Maybe it was the billboard featuring a mugshot of the Unabomber with a line under it, “I still believe in global warming. Do You?” Or maybe it was the con-job by a longtime global warming researcher and advocate Peter Gleick  that unveiled email evidence of a planned campaign to discredit global warming in schools – and also listed its major donors (plus, one must mention, that led many of his friends to question Gleick’s own  ethics and honesty). Those are two of the factors that, the Guardian’s US environment correspondent Suzanne Goldenberg reports from Chicago this week, are behind a deep crisis within the Heartland Institute. Donors have fled, she reports, and so have staffers. Morale is down, anger is up.

The story is not about collapse of doubt over global warming. Along with their donors, the advocates of doing little or nothing to slow greenhouse gas emissions will find new venues to share their conviction that mainstream climate science is mistaken, fraudulent, or both. But this is a dramatic story on the shifting politics and big money in the realm of climate change deniers and other pooh-poohers. Nobody else seems to have followed events as closely as has Goldenberg. That’s testament to the Guardian’s news sense. One suspects that a higher percentage of the UK’s new-savvy populace has an inkling what the Heartland Institute is than does the equivalent slice of the American public.

Goldenberg’s reports:

• Monday May 14: Heartland Institute grows isolated as three more donors disassociate ;
  
• Sunday May 20: Heartland Institute facing uncertain future as staff depart and cash dries up ; And, she reports, the coal industry for the first time is, at least openly, giving money to Heartland just to pay the immediate bills and run its much-shrunken annual meeting.
• Monday May 21: Peter Gleick cleared of forging documents in Heartland expose ; Good news for Gleick, who largely withdrew from public life after he conceded he was the one who sprang the institutes’ emails by pretending to be somebody else. He repeatedly denied Heartland accusations that he salted the cache by adding an extra, damning document he wrote himself.
• Tuesday May 22: Heartland reflects on its beating / The ultra-conservative group’s climate conference showed how far it has fallen after an internet sting and a disastrous ad ;

Other recent Heartland Institute stories: Not much, either.

• Comedy Central blog – Ilya Gerner: Heartland Institute Shrinking Faster than the Ice Caps ;
• The Hill – Andrew Restuccia: Climate activists rip Clear Channel for rejecting billboard ;
• ThinkProgress/Climate Progress blog – Stephen Lacey: Heartland Denial Conference: Special Guest Lord Monckton Goes Birther, Admits He Has ‘No Scientific Qualification’;

Grist for the Mill: Heartland Institute 7th International Conference on Climate Change ; Includes a live stream from the meeting and texted comments from viewers. Just now (8:15 a.m. Pacific) a speaker was going through how such people as John Holdren says they’re trying to save climate but their real agenda is to slow and transform the global economy, all part of a blue-green agenda.

It waited through a few delays as glitches and weather held things up, but the long-dawning era of entrepreneurial space stuff that doesn’t involve geostationary Comsats just lit up the night at Kennedy Space Center. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted a reusable Dragon cargo shipping container into space on a proper path to the International Space Station tomorrow, with docking set for Thursday. Space Exploration Technologies Corp, or SpaceX, built the whole thing to designs it developed on its own. If it unloads its food and other goods as planned and makes it back to Pacific Ocean splashdown it presumably will get hired for more ISS trips – some day perhaps with an uprated version carrying people back and forth. Risks remain, but the hardest part is behind the SpaceX mission control team.

The event has been well-monitored by many reporters and outlets over recent weeks, so reporters had their A-matter ready to go. A flood of separate stories has already lit up the web. By the way, while private space heads up, next post down leads on public (US) space science heading down.

Stories: (with an effort to put those datelined Cape Canaveral up top, and assuming they all mean the reporter was there):

• AP – Marcia Dunn: SpaceX supply ship rockets toward space station ; She writes that this is “opening a new era of dollar-driven spaceflight.” I dunno. Seems to me it is different, sure, but privately-owned telecommunication satellites have been profit-makers for rocket companies for quite awhile. Other than that minor hyperbole this does kick the door open wider than it was. Dunn, filing from the launch, ties it together in classic, tight AP style with the facts, the bigshot quotes, and the emotion of the moment inlucing the ISS crew grinning that some new stuff is on the way,  all in their places. When one is sitting in a news room wth direct feed from mission control, interesting little facts are flying all over. One, which she has, is that at the moment of liftoff the ISS was “zooming over the North Atlantic, just east of Newfoundland.” That’s the kind of aside that gives the news account its immediacy.
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: SpaceX rocket lifts off for space station trial run ; Also fine, deadline writing (with a lot of copy already done in advance, natch), but more absorbed by the timeline of this and other events to follow and better suited to outlets that don’t have much room to run it in. There is a minor note of American triumphalism in the AP dispatch, not so much from this international news service rooted in the UK.
• Orlando Sentinel – Scott Powers: SpaceX rocket blasts Dragon into space in historical launch.   The cape is his beat, and the experience shows. Besides, you gotta like a reporter who puts on his company bio under interests: ‘beer drinking and channel surfing’.
• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: SpaceX Launch Signals New Era In Spaceflight ;
• USA Today/Florida Today : SpaceX makes history as Dragon capsuel speeds toward ISS ;
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Private Cargo Rocket Heads to Space Station;
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: SpaceX rocket begins milestone mission to space station ;
• Wired – Jason Paur: SpaceX in Orbit – Successful Launch of Falcon 9 Rocket ;
• LA Times -W. J. Hennigan: NASA hails SpaceX launch as ‘an new era’ for spaceflight ; Hennigan phrases the specific significance of this flight well: “..the first test of NASA’s plan to outsource space missions to privately funded companies now that its fleet of space shuttles is retired.” Hmm. But three shuttles is a pretty puny fleet. Handful is more like it. But history does inflate things. Many call the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria a fleet.
• AP – Seth Borenstein : What’s the big deal about private space launches ; A sensible FAQ.
• Forbes – Shel Israel: SpaceX: the Enterprise Voyages Begin ; The copy is truncated, but one can read enough to recognize a puff piece, a fan letter.
• Bloomberg – Brendan McGarry: Space X launches vehicle to dock at International Space Station ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: SpaceX launch: private industry inspires new generation of rocketeeers (+ video) ;
• National Geographic – Ker Than: SpaceX Launches for Space Station – Like “Winning the Super Bowl”

Somewhat related news: Wanna know who this Elon Musk, electric car maker, rocketeer, dot.com billionaire, generalized A-list and driven entrepreneur, is?

• Forbes (March 26) Hannah Elliott: At Home With Elon Musk: The (Soon-to-Be) Bachelor Billionaire ; The underlying message is, see, if you are head of NASA, a public servant, you better life low and sober and go to work in a necktie and not strut around with too many fancy women. If you are a flashy brilliant man of the private market forging your way into space like Ayn Rand prescribes, you can live really really large. You can be Tony Stark’s role model. The best line I found is the part about the Hegelian dialectic.

Grist for the Mill: SpaceX Press Release ; SpaceX homepage ;

Seen the Avengers yet? I did, with three grandsons (youngest one James, 7, head buried in my chest when things got tensely menacing). Some of its opening scenes and a lot of the action – when not on Manhattan’s streets with Hulk bashing a Nordic god like a rag doll – are at the JDEM, or Joint Dark Energy Mission, a government research center with Very Large Array-type but nonsensical radio dishes that look very telegenic when falling in ranks into the maw of a misbehaving Tesseract. Anyway, it turns out that the movie makers did some homework to lace their Marvel superhero-world with hip, informed jargon. (For a delightful film review by a genuine UC Santa Barbara dark energy maven see the Ain’t it Cool blog by Andy Howell (aka Copernicus): Science of the Avengers, Part I.)  The JDEM isn’t like it is in the movie, but it was a genuine NASA-DOE proposal for a space telescope rigged to measure the acceleration of the universe, a key to understanding dark energy.

Well, forget JDEM (which was rolled recently into another mission called WFIRST, meaning Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope).  If the Avengers were in production today, maybe they’d choose a timelier name for their pseudo-scientific beehive of genius physicists – maybe the (Europe-led)  Euclid Accelerating Universe Consortium. US dark energy research has just gone into the freezer. Our great nation had to scratch for a few million in chump change as a bit player in Europe’s Euclid program so it can kibbitz on the data.

Our dark energy face-plant – after we divined the mystery stuff -  is the lead example in Dennis Overbye‘s science section topper today devoted to the many ways that the US and NASA budget cramps have shot holes in American primacy in astrophysics and physics generally.This is important but not new news, and it merited this big treatment. In most media  round-ups of NASA’s withering science program cosmology and astrophysics cuts play second fiddle to the drastic pull-back in Mars research ambition. This is good reporting. Here’s a minor style question. The story renders the infrared survey telescope program’s acronym Wfirst, in Brit style (they write NASA as Nasa). Why? Also, perhaps over-thinking things, I put the story’s evocative illus top right. The rocket is a Bumper, a late 1940s, war-booty German V-2 rocket with a US WAC-Corporal second stage. Is its use with this story a subtle symbolic reference to the US space rocket program’s roots just as Europe seems to be inching-by-default ahead in some aspects of space science? For sure we are bumping ourselves off the first-class coach.

Other notable Science Times headlines:

• John Markoff: Troves of Personal Data, Forbidden to Researchers ; Oh, how the real scientists at conferences hate it when colleagues with likes of Google or Facebook show up to give papers on the stats of social networking etc. at conferences and won’t share their data. Privacy versus Replicability is a well-delineated way into a thorny issue.
• Sarah Fecht – Relics With Much to Tell About Bird Diets May Be Lost to Time; Sort of an  anti-Markoff topic here, the fragility of non-digitized old data. Also resonates with NASA’s woes and Overbyes tale of reverberating science budget cuts.
• Douglas Quenqua: Drugs Helps Tailor Alcholism Treatment; Purports that bespoke treatment for alcoholism is on the way. Very iffy proposition. Well reported, the caveats are all here. One is unsure of the news judgment that the field is sufficiently well grounded for such hopeful play.
• Katherine Bouton : Two book reviews that may prompt a few tablet e-reader sales. Heds (not the book titles):  Rebels Whose Bold Moves Set Science Aglow and Raise a Paw if you Understand Einstein ;

As ever, much more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Plenty of interesting stories coming from Latin America. A study in Ecuador reveals that the 10 most consumed medications in the country have nothing to do with the real needs of the population. The study says that Ecuadorians choose medications based on advertising not prescriptions. In Chile we read a good document reviewing the first 10 years of the cosmetic use of botox, and data saying that 20% of interventions in Chile are among women younger than 34. Also from Chile a good story explaining WHO data about high obesity indexes in Vanezuela and Chile, and low diabetes in Peru and Colombia. From Argentina a great interview with an engineer who feels his nation’s scientists are too focused on basic research, and they should spend more efforts in developing useful  technologies. Another storysays that the science ministry will modify criteria to favor innovation and applied research. From Venezuela we read about a scientist doing research in Europe on how to get embryonic stem cells without affecting the original embryo. Two stories in Colombia. One about a mastectomy on a woman who didn’t have breast cancer, and another summarizes well the state of research in particle physics. From Spain, a good story about anti-aging, and another about post-orgasmic illness syndrome. SciDev reviews a study revealing that biodiversity in some areas of the Chilean coast increased significantly after the 2010 tsunami. And Mexico’s El Universal presents another excellent online graphic document, this time about contamination in big cities.

Recopilación de noticias bien trabajadas en los periódicos latinoamericanos. En el suplemento semanal de ciencia Tendencias de La Tercera leemos el muy interesante texto “10 años de Botox: la medicina que cambió el rostro del mundo” de J. Abate y P. Sepúlveda. La nota explica cómo hace 10 años se dio luz verde al uso cosmético del botox, ensalza sus virtudes, pero en seguida pasa a denunciar el exceso que se hace entre población cada vez más joven. Según fuentes consultadas por la tercera en Chile se estima que el 20% de aplicaciones son a menores de 34 años. Narra el caso de la chica de 27 años que va por su segunda intervención, y del creciente interés en la población masculina. Interesante también el texto de J. Abate “Ahora la supervivencia es del más culto”, si bien en el artículo se confunde la importancia de la acumulación de conocimiento para sobrevivir a nivel de especie (que es lo que defiende el investigador entrevistado por la tercera), con el nivel individual que se entrelee en el titular y entradilla. Mezcla de conceptos, y no queda claro cual es el mensaje novedoso del autor. En otro artículo Cecilia Yáñez nos explica que la “OMS alerta que obesidad, hipertensión y diabetes ya son un problema mundial” y hace muy bien concentrando la información en los países de la región. Desde los altos índices de obesidad femenina en Chile y Venezuela, a los bajos niveles de diabetes en Perú o Colombia.

Yendo a Venezuela, destacar la buena nota de Andrea Small “Una bióloga venezolana explora la vida en camino” en El Nacional. El titular es muy ambiguo, pero relata el trabajo de la venezolana que según Andrea fue la primera investigadora en Europa en conseguir líneas de células madre sin destruir embriones.

En Ecuador, muy buen trabajo de El Comercio explicando que “los diez fármacos más vendidos en el país responden a impactos publicitarios, y no tienen nada que ver con las enfermedades que padecen los ecuatorianos”. Gran texto que ofrece la lista de los 10 más vendidos, y advierte que algunos como el antiinflamatorio que está en primer lugar tiene efectos secundarios.

De Argentina recuperamos un par de notas de hace un par de semanas en La Nación, ambas por Nora Bar. En la primera Nora Bar “Si YPF no impulsa tecnología local, no vamos a estar mejor” entrevista a un ingeniero que reclama más transferencia de tecnología. Muy interesante nota, explicando las raíces históricas que hacen que los argentinos sientan predilección por la ciencia básica que sólo pretende ampliar conocimiento. Para el ingeniero entrevistado es un error, y sitúa la tecnología como la asignatura pendiente del Conicet. Completísima y muy recomendable entrevista. Justo dos días después Nora publicó que “cambiarán el modo de evaluar la ciencia local”, con nuevos criterios que favorezcan el desarrollo tecnológico.

De México, nueva nota y espectacular gráfico en El Universal, en esta ocasión sobre las sustancias tóxicas en los aires de las grandes ciudades (Guillermo Cárdenas). El punto del texto es que hay muchas sustancias peligrosas que no se están monitoreando por no estar incluidas en las normas. Pero lo que destacamos una vez más es el excelente documento gráfico presentado por el equipo de El Universal.

En SciDev leemos por medio de Paula Leighton que los ecosistemas costeros en Chile resurgieron tras el tsunami de hace 2 años. Es lo que explica un curioso artículo en PLOS: la biodiversidad aumentó, y eso es una indicación de que los muros de defensa que había hasta la fecha tenían un impacto negativo en la población de especies.

En El Espectador de Colombia, extenso reportaje de Diana Carolina Durán “La lucha de una amazona” sobre la serie de infortunios que llevaron a extirpara un pecho a una mujer que en realidad no tenía cáncer de mama. Interesantísima pieza también en Colombia esta vez en El Tiempo por Ángela Posada Swafford ”El significado de la física de partículas”. Ángela parte de las últimas referencias a neutrinos y bosón de higgs para enlazar una serie de preguntas que van desde para qué sirve este tipo de investigaciones, hasta si hay planes de construir un acelerador más grande que el LHC.

Terminamos en España con dos excelentes reportajes, uno de N. Ramírez de Castro “La frontera de la inmortalidad” en ABC, cubriendo diferentes ángulos de las investigaciones destinadas a comprender e intentar revertir el envejecimiento. Desde las nutricionales, a los estudios con pacientes de progenia, a la acumulación de los daños moleculares. La otra pieza la publica en El Mundo Silvia Taberné “Orgasmos de pesadilla” y es un extensísimo trabajo sobre el síndrome de enfermedad postorgásmica, caracterizado por generar dolores, depresión o fobia a la luz tras la eyaculación masculina. No se saben todavía las causas, pero Silvia explora muy bien las hipótesis. Recomendable lectura también, y nueva muestra de la buena línea de información científica sobre sexualidad que lidera El Mundo.

- Pere Estupinyà

Whether you call it Tyrannosaurus or Tarbosaurus, T. bataar was one ferocious predator and it was nearly the size of its relative and everybody’s favorite Mesozoic nightmare, T. rex. A Soviet expedition (says Wikipedia) found the first one in Mongolia in 1946. A few others are known to science. One near-complete fossil skeleton just sold at auction in New York City for $1,052,500. But sale is on hold while courts sort out its proper ownership – the President of Mongolia says it was smuggled out of the nation and like all fossils found there is nobody’s but Mongolia’s.

Big teeth, big money, a big celebrity in the family, and now a big lawsuit. That’s a heady news mix.

A bit of the background was in circulation a few days ago at LiveScience, by Wynne Parry. She reported it before the contingency sale yesterday (Sunday), but reports that the auction house feels it is unknown exactly where it came from, that the for-sale sign has been out and public for weeks on the skeleton, and that whether it’s from China or Mongolia the sale appears to be improper. Bloomberg‘s Katya Kazakina reported promptly that a judge in Texas ordered a halt to the sale. The AP‘s Jennifer Peltz picked the thread up this morning, reporting that the auction went ahead, and had a winning bidder pending settlement of leal issues, and providing some of the increased heat and rhetoric around the propriety of selling the beast’s remains.

It does seem odd and improper that such scientific specimens are in general commerce. If one walks into a tycoon’s house and sees a ankylosaur or mastadon skeleton mounted in the drawing room, that’s weird. Such things surely belong in museums. However, rich people, and corporations and other private entities, have all sorts of stuff and drawing sharp lines between what ought to be public and what is legal to buy and sell is not easy. This one will be interesting to watch.

By the way, the agent for the unnamed sellers, Heritage Auctions, has pages of listings on fossils it has for sale. One wonders who put in the high bid for this one.

*UPDATES (Hat tip to Dan Vergano for several links,)

• New Scientist – Jeff Hecht: Tyrannosaur auctioned despite protests from Mongolia ; Hecht gives wider context that, for many readers, will make clear that large-scale looting, smuggling, and illegal sales deeply besmirch commerce in exotic fossils.
  
• USA Today/Science Fair – Dan Vergano: Tyrannosaurus auction protested by Mongolia ; As often with Science Fair, a post rich with extended excerpts from other sources, emails, and similar inside background.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: $1,052,500 Tyrannosaur sale proceeds despite court order ; Where we learn that, as the auction began, the lawyer for Mongolia stood up, protested, and with the judge on his cell phone relayed word of the court order to block sale. The auction house promptly escorted him out, and went on with the now-clouded sale.
• Daily Mail (UK) : Waiting to be snapped up, T-Rex’s cousin: Near perfect dinosaur skeleton to go under the hammer. Ran last Wednesday. Good pics. Asserts, via an auctioneer, that a man in Dorset is selling the specimen.

Grist for the Mill: Heritage Auctions “Superb Tyrannosaurus Skeleton“ ;

- Charlie Petit

Sunset, Odessa TX, May 20 2012

Yesterday I got a ride with two old friends, science writer Horst Rademacher and his seismologist wife Peggy Hellweg, up to Nevada County in the northern Sierra foothills and into the path where yesterday’s eclipse would unfold in full annularity. We spent mid-day ogling the impressive mess that gold miners in the 1850s-70s left at the Malikoff Diggins, now a state park. The miners hosed down mountainsides with gravity-driven water cannons (or “monitors” as they called them) until townspeople and farmers downstream on the Yuba and other rivers sued, and won. The debris was clogging things up and causing floods. Even today it is a problem. One hundred fifty years later, the excavation with its fluted towers or eroded sedimentary rock “looks like Zion National Park,” Horst exclaimed. But this one is no testament to nature.

     Nature got its show time next. As late afternoon approached we found a good spot next to a pasture on a gravel road to watch the moon fail to quite block the sun. Horst and Peggy, organizers and owners of many marvelous gadgets,  had thought ahead and  obtained thin-sheet solar filter material for binoculars, eyeball-viewing, and to fit over their impressive motor-driven Meade telescope’s barrel and a second ‘scope with a camera they affixed to it. We could easily make out three active regions, or groups of sunspots. The eclipse was eery and spectacular, the moon moving close to smack through the middle of the sun’s disk, the day getting sort of gloomy but not dark, and mosquitoes suddenly arising as they sensed, one presumes, the brief dusk. Birds twittered too.

And on the drive out, down North Bloomfield Road, a bear scampered out of the woods to the left and back into them on the right only about 50 meters in front of us. A lesson in landscape engineering, a splendid display of orbital dynamics in the sky, and a surprised black bear (actually, sort of chocolate) galloping by. That’s some sightseeing for one day.

There are, of course, many stories on the eclipse path from dawn in China and Japan, up to near the Aleutions, and down across Northern California toward its finale at sunset in New Mexico and west Texas.. And many pictures.

Not much in popular press, to my mind, takes full advantage of an oddity. Just two weeks ago news was rife on the SuperMoon, when it rose with an apparent size in the sky greatest of the year. The same moon that was a notable giant two weeks ago was too puny yesterday to even cover the sun. Some might ask, how could the moon shrink so fast? Two weeks, all the smart people reading this site know, is about half the time the moon takes to go around the Earth. It doesn’t go in a circle. Its elliptical orbit varies its distance, and apparent size or patch on the sky, by about 13 percent from largest to smallest each time around. So two weeks ago the full moon- on the side of Earth opposite the sun – was big as the full moon nearly coincided with perigee. Yesterday’s new moon, sitting dead sunward from here, was near its seeming smallest extreme due to the corresponding apogee. To tell readers that little bit gives them a visceral encounter with fundamental parameters of life on Earth that many have not pondered.

Some did explain it. One excellent example was picket up by Wired from SEN.com (Space Exploration Network) by Paul Sutherland. Another is at MSNBC’s Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle written a few days after the SuperMoon and with a passage on the logical reason we were soon to have an annular eclipse.

At Space.com Joe Rao has a super explanation of this year’s annular event, written a few days beforehand. But he misses the chance to mention why it came just two weeks after a full SuperMoon.

To no possible surprise the apogee-perigee, SuperMoon vs. annular pipsqueek, dichotomy also got full explanation at the blog Bad Astronomy by Phil Plait. He includes a link to a very cool video enactment of how the moon would look from Earth all this year to people on the ground with no clouds and no bright sky. It nods and approaches and recedes, over and over again – mesmerizing.

Associated Press put together a fine gallery of photos of the eclipse, here at the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

- Charlie Petit

When one combines the creepy with the scientific, one has news. The example today is a report, in Science, that microbes recovered from under a barren plain on the North Pacific’s abyssal plain appear to be trapped in red clay sediments isolated from the rest of the biosphere for 86 million years. Yet they live. Oxygen of short and so is food. Their metabolic motors are barely ticking. The atoms in their tissues turn over every few centuries to perhaps a few thousand years. This is weird. The same little glob of fat or whatever they have that was there in, oh, 1054, is still there unused yet. Nobody knows how old these bacteria are. Maybe millions of years?

One wonders how the ones extracted from the mud are doing in culture. Basking and lolling in delight? Or dying of overindulgence?

Stories:

• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Ancient life, potentially millions of years old and barely alive, found beneath ocean floor ;  The Danish chief scientist on the project says, compared to us, these creatures are in suspended animation. Achenbach called an astrobiologist at NASA for comment. She said it shows how boring life on Earth is. The deep biosphere, she suggests, is not only life in the slow lane, it may be one of the most extensive and heavily populated of the Earth’s habitats: the norm. Achenbach and several reporters note that if life can throttle down this far on Earth, that bodes well for persistence of life on other worlds including on blasted-off impact fragments that might carry seeds of biology from one planet to another.
• The Scientist – Ed Yong: Live Slow, Die Old ; Includes deft capsule on the sequence of development and discovery that preceded this paper. The biological bleakness of the sample sites, right up the surface where few sediments fall and marine microbes scrounge them thoroughly before the are buried. Yong also is on the story at his Not Exactly Rocket Science blog with Deep-sea bacteria redefine life in the slow lane.
• ScienceNOW – Erin Loury: Barely Breathing Microbes Still Living in 86-million-year-old Clay ;
• NPR – Richard Harris: Ancient Deep-Sea Bacteria Are In No Hurry To Eat ;
  
• Scientific American – David Biello: Millennia-old Microbes Found Alive in Deep Ocean Muck ;
• National Geographic News – Christine Dell’Amore: Slow-Motion Microbes Still Living of Dino-era ‘Lunch Box” ;
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: Tiny Deep-Sea Life Eats Dinosaur-Era Meals ;
• Nature.com – Leigh Phillips: Slo-mo Microbes extend the frontiers of life ; Phillips lets us know that, coincident with publication of this in the rival journal Science, a meeting in the lead authors Danish home town explored the general topic of the limits of life. One of his sources suggests that if life is this stubborn on Earth, then if there ever were native Martians something is probably still left there eking along and waiting for the good times to return, waiting and waiting…

*UPDATE: A hat tip to the author (see comments) – A deeper background on the biosphere under the deep sea …

• Science News (Feb. 11) Alexandra Witze: Deep Life / Teeming masses of organisms thrive beneath the seafloor ; Excellent, but given the privations of life down there, it appears there is – in many places if not most – not much extra energy for teeming. Hardly a squirm. But Alex’s report may give the headline an out – some places even quite deep in the muck may be well-fed with energy food. She writes that they do seethe.  Best of all is the name for these critters alien to the life most of us know: intraterrestrials.

- Charlie Petit

Back in 2009 (earlier post) US researchers and colleagues elsewhere reported that fossil bones in an open pit coal mine in Colombia dating from about 60 millions years ago are what’s left of a monster snake, dubbed Titanoboa, that was around 40 feet long, a yard wide, and weighed 2,500 pounds. This was shortly after the end of dinosaurs, but even so it now there were some local animals even the big python’s jaws would not fit: turtles the size of Smart Cars. Actually, that’s a teeny car, but the shell is nearly six feet long and the head is about as big as a regulation NFL football. So report researchers led by a Colombian grad student, a turtle specialist, at North Carolina State U.

This gets some pickup, chiefly from the local paper:

• Raleigh News Observer – Jay Price: NCSU scientists help discover fossil of prehistoric turtle in Colombia ; Sheesh, wow, forget turtles and snakes, you want to know big? It says here the open pit mine (named Carbones del Cerrejón)  is five miles wide and 30 miles long. With or without fossils that’s a load of bitumin.
• e! Science News: Ancient giant turtle fossil revealed ; I include this just because the site, as noted in at least one earlier post, is so perfectly irritating. Perfect because it captures the state of the news business, and irritating because it proudly declares its editor to be a computer program. That, and a name that is easily confused with the Eurekalert! press release service that the AAAS has run for many years. The text is the NCSU press release (in Grist below).
• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Turtle fossil the size of a Smart car found in Colombia ;

Grist for the Mill: NCState Press Release;  journal Paper ;

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a technology development that could erode a modern cultural intuition regarding the difference between brains and computers. Computers, the assumption goes, are precise and fast and wizard-like in going through data lickity split and sorting it out precisely. People are sloppy and erratic thinkers, slug-like when doing most math or anything else tediously detailed, but nonetheless through sheer volume of interconnection among dumb-as-mud neurons we’re wiser and more able at processing info on the fly and seeing patterns and meaning in ambiguous circumstances than any computer no matter what software one puts in it. A typical human brain deals with the fog of life by telling jokes and knowing when and how to laugh. Computers, I think, not so much.

The news is an int’l team (Rice and UC Berkeley in the US plus at Singapore’s Nanying Tech. U. and a computing science institute in Switzerland) that told at a conference in Italy it has made prototypes and plans commercial use soon of a kind of computer chip that by design makes a lot of mistakes but, as with brains, that’s okay. It is 15 or more times as efficient (ie, it runs cooler) and faster that conventional ones. For some uses, such as image or sound processing, the output is just fine. We can look at or listen to things that are pretty fuzzy and make them out. Battery powered e-slates and hearing aids are among planned apps. One imagines there are many others to come.

Stories:

• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Hot trend in computing: Chips that sometimes get it wrong ; Good lede start, “At first blush it seems a daft notion…” ; Berger gets the lowdown on the local Rice computer scientist who has been developing – and gaining notice among colleagues – this idea for nearly a decade. We also get a sense of the close ties between Rice and Nanying Tech. University. We also learn the name of the strategy: “probabilistic computing.”
• PC Pro – Stewart Mitchell: “Inexact” chips save power by fudging the maths ; Other than noting that such chips might best not be used for calculating financial trading sums, one sees nothing here beyond what the press release provided. Surely a site such as PC Pro has access to other chip designers who may have something to say?
• Gizmag – Darren Quick: “Inexact” computer chip makes mistakes, but is 15X more efficient ; Gizmag too may not have added much value to the press release except for one thing. Quick or somebody there did check the pub’s own previous reports – and links to its report a bit more than a year ago on the same research’s status.
• The Verge – Andrew Webster: “Inexact’ computer chip is 15 times more efficient than current models ; A short press release rewrite.

Years ago a kind of software employing “fuzzy logic” made some news because it is so counter to the expectation that computers must above all be reliably precise and accurate. This week’s media accounts stories follow the lead of the Rice U. press release, describing the surprise but not elaborating on the mold- and metaphor-breaking aspect of the work. Nonetheless this does appear to have cultural impacts too, making computer brains seem significantly able to be more like our own. The researchers have, I gather, mainly lopped off the circuits that checked the last few decimal places in numerical calculations. That seems a bit like not taking the time to count and weigh the fish in the bucket one by one but merely  declaring “looks like a dozen to me, about ten pounds.” That’s quicker, easier, and may serve the purpose. Nanotechnology can make devices that are as complex right down to the molecular level as are living cells and organelles. And computer science has fast chips that make mistakes but stay largely on course. Life and technology continue the great convergence.

Such vague but high-falutin’ interpretations are absent from the first burst of news coverage. It tends to follow the lead of the Rice U. Press release. Which is wow, these so-called pruned chips are sloppy, they violate dogma, but are a significant improvement anyway. The presentation, it says here, won a prize for best paper at the conference.

Grist for the Mill: Rice U. Press Release;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) A drug that could prevent Alzheimer’s will be tested in a Colombian community with genetic predisposition to the disease. The cause is a rare mutation that brings early symptoms as soon as 45 years old with full dementia by about 50. It’s been studied for nearly 3 decades by Francisco Lopera from the University of Antioquia. The study is receiving $100 million from NIH, Banner Institute and the Genentech company that makes the drug (crenezumab). The trial is the first for people at high risk and given before symptoms appear. Lasting 5 years, the study should start yielding useful data in less than half that time. US federal officials announced the trial on Tuesday (in English – NYT), and Colombian press has been writing stories this week as well. We highlight the great job by a reporter who has been covering Lopera’s research for a while.

Ya hay numerosos estudios clínicos con fármacos contra el Alzheimer probados en pacientes cuando aparecen los primeros síntomas. Pero debido a la dificultad de identificar población de riesgo, todavía no se ha analizado ningún fármaco de carácter preventivo antes del inicio de la enfermedad. Según los investigadores en esta etapa podría ser mucho más efectivo. Esta posibilidad existe en la región colombiana de Antioquia, donde existe una comunidad de familias con una mutación genética que provoca los primeros síntomas en edades tan tempranas como 45 años, y demencia completa hacia los 51. Fueron identificados y estudiados durante casi tres décadas por el investigador colombiano Francisco Lopera.

El pasado martes el departamento de salud de EEUU anunció un estudio clínico con el fármaco Crenezumab con 300 miembros de estas familias antioqueñas. Los 100 millones de dólares del estudio serán financiados con $16M por los Institutos Nacionales de la Salud (NIH) de EEUU, $15M por donantes privados del Banner Institute, y $65M por la compañía Genentech productora del fármaco. El científico Francisco Lopera será uno de los directores de la investigación. El estudio durará 5 años, y se estima que a los dos años ya podrían haber datos para ver si el fármaco retrasa el deterioro cognitivo de estas personas con alta predisposición genética al Alzheimer. Si es así, no sólo será útil para estas familias sino posiblemente para muchos de los futuros afectados por Alzheimer. Es una muy importante noticia para Colombia, que quizás podría haber generado reacciones más detalladas en la prensa del país. No nos queda muy claro el rol que tendrán los investigadores locales en el estudio.

El texto más extenso lo firma Juan David Montoya “Antioquia tiene la clave para acabar con el Alzheimer” en El Colombiano. Quizás exagera un poco el peso de los científicos colombianos, pero explica muy bien el estudio a realizar, cuenta con declaraciones de Francisco Lopera, explica el funcionamiento del fármaco, y construye varios despieces con la información clave. Muy buen trabajo. Un punto interesante es que el Dr Lopera opina que si el fármaco no tiene éxito, podría enterrar la hipótesis que achaca a las fibras amiloides el origen del Alzheimer. Bonito detalle de Juan David al recuperar de una entrevista anterior en El Colombiano el origen del interés del Dr. Lopera en el alzheimer: comprobar de chico dolor de su padre cuando su madre afectada no lo reconoció.

El Tiempo publica una nota de Angélica Cervera “Prueba piloto del alzhéimer se realizará a 300 paisas”. Exagera también al decir que el tratamiento fue presentado por la Universidad de Antioquía, pero buen texto también, que explica de manera clara los principales datos del estudio, destacando que la diferencia con todos los tratamientos restantes es que éste empieza antes de la aparición de síntomas. No entendemos muy bien que la misma nota aparezca en otra dirección de el diario, firmada también por Angélico, pero bajo el patético título “Portadores de Alzhéimer tendrían cura”.

El Espectador “En Antioquia probarán fármaco que podría curar el Alzheimer” es la nota más discreta, saltándose gran cantidad de información sobre esta importante noticia. Podemos recuperar una muy buena nota del 2010, firmada también por Juan David Montoya “Los detectives del Alzheimer”, y una larga entrevista a Francisco Lopera por J. G. Fitzgerald hace sólo tres meses.

Fuera de Colombia destacamos la buena nota de BBC Mundo “Un estudio pionero para prevenir la demencia se iniciará en Colombia”, y el texto en ABC de Núria Ramírez de Castro “EEUU probará en Colombia el primer fármaco para prevenir el Alzheimer” que decide empezar con la historia de dos antioqueños afectados. No sabemos si en este caso dicho recurso es el más acertado, pero luego la nota dirige muy bien a la información clave, incidiendo también en que será un test a la hipótesis amiloidea.

- Pere Estupinyà

A report in Nature today that two stroke victims, paralyzed for years, have learned to use their thoughts to control a robot arm and to help them drink a beverage kicked up a storm of news coverage. Never mind that the system is nowhere near ready for practical use – an implanted brain probe prone to deterioration an the arm is not only not attached to the person but is slow, clumsy, and doubtlessly far too expensive to qualify for any medical plan’s coverage. Plus, the implanted chip is prone to deterioration with time and comes for now with a big, external box stuck on the user’s skull like those transformer lumps on the ends of power cords for low-voltage dc devices. The report is from a Brown University team.

One thinks that the inventors could have come up with a better commercial name for the device: BrainGate. Sounds like a scandal. Maybe something Chris Mooney might put on a book about why some people’s brains are so bad at thinking straight.

Stories:

• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen : Paralyzed woman uses thoughts to move robotic arm ; One wishes to read more on how the system learns what patterns in the brain mean what for steering the arm. It is easy to imagine the logic of it (subject watches the arm being manipulated, imagines ‘making’ it do so, and a computers tries to correlate brain signals with what the arm is doing. But that’s just a guess). Steenhuysen has the basic story, but no outside comment on its larger significance.
• NatureNews – Alison Abbott : Mind-controlled robot arms show promise ; Scientists at other groups are elated, it says here. Still not much about how the machine learns which signals mean what, but has the next expected stage of research.
• MSNBC – Linda Carroll: Paralyzed woman gets robotic arm she controls with her mind ; Not really. She only “gets” the arm at the lab and it can’t really do much yet. The story’s better than the hed, and does say a bit more about how the instructions go from patterns in the brain’s motor center to specific instructions for the arm’s controller.
• Discovery News – Eric Niiler: Robot Arm Follows Brainwave Instructions ;
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Robotic Arms Give Paralyzed Patients Ability to Grasp Objects ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Two paralyzed people successfully use robot arm ; I thought Tom had retired from the Times. Nice to see his name back, even if only occasionally.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Paralysis victims use brain signals to control robotic arm ; Vergano ties this report in with another in a closely-related effort.

LATE ADDITIONS:

• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Paralyzed woman moves robotic arm with her thoughts ;

Grist for the Mill: Brown U. Press Release ; With video.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s another reason to be grateful that a few non-profit sites have stepped into the breach left by collapsing news holes in big newspapers for science feature stories that are, at heart, deeply-written breaking news stories pinned to a single event. Which is to say – news, but not necessarily sweeping stories of the sort that fancy magazines would publish as features.

• Yale environment 360 – Carl Zimmer:The Vital Chain: Connecting the Ecosystems of Land and Sea ; A fine model of narrative organization that goes from vignette to the particular to the general on out to a tincture of the (gracefully) pontifical. He even brings up grizzly bears that appear nowhere in the source paper’s text but are, by oblique ref., in footnotes.

The news is that a research team mostly from Stanford and UC Berkeley with a dash of Harvard has a paper out (see Grist below) detailing how Manta Ray hangout locales off  tropical Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific respond to the landscape through which their runoff comes. Native forests means lots of the huge, delta-winged swimmers. Palm plantations: zip. It has to do with nitrogen (especially its isotope N-15) and guano and algae. Does this mean that plantations that feed lots of N-rich fertilizers to the sea are great for plankton eaters? Zimmer brings that up too – and mentions it’s not the same. One reason is dead zones.

For a website such as e360, this is a modest story. It might easily fit on a wire service such as AP, and some of the AP’s and Reuters’s writers turn out similar stuff once in awhile. Newspapers still run them, or put them on their websites. But not as much as they once did.

Grist for the Mill: Scientific Reports article ;

While on the topic of non-profit news outlets here are some others that I can think of off the top of my head with recent, well-reported examples of their science coverage. This is of course incomplete. It leaves out blogs, and it leaves out university public affairs shops whose press releases get picked up hardly altered by ‘news’ services that merely pass on, with credit or not, items on which somebody else did all the work and paid the bills to do it.

Other Science etc. News from Non-Profit agencies (some pretty old. Some new)  :

• Pacific Standard (former Miller McCune magazine) Rachel Swaby: Building a Better Banana ; GM crop gets some good press. An Australian hopes to modify banana’s to provide some extra vitamins and minerals. One suggestion: Don’t bother putting it in the Cavendish variety of banana the dominates the market and is wilting in the face of a global fungal blight.
• Climate Central – Michael D. Lemonick: Arctic Death Spiral: More Bad News about Sea Ice ; Less extensive in late summer, check. Thinner every year, check. We knew that. Lemonick’s new omen: Each winter’s fresh-freezes are darker.
• High Country News – Mike Barenti:  Kayaking memories on the White Salmon River ; A graceful little essay. It refers to the dynamite breach of Condit Dam on the river. It happened, and it was ugly. Next year it should be recovering toward clarity and healthy salmon habitat. Watch a good Portland Oregonian video of the event.
• National Geographic News – Ker Than: Hundreds of Superflares Seen on Sunlike Stars; National Geo is an old line news outlet, although its daily news service is somewhat recent. It it easy to forget that the society is non-profit. New York-based freelancer here covers a report in this week’s Nature on one of the things that the Kepler space craft has discovered yet are not what it was built to discover, alien planets, of which it has found plenty as well.
• NatureNews – Ewen Callaway: A biological clock to wind them all ;
• ScienceNOW – Sid Perkins: Keeping Greenhouse Emitters Honest ;
• Voice of OC – Norberto Santana Jr.: Trying to Give Some Trout a Let Up ; VoOC is new, an Orange County, CA, nonprofit investigative news agency. Not to much science-oriented, but some. This one is about a local activist and his drive to get some fish ladders installed on local creeks – and to find agencies that will take care of them.
• Mission Loc@l – Heather Smith : Street Science: Your SF Frogs, Local and Secret ; This is a good story abut peepers … and a self-serving plug. Ms. Smith just got herself selected to be among this fall’s group of Knight Science Journalism fellows at MIT, the tracker’s employer. Mission Loc@al is among a pioneering gang of hyper-local news sites, their staffs pretty much embedded in the neighborhoods they cover.
• Science News (pub by DC’s Society for Science & The Public) Alexandra Witze: Dancing droplets reveal physics at work ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: CSI Tornado: Decoding – and chasing – supercells with the experts ;

This list of science news from non-profit outlets is the result of an hour or two’s near-random looking around. Many further examples are therefore not here. Please use this site’s suggest stories function if you have something that you think ought to be on it. No promises, but I’m pretty easy.

*UPDATES:

• Chemical & Engineering News – Bethany Halford: Bosutinib Buyer Beware ; Written with illus to match for, natch, chemical engineers who know their isomers from their anilines. But considering that it is about an apparent fiasco in reagent sales, a huge and potentially consequential, subtle OOPS!, and some diligent detective work, it is news that with care could well be written for general audiences too. This one  is wa-a-a-ay insider chemistry, but if you like your nomenclature raw it captures well the growing horror of researchers as they learn their project just was mush from the start. As the scandal widens, its roots appearing to go back years, some actors are going mute, refusing to comment, not answering queries, engaging in what looks like coverup by shut-up. Others are apologizing. What a stew.

- Charlie Petit