Oh terrific. The Tracker and his babe just signed up to put solar panels on the roof and, it says here, Berkeley is going to find a way to help all its non-solar homeowners buy theirs. And we’ll need solar water heaters on the roof, too. Well, bring it on. All this inferred from an account by the San Francisco Chronicle’s Carolyn Jones. It is a compendium of the sorts of steps the entire nation — and one hopes the whole industrial world — will soon have to take if the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide is to stay outside the dreadful zone. Berkeley’s city council has resolved by 2050 to get its emissions down to just 20 percent what they are now. We cut emissions 9 percent since 2000. ‘Can’t wait to see that electric meter spinning backwards.

Grist for the Mill: Berkeley Climate Action Campaign/Mayor’s Office website.

A young, male great white shark, kept captive for more than four months at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and then fitted with a tracking device, didn’t exactly hang around when let go. The Oakland Tribune’s Douglas Fischer reported in Wednesday’s edition that the animal beelined south to Mexico. In three months it traveled 2,200 miles and ventured as deep as 1000 feet under the surface.

The data, it says here, are the clearest log yet of what such sharks do when they’re not spotted, momentarily, cruising along near the surface. The story touches on a few issues, such as conservation of sharks. Primarily, it shares with readers the scientists’ curiosity about shark behavior. Judging by Fischer’s account, some it remains mysterious — not the what part, but the why.

-CP

AP:

Tim Sullivan: Study: India’s Tiger Numbers Much Lower ;

Marcus Wohlsen: Rescuers Back Off Lost, Injured Whales;

Discovery News (via ABC Australia) – Larry O’Hanlon: Universe may disappear from view ;

Agençe France-Presse (via ABC Australia) – Dinosaur ‘feathers’ are no such thing ; (It’s lede, that one fossil deals a blow to birds-as-dinosaurs, seems a reach);

BBC: Tracks suggest dinos could swim ;

Reuters: Study finds dolphins speaking ‘Welsh’ dialect;

Christian Science Monitor:

Tibor Krausz: Making the world safe for big cats;

Robert C. Cowen: Forecast for alien worlds: windy, hot;

LA Times – Margot Roosevelt: State acts to limit use of coal power;

Just as it said it would — while spending $1.8 billion getting ready — the Tennessee Valley Authority yesterday turned the Browns Ferry Unit 1 reactor back on, some 22 years after it shut it down. All three units are now running.

NPR’s David Kestenbaum broadcast a report this morning that covers the bases well. The reactor, along with Unit 2, had a fire — lit by a candle in a room full of cables and flammable insulation — during its first operating life. It was among the worst US nuclear incidents. Nobody was killed and no significant radiation release ensued. But controllers got panicky as controls went kerflooie. A meltdown was narrowly averted.

With electricity rates rising and other sources hard to find, the utility expects to get its money back on the restart in just four or five years. And while this is an old unit, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency expects applications for up to 28 new reactors from US power producers in the next few years. A long-vaunted nuclear renaissance may be starting. Kestenbaum reports it’s about money — existing reactors are immensely profitable — and about global warming. Most of the local press is fairly boosterish on the restart — with nods to enviro critics who would rather see the money go for conservation, renewable sources, etc.

Other stories:

AP Jay Reeves; Northwest Alabama Times Daily Dennis Scherer; Decatur Daily Eric Fleischauer; Knoxville News Sentinel Andrew Eder;
Grist for the Mill: TVA Press Release; Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (industry) Press Release; Bechtel Press Release;

The LA Times’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar reports that, based on an  internal memo obtained by the consumer group Public Citizen, GlaxoSmithKlein and the FDA knew nearly five years ago that the drug Avandia might be causing heart failure. This just a day after news broke on the drug’s problems. He also hears from the office of a senator that efforts to put clear warnings on the diabetes medication were turned down by the FDA.

The story is eliciting a flood of followups, too many to track entirely.

Other stories:

Reuters Susan Heavy; NPR’s Philip Hilts explains the difficulty of learning how a drug is doing once it’s on the market;

Related News: NY Times business writer Barry Meier reports how data posted publicly by GlaxoSmithKlein led to the report that now has it in hot water. The result, he writes, shows why businesses tend to avoid full disclosure.

See Also: Earlier Post May 22 Wires, dailies, more: A diabetes drug and heart attack risk  ;

Scientists were “astonished,” reports the Times’s (of London) Lewis Smith upon learning that a bonnethead shark in Nebraska gave birth asexually. The animal, a type of hammerhead — kept in an Omaha zoo — had been around no male for at least three years. The birth was in 2001. Researchers took until now to build a solid case. The results, by US and Irish researchers, are in Biology Letters of the Royal Society.

The pup, in an event that was sad for zoo goers and keepers but made genetic testing a bit easier, lasted only hours before a stingray in the same tank killed it. DNA analysis confirmed no sign of male involvement in its conception. While parthenogenesis, or virgin birth, is well-known in many animals including some fish, this is a first for sharks.

Other stories:

NY Times Henry Fountain; Wash. Post Juliet Eilperin says the finding may explain other, previously ambiguous but possible virgin births in captive sharks, and that one of her sources, betting against it, owes a few pints of Guiness to colleagues; AP Shawn Pogatchnik; BBC;

Grist for the Mill: Queen’s Univ. Belfast Press Release; Royal Society Biology Letters paper;

The mice once were blind, and now they see. Amazing and the AP, at least in versions The Tracker can find, has no byline on its account of a rather interesting report in Nature Medicine about gene therapy. It is getting some play.

Researchers from the Univ. of Florida in Gainesville, the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, and State Univ. of NY say they revved up the inactive, retinal cones of specially-bred mice by installing a fresh version of a defective gene. The repair occurred with the help of a virus delivery system. More important, the mouse blindness seems similar to a congenital condition also found in about one in 30,000 people and may be pertinent to other vision problems. AP actually says “one in 30,000 Americans.” C’mon, just because the press release says it that way is no reason for a reporter to leave his or her brain in neutral. That’s a false localization. Surely the rate is general, not distinctly American.

The AP’s account also says that the treated eyes attained “electrical readings on par with those taken in normal mice.” That evades the question whether the rodents could actually see. Maybe their visual cortex still didn’t get it? The U. Florida press release seems however to settle it. They could see, as measured by a rather clever test at SUNY.

Other stories:

Gainesville Sun Diane Chun writes that the 3 blind mice of nursery rhyme could have their sight restored this way. The rhyme mentions rods and cones? A natural lede. It could use a maybe. She picks up the “one in 30,000 Americans” oddity, too. ;

Grist for the Mill: U. Fla Press Release;

Ooof. That was The Tracker’s sensation on reading this opening line last night in a fund raising letter from Daniel Kleppner of the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms:

“Do you share my distress when newspapers misrepresent science, ideologues distort scientific findings for political ends, or journalists turn a healthy scientific debate into a clash of personalities merely to catch an audience? We can do little to prevent the media from distorting science but we can do much to assure that accurate records are preserved…..”

Kleppner heads the Friends of the Center for History of Physics, an AIP effort. It’s in Maryland at the Center for Physics (pic). A worthy cause no doubt. And sure, who wouldn’t share distress at such things? But ouch. The one for-instance of media dereliction, in the next graf, is drawn from a paper on global warming and hurricanes — and on efforts to discredit the link as reported in the media — by Judith Curry of Georgia Tech. Her paper, noted in a footnote on the fund-raising letter, is “Mixing Politics and Science in Testing the Hypothesis That Greenhouse Warming Is Causing a Global Increase in Hurricane Intensity,” in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 87(8):1025-37, published last year.

Two points here. First, Curry’s paper is worth a long, hard sit-down for a glimpse at the way that logical fallacies — in any argument — can be parsed. It offers lessons for any serious reporter. The paper drops the ball when it gets down to specific examples of media mischief. Curry writes that “one reporter manufactured a personal conflict between (herself)(including an egregious misquote) and a scientist on the other side of the debate.” No details on who wrote it, who was involved, how typical it was of media reporting, etc. What was the egregious misquote? But the upshot, one gathers from Curry’s report, is that media-concocted and exaggerated tiffs among scientists poisoned the atmosphere of meetings. They turned collegial disagreement into personal animus. Could be and, if so, looks like bad journalism by some reporters.

The Tracker has neither direct info nor the time this morning with which to sort that one out. Media do distort many things, science included. That’s a prime reason for the ksjtracker’s existence.

The second point is: While Dr. Kleppner scolds the press for imagining a “clash of personalities merely to catch an audience,” he does so in a letter that in a similar vein intensifies hostility to the press — painting it with too broad a brush and even referring to the “media circus” — merely to catch money. All in a good cause.

-CP

LATE ADDITION: A Tracker reader suggests, plausibly, that the article to which Dr. Curry refers is this, by Valerie Bauerlein at the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 2, 2006: Hurricane Debate Shatters Civility of Weather Science/ Worsened by Global Warming? Spats Are So Tempestuous Sides Are Barely Talking/Charge of ‘Brain Fossilization’ ;

Grist for the Mill: AIP Center for History of Physics

Other Hurricane-Sea Temperature News: Reuters Timothy Gardner on a study, in Nature, concluding that hurricane intensity has varied widely for thousands of years, with no clear connection to surface water temperatures.

NPR, partnered with Nat’l Geographic, has a “Climate Connections” series underway (series link here , including this week’s excellent N.G. cover story by Tim Appenzeller on the polar “Big Thaw.).

And on NPR yesterday, as part of it, was an unusual and arresting broadcast by Lynn Neary, inspired by and in places borrowing from (with credit) a BBC special about a group of artists taken aboard a sailing ship to Norway’s far northern Spitzbergen Island. In a reversal of how some may see things, one artist declares that scientists see things too much as abstractions. It is the artists, it says here, who make them concrete and personal. The Web site’s text has the gist but the linked audio is far more rewarding. One bit from a dancer is marvelous.

Also notable: It’s in the above-linked package but worth special reference is this by Annie Fiedt of Alaska Public Radio, on the cold truth of science on ice.

-CP

Mostly it’s the image that is worth a look here. The Los Angeles Times’s Eric Bailey has a piece out today on the elusive-no-more beauty of the moonbow. This, he explains, is a rainbow formed at night from moonlight. It says here that a team of Texas State University astronomers developed software that predicts when the moon will be at the right spot in the sky to produce a moonbow in the mist of Yosemite Falls, the biggest cataract in the national park. The story includes a link (here) to the phenomenon’s calculated sked.

High res of photo here. See the press release below for more, in some ways better, images.
Grist for the Mill: Texas State U. Press Release .

The lead story in this week’s NYTimes ScienceTimes is Benedict Carey’s long, intimate report on the stories people tell (to themselves and others) to explain their natures and how their life histories shaped them.

Carey’s piece brings few surprises — it’d be a surprise if self-reflections bore no connection to the ways we conduct ourselves. On the fuzzy touchy feely side, the story will not appeal to all. But it has an effective intimacy. It gets the reader inside the minds of others too. Faced with any sequence of events, Carey writes, it is a human instinct to stitch it into a narrative with themes, chapters, morals, etc. Accordingly The Tracker hereby declares a theme for the entire section this week: introspection. Other notables that fire inner-self (and empathy) neurons:

John Tierney’s column on spam filters, grapevine social-info networks, and email’s violation of traditional communal rules.

Cornelia Dean’s account of the enviro epiphany that has driven one old-line, carpet-making exec. into Al Gore’s camp, made him a crusading prophet for sustainable biz practices, and rewarded him via corporate profits too. With sidebar.

Dr. Jessica L. Israel’s guest column on palliative care — with a wrenching, beautifully-drawn visit to a room in a hospital in which a dying child lies, fate certain, and where a mother wonders with a numinous intensity who will receive her girl’s heart.

This is a stretch, but Ken Chiang’s article on the microstructure of metal alloys. It starts with a suggestion to stare into one’s beer. For some of us it rarely gets more introspective than that.

The section overall is here.

Not-fitting-the-theme are many other stories. William Broad reviews a handsome book of photos of often-gelatinous creatures of the dark mid-ocean (with examples); Henry Fountain’s grab-bag Observatory provides the odd pic. It goes with an item about a moon of Saturn. Read it to see how.

-CP

Here we go again with big pharma and worries that a popular drug has side effects that should have been caught. This time a diabetes drug from GlaxoSmithKline may substantially raise the rate of heart attacks. This according to a meta-analysis, of previously reported studies, by a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist and put online by the New England Journal of Medicine. The drug, rosiglitazone, is on the shelves as Avandia and as Avandamet.

The Hartford Courant, in a story it attributes to combined wire services, sums it up: “Another big drug safety issue has consumer groups, doctors and congressmen calling for an overhaul of the US Food and Drug Administration.” The company emphatically says its own review of literature, and its studies, do not confirm that the risk is significant for the great majority of patients. The FDA is gearing up for a new look.

Such statistical duels are not easy to analyze on the fly. This is little help to patients sure to be confused but the news cycle cannot wait. The first-day’s flow of ink is impressive. Much of the initial lot is from biz writers who know about one thing for sure: stock prices.

-CP

Other Stories:

AP Marilynn Marchione, among others, puts “Vioxx-like” in her lede to neatly tie the story to recent others; Forbes Matthew Herper gives it a perceptive, narrative history at the top and refers to the new analysis as an example of “pharmaceutical vigilantism” and “an open source approach to drug safety”; Los Angeles Times Karen Kaplan, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar; Washington Post Rob Stein;  NPR Morning Edition Joanne Silberner; Reuters Lisa Richwine has the regulatory-medical side of the story; Reuters Julie Steenhuysen has it similarly; Reuters Ben Hirschler does it mainly as a biz and economics story; NY Times Stephanie Saul; Guardian (UK, filed from NY) Sarah Boseley, Andrew Clark; Newsday Jamie Talan leads, in an exasperated tone, with “It’s taken eight years and 60 million prescriptions…”; Baltimore Sun Chris Emery, Jonathan Bor; Seattle Post-Intelligencer Cherie Black; Bloomberg Michelle Fay Cortez;

Grist for the Mill:

GlaxoSmithKline Media Ctr w/link to Press Release; FDA Press Release; Cleveland Clinic Press Release ;