The Tracker was asleep at the wheel and missed a rising tide of stories on whaling. But luck struck in the form of a happenstance look at today’s online Grist Magazine site. It has a fine roundup of news reports, with links to them and the outlets carrying them, on Japan’s drive to renew commercial hunting of some whale species. Grist’s post on this contentious issue is the last item in its Daily Grist feature.

Read it;

See Also Previous Tracker post 5/12;

Two more reports conclude that hurricanes have probably gotten stronger in recent decades. One of them is from an MIT and Penn State team that already has said tropical cyclones are gaining power as oceans heat up, but they say they have a better case now. But the Times’s John Schwartz writes that while the researchers feel their data are solid, none say it is yet conclusive. The second study, from Purdue University researchers, looked at a hurricane score that includes their numbers and intensities. They found that it doubled with just a one fourth degree C rise in recent global temperature. Schwartz closes his piece with remarks from a US government researcher skeptical that hurricane intensification shows up in the data. He called such claims a “new theology.”

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: Penn State Press Release; Purdue Press Release;

The world’s HIV cases reached 38.6 million cases last year, the Times’s Thomas H. Maugh II writes today from a United Nations report. The figure is a record but Maugh quotes a leader of the UN’s AIDS programs as saying the epidemic is slowing below earlier rates of growth. India, the report also says, has passed South Africa as the nation with the most people living with HIV, and prevention programs are taking hold across much of Africa. The SF Chronicle’s David Perlman writes the report has a “touch of optimism” but leads on the fact that AIDS is still growing, affecting more adults and women in particular than ever before.
Stories:

LA Times Thomas H. Maugh II; Knight-Ridder Shashank Bengali, Ken Moritsugu; NY Times Lawrence K. Altman; SF Chronicle David Perlman;

Grist for the Mill: UNAIDS Press Release.

Just a month after news broke asserting that Brits are healthier than Yanks, another study says ditto for Canadians. They have or at least say they have lower blood pressure, less diabetes, less heart disease, and so on. Plus, more Americans say they can’t afford the medicines they need. The study’s in the American Journal of Public Health. Mike Stobbe at AP reports squabbling between authors of the this study and of the earlier one on UK-US health about whether universal health coverage is an important factor. The new survey is a phone study using data gathered in 2002-03. (Tracker’s aside: As with all such surveys these days, one wonders if cell phone-only users were included, and whether, three years ago they were a demographically important slice of the population.)

Read it;

Earlier posts: 5/22 NYTimes followup; 5/3 original news.

In Alaska researchers from the National Marine Fisheries Service are coordinating a study of the threatened stellar sea lion. Research includes attaching tracking devices and hot branding some of the animals. The Humane Society of the US thinks the study violates regulations protecting such animals. A US District Court judge in DC agrees, reports the AP’s Jeannette J. Lee from Anchorage. The feds say the study poses no threat to the species and may aid in its preservation.

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: Humane Society Press Release.

In Eastern Utah near the Green River is Range Creek Canyon. More than 1,000 years ago it was home to the Fremont people. Still there are ruins of their houses, rock art, pottery bits, and arrowheads. Until recently in private hands, the canyon has barely been given scientific study. The Tribune-News’s Brett Prettyman toured it with a state conservation officer, talks with visitors, and provides a glimpse of the treasures gradually going missing as the public gains access, and of the people who made them. In an accompanying story the paper’s Greg Lavine reviews the region’s potential archeological significance.

Two Stories in Salt Lake Tribune: Brett Prettyman and Greg Lavine.

News is never ending on the invasive species front. Illinois is starting to worry whether that firewood you’re toting to the campground will help spread the emerald ash borer beetle. It showed up in the US in Detroit four years ago and has killed more than 15 million ash trees in the midwest and in Ontario, Canada. Atlantic states are finding it. Michigan’s Governor even recently declared an “Emerald Ash Borer Awareness Week.”

Stories:

Chicago Tribune Dave Wischnowsky; AP Rick Callahan; Petoskey News-Review Fred Gray;

Iowa, as do many states, has a deer problem. The leggy animals’ fecundity means more road accidents, damaged cars, and crops eaten before harvest. The Register’s Juli Probasco-Sowers reports a state deer biologist’s satisfaction in the latest, all-time record deer culling figures. They signal success of the recent, antlerless deer focus of its hunting regulations. That means the state wants female deer in particular to be shot. And it seems to mean a whole lot of venison in Iowa’s freezers.

Read it;

An upcoming spacewalk includes a participant NASA bills as the science officer aboard the International Space Station, so maybe there is science up there some place. The news from AP’s Mike Schneider is that the station’s crew can’t find all the equipment it thought it needed for the excursion, so they are improvising. And the AP story and one from the Times’s Warren Leary say a publicity stunt paid for by the Canadian golf club maker Element 21 in which the Russian half of the spacesuited foray is to tee off into the void with a gold plated golf ball, or club, or something, has been put off. Sic transit gloria cosmos.

Stories:

NYTimes Warren Leary; AP Mike Schneider; Space.com Tariq Malik;

Related fluff: Element 21 Company’s Press Release. The company says it includes scandium, 21st on the periodic table, in its clubs. It got the idea from Russian aerospace practice.

China’s officials seem to be getting desperate as they fail to make much progress against their nation’s dreadful smog, an industrial pall so thick that it sickens people and wildlife. Its dimmed light stunts crops. The gunk, sometimes called the Asian Brown Cloud, fouls Korea and Japan and crosses the Pacific to affect the US. AP, Xinhua, and others report today that hopes for a reasonably blue sky 2008 Olympics are fading in Beijing’s murk.

Stories:

AP, Xinhua;

Related News: Beijing is gripped by drought too and may have a parched Olympics. Plus the Yangtse is so polluted it is “cancerous.” Read it on Reuters.

Several dozen Eastern Pacific Green Turtles, headed by an enormous (550 pounds) matriarch called Wrinklebutt, hang out near Chula Vista in southern San Diego Bay. The Union-Tribune’s Shannon McMahon reports that scientists are not sure how they got established in this urban harbor at some distance north of their usual haunts in Mexico and farther south. They are tagging the animals with transmitters so they can track them on their annual migrations to…somewhere…and back. The locale seems to suit them. The big, top turtle is a local celebrity and, they say, the largest of her species ever recorded. It’s a pick because one just does not often find a Wrinklebutt in the news.

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: Port of San Diego Online Wrinklebutt Site;

A report in PNAS last week proposed an explanation of an evolutionary mystery. Why did early whales keep growing rear legs for so many millions of years after their ancestors went fulltime to sea? The Beacon Journal’s Paula Schleis visited the research team leader at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine for a personal account of his quest for an answer. His mission took him fossil-hunting in Pakistan to study the fossils of early, walking, amphibious whales. He then gathered an international team for the genetic reconstruction of what went on, eventually, to first evolve their descendants’ front legs into flippers and, more important, to eliminate hind legs altogether. The key: a gene called sonic hedgehog.

Read it;

See Also: The Calcutta Telegraph’s G. S. Mudur with a focus on the Indian participation in the research.

Grist for the Mill: NSF Press Release;