Tracking will resume Monday, Dec. 1. In the meantime, many American households tomorrow will be consuming Wild Turkey for the Thanksgiving national holiday. But most of us will likely be drinking the fine Kentucky Bourbon of that name (and which’s logo bird is standing soberly there). The Tracker intends to buy a bottle himself.

The birds in the ovens will only rarely be the lean, dark plumaged, long legged, flight worthy and quick witted “Turkey birds” that the first European explorers saw and misidentified. We’ll be eating enormous, white feathered, carefully bred, flightless, reputedly dim bulbed even by poultry standards, and hyper breasted balls of mostly white meat. Why people prefer the white is baffling but that leaves more dark for me.

A lot of outlets had the same holiday story idea: let’s write about wild turkeys! Those would be Meleagris gallopavo, with several subspecies around the nation. One suspects it happens in a few news rooms every year. The birds are probably as, or more, common in the US today as when English settlers shared a dinner with their Wampanoag benefactors at Plymouth Colony in 1621. They also support a thriving hunting industry. Many live in places to which they are not truly native. Long may they strut.
Stories:

• Columbus Dispatch – Spencer Hunt : With help, wild turkeys come back in Ohio, thrive ; In the 1980s, he reports, one could find them in just one southeastern Ohio county, and for awhile they were nowhere after being shot out early in the last century. Today: 200,000 are raucously roaming Ohio.
• AP : Breed of wild turkey growing in southern Ariz. ; A subspecies, resident largely to Mexico and the tallest wild turkeys, is doing well after earlier re-introduction efforts petered out. Nice yarn. One suspects, as it lacks byline, that this was picked up from a local news outlet, or perhaps comes largely off a press release. But a search can’t find any other source, right off. There is a hunting season but it’s hard, apparently to get a tag. There still are only a few hundred, in south Arizona.
• Minneapolis-St. Paul  Star Tribune – Mary Jane Smetanka : The new neighbors are real turkeys ; From a few birds 30 years ago, tens of thousands now in the state. desdendants of Missouri transplants. And, a source says, they are unlikely to become pests (as in, like Canada geese).
• Twin Cities Pioneer Press – Dennis Lien :  Wild turkeys return to Minnesota (with a great picture of two wild (it says wild, but Tracker’s suspicious) toms in full spread-feather splendor); Tells us that farmed turkeys in the state, a huge domestic turkey producer, still outnumber wild ones 49 million to 70,000.
• Albany Times Union – Bill Danielson : Gobbling in the wilderness ; Explains how life is, if you’re a wild turkey.
• Chicago Tribune – Lisa Anderson : A toast to Manhattan’s wild turkey ; That’s right, singular. A lone female wild turkey somehow made her way to NY City’s Battery Park. Zelda’s the name.
• Victoria Advocate (TX) Ro Wauer : The turkey is our symbol of Thanksgiving ; mostly an ode, but with a priceless quote, from a source’s book, on the difference between the domesticated and wild turkey.
• Escanaba Daily Press (Michigan) Audrey LaFave : Fowl play/Turkey population thriving in U.P. ; That’s in the Upper Peninsula, and none are native – historically, too much snow. Now there are maybe 14,000, it says here. And, it’s easier to get a hunting license to bag one for dinner. The National Wild Turkey Federation also has a local chapter, we learn: the Bays de Noc Gobblers.
• Portsmouth Herald/Ottaway Newspapers Group (N.Hampshire) Karen Dandurant : Gobble! Gobble! Turkey population thrives / State numbers skyrocketed in last 3 decades ; We learn that, for 125 years, the state had no wild turkeys. A few transplants from New York fixed that. And it says here that, aside from people, those that eat them include great horned owls, foxes, and coyotes, while raccoons and possum raid their nests for eggs.
• Winston-Salem Journal Phil Dickinson : Bird’s-Eye View: Wild turkey is a majestic, quick, clever native bird ; Maybe, we learn, no turkey was served at all during that first, now myth-shrouded Pilgrim dinner. This story is among the stronger on the bird’s natural history. The writer, it turns 0ut, is a ringer. He’s past-president of the local Audubon Society chapter.
• Longview Daily News (Washington) – Leslie Slape: Couple says wild turkeys have worn out their welcome ; Sheesh, what grumps. But it does say the flock-beset household is dealing with some awful big poops. Turkeys are no=\] at all native to Washington state, but state wildlife has introduced them.
• Penasee Globe (Mich) Charlotte Weick : Longspurs are wild about turkeys ; Mostly an appreciation, nicely done, of the local and public-spirited wild turkey club.

There is much other turkey news yesterday and today. One that stands out tells how turkeys (and other traditional Thanksgiving fare) got so different from their wild versions. It’s at Wired News, by Alexis Madrigal.

  A private underwater archeology company, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that paid for some of their work, revealed this week a fascinating discovery off the Caribbean’s Turks and Caicos Islands. The remains of the ship Trouvadore, its place in history already established but largely forgotten over the years, lie on a sandy seafloor just offshore.  It sank in 1841 after striking a reef. Most of those aboard were captive Africans bound for sale as slaves. Reading the news stories and the release, it is clear they needed a change in their luck and they got it. The British, who ran the islands, had already outlawed slavery. The result therefore stands in rather sharp contrast to those for perhaps the most famous slave ship story – that of captive Africans who rebelled on the ship Spanish slaver the Amistad at about the same time. The Amistad’s ship’s new masters took it to the United States. There, authorities clapped them in prison (eventually, they went free following a dramatic court decision).

As for the Trouvadore, as survivors straggled on shore at the Turks and Caicos the Brits arrested the crew. They didn’t quite free the 192 Africans immediately. They put them into a year’s indentured servitude, it says here, but then accepted them as free residents. Much of the island’s population today traces bloodlines to the Trouvadore’s human cargo.

That’s a fascinating archeology tale and a rare case of a slave ship tale with a more or less happy, or at least emotionally gratifying, conclusion. A few outlets picked it up.

Stories:

• AP Randolph E. Schmid reports this has gotten powerful welcome from the islands’ residents, especially those with ancestral links that go through the ship, ;
• Reuters Jane Sutton says that two glass-eyed idols were vital clues to the wreck’s location.
• Miami Herald Trenton Daniel ;

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; Slave Ship Trouvadore website ;

Science News‘s Bruce Bower this week reports that two US studies of babies found that ability to mentally rotate or recognize mirror images of geometric objects – that is, spatial sense – is on average measurably better in boys than girls even at three to five months age. That has some, if slight, pertinence to another spot of current news: Lawrence H. Summers’s position as a top back in the news as a top Barack Obama finance adviser. He, of course we all recall, barely survived blistering criticism a few years ago at Harvard for supposing out loud that maybe (also, maybe not) one reason women are not as highly represented in top science fields is innate ability. One whether these two, new studies will raise a small ruckus, too.

The two studies are in this months Psychological Science. Bower includes remarks by one researcher, not part of the two groups that published the results, saying that systematic confounders could have thrown both studies off their statistical kilters. Further, the source says that even if spatial ability does have a tendency to be higher in boys initially, that has no known connection to eventual success in geometry, geography, science, etc. Most interesting, in any case, is to learn how psychologists contrive tests of spatial ability in babies who can’t just tell you what they’re thinking. One thing is for sure – girls will tend to be able to explain such things at earlier ages than can the block-headed little boys.

-CP

The admirable Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media provides this week, for the edification of reporters and the general public – by the Toledo Blade‘s political and enviro columnist Tom Henry – a revealing article about an assignment. Despite the hard times in the business, his bosses called him in one day and asked how he’d like to go to Greenland. Out came, in October, a four part series on climate change on that big Danish-Inuit island and its ramifications for Ohio.

The series is now hidden behind a pay-to-play archive wall. The Tracker, having missed  it when it was fresh, this morning pungled up $2.95 to read the first part (and is asking if there’s a way to get the whole thing released for this site’s faithful readers to see).

*UPDATE: Whole series available here.

The first one is long, meaty, full of information on how the people of Greenland are coping with a suddenly warmer place that is even getting green, and moves along briskly. As he explains for the Yale Forum, Henry is concerned that so few members of the general public are convinced of climate change as an immediate, urgent, and gigantic problem. His angle was to get past its reality and tackle the next phase of response: adaptation to what is now inevitable. But his behind-the-scene article at the Yale Forum site is an excellent, inside-the-newsroom piece in itself.

For a taste of Henry’s usual output, here’s a recent column he wrote on the IPPC, Kiribati, the upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, and their pertinence to the Great Lakes region of the US.

-CP

Gotta go, but just learned of and read a long investigative piece in the Inquirer by Tom Avril on conflicts of interest and their intractability and ambiguities, with one prime example. Avril has apparently been dogging a Penn nutritionist for months to get to the bottom of her business dealings with industry, her career as dispenser of nutrition advice and as a best-selling author, and to find any evidence he can of clear patterns of favoritism. She, to read this, is fed up with his questions. He, to read it, is fed up with the run-around.

It’s an entertainment, for anyone who has doggedly pursued a source who is not all that cooperative. It’s serious. It’s impossible to tell, at a fast read, how it will turn out. But Avril uses it to put some detail and for-examples on the broader issues raised by efforts to enforce conflict of interest rules. This one will have repercussions, that’s sure.

PIc source ;

-CP

-CP

A loyal reader sent The Tracker a message with a link and a few words: “It’s simply amazing.” At a popular site called Politico, which is of course not about science so much, writer Erika Lovley catches us up on the hopes among such stalwarts of the right, who feel that global-warming-isn’t-true-or-it’s-good-for-us-or-both, as Sen. James Inhofe and climatologist Patrick Michaels. They are counting on the economic catastrophe to derail serious efforts to reduce CO2, etc.  On the rise, her sources tell Lovley, is a new counter-theory, global cooling. Well, by some assessments it HAS been ten years since the warmest year on record. (others say 2005 was hottest with 2007 not far behind, but never mind…). Among citations: The Farmer’s Almanac.

(Note: earlier version of this post had the hottest year dates and rankings fouled up).

*UPDATE: The Tracker hadn’t the heart to do a chapter and verse dismantlement of this article, but somebody else did: See Curtis Brainard‘s analysis or perhaps one should say smackdown at Columbia Journalism Review‘s The Observatory site.

Pic source ;

-CP

Last week, while The Tracker was looking the other way, the Union-Tribune‘s Scott LaFee took his readers on a jeep ride through a parcel called the Freeman property in the desert west of the Salton Sea. The land has been donated to the state. LaFee was with a man from the San Diego Natural History Museum whose findings may influence how it’s used: wildlife refuge, off-road gallivanting playground, etc. As his host tells the reporter, “That’s politics. This is science.” It’s a long, relaxed yarn filled with details from the field naturalist’s art: sampling, observing, testing, and recording. One gets a clear sense of the wildlife and vegetation in what one might, it says here, naively take for a barren wasteland. The Union-Trib, one must note, has let its regular, daily science writer go. Trimming costs, blah blah and more blah. But this ran in its weekly Quest science feature section. The paper, one hears, is on the market. One hopes its Quest section persists and that the paper eventually revives its regular science news beat.

-CP

Most of us have been reading of the other big shoe to drop in arguments over CO2 “fertilization” of the biosphere: Ocean acidification. This one happens whether or not the climate gets warmer. If things keep up, they evoke a depauperate ocean of jellyfish, of corals and molluscs and shelled plankton dissolving, of reefs collapsing, of fisheries becoming irreparable even if the long lines and seines and trawls all stop. On NPR‘s Morning Edition this morning Richard Harris brings in vivid detail the story of Tatoosh Island off Washington state’s rainforested Olympic Peninsula. There, says a Univ. of Chicago researcher in Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences, the mussels are declining while acid-tolerant algae are moving in. It’s an acid hot spot, he reports, nobody is quite sure why. But if it’s harbinger of a spreading, oceanic blight, noted marine biologist Jane Lubchnko tells Harris, it’s not clear what if anything can be done about it.

Other stories:

• Discovery News – Jessica Marshall: Ocean Acidity Rising at Surprising Pace ;
• Scientific American – Susannah F. Locke: Ocean turning to acid at lightning speed ;
• BBC – Julian Siddle: Marine life faces ‘acid threat ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Unexpected rise in carbon-fuelled ocean acidity threatens shellfish, say scientists ;

Related News: ABC (Australia) TheScienceShow on Nov. 15. Host Robyn Williams interviewed a New Zealand researcher about similar, fast-rising ocean acidity in local waters there.  (She’s at the U. of Otago, the same place we heard from last week and in today’s NYTimes regarding extinct penguins).

Grist for the Mill: University of Chicago Press Release ;

A big earthquake yesterday rocked a remote region deep under the Russia’s Sea of Okhotsk between eastern Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula. Presto P-wave! Earthquake sensors in Southern California and maybe a few other places saw little quakes light off in the western US. They popped up in automated US Geological Survey websites. The Associated Press sent out alerts on them. But shortly thereafter the asserted (if tentative) temblors disappeared after geologists eyeballed the data and declared them spurious. The Los Angeles Times‘s Jia-Rui Chong got a quick story on life in seismometry from the episode.  Computers, one geologist told her, get confused every once in awhile when great big quakes send powerful shudders gonging and reverberating around the whole planet.

The AP also reports the news, without embellishment. Ditto Xinhua.

Pic source ;

-CP

A nasty-looking invasive tumor that has broken out of its origin in milk ducts and is spreading – and then just goes away? Poof, you’re well? Sounds like a rare near-miracle. But such self-resolution may clear about one in five breast tumors, a US-Norwegian team reported yesterday in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The research leads many specialists to wonder whether aggressive screening and treatment protocols need adjustment.

A good number of news stories, despite the built-in readership for breast cancer news, present it in their ledes and heds almost as though a paradigm has shattered and that a new, essential fact has emerged. That might be true. But one study seems a thin reed on which to base such bold conclusion now. A pertinent question to tackle first, one might think, is whether these results offer women with a fresh diagnosis of an invasive tumor any useful information at all as to what to do about it. Mammograms disturb some women a lot as it is – maybe some of this coverage will convince a few more to skip them. That would seem a bad outcome. Plus, isn’t this sort of dilemma already seen in other cancers? – prostate comes to mind. Not that those tumor go away so often on their own, but screening may be turning up and eliciting treatment of many that would never turn out to be a problem.

Many accounts include rejoinder from the American Cancer Society, whose reps say screening remains a very good idea, as does treatment for invasive tumors.

Bloomberg‘s Michelle Fay Cortez leads with an aggressive angle – that mammograms may lead to unneeded treatments.

Canadian Press‘s Helen Branswell writes it under a disturbingly unqualified hed “Study: Harmful to treat some breast cancers.”

*AMENDMENT & CLARIFICATION (See comment below) – Ms.  Branswell’s CP story did NOT go out, we are advised, under the headline quoted immediately above. The Tracker regrets the misleading implication that the hed on the linked article (as one of the service’s clients ran it) was her or her employer’s doing. CP’s proposed and sober hed: “Study suggests some breast cancers may resolve without treatment.”

US News & World Report‘s Deborah Kotz runs it under the hed, “…Do You Still Need Mammograms” (and, just a bit into the story, answers that by saying this study doesn’t change anything about the advice to women ; USA Today‘s Liz Szabo carefully softens the news in her lede, letting readers know that the researchers “hope to begin a debate challenging the conventional wisdom…” which reads as pretty sensible from here.

Note of why to be cautious: Something of how this news might be greeted among women disposed to distrust scientific medicine, big X-ray machines, and mammograms specifically can be seen at a site called “Natural News.” There, writer Sherry Baker baldly declares that “breast cancer rates soar after mammograms.” Oh my.

The study itself seems clever enough, but surely holes in its statistical robustness can be found. It compared breast cancer rates in two very large cohorts: one that got regular checkups but no mammograms for six years (before such screening was routinely available), and another in the years immediately after and that included biennial mammograms. New York Times‘s Gina Kolata‘s piece this morning wisely leads her piece a bit circuitously, explaining that regression is already known and an existing confounder to screening issues before getting into this one. Plus, she has quite a bit on alternative explanations for the data.

Other stories:

Guardian (UK) Sarah Boseley ; Wall St Journal (health blog) Sarah Rubenstein ; WebMD Kathleen Doheny ; Reuters Michael Kahn ; Newsweek Sharon Begley ;

Grist for the Mill:

Archives of Internal Medicine abstract ; AMA/AIM Press Release (via NewsWise) ;

Pic source ;

-CP

Last Thursday several outlets ran daily news on an exotic cosmic ray report in Nature (earlier post). Today in the NYTimes’s science section Dennis Overbye advances the ball considerably, and in a fashion that will, one guesses, win no prizes. That’s no criticism at all, but a salute to him for giving readers a snapshot of unresolved ferment in astro- and particle physics. The last line kicker in his story explains that, a year from now, specialists will either not be talking about these data or they will be talking about nothing else. Prize winning stories, commonly, have some resemblance of resolution. This story is open-ended, sort of like most of science and like most of history: one damned thing after another. The initial news was that a Louisiana State University team, with cosmic data gathered from a giant balloon that circles Antarctica, found a bump in electron and maybe positron energies. The excess fits some tentative theories of dark matter annihilations in our galactic neighborhood. Overbye follows that strand into a branching web of other research in space and on Earth. The vibrations in the maze, like a distant fly or something struggling in the webbing, suggests that mighty mysteries may be close to our grasp; it’s a “concantenation of puzzling results,” he writes. If you, like The Tracker, enjoy the eerie syllables and hyphenated alliteration of Kaluza-Klein particles even if you’re unsure exactly what they might be, this multi-dimensional story is for you. It also illustrates the rewards, for reporters and readers, of sitting on breaking news for a few days of deeper, more diverse conversation.

That funny penguin illus up there goes with another story’ in the section’s The Observatory grab bag. There Henry Fountain also follows up – but in brief style – news that broke last week. This one concerns discovery in New Zealand of an extinct penguin’s fossil (earlier post). Heretofore unknown, that species’s DNA-containing remains lay in a stratum under a succession of bones of the vanished type’s local successors. Fountain had time to track down and interview the doctoral student who did the main work. It’s a short item but her comments make this a livelier tale than most of the spot news last week. Plus,  that cartoon is wonderful. The Tracker even looked up a real penguin skeleton for comparison. Neck’s a little too short but that big breast plate thing is about right.

Other notable headlines:

• Cornelia Dean: A Soldier, Taking Orders From Its Ethical Judgment Center ; (about battlefield robots and hopes, contrary to ones instinct, that they might be MORE ethical and obedient to the Geneva Convention etc. than human soldiers) ;
• Natalie Angier: In an Age of Robots, One to Clean the House? Still but a Dream ; (nice return to temporal reality after Cory Dean’s visit to future war. Some lab robots, Angier writes, are promising gardeners.  ;
• Anthony DePalma: Bald Eagles in Catskills Show Increasing Mercury ;
• Gina Kolata: New Arena for Testing of Drugs: Real World; (On followup efficacy tests on patients unscreened for confounding factors to see which treatments work given the messiness of the average patient’s chart) ;

For many years, it appears, paleontologists have scratched their heads over occasional evidence for muticelled life in sedimentary rocks so old they predate when other evidence says such advanced organisms arose. Among puzzling clues are tracks that look to have been left by worms or other creatures wriggling through the ancient seafloor’s primordial ooze. Now, University of Texas researchers say they have an explanation: it wasn’t a multi-celled crawler at all. Maybe it was a monster one-celled thing, a protist. As evidence: they’ve found just such a thing today leaving just such a trail.

The Los Angeles Times‘s Thomas H. Maugh II caught The Tracker’s eye with his write-up on this today (as listed below, others had it last week). He writes that the living protist is “a bland, grape-sized distant cousin of the amoeba” and is among the largest single-celled creatures known. The size and existence of such things is not new, but the fact it can move (very slowly) in a straight line and leave a trail is news. It’s a lively tale of what the researchers initially called “doo-doo balls” after spotting them, through the windows of a deep submersible, in the Bahamas. They thought they were, in fact, doo doo. Then, upon sampling the supposed scat they found they are alive and, judging from the grooves extending from them and across the sea floor, they move very slowly. Relatives are known, it says here. But they had not been known to move about. The researchers also learned there is another name for them: sea grapes. Here’s a science story that offers no good answer to the cynic’s “so what?!” question other than: it’s so interesting, that’s what.

Other stories:

• BBC – ‘Grape’ is key to fossil puzzle ;
• The Scientist – Bob Grant: Amoeba tracks trump trace fossils?
• Discovery News – Michael Reilly: Single cell giant up-ends early evolution ;
• New Scientist – Devin Powell :  Amoeba tracks prompt rethink over early life ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Texas-Austin Press Release ;

-CP