Dang, good shooting. The Tracker must say that the Navy and all the engineers and contractors working for it came up with a pretty good bit of marksmanship, plunking that misbehaving reconnaissance satellite with an anti-missile missile on the first try. The satellite’s going maybe 17,000 miles per hour, the rising third stage of the Standard Missile 3 rocket (with its own motor still roaring? Dunno) was going really fast too, and bingo, perfect intersection. It’s not quite like hitting a bullet with a bullet, as the interceptor presumably has terminal steering jets or other ways to home in. But still. The US military-industrial complex does have some considerable chops.

We still don’t know where the debris went and how soon it will all reenter or where, but there’s not a whole lot more to say except: mission accomplished, technically. The logic remains a baffler. This is the underlying message in a sensible piece by Seth Borenstein for the AP, filed just a bit before this round of orbital skeet. A similar take, and a nod to suspicions of other motives than public safety, arises in Richard A. Lovett‘s piece for National Geographic News. Sooo-o-o-o many pieces of satellites have come down to earth out of control, and so far so good. Why so much fuss for a little hydrazine does seem out of whack. Hmmm.

And, Seth and Rick, like writers of many other accounts, refer to “shooting down” the satellite. I have fussed about this before (earlier post). That is plain misleading. The missile scattered a satellite that was coming down anyway, spreading the pieces (including, one supposes, a shattered and far less worrisome fuel tank). It probably delayed the entry of some. We shot it. But we can’t take much credit for the down part.

Stories:

NY Times Thom Shanker does not say shoot down, preferring the simpler verb “struck” in the lede while the hed has it striking a spy satellite falling from its orbit ; Time Magazine Jeffrey Kluger keeps the doubts stirred in his piece, writing in the second graph that the Pentagon’s and White House’s rationale still is leaking water. This is a stylish piece, referring to the target as a “clay pigeon” that “never quite got its purchase on space” ; Reuters Andrew Gray has a fine report and also notes (surprise) that a round of cheers went up in the ship’s operations center when data indicated they’d clobbered the target ; Wash. Post Marc Kaufman, Josh White also, safely, say “hit” and “destroyed” and relay without challenge a military man’s belief that the overall mass of the target had been substantially reduced. Say what? ; lots more out there too.

On the political side China, lambasted last year for shattering one of its old satellites at much higher orbital altitude last year, is accusing the US of double standards. Many accounts have this angle, which is neatly reviewed in the UK by James Randerson at The Guardian.

Grist for the Mill: DOD Press Release ; DOD Photo Gallery .

-CP

One hopes that professional adventurer Bertrand Piccard, son of the bathysphere inventor and grandson of the first stratospheric balloon skipper, gets the money to build his Solar Impulse. It is to be a delicate, enormous airplane with four electric propellers and a slew of solar cells across its slender wings that he plans to captain around the world (it is a system pioneered by the late engineer Paul MacCready, but for automated aircraft). Piccard is raising money, has gotten an endorsement from the aviation industry that wants to look as green as possible, and garnered himself some publicity with a news conference at an air show in Singapore this week.

Whether such a craft will help pave the way for profitable, passenger-carrying no-carbon-contrail-print solar airplanes is anybody’s guess. So, here’s The Tracker’s Guess: You nuts?

Nonetheless, a few outlets picked up on the news. Again, hope it happens if only for the spectacle of such a gossamer, technically sweet feat.

Stories:

AP Gillian Wong gives the news its main boost, noting that a new partner, the Int’l Air Transport Association, will be especially useful for advice on how to get air traffic control clearance ; ArabBusiness Rob Morris says, in a credulous leap, that if this one works out such aeroplanes will eventually replace Middle East carriers’ existing fleets (what his story, deeper, hints is that what could somewhat plausibly follow is airplanes with turbojet engines gulping biofuels made from plants that soaked up sunlight on the ground. So they’d be indirectly solar powered. But Solar Impulse’s success hardly seems to be a requisite step.) ;

Grist for the Mill:

Int’l Air Transp. Assoc. Press Release ; SolarImpulse.com ;

-CP

In the last few days, from the AAAS meeting in Boston, came a spate of news that warming of Antarctic bottom water may bring in hordes of hungry crabs and sharks not seen in those waters for maybe 40 million years (see Earlier Post Feb. 18). Today comes a second slug of related news, although and somewhat inexplicably few accounts note the connection.

The news: An Australian (plus French and Japanese) three-ship expedition has returned from a survey of the abyssal Antarctic life and found eye-popping species down there, some of them giants. They released a gripping video (see Grist below). Sea spiders swimming slowly but frantically, strange tulip-like tunicate things almost crystalline in their symmetry and grace, enormous worms, and more. So if the hungry new predators get in, now we know what they might eat – presuming the warmer waters don’t themselves do in some of these edge-of-frozen, polar sea-evolved species.

Stories:

Expedition members found “flabbergasting” fish, reports David Killick in Mercury, “The Voice of Tasmania,” as part of a diversity of life far beyond what they expected; The Daily Mail (UK) Richard Shears reports jellyfish “with tentacles that stretch more than half the length of a London bus” (aren’t jellies with of similar span found widely?) ; Reuters Michael Perry ; Guardian (UK) David Adam captures the strangeness of the seascape, a source describing areas literally carpeted in life, next to the barren scrapes left by the keels of icebergs. He also provides a source’s comment that rising, shell-dissolving acidity of CO2-enhanced sea water could inflict more extinction than any sharks, crabs, or warmth shall do ; AP ; Telegraph (UK) Nick Squires files from Sydney and does include mention of the week’s earlier warning that warmer water predators are inching south onto the Antarctic shelf; Voice of America Phil Mercer (from Sydney) has his whole story drenched in a theme of imminent, wide extinction for a marine biome only now come to light ;

Grist for the Mill:

Australian Antarctic Division Press Release; Video (load may be slow, worth the wait) plus hi res of images ;

For some time now outlets in the US northeast, plus wires, have been carrying bad news for bats. The largest, lethal epidemic ever seen among them, affecting several species, is leaving many bat caves – or hybernacula – awash in the odor of death. In yesterday’s Free Press Candace Page reports one state fish and wildlife biologist’s first hand look. Checking a cave where thousands of northern long-eared bats and brown bats repair during the day, he found the snowy entry littered with them, dead and dying. Inside, they were behaving oddly. Dead, they seem emaciated, as though they’d been unable to eat. Most have what has been dubbed white nose syndrome – their noses pale with fungus, their lungs congested. But its origin and exact nature are mysteries.

The story thus far is reminiscent of the early phases of the honeybee colony collapse disorder – an important social animal hit by mysterious malady, no explanation and no solution or resolution in sight.

The epidemic has been perking for awhile. Page for context reports that 11,000 bats were killed by it in and around Albany, New York last year.

Other recent reports include:

Rutland Herald Susan Smallheere has sources seriously worried of extinction or, at least, local extirpation of some varieties (via Barre Montpelier Times Argus – which seems to have some kind of automated google ad thing that, seeing “bat” as a topic, provides a Nat’l Geo video of a spider killing a bat) ; Bennington Banner John Waller reports the syndrome has hit 11 caves in New York, two in Bermont, and one in Massachusetts. And while no danger to humans is apparent, many biologists are going into the caves clad in haz-mat suits ; AP Michael Hill ; Vermont Public Radio Ross Sneyd (with audio links) ;

STYLE NOTE! : Danbury News Times Robert Miller reports zoologists are finding some caves with their bat populations down from 15,000 to 1,500 in the “gravest threat to bats they’ve ever seen.” Fewer bats will mean more bugs, he adds, but in this otherwise sturdy piece he abuses the language just a bit – misdemeanor but no felony. In New York, he writes, the rare Indiana bat “may be totally decimated.” Well, we know what he means but, to be boringly schoolmarmish, one ought note that decimation means a loss of ten percent. Colloquially it may mean nearly wiped out but taken literally, totally decimated is just plain decimated. It’s from Latin. Roman generals feared decimation. It is an unsustainable loss rate per battle (if that is happening, better hope for a short war). Tyrants might punish a restive town via decimation – randomly killing every tenth man, etc. The Tracker supposes he means totally in deep trouble and that’s true.

Grist for the Mill:

Northeastern Cave Conservancy Press Release ; Vermont Agency of Natural Resources Press Release ;

Thank you John Cox, ace backup tracker, for running the ship yesterday, while The Tracker attended a full day of the MIT Science Journalism Fellowships (descendant of the Vannevar Bush Program) 25th anniversary symposium on the future of science journalism. With apologies for those visiting the site for a taste of mass media science journalism end product, here’s are a few slices from this inside-the-madness meeting.

First off, outgoing Knight director Boyce Rensberger provided for the big crowd of chummy former fellows and other droppers by a detailed and entertaining history of science journalism in the US, taking it from its weird birth more than 100 years ago and on through various stages (cheerleader-gee whiz, watchdog age, golden age, and today’s mass media wobble while new forms proliferate). One constant: the pervading alienation of science writers in mass media newsroom culture. Incidentally, woodcarver Boyce got from the department director, at a banquet last night, a solid block of olive wood big enough to use as a wheel-stop on a pickup truck to whittle (he’s going to write that book, too….). And new director Phil Hilts charmed the crowd as he said hello and all assured him it was nothing but onward and upward. He’s in that sublime time basking in the glow of a great new job, but no work to do yet. The program certainly will go on nicely (it is endowed, after all).

But The Tracker also confirmed that as bloggers go, in the technical and speed department, I’m not only an old Bush fellow I’m strictly bush league.

Eventually, if the recordings of the conference are up to snuff, they’ll likely go on the main Knight Site. But I do have more to relay, via other blogs.

Clive Thompson, a busy freelancer from New Yorker, was on the program. He’s mainly a technology writer, and a frequent contributor to Wired. He showed what wired in public looks like. Fastest public talker most of us had ever heard and who wasn’t talking fast just for laughs – though he got many. His blog, Collision Detection, provides him story ideas, a sounding board for his own stories in development, and a catalyst for his pitches. As he spoke, he went on the interactive site Twitter – sharing it with us via video projector – to ask if anybody logged on in the randomosphere had any questions for us science writers whom he was addressing. A few minutes later some wise guy was asking if we actually make sure we understand our topics before writing or just wing it and hope for the best (Thompson asked for hands: about 196 for understand, four for wing it including me. Not sure I ever really understand anything).

Want more? The bracing thing was that another blogger, Alfred Hermida, a journalism prof at the Univ. of British Columbia, was blogging on blogger Thompson from the audience live. Hermida’s postings provide a more nourishing taste of the meeting than I can provide – all here at his Reportr.net. It includes a video he made of Clive Thompson after his talk, clear evidence Clive can likely talk circles around you. Also there are Hermida’s other selected observations on this meeting to discuss where our business has been, and is going. Multi-platform mastery.

-CP

.

A panel discussion at the AAAS meeting on climate coverage by the media drew a lot of interest in the blogosphere, most notably around the nettlesome question of nomenclature. John P. Holdren, director of the center on science and technology policy at Harvard, made a case against the continued use of “global warming” to describe the future we face. Neither global nor warming convey the idea of seriously damaging threat or the possibility of abrupt change. In his blog at DotEarth, the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, another panelist, quotes Holden as lamenting, “We’ve been almost anesthetized by the term.” Holdren voted for the phrase “global climate disruption.”

Warming, change, disruption, global—nothing captures in the popular mind the potential for danger or damage that could be on the horizon. At least, it seems so to this sub-tracker. Warming is slow and benign. Change and disruption are vague. Global is a place where nobody lives. Maybe the problem stems from the fact that climate scientists who understand the causes of change of global mean temperatures can’t put their fingers—with much detail—on just how these changes effect regional climate, where people live. Or maybe we just need the greenhouse gas equivalent of “Ozone Hole.”

Discover’s Blog and Nature had other takes on the panel. (LATE ADDITION – Of particular note is at Curtis Brainard‘s The Observatory blogsite by the Columbia Journalism Review – CP)

-JDC

The discovery of a giant fossil frog—dubbed Beelzebufo—in Madagascar proved irresistible to many outlets, especially as headline writers in the UK worked over the idea of what the critter might have had for breakfast 70 million years ago. It’s evidently the long-lost cousin of the South American horned toad, about the size of a beach ball with a pretty big appetite for insects and small vertebrates. In fact, said Professor Susan Evans at University College London, “its not impossible that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile dinosaurs.”

At the Daily Mail, it was “Frogzilla the killer: The massive toad that liked to eat dinosaurs for breakfast” and in David Derbyshire’s story, the critter “terrorised the prehistoric Earth during the dying days of the dinosaurs.” While the Telegraph called it “The Frog from Hell that Ate Baby Dinosaurs,” Roger Highfield’s treatment explored the geology of the find. Likewise, at NewScientist.com, Rowan Hooper developed the interesting geological implications of the discovery, suggesting that it had “opened a rift among researchers” over when the land link between Madagascar, South America and India was severed. The controversial new theory is that the land formed a super-continent as recently as 65 million years ago. The conventional view is that the continents split apart about 120 million years ago.

The find was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Picture: Artist’s conception from SUNY-Stonybrook

Grist for the mill: NSF press release ; University College London release

-JDC

In a picture worth a thousand words, right, a fascinating piece by Carl Zimmer shows just how the cuttlefish uses camouflage to “disappear” onto a background of pebbles of different shapes and colors. Zimmer describes the work of Roger Hanlon, a senior scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, MA, who has been looking at these cephalopods, that include squid and octopus, for some time now. The way Hanlon sees it, the seemingly endless patterns they quickly adopt can be reduced to three basic modes of camouflage: smooth, mottled and disruptive patterns such as the pebbles shown in Hanlon’s photo. Most peculiar, these critters that can adopt any hue of the rainbow, are colorblind.

Kenneth Chang describes the work of two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory who have been working on a way to remove carbon dioxide from the air and converting it back into gasoline. Chang writes, “There is, however, a major caveat that explains why no one has built a carbon dioxide-to-gasoline factory: it requires a great deal of energy.” Dang—but they’re working it.

Other Science Times headlines:

Reviewing a new book by paleontologist Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago—”Your Inner Fish”—Natalie Angier concludes that much of what we think of has exhalted human physical characteristics we owe to our finned friends.

Ken Chang takes an interesting inside look at rocket science to describe the problem NASA is facing with the design of its new booster it intends to replace the Space Shuttle.

Grist for the mill: The whole package is available here

-JDC

The Tracker was unable to get to this year’s AAAS meeting now ending in Boston, although I’m now there to join the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowships Program celebrate its 25th anniversary. (Posting may be briefer this week. And tomorrow – Tue – ace backup tracker John Cox is at the helm). AAAS is worth a longish look from this hotel room in Cambridge as a number of notable stories are emerging from its vast newsroom operation. With apologies for a tad unwieldy post, here’s a taste. (The Brit press has been there in droves, it appears. ) ;

Climate change could bring a blood bath to Antarctica’s seas. Marine scientists expect that sharks and shall-crushing crabs expelled tens of millions of years ago by frigid waters will be returning soon to feast on shrimp, ribbon worm, sea stars, molluscs, fish with built-in antifreeze, and other species now distinct to the Antarctic continental shelf. They’ll be helpless when these predators move in.

New Scientist Phil McKenna ; Independent (UK) Steve Connor ; Scotsman Ian Johnston calls the existing fauna “almost prehistoric” and that’s catchy but just, well, empty verbiage. Nearly all species are prehistoric, and no almost about it. Beyond that, the point of the news is that Antarctica’s vulnerable marine species are relatively young in evolutionary time – compared to those returning sharks and hungry crabs. Johnston has good, wider context: giant king crabs are moving poleward in the Arctic, too ; BBC Helen Briggs ; Times Mark Henderson ; Nat’l Geographic Mason Inman ; Washington Post Richard Aronson guest column (author is one of the scientists) ;
Related News : At another AAAS session,, reports the Financial Times’s Clive Cookson , came word of nine shark species facing extinction, largely to make soup. Also, Telegraph Nic Fleming ; Independent Steve Connor; several others…
Grist: Dauphin Island Sea Lab research news (scroll down) ; U. Southampton Press Release ; U. Rhode Island Press Release ;

Poverty “poisons” children’s brains.

Financial Times‘s Clive Cookson got one story pretty much all to himself. Neurologists at the meeting reviewed evidence that the high stress hormones common in impoverished families wreak permanent damage on the developing brains of small children. Notably, Cookson’s piece inspired a column today in the NYTimes by economist and reporter Paul Krugman.

Exo-Planets – Yep, there’s a lot of them out there. The Spitzer Space Telescope provided new data. U. of Arizona Astronomers at a AAAS session estimate that around 20 percent of sun-like stars have planets, some of them Earth-sized. Some, speculation is, are worlds with water, some with biology, etc.

BBC Helen Briggs ; Space.com via MSNBC Robin Lloyd ; Scientific American Steve Mirsky (podcast) ; Toronto Star Peter Calamai ; Guardian (UK) Alok Jha ; Telegraph Nic Fleming ; AFP ; Times Mark Henderson ;

Grist: U. of Arizona Press Release ; JPL/NASA Press Release ;

CLINTON v. OBAMA (by proxy) science platforms: One session featured a civil duel between representatives of the two remaining Democratic candidates (the GOP pair, McCain and Huckabee, sent nobody), discussing science policy. NYTimes‘s Claudia Dreifus moderated.

We’ll start with the Arizona Daily Wildcat Yusra Takbali, a serious report that includes a pertinent assertion: the audience was mostly science writers ; Guardian James Randerson has a blog-type account, with a killer quote up top of an insightful piece – and he suggests the packed hall was mostly scientists, not science writers ; What really happened? – read that in the skillful rundown for Congressional Quarterly by Peggy Girshman , including the remarkable generational difference in the two campaign’s agents.

*UPDATE: The Cost of Science: IslamOnline‘s editor Mohammed Yahia interviewed researchers from CERN, and American physicist and author Lawrence Krauss, on the clash between what physicists need to find out and the huge cost of the machines to do the job. It comes out a little awkward in English, but is a sturdy enough summary of the big picture in particle physics. There is not much of that, one imagines, reaching the Muslim press.

Want more? Try the blogs. AAAS meeting newsroom and related ones include:

AAAS’s own blog ; Nature Climate Feedback ; Discover Mag DiscoBlog ; NYTimes Andrew C. Revkin Dot Earth ; Nature In the Field ;

-CP

Out of money? Let’s shoot the moon! That’s a rough translation of Roger Highfield‘s rendition in the Telegraph of an ambitious Anglo-American lunar program, jointly announced Friday and hitting the news Saturday. The British National Space Centre and NASA announced a planning effort aimed at a UK-led robotic orbiter called MoonLITE (one feature would be dispatch of instrumented missiles into the lunar regolith) followed perhaps by collaborative human expeditions. The latter would mean reversal of a decision, decades ago in Britain, not to pursue its own manned space program.

Most accounts turned up in a search write up the lunar ideas. Highfield, in the piece linked above and in one a day earlier shared with Tom Chivers, mischievously, or perhaps angrily, wraps that bit of hopeful projection in a big dose of today’s reality. The UK ministers are, to read this, eviscerating all manner of research budgets in the hard sciences – pulling the plugs on telescopes, high energy physics programs, and more. He includes links to the full report and related material – including a bleak Royal Astronomical Society statement (in Grist below). The story package internally links to additional, related Guardian accounts. One notable Op-Ed by Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin (Rees) relates pure anquish. If misery loves company, US physicists and astronomers in a funk might find company reading these.

Other Brit moonshot news:

AP ; Reuters Tim Castle ; Scotsman Gerri Peev ; The cheeky wise guy prize goes to Mark Ballard at the Inquirer, who says the MoonLITE’s instrumented probes will test “mobile phone masts” on the moon.

Grist for the Mill:

US-UK Report on Lunar Cooperation ; British National Space Centre Press Release ;

Pic Note: Source is a blog that shows the orbiter mission idea has been circling for quite awhile.

-CP

For several years researchers along the US Pacific Northwest have documented a seasonal pool of low-oxygen water off the cost. It seemed to be getting larger. Dead fish and crabs washed up. In today’s PI environmental reporter Robert McClure describes new studies that suggest it’s a recent phenomenon, is getting worse, and just might herald that a switch or “tipping point” in shallow ocean waters is near. The suspicion points, to no surprise perhaps, at global warming. It’s in Science (and also was reported by an Oregon St. U. researcher at the AAAS meeting in Boston – more on AAAS in next post below).

Some recent measurements found anoxic zones that were, in fact, anoxic. As in zero dissolved oxygen, McClure writes. Scientists, he writes, say the sea nearby – and perhaps in other similar regions – appears “poised for significant reorganization.”

-CP

The usual mob of reporters, presumably, is at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, now underway this year in Boston. Some reporters are keeping their eye on it from afar, via press releases etc.

On Monday we’ll try for a further wrap-up of news. But sofar, the largest news splash seems to come via a “supermap” of the world ocean color coded to show where human activity is having the greatest impacts. It’s a multi-institution job, published in AAAS’s own Science (hence easily available to reporters not at the meeting). Eurasia’s east and west coasts are hardest hit, the polar oceans least, and in between are the overall mid-latitude open seas. Overall, 40 percent of the ocean’s aereal extent is significantly altered and only 4 percent is pristine.

Sample Stories:

Telegraph (UK) Nic Fleming ; Wash. Post Juliet Eilperin ; NPR John Nielsen ; Register (UK) Lester Haines ; Baltimore Sun Dennis O’Brien ; Scotsman Brian Ferguson with an emphasis on the sorry North Sea and calls to tighten protections ; AP Randolph E. Schmid ; Bloomberg Alex Morales ; BBC Helen Briggs ; Guardian (UK) Alok Jha ; MSNBC Alan Boyle ;

Grist for the Mill: NSF Press Release ;

pic hi res ;

Also at the meeting, AAAS President David Baltimore’s opening speech on dim prospects for an HIV vaccine received coverage.

Sample Stories:

BBC Helen Briggs ; Independent (UK) Steve Connor ; Times (UK) Mark Henderson ;

-CP