After a what in Earth observing news early yesterday – the stunning failure of NASA’s Carbon Orbiting Observatory to reach orbit (with several breaking stories gathered two posts down) – by late afternoon and into today we get a packet of needed so what reporting that addresses the crash’s aftermath in the climate science and policy world.

Stories include:

• AP – Seth Borenstein :  NASA rocket failure blow to Earth watching network ; It’s all here – the bitter pill for mission workers and the broader context of a lagging US earth observing program. The mission was expected to be the first brick in the space agency’s return to eminence in the field. Borenstein talks with appropriate big shots – former NSF and OSTP director Neal Lane, NASA space science boss Ed Weiler, and several top profs.
• Climate Wire – Lauren Morello : After NASA’s carbon observatory crashes, scientists ask, ‘What’s next?’ ;  Climate Wire is not a well-known outlet. The Tracker’s fleeting eye would probably have skipped past it as a special-interest pub. But this link is carried on the NYTimes web site. That’s an endorsement. Glad I stopped. Looks like Ms. Morello was well-prepared, and transformed an expected, heavily-reported celebration story into a lament.
• BBC - Mostly an accident report, with some context, and notable for the excellent, explanatory graphic.
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach, Juliet Eilperin : NASA must regroup after satellite loss ; NASA’s Weiler says a re-do is an option, but it is too early to commit to it.
• Chicago Tribune – Frank James (blog) : NASA’s failed satellite carried big hopes ; While overshadowed by Obama’s big speech, he writes, “that was one very important satellite.” Interesting story structure has insets of text lifted (with credit) from another outlet and from a NASA press kit.
• MSNBC – Alan Boyle (Cosmic Log blog): Black day for a greener NASA ; Boyle knits in many strands, including NASA boss Michael Griffin’s early Bush-era musing that climate change may not be a job for NASA, the late Bush-era promise to boost such studies, and the climate-worried remarks by new science adviser John Holdren during Senate confirmation.
• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr. : NASA satellite crashes ; Blow to NASA, to climate science and, it says here, to rocket maker Orbital Sciences Corp. Nice roundup – but in the “not seen gambling recently” category of false reassurance, its final graf on the rocket’s toxic hydrazine fuel might only prompt public worries where none, due to this particular accident’s nature, would have merit.
• Times (UK) – Chris Ayres : Mission to map Earth’s CO2 ends as rocket crashes into H2O ; Good lord, this one puts the peril of hydrazine that could be “poisoning the ocean” in its lede and second graf. This is an error in the category of jamming the there is no such thing as a little bit pregnant square peg into a round hole.  Some people have a tendency to equate pollution with sin – it’s wrong and deserving of perdition, period. Releases of radioactive materials trigger such fear most commonly. Some carcinogens in drinking water do too. Dilution is not the cure-all solution for pollution that industry spokespeople might say it is. But it sure helps. How could a whole tank, or ten of them, of hydrazine poison the Southern Ocean? It might wipe out one herd of krill but those things reproduce fast. Reporter Ayres also finds newsworthy that a few conservative bloggers celebrated the dousing of this investigation into perceived, phony science. That, actually, is marginally interesting. Then his hypocrisy detector brings him to note that no carbon footprint analysis of the mission is available. ………say what?!
• Denver Post – Mark Jaffe : Rocket crashes with CSU device to measure CO2 ; A purely local  story on the two scientists and their hopes the year after years of work they’d put into this package.
• Orlando Sentinel – Robert Block: $273M mission’s demise disheartens NASA;

A friend suggested The Tracker take a look at the current edition of Health News Review, the University of Minnesota’s excellent site for dissecting how medical research is reported in the media. It is a yin to this site’s yang. The difference: HNR is the one with rigor, formal metrics for quality, and other scholarly embellishments. One cannot help noticing that its highest ratings -  for five stars of attention to statistical significance, caveats, cautions, and underlying scientific method – aren’t given out cheaply. This month it gave two such bouquets to one reporter,

Marie McCullough at the Philadelphia Inquirer. They are:

• Hormone use: Studies suggest two years max ; A solid review of studies in journals.
• A protein may detect colon cancer’s spread ; Even better – not only solid reporting of facts, speculations, and maybes, but a clear narrative tying a researcher’s excitement to the “increasingly blurry line between experimental tests and commercialized versions” and a worry that “novel molecular tests are being rushed to market.” The story has gristle.

McCullough’s work does deserve wider appreciation. KSJTracker has recently boosted its medical journalism vigilance with the addition of posts from the sharp-eyed, keen-bladed Julie Robotham (JR in creditline) in Australia. Medical writers who want to keep up on the field ought to be sure to include Health News Review (along with us) in their beat checks.

It’s one thing for a space rocket to totally blow up or do something else spectacularly disappointing. There is in that at least a touch of heroic failure. But when everything goes just fine except for one little thing – such as an aerodynamic payload fairing that stubbornly won’t fall off up where the atmosphere runs out – that just slightly weighs the rocket down too much for successful orbit? Utterly heartbreaking and appalling. Before dawn this morning just such agony squeezed the managers, scientists, engineers, and everybody else with NASA’s $278 million Orbiting Carbon Observatory. It lifted off from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base atop a Taurus (Orbital Sciences Corp.) rocket and within minutes, burdened by the clamshell-shroud that wouldn’t let go of its nose, its payload hit the ocean near Antarctica. Maybe just one little pyrotechnic bolt….

It was to have added short-term spatial and temporal detail to where and how much CO2 is being extracted from the atmosphere by forests, oceans, etc.That would have been fascinating to see.

Much more press is likely to land in the dailies later today and tomorrow. Here are some among the breaking news reports already out:

• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Botched launch ends U.S. satellite’s mission;
• AP – Alicia Chang (with Seth Borenstein, P. Solomon Banda) : NASA global warming satellite crashes after launch ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Satellite’s loss a setback for study of greenhouse emissions / A NASA satellite designed to study carbon emissions is sleeping with the fishes somewhere off Antarctica ; He uses the same “sleeping with the fishes” line in his lede – a good example of the sort of urgent phrasing, cliche-shunning niceties be damned, that a good writer slaps out while racing to get today’s news reported right now.
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: NASA Satellite Fails to Reach Orbit ; And just after he wrote a curtain raiser for it.
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach : NASA Satellite Crashes Before Reaching Orbit ;
• Los Angeles Times – Michael Muskal : NASA satellite crashes near Antarctica / The satellite-observatory would have been NASA’s first dedicated to monitoring global carbon dioxide, but it wound up in the ocean near the Antarctic ;
• Radio Netherlands – Marnie Chesterton: Heartbreak for NASA scientists as satellite launch fails ; Rather well-composed, sudden tale of sudden disaster;
• AFP : NASA mission to monitor carbon dioxide fails ;
• Wired News – Betsy Mason : NASA’s Carbon Satellite Fails / See Video of Launch ;
• NPR – Richard Harris, Renee Montagne : Failed Launch Puts NASA Satellite In Ocean.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Orbiting Carbon Observatory site ;

The Tracker just indulged his soft spot for the non-profit magazine High Country News. Your turn now.  Please treat yourself, curl up somewhere comfortable, and see a big, important tale unwind under Matt Jenkins‘s byline. It’s hed: How low will it go? Colorado may face a dry and difficult future of fighting for water. That sure won’t get anybody’s motor running.  But this intimate yet sprawling piece grabs from the start. It’s a profile of a brainy water manager that while filling in details on him propels readers right into the shrinking aquifers and dwindling streams of the Colorado basin – and makes things about the water wars to come that we’ve already read, perhaps drily, to come alive. Jenkins, a prize winning writer on the Western US, knows how to sculpt his verbiage. One finds a Biblical two-fer in its reference to exegetical nuances just a graf above an independent allusion to Deuteronomy , plus elsewhere a Perry Mason moment and a dollop of miasmal haze. Plus the fine map (hi res). The story jumps seven times. Well it is a non-profit – needs to refresh its list of sponsors and ads as often as possible.

Of some further interest is that aside from the story’s appearance in HCN, with its backing by foundation and other donated monies, its end credits include “This article was made possible with support from the Kenney Brothers Foundation.” Paired, those associations say something about the economics of long-form journalism these days. A little search finds the foundation site, and if one noodles around it just a bit, one comes across the c.v. of one of its founders, a man named Jay Kenney. Just reading that document makes one think: here is someone realizing a life well-lived. But don’t call on him unbidden. It also says, elsewhere, that the foundation does not accept or solicit letters of inquiry or grant proposals. Maybe Matt Jenkins just moves in the right circles.

-CP

Whoa. Check out lower left on Science Times’s p. 1 today. There one finds the cheerfully skeptical columnist John Tierney‘s full-body immersion in the world and logic of Roger Pielke Jr., a climate and environmental researcher in Colorado, and operator of Prometheus, a well-known blog. Pielke is popular among those relatively few intellectually dissonant crossbreeds who believe that greenhouse overwarming of Earth is real and perhaps very serious – but simultaneously that this is no reason to get nutsy with huge government and multi-government programs and other interferences in the private market to deal with it. (More commonly, it seems to The Tracker, vigilant small-government conservatives are so repulsed by the colossal international regulatory bureaucracy that might be need for a truly effective post-Kyoto agreement that they seem instinctively to decide that such an awful solution can only mean one thing: the problem is wholly fiction, even a lefty scam.) Tierney does a reasonable job pointing at the scientists in the Obama administration explicitly as activists. Yes. But The Tracker frankly does not recognize many actual academic scientists who, in keeping with Tierney’s description, try to wholly disguise their political agendas as objective science. They do that at the likes of Greenpeace, not so much in the Nat’l Academy of Sciences. Tierney seems to have no similar problem with the political colorations of the smallish number of science skeptics who sport academic credentials. A possible antidote for this column is to listen to the goofy, cheerful, gov’t-funded, reasonably scientifically sound rap-attack,  Take AIM at Climate Change, that is getting so much mileage at YouTube (despite the scorn of serious aficionados of hip-hop). I like the piece. This despite its being as schmaltzy as “It’s a Small World After All” that hammers the ears through a Disney World and Disneyland ride (at least, used to) and then drives one crazy by replaying itself again and again in the brain.

Whew. Too much about that. But the pic above right, source here, seems appropriate.  THAT’s activism that’s not disguised at all.

Other headlines of note:

• Denise Grady : After a Devastating Birth Injury, Hope. First, take a look at the stunning image a Times-hired photographer got and is the section’s lead art. It supports a fully absorbing, wrenching word portrait of traveling surgeons facing the results of deep poverty. That’s an old formula, and a good one. This time it is about fistula, a potentially dreadful injury from prolonged childbirth that the infant seldom survives and the mother barely if at all. One wonders, in sadness, if the particular women where this is set, in East Africa, also live with the results of mutilative female circumcision. Perhaps better left alone – one category of calamity is enough for this piece to carry.
• Thayer Walker : Wave-Powered Monitor Is Moving Beyond Listening to Whales ; for those who love simple, sophisticated gadgetry that is so clever, yet so obvious when explained. Oddly, the piece does not mention a passenger-carrying vessel that the NYTimes wrote up less than a year ago, using much the same locomotive principle (illus here).
• Abigail Zuger: In the Open at Last, a Secret All Women Share ; Ah yes, the first period. Actually, at the line “At this point, male readers may want to go outside and toss a ball around for a while,” The Tracker moved on. To many however this bood review will be engrossing.
• Nicholas Wade: From One Genome, Many Types of Cells. But How? ; an explainer, not a news story, on epigenomics and part of what the Times calls a new, occasional series on frontiers of cell biology. Wade recently quoted sympathetically a man who believes a Neanderthal genome could be used to recreate a live one in short order. He’s written similarly on mammoth DNA. Now he’s writing ably on epigenomics – a biological wrinkle that The Tracker has opined (without much expertise, as usual) may make reconstituted mammoths or Neanderthals an impossibility. But this piece today suggests that a pure DNA sequence can command an appropriate epigentic scaffolding to form around it. I’d like to know more…
• Benedict Carey : After Abuse, Changes in the Brain ; More on epigenomics. See fine ksjtracker post, a few below, by Julie Robotham (JR tagline), for more on this news.
• Gardiner Harris, Kenneth Chang: Beaker-Ready Projects? Colleges Have Quite a Few ; Read this if you wonder how research grants can be solid economic, job-generating, stimulus for our hard times.

Either the gods of synchronicity have smiled on Michael Meaney, or his own timing is impeccable.

Days apart, Meaney – a neuropsychiatrist at Montreal’s McGill University – followed up a widely-publicised (within Canada) complaint about an abrupt cut by government to funding of a unique childhood study cohort that he runs, with the publication of extremely important related findings in the impeccable journal Nature Neuroscience.

Still, not everyone put the two together. CanWest’s Margaret Munro was among those who did. Long-time science writer Munro offers a detailed but highly accessible take on Meaney’s new finding – the first in humans to identify evidence of a long-lasting and possibly heritable epigenetic effect of childhood adversity. (Meaney studied gene expression in the hippocampus of people with a history of abuse who died by suicide, comparing them with those of people who had died suddenly from other causes.)

In particular, Munro’s elegant description of the epigenetic process is worth noting: “They looked for differences in chemical marks on a gene involved in stress response. Such marks are laid down early in life and are thought to be a sensitive to one’s environment. They punctuate DNA and program it to express genes at the appropriate time and place.”

It’s clear from the diversity of quotes attributed to Meaney that he spoke to many, many reporters in person, and did not rely on a press release or a single agency story.

A fine media operator. The Ottawa government might well be wishing they had picked someone else for the budgetary guillotine.

Other Stories

• ScienceNOW Daily News – Constance Holden: Abuse Leaves Its Mark on the Brain
• New York Times – Benedict Carey : After Abuse, Changes in the Brain
• National Geographic News – Brian Handwerk : Child Abuse Alters Stress-fighting Gene, Study Says
• ABC Science Online (Australia) – Helen Carter : Child Abuse Damages Genes, Study Finds

Grist for the mill :

• McGill University press release

Image is from the Child Abuse and Neglect Council of Saginaw County, Michigan.

- JR

While driving back from Best Buy for the umpteenth time with no success to report by the Geek Squad on its latest effort to fix a mulish Gateway laptop, The Tracker yesterday was snapped out of a sour mood by hearing NPR‘s Joanne Silberner. She explained very lucidly for All Things Considered that, maybe just maybe, a team of scientists has found a way to fix those mulish influenza viruses but good. In Nature Structural and Molecular Biology the Dana-Farber, Harvard, CDC + team reports a discovery it made almost by happenstance. It is that many influenza viruses share at least one, previously unappreciated protein sequence just under the surfaces of their coats, but accessible. Not only that, an antibody the group already had isolated, targeted on that sequence, neutralized a wide variety of the viruses in the lab. That includes Avian flu, the 1918 flu virus, and several among the many other seasonal strains that have emerged in recent years.

If this works out, said Silberner and a flock of other reporters, vaccine suppliers would not need to start from scratch every time that a new mutated strain shows up sporting a fresh set of proteins in its jacket. Or, at least, not so often. One shot might provide lasting resistance against much and maybe most of anything the influenza family of viruses come up with. Silberner’s story does a particularly nice job sketching the news up front, and then backfilling with the growing excitement in the team as a line of narrowly aimed research stumbled upon a potential broad new tactic against influenza. The story, one supposes, may inspire envy and, one hopes, emulation in the HIV research world.

Other stories:

• Boston Globe – Stephen Smith: Team finds secret that could stem flu viruses / Tactic targets bug’s weak spot ; One day, he surmises, flu shots might be like those for measles and mumps.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Antibodies protect against bird flu and more ;
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto : Flu Treatment Stops Many Strains at Once in Animal Research ;
• NYTimes – Donald G. McNeil Jr. : Antibodies Offer a New Path for Fighting Flu ;
• San Diego Union – Scott LaFee : Flu virus neutered in new therapy / Research could lead to universal vaccine ; Quite detailed, with clear explanation what this target protein does. It is part of a system the virus uses to smuggle itself inside its prey’s cells.
• Health Day – Steven Reinberg: Scientists May Have New Way to fight the Flu ;
• Telegraph (UK) Ben Leach: Hopes of vaccine for all strains of flu within years ; Barely defensible hed. But hopes is an imprecise metric, and the number of years is undefined. So it’s true, but suggests more than this research seems likely to deliver soon.
• Independent (UK) Jeremy Laurance : Hopes raised for universal flu drug  ;

Grist for the Mill:

Dana-Farber Cancer Inst. Press Release ; Burnham Inst. for Medical Research Press Release ; NIH-CDC Press Release ;

-CP

Several outlets see drama in the recent news that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, after last-year’s big whoops with a melted, blown-up superconducting magnet and spilt helium, will now resume operations in September. And after that, it will go full bore all winter, even though that’s when electricity rates are highest. The payoff for newshounds is that this means the Higgs, or “god particle” in layman’s middlebrow shorthand, is up for grabs again. Chicago’s Fermilab with its rather puny accelerator and storage ring (by LHC standards) now has more time to scoop the European machine -  maybe one last, big hurrah before the LHC earns its crown as lord of high energy physics.

The latest wrap-up on this war to find a hypothetical particle – a boson whose behavior may be what modulates manifestation of mass – comes across the AP wire from  Don Babwin in Chicago. But the general theme of an unexpected resumption of competition (fight! fight! Always a good way to attract readers) has been pursued or at least mentioned by several reporters.

Other stories:

• New Scientist – Ivan Semeniuk: Fermilab ‘closing in’ on the God particle ;
• BBC – James Morgan: Race for ‘God particle’ heats up ;
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Officials Set Timetable for Getting Particle Collider Back on Track ; The Higgs is in his last graf.

Bloggers Ahead of the pack:

• Two good ones: at US/LHC Blogs Adam Yurkewicz provides an insider’s view, one that is echoed and acknowledged at Cosmic Variance by Sean Carroll; The latter says, after sniffing at the idea of a race as an important angle, adds that “the smart money would seem to be on Europe.”

Pic: A black, knit, felted wool plushie filled with hidden mass (gravel). Source ;

-CP

The Inquirer‘s Tom Avril has today an easily digestible account of the search for enzymes able to make the production of a gasoline or diesel substitute out of wood, or grass and other lignin-locked plant tissues.  He focusses on more than one, local example of such research. The result is well-composed, starting and ending on one vignette – a nice example of the circular narrative arc. He devised a clever kicker to tie it up with a bow. Included is a nod to the vital factor in any such applied research: economics. Right now, gasoline prices are low. That’s discouraging for such work as this.

While we’re at it, one notices that Avril last week caught a talk by a locally-rooted astronaut who won an engineering award. The reporter came back with a story on NASA’s space station challenge in extracting good drinking water from urine, and in making space comfy and convenient in general. Avril  showed more enterprise than to merely have taken notes in an auditorium. The space man made reference to a new concept in propulsion. Avril ran that down with a phone call to the research director at the company working on it. Lovers of technical lingo will like its name: Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket. Somehow, Avril reports, it comes out VASMIR (but a check finds it’s really VASIMR).

Pic: poplars, source ;

-CP

On the front page of today’s Washington Post its eclectically skilled writer Shankar Vedantham wrestles with a lot of anecdotal and disparate items to jam them all into a bucket he calls ecomigration. It holds that people are starting to move – either from desperation or from cerebral analysis of the odds that greener pastures will stay that way – because of climate change. New Zealand comes up a lot, as do what passes for highlands in Bangladesh. His thesis gets backup from scholarly sources, including one in the cross-discipline of political economics. It hangs together rather well despite its selection of examples from events at many scales – big migrations, individual decision, etc. A tip of the hat to Matthew Nisbet at his Framing Science site for spotting it first this morning and already getting a post up – he argues that this is a sampling of “agenda-driven” reporting. And the latter, he suggests, does not always mean that the associated news judgment arises from standard newsiness reality. Another high profile blogger, Andrew C. Revkin at NYTimes‘s Dot Earth, suggests that this story might by overgenerous in its attribution of migrations to climate change rather than to the sort of disasters that always have uprooted people (read down into his wide-ranging post, past the Al Gore part).

Other Migration News:

• For another, local angle on the topic see this previous post on the view from Washington State.
• AP – Charles J. Hanley: Mass migrations and war: Dire climate scenario ; Filed from Cape Town after a UK gov’t official delivered a talk tying climate change to high risk for “extended world war.”

Other Washington Post Science News:

• Joel Achenbach: Search for Life Heads to the Outer Solar System ; A follow to last week’s news that NASA and ESA have set their sights on Jupiter’s Europa. He gets into the competition between boosters of that idea, and the fans of another go at Saturn’s Titan.
• Marcia Bartusiak: Einstein’s Telescope, by Evalyn Gates: Bartusiak, one of the savviest hard-science writers in the business, years ago wrote up dark energy. Here, in the guise of a knowing book review, she succinctly catches up on what she’s missed in the meantime (plus much that is still missing) in the field.
• Rob Stein: Scientists Await Action on Stem Cells : This, from last Thursday, still has cogency. Also some news, as that the heavily-funded California Stem Cell Institute already is busting down its firewalls between fed’l and other moneys.

Pic: Kiribati ;

Pity the wee phytoplankton when it can’t tell which way is up. So it seems at least from  last week’s Science. A paper by researchers at MIT report a mathematically-modeled explanation for why phytoplankton sometimes aggregate in dense mats near the surface, a phenomenon with no clear advantage for the plankton but that can eventually cause algal blooms toxic to fish and other marine life. The story gets a boost from the rather pretty painterly rendition, provided by MIT, of how it works.

A lot of these dot-like creatures swim, they explain. Many species tend to migrate periodically to the sea’s surface. They know which way to go because their asymmetrical bodies tend to take specific orientations to the vertical. But that may not work in the shear zones between the shallow surface layer and underlying currents. They worked it all out with math and tested it in lab tanks. One rather hopes it is true, if only because the explanation provides a simple mental image for how these oft-reported congregations occur. It may also provide a tool for detecting when conditions are ripe for blooms. Too bad it doesn’t offer any obvious way to break them up by giving the participants a clue on what to do. Two outfits at least picked it up. Each describes the idea clearly :

• Science News – Sid Perkins:  Physics could unite plankton / The oceanic version of wind shear can disorient marine microorganisms and trigger formation of thin, densely populated layers ;
• Discovery News – Michael Reilly : Ocean’s Vital Plankton Sheets Form by ‘Mishap’ ;

Grist for the Mill: MIT Press Release ;

Other Plankton News:

Environmental Research News: Storm nutrients disturb plankton populations;

-CP

While most reporters in the continuing, if abating, media frenzy over the LA octuplets are focussed on beating one another to sensational or scandalous details from that one case, the AP‘s Stephanie Nano on Saturday provided a broader examination of the affair’s potential, longer term consequences. In an enterprising piece she reports what the fertility clinic industry in the US offers as ethical and medical guidelines regarding multiple births and how good its members are at following them. If one were to grade this like a high school exam – which Nano doesn’t do but The Tracker sallies forthwith – they’d be lucky to get a D, and maybe it’s F. Regulators, some of her sources tell her, may soon be putting federal muscle on those guidelines, following the example of several other nations. As she puts it, the doc in the LA case is no lone wolf.

Pic source

-CP