The Tracker paid little attention, other than to wonder what the doctors were thinking during the pregnancy, to news of eight infants from one mother in one day at a Kaiser facility in Southern California. Scrolling through feeds as the day wanes today, I find the Los Angeles Times‘s Shari Roan and Jeff Gottlieb got immediately on the phone to ask experts their opinion of such a pregnancy, risky to mother and to offspring,  and of how it came fully to term. One authoritative source told them, “if a medical practitioner had anything to do with it, there’s some degree of inappropriate medical therapy there.” The story is fairly long, and includes a good deal of information on the risks of such extreme, multiple births.

Related News:  CBS News has this update on the case today.

Pic source ;

-CP

This news hit two days ago – a UC Santa Cruz astronomer and colleagues have gotten the first direct data about weather changes on a planet orbiting another star – a member of a binary system 200 light years away. Naturally, one presumes that the kind of weather way out there and yet visible, even indirectly, from here has to be pretty wild. It is, and makes the cover of this week’s Nature magazine. The Tracker isn’t sure if it’s nearly that red on the actual Nature cover shown right. It looked so routine in the original that I took a lesson from NASA and enhanced the image (original here), cranking up the mid tones and contrast with Microsoft’s picture editor to make it look really really hot-poker ouchy-ouch hot. Any way one cuts it, the pic is not a true photograph but a computer-aided inference of the data’s meaning.

The infrared data from the report are from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, which was massaged to isolate the planet’s reflection and glow as it orbited the star, and as it ranged in its highly elliptical orbit while passing in front of and then behind the star as seen from here. Its path carries it from a distance farther from its star than is Venus, and then dips nearly as close as the Moon is from Earth. The temperature of its cloud tops shoot up hundreds of degrees in just a few hours. That’s  no slow-cookin’ Texas barbecue, it’s marshmallows-with-a-blowtorch.

Clever reporting prize on this goes to The Register‘s Lewis Page in the UK. His hed: Force 1800 superhurricanes snapped on far-off world. Take that, Katrina. Page got his hurricane equivalency, he says here, by drawing – all by himself with no press release to lead him by the nose – an extrapolation from the Beaufort Scale for terrestrial cyclones on out to the estimated 5 km/sec velocity of winds exploding from this planet’s substellar point at periastron (just showin’ off some jargon – from the middle of the near side at closest encounter).

Other Stories and their Stormy Headlines:

• AFP : Distant planet is an orbiting hell ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Victoria Jaggard : Eccentric Exoplanet gets hot flashes ;
• Bad Astronomy – Phil Plait : Weather sizzles on planet that kisses its star ; yes, Plait’s a blogger and a ringer (real astronomer), but he wrote a fine headline.
• BBC – Distant planet’s roasting orbit ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Exoplanet runs hot and cold in wild orbit ; He gets some great reax from another planet expert, and notes that we’re now feeling heat from a storm that burst when James Monroe was President.
• Bloomberg – Ryan Flinn: NASA Telescope Spots Weather Changes Outside This Solar System ;
• New Scientist – Jessica Griggs : Elliptical orbit gives exoplanet a regular roasting ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein : Odd planet’s extreme global warming: Highs of 2240 ; Says here’s a planet where “mild” would never enter a weather forecast.
• Space.com Jeanna Bryner : Massive planet sees extreme heat waves/Within six hours, temperatures can soar by more than 1000 degrees ; That’s more than 1000 F. More like 700 C ;
• Wired – Clara Moskowitz : Extreme Exoplanet’s Wild Ride ;
• Sky and Telescope – Kelly Beatty : HD 80606b: The Hotheaded Exoplanet ; That hed is a perfect mix, for his savvy readership, of obscure terminology with expressively plain English.
• Metro (UK) : The planet with 1,226°C Valentine’s Day heat ; That’s a timely tie for this exceedingly tiny article. The releases below do mention a Valentine’s day transit, as seen from here that day.
• San Jose Mercury News – Michael Torrice : UC Santa Cruz astronomers document distant planet’s exploding skies ; Hometown news – The Merc is the nearest big-city daily to the astronomer. Not sure the reporter (or an editor) entirely got the picture. It describes the hot news as occurring as the planet “passed by a nearby star.” That’s an odd description of a planet’s own sun. Deeper, the piece regains its bearings.
• CBC (Canada) : Scientists report dramatic heating of ‘eccentric’ planet ;
• NPR – A Distant Planet Has An Extreme Forecast ; Audio to come at 6 Eastern.

Grist for the Mill:

UCSC Press Release ;  Movie of reconstructed, thermal storms ; NASA JPL Press Release ;

-CP

 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be on the auction block and likely to fold soon, but if so it’s going out with its head held high – for one thing, it sure kicked the bejabbers out of the boy scouts, huh? That does show mettle, as it seems a sketchy ploy for rebuilding circulation.  Not that the kids are targets. It’s the adults in charge of Boy Scouts of America and who, via regional councils, manage the considerable land the organization owns for its summer camps. A PI Team led a nationwide investigation by reporters at Hearst newspapers including the San Antonio Express-News, Albany Times-Union, Houston Chronicle, and San Francisco Chronicle. The tone is set by the lead piece from the PI’s Lewis Kamb, with a hed declaring “Profit trumps preservation for Boy Scout councils nationwide.” The pic above right accompanies it, showing a timber harvest on Boy Scout land near the town of Elma, Washington, about 40 miles from the Pacific coast. The package’s theme line, below, underscores the message.

To back up some of its sources’ declarations that the Boy Scouts are guilty of hypocrisy, the long piece includes as a gotcha at its end verbiage straight from the scouting organization itself, including its explanations of Scout Law, its Outdoor Code, the qualifications for a Forestry Merit Badge, and a motto: “Leave No Trace.”

Washington, being a state with many lumbermen and other loggers, provides some pretty zesty commentary among the published readers’ reactions. Some defend the PI. Most of them say “So? They sell trees? Who cares?” etc. One snarky one asks, “the hearst papers – wonder how many acres of timber they’ve destroyed over the past 20 years.” That’s a good question, actually. Many also go off on tangents, castigating this as just one more anti-scout episode from a press that tarred the scouts in the past for excluding homosexuals from their organization, and atheists too. Both, The Tracker agrees, are good reasons to get on the scouts’ case – I’ll never forget, as a high school freshman, being invited by a friend to a big jamboree campout but warned something like, “Charlie, do not to say a word about being an atheist. We’ll both get in trouble.” It amazed me then, and now.

The reporting, from this corner, looks sound. But it reminds The Tracker of, back in the day, occasionally covering the city health department’s inspections of restaurants. They don’t say “saw a mouse” in their reports, they’d say “rodent droppings under counters” and that’s disgusting. One could find such a line attached to some of the classiest eateries in town, driving customers right back to their home stovetops. Similarly, extensive recounting from state logging inspectors’ reports of hillsides left bare, of riparian corridors silted, of dirt roads allowed to deteriorate, of drainages downstream home to threatened salmon, of old snags cut when they ought be left as habitat, of cutting right to streamsides, and so on sound and probably are often bad.

What the package lacks is context. Specifically, do the councils tend to be among the better or worse forestry managers among private land owners? If they’re well below par, then it’s a big story. Otherwise, not so much.

The piece includes an elaborate graphic, built around a Google Earth image of the US, with details on specific instances of logging on scout land, plus a Slideshow ;

Accompanying, regional sidebar stories:

• San Francisco Chronicle – Seth Rosenfeld : California scouts logged in sensitive areas; Yes, but the piece largely suggests the local councils’ follow responsible forestry, mostly.
• Albany Times-Union Nadja Drost : New York camp a virtual parking lot/ Council says diseased trees posed a danger to boys ;
• Seattle PI – Lewis Kamb : Settlement silenced critics of logging ;
• Seattle PI – Lewis Kamb : Conservationist’s gift logged for profit ;

The series continues on Monday. The package’s main site is here;

Grist for the Mill: BSA Response ;  Which the Hearst papers, properly, include linked in their package.

An editor at Fermilab’s and Stanford’s SLAC laboratory’s joint magazine, Symmetry, points out to the Tracker a piece by an intern there that I’d never have seen otherwise and that dives bravely into some rather arcane physics. Ordinarily this, in a hyper-specialty magazine, wouldn’t get a post – plenty to do just watching for stuff at the mass media. But anybody, as does writer Lauren Schenkman in this article, who comes up with such a phrase to describe a theoretical exercise as being one that “..undermines the mathematical feng-shui of the otherwise elegant Maxwell’s equations…” ? It more than merits a nod. Who’d a thunk up comparing equation-jiggering with rearranging furniture? Sure works.

The piece was inspired by an article by a Stanford physicist in this week’s Science Magazine, and slightly highlighted for reporters in the AAAS’s ScienceExpress bulletin. It got, as far as can be told, no other pickup. For that, one reason may be that ScienceExpress rendered the paper’s title wrong, saying “Including a Magnetic Monopole” rather than the correct “Inducing …”. The paper explains how in theory one ought to be able to see and measure and study a virtual magnetic monopole whether or not Dirac’s famous supposition actually exists in nature. Schenkman manages to explain how, with the help of a mirror of most unusual composition, it might occur and in plain English (but she does so at an uncompromising level of detail that would not get past the copy desk at many traditional news outlets for general readers). It’s so interesting.

Grist for the Mill: Article abstract ;

pic – magic mirror from Snow White, source ;

-CP

That sure does look like a very large hand axe – or who knows, maybe it was hafted – in the hands of a Malaysian archeologist. The date sounds sensational, and will be so for sure if verified: 1.83 million years (plus or minus half a million or so). That is as old as, or even older than, any such tool from Africa and southern Europe where such paleolithic tools are usually found.  AP‘s Julia Zappei files it from Kuala Lumpur, reporting that a team from the University of Science Malaysia found it and other stone tools in the northern Perak state. This is a story with many more shoes to drop: it has but a single source who has worked with the specific implements, no reference to its being in a journal, and no evidence it’s been through any sort of peer review (blah blah blah). But one hopes the story holds up.

The AP just put it up on the wire this morning.

Its first break appears to have been yesterday in Malaysia’s New Straits Times, by Melissa Darlyne Chow, filing from George Town not far from Perak. Her piece suggests that the archeologists threw a lot of information at her that she had little time to digest. Her resulting story has quick but not entirely explained references to Out of Africa theory, a mineral called suevite, a paleolithic culture 40,000 years ago, and a meteor crash. She refers to carbon dating using the fission track method (a description hard to decipher. Generally, as the Tracker understands, fission track dating relies on uranium decay, not C14). It implies that Out of Africa theory may need a rewrite, but not why or how. Perhaps it has something to do with hypotheses that Asia and not Africa was the radiation point for H. erectus, or perhaps at least of the hand axe (Acheulean etc) making cultures. But if the discoverers believe that Asia was the independent origin, or perhaps primeval source, of all hominins, they’ll have big arguments on their hands. These are sympathetic remarks, overall – the reporter, one must say, appears to have plunged rather bravely and earnestly into what was probably an entirely new topic for her. And the story solidly includes some other established dates for colonization of the region by early hominins – presumably Homo erectus (e.g. Java Man) although neither this nor the AP story uses species names.

-CP

Taking advantage of a natural experiment – made possible by runoff to one side of volcanic islands – in ocean iron fertilization and algal blooms as a way to sink CO2 and seal it away in the seabed, a British-led team reports in Nature today that the process is remarkably efficient at sending iron into the deep briny. However, evidence that it will stay there with sufficient reliability to blunt the greenhouse effect is not so promising. This news follows by a day the word, from the Southern Ocean, that a fully artificial experiment, by Indian and German scientists (scroll down to the post with a pic of an icebreaker, or click here), is getting underway. Bottom line seems to be: it works but, it appears, it does not work very well. As seen below, and as is common in the breaking news business, headline writers don’t seem all to be in synch with their story writers.
Stories:

• BBC News  – James Morgan: Ocean climate fix remains afloat ;
• ABC (Australia) Anna Salleh : Questions raised over ocean fertilisation ;
• Wired News – Brandon Keim : Ocean Iron Fertilization Works – Unless it Doesn’t ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor : The Big Question: Is there a technological solution to the problem of global warming? ;
• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray – Pumping iron into the ocean could help slow climate change ; That’s a misleading hed on a story that covers the bases alright.
• Times (UK) Lewis Smith : Iron-fed plankton can seal carbon for a century in ocean depths ; Another bad hed on a fair-minded yarn. A century is not enough.
• Economist (UK) : Every silver lining has a cloud – Plans to engineer the climate may be less effective than had been hoped ; Bingo.
• Scientific American – David Biello : Fertilizing oceans with iron might combat climate change ; Right, it might. And might not.

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Oceanography Centre (UK) Press Release ;

-CP

Its about time somebody reported this with a skeptical eye. A BBC account by Jason Palmer out today counters, somewhat, the multiple outbreaks of news in the last two years devoted to the intriguing idea that just maybe an ice-age comet exploded on or over Canada 13,000 years ago. Such event is posited by adherents, citing geologic evidence, as the killer of many of the giant Pleistocene animal species of N. America, including elephants, along with the Clovis culture of human hunters.

Palmer’s sources include a University of London researcher – who is publishing his paper, it says here, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science – and Columbia University’s grand old man of oceanography and of climate change things generally, Wallace A. Broecker. The new evidence, the story reports, does not by any means disprove the mammoth-smashing comet hypothesis. But it does undermine one of its planks: that massive wildfires spawned by the comet’s bursting helped to erase megafauna and to temporarily revive the waning ice age. Layers of charcoal, the new analysis says, indicate there were big fires spotted through a broad stretch of prehistory in that period, but none that suggest a continent-wide megafire. Broecker, for his part, gets in a feisty prediction: “One by one, every piece of evidence they [comet hypothesis proponents] have presented is going to fall.”

This, one suspects, will hardly put the matter to rest.

Grist for the Mill: Royal Holloway, University of London Press Release ;

pic source ;

-CP

Over at Science Magazine its longtime, ace news writer Richard A. Kerr last week had the major role in an enterprising story. Now he is wondering why a rather sensational scientific development on which he and co-author Richard Stone have pretty much a scoop has fallen flat elsewhere in the media. After reading it, one has to join his wonderment. He followed up a presentation at December’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union. It suggested that the immense earthquake last May in Sichuan Province had a human-made trigger: the new Zipingku Dam that sits almost on the epicenter.  His further evidence includes a seismology article, dug up by co-author Stone in Beijing, on that theme in a recent issue of a Chinese journal. The article does not suggest that the whole quake was powered by the strain generated by the rapidly-filled (and then partly unfilled) reservoir. Rather, that there is a plausible argument that the weight yo-yo was just enough to push the nearby, already-stressed fault into local failure. Thus, starting in Zipingku the fault unzipped on through 300 km more of its trace. So, exactly such a quake may have occurred anyway – but maybe centuries from now. This dam, by the way, was extensively featured in post-quake stories because it cracked, raising fears that it might fail.

The evidence for this anthropogenic calamity may be growing but the idea is not new. The Tracker discovered, for instance, a post last June 11 by geologist Chris Rowan, at his blog Highly Allochthonous, entertaining the same hypothesis. But this does raise an issue for journalists to ponder. Few reporters have any compunctions about jumping on news brought to them by press releases. This even though even the best and most ethically-done releases have at least some element of self-service to them. But if it’s another, presumably fully objective reporter’s work – and by and large the reporters at such trade and professional mags as Science, Nature, Chemical & Engineering News, Chronicle of Higher Education etc are real reporters – there seems to be some reluctance to follow. Kerr was the only reporter to attend the pertinent AGU session, and the paper had no press release or press conference to give it a spotlight. The thought on reading the result may be, “Oh look, Dick has a pretty good story here” but that’s it. It is easy to think, perhaps, that if another reporter has it, it’s old news?

-CP

The wonder may be that it took more than a whole week after the new administration took over for former vice president Al Gore to remind Congress that the planet is in peril and its fate, to some significant extent, is up to America. The alternative, he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on climate change yesterday, could be the end of civilization. While The Tracker has long admired his foresight on global warming as a top-drawer issue (while wondering through the 90s why he let Bill Clinton hit him with the mute button), the Nobel-winning act is a familiar one by now. So, to mix things up a bit from my usual random sortings and maintain focus, and because the rest of the world is looking at the US particularly keenly right now, and because Gore’s name provides a quick international shorthand evoking bigger issues, I’ll look first to see how Gore’s latest redux played in the media elsewhere.

Germany’s Spiegel has a knowledgeable, unsigned opinion piece (But it is initialed – bottom credit is “cgh.” That, according to a site here and forwarded by a reader, represents Charles Hawley). It uses Gore’s appearance as a key part of a summary of “a busy day for global climate.” It pegs it as marking “the first small step” away from “head-in-the-sand policies” of the last eight years. The piece chooses as its key Gore’s declaration that the EU cannot be counted on to lead the world’s turn toward muscular greenhouse policies, and that “our country (the US) is the only country in the world” up to the task.That, it says further, is not a message likely to play well as Europe debates  its role.

At The Guardian in the UK, the appearance got a double dose of coverage. A commentary by Brian Beutler id’s two co-stars of the hearing, men whose names are familiar around the world: chairman Sen. John Kerry, and Gore. He writes, “It would be difficult to ignore the symbolic significance of the event” as two would-be presidents made their pitches on both sides of the mike for a committee whose recent chairman was Joe Biden, and with Obama a recent member. Even one Republican, a fellow Tennessean, seemed somewhat deferential to Gore, it says here. Interesting here is Beutler’s mention of reasons that Gore resisted an unvarnished endorsement of major increase in nuclear power: it’s costly, has proliferation concerns, and the world’s fissile uranium supply would tighten quickly. No scaremongering about waste disposal or radiation at all – just inarguable facts. A straight news piece, filed from DC, comes from The Guardian‘s Suzanne Goldenberg, who writes Gore “reprised his role an environmental prophet.”

Other non-US media:

• AFP : Gore: US must lead world on climate ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko : Gore urges passing stimulus deal to aid climate ;
• EU Observer – Honor Mahony : Gore doubts EU leadership abilities ;
• Financial Times – Andrew Ward, Fiona Harvey : Gore adds weight to climate debate ; Despite the hearing, they report, doubts are rising that any significant climate change legislation – carbon caps, for instance – will get done this year. As reported recently in the NYTimes, and reflected in this piece, coal-state Dems are leery of regs that’ll crimp their states’ industrial bases.

US Media:

• Wash Post : Two pieces here. Columnist Dan Milbank: With Al Due Respect, We’re Doomed ; and environmental reporter Juliet Eilperin: Gore Delivers “Inconvenient Truth” Lecture to Senate Committee ;
• NYTimes – Kate Galbraith : Gore Testifies Before Senate Committee ;
• AP – Dina Cappiello: Gore: Economy should spur action on global warming ; (from an interview with Gore prior to testimony) ; and Gore urges action on economy, global warming filed after the hearing.
• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh : Gore in the Senate: A More Receptive Audience Now ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Eoin O’Carroll : Gore: Stimulas package will help curb climate change ;
• USNews & World Report – Kent Garber : Professor Gore’s Climate Change Lecture Warmly Received by Senate ; for a mag reportedly getting out of the news biz, this is a solid, smartly-written summary ;
• Voice of America – Cindy Saine : Gore Pushes Congress to Take Action on Climate Change ;
• NPR Morning Edition – Richard Harris : Gore Urges Senate to Avoid Kyoto-Type Failure ; Harris brings a knowing sense of history to the issue. He also highlights an issue passed over in much coverage: The radical water emergency in Asia likely as Himalayan ice fields disappear, changing flow patterns of vital rivers ;
• … could do more

Grist for the Mill: Senate Foreign Relations Committee “Addressing Global Climate Change: The Road to Copenhagen” (links to Gore testimony).

Related News: At the Yale Environment360 site is a screed by UK author and journalist Fred Pearce against a continued pass given nations he pegs as “climate freeloaders.” Think Israel, S. Korea, UAE, Malaysia….  It raises what could be a gnarly trigger for hot tempers at the big UN climate meeting in Copenhagen.

-CP

On Sunday the Dispatch‘s Kevin Mayhood told readers they drive past its headquarters all the time, and attend events in public meeting places that have its name on it, but few know what Battelle Memorial Institute is or does. If they’ve been reading his series from then through today, they do now.

Among science journalists, chances are one won’t find many who know what it is, either. But it manages six national labs, it says here, including Oak Ridge and the National Renewable Energy Lab. The series is largely a barrage of facts, quotes, and quick vignettes. It is tough to find a narrative arc or coherent structure in an outfit as multifaceted as Battelle, so this approach may be the only that looked feasible.  Near the top of part 1 Mayhood’s first quote is from Battelle’s CEO. He ends the segment with another. Hmm. The latter reveals that the man, in part, models his business’s ambitions after those of the high-powered, dynastic English soccer club Manchester United. That, one thinks, would have been a fine way to start it off. The package provides enormous description of Battelle, but has little examination or analysis of its business plans, its significance, or its novelty. It has, nearly as The Tracker can tell, nothing bad at all to say about the local colossus and little on anything controversial associated with it – other than to recount a long-running tussle over its tax-exempt status as a charitable organization. Surely, it has its critics, somewhere?

• Part 1:  Battelle’s world: Columbus-based research giant extends its global reach ; with sidebar, First to Know ;
• Part 2:  Building a defensive strategy ; On military and homeland security work.
• Part 3: Holy Petaflop ; about Oak Ridge and Battelle’s supercomputer prowess / An energetic push ; an encouraging look at the National Renewable Energy Lab whose management Battelle shares.
• Part 4: A healthy bottom line ; A look at medical and health research ;

Whole package home page here ;

Grist for the Mill: Battelle Memorial Institute

It seems perfectly natural to find that digging into ancient ruins, pulling out the shiny bits and handsome statuary, and selling such goodies is illegal most places. It’s called looting of national heritages. But as USA Today‘s Dan Vergano wrote yesterday, in the ocean it is called treasure hunting. There it has a certain rakish glamour, sort of a lotto for the scuba diving set. His story captures some of the conflicts and ambiguities as film makers, treasure hunters, academic scientists, and others square off over the proper way to police – and profit from – archaeological sites on the sea floor. Some treasure hunters, it says here while quoting a source with a private company, say they do follow certain ethical principles and only sell “artifacts that have many duplicates and are of very little archaeological interest.” You buy that?

The Tracker particularly chuckled at one professional shipwreck hunter who told Vergano that complaints of his trade reflect “the hubris of a small group of archaeologists who believe that anything in the popular media is beneath their standards.” Well, does this character disagree with the truth behind that? As a longtime employee of the popular media and defender of what they do, I’d say that in fact many of the standards of refereed journals – aside from a shared desire for accuracy – are in fact not only irrelevant to what we do, but often are, indeed, well over our heads and beyond our ability. For instance: footnotes. Neither time nor room for those in the popular press but vital in the academy. Ergo, beneath its standards.

-CP

A weighty series on nuclear power’s new glamour – its immense potential and the immense list of its problems, from upfront costs to fuel shortages to accidents and waste disposal – is unfolding over at the Scientific American website. Its environment and energy specialist, David Biello, has done a tremendous amount of reporting. Thus far three parts have run, with more to come. It is difficult to break new ground on the topic. But this series is heavily reported and brings an up-close intimacy to the raw information by taking readers close to the action, such as it is. For US readers, who may mistake the all-hat and no-cattle talk of a nuclear renaissance here for the whole world, its power may be its opening segment’s summary of the increasing tempo of construction in other nations too.

• Part 1: Finding Fissile Fuel ;  On the scarcity of uranium ore and rising demand ;
• Part 2: Reactivating Nuclear Reactors for the Fight Against Climate Change ; US-based, on one shortcut already employed. Old half-build plants are being completed, and new carbon copies of old ones are going up, saving time that new designs would require (including one that swaddles its core in an ice bath that engineers hate for its complexity).
• Part 3: Spent Nuclear Fuel: A Trash Heap Deadly for 250,00 Years or a Renewable Energy Source? ; Sophisticated, colorful piece that confronts a striking paradox in US spent fuel disposal strategy ;

Sci Am has the series and links to its many previous stories on line here.

-CP