AFP: Chinese city panics over undrinkable water supply;

AFP: Pacific tuna stocks at critical point;

Reuters: There’s something in the air in Rome: cocaine;

National Geographic News, Stefan Lovgren: Sun’s “Ring of fire” stoked by sound waves;

At Environmental Science and Technology, Erika Engelhaupt describes a growing sense of unease among climate modelers. A group that is often criticized for being too pessimistic is beginning to worry that they haven’t been pessimistic enough–that their models have underestimated the pace of change in a warming world. Rapid changes in the mass of Greenland’s ice sheet are a prime example of how models have underestimated the dynamics of warming and the pace of sea-level rise. Another interesting Engelhaupt article pulls together results of recent public opinion surveys that describe rising awareness and concern among Americans on the subject.

-JDC

Knowledge of the relationship between genetics and language is taking an interesting turn, and a study by two University of Edinburgh language researchers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences drew some carefully constructed stories. This one is easy to overstate, but there seems to be a solid statistical correlation between the presence of two genes and the language type–tonal, like Chinese, or non-tonal, like English–spoken by a given population. Does the possession–or absence–of the two genes affect an individual’s ability to learn a tonal language? Answering that question, it says here, is next on the agenda.

Outstanding stories: Michael Balter for ScienceNOW Daily News; Mason Inman for National Geographic News; Nikhil Swaminathan for Scientific American.com; Leigh Dayton for The Australian;

-JDC

Grist for the mill: abstract from PNAS;

Subtracker got caught looking through the wrong end of the telescope and feels a little chastened by Marcus Wohlsen‘s story for the AP about the wayward whales in California. It wasn’t the application of marine biology to the spectacle that made a good science yarn, but the other way around. Wohlsen’s treatment is a fine description of what the scientists think they stand to learn from the whales.

In Anchorage, meanwhile, Richard Black for Reuters and P. Parameswaran for AFP are keeping up with the increasingly acrimonious goings on at the International Whaling Commission meeting.

-JDC

Mercifully, the two famously wayward humpbacks, mother and calf, holed up in the Sacramento River Delta may have slipped under the Golden Gate Bridge sometime Wednesday and headed out to sea. At any rate, after two breathless weeks of media attention, they slipped out of sight. Several writers tried gamely to make science stories of the spectacle, but marine mammal biology didn’t have much to offer. You didn’t need to be a marine biologist to see the gashes on the animals from a boat propellor or keel, or to speculate that the mother was seeking a refuge while the wounds healed. When it came to coaxing the whales back to the safety of saltwater, nothing the scientists tried seemed to work until the whales decided for themselves it was time to go.

For the SF Chronicle, Henry K. Lee and Glen Martin had the latest; as did Marcus Wohlsen for the AP; and Eric Bailey for the LA Times, among many others.

Meanwhile, in other whale news:

Mike Houlahan for the New Zealand Herald and others reported that the talks of the International Whaling Commission in Alaska were dragging into another day without agreement over Japan’s request to add 50 humpbacks to its already active “scientific whaling program.” The U.S. and Britain joined Australia and New Zealand in opposition to the idea.

For Reuters, Rob Taylor, in Canberra, reports that, according to the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission, military exercises planned by Australia and the United States next month off the Australian coast could cause large-scale whale deaths or injuries. Military people say they will make sure no marine mammals are around the exercise area, but environmentalists say the lethal effects of powerful sonars and other injurious sounds can travel for miles. Don’t look for a resolution of this issue anytime soon.

-JDC

Encouraging developments on the detection and potential treatment of the dreaded avian influenza came over the long weekend (and the sub-tracker is still playing catch-up).

Reuters‘ Maggie Fox seemed to be alone in reporting the development of a mass spectrometry device that, in a matter of hours, detects the presence of influenza viruses, including the lethal H5N1 avian flu–a process that currently can take conventional laboratory methods several weeks. Developed by California-based Isis Biosciences, the device is not small and not cheap, but something a large institution or government lab could find cost-effective, it says here.

In contrast, a lot of ink followed the announcement that an international research team has used human antibodies derived from recent avian flu survivors–four Vietnamese patients–to successfully treat infected mice. Many accounts gave it the wide-eyed Medical Breakthrough treatment. At ScienceNOW Daily News, however, Martin Enserink took a more restrained look, describing the antibody treatment as a potential “extra tool” in the fight against a future pandemic.

-JDC

Other stories:

AP’s Lauran Neergaard; Reuters’ Maggie Fox; Agence France Press Marlowe Hood;

Grist for the mill:

On antibodies study, PLoS paper and NIH release; on detection device, PLoS paper and company news release;

From Reuters

Mica Rosenberg: Damage from climate change may cost Alaska $10 billion

Skye Wheeler: Elephant herds found on isolated south Sudan island

From Scotsman

Ian Johnston: Butterfly spreads its wings to new areas after milder winters

-JDC

Getting a lot of traction in the UK media, ahead of any peer-reviewed description of the discovery, is a story about genetic screeners in New Zealand who have come across a cow that naturally produces skimmed milk. Researchers at Vialactia Bioscience of New Zealand say they have bred offspring from a single cow that produce skimmed milk that is also high in healthy omega-3 oils and contains polyunsaturated fat. A bull that produces offspring with the same traits has not yet been produced, nor has the company identified the specific genes that produce the unique features of the cow’s milk. Jonathan Leake at the Sunday Times and Alok Jha at The Guardian have the story as well as an unsigned piece by the BBC.

-JDC

Naturally, we sympathize with scientists who decry the media’s failures to accurately reflect the nature and context of scientific controversy over the link between a warming climate and hurricane activity–but hey, don’t feel too sorry for them. Arguing about wind probably is the oldest tradition in meteorology. The Greek thinker Aristotle, who coined the term for weather science, argued that wind was not, in fact, moving air but rather some kind of geophysical flatulence. Early in the 19th century, William Redfield and James Espy, and their respective factions in New York and Philadelphia, argued interminably–and heatedly–about the nature of hurricanes. As Joseph Henry put it at the time, it was “as if the violent commotions of the atmosphere induced a sympathetic effect in the minds of those who have attempted to study them.”

So Cornelia Dean’s comprehensive and thoughtful rumination in the NY Times seems all the more valuable for its calming effect. It may not require the space of a dedicated section to do justice to such a process story, but it sure seems to help. While the question of whether a warming climate is leading to more treacherous hurricane seasons remains unresolved, the story nicely brings the combatants together in agreement on the folly of current real estate development trends that put increasing numbers of people in harm’s way. She quotes from a joint 2006 statement in which the scientists expressed optimism that the scientific questions will be resolved eventually, “But the more urgent problem of our lemminglike march to the sea requires immediate and sustained attention.”

Speaking of harm’s way, an accompanying piece by John Schwartz more narrowly examines the engineering and modeling questions surrounding the new levee system intended to more effectively safeguard New Orleans. Can science outwit storms like Katrina? The modelers and engineers would like to think so, but Schwartz observed that after all the billions is spent, New Orleans “remains a city in the cross hairs for dangerous storms.”

Other ScienceTimes notables…

Natalie Angier has an ode to nitrogen, one of our favorite chemical elements.

Christine Hauser looks at trends in improving hospital care for premature newborns.

Nicholas Wade has an interesting piece about Nature’s visual tricks that help protect moths from predators.

In a bundle, it’s all here

-JDC

The science Quest Section in the San Diego Union-Tribune this week has a bumpy-Earth space story from freelancer Richard A. Lovett. He reviews the findings of the gravity-anomaly satellite GRACE. The bumps are in the gravity field, yielding clues to how much of what is where on this world. Good hed, too: “Appraising GRACE.” The satellites have been tag-teaming their way around Earth for five years (it’s Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment). This is a good update on what they’ve been doing.

Previous news from the duo, Lovett helpfully reports, including signs of accelerated loss of ice — hance mass, with its gravity — from polar regions.

-CP

For the first time, reports Lee Bergquist at the Journal Sentinel, a hemorrhagic virus that hits infects many species of fish is turning up in Lake Michigan. State wildlife biologists found it in a brown trout and in a smallmouth bass. This is a straight-on news story. It includes a roundup on worry that a billion-dollar sports fishery is in peril. An accompanying story by Bill Glauber tells of fretting fish farmers as virus looms.

See also: The Scientist Bob Grant has a general story, loaded with links to further info.

What the heck dept: Other Dangers to Fishing Headline:

AP: Man competing in fishing tournament shot by fisherman ; (It’s a trend: bass again). See also Morris News Service Todd DeFeo in the Augusta Chronicle.

We had a post already, early this week, on a session at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco where researchers shared evidence that a comet blew up 12,900 years ago over the waning Laurentide ice sheet. Maybe it plunged North America back into full ice age. It’s a spectacular thing if it proves to be so.

-CP

See Also: Earlier post May 21 (UPDATED) The Observer, BBC: Did a comet’s air blast wipe out N. America’s Pleistocene giants, ravage stone-age peoples, etc? ;