USA Today: NASA’s Giant Task, Skimpy Budget
Friday, June 30th, 2006
The Tracker has not tried to post on the myriad stories about NASA’s run-up to another try at resuming shuttle operations. Just too much to harvest, with about as much science as in coverage of an FAA airliner accident investigation (stories on the struggling science side of NASA easily clear the bar). However, a shuttle story today by USA Today’s Traci Watson merits an exception. It is timely and tidily spells out the enormous task NASA faces in trying to comply with White House directives to refly the shuttle, promptly retire the shuttle, finish the space station, get out of the space station biz, replace the shuttle, fly back to the moon, build a moon base, head for Mars…. and all on a flat budget. Plenty of others have covered the same ground. This one is a concise and clear job.
Late Addition: The Tracker takes part of it back. There is some science on the upcoming launch. SF Chronicle’s Keay Davidson today reports on a few thousand fruit flies that will be aboard for a study of immune system response to microgravity.
As expected, a US government advisory panel recommended yesterday that girls get Merck’s Gardasil vaccine against several strains of human papilloma virus to greatly reduce chances of cervical cancer. The FDA has already approved it for girls as young as nine. The panel now adds unanimously that vaccination for 11 and 12-year-old girls should be routine. This is getting heavy coverage, as have previous steps in the vaccine’s progress through the FDA’s regulatory maze. The virus causes genital warts and is usually picked up by sexual contact. Media stories include many references to worries among some conservative advocacy groups that such early vaccinations will signal tacit approval of sex at a young age. None of the stories The Tracker read, however,appear to quote anybody flatly opposed to the vaccine’s use in pre-teen girls. Some, however, don’t want it made mandatory. Not in the panel’s recommendation is explicit backing for the controversial suggestion that the vaccine be made be a requirement for public school enrollment. The vaccine is expensive. Merck expects $3.2 billion in sales annually by 2011. At least two major health insurors already say they will cover it.
A few years ago a study from the University of Illinois described test subjects instructed to watch a video and count how many times a few people in white shirts passed a basketball among themselves while others in black shirts did the same. Most of its testees got the answer. But about half of them focussed so fiercely on the task at hand they totally missed a woman in a gorilla suit who walked through the game and drummed on her chest. The study is famous, and won an IgNobel Prize. Now a University of Washington group has tried the same video trick, with a twist. It gave some watchers a cocktail. The drinkers were twice as likely to miss the gorilla lady as were the utterly sober ones (who, as before, didn’t do too well either). The Times’s Warren King writes that the alcohol levels were well below the DUI level, but nonetheless show that even mild drinking affects drivers’ awareness. It’s in the Journal of Applied Cognitive Psychology.
So much for global warming’s silver lining, one fears. Hopes that more CO2 will act as an airborne fertilizer for crops faded a bit this week after a study by US and Swiss researchers came out in the journal Science. It concludes that any agricultural boost will be small or nonexistent. In open-air tests — with predicted elevations in carbon dioxide and also in ozone — rice, wheat, and soybeans got only half the improvement seen in some earlier greenhouse studies. Maize (corn) and sorghum got none at all. The former trio are C3 plants, the latter two are C4. That’s a botanically important distinction. But that is all that the press release says about that. One might suggest to the Univ. of Illinois media team that its press release could well have explained for reporters, however briefly, what the terms mean (they relate to the handling of carbon during photosynthesis and a plant’s metabolic and water-use efficiency). None of the resulting press stories mention C3 or C4, and whether they would have anyway had the terms been explained is unknowable. Reporters could always look it up. Many readers enjoy explanations. They might also enjoy the punchy lede on Tina Hesman Saey‘s story in the Post-Dispatch: “This could make Al Gore cry.”.JPG)
The mammoth flooding along the mid-Atlantic coast of the US naturally triggers the question: is this, like Katrina and like all those melting glaciers and like those altered animal migrations, a sign of global warming? Reuters’s Jason Szep took that question to a few experts and others. Their answer, of course, is maybe. Much of his story, datelined Boston, revolves around comments by one Harvard authority on climate change and its impacts on health. He also shoehorns a contrarian in there; a commercial meterologist opines that the warming is real, it may be pumping up storms, but natural cycles and not human meddling are to blame. Oh, Right.
American kids get too little exercise. Maybe it doesn’t take a scientific study to show that children will work hard to have fun, but a professor and his grad student at Indiana State performed one anyway. They velcroed up some kids with heart, respiration, and other monitors and gave them cardboard blocks to play with. Some blocks had three-pound pieces of steel in them. Sure enough, the tykes hefting the weighted blocks worked harder, expended more energy, and pumped their hearts, lungs, and muscles more intensely. The press release mentions only weighted v. nonweighted blocks, but AP’s Deanna Martin writes it and throws in three-pound teddy bears and the like. She also finds a few childhood health experts to point out what The Tracker’s grandkids prove all the time: kids bam each other with their toys. A padded Pooh with a rock deep in his tummy is one thing. A building block that looks like a brick because it is a brick plus a feisty four-year-old, may mean mayhem. The press release, by media intern Megan Anderson, has an unexpected, closing tangent on the grad student’s lessons in professional presentations. The wires are getting considerable play with this story. A search finds the Indianapolis Star did it a few weeks back.
A faster, cheaper way to turn plant sugars into feedstock for some plastics and maybe diesel fuel is in the works, say scientists at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Their paper is in Science this week and the Journal-Sentinel’s Katharine Ott writes it up. Her story is also on the McClatchy-Tribune wire. She even includes enough technical information that a chemical engineer might be able to tell from the piece just what they did. Which is, she explains, to get a high yield of something called 5-hydroxymenthylfurfural from fructose (and how often does something like that make the paper?).
AP filed yesterday on a story that’s been bouncing around for a week or so from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s gray whale monitoring program. AP’s story is largely off a press release and carries no byline. A few other outfits have also filed on it in the last few days. The story does seem to have intriguing, unexplored angles. The essential new fact is that calves spotted migrating with their mothers north past the Central California coast to the Bering Sea and into the Arctic Ocean are up this year over last, and dramatically up over five years ago. This seems to signal the end of a recent slump in reproduction. One hypothesis is that the whales have learned to shift their feeding grounds north, beyond the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean as the sediment-dwelling crustaceans on which they feed shift habitats and ice cover diminishes. The Tracker wonders: what good story might await up there around Barrow? What exactly is going on with the continental shelf ecosystem? Jane Kay’s story in the SF Chronicle at least raises such questions. And while we’re at it, what of the Inupiat Eskimo subsistence whaling crews that now go after Bowhead Whales under special license? One wonders if they are tempted, legally or not, to harpoon some of the increasingly abundant Grays.
A flurry of attention greeted discovery near Luxor early this year of an apparently unlooted ancient burial chamber, which would be the first since King Tut’s, by Egyptian and University of Memphis archeologists. But none of the eight coffins — the last opened this week — carry bodies, and that’s a mystery. The delicate, dessicated woven flowers and other funerary items found in the eighth and final one bring some solace to the researchers, it appears.