Here’s a switch. A highly illustrated lead story on climate change complete with a sliding, melting Himalayan glacier and it’s not by Andrew C. Revkin. Nope, Andy’s inside writing about honey bee colony collapse disorder. The Times’s Delhi Bureau Chief, Somini Sengupta does the glacier. If she tires of politics and general assignment she could do well on a nature or science beat. Indian glaciers, she tells us, are among the least studied in the world. She accompanies a government team gathering data, watches them drill holes for bamboo poles that will help reveal movement and shrinkage, and listens to the stream gurgling from one big glacier’s nose. The story puts into global context the big problems looming as the buffers on the subcontinent’s high-altitude runoff melts away.

Other notables include:

Andrew C. Revkin: Some entomologists are asking colleagues — and the media — for a longer perspective on honeybee colony collapse disorder. Several say recent worries over bee health are overblown, lack a sense of history, etc.

Grist for the Mill: At least one press release, from Oregon St. University, has been around for several days on this. The Times is the only major outlet, thus far that The Tracker notices, to look into it.

Cornelia Dean: The mystery of a massive, free Islamic creationism book distribution to scientists. Dean tells readers of a gorgeously-illustrated book by a Turkish writer that is showing up, unordered, in the mail of science professors and research institutes all over the US. Her efforts to discover how the publisher is paying the certain high costs met a dead end. It’s a good treatment of a phenomenon a few other reporters also have noticed.

Other, earlier stories:

Reuters Tom Heneghan;

Grist: Atlas of Creationism site (amazingly lavish).

David Tuller: A good, freelance rundown on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and, according to Tuller, the gradual acceptance of it as a real ailment — albeit one whose cause is maddeningly hard to pin down. That is, it is not just another name for depression. Also not much new here other than word of a CDC survey, and hints of a viral aspect.

Claudia Dreifus: Q & A with a Harvard physics professor with a distinctive teaching style and a zeal for instilling broad concepts as well as the usual, rote, memorize and drill process used to master scientific info.

Much more, as usual. Whole Section Here.

-CP

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