Most of the big hubbub over the top level appointments to the incoming administration’s science, tech, and environmental cadre has settled, but elaborations on the agenda that might follow are running with some constancy. As we’ve said before here, these will be interesting times for science policy with so many highly competent, driven, and stiff-spined techno-wizards buzzing about the West Wing and similar environs.

To start nowhere in particular, High Country News has online a Western wish list for the Obama years. A dozen prominent or outspoken thinkers and leaders receive the magazine’s queries. Out come capsule summaries of how they’d like things to change. Most tend to focus on environmental matters. It’s a good selection. One in particular might stand out for readers of this site, as it comes from well-known investigative journalist Mark Dowie.  Just scroll on down through the article and find a concise diagnosis of one explicit, systematic aspect gov’t science that has gone wrong, due to deliberate policy shift, in recent years and ought be set right.

Over at today’s NYTimes Science Times, Andrew C. Revkin and Kenneth Chang team up for a further rundown on new members of the Obama science team starting with Energy Sec’y Steve Chu. It has sidebars on the new science adviser, and on the new head of NOAA  (see bullets below). Chu wasn’t available so they focus on a remarkable initiative in cellular re-engineering for production of fuels from living things, housed in a sleek lab complex called J-bay (for Joint BioEnergy Institute) several miles from its primary parent, the Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab where Chu is now director. The Tracker happened to have been in the place a few days ago talking to its inhabitants, was stunned by it, and wondered why I hadn’t seen much written on it. Now, the NYTimes has done it. I also tried to get an interview with Chu, not even about his new job, and found that a “cone of silence” had dropped around him. It’s a small comfort knowing even NYTimesers couldn’t penetrate the Obama team’s cone. (Pic: Not Chu. That’s Maxwell Smart in there… )

Other headlines to note:

• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts :   Obama’s science appointees called a team of all-stars / Accomplished and outspoken, they’re likely to tackle climate change head-on.
• Dow Jones Newswire – Ian Talley : Obama Science Adviser Supports Long-Term Coal, Nuclear Devt ;
• NYTimes Andrew – C. Revkin, Cornelia Dean : For Science Adviser, Dogged Work Against Global Perils; Cornelia Dean – In Choice to Lead NOAA, a Wide Range of Credentials;

STYLE NOTE: The preceding two stories’ heds (and the body of Spotts’s piece) spell the job title historically right in this corner’s firm, if trivia-focussed, opinion and even though it’s “advisor” over at the website of the Office of Science & Technology Policy. The common usage was adviser, not advisor, in the early days of the job at the White House, starting with Vannevar Bush for Roosevelt, James Killian and George Kistiakowsky for Ike, etc. Mossbacks like me notice those things.

• Sci. American – Ivan Oransky : Obama names Holdren, Lubchenco, Varmus and Lander to science posts ;
• Houston Chronicle – Richard L. Burleson : Energy nominee is no fan of fossil fuel-based energy / Chu supports renewables in climate-change strategy ;
• Huffington Post – James M. Gentile: Steven Chu, Energy Chief ;
• Independent (UK) – Geoffrey Lean : Obama cranks up the green revolution / The next US president is reversing Republican policy on global warming by putting leading scientists in key posts. Geoffrey Lean reports
• …. could get many more
-CP

Two distinct but complementary stories landed in the last few days on environmental matters in Puget Sound and nearby waters off the Pacific Northwest.

• The AP’s  Phuong Le on Saturday filed a roundup of studies of the region’s orcas. Their numbers are falling, nobody is sure why. Le checks with reps and experts at more than half a dozen research institutes, government agencies, and wildlife advocacy groups to stitch this yarn together. The hook: whale poop and whale breath carry vital clues.
• Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Tom Paulson, in the meantime, provides a well-composed report on the tale told by contaminants layered into the sediments on the sound’s floor. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory say that the varying chemical composition of the muck provides a “rap sheet of toxins. ” That’s a good line. Paulson shows due diligence, with several quotes distinct from anything in the press release. So who could blame him for using that rap sheet thing, which is in the release? It’s a good coinage. Most toxic compounds, it says here, are still below levels at their worst of  a few decades ago, and some are at pre-industrial levels. But there are signs of trouble brewing too.

• Grist for the Mill: PNNL Press Release ;

Pic ; source ;

A skillfully detailed, breathlessly told, thoroughly engaging account of the race to be first with a human stem cell derived from adult tissue – but able to match the powers of those from embryos – unfolded over three days in the past week at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Writer Mark Johnson spent many months on this project. As it happens, it ran just before AAAS and Science Magazine proclaimed the reprogramming of cells to be the scientific breakthrough of the year (see additional post below, on lists of top science stories of the year). If you want to know how that all happened and at nearly book length, read Johnson’s account. The Tracker has no qualification to judge the fine-grained accuracy of it, but it’s one helluva yarn – multiple characters, vaulting ambitions, noble goals, and the gnawing certainty in the mind of top-notch scientists’ minds that rivals are at their lab benches right now, racing to get there first, so one’d better plop down too and do that next run, now.

This package is not to be missed by any reporter who has wrestled with how to corral a complex tale. Notable is how Johnson tackled multiple, simultaneous, interwoven threads. He simply busted it into distinct chunks, each introduced with a date on top of its block of text. The result bounces the reader around the world from lab to lab, from worried scientific group to worried scientific group, from advance to setback and onward, as the competitors raced along. In this case, The Tracker will forgive the use of that overused bromide, Holy Grail. Because holy Moses, holy moly, holy everything else, this sure has the texture and taste of newspapering of the finest sort. Not sure how he got the editors to sign off on such a laborious project, but that alone deserves a huzzah.

-CP

In the north corner of San Francisco Bay is an abandoned Army Air Base, once called Hamilton Field, where the US Army Corps of Engineers plans to pump bay mud, get it to the appropriate grade in relation to mean sea level, and restore a fraction of the region’s prehistorically enormous estuarine wetlands. Chronicle writer Brian Hoffman, who keeps an eye on daily fishing reports for anglers, gets his hooks deep into this one, and on page one too. A battle is underway, it turns out, over plans to accelerate the restoration by dumping the fill into a pit during into the bay’s floor as a sort of settling basin and holding station. Other are worried that straying clouds of murk will foul the fishing.

Grist for the Mill: Hamilton Wetlands Restoration Project ;

-CP

Two items here from outside the usual trapline. Both are of keen interest to those of us who hope to see robust, competent, and professionally fair, objective reporting on science and related news continue to reach the public in as many and as diverse ways as possible – and who believe that such reporting pays off in a better informed and wiser society.

• 1)  TOP SCIENCE JOURNALISM TRADE ORG’s PROTEST to CNN: Early this month CNN made public its decision to sharply cut its staffing for science and environmental news (earlier post) . The most prominent casualty was veteran broadcaster and anchor Miles O’Brien, but it was a lot more than one man out the door joining the throngs of unemployed journalists from all over, from nearly all beats. In response The World Federation of Science Journalists, Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, National Association of Science Writers, and Society of Environmental Journalists sent a joint letter of protest. The letter includes links to some other reactions, one off this site but, more important, some terrific essays and reactions from other observers of the science journalism scene. (Disclosure, I am on the board at CASW and a former NASW president – Charlie Petit).
• 2) THE PUBLIC’s ATTENTION: As it happens, the latest Washington Post/ABC poll asked about two science topics – climate change/global warming and stem cell policy – and found them each to be top concerns of all of about one percent apiece of the US public. This sounds bad, huh? But Matthew Nisbet at his Framing Science site puts the news in excellent perspective. (A look finds a lot of other stuff that you know people fret over a great deal also comes in at about one percent each, such as education and taxes. Foreign policy comes in at *, which means less than half a percent. Remember, the question is what is MOST important and we all know what’s on folks’ minds these days – which brings us back to why CNN laid off all those excellent reporters, editors, producers.

For some years now science and medical writers have been reporting dutifully that the DNA between genes, the vast stretches once called junk DNA, are not junk. In there are powerful determinants of gene expression and other essentials of cellular heredity. Chances are a sidewalk quiz for public understanding of junk DNA wouldn’t have much to report.

In the Inquirer this week Faye Flam displays nicely a time-tested way to make arcane but important science come alive. It may also be more memorable than is the standard news account. One simply embeds the science in a profile of one scientist or other person. In this case, a local researcher just won a big prize from the American Society of Human Genetics. Flam uses his life’s arc as a timeline on which to pin discoveries in genetic junk and not-junk. The protagonist scientist’s curiosity, and his gratification at getting answers, push readers into communion with ideas and concepts that seldom come up in their daily lives.

The general process is commonly displayed every October when Nobel Prizes come out. The discoveries are old and not news in themselves. But to explain why winners won reporters tend to produce engaging, swift-moving overviews of long term accumulations of discovery that, otherwise, would rarely get recapped (and, in some prize winner profile cases, are told for the first time in popular media).

-CP

Not that this news is a surprise, but when NASA scientists say it is already clear that global warming is turning up the wick on violent storms in the tropics, that’s worth listening to. Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released their report today, based on five years research data from infrared sensors on board the space agency’s Aqua spacecraft. The authors delivered the news at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. It also is in Geophysical Research Letters. The gist appears to be that, as evidence accumulates that the warmest sea surface temperatures correlate with higher-lofted clouds and more vigorous convection, it then follows that as global warming affects the oceans’ temperature baselines storminess must surely increase apace. The estimated rise in frequency of intense storms: 6 percent per decade.

Stories:

AFP ;  AP ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

Breaking in Britain is news of the impending birth of a little girl which, as an embryo, was selected specifically for implantation because its genes don’t include one variant, BRCA1,  linked to greater risk for breast cancer. This, it appears, is a first for Britain (and maybe anywhere?).

It does not appear to have been a frivolous decision. The BBC reports that the father’s family has seen three generations of women diagnosed with the disease in their twenties. It also includes some discussion of the procedure’s ethics, and of the unusual severity of the inherited risk in this one case. Of some interest is that the BBC reports that the couple does not yet know if the embryo is male or female. That leads to a question: how could that be so? Would not the team performing the genetic analysis inevitably learn the embryo’s sex? And if a boy, would it go through with the implantation if they knew it was male?

An unsigned report from the Press Association says confidently it’ll be a girl, due next week.  The latter report also carries word that such genetic screening already has been used for a few other conditions, but ones that are inevitable given faulty genes – such as those for Huntington’s disease. The Telegraph’s Kate Devlin similarly suggests no one knows the gender.

-CP

 Ever hear of the Lacey Act? Science News’s Janet Raloff has. She has a story on it online, with some interesting news The Tracker sees nowhere else. For one thing, it declares that even under the current administration some environmental protection laws are getting stiffer. In this case the ancient Lacey Act, signed into law we learn from Raloff by President McKinley more than a century ago, has been amended. The original prohibited import and other trade in certain species – originally all of them wild game and birds. Now it includes trees and other plants. Thus import of Brazil wood or Phillipine mahogany or who knows what else over-exploited tree will be included.

    Raloff thoughtfully includes a link to a detailed write-up in a pub. of something called the Int’l Network for Environmental Compliance and Enforcement. That’s where The Tracker found the plot in the illus up there.  Another odd bit that’s interesting. She also includes a link to the Lacey Act update at a Homeland Security site. And that in turn links to this full-text display of the amendment. Now, maybe this last thing is a computer printout. But it looks a lot more like a bitmap or scan of something that was typed, you know, on a typewriter clackety clack. Could that be true – somewhere in the bowels of this supposedly technological powerhouse of a nation, in a room where regs are made official, sits a steno pool with antique Royals, or maybe IBM Selectrics, typing things? Carbon paper, too? The mind reels.

-CP

It was some time around the second Earth Day back in 1971 when The Tracker, on his first newspaper job – at the Livermore Herald & News – covered a public talk before a service club, Rotary or something, in Pleasanton as I recall. The speaker was John Holdren, a magnetic-confinement fusion energy physicist at the lab. He had just turned his attention more to energy and environmental policy. This was at a time, although before the 1973 oil crisis, when energy and pollution worries were just penetrating the public’s consciousness. Holdren had thick black hair and lots of whiskers (sort of like now except for the gray). Back then in conservative Livermore his mien meant pie-eyed hippie, not just another guy, so his look stood out (although he was and is very buttoned-down). I still cringe at the lead I put on it which was (if memory serves), “Optimism came in with a bearded smile in Pleasanton last night…” yada yada energy etc. Gawd.

So. A few days ago I wondered in this site what first-rate academic would want to be White House science adviser when Pres. Obama will have Nobelist and current Lawrence Berkeley Lab director Steve Chu – UC Berkeley PhD in physics – sitting right there in his cabinet. A: John Holdren. Ever the optimist. It is a satisfyingly solid choice and he won’t be any quiet little second banana either. Holdren has been prepping for just such a job, at the nexus of science and policy, for more than 35 years. He’s now Harvard, but was at Cal from 1973 on and remains a UC professor emeritus in energy and resources. As an Old Blue, I get the inevitable alum’s pride in seeing two Cal-associated science people likely to get regular, quality time in the oval office.

Not to be overshadowed at all by those two picks is the reported decision by Obama’s team to put Oregon State University’s public-spirited marine biologist Jane Lubchenco – like Holdren, a former president of the AAAS – in the directorship of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. As with other picks in science jobs, she is a skilled and energetic participant in argument for aggressive policies to maintain Earth’s biodiversity and to somehow tamp climate change. Maybe with her in that job, ocean acidification will rise in the public’s awareness of CO2-caused global perils. Among other things that has put her in the news is her study of a dead zone, and a pool of acidified water, off Oregon’s coast.
Stories:

• Washington Post Juliet Eilperin, Joel Achenbach – who, apparently, got the scoop on the Lubchenco story among major media. The Holdren part appeared first on a AAAS news blog (next bullet). The Post story dwells a bit on the stark contrast between the science teams, and attitudes, of two administrations  ;  Achenach also has a profile of Holdren.
• AAAS Science Insider got the real scoop; One theme is that problems may arise in coordinating advice from so many bigshots with strong feelings about climate change.
• NY Times Andrew C. Revkin (on Dot Earth blog) ;
• New Scientist Ivan Semeniuk sums it up: “Barack Obama’s growing all-star science team is poised to pick up another heavy-hitter…” ;
• The Atlantic James Fallows ; He perceptively shares nagging anxiety over Holdren and Chu working out shared roles as scientist-in-chief.
• Boston Globe Carolyn Y. Johnson, Bina Venkataraman ;
• Scientific American Jordan Lite provides a taste of Holdren with a quote from a Sci. Am. piece by him – climate change is “well-beyond dangerous and is careening toward completely unmanageable” ; Hmm, picky picky Tracker says the proper verb is “careering.”
• Newsweek Sharon Begley writes of a “sigh of relief emanating from laboratories around the world..” ;
• Wired News Brandon Keim calls Holdren a policy expert, but “wonk” is in the hed ;
• Science News Janet Raloff ; Has impressive sampling of Holdren’s awards;

*UPDDATE or, On the Other Hand Dept: NYTimes John Tierney takes a decidedly skeptical view of Holdren’s merits, based in part on a famous bet, many years ago.

Somewhat related news: Still hanging fire on the science-in-Washington front is a new adminisrator at NASA – or perhaps a decision to keep Michael Griffin in the job.

• Orlando Sentinel – Mark Matthews: Gordon backs Griffin as NASA chief ; plus, a tough-on-Griffin Editorial ;
• Av. Week – John M. Doyle : Lawmaker Wants Griffin to Remain ;

About ten percent of Earth’s sedimentary rock is limestone with its carbonate minerals, it says somewhere or other. Now, an outcrop rich in carbonates has turned up on Mars. The pic shows a spectrum sample and a chunk of landscape where about 1,500 acres of carbonates are color coded as green (yellow is rich in olivine). The news is from reports in Science magazine and delivered in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union’s annual fall meeting.

So? Well, researchers  using a spectrometer aboard NASA’s marvelous, hard-working Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found it and are elated (the lead author is a grad student at Brown U. She looks elated in a pic – see release below in Grist). While traces had been spotted there before this is apparently the first big slug of the stuff seen. Again, so? Acid dissolves carbonates. The discovery means some of the water in Mars’s past, at some times and some places, was not as highly acid as implied by minerals sampled by Mars rovers and landers elsewhere. That’s good for the Mars astrobiology community’s morale – some Earth microbes can live in terribly acid places, but more benign waters make life’s evolution seem easier.

Water of any pH on Mars is not exactly news. But this wrinkle has merit and gets some media attention. Some of the daily writers within the big press corps at San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the AGU meeting got it there, others from Science magazine, press releases, teleconference, and presumably phone calls and other direct inquiries.

Stories (with indicator if datelined SF):

• Reuters – Clare Baldwin (SF): Mineral points to Martian water suitable for life ;  in her tidy and composed dispatch uses a quote, “It’s white — it’s a bulbous, crusty material.” Maybe that’s why somebody appended to the story as illus an old imagination of Mars glacial ice. Well, it is white.
• AP (probably Alicia Chang, in LA) : Mars find suggests area may have been hospitable  ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos (SF): NASA finds ‘missing’ Mars mineral   ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman (SF): Hint of Carbonates Points to Life ;
• New Scientist – Maggie McKee : Long-sought carbonate minerals found on Mars ; This is one of the longer, more complete efforts.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson : Discovery Indicates Mars Was Habitable ;
• Money Times (India) – Pallavi Kulkarni (SF) : NASA spots carbonate minerals on Mars ; This one has some chemistry in it and most of the essential points. But it  somehow misses a vital angle – the implication that acidic waters were not universal on Mars.

Grist for the Mill:

Brown University Press Release ; NASA Press Release ;

-CP

Sometimes a research result that gets scientists the most excited is not the best angle for telling a story to a public unfamiliar with the more arcane corners of a field. Take for example a report in today’s Nature. Researchers at the Max-Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn reported a fortuitous alignment of a distant galaxy and an intervening gravitational lens, one that fired a brilliant spectroscopic line for water in our direction. The only thing known able to make  H20 shine like that in the near vacuum of space is a maser. It’s the equivalent of a laser, at microwave frequency, supported by thin intragalactic gases and thought to be pumped by a galaxy’s radiation from a supermassive black hole in its center. They’ve been known since 1968 when one was spotted in Orion. (Famous line: “It must be raining in Orion!” from the grad student watching the gadgetry). So the excitement is not that there’s some water in far off galactic spaces, but that the energetics that make masers may be more common than had been supposed.

A far-off maser is a bit obscure for a headline. But farthest water ever seen? That’s a simpler place to start, and that’s what the few reporters who tackled this decided to do  (and the press release too).

Stories:

• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Astronomers Detect Water at Record Distance From Earth;
• Wired News  – Clara Moskowitz : Soggy Universe: Astronomers Fine Most Distant Water Yet ;

Grist for the Mill: Max-Planck Press Release via ScienceDaily;

Pic hi res ;