It’s good to see William J. Broad exercising his surpassing skill at reporting big spooky adventurous and muscular technologies developed mainly to rattle or confront America’s adversaries – but aromatic with discovery too. Bill’s easiest feasting was during the cold war. He returns to that venue today with a report on an intelligence-gathering cruise into Soviet-controlled waters – under the Arctic’s sea ice – by the ice-armored, Sturgeon-class nuclear sub Queenfish in 1970. It’s a tale with elements of heroism, and near-disaster. It’s spurred by info in a new book, some of it previously classified, and pertinent to events today. The Soviet territorial claims that the Queenfish defied, and as Broad reports, are turning into white-hot diplomatic arenas. The Arctic is clearing. Ships are sailing ever-more freely over a sea bed that could contain vast oil and mineral deposits. The Tracker isn’t sure, and Broad doesn’t bring it up, but I believe that the Navy has in recent years retired the last of its subs able to operate routinely under the frozen parts of the Arctic Ocean (and to shoulder their ways through to the surface). Those were the days.

Broad has a second, resonant piece on honors given Russian scientists for their recent expedition to the Arctic’s abyssal plain to do some biologizing (and, not incidentally,to stake Moscow’s claims to a mess of the continental shelves that extend beyond usual territorial limits). He doesn’t say whether the specific trips were what planted a titanium Russian flag at the pole (see earlier post Aug 3, 2007). One can guess yes.

Other notable headlines:

Natalie Angier – In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy ; Every section gets a crack at Governor Spitzer. Angier says, except maybe for a flatworm, H. sapiens’s wayward ways are the sexual norm on Earth. Glad she wrote it – mainly she’s such a fine writer, but also ’cause if a man had written this it’d be pegged as yet another oafish guy’s apologia for caddishness.

Claudia Dreifus – A Conversation With Dr. Terri Brentnall / One Gene Closer to Understanding Pancreatic Cancer ; very effective Q & A on the challenges, rewards of clinical medical research ;

Denise Grady – A Daring Treatment, a Little Girl’s Survival ; A delicate topic. Grady knew, while reporting, a tiny, sick girl once, thought she was dying for sure. Then finds out she wasn’t. Readers get a tender catch-up, dosed with a careful caution it’s more anecdote than science. They also get an intimate reminder what the late Dr. Judah Folkman and anti-angiogenesis were (and are) all about.

John Noble Wilford – Debate Over ‘Little People’ Intensifies After Recent Island Discovery ; This story is getting pretty well tilled but the Times’s ace paleoanthropology man knows whom to call to get the lowdown on these fossil lowbrows. The result is not only a good summary of quarrels over hobbit-like humans on Pacific islands, but a handy listing, by name, of the more prominent partisans in the fray.

Benedict Carey – Teenage Suicides Bewilder An Island, and the Experts ; Nantucket’s high school reels after student deaths, and soon enough gets a little tired of outside experts popping in to tell them how to deal with it ;

AND FINALLY, BEER:

Carol Kaesuk Yoon: For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test ; A hot paper from a Czech researcher reports that, among ornithologists anyway, a tight correlation exists between which bird experts publish the most, and those that drink more beer (it is inverse). Another good take on this news is at The Telegraph in the UK, where Roger Highfield wryly associates it with a news category: Science of the bleedin’ obvious.

As ever, lots more. Whole section here;

-CP

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 1:05 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories, Health & Medicine Stories, Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.