With a seafloor landrush reviving, and the old but not yet fully ratified and codified Law of the Sea Treaty coming out of regulatory limbo, the Wall Street Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz hied himself over to United Nations Plaza. There he met the superintending referee in inevitable oil and mining claim tussles. The column displays a good bit of enterprise, looking as it does into one of the interstices of high-stakes science and technology policy making. One datum that Hotz shares really stands out: If one printed out the data submitted by just one petitioner, Russia and its desire for sovereignty over much of the Arctic sea floor, it would fill wall to wall and to the ceiling the conference room where things are to be settled.

That’s a lot of spreadsheet. The job is huge. Hotz suggests that the part-time group of 21 geoscientists who serve on the panel weighing claims haven’t the resources to get the job done. They also don’t have time, as they have other jobs too. The US has not ratified the treaty due in part to fear, from some quarters, that it’d would weaken American sovereignty. But even without formal ratification by the US, its emergence from hibernation more than 25 years after it was drafted will make it the de facto rule maker for everybody.

pic source, including hi res (from Aug 22 WSJ story by Neil King Jr.)

-CP

Most rationalists, on hearing of a Christian preacher extolling evolution and science as expressions of god’s will might think that’s just fine and leave it alone; certainly it’s better than the fundamentalists who want creationism presented in science classes.

The Register Science Editor, Gary Robbins, however challenges the man hard to explain just exactly how it works that a believing Christian can easily re-interpret traditional scripture in light of science’s prevailing conclusions. He demands specific examples of how God’s word is revealed through science. He doesn’t just let the poor fellow go. It’s good, tough questioning where most general assignment reporters would probably pass the creampuffs. On the other hand, The Tracker cannot tell exactly where Robbins sits in the atheist/secularist to fundamentalist spectrum either. That’s probably a good thing.

This is a bit marginal of course as science journalism. But Robbins provides a public service worth noting for broader reasons. Robbins is among the relatively few newspaper bloggers with major responsibilities for the print edition but who write almost nothing for it. His blog, the ScienceDude, not only is almost his exclusive personal outlet but adheres to conventional journalism. Which is to say, Robbins calls people up, gets contrary opinions, goes places, digs stuff up, and does other sorts of enterprise reporting but entirely for the web. He localizes almost everything relentlessly. I talked with him during last week’s MIT-KSJ 25th Anniversary Symposium in Cambridge, MA. His venture into all-web reporting – underway for quite a while now – while paid by a conventional outlet may be a sign of what’s in store for many more mainstream media reporters.

Among more unusual Robbins efforts: an accounting from public records of the presidential campaign contributions by Orange Country college and university professors, several of them scientists. Who else would have thunk of doing that?

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“The verdict is in,” intones Bob McDonald, host of Quirks and Quarks Canada’s CBC radio network. “It doesn’t look promising” so far as whether the surface of Mars could have ever supported life. For a segment he calls an acid trip to Mars he interviewed a Harvard professor on the Mars Rover team. The result is a good update on the two machines, now and amazingly in their fourth year of work. More important is word that for the last 3.5 billion years it seems likely that water near the planet’s surface was exceedingly acidic and salty. And while such pH levels and such can support extremophiles on Earth, it doesn’t mean they did so on Mars. There is a big difference, the man says, between a planet with abundant resources floating aroundand into extreme, barely habitable environments as on Earth, than one like Mars where such hellish environments may be the most habitable and where life might need to first appear.

The verdict may be in but juries can be wrong. There still is no reason to exclude evolution of life on Mars very early after its formation when conditions could have been more clement, the source says. OK. But maybe NASA’s Mars mantra, “follow the water,” ought to be amended to “follow the battery acid.”?

The Q&Q site includes links to press releases and relevant web sites.

Other stories:

This thesis surfaced at the AAAS Meeting ten days ago or so and received a flurry of print attention there. It includes the Telegraph (UK) Richard Gray, BBC Helen Briggs ; ABC (Australia) ; Nat’l Geographic News Anne Minard ;

Whole weekend Quirks and Quarks program is here with additional segments on our “inner fish,” buttterfly evolution, lark buntings, and gecko feet.

Other Mars News on the Radio: Robyn Williams at ABC (Australia) and its Science Show updates listeners on the next probe to Mars. That’s the Phoenix lander. It’s nearly there, due to set down near Mars’s north pole at 4:26 pm Sunday May 25th Pacific Time in the US. Williams naturally asks the director of the Jet Propulsion Lab, Charles Elachi, how can one be so accurate? Answer: Celestial mechanics. Either it’s then, or we’ve missed Mars. It big job is to drill into the shallow permafrost and analyze the icy soil. Maybe, who knows, it won’t be so salty and acid after all.

Grist for the Mill: Arizona State University Mars Phoenix Site.

Other Space Probe News: Death Watch on Ulysses.

Several outlets in the last few days are writing on the flickering power system aboard a solar probe, Ulysses, that has been observing the sun from distant orbit for 17 years. Its radioisotope thermal generator is getting low on decaying plutonium, its maneuvering fuel is therefore freezing, and its systems are shutting down. It, like the Mars Rovers, can die amid satisfaction, however, as it lasted a lot longer than the nominal mission specs demanded.

Stories:

AP Seth Borenstein ; Discovery Channel Irene Klotz ; Wired News John Borland ; AFP ;

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A well done wrap-up on last week’s MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowships 25th Anniversary Symposium is to be found at The Observatory, Curtis Brainard‘s blog for the Columbia Journalism Review. It covers the issues raised, a few of the more provocative points from speakers about the rocky waters for mainstream print journalism and the absolute ferment in digital, multimedia news evolution, and ends on a hopeful note.

See Also: Earlier Post Feb. 20.

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Last week The Tracker blogged a question (see earlier post Feb 21) on NASA’s recent grant to MIT and colleagues at the Naval Research Lab of enough money to draft a plan for radio astronomy on the side of the moon away from Earth and hence shielded from Don Imus, American Idol, cell phone, and other radio frequency pollution from Earth. I wondered if the proposal depends upon NASA’s ambition, mandated by the White House, to reoccupy the moon in the next dozen or so years? The first, scant stories didn’t say if it would require, or be cheaper (as a line item) with, human mechanics and operators.

As it happens, the Washington Post‘s Marc Kaufman has out today a more detailed, feature-styled piece on this embryonic plan. Nice piece, good graphics (Here on the geometry of the location). It hints strongly but doesn’t quite say emphatically that a robotic method for installation could not work – only that during the Apollo days none could have done it. But, he writes, the plan gains traction now – largely due to NASA’s plan to get people in spacesuits, presumably with plenty of wrenches and other tools, some time after 2019.

It looked to The Tracker for a brief moment that Kaufman stumbled into a common error, referring to the dark side of the moon. That’s a fine title for a Pink Floyd number. Not so for a moon that gets sunshine everywhere but the bottoms of a few polar craters during its 27-day rotation period. But reporters seldom write their own headlines, and his story and illus captions are punctilious on this score. A hed on the news feed does – or did this morning – label a promo for Kaufman’s appearance tomorrow on a live net chat with the dark side flub. Hmmm – of course it IS dark to terrestrial radio emanations so one conceivably could hide behind that. Nahhh.

-CP

(The Tracker didn’t get much in this week, what with travel to Boston and back, jet lag, laziness, etc., but here are a few more good ones. Back in stride next week. Have a great weekend everybody.)

Papers in both of the world’s leading general research journals, Science and Nature, provided over the past two days an avalanche of fresh data on human genetic diversity and what it all says about our origins. Not new: We’re a patchwork, we started out in Africa, our migrations and ways that our ancestries affect how we look and somewhat how we handle disease. And, there is more diversity within any specific group than there is average difference among groups. But the details are fascinating and are being sifted out better than ever. So, as one would guess, we’re a lot more alike than different. The armies of researchers relied on data gathered, via the Human Genome Diversity Project, from peoples with little or no recent dilution of ancestries rooted in specific regiions of the world.

The two-journal, three-paper news break provided a good chance for reporters to get confused or miss things. Not everybody scours the advances from both, not all the papers had associated press releases. So some coverage came up a bit scanter than it ought to have. At least, the three papers seem to have the same gist.

There is no new, giant discovery here. Rather, it confirms in an incremental way the presiding, general picture of an African diaspora and genetic radiation in the last 100,000 years or so. Media reports rightly focus on the new details. One detail is a map – in a paper in Nature by a large international team that a Cornell University professor led – of the patchwork of distinquishable aboriginal types or clades. Africa is densest in diversity – makes sense, we’ve been evolving and differentiating longer there than anywhere else. (Nature has a second paper, too, from a NIH-led group futher cementing the overall portrait of how human genetic diversity has grown).

The U. Michigan end of one of the Nature paper’s authorship made the map, centered on Africa and resembling a colorful patchwork quilt. Among those featuring it is Roger Highfield at the Telegraph in the UK. He breaks one implication rather gently, after a few grafs, to his readers: White Europeans carry more harmful mutations than, say, Africans – a result of a bottleneck in population and diversity as humans moved into Europe perhaps 45,000 years ago. Fox News, by contrast, gave this interpretation a bit more dash, with the online hed: “White Genetically Weaker Than Blacks…” (cq) . Well sheesh.

Los Angeles Times Karen Kaplan leads today on the Science journal article’s findings, but quickly enough refers to the corroboration from the Nature studies. She imagines “an ancient band of explorers left what is now Ethiopia” and went on to colonize just about everywhere else. She doesn’t say much about must have been considerable continuing gene flow from Africa, and sloshings back and forth as traders and armies and kidnapings kept the DNA soup bubbling. She also gets enough into SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) and other detail to suggest the increasing detail that is available to genetic paleohistorian sleuths.

Other stories:

San Jose Mercury News Lisa M. Krieger does just the Science study, with nothing on the large Michigan-Cornell effort in Nature ; San Francisco Chronicle Sabin Russell gets them both in, calling the upshot the “largest and most conclusive” argument yet for a fairly recent Homo sapiens “Out of Africa” model of the origins of modern humanity – and he gives whites some solace for having a weaker collective genome than other populations. The first Europeans kept running into ice ages and those would, one surmises, force them (including The Tracker’s Irish-French ancestral forbears) into small, interbreeding clans of survivors ;HealthDay News via US News & World Report Steven Reinberg ; Washington Post David Brown has a generic but useful lede: “We’re all pretty much the same except, of course, for the little things that make us different,” Bloomberg Ryan Flinn looks only at the study in Science ; Reuters Maggie Fox acknowledges just two of the three studies in the two journals ;

Grist for the Mill:

(Nature paper) Univ. Michigan Press Release and Cornell Univ. Press Release ;

(Science paper) Stanford Sch. of Medicine Press Release ;

For years some individuals within the snorting multitudes in global warming skeptics land have hardy-har harred at the silly and probably one-world leftwing scientists fretting publicly about global warming. After all, they scoff, just a few decades ago this same scientific tribe was alarmed by impending ice ages, ergo science’s flip-flopping conclusions are more politics than logic.

The Tracker has seen several debunks of that fringe thesis over the years. Another is now out. Doyle Rice at USA Today on Thursday wrote up an analysis by a man at the National Climatic Data Center and colleagues. That concluded that while, decades ago, a few prominent US media outlets did trumpet a possible new glaciation soonish, nothing in the refereed literature suggests that many, if any, pertinent experts held to that thesis. In fact, even then, anthropogenic warming was seen in relevant analyses as more likely than cooling – natural or otherwise. Plus, even mass media of the time, despite a few exceptions, did not get on any global cooling bandwagon.

It’s interesting that John Fleck, a well-regarded science writer at the Albuquerque Journal, is cited as a a co-author of the new study. Unfortunately for Tracker readers, and perhaps good for the Journal’s bottom line if its business model is working out, the paper is among the few in the US that doesn’t offer much of its contents free on the web. So, we haven’t had much of his stuff. I salute the pub’s moxie, and regret it too.

Other stories:

Hunting About, one finds a blog, Buuuuuurrrrrning Hot, with a post that includes one of the foremost stories of the 1970s, by Peter Gwynne at Newsweek, exploring the potential for disastrous worldwide cooling. The blog also notes earlier refutations of any erstwhile global cooling consensus.

The Op-Ed Front:

Coincidentally, last Monday at the Ottawa Citizen a guest column by Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the Univ. of Victoria and a regular, prominent author if IPCC reports, described his own similar conclusions after a survey of the literature. To look at the comments, it all bounced right off the hides of deniers and scoffers of global climate disruption as something important, our fault, and not good for us.

And while we’re looking at op-ed contributions, The Arizona Republic has one from an Arizona St. University professor, Anthony Brazel, on the same topic but far muddier in perspective. Honestly, I can’t tell whether he’s worried, not worried, or what about climate change. He seems to be determined to be prudent and not alarmist. Just can’t figure it out.

Pic source ;

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On Thursday USA Today‘s Elizabeth Weise got on the front page news that Burmese Pythons, able to grow to more than 20 feet long and, at such size, to swallow sheep and alligators whole, are not only established in Florida but would be very happy across the entire US southern tier. Even California – which seems odd in this Mediterranean climate, but that’s what biologists at the US Geological Survey and US Fish and Wildlife Service think.

Wotta story. And what’re the chances, really? One can imagine giant snakes in the bayous of Louisiana and the coastal marshes in Georgia maybe, but southern Arizona? Really? Hard to imagine there are enough places for them to slink around in privacy there – management and removal would be simpler than in the Everglades. The perp in all the stories is not the snakes, but pet owners who decide they are just too much to handle, so let them go in some nearby swamp.

Weise was among the first but hardly the only reporter to wrap him or herself around the news. Most played stirred it into a stew of wonder, horror, and laughs – plus a few facts on the snakes’ natural history.

Other stories:

Speaking of laughs one cannot hardly, reliably find a better weird-news writer than Steve Rubenstein at the SF Chronicle, who calculates with his tongue in his cheek that, at full speed (20 miles per month) a Florida python could be in San Francisco in August, 2020 ; Atlanta Journal Mark Davis pays the snake respect, calling it Mr. Bivittatus (from Python molarus bivittatus) with news that the snakes could be very happy eating wild Georgia pigs and turkeys. He says however it’s likely to be decades before they reach the peach state ; Miami Herald Curtis Morgan catches up with the story today, assuring readers in a detailed account that the snake can make it in scrub deserts (and again…really? Amazing, if true). They are prolific – Everglades rangers figure they’re only capturing a small fraction of the region’s population, but it says here that they caught almost 250 of them last year ; Discovery News Larry O’Hanlon has a source noting that snakewise, this is a quantum leap for the US. The biggest natives run to nine feet at the most. People are not much at hazard, the man says, “but I’d be very concerned if I were a Key Largo woodrat” ; Oklahoman Josh Rabe gets a source to explain how such snakes, by burrowing and slowing their metabolisms, could tolerate the cold winters – like now – in states such as his ;

Grist for the Mill:

USGS Press Release ; Florida Fish and Wildlife Nonnative Species Information (did you know a 5 to 9-foot African monitor lizard is also breeding in Florida?) ;

These big snakes look like an opening. A good story would be on all the large, alien terrestrial species setting up camp in the US. Most introduced animal species one hears about are little things like mussels, or are fish and birds. How about those thousands of huge Oryx antelope, descended from a few Kalahari Desert transplants and just laughing at native predators such as mountain lions, roaming New Mexico? They could, The Tracker has heard, colonize the entire US southwest if not checked. Barbary sheep and ibexes are out there, too.

Pics:

Famous dead, exploded python in Florida, found two years ago after it ate too much alligator. Source.

Map, of current potential range, from USGS press release.

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Recent reports, noted here as they broke, brought word of two intriguing developments in optics: a coating that is far blacker than any before, and preliminary successes at “cloaking” objects with strange refractions so that electromagnetic radiation (maybe, someday, multi-spectral light) flows around them. Hence, invisibility. They are different stories but they tickle similar kinds of amazement. At the Washington Post Rick Weiss took on the difficult job of stitching them together more or less seamlessly into an exploration of optical shenanigans. The result ran yesterday. It’s a good job of dropping the second shoe. After news breaks, enterprising reporters may wait for the smoke to clear and go back in to find out more of the back story, why some people care, and where it’s going. In this case, Weiss found two second shoes and dropped them together. Kudos.

Speaking of shoes, his kicker is delicious. Several reporters covering the cloaking progress news have noted that, if one is rendered fully invisible, one is also rendered blind. If photons aren’t interacting with you, your eyeballs haven’t much to work with. So much for walking unseen into some attractive person’s shower room for a boorish thrill. So how to communicate? Well, go read the kicker.
pic source ;

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‘Haven’t gathered much archeology news lately, but two mysterious and intriguing New World discoveries, one in Peru and the other in Guatemala, are making small splashes.

At National Geographic News Kelly Hearn reports form Buenos Aires that remnants of at least ten pyramids were found near the coast of Peru. They seem to belong to an ancient culture, the Vicús, about which little is known. A nearby cemetery from the people, dated at 200 BC to around 300 AD, has been looted but the pyramid remains and their interiors should go far to yield info on them. One is left wondering what kind of shape they are in – are they fully buried, with most of their structures intact, or eroded to nubs, or what? The image that The Tracker could find indicates they are pretty lumpy now. Of course, if they were just sitting there somebody would have noticed them long before now. Archeologists are on it now, and may have answers soon enough.

Second, from Guatemala, comes word of a temple complex revealed in a heavily forested area with the help of satellite remote sensing gear. Reuters‘s Mica Rosenberg reports that an archeologist noticed that satellite images of some buildings he’d already found showed discoloration in vegetation. No dummie, he looked for more discolorations on the hunch that they might indicate where to look next. It worked. Hundreds of buildings, it says here, have been added to archeology’s ledgers on ancient Maya temple and other complexes. Rosenberg’s lede is slightly labored but worth looking at. It ambitiously recognizes an appropriate symmetry: the temples were built with alignments gained by observing UP at the sky, were lost, and now are found by observing DOWN from the sky. Such discoveries, it says here, may help understand how and whether Maya society’s building patterns contributed to their society’s eventual inability to maintain such elaborate ceremonial sites.

The image is from a brief account at the Living in Peru website, and suggests news down there has been circulating for at least a few weeks.

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A pretty good illustration of public health policy’s technical perils is unfolding with the flu season in the US. The vaccine combo promoted by the feds and by vaccine makers is highly effective against fewer than half the influenza virus strains making the rounds. Local outlets have not failed to notice the result. At the Peoria Journal Star Frank Radosevich II reports the virus (really, viruses) is “flexing its muscles and flooring its victims.” At The Olympian in Washington state, Christian Hill has the flu season “in full force” with a note soon enough that the vaccine is not working well, and at The Chattanooga Times Free Press Emily Bregal reports a Georgia family that thought they had the game beat, getting shots for their kids, when bam the kids were achy, feverish, and home from school. Dallas Morning News‘s Sherry Jacobson‘s roundup has the discouraging hed: “Flu vaccine protects against 27% of Texas cases.”

All of which is a set-up for a fine visit by AP‘s Lauran Neergaard with weary officials from CDC and other federal agencies who must now figure out how to do better next year. They are meeting to scratch their heads, run spreadsheets, crunch some numbers, and stare at chicken bones or whatever they do (The Tracker is making that all up; Neergaard is more responsible) to decide what strains will predominate next year. On the agenda, it says here, is a “complete overhaul” from this year’s formula. It seems clear, one guesses from this, that three strains that surprised the experts this year will get the kibosh from next year’s brew. This may be a little like generals who tend to plan for the last war but, really, what’re you gonna do? Neergaard usefully points out that, all in all, the CDC’s track record in the flu-guessing game is pretty good.

-CP

MIT has a press release out saluting itself for winning part of a $500,000 grant to scope out a plan by some of its astronomy and physics professors to install, on the quiet side of the moon (away from civilization’s electromagnetic cacophony), a scattering of radio receivers. It’d be LARC, for Lunar Array for Radio Cosmology. There they would pick up long wavelength emissions left over from the early universe’s dark ages. That’s the span between the fading of the big bang’s explosive glow and the appearance of starry galaxies. One might learn clues to how early mass fluctuations organized themselves on a large scale.

This would neatly fill a hole in astronomy’s instrument lineup. Not many outlets, so far, have picked it up – and there’s no big reason to give such a tentative exploration of a possible project big play. The Tracker could find but two stories, each just this side of a brief.

But those of us of suspicious mind might enjoy some deeper inspection of this plan, one of several proposals knocking about and given longterm analysis money by NASA recently. The question is whether the proposal in any way would depend on, or just benefit from, astronauts as construction workers and maybe as technician-repair crews. Which is to say, is there any way such a worthy, if costly (estimated $1 billion) project’s prospects will get tangled up in NASA’s Constellation program to get people back on the moon? It is an ambition that seems sure to get reinspection upon arrival of a new administration in less than a year. More generally, the whole, winding and roundabout way that NASA’s mega-dollar projects go from blue-sky idea to launch pad could use a little more, if only occasional, media attention.

(Full Disclosure: The Tracker got to thinking about all this after running into David Chandler during this week’s Future of Science Journalism Symposium sponsored by my employer, the Knight Fellowships at MIT. Chandler is a former Boston Globe reporter currently on staff in MIT’s news office – and author of the press release). Speaking of that symposium, a good blog on one of the closing presentations is here at Reportr.net, from Alfred Hermida of the University of British Columbia.
Stories:

Boston Herald Mike Underwood ; Wired John Borland ;

Grist for the Mill:

MIT Press Release ; NASA Press Release on full, recent round of long range study contracts ;

Pic: Lunar farside, source and hi res ;