At the Philadelphia Inquirer the clever Faye Flam went into full deconstruction mode on Monday, quarreling with creationists’ glee over their declaration that big shot scientists just stumbled across the creator. She did so in her column, Planet of the Apes, which revolves around evolution issues and, one has to say, cosmic evolution surely can be squeezed in among them.

The news she parses is that a big meeting in the UK among cosmologists led to discussion of Stephen Hawking, whose 70th birthday was the meeting’s cause even though he was too ill to attend, and specifically Hawking’s allusion to god in context of efforts to divine (heh heh) the mechanisms by which the universe arose. This in turn led New Scientist to run a story by Lisa Grossman earlier this month entitled “Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event,” followed by an editorial “The Genesis Problem.” Your tracker has not read either to its end, as they are mostly hidden by a pay wall I’ve not had energy to breach. Flam says the magazine did deliberately imply that the physicists entertained the Almighty as an explanation for everything. Could be.

But one suspects that whatever was said at the party, they are not literal proclamations that scientific method has led physicists to Jehovah or other lord above. Scripture, not just biblical but all kinds, includes a large share of the most vivid and unforgettable writing ever composed. So it is no wonder writers and thinkers of all sorts borrow from its parables and cosmologies to give their words extra oomph. It doesn’t mean they believe it, but they appreciate it. After all, Einstein once said he doesn’t believe that god plays dice with the world. That’s a figure of speech. It’s not a prayer, or a revelation (gad, scriptural imagery all over) that if there is a god it would ever roll dice as tie-breakers.

Anyway….apparently creationists took New Scientist’s reporting as Good News. And Flam took that as a cue to write some savvy lines. They include explanation, via her sources and herself, that when science runs out of hypotheses or evidence to explain something, it may be a mystery but that doesn’t make it a miracle from heaven.

    – Charlie Petit

A little announcement at the National Arboretum in DC, about a new version of the handy climate zone maps that the USDA and its Agricultural Research Service publishes to help home gardeners and others know whether figs, peonies, or passion flower vines will do well in the yard, included a delightful round of fast-talking. That is, if the AP‘s Seth Borenstein got it right, and he’s a diligent reporter. AP has a video by Lee Powell on the news, too.

Now, he could have written portentiously that the affair reflects recognition by a federal agency that global warming is making a practical impact, and compared the kibosh laid down on such revisions when they were considered during the administration of George W. Bush.

Instead, one gets a delightful vignette in which a USDA spokeswoman insists that the map should not be taken as evidence of global warming (was she also there during the Bush administration and still feeling the sting? Yes, if this press release from 2002 is any indication) . Seth immediately follows his sketch of the evasive tap dance with quotes from several horticultural authorities who say of course it’s global warming, sheesh and wottayathinking? The USDA woman had one good point, one thinks. What wipes out many plants is cold weather, so the maps rely only on a region’s cold extremes, not the average temp. But, one bets, there is a pretty strong correlation between the two in how they change.

   There is more to this, one suspects after hunting around for the previous map, pasted here. the colors are a bit different so it’s hard to be sure whether zones are heading north without a  ponder.  Go to this site where I found it and see that there was a 2006 edition of the map too. But USDA didn’t publish it. The National Arbor Day Foundation, apparently stepping into the breach, did that one. It includes a swell subtraction-comparison of zones to show the migration north that was apparent even then. See the arbor day group ‘s own posting of the 2006 effort and the press release it had that year. Nobody that I’ve seen in this weeks news round gives any credit toe NADF for its intermediate map, which sure looks as nicely done as the USDA’s. The Tracker had a brief post on it at the time.

The USDA is not going to make printed posters of the new map, reports say, relying on the web to circulate it. Maybe the nice people at the arbor day organization will step into this breach, too, and run some off.

Other stories on the USDA’s 2012 catch-up hardiness map:

• NPR – Dan Charles: Gardening Map of Warming U.S. Has Plant Zones Moving North ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – Stacy Finz: USDA releases new Plant Hardiness Zone Map ; Gives a plug to Sunset Magazine – a source says it does better job on its maps, for the western US,  than does the USDA.
• Newsday – Jessica Damiano: New Plant Hardiness Zone map released today ;
• USA Today – Janice Lloyd: New USDA climate zone map reflects northward warming trends ;
• Washington Post – Adrian Higgins: New plant map shifts area to warmer zone ;

Grist for the Mill: USDA Ag.Res. Service Press Release, Oregon State U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

At IPS  a general news service that includes a good deal on  climate change, (Note:  earlier post erred in saying it run mainly climate news) Canadian crusading journalist Stephen Leahy reports a surprise, if it’s true. But one sees in the story an element of bait and switch. It’s not enough to refute the main point, which could well be perfectly valid. But the brush is broad.

Compare the lede, “The only green in biodiesel fuel is the money producers make from it, new research has revealed,” with the followup: “Biodiesel from palm oil plantations may be the world’s dirtiest fuel – far worse than burning diesel made from oil when the entire production life cycle is considered.”

Thus the target is just one way of making biodiesel. It is a widely used and still-growing one to be sure. It would be no surprise that clearing vast natural forest tracts to grow palm oil makes biodiesel overall a product that accelerates rather than retards global warming. But the story ought to tell readers whether there are are some biodiesels that are as green as advertised. I’m thinking of the small operations that turn used cooking oil into biodiesel, but one can imagine others that pass muster on the greenhouse gas scale.

Leahy, whose work has been posted on here several times, is among the more innovative freelancers in the struggle to get the money to keep working. Among his strategies for covering travel and other expenses is to seek donations on the web. I’ve made a small one myself to his community supported journalism venture. He uses it to do good, if clearly agenda-driven, work. Being a crusader and being an honest are not incompatible.

But one more paragraph in this story would be welcome, one that might reassure the public-spirited lady driving her old Mercedes diesel around the streets of Cambridge or Berkeley that she is doing the world a favor when fueling up (for high cost) at a little neighborhood biodiesel outlet.

Other Biodiesel News (some may enforce Leahy’s angle):

• Reuters – Michael Hogan: Green fuel taxes choking German biodiesel growth ;
• Des Moines Register – Dan Piller: Fragile future for biofuel industry foretold ; This is off topic, but a prime source here is named Joe Jobe. He is executive officer of the National Biodiesel Board in Missouri. I usually have the discipline to suppress puns, and also making much of people whose names seem right for the job. Not this time. Jojoba plants, full of wax and natural oil, were for a while the hottest-promoted feedstock for biodiesel. If I were a reporter, I’d ask about that mellifluous name of his. Maybe it’s his given name, or not. Apt for sure.
• Bikya Masr (Egypt independent news) Sharifa Ghanem: Biodiesel buses on the move in UAE ; A little hunting around reveals that the supplier, Lootah Biofuels, says it makes it from used cooking oil. It doesn’t say if it is palm oil, which seems unlikely. The problem, one gathers from Leahy’s story, is palm oil produced for direct conversion to biodiesel.
• Forbes – James Glassman: Liberate Biofuels From Abroad ;He cites Elisabeth Rosenthal of the NYTimes and quotes a five-year-old article of hers, quite badly out of contest, to build enthusiasm for import to the US of exactly the palm oil-based biofuel that energizes Leahy’s report. The headline on Rosenthal’s story (to which Glassman links): Once a Dream Fuel, Palm Oil May Be an Eco-Nightmare. Had any editor at Forbes read Rosenthal’s story, he or she would have done well to tell Mr. Glassman he may not cite it as ammo for his argument. Glassman, one notes, is a free-market crusader and head of the George W. Bush Institute, at the library of the same eponym at Southern Methodist University.
• Malaysia Star – Hanim Adnan: Cries of EU biofuel discrimination grow louder ; This one was in he paper yesterday. Ms. Adnan is quite the fan of her nation’s palm oil – here‘s what she wrote in October.

Grist for the Mill: US Dept. of Energy Biodiesel Production page. Main reference is to conversion of vegetable and animal fats; doesn’t mention palm oil. Implies production in US relies on used and locally-produced feed stock materials.

- Charlie Petit

Y’ see bloke, here’s a way by which one might pass himself off as a true son of England. Not only study up on yousel’s accent, East Midland will serve, but you best toss in mention o’the occasional damp squib. Well! That sentence is all made-up English in rhythm and I don’t mean the Queen’s English or wots you hear on the Beeb. So no need to tell me I’m a pathetic linguist, as that’s sort of the point. This is entirely a syntactical lark unhinged from reality, excluding the damp squib, wot is the real deal. This Britishism  means something that was heralded in some quarters as great and impactful but in the event fell way short, sort of like the big solar storm that swept the planet the other day. Not recalling ever encountering the term before, I looked it up. And I did so after coming upon this tidy yarn:

• New Scientist – Stuart Clark: Fight over changing constants reaches stalemate ;

The damp squib resides right in the lede. One suspects Mr. Clark comes naturally to use of the term. It is not merely apt it entices the reader. It amuses and relaxes the brains of those who might otherwise think any story on speculation that the laws of physics, which includes its constants, might be drifting over time and be detectable when integrated and compared across cosmic distances, is just too dry, arcane, and dense for further reading. This is a sharply reported story, derived from a paper to which it links on the great server of fresh, hot, un-peer-reviewed space stuff, arXiv’s astro-ph. Maybe there is a press release lurking in its genesis. But it smells like enterprise, complete with remarks from several researchers dismayed that their investigation’s result is a bit of a you-now-know-what.

The news, incidentally, is that data the Very Large Array telescope gathered on itty bitty details in H1 and OH lines are so muddy as to be quite consistent with zero change over space and time by the fine structure constant, the proton-electron mass ratio, and something called the proton g-factor, aka the gyromagnetic ratio (about which you may read in another New Scientist piece from last year). The image up top, also by the way, is from a site that associates the fine structure constant with physics anticipated in the Kabbalah.

Even the great MIT-Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog missed this one.

- Charlie Petit

NASA Goddard Photo and Video, http://tinyurl.com/6o54j7j

Got some planet news today, one nearby, another way out there.

1) The Latest Blue Marble from NASA.

• NPR (blog) Mark Memmott: “Blue Marble 2012′ ; NASA’s ‘Most Amazing’High Def Image of Earth So Far ; Reproduced really big above, so you can appreciate it. Memmott doesn’t make it clear how to get there, but one can find it in super duper full res here.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Blue Marble 2012: Amazing High Definition Image of Earth ;
• Daily Mail – Rob Waugh: NASA reveals stunning new hi-def “Blue Marble” image of our world, as captured by agency’s latest satellite ; IN a good move, Waugh, or the Mails’s photo editor, also includes last year’s NASA blue marble, taken by an older spacecraft.

Grist for the Mill:  U. Wisconsin Press Release (explains the name Suomi).

2) Is that a planet ’round yonder star?

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Fomalhaut b “first” planet picture in doubt ; Dueling over data from different space telescopes. Nice snapshot of science when the data are sketchy and the researchers competitive.
• Sci Fi surprise – A new book from Brit writer Paul McAuley is all about Fomalhaut, its obstreperous inhabitants, and its ancient gas giant planet. Who needs science and space telescope pics when we have science fiction? I don’t read sci fi anymore – so can’t say anything about this one’s literary quality. I merely found it while nosing around for Fomalhaut news.

OK, one more. While nosing around Goddard’s imagery archives I looked at the most recent, and found a wonderful one of Mars, just in.

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- Charlie Petit

  Tons of ink the last few days as a big blob of sun stuff, belched into a space from a spectacular solar eruption and flare, a coronal mass ejection of high ranking, came at Earth. Would it bollix communicaiton satellites, induce overloads in transmission lines, make hearing aid batteries explode (ok I made that up), or what?

Nothing much. Here are a few yarns filed after it went on its way toward the heliopause and points interstellar.

• AP – Karl Ritter, Seth Borenstein: Solar storm sparks dazzling northern lights ; With very impressed quotes from a cruise ship’s passengers, one of them perhaps the astronomer-naturalist, off the coast of Norway. More storms, write the AP duo, are surely due, perhaps larger, as solar maximum approaches in the next few months or even a year or two. But this one didn’t damage anything important enough to report.
• International Herald Tribune – Harvey Morris: Here comes the sun; 
• Cape Argus (S.Afr) Sibusiso Nomo, Shaun Smillie: Flare all dazzle and no damage ;
• BBC: Chances of seeing Northern Lights dim / effects are lessening
• Reuters – Kyle Peterson: Solar storm forces Delta, United to divert flights ;
• Fairbanks News Miner – Dorothy Chomicz: Solar storm produces outstanding aurora over Alaska as airlines, telecom companies fret over disruptions ; The paper has two quite striking photos.
• LA Times – Amina Khan: Solar storm sends charged particles toward Earth ; A calm, competent story that ran on the eve of the main ejection cloud arrival, and which predicted little or no damage. The LAT’s Amy Hubbard had an update after it passed.
• McClatchy Newspapers / Boston Herald – Michelle Theriault Boots: Aurora borealis mesmerizes watchers who toughed Alaskan night ;
  

- Charlie Petit

Lately one often encounters discussion of US research supremacy in context with ferment in a China that, after becoming the foremost, high-tech workshop for the world, is driving hard to seize prominence in innovative basic and applied research too and good for it. We need the competition.

This is a meandering post that will wind up with a minor point, thud. And it doesn’t have to do as much with international science rankings or even science journalism as with one of the latter’s prominent feed stocks: press releases. Bear with me, for there’s a journalism observation too.

Onward. Awareness that China’s rise in the world of high-level, original scientific research is a current topic is why, when the latest tip sheet for press from the American Chemical Society arrived, I perked up. It highlights two instances of Chinese research. It also shines a light on a piece of watermelon-related research performed in Turkey. Very international, this tip sheet is. But back to the Chinese ones. Both have catchy details that might attract some press coverage. One says that objects subject to damage by wind-blown grit might be more resistant if their surfaces bear corrugations inspired by yellow fattail scorpions. (Here’s a site full of xlnt pictures of them).  The animals manage to live in windy deserts but not get sand-blasted, it appears. Another paper concerns the boatload of promising antibiotic compounds in the skin secretions of odorous, ie very bad-smelling, frogs. Stinky frogs and tough desert scorpions are easy fodder for news stories with snap.

But then, looking at both the short summary and the full text of the scorpion paper I find that the authors refer to their proposed new surfaces as “bionic.” The researchers even work, at Jilin University in Changchun, in the Key Laboratory of Bionic Engineering. By the way, I ran down a bio of the lead author, Han Zhiwu, just to see if he happened to have his PhD from Berkeley or Caltech or MIT or something, you know, a US-connection to the work. Nope – Professor Han is entirely China-educated and innovative too. Back to the topic: Wow, there’s a story, bionic scorpions! Bionic is not even in my 1976 giant Merriam-Webster 3rd Int’l Dictionary. More up-to-date on line definitions say, just as one would guess if one had ever watched or heard of the Bionic Man or Bionic Woman on TV, that it means enhancement of normal muscular strength, vision, etc., by electronic or mechanical devices. To be sure, other definitions on line say it means simply the use of a system or design found in nature (American Heritage Science Dictionary, Houghton-Mifflin, 2005). So Dr. Han is in the clear with his nomenclature. But c’mon – bionics to the average person means some actor zooming along at 60 mph due to weird mechanical implants and using artificial,  multi-spectral zoom lenses in his or her eyes to look around for a car to pick up. Any reporter who happens to render this for popular consumption and jazzes up its eye appeal by talking about bionic shields, unless the term is immediately defined, is performing a cheap word stunt. A better word to use is biomimetic, meaning inspired by or copied from nature, not bionic. Just because some scientists use a word does not give a reporter free pass to do it, in a misleading manner, too. It’s the reporter’s story. It  should use words that mean what they seem to mean at first glance.

Now to see if this little advance in applied research in materials science gets traction in popular media aside from the “churnalism” aggregators that just swallow and disgorge press releases without digestion, and often call themselves news agencies. Here’s one such out already, at something called Science Codex. It says it “posts articles on the latest science news all day, every day.” At first approximation, that suggests it wants to pass as a news agency rather than a web bucket full of press releases and journal extracts.

- Charlie Petit

Sometimes ya gotta wonder: Do the people who write for The New York Times actually read The New York Times?

Sunday’s Book Review had a review by Robin Marantz Henig of a new book on disgust by Rachel Herz, a psychologist at Brown.

Tuesday’s Science Times had a story by James Gorman on disgust, which didn’t mention that the subject had just come up in the paper two days earlier. Was Gorman aware of the coincidence, if that’s what it was? And if so, why didn’t he make the link for readers? A seemingly authoritative piece in the Times that ignores a recent story in the paper suggests either that Herz and her book are not worthy of consideration, and the book should not have been reviewed, or it suggests that Gorman’s reporting was not very thorough.

I know what you’re thinking: Science Times went to bed before the Book Review appeared on Sunday. I don’t know when Science Times goes to bed, but the book review comes out, I think, on the Wednesday before the paper version appears Sunday. So there would have been time for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea, as Eliot put it.

The only person who did read the paper was Tara Parker-Pope, who managed to avoid writing a column Monday by quoting Gorman’s story at some length before it even appeared in the paper.

I read the book review immediately before coming across Gorman’s story, and I now wonder whether Herz is an important figure in research on disgust, or not. I get conflicting messages from the Times. The attention paid by the Book Review suggests she is, and the Science Times article suggests she isn’t.

Editors: A little help?

- Paul Raeburn

At the Wall Street Journal Robert Lee Hotz extols new research into brain anatomy – especially new ability to capture the physical routes of neuronal communication. One can guess what went on in the reporter’s brain when one reads an evocative passage such as this in the story:  “..all cognition emerges from the interplay of electrochemical impulses along the brain’s circuity, which can call a word to mind, apply the rules of grammar, and voice it aloud in 600 milliseconds.” What’s going on is recognition that the story is important, possession of a general idea what the science is about, and no time for years in post-doc training to really get what the heck those neurons are doing. So one winds up writing about interplays of impulses and that’s fine. What else was Hotz supposed to do?

What makes the story is the pictures anyway. If there are images like these, one just knows that experts have to be learning something from them. Good job of handling a difficult topic. With the piece is Hotz’s sure-handed explanatory video. One learns that our thoughts are racing around through a ‘connectome’ . So that’s not you talking. It’s your connectome.

- Charlie Petit

Everybody (especially in the news biz) likes a fight. One may not approve of the behavior, but it is difficult to look away. Maybe there should be an emotion named for such rapt attention (see today’s post on NYT Science Times, annoyance, and disgust).

Case in point: the continuing loud debate among environmentalists, energy industrialists, and atmospheric scientists over the green merit of natural gas, especially that recovered by hydraulic fracturing or fracking. It got intense after Cornell biologist Robert Howarth and two co-authors reported last spring in the journal Climatic Change Letters that so much natural gas (methane) leaks into the air unburnt from such drilling that the industry’s overall addition to greenhouse forcing is worse than from coal mining and use. Some colleagues of his say he used outdated data, distorted other figures, and generally got it wrong. That is, it may not be doing the planet any good but it’s better than coal and it’s a bridge toward a low-carbon economy. Howarth for his part is sticking to his guns. This is a fight for sure.

In a recent issue of the same journal, two teams, both from Cornell and one including Howarth, offer dueling papers stating their cases.

Perhaps the most partisan account of all this runs as an op-ed in the Murdoch tabloid New York Post, but it’s more than a cut above the paper’s usual. Writer Jon Entine makes no pretense of neutrality in this article that clearly tells the reader to think Howarth spewed bunk or, in the headline’s term, farcical science. It’s hard to tell if he’s a journalist or pure opinion writer (job title is senior research fellow at the George Mason U. Ctr for Health & Risk Communication). As a litigator, he’d make a good living. He’s not a contrarian or denialist on the larger issue of climate change, quite the contrary. But Entine does appear to be deeply insulted when he perceives somebody on the side of the angels (ie, of an Earth not careering into climate chaos) going past good science to make the case. One can quarrel with his label of some anti-fracking forces as “hard leftists.” Some of’em must be such – whatever a hard leftist is these days. But it’s off-base to declare that an overt, radical political agenda is a prime incentive for fracking opponents. Maybe Entine simply stuck in some red meat language to get the story past the NYPost’s editors.

Other Fracking Duel stories:

• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: Fracked: The Debate Over Shale Gas Deepens ; Great line: “So what does this all mean – other than the fact that the Cornell faculty club may be getting a little testy these days?” One offers that Walsh should explain why natural gas may have twice the global warming punch as coal over 20 years, but only about the same over a century. It has to do with methane’s fairly short persistence in the air, a reason interesting enough to be described. The piece does tilt a bit – and against Howarth.
• Business Week – Jim Polson: Fracking’s Greenhouse Gas Contribution Splits Scientists ; This one picks no winners.
• Scientific American – Mark Fischetti :Fracking Would Emit Large Quantities of Greenhouse Gases ; Pretty much reports the anti-Fracking argument by Howarth et all straight and without counter till the end, when doubters get a brief say.
• Canada Free Press – Dennis Avery: Shale gas: Boon for humanity or bane? ; Boon, says this piece from a stoutly conservative pub ;
• Essential Public Radio (Independent, lots of NPR, from Pittsburgh) Jared Adkins: Natural Gas From Shale Could Worsen Climate Change ; That’s a non-sequitur in the hed. Of course it’ll worsen it. The question is whether it is a worse worsener than coal. The story relies only on Howarth and his co-authors as sources.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Ben Cubby: Gas no good to bridge coal and renewables, says study ; The perspective from Australia, leads on Howarth and the fracking doubters, and acknowledges doubts of that doubt’s evidence from both academia and industry.

*UPDATE:

• IPS – Stephen Leahy: Shale Gas a Bridge to More Global Warming ; States the case against shale gas, ignores arguments by some academics that it is still better than coal ;
• New Scientist – Mike Stephenson: Frack responsibly and risks – and quakes – are small ; A pure opinion piece. The author is head of energy science at the British Geological Survey. Not on greenhouse gas forcing, but on the local risks from such drilling practices.

There are some more. In recent years media has faced heavy criticism, overblown in the tracker’s view, that it has engaged in false balance in climate change reporting, portraying contrarians as of equal debate stature as, say, the National Academy of Sciences. In this fracking fight, one is forced to conclude, the scientific debate does demand balanced coverage.

Grist for the Mill: Original Cornell Press Release in April ; Latest paper Press Release from its authors, apparently;  (A funnier press release out from Cornell is out right now, and totally off the fracking topic, on the kinds of people who think they are taller than they are. )

- Charlie Petit

A seawall - on a lake?

Not long ago NPR’s Joe Palca got attention for his book, with Flora Lichtman, on the unappreciated, nearly overlooked emotion they summarized as annoyance, and everybody knows what that is. The clever book was partly humor, yet also serious of intent. I got to thinking about it on reading the double-down version of annoyance, one could even call it annoyance cubed: Disgust. Everybody of normal consciousness knows what disgust is, too.

The Times’s James Gorman hits some of the same notes that Palca and Lichtman did in declaring that despite its intensity and universality, disgust has not gotten due attention from neuroscientists, evolutionary biologists, behavioral specialists generally, and even the public. Well of course. Nobody wants to think long about disgust. To do so evokes images of what triggers it and they are all disgusting. Yecchh. If you can stomach it read this appreciation for it and the new breed of disgustologists sorting through its causes, what it lights up on brain scans, and the survival rewards that have made it essential in our emotional armory. Disgust, it says here, is finally getting academic respect.

Other notable SciTimes headlinies:

• Jennifer Pinkowski – After Being Stricken by Drought, Istanbul Yields Ancient Treasure ; Your tracker must confess to a knee-jerk. I read this all the way through, after seeing the hed, thinking Wilford – that being John Noble of course – got himself another dandy yarn about old ruins and their rediscovery. Never assume. Wrong writer. Good one though. Pinkowski certainly brings ancient ages to life in the imagination as she relates how a long-forgotten port town not far from The Bosporus, exposed by drought on a lake slightly inland, is revealing key stages in the growth and death of empires. One question unanswered: If this was a harbor for the Byzantine fleet way back when, how’d the lake now lowered by drought get separated from the Mediterranean tides?
• Roni Caryn Rabin: Men Struggle for Rape Awareness; A stat-heavy report on a crime only recently getting heavy, important attention. One wonders whether Rabin drew too little distinction between rape of boys and young teens, which surely has always been recognized as a serious crime, and that of grown men. Are not there somewhat distinct aspects to the two? Surely the public has long known of sex crimes against boys, and found them abhorrent as is rape of women and girls. I found myself distracted by another, trivial question: where was the spooky photo, of a man who describes being sexually assaulted when he was young, taken? Is that place real? A diorama? (Late note: I see a second pic on line, probably the same place, looks like a downtown public park). Also disconcerting is the brief reference to the suspect the police arrested for  the crime and, it says here, killed on the streets before he could be tried. Say what? Vigilante justice?
• Anthony DePalma: Mercury’s Harmful Reach Has Grown, Study Suggests ; Rising worry that fallout from coal plants is harming wildlife, too.
• Kenneth Chang: After Hardship and Homelseeness, National Science Fair Honors ; Not so much about science itself as about the moxie and drive to do it right, embodied in a teenager (already widely noticed by journalists and TV show hosts) who sticks with it no matter what.
• Also, but in the Business Section, Andrew Pollack: Stem Cell Treatment for Eye Diseases Shows Promise;

As usual, lots more. Science Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Carl Zimmer has published at least two ebooks, although I don’t know where he found the time. That’s because he seems to have made a full-time career out of studying the ebook market, the apps, the publishers, and anything else possibly related to publishing ebooks. If you are at all interested in collecting and publishing those pieces that you rescued from a defunct magazine or website, you should see what he, and co-organizer Tammy Powledge, had to say.

Their list of resources can be found here. It amounts to a semester-long course in epublishing, and you couldn’t find better teachers.

If you’d like a little lighter reading, on a very important slice of the story, check out the post by Christopher Mims at Technology Review. He writes about The Atavist, which has created an ebook publishing platform that any of us can use to publish words, pictures, sound or video as an ebook formatted for Kindle, Nook, iBooks, and multiple other formats including simply publishing on the web.

- Paul Raeburn