The predictable objection from religious quarters over the Discovery Channel’s promotion of a possible burial place for Jesus and his family gets amplification from secular experts here. The Washington Post’s Alan Cooperman reports today that denunciation of the upcoming show’s theme comes “not just from Christian scholars but also from Jewish and secular experts” without, as one tells him, a dog in this fight. The words “publicity stunt” come up. Cooperman appears to have diligently called plenty of scholars for the story.

One professor, it says here, decried the press conference and the absence of any peer-reviewed journal to go with it by saying the station’s handling of the topic “is flawed from beginning to end.”

Read it;

See also earlier post Feb 26 AP, Discovery Channel: The bones of Christ? His DNA? A son? Big furor seems a sure thing. ;

This one is not getting lengthy coverage, and no wonder. When a sort-of UN-linked, international science panel says the world better get cracking on blunting global warming, and when it comes weeks after the real UN’s bigger IPCC report pretty much said the same thing with all its graphs and projections, it seems like the same old same old alarm bell. But it is getting wide coverage, albeit with shortish pieces. The report makes its policy recommendations out loud rather than taking the disinterested stance of the IPCC.

Most outlets apear to be going with wires. The 166-page report is from the non-profit United Nations Foundation and Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. It formally presented the report to the UN. Even The Tracker, about as fretful a climate worrier as you’ll find, stifles a yawn. Shouldn’t this have been released simultaneously with the IPCC, or within a news cycle or two?

Stories:

Los Angeles Times Robert Lee Hotz whose stress that the panels recommended actions, aside from carbon taxes and a ban on coal plants, include that beachfront construction ought to end may set a few rich Angelenos’ tongues wagging; Reuters Deborah Zabarenko has in her lede a recent chestnut — the global warming debate is over — and quotes AAAS pres. John Holdren that the time is “not next year, not next decade, but now…”; AP Charles J. Hanley ; Voice of America Peter Heinlein;

Grist for the Mill: UN-Sigma Xi Press Release (with link to full report)

A big AIDS meeting, the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, is turning out news in Los Angeles of a brace of new medications to fight HIV. It is, it appears, very good news. It is getting considerable attention, including a front page piece by Lawrence K. Altman and Andrew Pollack in the NY Times. Their piece stresses that two of the drugs, from Merck and Pfizer, represent new classes of such medications. They are called CCR5 antagonists and integrase inhibitors (as in pic). In the LA Times Ji-Rui Chong plays it much the same way and stresses that the new classes of drugs double the number of patients who can be treated once standard meds hit resistant HIV strains.

Wall Street Journal‘s Marilyn Chase and Jacob Goldstein report the meds are part of a new “bumper crop” of HIV treatments.

Other stories:

San Francisco Chronicle Sabin Russell writes that the drugs are highly successful in patients who have exhausted other options; Reuters Deena Beasley writes just of one new drug, from Pfizer, but see also a Feb. 23 story by Beasley and Ransdell Pierson anticipating the news of several drugs at the meeting; UPI Ed Susman; CNNMoney.com Aaron Smith covers it as biz news, from New York;

Related News:

The SF Chronicle‘s hard-working Sabin Russell squeezed a second, important story from the LA meeting, reporting “astonishingly” successful programs in Uganda to prevent malaria among children with HIV.

LATE ADDITION: NYT Lawrence K. Altman wrote the Uganda story too, pub’d Mar. 1.

Talk about a backfire. And it seems so logical an idea — slow down aging by countering the crosslinking and oxidation and other crud build-up in tissues by taking antioxidants. But, as Thomas H. Maugh II writes in the Los Angeles Times, a new and surely influential study is “adding to the growing scientific consensus” that it does not work. One outside source told him that such supplements have “great scientific plausibility.” But, alas and etc. In fact, some, in high doses, seem to increase mortality by several percentage points.

Sellers of vitamins and other pepper-upper supplements to tens of millions of customers annually don’t agree. They say the analysis is muddled. The study, from Danish researchers, is a meta-analysis, or statistically-gilded form of literature review, that mash-upped dozens of previously published analyses (is mashup only a new noun, or a verb too, wonders the decidedly uncool Tracker). Most accounts tend toward the brief side. The tone of reports varies widely. Some reporters take the report as a clear cause for concern, others hurry to reassure readers it may mean nothing. This merits some followup.

Other stories:

AP Carla K. Johnson spells it out in her lede — vitamins A, E, and C, beta carotene, and selenium are all on the won’t-work and most are on the could-hurt list of stratagems to delay aging; Washington Post Rob Stein; Reuters Michael Conlon gets contrary sides in the first two grafs; In The Australian Leigh Dayton calls the new report “alarmist” and finds an “accredited dietitian” who urges Australians not to worry about their multi-vitamins as dangerous; HealthDay Ed Edelson says the news follows years of equating antioxidant with “disease-fighting goodness”; Toronto Globe and Mail Andre Picard spotlights sources who say vitamin users need not change their behavior and that the studies analyzed were of such diversity the meta-analysis may mean nothing; The Times (UK) Nigel Hawks goes for the alarm button under a hed: Supplements ‘raise death rate by 5%’.

Grist for the Mill: JAMA Press Release; Council for Responsible Nutrition countering Press Release;

Researchers with Australia’s national science agency are reporting 20 new species of bats, rays, sharks, and other such rubbery, scaleless, gray fish. What catches the eye here is how they did it: by surveying catches at local fish markets in Indonesia for five years. The nation catches 100,000 tons of such animals yearly and has the world’s most diverse shark and ray fauna as well as its biggest fishery.

The AP‘s Michael Casey has the item.

Read it;

Grist for the Mill: CSIRO Press Release;

A little news spike this week greeted word of a study of self-absorption, or narcissism, among college students. It’s from San Diego State University researchers based on trends in scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test. At NPR, Alex Chadwick interviewed (audio link) the study’s lead author.

It is worth a listen. Nothing evasive about this professor. She is emphatic that college kids are getting too full of themselves. She wrote the book (literally). She blames it on schools, media, and parents in that order. The old “self-esteem” mania of the 80s and 90s gets its knocks. Among other ways kids get the idea they are entitled to prominence, she says, is a preschool ditty whose main lyric is “I am special.” Hence, You Tube. …. Man, wonder how professional major league athletes would score on that inventory.

Other stories:

AP David Crary; LA Times Larry Gordon, Louis Sahagun;

The Tracker has read a few right wing ranters declaring that if Al Gore were really righteously green he wouldn’t fly around in airplanes. That’s dumb. But the AP has a little item by Kristin M. Hall that The Tracker came across in the Memphis Commercial Appeal and it may have more bite: His household utility bills run about $1200 per month. He must be keeping all those compact fluorescent bulbs going all the time by the hundreds (please Al say you don’t use incandescents). It says here the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, a conservative outfit, released the info right on the heels of Al’s Oscar statuette victory in Hollywood. Gore’s people, it says here, say he buys offsets for many of his carbon-emitting activities.

Read it;

In the NYTimes today is a long report on the proliferation in recent years of campus review committees and, some say, their untoward interference in routine research and their protocols. Reporter Patricia Cohen traces the growth of such ethics panels from narrow authority over biomedical research on human subjects to scrutiny, on some campuses, of every query into human behavior including mere opinion polls. The American Association of University Professors apparently is looking for protection from such outfits. She has a list here of cases that, at first glance, do seem to reflect nosiness gone overboard. There are many, many such boards, it says here, without many rules controlling their purview.

Read it;

Somewhat Related News:

A University of Minnesota researcher is asking the journal Nature to publish a letter telling colleagues to ignore some of the data she used in a 2002 paper on adult human stem cells and their pluripotency. The New York Times‘s Nicholas Wade writes today this update on a story that has been bobbing in and out of the news. He properly credits The New Scientist with instigating most of the investigation of the research. A campus review panel has concluded the research is flawed.

Read it;

A look at the EuroScience.Net site, run by science journalism colleagues over there, brings to The Tracker’s attention a zesty commentary by The Guardian‘s science writer Alok Jha. The piece ran more than a week ago but is a departure from news writing so worth a look. It’s an exercise in disciplined rant with a nice lede: “You wonder sometimes if government ministers get special training to cling to the daftest ideas.” It’s about stubborn and special-interest-driven opposition to any form of animal-human hybrid embryos, including decidedly non-viable ones, in research. Such things, Jha writes in exasperation, “do not open up a Pandora’s box of hideous half-men, half-beasts.”

Read it;

In the January issue of Geophysical Research Letters a Univ. of Hawaii geologist reports evidence that earthquakes can cause or increase intensity of volcanic eruptions, sometimes at a fair distance.

The Star Bulletin‘s Helen Altonn has the story. The scientists tell her they gathered data from Indonesia. They were keeping daily track, via satellite, of output from two volcanoes when an earthquake hit, 31 miles from one eruption and 165 from the other. In a few days, both volcanoes got busier, a lag that seems to fit the delay time between a magma reservoir’s change and an effect at the surface vent, it says here. Research is continuing. The news story leaves a question: how controversial, or surprising, etc. is the report of distant quakes triggering eruptions?

Read it;

A study in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, from U. Washington researchers, reports that ivory poaching is nearly out of control in much of Africa. The Washington Post‘s Marc Kaufman says some sources worry about the species’s survival. Some 23,000 of the animals, he writes, were slaughtered last year.

The PNAS news offers extra reason to note that National Geographic in its April issue (see pic full res here) carries an utterly gripping account by naturalist J. Michael Fay — with photographer Michael Nichols — on one precariously protected, but still largely intact, population of elephants in Chad in central Africa.

Grist for the Mill: U. Washington Press Release;

LATE ADDITION: AP Feb. 28 Clare Nullis on South Africa’s elephant surplus and plans to rein them in.

Grist for the Mill: SA Environment Ministry Press Release ;

Kenneth Chang leads the NYTimes’s science section with an exploration of small-scale, sometimes offbeat schemes for fusion energy. The seekers, he writes aptly, are quixotic. Mostly this is about bubble fusion that may or may not occur in the implosions of cavities born from sonic vibrations in fluids. Also in here is plenty on standard fusion, and on the field’s ever-frustrating, irresistable promise (for once “holy grail” is the right metaphor and it does come up in one quote). At the end is a terrific statement from a source that reveals well the nature of those trying for short cuts to limitless power: “There is zero question that fusion is hiding in some system…I just have to figure out the right recipe.” And good luck with that.

The full ScienceTimes lineup is here.

The section is worth a full peruse. Notables include:

John Tierney with an adulatory and persuasive, coherent profile of former merry prankster, Whole Earth Catalog-founder, and converted-to-nuclear-power advocate Stewart Brand (see pic). Agree with him or not, Brand is a seminal force. Tierney bottles him nicely, including a word on the Long Now Foundation and its very slowly-ticking clock.

Roni Rabin on new evidence that male fertility not only declines but odds of birth defects in offspring go up with age.

John Noble Wilford takes a late whack at last week’s report in Science that medieval Islamic tile-layers used principles of quasi-crystalline mathematics in their designs. Some advantage of waiting a while on a story here. Deep in the story is an insider quarrel among mathematicians over the novelty of the journal article’s findings.

Assembling items into a catch-all is an unappreciated art. Many papers do these lists; this site seldom tracks them as they are such small bites. Henry Fountain does it consummately every week in his Observatory. This latest set is typical and delightful.