It’s a holiday, with picnics and parades and a few old union leaders railing against the bosses while the bosses celebrate the fade of organized labor. Plus, The Tracker this week may have different initials. CP checks Monday evening to see if he is – or rather, I am – called to muster. BR (Boyce Rensberger) and JC (John Cox ) will be filling in if, and forever how long, this occurs.

Pic: Labor Statue , also known as Mechanics Statue, in San Francisco by Douglas Tilden. Date of Photo: 1906. It’s still in the city. Grist: Statue’s history. This pic’s original is at the Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.

-CP

The Tracker remembers somebody saying somewhere sometime – which means I have embraced it as gospel – that the trick with swatting flies is to aim just behind where they stand. They launch themselves toward their rear, word was.

Word was wrong. Several outlets carry the report from a man at Caltech who really did watch flies take off in super slo mo. He found they do something far simpler in concept but far more complex in execution than to just jump backwards. They do it fast. And, it’s still a good clue to effective fly swatsmanship. One caveat: the experiments and super video were done on fruit flies. They seem rather poky, as flies go, don’t they? Well, in his explanation, NPR‘s Joe Palca on Morning Edition has the fly scrutineer calling the maneuver “an elegant little ballet” and one hadn’t noticed fruit flies in tutus, either. At the LA Times Thomas H. Maugh II warns swatter-handlers their prey “don’t just fly away from impending doom.” In the UK – where a lot of outlets inc. the tabs swarmed to this one – The Independent‘s Steve Connor has it complete with a diagram and the hed, “Gotcha! How to swat a fly, and know that it will die”   ;

Other stories:

Scientific American Adam Hinterthuer ; Times (UK) Mark Henderson (source of pic) ; Reuters ; BBC Matt McGrath ; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield ; Metro (UK) Sophie Freeman ; Daily Star (UK) Laura Neil ; Newsweek Sharon Begley notes the scientist’s email handle is flyman (but not that, a few years ago at Cal Berkeley, he got a MacArthur grant) ;

Related Grist for the Mill: Caltech Press Release (same guy, different fly research) ; Cell Press Press Release (via EurekAlert) ;

-CP

Thank you Jim Romenesko at his site at Poynter Online for posting on this. Thus The Tracker learns that Editor & Publisher‘s Joe Strupp has a good rundown of preparations at the New Orleans Times-Picayune for its next hurricane – which is starting to look like it’s the one named Gustav swirling and glowering on the Gulf’s rim. Three years ago today Katrina pole-axed the city. Thousands of residents who had not evacuated suffered terribly – many of them unable to have escaped if they’d wanted to. The paper’s staff eventually got  Pulitzers.  But they know they weren’t exactly ready for the storm. Now, they think they are.

FYI, the newspaper’s top hurricane story today, by Jan Moller,  is that the LSU’s season opener will have an early kickoff tomorrow, the better to let fans leave the stadium in time to leave the city, too. Also, Sheila Grissett reports the Corps of Engineers’ battle plan for holding the levees should the storm hit town. This is a newspaper on high alert and pumping out the news – just put “Gustav” in its search engine and you’ll see: NOLA.com home page.

Pic: From Times-Picayune from way back in May last year. Darned hurricanes – you write a big warning story and nothing happens all year. Well, it still works.  Source ;

-CP

Brazilian anthropologists, among others, have said for quite a while that the Andes, the Yucatan, and central Mexico maybe weren’t the only Pre-Columbian centers of urban civilizations. Plenty of people lived in their rainforest, too, and not all in small hamlets. There isn’t much stone with which to build in that vast alluvium, but societies may have been pretty sophisticated. So now a University of Florida team reports in Science magazine that in the Upper Xingu region of Mato Grosso state are, as BBC put it, “a grid-like pattern of settlements connected by road networks and arranged around large central plazas.” The lead researcher says the evidence does not include fully formed cities, but does say “this is urbanism, built around towns.” The builders’ direct descendants appear still to be in the area, sort of like today’s Mayans to the north.

Well, take that Chichen Itza-Machu Picchu-Tenochtitlan partisans. From the looks of this, the Amazon had societies at least in the same league with North America’s Mississippian mound builders in the US Southeast and with the Anasazi out west. The Brazilian developers of old weren’t pikers, either. There may have been thousands of square miles of urbanized territory now concealed in forest.

Other stories:

Reuters ; AP Randolph E. Schmid sneaks up on the news with an evocative lede and a drumbeat of clues ; New Scientist Catherine Brahic, in light of today’s logging and the clearing that must have preceded the earlier settlements, calls it history repeating itself. She also provides a compelling narrative on how the moldering old walls came to the eye of modern science ; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield calls them “garden cities (that) radiated out over a diameter of 150 miles”  ; Economist writes that rainforests “are often though of as virgin habitats … pristine ecosystem.” One wonders – if a rainforest is fully in equilibrium and highly diverse, how does it matter to preservation policy that villages once were there? ; Scientific American David Biello gives the story a good, historical flavor ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Florida Press Release ;

The Telegraph‘s political editor Andrew Porter this week reported what the nation’s Business Secretary, John Hutton, has to say about the UK’s energy policy. It’s a little off-center from the theme lately in the PM’s offices that climate change is a top tier issue facing the world’s industrial nations. Even more foremost, Hutton says, is reliable energy whether it is new coal, new gas, or new nuclear. Such a position – energy security #1, climate #2 – may make realpolitik sense. But it may also make it a bit tougher on international negotiators who challenge India and China to take it easy on their rush to build new coal plants  – when their current policies are devoted, same as the Brits, to reliable, abundant energy as a first priority. The declaration was enough to inspire Reuters into picking it up.

Also notable is the minister’s declaration that the age of cheap energy is over. This contrasts with the election-fueled frenzy in the US among politicians swearing they’ll find a way to get gasoline prices back down to an SUV-friendly level. This morning in the NYTimes biz section, columnist Floyd Norris makes the point – one that no top US politician has the guts to make out loud – that stiff energy prices are essential as we transform our energy sector. (And, as Norris observes well, just ask Gerald Ford’s ghost about how well that went over when he tried it).

Pic source

-CP

Science Magazine’s medical reports seem to The Tracker to usually deal with fundamental disease processes and research carried out far from the bedside – such as lab studies employing genomes or that chart arcane metabolic pathways. But one straight from the hospital intensive care unit made it in this week. It’s a good one, too, from researchers on Alzheimer’s disease at Wash. Univ-St. Louis and the Univ. of Milan. During surgery on brain-injured patients they implanted sensors to keep track of soluble beta amyloid. They found a surprise in its varying concentration during the brains’ healing. They hope they now have clues to both the beneficial roles that the protein may have in brain tissue, and why it sometimes congeals with other proteins into the plaques that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s. The news: rather than hitting a peak shortly after injury when tissues are most stressed, it rose as they healed and as neural communication picked up. That raised a few eyebrows.

The two primary wire services and a few specialty outlets went after the story. The big dailies – not so much (ie, not at all in The Tracker’s search).

Stories:

AP Lauran Neergaard reports nicely that beyond its implications for understanding Alzheimer’s, the authors of the study may have run across a way to biochemically monitor the healing status and pace of neural reconnection in an injured brain. She throws in, sensibly, that the study yields more questions than answers ; Reuters Julie Steenhuysen has it on the wire under a hed saying this all adds to the Alzheimer’s enigma ; HealthDay News (via Wash. Post) ; Science News Tina Hesman Saey crafts a wry lede, “Amyloid-beta is a thinking brain’s protein..” and puts up high an uncluttered  reason for the research: scientists don’t know why the brain has the stuff in the first place, and a source tells her the neural fluid sampling method is “an extraordinarily powerful technique”  ;

Grist for the Mill: Wash. Univ-St. Louis Sch. of Med. Press Release ;

Pic source ;

-CP

It’s easy to like the illus that goes with a takeout in today’s San Diego Union-Tribune‘s science section by Scott LaFee. His subject is the ambitious range of ideas for removing CO2 from the air. The fanciful art is quite elegant. A blocky cyber-tree reaches to the sky. Underground are what look like disconnected roots.

The merit of the story is to catch those of us who follow such things up on the man who wanted to scrub CO2 from the air with what look like monster flapjack flippers erected across hundreds of square miles of land (see illus in earlier post, April 19,’07). Lately, LaFee reports, the Columbia U. geophysicist behind the notion is thinking of a more organic variant. Rather than the big radiator-like air scrubbers held aloft, it makes better sense to put the CO2-grabbing membranes in the equivalent of tree branches. More space efficient. But it says here no foliage would be included – artistic rendering of rhombus-shaped leaves to the contrary.

The story leaves a ton of questions unanswered. One is about the idea of, rather than just burying the captured CO2, reducing it to a flammable form and using it as liquid fuel. That conversion has to, in itself, consume a lot of energy – where does that come from? Presumably, the author of the scheme has answers (nuclear ones, one guesses).  As for the underground portion of the graphic, it represents not roots but real trees. They go with another big strategy a few climate-fixers are considering and whom LaFee interviewed. Forests absorb a lot of CO2 as they grow. Once mature the old trees die and  rot, releasing CO2 about as fast as the forest’s saplings absorb it. The way out of that is to cut the trees and bury them deep, siphoning off biomass as fast as the forest piles it up. It’s been done. The timbers of medieval buildings around the world – and of houses built today too – are sequestered forest carbon, right?

-CP

This is one scholarly stand-off that seems to have no end. Assertions by a South African researcher and several colleagues that they found bones of dwarfed people, dubbed Hobbits and proclaimed to represent a new species, are getting another put-down. This time it’s a paper in PloS One by researchers from North Carolina State, Univ. of Oregon, and Australian Nat’l University. They say the  fragmented bones, while from slender individuals, were not all that short when whole. Ergo, the specimens represent our own species and were short but not peculiarly so. Maybe five feet tall, not the 3 to 4 feet posited by the bones’ discoverers and some others who have looked at them. As for the tiny brains and primitive details asserted in first publications, the PloS paper’s authors say those are merely from one, probably developmentally disordered, specimen.

The paper is emphatic in its assertions. It hasn’t much pick up in media. Perhaps most science journalists are tired of the topic’s frequent back and forth rejoinders and rejections.

Stories:

National Geographic Brian Handwerk notes that his employer funded the research by the pro-Homo floriensis group ; says flatly the new research refutes the hobbit hypothesis ;Pacific Magazine David Miho  ;  Science News Bruce Bower ;

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. Oregon Press Release ; PloS One article  (it loaded erratically this morning. One can also chase it via the PloS ONE homepage ) ;

-CP

Scratch off another canard laid upon our distant Neandertal cousins – the one suggesting that the more gracile, and probably more talkative, Homo sapiens of a few tens of thousands of years ago outcompeted them partly on the strength of a better tool kit. Several outlets this week carried news, from a paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, that UK-led researchers ran a comparison test of the tools used by both groups. They even made copies themselves. The “flake” technology typical of H. Neandertalansis has no evident overall inferiority in performance to the “blade” tools favored by their more recently-arrived relatives.

Stories:

Newsweek‘s Sharon Begley gives it a feature flavor. She profiles the lead author, a student in a program in “experimental archaeology.” The Exeter researcher, she reports, learned to flintnap like a Neandertal to “go beyond mere observation” in his examination of the old-timers’ tools ; New Scientist Ewen Callaway ties this study in with others to declare “Neanderthal stock is on the rise” ; BBC ; Independent Steve Connor ; Guardian Lee Glendinning (plus wires) ; Wired News Brandon Keim ; Scotsman Jenny Haworth uses the tool study to reject the whole stereotype of “knuckle-dragging, dim-witted caveman,” but that’s one that’s been debunked many times before. She says “Neanderthal” should be considered a compliment ;

See Also: At the professionally-oriented Anthropology.net, the blogger complains the paper has not yet been published, declares that the “press is running wild,” and has some general, knowledgeable-appearing remarks.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. of Exeter Press Release ;

PIc, Neandertal flake and this one is for sale, source ;

A rather lovely profile of science in beautiful places ran in the Sacramento Bee the other day. It should inspire other writers, if they have willing editors and the time, to get away from the desk and into some fresh air. Tom Knudson accompanied a zoologist as he recorded the shrinking habitat, high in the Sierra Nevada Range, of the alpine chipmunk. The precise topic is the evidence that a warming climate is pushing the animals closer to the mountains’ peaks. Eventually, the scientist tells Knudson, “it’s going to get shoved off these mountains and go extinct.” The greater power of the piece may be its evocation of the rewards of life as a naturalist, and the merits of being an exceedingly careful, punctilious one. In here is a nice ode to a previous generation of wildlife biologists and their gifts to those at work today.

Included is a slideshow from the day’s trek.

-CP

What’s illicit in distance races is great in the lab. So, with many researchers in a lathered sprint to easy transformation of embryonic or other pluripotent stem cells into tissues of one’s choosing, a team of regenerative medicine researchers at Harvard’s Stem Cell Institute (led by a Howard Hughes Med. Inst. professor) took themselves a head start. They report it in Nature. They started with adult cells that had already taken most of the appropriate differentiation steps. They thus needed to worry only over the last lap or two of developmental expression that made their starter cells different from what they preferred.

The not-so-raw material was adult pancreatic exocrine cells. These are not the beta cells that make insulin. Then, in essence, they backed them down the differentiation tree a step or two and rerouted them on the path toward beta-ness. A modified retrovirus carrying three genes for transcription factors was all it took – and in living mice yet. Not that it was easy to figure out which transcription factors would do the trick. But at the AP, Malcolm Ritter says this is a lot like a scientist’s ability to become a lawyer without having to go back to kindergarten and grow up again. Maybe Harvard needs a new research outfit: The Post-Stem Cell Institute.

The NY Times‘s Nicholas Wade writes that functional barriers between adult cells are not as immutable as supposed. He  adds that the reported exercise fell short of full transformation. The semi-beta cells  did not organize themselves into islets, or clusters, as do the real things. He also reports useful context. Other groups are doing some of the same things, though not all as dramatic as this instance.

Several outlets use a researcher’s simile: extreme make-over of a cell. Several also say the cells were “transformed”. In keeping with the dramatic news that only slight modification is involved, one thinks “converted” is more apt. The abstract simplicity of the work gives it its power.

 Other Stories:

Los Angeles Times Karen Kaplan quotes the lead researcher’s hope to reprogram nerve tissue into the motor neurons lost in ALS ; Washington Post Rob Stein finds a religious man to say no moral problems to it, and another researcher to say things like this are always “easier on the blackboard” than in practice (human trials might come in five years the p.i. says) ; Reuters Maggie Fox ;  USA Today Dan Vergano‘s lede: Call it “Extreme Makeover, the Cellular Edition” ; Bloomberg Rob Waters got to do one of his medical stories that have nothing to do with stock prices ; HealthDay Amanda Gardner ; Boston Globe Carolyn Y. Johnson ; Financial Times Clive Cookson calls it a tour de force ; Telegraph (UK) Roger Highfield gets right to the point in his lede: “hope of a treatment” without insulin injections for diabetes patients. And he calls it conversion, not transformation, hurrah ; Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire ; says the “transformation” is “living alchemy.” OK, it’s just daily news writing. But such excess doesn’t leave much room for higher-amped verbiage if somebody turns, oh, a pig into a porpoise.

Grist for the Mill: HHMI Press Release ;

-CP

Sneaking this under the wire before closing for the day: a yeasty long write-up on population control, global limits, planetary sensibility, and a wry plea from some in China for carbon credits in gratitude for that nation’s singular “one child” family planning program. A Chi Tribune correspondent in London, Laurie Goering, has it. Its starting point is a British Medical Journal editorial from a month ago – and it gathers plenty of other material to flesh it out.

-CP