No we don’t, it says here, but we do have an energy conversion and distribution problem. One could say much the same about food, fresh water, medications, good beer, and fishing holes too. To stop carping, Spiegel’s English language feed is carrying Jens Lubbadeh‘s acount of something called Desertec. It is a German-led project to turn desert sun into inexhaustible, clean, and affordable energy. It’s a story with the sorts of numbers that come around often, and are always intriguing but not entirely convincing. One example is that on the Middle East’s and North Africa’s deserts fall 630,000 terawatt-hours of sunshine annually. All Europe needs is to convert 4,000 of them into electricity to satisfy its current demand for current. Parabolic trough solar concentrators and collectors, it says here, are a good way to get started.

The piece may be on the beam, but it is hard to tell as it is essentially a sales job. It lets no one rain on its parade of sunny facts and other declarations.

-CP

Anybody who saw Disney’s version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea with that squid wrapping its arms around the Nautilus already knows the tentacled creatures have giant eyes. In New Zealand researchers have the specs. They thawed out a colossal squid (real name, and heftier than the giant squid) that was captured and frozen last year after a fishing crew pulled it from the Ross Sea off Antarctica.

Little time was lost before plucking its eyeballs, measuring nearly a foot across, biggest eye ever examined by science, it says here. And its lens alone, writes AP‘s Ray Lilley from Wellington, is as big as an orange. He also lets us know the animal’s Linnaean name: Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni, in case we forgot it from coverage of the capture itself. The AP double teams the story – with Emily Dugan reporting form the operating room ;
The story appears hard to resist.

Other stories:

AFP calls the eyes big as beachballs ; Telegraph (UK) Nick Squires files from Sydney – beachballs again and “most chillingly, much larger relatives lurking in the icy ocean depths”. Do squid lurk? ; BBC Richard Black including a video of the dissecting room ; The Australian reports that while this one weighs about 500 kg, full-grown it might be half again as heavy ; Reuters Alister Doyle gets right to the main message: this thing is creepy, a horror movie incarnated ;

See Also: Earlier posts on the squid’s capture, Mar 9, ’07 and Feb. 22.

-CP

A Houston Chronicle writer, Tim Fleck, got himself on NPR today as part of what it calls The Bryant Park Project. Fleck discusses his city’s nosing out Los Angeles. The trophy? It’s what the radio show’s promo calls “the crown of America’s biggest polluter.” And Houston doesn’t even have as many people. What it does have is a giant petrochemical and refining industry. The rankings are from a carbon dioxide inventory project led by a Purdue professor.

The result on NPR is a serious account of how Houston puffed its way into the lead, and the many programs underway in the city to try to clean up and to give the title to somebody else.

Grist for the Mill: Purdue University Press Release ;

-CP

ScienceNow news service has a tidy piece out by Andrea Thompson with an update on much-discussed but little-realized rewilding of the US Great Plains – in this case, prospects for restoring large free-roaming buffalo (more properly, bison) herds. While they’re well back from extinction, it says here only abut 20,000 of the half-million plains bison – of varying genetic merit – can be considered wild.

An analysis from the hardly neutral American Bison Society at the Wildlife Conservation Society says many more might one day migrate widely and wildly. Hmmm. With the price of grain shooting up one wonders whether marginal lands in the northern plains, so depopulated in recent decades, will return to ag production. That will vastly complicate such ambitious wildlife restoration plans. The story has some pickup. ScienceNow’s piece appears to be behind this one on Xinhuanet in Beijing.

Grist for the Mill: American Bison Society ;

Other Bison News: It’s merely an item but the Canadian Press, prompted by the Sierra Club Canada, provides a disturbing vignette of poaching in Alberta. The headless, skinned corpses of wood bison – cousins of the plains bison – have turned up in a provincial park in Alberta. Members of a local Cree nation found the trophy collectors’ leftovers and hope to see better protections for the animals.

Grist for the Mill: Sierra Club Canada Press Release ;

Pic source;

-CP

It appears that a media storm came and went this week over supposed word that climate skeptic, and hurricane predicter, William Gray of Colorado State University, is in trouble with his bosses. The Tracker can’t do better than the summary of this kerfuffle to be found at The Great Beyond blog, managed at Nature Magazine by Daniel Cressey. Take a look.

Pic source ;

Hey, seen that before, the Tracker thought on seeing this illus in the LA Times over a story by enviro writer Alan Zarembo. It shows enormous flapjack flippers lined up across the desert, scrubbing CO2 from the air. And flapjack flippers are also what I thought almost exactly one year ago when Moises Valasquez-Manoff wrote about them , and about the Columbia University scientist toying with the idea, in the Christian Science Monitor. Both accounts say such atmospheric vacuum cleaners are an enormously costly long shot as a solution to global warming. Both accounts say however we’re headed for desperate times. While some pandering, opportunistic politicians these days say they’ll cut the federal tax on gas so we can keep driving ourselves to another planet (anent this Tom Friedman rant in today’s NYTimes), it is suggested that a tax rise by about the same amount but worldwide might raise enough trillions of dollars to blanket Arizona with these Brobdingnagian CO2-scouring things. No doubt an image this striking has gained other media circulation, too. The herd of teeny-looking horses is a stroke of graphic arts genius at its creator, Stonehaven Productions.

Zarembo’s piece does move the ball forward a bit, and has the broader perspective on such ambitious technical fixes for a changing climate. He uses the big carbonate-making, probably nuclear-powered devices as sample of several such mega-engineering ideas circulating widely in recent years.

See also: Earlier Post Apr. 19, 2007.

-CP

Two sets of reports in the news this month – and given prominence this week by the NYTimes – underscore the striking, recent advances in mapping large patterns in human genes.

First off: Tests to reveal chemically-enhanced athletic performances include ferreting out extra testosterone with a simple urine test. If ratios of certain metabolites are way out of whack, further tests follow to be sure whether doping is the reason. Over the past few weeks a report from Sweden and at the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism has been making trouble for that tactic. A study concludes that a large percentage of East Asians in particular, and a fair share of people with other ancestries, have gene variants that let them take plenty of extra testo without spilling the evidence into their pee.

This will be an unfolding story for some time as the proctors of sports sanctioning bodies seek practical tests to keep playing fields close to level.

Second: In the last week or so, several outlets reported – off a study in Nature Medicine – that a large share of people with sub-Saharan African ancestry (as much as 40 percent of African-Americans) gets no benefit from the heart drugs known as beta blockers. Essentially, they make their own.

So here we have two medical-cultural phenomena with high profiles and big stakes in both money and health – keeping athletes clean and keeping bad hearts going – in which associated procedures are suddenly found to be significantly affected by enormous genetic variations in people. This genomics business is starting to really matter. As many have noted, attention is shifting from how much alike we and our DNA are (even counting great apes as “we” ) to the profound importance and impacts of remaining differences.

Samples of both sets of news stories:

Testosterone:

NYTimes Gina Kolata has it out on p. 1 today, quite a bit behind other outlets. She is emphatic that the evidence is strong (“..a striking demonstration of a genetic discovery..) ; ScienceNews Tina Hesman Saey had the news way back on March 26 ;  AFP had it Apr. 22 ; Toronto Star included it in a roundup April 13 ; The Economist included it way back in its April 3 issue in a story on sports doping ; In the Philippines the Baguio Sun Star‘s medical columnist Dr. Victor Dumaguing had it a few days ago ; etc. ; It seems to be getting some blowback in China. Most of the story requires one to sign up, but a hint is in the lede from the South China Morning Post by Martin Zhou and AFP ;

You be the judge. Well, better not, unless you’re trained in geomorphology and remote sensing analysis. But the image on top is from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the bottom is of an Earthly hotspring, or geothermal deposit. Researchers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center wonder if they’ve found a Martian hotspring and, therefore, an attractive target for investigation with some good astrobiology gear.

At Space.com Leonard David had it up five days ago, and the Washington Post‘s Marc Kaufman did so yesterday in a story filed from California’s Silicon Valley. The apparent “spring mounds,” one of Kaufman’s sources tells him, are as much as 80 feet high and 650 feet wide, and even greater in length. The source, who has spent plenty of time at Yellowstone’s geyster-riddled valley, says the images of the ones on Mars “just shouted water and hot spring.” But even a few NASA managers – at an agency prone to shout Eureka at every possible Mars sighting of water – cautioned against jumping to any conclusions.

The place, natch, is a candidate for visit by any future sample return mission.

Grist for the Mill: A paper by the authors of the hotprings thesis. It includes hi res versions of image above, from space.com.

-CP

The Wall Street Journal has some of the best health and big pharma writers in the business. Many of their stories revolve around FDA rules making that might send a stock’s price shooting up or down or just oscillating wildly. Its Aches and Claims column today has a piece that isn’t waiting for any outside agency’s proclamation. Writer Laura Johannes does a skillful job partly skewering – and leaving room for thinking maybe it does work – a product that is hitting the crowded US shelves of weight-loss items. This one has oat oil and palm oil combined in a way, its makers say, to smuggle the palm oil intact into the ileum. Then one feels full. Then one doesn’t eat as much. So the logic goes. Various authorities tell her such a concoction demands a great big “unproven” retort.

-CP

Nine years ago, far up in the northwest corner of British Columbia near the Yukon and Alaska borders, three hunters seeking Dall mountain sheep instead found a young man’s body emerging from a thawing glacier. He’d apparently been in the ice for several hundred years. Soon he was dubbed the BC Iceman. The body had been sheared by glacial movement but was in fairly good shape. So were tools and clothes including a gopher skin blanket and a woven hat. More formally, he’s Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi or Long Ago Person Found in the Tutchone language.

Now a reunion of sorts is being celebrated. Canadian news outlets are carrying news, from a science conference in Victoria, that his genes indicate affinity to 17 people alive today. Fifteen of the 17, it says here, are from the Wolf Clan. They are among 240 members of native Champagne and Aishihik peoples who volunteered to be tested (the community appears to be deeply interested in archeology). All live in nearby regions of northern BC, Yukon, and Alaska.

For this first burble of news reporters tended to focus, naturally, on the delight felt by some of those who are either descendents of the fellow or of some of the members of his immediate family. It seems, from some of the background gleaned this morning (see Grist) that this story deserves a much broader treatment. That is, people have been working pretty hard to put the man’s story together. It’s a saga.

Stories:

CanWest News Service (via Vancouver Sun) Judith Lavoie used as the kicker an emotional meeting in which three of the iceman’s kin thanked the hunters who found his remains. Lavoie declares the relatives to be “direct descendants” but one wonders. For one thing, Lavoie’s account says the evidence suggests a link via “matriarchal line” and that implies mitochondrial DNA which in turn hints that maybe they’d descended from one of Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi’s sisters, his mother or grandmother, etc.? Just wondering.

Globe and Mail Murray Langdon is more circumspect, calling the kinship a “direct link” which is has more wiggle room than direct descendant ;

CBC News – The Tracker found this just as closing up the post and ah HA, no byline but whoever wrote this says it was, indeed, mitochondrial DNA. The iceman’s scattered relations, it says here, now are planning to organize a proper memorial potlatch to say a goodbye to their clansman.

Grist for the Mill: No press release or other direct link to the researchers who put this all together is readily available this morning. However, the conference site, for the Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi Symposium, is here, and includes pre-published abstracts. Plus, a note on a public lecture that revealed the new DNA data. All interesting, and includes one abstract by the chief of the tribe and two co-authors, all women (it’s mitochondrial DNA, after all) heralding the gene findings.

The Tracker wasn’t expecting to read William J. Broad‘s lede piece all the way through. Oh yawn, I thought, look at all those photos that the Iranian government media freely released showing Pres. Ahmadinejad and companions touring their nation’s uranium enrichment facility. But Broad shows he still has the tech-savvy and intel mastery that first made him such a vital newsman back when the Cold War kept everybody wondering whether Star Wars (SDI) could work and what the Red-star Kremlin was up to. There is no basic science anymore in making enriched uranium. But there is fascination in this story’s insight into Iran’s (and Pakistan’s) pursuit of the precision engineering that the Manhattan Project wrought 60 years ago.

Other notable headlines:

Gina Kolata – Genes Explain Race Disparity in Response to a Heart Drug ; She asks the two right questions: how did such an enormous distinction in the pattern of sub-Saharan African response go missed so long, and what in evolution’s name explains it?

Claudia Dreifus – A Genetics Pioneer Sees a Bright Future, Cautiously ; Nice, but is there any graceful way this old gent could have been asked about the issue Gina K’s story explores? ;

Cornelia Dean – Roving Defender of Evolution, and of Room for God ; It’s about Francisco J. Ayala of UC Irvine, a fine fellow and, it appears, an effective peacemaker in the mutual harrumphing from camps of atheist-leaning Darwinists and of scripture-spouting creationists, wild-eyed all.

Henry Fountain – The Beetle Factor in a Carbon Calculus ; the greatest forest blight in North American history has cratered British Columbia’s vast lodgepole pine interior forest and is moving through Alberta. Its climate aspects have been in the press recently. Fountain summarizes the news efficiently. UPDATE: CBC‘s Quirks and Quarks with Bob McDonald Saturday had a segment on the same news.

Marlene Zuk – “Essay” A Great Pox’s Greatest Feat: Staying Alive ; That’s syphilis, and it slammed into Europe via the New World, it says here. Then it promptly changed from an uglifying skin disease into a more stealthy venereal one. Europeans wore clothes. Evolution happened.

As usual, plenty more. Whole section here.

-CP

The Dispatch’s science section this week provides a nice example of how to turn a local research lab into a general purpose vehicle for a roundup on a whole lot of science. The lab in question is the Ohio Supercomputer Center. It’s probably not much different from other such setups at large research universities and in national labs. But the Dispatch‘s Kevin Mayhood gives readers a good insight on their tax dollars at work, albeit in arcane ways and with the toilers not just from Ohio State but from several outside users of its whiz bang processors. And, he says, there are around 2,000 such users in all, with physics, chemistry, material research, molecular bioscience, and engineering disciplines the busiest.

-CP