The first trial of a new blood test is promising more reliable diagnoses for prostate cancer. Not only does the current PSA test fail to detect some cancers, its high level of “false positives” causes more than a million men a year to unnecessarily endure the pain of biopsies. Jonathan Bor in the Baltimore Sun and Susan Brink in the Los Angeles Times, among others, report on findings of a study published in the journal Urology. Conducted by Robert H. Getzenberg, of Johns Hopkins University, the test of 385 men was sponsored by Onconome Inc., a privately-held Seattle biotech company that developed the test that relies on measure levels of a blood protein called EPCA-2. More and bigger trials remain to be completed, but Getzenberg said the new test could become available sometime as early as 2008. Anne Underwood in Newsweek has in interview of Getzengerg.

Grist for the Mill: Onconome, Inc., press release

-JDC

Bravely, it seems to us, BBC and LiveScience, carried by MSNBC, picked up on an interesting nanotechnology development that is especially hard to describe and make relevant. Reporting in Nature, researchers at MIT relate how they were able, for the first time, to accurately measure the weight of a single living cell. We’re talking here about zeptograms, things that weigh a thousandth of a billionth of a billionth of a gram. Weights in that realm are measured by a tiny silicon slab called a resonator, which changes its vibration frequency according to the mass of the sample. The problem with weighing living cells is that the resonator needs to operate in a vacuum. The BBC’s unsigned report wins honors for a description, quoting biological engineering researcher Thomas Burg as saying, “We turned the problem inside out.” The MIT team devised a way to insert a fluid containing the cell inside the resonator. LiveScience’s report wins for relevance, reporting that the technique could help in the development of cheap, portable devices that could count immune cells in AIDS patients.

Grist for the Mill: MIT’s news office release by Anne Trafton has the best account of the research and its implications.

-JDC

The mystery of the missing honeybees is taking on the look of a classic process story.

Out of the pack of possible causes mentioned in Alexei Barrionuevo’s generalized description in Tuesday’s NY Science Times, the fungus angle is making a bid. Sabin Russell in the San Francisco Chronicle and Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II in the LA Times give UC San Francisco researchers an edge. Biochemist Joe DeRisi gets a bit of the hometown treatment from Russell, who describes him as the person “who found the SARS virus in 2003″ and won a MacArthur “genius grant” for his effort. Material in bees from a collapsed colony in California’s central valley contain genes from a fungus parasite, Nosema ceranae, that can wipe out hives, DeRisi says, although he is not claiming to have found the cause for the widespread disappearance of the pollinators across the continent. The LA Times offers a more complete look at the doubts raised by other experts, including this from Penn State entomologist Diana Cox-Foster: “By itself, it is probably not the culprit … but it may be one of the key players.” The story has a kind of ruminating feel to it, and clearly there is more to be written. For readers who like their science short and declarative and peer-reviewed, this on-going glimpse into science in action may not be so rewarding.

Other stories:

Reuters, quoting the Chinese language United Daily News and Taiwan televison, reports a massive loss of bees in Taiwan. And AP’s Tara Godvin reports the appearance of a mite that decimated mainland bees a few years ago has appeared for the first time in Hawaii.

Grist for the Mill: UCSF Press Release

-JDC

It’s an old scenario for horror: A big airplane crashes into a nuclear reactor, raising a frightening and dangerous cloud of radioactivity to spread downwind, sowing panic. The UC Nuclear Regulatory Commission is asking reactor builders to factor more awareness of such a thing into their designs. That doesn’t sound like particularly tough rule making and, more important for this site, has less to do with science than with engineering.

The Tracker is gathering up a few samples anyway — mainly to marvel at the image that Reuters chose to illustrate the issue with its story, here. It shows the cooling tower of a retired nuclear facility, on the Oregon side of the Columbia River, collapsing via deliberate demolition in a cloud of dust. Huh? That’s what a plane-struck nuclear plant would look like? Two of the problems are that 1) A flimsy cooling tower is hardly the rational thing to hit if one wants to release radioactive wastes and 2) If one smacked a reactor containment building with a plane, it is immensely doubtful the steel-reinforced fortress would just fall over. Results could, one suppose, be serious if a plane hit a lightly-roofed water pool for spent wastes. But this image in this context is japery, not serious journalism. (To be sure, one supposes, if panic is the point a collapsing cooling tower might indeed send the general, nearby public into rout).

-CP

Other stories:

NY Times Matthew Wald stresses that the new NRC reg does not have much bite; AP H. Josef Hebert;

Grist for the Mill: NRC Press Release;

As far as can be discerned by quick search, only Reuters‘s Timothy Gardner covered (or, at least, filed on) a meeting in St. Louis to discuss the future of coal. The coal industry is immense, powerful, vital, and impossible to wish away — global warming or not. The piece is a small one, but encouraging. It suggests innovation is moving fast among smaller companies trying to figure out how to turn coal into cleaner-burning gas and, more important, to keep its CO2 emissions out of our common air supply. The pic shows a German facility’s coal “mix hall.”

-CP

With 200-plus extra solar planets listed already, one more doesn’t exactly cause a starquake in the news biz — even if it is the first that looks, from the few specs available, suitable for (insert cliche drumroll..) life as we know it. One must chuckle on finding Dennis Overbye‘s piece in the NYTimes‘s national edition tucked away on A15 in the “National Report.” They’re not even US scientists. True, there is no Interstellar Report section but gee. Anyway, Overbye calls it “the most enticing property yet found outside our solar system.”

Most of the usual suspects on the space science beat are writing this one. The news, with more than 600 Google News hits in media around the world (that is a fairly big story rate) is that, 20 light years away, around the red dwarf star Gliese 581, one previously-known giant planet seems to have a small sister with a diameter just half again as large as Earth’s, plus another intermediate-sized sib eight times as massive as Earth. The littlest planet sits at the right orbital distance from its cool star for a surface temperature fine for liquid water. Swiss and other scientists spotted it with a European Southern Observatory telescope’s spectrometer in Chile. It’s online at the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Sun-like stars (we’re around a yellow G-dwarf star) are where astronomers instinctively have pictured Earthlike planets. But the Milky Way has far more red dwarfs, and they last billions of years longer than the sun will without exploding, collapsing, or otherwise going berserk. So maybe the odds for alien life forms, including smart ones with radios, just went up. The planet is only an inference from its gravitational influence on the star’s movements. Better instruments are in the works. As Overbye reports, their makers face budget and technical problems but, with such gadgets, we might someday see Gliese 581c directly.

Overcome by awe of the NY Times’s decision that this is national news, we’re breaking the sampling down by US and Int’l coverage.( Style note: It’s a big day for holy grails.)

-CP

Other US-based Stories:

AP Seth Borenstein translates the distance to 120 trillion miles, which sounds farther than 20 ly ; Los Angeles Times John Johnson Jr. says it’s in a “sweet spot” for life; NPR Morning Edition Nell Boyce; San Francisco Chronicle David Perlman has a source call this a “huge milestone,” but finds some experts not at all sure the planet is likely to be habitable (it’s probably in tidal spin lock with its star, for one thing);Tampa Tribune Kurt Loft calls it “about five times the size of our home planet.” That looks like a flub. It’s mass is five times more. That’s not size. A world 1.5 times wider across has a bit more than three times the volume. ; National Geographic James Owen; Reuters Maggie Fox (from DC) who hears, from the paper’s lead author, that oceans fit easily in the planets parameters; Baltimore Sun Dennis O’Brien puts the possibility of a rocky, ocean-covered crust right in his lede; McClatchy Newspapers Robert S. Boyd; Blomberg Alex Morales; USA Today Dan Vergano; Chicago Tribune Jeremy Manier keeps a healthy reality (skepticism) to his report; Space.com Ker Than (Holy Grail headline alert!);

Not US-based Stories:

BBC; Belfast Telegraph Andy McSmith; Scotsman Rhiannon Edward says it “could be covered in rivers, lakes, and oceans”. Yes. Or not.; The Australian Leigh Dayton has “Goldilocks Zone” in here, which is fine, but also a source who just has to say (Holy Grail alert!) it is, yes, that very thing; The Economist, no byline on this xlnt, reflective piece – but what’s a bolthole? ; CanWest News (via Vancouver Sun) Margaret Munro gets a local angle – a Canadian space telescope is on the trail of this thing;New Scientist Hazel Muir has a chatty style but infers “spectacular scarlet sunsets.” Maybe that ought to be singular. If it is in tidal lock that means one, more or less stationary sunset as long as that sun does shine; Mirror (UK) Stephen White; Guardian (UK) Ian Sample calls it a warm and rocky second Earth; Irish Examiner John von Radowitz; The Age (Australia) Chee Chee Leung; Telegraph Nic Fleming Thorsten Schäfer (UK); Deutsche Welle with a Q&A with a lead scientist; Spiegel Markus Becker (holy grail alert!);

Grist for the Mill: European Southern Obs. Press Release; Astronomy and Astroph. Paper.

Toronto Globe and Mail – Tenille Bonoguore: Ottawa moves to ban incandescent lights;

Reuters – Alister Doyle: Fossil Arctic animal tracks point to climate risks;

Atlanta Journal-Constitution – Mark Davis: Georgia wants whale sharks, but Taiwan demands answers ;

Los Angeles Times – Richard Simon: Democrats want swifter EPA action on emissions standards ;

Houston Chronicle – Kevin Moran: Endangered turtle lays 84 eggs on South Padre ;

The AP’s David Mercer has a breezy lede for his story on a coal mine in Illinois where, traveling along its deep galleries, paleobotanists and geologists can see the imprints, in the ceilings, of a forest dead 300 million years or so. Apparently it got buried all at once, perhaps via earthquake subsidence into a sea. The result was a whole forest preserved as it collapsed atop the heavy peat in which it was rooted.

The underlying bed became a coal seam. Miners chipped it away from below. Thus exposed were not just fragments of leaf and branch here and there but the “largest intact rain forest from that period ever studied,” it says here. A University of Bristol paleontologist is involved with US colleagues. The Bristol press release notes that the preserved forest remains are spread over an area ten kilometers wide — large enough to cover Bristol. The paper is in the Geol. Soc’y of America’s journal Geology.

-CP

Other stories:

National Geographic News Sara Goudarzi; In the News, a UK website, has a small piece with a most-clever hed: “Welcome to deadwood”; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield avers that the find will transform understanding of such long-ago ecosystems; Nature Katharine Sanderson with a fine bit of detail on the Earth of the time, and on the upcoming collapse of the idle mine; Times (UK) Lewis Smith;

Grist for the Mill: U. of Bristol Press Release with the overdrawn hed, “Earth’s first rainforest unearthed.” Oh c’mon, thinking caps everybody!

Other fossil plant-thing News: A 400-million-year-old mystery fossil of a tree-like organism has been id’d as a monster fungus. The report is by a U. Chicago researcher, also in the journal Geology.

Stories: Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield; Reuters; Wash. Post Rick Weiss;
Grist for the Mill: U. Chicago Press Release (via ScienceDaily).

Surfers, kayakers, and harbor seals are taking a cautious look around before they paddle into the Russian River estuary in Northern California’s Sonoma County.

The SF Chronicle‘s longtime outdoors writer Paul McHugh brings the story of Nibbles the mean, or confused, or perhaps just sexually frustrated elephant seal bull. The animal may have coverage under the Marine Mammal Protection Act but, rangers say, push come to shove and somebody may have to shoot it. It has killed several harbor seals and attacked people. It roared out of the surf to pounce upon a pit bull dog on the beach. McHugh has enough natural history of the elephant seal in here to explain that while Nibbles’s behavior may be extreme, it does have precedent. Pic shows the creature relaxing between berserkings.

Here’s a story that works best on the web with its high-def graphics. NASA has a new satellite duo called STEREO, for Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (should’a called it STERREO. That “relations” is an awkward usage). It gets solar imagery from the Earth’s neighborhood but with a four-degree difference in their views of the sun. Results thus can be combined, rendered red and blue, and served up in 3D. NASA’s Goddard center released them in a teleconference Monday. The Tracker was frustrated by early word on this. The images that moved on the wires first were all 2D. Today the good stuff is up. Cutting right to the chase, the Grist for the Mill department has the pics, also Here. All you need is those red and blue 3-D glasses (every science writer and like-minded sort should have a set in the drawer) — red on the left.

The images are a bit on the dim side. They’re cool, but not awesome. A fairly dark room aids viewing. Among the best of the bunch is the 3-D version (in color-altered, murky red and blue) of the 2-D, all-blue pic above right.

-CP

As for the science journalism….

Stories:

Baltimore Sun Frank D. Roylance says the “revelation” of the imagery will mean better solar storm forecasts, something the com-sat industry follows avidly; Florida Today Todd Halvorson; Chicago Sun-Times Andrew Herrman doesn’t have much but he opens with a Sacha Baron Cohen joke, on Buzz Aldrin. For that, kudos; Western Mail (UK, and no byline) has a local angle. The imagery software is from the Univ. of Wales, aka Aberystwyth; AP Alex Dominguez uses, as do several outfits, a literal “wow” quote from the scientists; Reuters; Space.com Jeanna Bryner writes that the violent storms raging from the sun’s photosphere “…come to life”; BBC; The Telegraph Roger Highfield; New Scientist Kelly Young; Aerospace Daily & Defense Report Frank Morring, Jr.; etc…

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Press Release; STEREO mission site; Aberystwyth University Press Release;

The Trib’s Kirsten Scharnberg takes on a challenge here and carries it off. The theme is the ends to which parents will go to try to help their children. With few treatment options in the mainstream for autism, some are looking for miracles. Their searches and their emotions are natural ingredients for an engrossing opening vignette.

Scharnberg manages to use such a heart-grabbing structure without, to the extent possible, feeding unreasonable hopes. While hyperbaric oxygen doesn’t even seem intuitively to be a good idea, Scharnberg has one of its boosters giddily, recklessly proclaiming it is nearly faultless. The story manages to mix in such ingredients while explaining that this treatment is not merely unproven but outlandish. Yet it is getting so much attention (the pic is from hyperbaric/autism promotional material) that. it says here, a controlled trial is getting underway to see if, by long chance, it helps.

-CP

In a departure the NYT’s sci-section lead story, by Jan Hoffman in ScienceTimes, is on clinical care. And it’s not about some exotic or rampant ailment  but about a general field: adolescent medicine. It’s a specialty that, it says here, needs more members. Agreed. The Tracker’s eyes blurred. It’s a long piece, well-reported.  The feeling from here is that the piece is upside down (and haven’t we all buried ledes?). Keep reading it. More than halfway through is a sentence: “Doctors who choose to treat teenagers have a special affection for them.” That works as a first line. It is followed by glimpses of docs who just love these half-kid, half-adult, all-mixed-up patients. If those eager MDs had been the openers, the vital facts and stats would be more interesting.

It has been noted before that science process usually gets short shrift compared to the reporting of results, breakthroughs, and personalities. The Times has a story today that is all-process. One senses why scientific method alone is a tough thing to report — where’s the payoff? This one, by Alexiei Barrionuevo, works. It is about colony collapse disorder — the honeybee plague nobody can figure out. It can’t advance the ball much because the science itself is still just trying to put the ball on the tee. It portrays scientists confronting mystery. One hopes they figure it out soon. In the meantime, The Tracker is going to drill a bunch of holes in some timbers and entice native, wild bees to propagate themselves in the garden below.

The whole ScienceTimes lineup is Here.

Other notables include:

John Tierney‘s essay on a Virginia doc — in the news a lot lately — on trial for allegedly overprescribing opiates;

Sandra Blakeslee‘s piece on asymmetrical wags and their intimations of pooch opinions;

Claudie Dreifus‘s Q & A with a marvelous biologist whose yeast studies illuminate Parkinsonism’s maladroit protein management;

…and really, lots more.

PLUS: The Biz Section, again, horns in on science and hurrah for that. In its World Business pages Lawrence M. Fisher reports a New Zealand company’s plans for a novel way to manufacture ethanol fuel from an odd steel industry waste: carbon monoxide. The process relies on bio-reactors. Whether it’s “good” non-fossil carbon here is unsaid. But a quick search suggests the industry’s CO results in part from the coking process — that is, an oxygen-starved combustion of a primary climate bogeyman: coal. Plus, pig iron has coal-derived carbon that is converted into CO during steel-making, it seems. Now, if that carbon source were replaced by charcoal maybe this new ethanol would be a deeper green.

-CP