other end of the circle.

FLATOW: Oh, yeah. I'm thinking about this.

LICHTMAN: So they have like tons of people sort of pulling things in line. It sounded like a dramatic construction process.

FLATOW: You need a lot of buddies to help out on this.

LICHTMAN: Yeah. And a lot of strong firefighters it sounds like.

FLATOW: And it's beautiful because you have all that inside space that's open to work with it, right, once you get it done?

LICHTMAN: It's huge. It's like being in the - it's like living in omnimax. I mean, it's just this kind of really, really open space, and he uses it with - he's got a swing inside.

JEFF: That's right. You could swing from side to side. You could - yeah.

LICHTMAN: Which he does.

FLATOW: Yeah. You could see all of this in our Video Pick of the Week. It's Flora Lichtman's, got it up there on our website at sciencefriday.com. You can also download it on our podcast on iTunes. And it's up there on the left side. And this guy, you see him swinging on his rope, climbing up the roof.

LICHTMAN: It's really - it's worth watching. And also, I'm looking for other people who are living in sort of unconventional homes and doing things in a DIY green way because Kevin really has figured out how to do this on his own.

FLATOW: Right.

LICHTMAN: So if you know of anybody, shoot me an email. I put my email address on our website by the video.

FLATOW: And you asked one - you asked a couple of weeks ago for mushroom pictures, right? And we got all kinds of mushroom...

LICHTMAN: The mushroom pictures have flooded in. Check out the Facebook page. They're really beautiful. And we've got long, sort of, threads going on about what they are. I can't identify them, but our listeners are doing a good job.

FLATOW: All right. Flora Lichtman, our Video Pick of the Week.

I'm Ira Flatow in New York.

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