With so much recent news of commercial companies peddling services and kits for gene profiles of almost anybody, the Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz enterprisingly enlivens the topic with a fresh angle. “…political candidates may be pressed to disclose their own DNA, like tax returns…” he surmises. In a way, of course, this year’s race and the wide discussion of Sen. Obama’s distinctive ancestry means that his genes were under scrutiny, for better or worse, already. But nobody asked for his DNA profile. Such queries from rivals or the general public could come as soon as the next presidential cycle,Hotz’s sources tell him.

One reason this might be so, not stated explicitly in the piece but illustrated there nonetheless, is the waning strength of the public’s concern for personal privacy. As it is, younger residents of the developed world are accustomed to posting almost anything about themselves on internet social networks including videos and intimate diary entries. Surveillance cameras go up with little complaint. And one of Hotz’s sources at Harvard is honcho of a Personal Genome Project aiming for public posting of 100,000 individual genomes. He has 6000 volunteers already, many of them well-known public figures.

Furthermore, it’s not so hard to filch a bit of a person’s DNA – from a half-eaten meal, hair from a comb, a sneezed kerchief, etc – and get a genetic profile with or without permission. Once done, that info could easily leak out should its origin be a celebrity. As Hotz’s column tells us, the anticipation that such genomes carry much predictive meaning is running far ahead of the science. Statistical correlations off illness with certain DNA markers are hardly predictors for specific individuals. But imagine the ruckus if a candidate was found to have a genetic predisposition, however slight, to schizophrenia, early onset Alzheimers, stroke, or other worrisome condition?  And if presidential candidates face such pressures, can similar demands on anybody seeking an important job be far behind?

Who knows. Maybe it will just make us all more tolerant of faults. We each have, it says here, a better than even chance of having at least 15 potentially harmful mutations lurking in our own private genome. Few, if any, would come out looking immaculate following such exam.

-CP

Sad times all over on Mars. NASA has robots up there, dying. To be sure, the limping, doughty two Mars rovers named Spirit and Opportunity are naturals for the anthropomorphic roles of bravely expiring pioneers. They move around on balky wheels and with instruments getting sclerotic just south of the Martian equator; they are taken as females; they have those capital-lettered names. Such heroines. But a certain pathos also arises in reports on their distant mechanical cousin, the Mars Phoenix Lander. It sits near paralyzed by stiffening cold near the north pole. While the rovers conceivably could keep going, years after they were supposed to conk out, Phoenix seems sure to expire soon. It’s just five months old, but that’s two months longer than the putative mission. Nobody expects it to revive many months from now when the Mars arctic sun resumes shining brightly on its solar panels.

The news is that Phoenix mission managers are shutting down their creation’s instruments one by one to conserve the dribble of remaining power. For a short time this week, they lost contact with it. Still to be written are summary judgments on the success of the mission. It started well but faltered a bit as time went on. The shovel and arm that scooped up the icy soil for analysis could not deliver it efficiently to the machine’s chemical analysis chambers. Post mortems will come later. For now, the story is of the mission’s end.

Stories:

Space.com Andrea Thompson ; AP ; NYTimes Kenneth Chang reports that, last weekend, the last major experiment on the sampled soil was completed, with data sent back for anaysis now underway. Temperatures are falling to minus 141 F (about -100 C) ; Bloomberg Demian McLean wrote Wednesday that the lander has sacrificed an arm – its robot arm, turned off ; Bloomberg Michael Heath, Damien McClean later reported the communication blackout and its automatic descend into a coma-like safe mode ; Arizona Republic Anne Ryman ;

*UPDATE:  LA Times John Johnson Jr. writes “the death watch is on…” ;

-CP

A long-running and mysterious malady among many species of cave-dwelling bats seems finally to be nearing explanation. The common factor, report researchers at the United States Geological Survey in Science magazine, is a cold-loving white fungus of a species new to science. For the last few years bat fanciers, including scientists, have notes that several species of bat in the US northeast were dying off, and that many of them bore white patches on and around their noses and elsewhere. The growths were suspected as fungus and now the researchers confirm it, and say it is a newly known species of a cold-tolerant genus called Geomyces.

The disease’s exact effect on the bats is not clear. It appears to rev up their metabolisms, leading them to starve to death during winters when they often stay torpid in their dens for long periods. Perhaps, one supposes, they simply get cold, but researchers are not sure. Halloween is an odd time for news that elicits sympathy for animals whose silhouettes are among traditional ways to give trick-or-treating kids the willies ;
Stories:

Los Angeles Times Thomas H. Maugh II ;  Boston Globe Beth Daly says the leading hypothesis is that bats run down their fat reserves while grooming themselves when they should be doing nothing ; Scientific American Larry Greenemeier ; Science News Susan Milius ;

Grist for the Mill: USGS Press Release ;

Antarctica’s great bulk – save its peninsula that extends beyond the polar circle toward South America – has for many years seemed to defy the warming trend seen elsewhere in the world. It thus gave example for skeptics who said if mankind’s greenhouse gases are warming the planet, then if anywhere is getting colder that’s reason for doubt (greenhouse worriers could always wave their arms and find reasons why a colder Antarctic in fact results from warming elsewhere. But that’s been a hard sell).

Most scientists are on board with anthropogenic global warming with or without Antarctica. Now a new study seems to make it a clean continental sweep that illustrates why majorities usually rule. In Nature Geosciences a team led by a prominent British researcher, Phil Jones, reports that temperature trends in the Antarctic are not only showing a recent uptick but can be explained only by the atmosphere’s changed, industrial-grade chemistry. New data from the great white continent and better integration of climate models appear to erase reasonable doubt. That last term, to The Tracker’s way of thinking, is not taken to mean that global warming is utterly proven as our fault. But it becomes unreasonable to doubt it, to assert that natural cycles are a better bet. Possible? Yes. Likely? No. A key was to factor in the cooling effect that the ozone hole has on Antarctic surface temps. The result showed that a countering warming from greenhouse forcing also is playing out there.

A good, exasperated lede is to be found in the Ottawa Citizen from its writer Tom Spears: “Done. Proven. Humans are making the Arctic and Antarctic warm up. Case closed, says an influential group of climate scientists.” He does get some quibbling in from a Canadian expert but the tenor of the piece is set right off the bat. Other stories suggest that mainstream media, for the most part, are tired of recognizing that a few holdouts deny global warming is our fault. That, their mood suggests, is so very passe … so very last-century.
Other stories:

Scientific American David Biello writes that this seems to cross off the last element of significant doubt from the IPCC’s most recent reports, last year ; Discovery News Jessica Marshall leads with “the verdict is in”  ; Independent (UK) Steve Connor runs it under the hed, “Climate change at the poles IS man-made,” a take-THAT stylistic touch ; AFP ; Scotsman Jenny Haworth ;

Grist for the Mill: One reason for the tone of media may be the hed on the University of East Anglia Press Release:  Conclusive proof that polar warming is being caused by humans ;

The Wall Street Journal‘s Health Blog  writer Jacob Goldstein surveyed things and correctly summarize today a “triple barreled shot of diabetes news” in recent days. Indeed. Newest are stats from the CDC gathered from 33 states indicating a nearly doubled US rate of type 2 diabetes. The agency blames it primarily on obesity, most pronounced in the nation’s south, with a 90 percent rise in just ten years. In places, about one third of the adult population is clinically obese. In no state is the rate under 15 percent. At the same time, a watchdog group is calling for a ban on GlaxoSmithKline’s diabetes drug Avandia for fear it brings cardiovascular and possibly liver hazards. Third, a new consensus statement from the American Diabetes Association and its European counterpart advise against using Avandia. Goldstein’s blog links to sources on all three counts – also linked below in grist. Plus, earlier in the week, a study in Archives of Internal Medicine found little evidence that costly new diabetes drugs are working particularly better than older, cheaper ones.

The rise in diabetes is so startling that it makes one wonder – are the stats really true, or might there be systematic changes in surveying, diagnosing, or other applied epidemiology behaviors that might make the numbers to go up faster than actual illness? Few accounts even address that question.

Stories:

DIABETES RATE: AP Mike Stobbe reports that the rising diabetes rate may not only be legit, but that stats could be underestimating it ; Reuters Will Dunham ; Bloomberg Tom Randall ; Florida Sun Sentinel Bob LaMendola, in a story too small for the news on his readership’s change, reports the the Sunshine State shot from among the better to among the worst states for diabetes rates, which tripled in just ten years ; Montgomery Advertiser Doug Abrams, in anothor brief and non-analytic story, says ‘bama is fourth ;

Grist for the Mill: CDC Press Release ; CDC MMWR Report ;  CDC (July) Press Release on US obesity.

AVANDIA, other pricey new drugs under assault:  AP ;US News & World Report (blog) Michelle Andrews ; Reuters Julie Steenhuysen ; HealthDay (via Wash. Post) Steven Reinberg ; WebMD Julie Edgar ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. of Chicago Medical Ctr Press Release ; Public Citizen Health-Research Group Press Release ;

-CP

With disturbing persistence in recent years reports of possible derailments of normal sex organs – especially among males – point suspicion at a family of ingredients known as phthalates and a related, specific one, Bisphenol-A, that the chemical industry uses for making several common plastics. They are potential endocrine disrupters, or estrogen mimics. The Tracker missed it earlier this week but a well-established science writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Faye Flam, had a piece that ran Monday perfectly illustrating the air of disquiet arising from to these chemicals’ ubiquity. She reported a doubling in recent decades in the rate of plastic surgery repair on boys born at local hospitals. National stats from CDC suggest it’s no anomaly. Many of the affected newborns suffered from a defect well-known to urologists. The urethra does not exit from the tip of the penis but from closer to the testes. It’s correctable but not easily. Other measures of genital development also tended outside the normal range in one, limited study. The story’s last line puts the delicate problem in plain-language perspective.

The story also sets the surgery rate evidence in explicit context with rising worries over phthalates in many common household products such as shower curtains and, in some cases, cosmetics. Flam finds no one persuasively saying the evidence is conclusive, merely highly suspicious. Industry asserts that concentrations are too low to cause demonstrable harm in people. Agitation for bans is underway, and one specific one on their use in children’s toys is soon to begin in the US.

The only direct evidence of such damage is from animal studies that may not apply to people. Frequent readers of this site will be familiar with the general arguments (put phthalates or bisphenol-A on this site’s search to find many previous posts).

If Flam’s story were the first such indirect indictment of this chemical group it would be easy to dismiss it as premature and alarmist. There are, however, so many such accounts that it seems clear that the FDA and EPA and other agencies are under the gun and have a clear choice: either really put the clamps on this stuff, or find a very strong, data-based argument why they should not do so.

Other Recent Phthalate News : Wall St. Journal (Oct 23) Nicholas Casey, Melanie Trottman on toys now in or heading for stores that will be illegal starting Feb. 10.

pic source  ;

-CP

The Hubble Space Telescope team has its machine booted back up, modems and data formatter and routers and all the rest in good fettle, and it took a dandy picture as evidence. Those things in the image, reports the NYTimes‘s Dennis Overbye, are two smoke-rings galaxies in a formation called Arp 147. Looks like there’s been a collision. Plenty of other reporters relay similar word, a welcome bit of news from the somewhat beleaguered US space agency.

That image could not be a random snapshot. One bets there were some meetings among Hubble operators and astronomers to choose something they’d shot before, is rather eye-popping, and that would make a fine opener to mark the telescope’s return to its scientific chores. They found a good one.

Other stories:

AP ; Science News Ron Cowen ;Washington Post Marc Kauffman ; Guardian (UK) ; Space.com Tariq Malik ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Hubble News Center ;

Don’t Get Your Hopes Too High Dept:

Later this afternoon, NASA is holding a teleconference to discuss the upcoming shuttle servicing mission to the telescope. You never know. New Scientist Rachel Courtland today blogs that the spare router unit, kept on the ground all these years,  for relaying data from the telescope might not be up to the job. Thus, the servicing mission may not be able to restore redundancy for this crucial task. And that, it says here, could lead NASA to reconsider the costly servicing mission. We may soon know.

*UPDATE – Servicing mission’s still on, reports AP‘s Seth Borenstein, but it won’t fly until May when a proper replacement part is ready.

-CP

  LA Times science (and mostly space science) writer John Johnson Jr. was on hand yesterday at Edwards Air Force Base to look over a full-sized engineering test model of the Oriion Crew Exploration Vehicle. That’s the passenger-carrying capsule that will get US and other astronauts back and forth from orbit a few years after the shuttle retires in two years or so (more on that below). Could go to the moon, even (with mods) to Mars some day if NASA ever gets really big money again for such a thing. Much has been made of its delays and of its general resemblance to the Apollo modules that have found their ways to the Smithsonian and other air and space museums. This is one of the longer looks at the specific vehicle that The Tracker has seen in the general press.

One thing is clearly different, he writes. It’s much bigger.

Related News: NASA revealed it is mulling ways to get the Orion into space a year or a year and a half earlier than is now on the official agenda – putting it in 2014 rather than 2015 or later.  This policy-heavy news is getting wide coverage. Its broader significance is unclear as NASA’s entire strategy for exploration vs. science missions in space is sure to be reviewed up, down, inside, outside, and sideways by the next administration. Plus, the rocket is taking some hits lately.

Stories:

Houston Chronicle Mark Carreau ; AP Marcia Dunn reviews both Orion capsule and worries over the Ares rocket family that it will ride on;

Also See:

Florida Today Todd Halvorson on a delay in the first test flight of an Ares launcher; ditto for the Huntsville Times Shelby G. Spires ;  New Scientist David Shiga focusses on a possible launch hazard with Ares ;

*UPDATE: Oct 31 The Times (UK) Jacqui Goddard reports from Miami that NASA keeps defending a rocket that “could blast off into its own tower” and if that didn’t happen might shake its astronauts to death before they reach orbit.  Goddard hasn’t anything new here, but writes it with a cheeky certainty.

DEPT OF SCOOPS THAT WE MISSED: This worry, about Ares safety and such things as liftoff drift, was broken last week by the Orlando Sentinel‘s Robert Block under a dramatic hed “Is NASA’s Ares Doomed?” which stirred a firm rejoinder from NASA ; The episode gets a review at Space.Com by Brian Berger.

-CP

This week’s Time has an anguished essay by Bryan Walsh on climate change. It’s worth reading by any journalist on the beat. The magnitude of response that seems needed to deal with a rapidly warming planet, and the general placidity of the public – even at its most informed edge – don’t seem to square, he laments. The problem, one thinks, is not necessarily in lack of effort by reporters, or lack of serious attention by general readers. More likely it’s that news of the same sort gets tiresome, and long range problems don’t register on the internal queue of urgent matters as much as do, say, keeping a job when one’s company is struggling, whether your kid is flunking English, worries of terrorists, the price of gas, who’s gonna win the game this Saturday…. etc etc. Stories on climate change thus may fit in the slot of VERY IMPORTANT, but NOT NEW. That is, this is not a matter for the public to push as much as it is for political leaders to lead. Global warming mediation should be like taxes – hardly anybody likes’em, they’re not news (or socialism), but most of us pay them because it’s the law.

-CP

It should be no surprise that the devastating tsunami that washed across much of the Bay of Bengal and other areas of the east Indian Ocean four years ago was a replay. The heavings of the ocean floor from such a big subduction fault have to have occurred before. Now we know when: about 600 years ago. Two research teams, one led by a Thai researcher with help from a US Geological Survey man who works for the USGS and the University of Washington, and the other by an Indonesian and Australian group. The news got substantial boost from press briefings in Portland, Oregon (USA), in Bangkok, and in Tsukuba, Japan.

In Seattle, the NPR-affiliated radio station KPIU and its reporter Keith Seinfeld (a former AAAS Prize winner and Knight Fellow last year at MIT), apparently had advance word on the Nature package. He has out a terrific piece today on the reports and their relevance to his own listeners. Seattle and much of the coast north and south sit on a geologic province remarkably like that under the Indian Ocean – a fact that most news outlets in the region have in recent years described vividly.

Other Pacific Northwest outlets that give the report strong coverage include Seattle Times Sandi Doughton . It is notable that the Portland Oregonian seems not to have this story even though the press conference was in town. If The Tracker is wrong about that, somebody let me know so this post may be updated.

Other stories:

AP Joseph B. Frazier‘s version ran, among many places, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and has a focus on lesson for the Pacific Northwest.  ; Reuters Tan Ee Lyn ; AAAS ScienceNOW Rachel Zelkowitz uses a feature lede, highlighting one Bangkok woman’s immediate swing into action to survey the geologic trail left by the quake and ocean upheaval ; ABC (Australia) Claudine Ryan gets a quote from an Australian with a word one doesn’t see spoken out loud too often, “whilst” ; AFP ; BBC Jason Palmer ;  Calcutta Telegraph G. S. Mudur leads on discovery of not just one, but three predecessor tsunamis of similar size ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Washington Press Release ;  USGS Press Release ;

Other Tsunami stories: Vandals and thieves at work.  In northernmost California on up into British Columbia public agencies have in recent years posted warning signs in potential tsunami inundation zones. But Humboldt County’s Eureka Reporter brings word that there are not now as many signs as there were. The county sheriff is investigating.

-CP

Planetary scientists working on NASA’s Messenger mission to Mercury appear to be goggling and boggling over the photos their spacecraft sent back after a close flyby early this month. Among news highlights are that, in earlier times, the Sun’s closest planet was far more volcanic than had been appreciated (more than our own Moon). Plus, when its mainly gray visage is run through a color-enhancing routine,  it appears covered with a lot of so far unidentified, bluish mineral.

Bolstered by a teleconference, the new face of Mercury attracted a throng of reporters. At New Scientist Rachel Courtland puts the report in proper context with the mission’s ultimate goal, writing “Researchers hope to learn more after the probe enters orbit around the Sun-baked planet.” Which means the data so far are mere appetizers for what’s to come after March 2011 when some really long, hard looks at its surface should begin. Courtland also provides detail from speculation over the kinds of minerals that might be providing the darker, blue splotches, minerals that appear to have been excavated from Mercury’s interior by impacts.

In the meantime, the series of close passages permit intimate sampling of the wisps of gas and mineral bits from the planet including vapors enriched in sodium, calcium, and now, magnesium, plus mapping of the planets magnetosphere and interaction with the solar wind. A third flyby  is to come in Sept. next year as it maneuvers for orbital insertion.

Other Stories:

AP Seth Borenstein brings up another, older mystery still begging explanation. Why are some parts of Mercury so much smoother than others?  ; Reuters Will Dunham ;  Register (UK) Lester Haines ; Wired News Loretta Hidalgo Whiteside highlights a literal highlight: two side-by-side craters of dramatically different depth and shadowed darkness, and talks with the Messenger scientist thrilled by the contrast – with an embedded YouTube video ; NPR Nell Greenfieldboyce ; Scientific American John Matson ; Voice of America Jessica Berman ; Christian Science Monitor Peter N. Spotts ; Florida Today James Dean ; AFP (via The Age, Australia) ;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA/Messenger Press Release ; NASA/Messenger Teleconference Images ;  Messenger Instrument Suite ;

-CP

Every year, it says here, commercial divers along the shore of southern Alaska scoop tens of thousands of Asian delicacies from the rocky sea floor – and most people even in Alaska don’t know what they are. Answer from the Empire‘s Kate Golden : “… a warty, sometimes spotted, reddish forearm-long fellow with meaty muscles that run down the length of its five-way radially symmetric body.” The meat, we further read, is frozen like chicken breast packets. AKA the sea cucumber, it gets feature treatment in this story that took a week for The Tracker to notice. It’s worth the wait. It even includes a recipe for echinoderm chowder.

State biologists,  we learn, are just starting to take censuses and undertake further studies that will help them devise sensible fishery management policies for the spineless crawlers. The pic above has a caption that is interesting for two unrelated but equally irrelevant reasons. One, the hands holding this specimen belong to a woman named Pickle. Two, it’s at the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute, its name a reminder of a Senator whose eponymous marks on Alaska will not fade anytime soon no matter how long or whether that ornery and in many ways admirable man winds up in the hoosegow. Speaking of Stevens and perhaps of erstwhile friends who testify against you, let’s look again at the sea cucumber. In a pinch, we learn, it self-eviscerates. Talk about spilling your guts.

-CP

p.s. – The reader’s comments at the newspaper site are, in a rarity for such things, rather friendly and useful.