In the Times‘s Business Section Matthew L. Wald reports that a study from an energy-focussed consulting company has good news. Better attention to efficiency and smart investment in renewables, etc., could trim up to 28 percent of the nation’s greenhouse emissions with little upfront cost and a fast, quickly profitable payback. This is not news to people at, say, such national labs as Oak Ridge, Berkeley, Livermore, etc. who have been cranking out fruitless and similar studies for years. Maybe these biz suits will give such findings more street cred.

Grist for the Mill: McKinsey & Company report summary, links.

Pic source ;

-CP

It’s natural enough for a New Orleans resident to regard a hurricane season that doesn’t wallop the US, particularly the New Orleans region, as a good one. Some provincialism of that sort is in a roundup story by the Times-Picayune‘s Mark Schleifstein, but overall it’s a fine summary of things. It includes comparative maps of storm tracks for the last three years, plenty on the uncertainties of cyclone prediction, and recognition that while the numbers were down, two deadly and powerful storms did roar through the Southern Caribbean and into Mexico and Central America.

The Tracker would like to have seen a bit on global stats for the same three years, including typhoons and cyclones in the Indian and western Pacific oceans. Nonetheless this is a good, technically sound piece with specific local info readers can use.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

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At the AP Lauran Neergaard plunged bravely into a fairly esoteric epigenetics story, starting it off with “Remember biology class where you learned…” and the real answer for most is probably no. But it’s a relaxing way to take the reader by the hand and walk him or her through the basics of inheritance and of genes silenced by germ cell imprinting.

The news: at Duke, scientists ingeniously devised a gene-mapping routine that identifies such silenced genes and greatly increased the list of known such. Now they are trying to find what they do, and ways to unsilence genes that could help overcome inherited ailments. The paper, featured on the cover, is in Genome Research.

Grist for the Mill: Duke U. Press Release;

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At least one rider of an ATV – those off road go-kart things that people ride on farms and for general kicks outdoors – apparently told a Bureau of Land Management official that dinosaur-looking tracks were at a popular off-road park in Southern Utah. Then some hunters said the same thing. Finally, it says here, the feds went and took a look. Thousands of prints were found, vulnerable to erasure by the knobby-tired vehicles.

All this from Mark Havnes at the Salt Lake Tribune. The AP picked it up, too. It’s as much an environmental story – the protection of a natural attraction – as paleontology. Havnes lets readers know they were laid down around 190 million years ago and include those of small carnivores, some non-dino crocodilians, and a 35-foot plant eater. ATVers have a perhaps undeserved reputation as reckless wreckers of the landscape, but it says here they fully agreed that the tracks should be fenced.

Other (marginal, maybe hairy) footprint news: Reuters‘s Gopal Sharma from Kathmandu reports that a US film team maybe has found footprints “similar to those said to be that of the abominable snowman.” The film makers are from an outfit specializing, it says here, in cryptozoology. Now there’s a business plan…

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Is the graveyard shift carcinogenic? The World Health Organization and researchers at its Int’l Agency for Research on Cancer think so. Maybe it’s general stress, maybe it’s that late-night workers tend to eat badly, but more likely it is disruption of circadian rhythms and melatonin levels, it says here. The main clue is an association with breast cancer.

Several outlets are carrying the news. The AP‘s Maria Cheng in her lede says this puts working nights on the same hazard list as anabolic steroids, UV rays and diesel exhaust fumes, “a surprising step … once considered wacky,” she writes, adding that the American Cancer Society is apt to follow WHO’s lead. The announcement is in the journal Lancet Oncology.

Other stories:

Reuters Maggie Fox ; AFP ; Hartford Courant William Hathaway gets a local angle from a doc who’s been on this hypothesis a long time ;

Pic – went looking for Hopper’s Nighthawks and found this interesting riff off the same mood. Source.

-CP

One hopes that High Country News, the progressive minded, deeply historically sensitive weekly based in Colorado that loves wide open spaces – lots of column inches – is making money (it’s a non-profit, but you know what The Tracker means). It’s a treasure of regular, deep, New Yorker-heft yarns mainly about the landscape, environment, and natural history of the US West with a soft spot for places in or near the Rockies.

A good writerly example is out now, by Michelle Nijhuis, on the battle to subdue the shrubby non-native tamarisk – or salt cedar – trees choking many lakes and watercourses. It’s easy to call the plants trees, and rather attractive ones at that despite their disruption of local ecotones. She rightly calls them weeds.

One gets a profile of a small team of biological-control mavens tracking the hit-and-miss successes by a little old-world beetle deliberately recruited for the task. The insect, we learn, can on occasion hit a reproductive sweet spot and defoliate salt cedar for miles along a stream bank. Or it can just peter out. All in all, things seem encouraging. And so far, it doesn’t seem to eat anything but its designated dinner. This expansive tale also dispels an oversimplification that The Tracker had taken to heart – that salt cedar’s mischief is driven by its immense appetite for water, drying up whole creeks and small lakes. Sort of, but not so simple, Nijhuis informs.

River Pic source; Beetle pic source ;

Other recent Tamarisk news:

Seed Magazine (Jan 07) Josh McDaniel ; Pueblo Chieftain (Nov. 4) Chris Woodka on the local use of beetles against tamarisk (and the little Colorado paper, it says here, at 140 years old has the highest market penetration of any newspaper in the US, with nearly 70-80 percent of local households subscribing. Somebody’s doing something right.); Cortez Journal (Mar 15) Shannon Livick

Here’s an enterprise story that doesn’t, one supposes, break any new ground on the basics of how smoking is bad for one’s health. But it is very well done. The New York Times‘s Denise Grady in a P. 1 story highlights a tragic wave of premature deaths among American women who took up smoking decades ago. Many have long since quit. But the accumulated damage to their lung tissue, it says here, is only now emerging. Not cancer, but a mass of scars, inflexible air passages and sacs, and inflammation called collectively chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Men, of course, get it too. It’s the fourth leading cause of death in the US and is aiming for third.

Experts, she writes because one can only assume she shares the opinion, “consider the statistics a national disgrace.”

This business of states taking over where the feds dropped the ball on greenhouse emissions is getting more serious all the time. This week, reports the Seattle Time‘s Warren Cornwall, local regulators told a consortium of utilities they can’t build a new coal gasification power plant – near the town of Kalama in the state’s southwest – until they comply with a state greenhouse gas law.

All such plants, new rules say, must emit no more carbon into the air than would a high-efficiency natural gas plant. If they use coal, fine, but they must find a way to sequester the extra CO2. Cornwall mentions that some regard the immense beds of basalt in Washington as a natural sponge for CO2, turning it into hard minerals (journalists who attended the recent CASW New Horizons Meeting in Spokane got an earful from a Pac. NW Nat’l Lab expert on that. But nobody has proven it’s practical, yet).

This got fairly wide attention. Other stories include:

Reuters ; Oregonian Michael Milstein ; Columbian Erik Robinson ; AP David Ammons, Shannon Dininny ; Longview Daily News Erik Olson ;

Nobody’s Pickin’ on Coal Alone Dept:

Balance suggests we note, from the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune‘s Paul Walsh, that an ethanol producer has been hit with $300,000 in fines for various environmental violations.

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Jammed and piled under the stands of the University of Arizona football stadium in Tucson is a lot of dead wood, reports the Daily Star‘s Eric Swedlund. It is the 2-million-piece collection of specimens for the school’s noted Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. And the dead wood is being moved out, to a spanking new home. The story does a good job telling readers what the lab and its researchers do. It also catches the eye as the pic, reproduced here, looks exactly, already and without any new location, as one supposes a tree ring lab’s warehouse ought to look. Lots of sliced tree trunks. Presumably, it also has plenty of those slim cylindrical cores that dendrochronologists drill from trees without, they hope, doing them much harm.

Grist for the Mill: U. Ariz. Press Release;

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It is easy to poke fun at the fanciful artist’s impressions that often accompany reports of new planets, weird stars, giant black holes, and other things that are but dots or even just scruffs of data in the outputs of telescopes. They are informed enough, but still, essentially, made up. But they do seem effective at getting reporters’ and editors’ attention. The image reproduced here is the real data, from the European Southern Observatory, that indicates confirmation of infant, or in some constructions “teenage”, galaxies presumed to have populated the young universe. It’s not exactly eye candy. Now, if ESO had issued a glorious painting of some proto-galaxy galaxy yowling amid a stirmash of colliding hydrogen clouds, maybe it would have gained attention from more than the AP‘s Raphael G. Satter and Reuters‘s Ben Hirschler. Or maybe not. They are, to most readers, literally and figuratively obscure.

It’s a story nonetheless worth telling. Such galaxies hadn’t been seen, just presumed. And astronomers saw them by pointing the Gemini Telescope and ESO’s Very Large Telescope at a seemingly empty spot in the sky for 92 hours. That’s quite an investment of time for two of the world’s foremost scientific instruments. The result: 27 candidate, small galaxies as seen when the universe was but 2 billion (out of 13+ billion) years old.

Grist for the Mill:

ESO Press Release ; Univ. Cambridge Press Release (it does have a very small, pretty rendition) ; Carnegie Institution Press Release ;

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At the Christian Science Monitor one frequently sees the bare-bones science writing of Robert C. Cowen. He has one today, on recent progress toward affordable ways to liberate hydrogen from water or other sources, and to store it in a reasonably practical manner. The Tracker says bare-bones because Cowen, who has been in this business a long time, does not often spend much time personalizing scientists by going into their hobbies, the colors of their ties, their personal tics, or their school boy adventures. Just what they’ve done lately, explained in plain English.

It has lawnmowers, egg shells, bacteria and acetic acid and more, all parading past in a series of simple – and almost always declarative – sentences. No muss, no fuss; no waste, no haste.

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The Tracker isn’t sure where to categorize it, but a well-deserved kudo to the Marian Koshland Museum at the National Academy of Sciences ran in the Post yesterday. It is by Sandra G. Boodman, who calls the place “largely undiscovered.” Many science writers have visited it, and indeed when I was there it was largely empty.

It is named for the late and accomplished University of California immunologist. Her better-known biochemist husband, Daniel Koshland Jr., also of UC Berkeley and at one time editor of Science (and, pertinently, member of a rather wealthy family) was the prime benefactor of the museum. He died earlier this year. He practically dragged people over to see the place he spearheaded in his wife’s memory. It is as this piece says a quiet, and also perhaps more scholarly, respite from the hubbub in the Smithsonian’s immense museum lineup.

Grist for the Mill: Koshland Museum ;

-CP