In the last few weeks the rising price of fertilizer, and expansion of intensive farming across much of the arable world, has made a bump in the news. The latest is out today on AP from Seth Borenstein, under the head “Dirt problem overlooked in global food crisis.” If the overcrowded world’s people are to eat, he writes, we’ll need better dirt. He provides a vivid example from a UN and World Bank sponsored study: Many places in Africa could harvest 9,000 pounds of corn per acre, with fertilizer. Without it, farmers are getting about 500 pounds.

The story follows several others on a similar theme. They include:

NY Times Keith Bradsher, Andrew Martin April 30 (dateline Vietnam) reporting that even in areas where fertilizer had been widely used, prices are sending it out of reach for many farmers, includes a terrific map-infographic ; Reuters Robert Melnbardis Apr. 25 on one Canada potash maker’s windfall revenues ;

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The image here, this week’s striking Science cover, certainly shows a classic-looking oasis in the Sahara. Melancholy is the caption inside: this is Lake Boku in Chad, one of the few bodies of water in the desert. It seems doomed because of encroaching dunes. It is a process that has been underway for a long time, says the report from a team of researchers led by a man at the University of Cologne. Sediments accumulating in such isolated Saharan lakes suggest that the fertile savannahs of thousands of years ago have been gradually turning to desert. That means, one might add, it seems not due to global warming or other overwhelming anthropogenic cause.

Stories:

National Geographic News James Owen reports in his lede that global warming may, in fact, re-green the Sahara ; NY Times Kenneth Chang finds sources who put clearly a puzzle posed by this study’s contrast to an earlier one based on ocean sediments and implying a sudden drying of the Sahara about 5,500 years ago ; NPR All Things Considered (audio initially unavailable this morning, due up at 3 p.m. US Eastern Time) ; ScienceNews Sid Perkins ; Reuters Alister Doyle ; AAAS ScienceNOW Mico Tatalovic ;

MORE! from the Dept of Unbelievable Pictures: Science magazine’s editors, to their credit, provide among the images in the press packet one of a Libyan truck with 30 passengers and their baggage that showed up, rescued after being lost, in the oasis where the research took place. But where’s the truck? And no seat belts? Hi res here.

Upper Pic hi res ;

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The weak version of the pre-Clovis school of archeology thought - that people were in the Americas considerably before those most famous of N. American stone age big game hunters got here maybe 13,000 years ago - received another big push from published data yesterday. A team led by Vanderbilt University’s Tom Dillehay, which for years has declared a site in Chile to be clearly older than the Clovis culture, said it now has extremely persuasive evidence. In a teleconference yesterday with reporters - and in today’s Science - Dillehay said they have radioisotope dates of about 14,000 years on seaweed residues in the hearths of the site, called Monte Verde. They didn’t just eat seaweed and fish. It appears they also were venturing inland to hunt elephantine big game called gomphotheres.

This follows by about one month a report, also in Science, that coprolites in an Oregon Cave date to roughly the same time. Together they are a serious blow to the tottering Clovis-first hypothesis of human arrival in North America - via an interior route through melting glaciers and into prairies loaded with mammoths, ground sloths, and other megafauna. Clovis hunters, say some favoring earlier arrival, certainly left a big mark across N. America. But by the time they got here other people appear more and more likely to have been long settled in along the coast.

1,000 years, one observes, is an important but hardly a shattering extension of humanity’s New World residence. Still un-demonstrated with persuasive physical evidence, apparently, are bolder pre-Clovis notions that people got here 20,000 years ago or more.

Reporters are giving it plenty of coverage, much of it colorful.

Stories:

Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield tells this one soberly (he also links to an earlier story of his saying Australia may have provided the embarcation point for the first Americans) ; AP Randolph E. Schmid ; Nat’l Geographic Stefan Lovgren ; AFP ; New Scientist Jeff Hecht ; Nature News Rex Dalton provides one skeptic asking “What type of people … only make use of seaweed?” ; SF Chronicle David Perlman starts it with a fine, evocative lede: “Southward those First Americans must have come…generation after generation” and he dwells a bit on their time, surely, dining on salmon in California ; Reuters Maggie Fox ; Christian Science Monitor Peter N. Spotts leads on the un-appetizing origins of the data: “Half-chewed seaweed … and fossilized feces” and that’d stop anybody from chewing for a moment ;

And finally, Pravda’s rewrite of the wires, with a completely daffy illus.

Grist for the Mill: Vanderbilt U. Press Release ; NSF Press Release ;

Pic source ;

Personal P.S.: The Tracker finds this evidence rather gratifying, having written a long US News & World Report story ten years ago about the situation then, including Monte Verde. It is, remarkably, I immodestly note, still on line.

The Allen Array, a project by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, has gotten a regular dose of publicity recently, with a good example this week in the San Jose Mercury News. Julie Sevrens Lyons went up to Hat Creek Valley north of Lassen Peak to visit with SETI signal icon Jill Tarter, other astronomers, and technicians assembling the most ambitious radio search of the sky yet. This summer it is to start science operation.

Lyons reports it well, with extensive graphics, as have several others (see earlier posts April 2 and Oct. 11). It also links to a video program on the same topic put together by the local PBS station, KQED, and its Quest program (in the preceding Apr. 2 link). The report tells readers that at least 100 SETI searches have occurred, many still going.

Pic: hi res ;

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At one time, Mark Roth tells readers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, some medical scholars explained longevity as a matter of pulse. All creatures (those with hearts, anyway), it was supposed, get about the same allotment of heartbeats at birth. Evidence: elephants with ba….bump pulses live a long time; mice and their vibrating little rib cages don’t. That makes sense.

But the hypothesis fell apart long ago. Hummingbirds live many years, for one thing. There were many other exceptions. Roth’s piece is a clearly written excursion through other classes of idea that have come and, in most cases, gone. Oxidative stress, strain, and its repair come out as a hot field for research right now. Don’t expect advice in here on how to extend your own life. It doesn’t get into flatworms, fruitflies, or an idea in the news lately: calorie restriction. Do expect to learn the somewhat peculiar, and somewhat upsetting too, reason that elephants don’t live even longer.

The Tracker would like to have seen some more detail, such as a sidebar on a lab experiment underway right now including a few arcane aspects of its protocol to provide a feel for the research. This smoothly-composed piece sticks to one topic: clues offered by animals that, in their natural state, live on and on - in one species’s case, 225 years. It’s possible you’ve had it for dinner.

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If it makes its deadline the US Fish and Wildlife Service will decide next week whether to list polar bears as endangered species, imperiled by forecasts of less arctic ice pack for habitat. The Bee’s Matt Weiser today provides a good appetizer for that news, whichever way it goes. The hook is a threat of suit by a California law firm, the Pacific Legal Foundation, should the white bear be put on the lists kept under the Endandered Species Act.

The piece has a good deal of background on the issues involved, such as whether the law is meant to apply to species for which there is plausible threat but that are, for now, doing fairly well. To illuminate it, Weiser brings up the case of a smaller mammal, the pika, similarly in danger in its mountain habitats if California’s warming raises the rodents’ comfort zone to somewhere higher than the summits of the ranges where they now live. Recently, a California Fish and Game board turned thumbs down on granting them such precautionary endangered species protection. See Weiser’s story on that, too. Could be a harbinger.

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Make that a lot of rain, and a lot of karst, and next thing you know you have a “diabolical rise” in the water table, writes the Plain Dealer’s Joel Downey. He has a pretty fair smattering of geology and deep time in a piece whose main aim is to share with readers the plight of one fellow - one example of several - fighting for a house uncoated in mold and without a flooded basement and without ponds appearing all over the property, quietly flowing from below.

The Tracker is unsure of his evocation of underground rivers at the intersection of four Ohio counties. But he brings up the region’s cavern-riddled, limestone karst underpinnings and their origin in vanishes seas. It makes it plausible, maybe, that heavy rains flooded the caverns and are feeding rising groundwater with particular force into people’s properties. Plus, there is some pretty good wordsmithing in here. That includes the local residents’ curiosity over what “hydro-geologic sins” brought the catastrophe on. It is, he writes among the details from the world of science, “like some horrific and bizarre biblical affliction.”

Plus, one learns of the famous (?) Blue Hole of Castalia. Sounds a little bit like those sacrifice-filled cenotes of the Yucutan.

It is not clear in the piece exactly why karst would make the situation worse. If anything, it’s a porous place into which surface runoff may run. How would shale, or granite, or any other basement rock be better? Is there an artesian phenomenon at work here?

The pic is a thumbnail of a BIG pdf graphic.

Barely Related Diabolical Hydro-geology News: AP reports a giant sinkhole in SE Texas has now swallowed oil equipment and vehicles. Not karst, but salt dome geology, apparently.

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For the Christian Science Monitor writer Vijaysree Vankatraman provides today a feel-good story from an MIT lab, and there’s nothing wrong with a story that makes you feel good. It concerns appropriate technology and a professor who devotes much of her professional life to spreading its gospel. Her basement “D-Lab,” it says here, churns out students with a knack for finding ingenious but technologically fairly simple gadgetry to make life more productive in countries without the infrastructure or wealth to take much advantage of the sort of advanced wizardry for which MIT is best known.

Such as, it says here, a pedal-powered, mobile corn sheller. Or a little device that produces charcoal briquettes from waste materials.

For more in the Monitor’s current sci-tech lineup, look here ;

Newsweek’s Sharon Begley has a tough-talking review out in this week’s issue. She gives high praise to the writer of a book called “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health,” and high scorn for the folks that the book skewers. She selects as an example a study of hexavalent chromium. It found no strong evidence it causes cancer. But it did so, it says in the book, via “meta-analysis” whose ingredients were concocted to wash out the peril, evidenced in tightly-focussed workplace studies, by adding other studies with large population and relatively little exposure.

It’s food for thought. It certainly has The Tracker - who had felt Erin Brockovich may be noble but that doesn’t make her science worth much - wondering if I’ve been had by industry.

Grist for the Mill: Book website at DefendingScience.org ;

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BBC’s Matt Walker has a short, smart piece out today on an observation many wouldn’t find curious, but that got tackled by a scientist’s rigor. A professor at the University of Aberystwyth, a place that few non-Brits and perhaps few non-Welsh seem likely to pronounce correctly, wondered why flowers wave and dip and twist so precariously in breezes, even mild ones. What evolutionary advantage could those slender stems offer, as they put precious blooms at good risk of beating themselves to pieces in a strong gust?

*UPDATE - A more analytic piece went up later today at The Scientist (Sigma Xi magazine) site by Elie Dolgin - and includes two perceptive critiques by outside researchers with a wait-for-more-research message.  The site may require registration to read it, but it’s free ;
Pretty quick, after some experiments, the prof and a colleague had a new datum for the books of botany and entomology: flowers that wave attract more attention from bees and other pollinators. This pays off even though it’s harder for the insects to spend much time on flowers that are flapping. The report is in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.

Grist for the Mill: Journal of Ev. Bio. abstract ;

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The evacuation of towns around Chile’s Chaiten volcano seems complete, its ash is creating havoc for nearby regions, and The Tracker wouldn’t post yet again on it were it not for this photo at the Nat’l Geographic site. The link includes a graf on how volcanic plumes occasionally mingle with passing clouds to touch off what some call “dirty thunderstorms.” Several outlets are running the photo.

Other stories:

Sunday Times (Australia) Leigh Dayton ; Times (UK) Lewis Smith ;

*UPDATE: A stupendous gallery of Chaiten photos including many others of the lightning show is HERE, at a Spanish language site called Terra. The shooter is not clear - some outlets credit the photos to UPI.

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Schoolkids love a platypus. But one has to wonder about one thing. Of all the oddities of its physique, why did naturalists hundreds of years ago pick on its flat feet to derive a common name? That fat, wide, electrically-tuned duckbill-like muzzle seems a better inspiration (and is why “duck-billed” is usually included in references to it - as though there are other kinds of platypuses). We’d justifiably be calling them anafacians or something like that. Its formal name is dead-on to the mark: Ornithorhyncus anatinus, for duck-like bird snout.

However it got it, the popular monicker is so goofily crafted for delight that it is nothing short of brilliant. Plenty of reporters are leaping at the chance to put platypus in a headline over a story that says its genes are fully offbeat too.

In Nature today a large int’l team, funded by the US National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH, reports genomic analysis of a female of the species. They found genetic links not only to mammals - platypuses nurse their young and are classified as members of an early mammal offshot version called monotremes with roots going back 165 million years. Also among its chromosomes are a big mix of reptile-like sequences. The latter may help explain, among other things, its bird face, snakelike venom, and its egg-laying. Maybe somebody should now sequence a representative of the only other monotremes - spiny anteaters.

Even without the flock of press releases the story nearly writes itself - and is of such a nature that reporters justifiably can go light on one standard, laborious aspect of oddball science reporting. There seems little need to call outside experts to find somebody to quarrel with the report. One other notable feature - The Tracker did not examine every line of every story but even though one press release calls the platypus a “ticket back in time,” few if any reporters trotted out “living fossil.” Good.

Stories:

Washington Post Rick Weiss leads with a vignette on an aspect of the platypus many reporters pick up - the first taxonomist in the UK to study a specimen sent from Australia suspected somebody stitched it together for laughs from pieces of other beasts and fowl. Weiss’s reference to “serpent-like spurs” on its back feet evokes well the strangeness of a platypus. The hed, implying that the animal’s first curator was right, declares it “cobbled-together. ” That is funny but a (forgivably minor) sin in usage. Evolution lacks volition, cobbles nothing ;

AP Rohan Sullivan ; Times (UK) Mark Henderson ; Reuters Michael Perry ; Nature News Susan Brown ; ABC (Australia) Dani Cooper ; NY Times John Noble Wilford ; Bloomberg Elizabeth Lopatto writes it “is both mammal and reptile” and is that taxonomically possible? Maybe? ; ScienceNews Amy Maxmen ;  New Zealand Herald Craig Borley puts a practical, if somewhat longshot, spin on the work - it could help fight human and livestock disease and boost farm productivity. Sure … another maybe. Borley mentions that the animals have ten sex chromosomes to our two, too. ; Australian Leigh Dayton gets in high another oddity - the egg proteins resemble those of birds, but the milk is like other mammal milk including that of cows ; BBC Helen Briggs ; New Scientist Emma Young ; … lots more.

Grist for the Mill:

NIH Press Release ; Wash. Univ. St. Louis Press Release ; U. of Otago (N.Zealand) Press Release ; Louisiana St. U. Press Release ; European Molecular Biology Laboratory Press Release ;

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