From the business page, casualty insurers now routinely see the costs of doing business as the price of a changing climate. Reporting year-end estimates from Munich Re, Forbes.com called it “Climate Change’s $75 Billion Bill.” The figure counts total damages from 950 disasters, the highest number since 1974, although 2007 saw no “mega-catastrophes.” At Marketwatch, Steve Goldstein didn’t seem to get it right, mistaking total losses for insurance industry payouts. Insured losses were about $30 billion. For Bloomberg, Aaron Kirchfeld and Oliver Seuss report that the 2007 estimate was double the 2006 figure but far below the $225 billion 2005 losses that were spiked by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. According to Munich Re board member Torsten Jeworrek, who warned that higher insurance premiums are on the way, “All the facts indicate that losses caused by weather-related natural catastrophes will continue to rise.”

Grist for the mill: Munich Re press release

-JDC

The idea that stem cells can be fashioned from plain human skin cells seems to have left scientists and science media fairly staggered. Is the political and moral conflict over embryonic stem cells–so white-hot just a year ago–really over?

If you ask William Saletan at Slate, you are told to “say goodbye to the stem cell war.”

On NPR’s Morning Edition Friday, Joe Palca was more restrained. They look like stem cells and behave like stem cells, but, Palca notes, some scientists say it is just too soon to be sure. At stake, of course, is millions of dollars in research already in the pipeline.

In the Detroit Free Press, Dr. Robert Kelch, executive VP of Medical Research at the University of Michigan, writes that it is “too early to abandon any avenue of research” on the subject.

-JDC

Reuters’ Miguel Angel Gutierrez scored around the world with the discovery by archaeologists of the ruins of an 800-year-old Aztec pyramid in the heart of Mexico City. The 36-foot high steps in the Tlatelolco area are older than other nearby Aztec ruins and will force historians to revise their timeline for the great pre-Hispanic civilization. The pyramid, found last month, could have been built in 1100 or 1200, it says here, while earlier finds had prompted historians to place the founding of the Aztec empire in 1325. Among the finds at the site is a sculpture of what may be the Aztec rain god Tlaloc or Tezcatlipoca, god of the sky and earth.

pic source: Reuters

-JDC

Online publication of a study about how blocking a certain protein seems to ward off tissue scarring of the livers of laboratory mice got the full holiday drinking-season treatment, especially in the UK.

In the Guardian, Ian Sample said it could have “profound impact on public health if proven to work in wider clinical trials.” At The Sun, it was a “miracle drug” that Alex Peake called a “major breakthrough.” At the Daily Mail, which ran a prominent photo of anonymous “binge drinkers,” Jenny Hope likewise opined, “The drug could profoundly improve public health if clinical trials back up the findings.” The BBC took a more restrained approach, quoting a spokesman for the British Liver Trust that the work “is clearly in very early stages.”

Poor readers are left with the impression that a cure for cirrhosis of the liver is on the way, when it fact it hasn’t been tried on humans, there is no human treatment and there is no drug for clinical trials.

Writing for HealthDay News, only Randy Dotinga seemed entirely sober on the subject. He quoted Dr. Scott Friedman, chief of the division of liver diseases at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. While it’s not a “major breakthrough,” considering that many projects are in similar stages of development, it builds on “20 years of very exciting research” that has been underway about how cells create scarring in the liver

Grist for the mill: Public Library of Science

-JDC

In a long and thoughtful report from the Arctic, BBC environment correspondent Richard Black describes in detail efforts by University of Alaska researchers to more fully understand basic life forms that inhabit the cryosphere–the microscopic polychaetes (pictured), copepods and amphipods that live under, around and in the ice. The polar bear and other iconic carnivores of the Arctic stand atop a vast and complex web of life that rests finally on these smallest and little understood forms, notes Black in this nice piece of writing. “Temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than just about anywhere else on Earth,” writes Black. “If you want to understand how that will affect life we can see, you have to know what it means for organisms like the polychaete larvea.”

-JDC

Some science bloggers and others found irresistible the new findings from researchers at the University of California, Davis, about a protection strategy used by rock and ground squirrels to ward off a chief predator, the rattlesnake–as Dave Mosher at LiveScience called it, “their slithering nemeses.”

UCD graduate student Barbara Clucas capture this picture of a squirrel munching away on sloughed rattlesnake skin. Clucas said the critters chew the skin and then lick their fur, thus masking their own scent in the smell of a snake. Another author of the study, psychologist Donald Owings, describes it as “a nice example of opportunism of animals. They’re turning the tables on the snake.”

Grist for the mill: UC Davis press release

-JDC

On a lean news day, Reuters’s Michael Kahn in London reports on a new study that employs a pragmatic, low-cost approach to targeting and treating Chagas disease, a deadly parasitic ailment common in Latin America. Fleshed out with a telephone interview, Kahn’s straightforward account describes a medical strategy developed by US researchers at the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention and published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.

The disease, spread by a single-cell parasite known as the “kissing bug,” is commonly attacked by community-wide spraying campaigns. But medical people have been hard-pressed to identify infected children in a practical way. Researcher Michael Levy described a study of 433 children in a poor neighborhood in Arequipa in southern Peru. Using data from exterminators, the researchers were able to zero in on children living in houses infested with the most bugs and were able to detect 83 percent of the infections while testing just 25 percent of the population.
pic: Reuters ;

Grist for the mill: Public Library of Science ;

JDC

Maybe it is too early to say for sure, but reports running up to the 2008 Olympics about Beijing’s progress toward cleaning up some of the dirtiest air on the planet are taking on a surreal quality. In an unsigned report from China’s capital, Agence France Presse tells of warnings to Beijingers to stay indoors Thursday because air pollution readings had gone off the charts. A spokeswoman for the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau tells AFP, source of this file pix, “This is as bad as it can get.”

This comes on the heels of assurances from officials that the sky over Beijing is getting cleaner and after the government has spent billions trying to make it so. As China Daily put it Dec. 21, “Beijing tells IOC it can breathe easy.” According to the president of the Beijing Organizing Committee, “We are determined to ensure that the air conditions meet the necessary standards in August 2008.” But Olympic officials are raising the possibility of “rescheduling” some competition if air quality is unsuitable, the BBC reports.

In USA Today, sports columnist Christine Brennan Wednesday ruminated on the “not-so-insignificant issue of how the world’s best athletes will breathe while competing.”

If there is a switch that will bend the atmosphere over Beijing to the considerable will and determination of the government of China, nobody seems to have found it yet.

-JDC

As the Old Year creeps through its final days, we are experiencing list-making time from many newsrooms. Several outlets come to the attention today with top science stories for 2007. As others come into view, this post may grow.

The Guardian‘s Alok Jha provides a top 10, mostly from life sciences but including a possible direct detection of dark matter.
At LiveScience, Andrea Thompson’s top 10 science “revelations” is heavy on climate news, including IPCC, Arctic meltdown, extreme weather, carbon dioxide and drought.

USA Today‘s Elizabeth Weise has a Year in Science review. Global warming is on top, followed by stem cells, a very bright star, and more.

Scientific American‘s Lisa Stein goes for big, with a Top 25 Science Stories of 2007 offering. It includes the rise of Al Gore as Nobelist, and the downward move by James Watson (but he keeps the Nobel), global warming, and more. This is, it appears, a collaborative effort by news editor Stein and others on the staff. The list is long and subdivided.

At Wired News, Alexis Madrigal keeps the focus narrow, with the top ten new organisms of 2007 (and those glowing cats are among them).

And Science Magazine has its own “top ten scientific accomplishments for 2007.” Those are, of course, not always the same as big stories. Human genetic variation is the lead breakthrough (not exactly a concise story), followed by nine runners-up.

-CP, JDC

Newsweek‘s ace Sharon Begley writes this week that with so much global warming already cocked and doomed to fire at us no matter what we do, adaptation is almost as big a priority as to eventually turn down the greenhouse gases that put us in this fix. Adaptation, she writes, will cost a lot of money and means a lot better than more muscular air conditioners. It’s a long list. One question arises over her lead-off example, however. She posits that warmer air, being less dense, forces airplanes to reach a higher speed before their wings get enough aerodynamic purchase to lift them off the runway. So we’ll need longer runways. That’s logical. But aren’t runways already built long enough for the occasional hot spell, anyway. Will O’Hare really need longer ones? Just wondering.

Related News in Newsweek: Andrew Muir provides a short profile of a stubborn, inventive woman born in Ethiopia and her development, at Caltech, of a new and promising, highly efficient fuel cell .

-CP

In Nature online Harvard researchers say they verified reports a month ago from teams in Japan and at the Univ. of Wisconsin that one can convert fibroblast skin cells into colonies of what look and act like embryonic stem cells. Aside from its confirmation of the results from elsewhere, the team at the Harvard-affiliated Children’s Hospital Boston brought the procedure closer to what must occur for it to have clinical application. They cultured the cells from a biopsy on a volunteer at the hospital and took them, in one lab, all the way to pluripotency. The other teams started with skin cells obtained from commercial tissue banks. Plus, the team at Children’s Hospital reported similar results from other, differentiated tissue types to revert to a highly potent stem cell state.

Stories:

Reuters Maggie Fox writes that the new research shows the technique “is not a rare fluke but in fact something that might make its way into everyday use.” ; AFP reports it with the abbreviation du jour in regenerative medicine: iPC (for induced pluripotent cell) ;

Grist for the Mill: Children’s Hospital Boston Press Release ;

What is it with any and all holy grails as ever-potent catnip for metaphor-hungry science and medical writers? How is it that French poetry, British Arthurian literature, and the romance of knights off on quests — one that not even Monty Python’s satire could cure — took such deep root in the imaginations of some writers in their youths (and of their sources)?

Today BBC has a perfectly okay story on an MIT team’s progress toward artificial blood vessels. The unnamed writer adorns it with this quote “..(this) is one of the holy grails of regenerative medicine..” Gad. It’s just one of several such grails? And this in just one subspecialty? Well, one takes one’s holy grails where one finds them. Somebody should do a survey. There must be scads of them. How many holy grails does it take to make them, you know, plain old grails?

Grist for the Mill: MIT press release via EurekAlert.

PS: It’s not just us science writers. The Tracker noodled holy grail on to Google news and got hits on a holy grail bedsheet, holy grail Cuban sandwiches, holy grail graffiti art , a holy grail walking path in Hawaii, and UNBELIEVABLE AS IT SOUNDS, DISCOVERY OF THE ACTUAL HOLY GRAIL!!!! Holy Moly. Also, Wholly Maybe. This by the Evening Times (Scotland) Wendy Miller. It could be sitting in the Louvre, it says here. Ms. Miller throws in that the grail is the source of the “world’s most ancient mystery,” and why she would say that is a mystery in itself. She never heard of Atlantis?

AND FURTHER, should you wish to read a stupefyingly scholarly, if not merely supefying, analysis of the Holy Grail in its greatest sphere of excess please consult “Decontructing Astronomy’s Holy Grail” by Steve Nadis, in the Annals of Improbable Research, May-June 2006.