The Associated Press has been riding US water companies and public utilities in the last year or so for allowing measurable amounts of drugs to get into streams and lakes and, often, back into the drinking supply (earlier post). Today the AP‘s Margie Mason reports from India a region that makes US’s drug-polluted waters look like spring rain carried in by a squall fresh from the wide ocean (well, not really, but lots cleaner anyway). One authority told her that if one bathed in the waters near India’s largest concentration of pharmaceutical factories, “then you have all the antibiotics you need for treatment. If you just swallow a few gasps of water, you’re treated for everything.” That looks like hyperbole. The “gasps of water” line is a good combo. It also is difficult to imagine a brew better suited for mass provocation of bacteria to evolve resistance to these drugs. Any wildlife left in such waterways surely are suffering, the study suggests. The effluent from one factory, she reports, contains enough of just one powerful antibiotic to treat 90,000 people. It and several other drugs were found to be in the discharged blechh at the highest levels ever measured for pharmaceuticals in a waste stream.

AP is not the first news outlet on the scene. The site, at an industrial zone in the town of Patancheru, judging from hits with search engines, has been regarded by environmentalists and other activists for some time as a disaster. The pic is from a greenpeace site. Here is a story from more than three years ago in The Hindu.
It is a bit difficult to tell the exact source of the specific news but Mason apparently showed enterprise and sewed it together from medical conference presentations and, presumably, plenty of phone calls. The primary source is a researcher in Sweden, but where and in what form the findings have been published or peer reviewed is not clear.  One quote The Tracker would have elided as overkill: “The water in a river in India could be the rain coming down in your town in a few weeks.” Exactly. The water there might be just a smidgen of it here. But not the gunk left behind by the evaporation, surely.

-CP

One thing is unlikely to change much, or fast, from new studies of autism. It is the small percentage – but large in absolute number – of parents who are convinced that autism has often resulted from vaccines that include thimerosal which in turn contains a mercury compound. But yet another study concludes that its results offer no reason to suspect that they are correct. The AP‘s Carla K. Johnson reports, from Chicago, that an Italian study published in the journal Pediatrics compared the results of behavior and neural tests on more than 1,000 children vaccinated for whooping cough in the early 1990s. As it happens, two different vaccine formulations were used. They contained appreciably different levels of thimerosal. Only one case of autism was found – in the low-mercury group. Johnson reports that only two of 24 brain function tests found any difference and that those “might be attributable to chance.” Does that mean no statistically significant differences at all, to one or two sigma or standard deviations? The abstract, see grist below, suggests so. The story should briefly say, for readers with that level of curiosity, what the “might be chance” line means.

Such results, presumably, may make it harder for the vaccine and autism forces to recruit more adherents. One has to sympathize with that movement’s burdens, and admire its energy – but not its logic. One also wonders how much pickup this story will get – any news on vaccines and autism probably stirs up a small but vociferous portion of readership, triggering intensely felt reader reaction. But news editors weighing the relative values of medical stories might ask themselves: is there anything really new or surprising here?, and come up with no. As Johnson writes, this study adds to a “mountain of evidence” with the same message.

Grist for the Mill: Journal Abstract ;

-CP

.

Times change.

Earlier this week in the UK the Financial Times‘ Clive Cookson and Andrew Jack were among several in the Brit press to report on a newly approved trial there with stem cells injected into patients’ brains as a potential therapy for strokes. They pointedly wrote that the sponsoring company had failed repeatedly to get a go-ahead from the US Food and Drug Administration for trials. One doc, citing politics, said, “We felt that we could never satisfy them.” (Note, see Grist, at bottom of post, for company’s version of events) ;

Today (as also reported mid-yesterday on the wires, internet, and in this morning’s newspapers) The Financial Times‘s Andrew Jack writes again but about the other shoe dropping. It is under the hed, “US allows use of embryonic stem cells.” In this case, the phase one test is on a treatment that aims, with the help of embryonic stem cells, to help heal severely injured spinal cords. Its sponsor is the Geron biotech company of Menlo Park, CA. The treatment from the US in fact appears somewhat more dramatic than that making the news Tuesday in the UK, as the latter relies on neural – not strictly embryonic – stem cells. But the Brit test does use cells derived from aborted fetuses. No surprise it got rough sledding at the FDA.

Most coverage of the FDA’s approval of the spinal cord trials makes note that it followed exceedingly fast on the heels of a change of residents at the White House – a temporal association FDA officials say is mere coincidence. The move, Jack reports in any case, “raises the prospect of a groundbreaking approach to medical treatment that had been blocked since 2001 by George W. Bush as president.” Also, as several accounts mention, the Geron stem cells are from the few lines approved for research with federal money by the Bush administration.

Other stories:

• US News & World Report – Nancy Shute: 3 Ways That Stem Cells May Speed New Cures : A good hook – and one also notes how brisk is a hed of one-syllable words. (I tried to write that remark similarly but syllable has too many syllables).
• AP – Malcolm Ritter : US approves 1st stem cell study for spinal injury ;
• NY Times – Andrew Pollack: F.D.A. Approves a Stem Cell Trial ; And he says it’s not just first for the US, but for anywhere.
• Chicago Tribune – Bruce Japsen – FDA OKs first human trials using embryonic stem cells ;
• Reuters – Maggie Fox : US FDA allows first test of human stem cell therapy ;
• Wall St. Journal (blog) Jacob Goldstein: How the Geron Stem Cell Treatment is Supposed to Work ; Brief but welcome explainer, and esp. nice to see such in the Journal, where this is mainly a biz story about stock price movement ;
• Y, En Español! – From Argentina we get word that a former Knight fellow wrote this up, too: Clarin (Buenos Aires) -  Valeria Román : Aprueban dos ensayos con células madre en humanos ;

Grist for the Mill: Geron Corp. Press Release ;

And other reporting on the British trials:

• Bloomberg News : British firm to use aborted stem cells in stroke test ;
• Times (UK) Peter Stiff : Stem cell boost for ReNeuron ; (byline reminds me – you see the NYTimes piece today on Brit place names that sound rudely funny?) ;
• Scotsman – Lyndsay Moss : Divided views on stem-cell pioneers ; A rundown on ethical worries ;
• Scotsman – Sue Gyford : A new vision of hope for the blind ; An opinion piece contrasting the different reaction to a study on blindness using adult stem cells, and the stroke study using stem cells from fetuses.

Grist for the Mill: ReNeuron Press Release ; ReNeuron Response to Press Coverage ;

Pic source (ReNeuron)  ;

A press teleconference, at least five press releases, a big set of pictures, and publication in Science Magazine helped boost coverage of a story that’d likely be news in any case: the forests of America’s west are slowly thinning almost everywhere that scientists have looked. At least, wherever a team from the US Geological Survey, US Dept. of Agriculture, and several universities found data in “non-managed” which means wilderness forests it almost always showed a rise – on average a doubling – in the last half century in the death rate. It’s happening at low elevations and high, and among many species. Drought, heat stress, shorter rainy seasons, less snow, pests, and other factors consistent with climate warming are the suspects, it says here. In most plots “recruitment,” or in plain English appearance of new seedlings, now falls short of mortality. The basic look of the landscape is changing even where far from farms, ranchland, and cities. This, one thinks, is how the Anthropocene, the (unofficial – for now) epoch of human-caused geological change, takes over from the post-glacial Holocene.

This is a good chance, one further thinks, for reporters to ask in follow ups what’s next, what new species might come in, what are some plausible new quasi-equilibria for landcover? How will wildlife react? One hears, for instance, that the classic sage brush landscape of the Great Basin might shrink radically, that junipers in many places are spreading, etc. What’s that about.? How about saguaro? So many angles to pursue.

Stories:

• Arizona Republic – Shaun McKinnon:  Old trees die too fast in hot West / Study warns of ecosystem devastation  ; The link actually goes to the Detroit Free Press which picked it up. It gave it that terrific hed but trimmed and rewrote the piece a bit (or used an early verson) ; here’s the home paper’s full story.
• Los Angeles Times – Bettina Boxall : West’s trees dying faster as temperatures rise ;
• NYTimes – Mireya Navarro : Environment Blamed in Western Tree Deaths ; Oddly ambiguous culprit in the hed, but second graf is clear; heat and drought and the second quoted source says it’s probably global warming.
• Seattle Times – Michelle Ma : Northwest tree die-off likely due to warming trend, study says ;
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin : Study Ties Tree Deaths To Change in Climate ;
• Time Magazine – Eben Harrell: U.S. Trees Dying at Alarming Rate ; Hmm. Being a literalist here about metaphor in this story’s lede. Dunno if forests are really like “America’s giant lungs soaking up masses of carbon dioxide”. One, that’s the opposite of what lungs do. Two, mature forests are pretty much in equilibrium with the atmosphere.
• HealthDay News (via Wash.Post)- Steven Reinberg : Old-Growth Forests Dying Off in U.S. West ; HealthDay?
• New Scientist – Catherine Brahic : Tree deaths double across western US ;
• AP – Jeff Barnard : Study: Western forests dying at increasing rate ; Filed, one notices, from the well-forested but arid intermountain west, in Grants Pass, Oregon.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox : Drought, heat killing trees in western N.America ;
• AFP:  Global warming doubles tree deaths in western US: study ;
• San Jose Mercury News – Hadley Leggett : Scientists say global warming may be killing trees in West twice as fast as usual ; Interesting heds on some, like this one – most outlets don’t say it’s global warming, but just warming, or regional warming, a warming trend, and such.
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon : Out on a Limb: Global Warming May Be Killing Old-Growth Forests ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Brian Handwerk : U.S. Old-Growth Forests Withering With Warming ; Includes a well-shaded account of possible outcomes, reasons.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Trees dying in the West at record rate ;
• Science News – Susan Milius :  Everyday tree deaths have doubled / In past 50 years, apparently healthy forests have started losing trees faster, possibly because of climate change ; This one subtly captures a sense of quiet peril tip-toeing in behind us.
• Canwest News Services (via Vancouver Sun) – Margaret Munro : Rate of tree death speeding up: Study ; Starts with unusual vignette lede from a BC coastal rainforest, mentions the colossal die-offs in BC and Alberta lodgepole pines due to beetle infestation – and cites the US as a model of old growth forest respect. ;
• Corvallis Gazette-Times – Kyle Odegard : Is climate change killilng old-growth trees ; for Odegard, near Oregon State U, this is a local story – it might, one thinks, have benefited from a bit more color or profile or vignette to describe his primary source’s field research or other specific role. But it includes an important point: this could just be the beginning of the change ;
• Could do lots more…

Grist for the Mill:

USGS Press Release  ; Oregon St. U. Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ; Northern Arizona U. Press Release ; U. Washington Press Release (pic source) ;

-CP

Two new papers this week on a topic of huge clinical relevance: how to treat young kids with apparent asthma. Both published in the New England Journal of Medicine – the holy grail of medical scientists – taken together they challenge current practice.

In the first study, doctors from Britain’s Queen Mary, University of London and University of Leicester compared the orally administered “rescue” steroid prednisolone against placebo, in children brought to hospital with an asthma attack. They found no significant difference in the length of time the child had to stay in hospital, nor in a number of secondary end-points, including the child’s symptoms over the following week.

On that basis, they said there was no justification for continuing the practice – allegedly widespread in the UK, though no media quantified this either in Britain or elsewhere – unless the child appeared unusually unwell. The study was sponsored by Asthma UK, a research and advocacy charity.

The second paper, from Canada, looked at a different way of reducing prednisolone use. Children with a history of wheezing after a cold or viral throat infection were randomly assigned to take a larger-than-usual daily dose of the inhaled steroid fluticasone (known as Flovent in the US, Flixotide in Australia) or placebo, starting immediately a parent noticed the first cold symptoms and continuing for up to 10 days at a time. The idea was to head off potentially dangerous wheeze before it happened.

In follow-up of nearly a year’s duration, researchers from the University of Montreal found the children who received active fluticasone were about half as likely to be given prednisolone for a severe asthma attack (8 per cent versus 18 per cent of those who took placebo).

Glaxosmithkline, fluticasone’s manufacturer and the sponsor of the Montreal research, unsurprisingly chose not to press-release the results. Instead, it diplomatically provided a comment to those media that asked – to the effect that the study had involved much higher doses than recommended in the drug’s product information – and let the doctors do the talking on the implications of the results.

Considering the prevalance of childhood wheezing and asthma (the rate has doubled over two decades to more than 6 per cent according to the Centers for Disease Control and it’s the third largest cause of hospitalisation), and given the potential of these results to up-end current treatments, maybe it was surprising relatively few media bought in.

The BBC did a thoughtful account of the British findings, and found experts who defended prednisolone use – on the grounds its side-effects could be justified by its occasionally “lifesaving” benefits.

The London Daily Telegraph‘s Kate Devlin emphasises the importance of identifying new treatments for wheezing children that steroids don’t help.

Reuters‘ Gene Emery‘s version is especially good on the methodologies of both studies.

Bloomberg‘s Rob Waters offered a more analytical account, drawing heavily on the comments in an accompanying editorial from of Andrew Bush, academic director of pediatrics at the British National Heart and Lung Institute. (Bush said it was, “disturbing to contemplate how many unnecessary courses of prednisolone have been given over the years,” because of a misunderstanding of the nature of wheeze in preschoolers).

Grist for the mill:

Queen Mary, University of London press release

University of Montreal press release

-JR

   In the NYTimes this morning Andrew C. Revkin focusses on a new Pew Research Center public poll that confirms most Americans see climate change as a legitimate issue but, when it comes to doing anything about it, it’s last on a list of 20 others that the pollsters presented. Environment is low, too. Immediate issues including jobs, the general economy, crime, national security, moral decline, and a lot of others score higher. Particularly interesting, energy sits quite high on the list – that should make the global change worrying crowd a bit happier. A good energy policy aimed at fewer oil imports and greater efficiency overlaps (coal excepted) a lot of what a decent climate change policy requires. Revkin has more to say at his Dot Earth blog. There he asks his  enviro-savvy readers to provide their lists of top five priorities. The Tracker, by the way, isn’t surprised at the ranks. If a third of Americans do believe climate change is a top priority (that’s in the results, too. Last doesn’t mean zero), one hopes that’s enough to work with. Most Dems in Congress and a few across the aisle have been listening without scoffing to years of scary testimony about the costs of climate inaction, too. The folks out on the sidewalk, however, seldom have much idea what to do about climate change but it’s easy to guess that it’ll be complicated and iffy. But ask them about jobs, or safety, or dirty air, or national security… those are things most probably can confidently lock into. Obama is a good explainer and persuader. This’ll be a test of his leadership. Climate change worry may be dead last as that phrase is used in sports – but it’s not actually dead.

The same data get a thoughtful once-over at Matt Nesbit‘s Framing Science ;
Related News:

On the energy policy front, here are examples from two outlets that asked ringers – that is, op-ed guest columnists with known axes to grind – to write on environment policy. They are from rather different parts of the political spectrum:

• Reuters – Mary D. Nichols : First 100 Days:Obama’s first climate change target ; She is Chairman of the California Air Resources Board and lays out her hope that the EPA promptly greenlights her state’s ambitious CO2 and other pending regs.
• Economic Times (India) – Bjorn Lomborg : The climate change safari park ; Well known pooh-pooher of GWarming’s seriousness provides an essay with muscle. Its power comes largely because the guy thinks humans really are warming the planet, but says we have other problems to face first so no sense spending money on, metaphorically, saving elephants while African children starve.

And here’s one that’s just stupid, for a reason explained:

• Kansas City Star (editorial columnist) E. Thomas McClanahan : Global warming bandwagon runs into the ditch ; No, I haven’t called McClanahan stupid, one supposes he’s not and is often erudite. But he does write one thing here that is stupid and he’s not the only one saying it with a straight face. In dismissing global warming he writes, among other things, that “fears that the Arctic ice cap would melt have proved unfounded. Ice is reforming at a record pace.”  Jeez. Is this so hard? The sun isn’t shining up there, it’s winter, it’s cold as bejeezus. As nobody says the Arctic won’t keep freezing over in the polar dark, and if as most arctic oceanography specialists say the summer ice cover will keep trending to lower and lower acreages, then a faster refreeze each winter is a necessary corollary. If you start from nearer zero ice coverage, you have farther to go to ice it back up each winter. This is, in fact, evidence for loss of summer sea ice. Whew. Doesn’t he have editors to ask questions of him before running his columns?

And finally, analysis of some aspects of CNN’s climate coverage since it fired most of its reporters with science or environmental reporting experience:

• Independent (UK) Steve Connor:  Sceptics, scientists and global warming ; the paper’s science editor blogs on the CNN’s, and on Lou Dobbs’s in particular, peculiar news judgment in reporting reputed “global cooling.”
• And if you want to see Mr. Dobbs really raked over some coals, do so at a recent post at Real Climate by Gavin Schmidt, with excerpts from his program.

There is not much here strictly science, perhaps a whiff of ethnography and forensic archeology in it, but there is an evocative photo. It’s time to button up the site for the day and now this image drifted across the Tracker’s monitor – so why not share it? The Advertiser‘s Michael Tsai reports today an encounter off Waikiki by two storied replicas. One is of a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe, the Hokule’a, the other a visiting replica of a 14th century Fujian junk. One wonders whether, back in the days of the fabulous Chinese treasure fleets under command of Admiral Zheng He, such original such vessels met up much? In the pic, those two characters in the foreground are not aboard primitive craft – but on modern, paddle surfboards.

-CP

One way to learn in principle whether cloning – say, Michael Jordan – might produce another prodigious athlete is to watch the progress of a colt named Gemini. The Inquirer‘s Faye Flam introduces the youngster to readers as a case study of the faithfulness of cloning as a way to photocopy greatness. Cloning, we learn here, is not permitted in the breeding of thoroughbred race horses. But nothing is in the rules for show horses – such as those that jump barriers – or for rodeo mounts. She writes, “Scientists and horse breeders alike are eager to see how much the clones mirror their originals.” A source tells her that, like people, horses have a “really complex set of things in terms of both behavior and athletic ability.”

Interesting is that the colt is cloned from the skin cells of a champion jumper named Gem Twist. And that the offspring – Gemini – won’t be put on the show tour but is expected to go straight to stud. The irony of all this is that Gem Twist has died, and was castrated to make him easier to handle and before producing any colts of his own. And thus, as far as stud work goes, the clone may well be just as good as the original.

Pic: Not clones, just a mom and her colt I saw in Wyoming one day.

-CP

It’s seemed quite plausible that maybe, as reports suggested, the bulk of Antarctica wouldn’t be warming even with a CO2 solar forcing on the overall planet – a wilder and windier circumpolar vortex isolating it further from temperate zephyrs, more storms and cloud cover, maybe somehow the ozone hole is cold, it’s almost in the stratosphere on all that ice anyway, or other arm wavings. Data have been a bit ambiguous but pointed toward an overall cooling. Now, scratch that. New sifting of the evidence seems to have undone its singularity in the global warming lineup. (Sort of – see “Note” below).

In Nature today, researchers at the University of Washington and at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan (yep, Jim Hansen’s bailiwick) say they’ve reanalyzed things and find, on average, the whole place is heating up just a tad. True, they say, much of East Antarctica (to the right of the mountains in the pic) has cooled very recently, but over a 50-year stretch it’s warmed. Its peninsula, thrust toward South America, and West Antarctica had already been verified as one of the faster warming places on Earth but their circumstance had seemed apart from the greater Great White Continent.

The lede at The Age in Australia by Andrew Darby, filing from Hobart in Tasmania, has an evocative feel, starting off “A big white missing piece has been fitted into the global clilmate change jigsaw…” ; Hobart is not so terribly far from Antarctica, but johnny-on-the-spot dateline prize goes to Reuters‘s Alister Doyle, filing from the UK’s Rothera Base, Antarctica, on the peninsula.  We noticed earlier this week that he’s down there, but he writes this story without much reference to his pertinent locale – save for a quote from a local researcher who does not appear impressed by the new work’s relevance to what’s going on in and around Rothera. For more from Doyle, he also filed on the fragile, soon-to-break off Wilkins Ice Shelf. If it’s going to go anyway, one hopes that it does so with Doyle standing by, watching.

Other stories, noting selected, key descriptor choices:

• AP – Seth Borenstein  ; An enigma no more, he writes.
• LiveScience – Andrea Thompson ; was the “lone holdout..”
• USA Today – Doyle Rice; “..lone holdout” ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts; “AWOL” no longer. Plus he notes it’s not so much warmer, as merely less “bitingly frigid”  ;
• New Scientist – Catherine Brahic ; “nowhere left to hide..” ;
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang ; “help(s) resolve a climate enigma..”
• BBC – Christine McGourty (goes to video link) includes lots of footage from Antarctica and general context. ;
• Chicago Tribune – Robert Mitchum ; ties the Antarctic news to other reports on changing season around the world, and to the brutal arctic air hitting his hometown lately ;
• ABC (Australia) Karen Barlow ; reports this along with word from the British Antarctic Survey that the peninsula’s Wilkins Ice Shelf is about to snap off, maybe all 15,000 square km of it.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman ; Until now East Ant. was a “very different story”  ;
• Newsweek – Sharon Begley ; “last holdout has succumbed” and she goes immediately to take that, Senator Inhofe and his climate skeptic aide, Marc Morano ;
• Bloomerg – Alex Morales ; “dashing a key argument..” (of skeptics). He even throws in the comeuppance of the late author Michael Crichton ;
• NPR All Things Considered – Richard Harris ; Nicely balanced report that says the conclusion “is a shift, but it’s not a total surprise.” And, he includes the creaking ice shelf too.;
• National Geographic News – Anne Minard ; Nice stress on the actual science – it is largely satellite data that provide the new result, and notes the surprise that the main bulk of West Antarctica may be out-warming the Peninsula.
• Science News – Sid Perkins ; Also emphasizes satellite data, and explains why the sparse weather stations in East Antarctica misled many scientists for so long ;
• Seattle Times – Sandi Doughton ; the place was “a paradox” ;
• .. could do more

NOTE: The paper’s authors correct some of the press. The Real Climate blog includes a posting by the scientists that clarifies their work’s import, and complains many journalists have oversimplified its conclusions and over-broadened their meaning.

Grist for the Mill:

• U. of Washington Press Release ;
• plus a novel one, provided directly by Nature Publishing for reporters unable to make all the requisite phone calls themselves – an outside opinion of the paper as gathered by a UK outfit devoted to gathering such things, the Science Media Centre. Hmmm – this looks to somewhat resemble an old US effort, by the Scientists Institute for Public Information via its Media Resource Service. The MRS was later taken over by Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Society based in North Carolina. That now appears inoperative. But an effort of the same name persists in Europe, underwritten, it appears, by Novartis. The Tracker has no clue how active that one is. One wonders how many bloggers use such things – or whether they’re generally allowed to take part at all.

Hardly Related, but worth a Giggle: On the Huffington Post, Andy Borowitz reveals Joe Biden’s new special mission .

-CP

A team at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Brigham Young U. scored big in the media yesterday and today by saying cleaner air means longer lives. Well, sure, one thinks, it should. But putting numbers on it is clearly an impressive feat – assuming they’re right in their conclusions – of statistical unraveling of causes and effects. The upshot is that Americans’ gradually lengthening lifespans owe a lot to better air  – with fewer fine particulates to irritate the lungs. It seems to account for nearly five months of longevity’s overall three years growth in recent decades. In some places, ten months extra lifespan can be credited to the Clean Air Act and similar regs, it says here. The study had to account for changing income levels, presumably dietary shifts, smoking levels, and other confounders. It’s in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.

There is not a whole lot, from a quick read, to differentiate most of the accounts. The news in fact is not that complicated nor, apparently, very contentious. Most start with a straight news lede that id’s this as the first hard evidence in the US that cleaner air means longer lives, or variants on that, than seek to clearly explain how the researchers came to their conclusion.

Stories:

• AP Alicia Chang ;
• Kansas City Star Alan Bavley, Karen Dillon; Nice start : “Take a deep breath…” ;
• BBC ;
• AFP ;
• LA Times Thomas H. Maugh II ;
• Toronto Globe and Mail Carly Weeks ;
• Boston Globe Bina Vankataraman ;
• Salt Lake Tribune Judy Fahys ;
• USA Today Liz Szabo ;
• NYTimes Nicholas Bakalar ;
• CNN Anne Harding ;
• Science News Rachel Ehrenberg puts some style on the lead with “Americans can breathe easier…” ;
• Scientific American Jordan Lite ; Oh, Tracker’s gonna be tediously nitpicky here. Lite asks how much clean air is worth and answers “five months to be precise.” No harm no foul, and it’s a lively way to launch readers along. But it’s not really precisely five months even on average, and it varies place to place, and .. maybe I’m being a literalistic fuss budget but the answer “five months, more or less” would serve as well and be, um..true.
• Bloomberg Elizabeth Lopatto ;
• HealthDay News Ed Edelson ;
• Wired News Brandon Keim ;
• eFluxMedia Anna Boyd ; This specialty outlet’s version, by standard journalism terms, backs rather slowly into a buried lede. But after reading others, it comes across to these eyes as distinctly useful and persuasive. Boyd starts with previous studies that implied this ought to happen, then gets to the new, confirmatory results.

Grist for the Mill: Harvard Sch. of Pub. Hlth Press Release ; BYU Press Release ;

A related remark: a frenetic and high-minded public service announcement campaign has been underway lately to debunk, as an oxymoron, the phrase “clean coal.” It has seemed from the start, to The Tracker, only half thought-out or, perhaps, excessively dumbed down for public consumption. Significant reduction in sulphate, mercury, and other particulate emissions from coal, along with similar demands on gasoline and diesel engines, dry cleaning shops, and general industrial crud, do seem to be impressive exercises in atmospheric cleanliness. Coal’s clean-up must be one reason for the improved life spans being reported today. There is a genuine accomplishment there (and for which the coal industry can, one supposes, take little credit. I doubt that Peabody and the Edison Electric Institute lobbied hard FOR such rules).  It’d be hard to re-think the “no such thing as clean coal” exercise now. But too bad it wasn’t phrased differently. Such as to say there is no such thing as green coal, or cleaner doesn’t mean greener, or nerve gas can be clean too, etc. “Clean coal” has real meaning. It just doesn’t slow the greenhouse. Additional fossil CO2 is demonstrably causing a global emergency. Coal combustion in the open air will some day be seen as villainy. But the maddening truth, which makes fighting this gas more difficult, is that CO2 isn’t a classic dirty toxic contaminant. It neither smells nor clogs lungs – or dirties laundry on the line. Ergo, to equate it with dirt just doesn’t hew to reality.  I say all this realizing that coal, even in the best-scrubbed integrated gasification combined cycle power plant on Earth, is hardly immaculate.

-CP

(Originally posted Jan 21)

*UPDATE:  Today, back on p. 23 in its print edition, the NYTimes ran a piece on celebration in federal science agencies, with a dash of caution, written by Gardiner Harris and William H. Broad. Its primary theme is that the new team will unwind just about all of the last eight years worth of (attempted) hobbles on what gov’t scientists say in public. But it won’t happen overnight. The article seems to justify re-posting yesterday’s.
_______________

The Tracker missed a terrific summary of the Barack Obama team’s approach to science – which we’ve tracked here several times already – that ran January 8 in The Economist. So I’m doing it today with the excuse that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer chose to run it for yesterday’s inauguration day on its opinion pages. It serves as a handy guide to the welcome turn in DC toward the theory that a fact and reality-based advisory policy is best. If you wish to read it in the original, which includes the jolly drawing up there to the right, here that is. One wonders how many Tracker readers can name all those caricatured. The story unfortunately, in The Tracker’s ear, joins the parade employing the the word “geek” to capsulize the Obama team’s mind set on science. It’s a useful word, in its place. But it also seems from stuffy here that it tends to trivialize the commitment to disinterested scholarship, disciplined research, and on occasion public service found at the high end of the science business (as does a fave label employed in the Brit and on occasion the Aussie press: boffin). Of course, some of them ARE geeks. Maybe boffins.  Some of us science beat reporters, too. Anyway….

In the same vein, USA Today‘s Dan Vergano summed up the new science team yesterday with a maritime metaphor – the politics of science are going from a storm-tossed voyage, he writes, straight into uncharted waters. One of his prominent sources tells us that the danger is (to paraphrase the story) that scientists will get too giddy now over prospects for totally sane – to them – policy and budget making. Reuters‘s Maggie Fox summed up the science side of Obama’s inaugural speech (“…promising a rational approach….”). And, Reuters in what may be a scoop of sorts, got the reaction of US scientists to the inauguration as reflected from the Brit’s Rothera Base on the Antarctic Peninsula. This one comes without byline, but as another story is on the wire from Reuters datelined Rothera and by its Alister Doyle, on skuas on the runway, one can figure out who enterprised from the white continent the new White House guy.

Other news includes the confirmation of Nobelist Steven Chu as Secretary of Energy, reported mostly in roundups on six cabinet-level appointments that got the okay – and that focus a lot on the temporary limbo for Hilary Clinton as Sec’y of State while a few Senators continue to chew over Bill Clinton’s charities and their donors. It’s hardly worth rounding up a lot of these, as the new energy guy just gets a line or two in most accounts.

Finally, to end this somewhat inchoate post, late last week, Chu received a rave review from a fellow Nobelist in a piece by Laura Snider in the Boulder Camera.

*Further Update:

• BBC Julian Siddle leads on the optimism from a notable British researcher, and then rounds up the general expectation for a very different attitude toward science.

-CP

We’ll all be reading and seeing and hearing soon a great deal about Charles Darwin. It will, on February 12, be 200 years since his birth (this year also marks 150 years since publication of On the Origin of Species).  While most celebrate his immense impact on both science and the general culture, many others will not. This site has not paid previous attention to the growing tide of stories. A good place to start,and  for a good perspective and preview of most of faith-fueled protests and the large crowd that will be making them is in Spiegel. It is a fine essay and report by Markus Becker.  It reads very smoothly. Spiegel has the good sense to credit the piece’s translator from German to English, Christopher Sultan. The piece’s hed: Has Darwin Failed? The answer of course is no but, as is clear here, evolution has hardly swept the boards. The magazine did not run the story with complete consistency in tone. That famous, splendid portrait reproduced to the right comes with a caption declaring that the Origin of Species “shattered the prevailing conviction…”. Was it Humpty Dumpty? This piece argues that the conviction is today solid among many otherwise fully modern people.

Other Darwin-related stories:

• AP: Whitehall may not celebrate ‘Darwin Day’ ; A town that went through a lot over its nativity scene is set to skip a Darwin event ;
• Newsweek – Sharon Begley ; The Sins of the Fathers, Take 2 / At tributes to Darwin, Lamarckism—inheritance of acquired traits—will be the skunk at the party ; Yes, Lamarckism is back, sort of (think epigenetics) ;
• OK Gazette – Ben Fenwick : University of Oklahoma plans a Darwin celebration ; This is odd. It has the remarkable, true, and yet implicitly false assertion that pertinent to Darwin’s great book is “a little known fact. It doesn’t mention apes … in no place does it say humans came from apes or monkeys.” Maybe not. But how can anybody write such a thing without immediate mention of his 1871 opus, The Descent of Man.., which makes the point explicitly?
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample : Evolution: Charles Darwin was wrong about the tree of life / Evolutionary biologists say cross breeding between species is far more common than previously thought, making a nonsense of the idea of discrete evolutionary branches; This story reports some facts and new discoveries on patterns of descent and on occasional gene flow across clades. But it seems nonetheless profoundly misleading and misbegotten – as in its closing, quoted line, “our whole fundamental view of biology needs to change.”
• Science News – Ran a big and grand package, by several members of the staff including editor Tom Siegfried and reporters Rachel Ehrenberg, Tina Hesman Saey, Sid Perkins, Patrick Barry, and Susan Milius. , in its January 31st issue. It includes a broad range of topics, including one on “dumb designs for sex.” The package’s review of cladistics and the “tree of life” makes a solid riposte to the Guardian’s story, one bullet above.

Grist for the Mill: A site calling itself Darwin Day Celebration has a listing of events.

-CP