Nothing like new equipment for seeing new things. That’s what keeps astronomers scribbling away on grant proposals. The latest example of the tactic’s wisdom comes from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, once known as GLAST. It was launched last June to spot sudden bursts of light in space, particularly the beams of radiation called gamma ray bursts. It caught a whopper at 7:13 pm Eastern Time on Sept. 15. It took some while for NASA’s scientists and their university-based colleagues to figure it all out but, today, they said it had more total energy (with a big caveat, as explained further down in the bullet about the story in The Register), the fastest-moving jets of matter at its source, and the highest-power initial blast ever seen. It seems rather surprising that the researchers were able to sit on this until now. But a quick search finds nothing previous to today on this sparkler – which formally goes by the designation GRB 0819 16C.

As soon as the operators of the Fermi orbiter saw their read-outs go nuts, they alerted operators of other telescopes in space and on Earth to gather as much as possible at all wavelengths until, in a few days, its afterglow faded away. The report on findings runs in today’s Science.

By sheer coincidence, this one’s radiation reached the Earth just a few days after a big splash of stories on a similarly record-breaking gamma ray burst (see previous post). Those who promptly found themselves studying this newer one must have had little balloons over their heads saying you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Not only is it the most intense yet seen, the spectral detail and temporal resolution provided by the Fermi instruments exceeds anything gathered from earlier GRBs. It seems odd. Neither Reuters nor AP ran this. Usually, record-breaking events are easy fodder for the wires. Nor did many of the big newspapers. Maybe space explosions don’t have the bang they used to, even when they’re bigger. Or maybe NASA should have commissioned a jawdropping artist’s impression of something that looks like all creation exploding instead of the actual image up there.

*UPDATE: (Friday evening) – ‘should’a known. Another energetic burstar on the scene – Science News‘s Ron Cowen – did notice the excitement over this object, back at the Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics in Vancouver in January. Tracker even had a mention of it then, which slipped the mind. That earlier post is here, and here is Cowen’s story on this one and other things pulsar. At the time, the full magnitude of the September burst was not clear, but he did report the excited conversation on the detail of its data and the odd dispersions in its signal.

Stories:

• AFP : Huge gamma-ray blast spotted in space ;
• Press Association (UK) : Record radiation blast detected ; Hmm, record space blast would be more to the point. Radiation blasts sound pretty scary.
• BBC : Telescope spies cataclysmic blast ;
• Sun (UK) Leon Watson : ‘Biggest bang’ seen in space ;
• Register (UK) Lester Haines : NASA ‘scope captures ferocious gamma ray burst / Energy of 9,000 ordinary supernovae (Actually, one thinks that’s its brightness as seen from here, or the apparent energy – such things beam their energy rather than send it in all directions. If it’s aimed at us, bright as can be. If not, pfft.

See also:  Aug. 27, 2008 post on the telescope :  Wash Post, New Scientist, much more: New telescope provides new view of the sky ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release ;

-CP

NASA announced this week that its next big battleship-class solar system probe will head for Jupiter’s moons, and especially for Europa to check the odds it not only has an ocean under its ice, but that the ocean might be conceivably possibly just maybe an abode for life. Or for prebiotic chemistry anyway. Partnering on the project will be the European Space Agency, which will launch its own orbiter toward the Jovian system at the same time, in 2020. They are to be there six years later and send data for at least another three years. A meeting in DC last week cemented an agreement to coordinate the two missions.

Most striking to The Tracker is this sign of the times, from the Whittier Daily News. It is not far from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where critical portions of the big enterprise will gestate. Staffer Tania Chatila writes it under the hed: New JPL mission will provide jobs, discoveries.  Note the ordinality of its expected achievements. She does gloss a bit through the actual mission, but nothing in the piece qualifies as an explanation of planetary science.

Other stories:

• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr. : It’s all systems go for Europa ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach:  NASA Puts Money on Mission to One of Jupiter’s Moons ;
• BBC – Paul Rincon : Jupiter in space agencies’ sights  ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: NASA and ESA headed back to Jupiter’s moons ; Actually, isn’t this a first to Jupiter for ESA?
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland : Europa trumps Titan in bid for outer planet mission ; Money, she notes, has not yet been secured at either agency.
• Daily Mail (UK) Claire Bates : Destination Jupiter: NASA and ESA plan multi-billion dollar space mission to gas giant ;
• Aviation Week – Jefferson Morris : NASA, ESA Join On Jovian Moons Mission ; Perfectly sound job. But it reminds one to miss the axed Craig Covault.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release ; NASA Press Release ; (essentially identical);

At the Independent in the UK this week editors teamed science editor Steve Connor and Jeremy Lawrence for a catch-all on science research they call University of the Bleedin’ Obvious. Gee, that headline alone is enough to make this thing worth tracking. It starts with a study that suggests, surprise surprise, that many men, upon seeing women in scanty clothing, drop their curiosity over their senses of humor or wants or needs or potentically scintillating conversation and think: sex object. There is more to it than that of course – it’s worth knowing what parts of a fairly normal male brain get stupid under the influence of the slightest suggestion that sex may be at hand. Beyond that, the newspaper’s handling of this opportunity to provide some light reading is to be saluted. And Connor does treat the lead item with some seriousness.
Only 21 male undergraduates got their brains scanned, incidentally, for the study that triggered this news wrap up. Could be some small number and non-representative, hence merely suggestive, stats in this.

-CP

Upcoming in the AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research is a paper that may explain why the almost-surely-doomed multiyear sea ice pack on the Arctic Ocean is marching to its end even faster than the computer models expect. Ice-free summers beckon. The Guardian‘s Oslo stringer Gwladys Fouché got wind of it early and explains it very well. The process is not only a good example of feedback loops but provides a sample of how such loops can catch researchers a bit by surprise. The news story is an admirable job of explanation without hype. The underlying theme is that ponds of meltwater sitting on top of ice are darker, hence warm up more in the sun, than snow or ice. Nothing new there – the process is seen on the land-borne ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. But what’s newly unusual about the arctic’s sea ice that makes it friendlier and hence more vulnerable to big, wide ponds?  Read the piece and see.

Grist for a closely-related Mill: Could find no press release on the above news at the research’s parent agency, the Norwegian Polar Institute. However, here’s another Arctic one at the site, and with news of something potentially significant: A large pool of freshwater building up in the Arctic. Could cut loose soon. This one is UNDER the sea ice…or what’s left of it.

Other Arctic Sea Ice News:

• Boomberg – Alex Morales: North Pole Explorers’ Arduous Trek to Prove Arctic Melt Speed ; Two men and a woman, none of them trained scientists, are going to walk across the winter sea ice and measure its thickness distribution.  Got a holy grail in here, too, provided by a source. But is sea ice thickness really the whole holy grail, top prize, summa cum laude, ne plus ultra, etc of the Arctic climate system?
• CBS News – Steve Berriman : How Much Ice Is Left In The Arctic ; same topic as prev.
• New Scientist – Catherine Brahic: Arctic’s personal greenhouse turns up the heat ; A general story on why it’s warming up there.

Grist that Needs Milling: BUSTED SATELLITE? National Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic Sea Ice Page. Haven’t seen anything in the press on this, but looks like the prime satellite sensor for measuring Arctic sea ice has been sending bad numbers lately, ergo it is on the fritz, and in the meantime one of the best data bases in this field is corrupted. Well, it has gotten one nibble: A blogging climate skeptic sees it as more evidence the arctic is not, really, melting.

Pic source ;

Short and sweet: Scientific American – Steve Mirsky : Count on Steves to Defend Darwin ; A fine example how a series called 60-second science can work.

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Ctr. for Science Education Press Release ;  (…Are press releases from the Institute for Creation Research ever funny…?)
.

-CP

The Tracker saw a few advance stories on NASA’s scheduled March 5 launch of the Kepler satellite into Earth-trailing orbit, from which it will seek signs of other earths in the literally transitory twinklings of distant stars. I went hunting for some more news stories to provide a roundup. Surprise – there are not just one but two space-bound Keplers. The second is a good deal less glorious than a planet finder but is a good hunk of engineering. So we’ll start with that one:

KEPLER THE FREIGHTER (earlier iteration, left pic) :

• BBC – Jonathan Amos : Next space truck honours Kepler : Europe is building an  ATV, for Automated Transfer Vehicle, to deliver materiel to the Int’l Space Station next year and says it will name it Kepler. It succeeds the Jules Verne ATV that flew last year. It appears that they are different names on the same model ATV.

• Grist for the Mill: European Space Agency Press Release (with a tidy  profile of Johannes Kepler, German astronomer, mathematician, and pioneer in deduction of the laws of planetary motion).

KEPLER THE FAR-SEEING SEEKER OF PLANETS SORT OF LIKE OURS (right pic) getting lots of ink already:

But First! – Oldie but VERY Goodie:

• To appreciate this mission, and perhaps after looking at the dailies below, come back and read this one – for Wired Magazine Oliver Morton  eight or more years ago wrote a terrific, long, techno-savvy profile of the man behind the Kepler, NASA-Ames’s very stubborn Bill Borucki. His story explains why this mission is a gadget-lover’s delight and why to pray, for Borucki’s sanity’s sake, that the launch succeeds. He’s been designing Kepler for a l-o-o-o-n-g time. The hed is good too: Shadow Science. Morton is now Nature’s news and features editor.

And some from this week’s Batch:

• Reuters – Will Dunham :  NASA spacecraft to seek out Earth-like planets ; Planets are a little old hat and this machine hasn’t yet found any of its long-sought, earth-sized quarry. Dunham finds a smart angle for the lede: biggest camera ever to fly into space. But the press release is iffy on that question: biggest camera overall, or most resolution in its photosensitive charge coupled device chip?
• AFP : NASA readies mission to find Earth-like planets ;
• Times (UK) Lewis Smith: Into space with a camcorder – Kepler prepares to find ET’s home ; He has a fine, plain-English explanation of how the transit detection method works, and why the rarity of the proper alignments should still leave planets to see (if there are appreciable numbers of them at all).
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : NASA’s new mission to seek Earth-like planets ; An homage to Carl Sagan in the lede, too.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson : NASA’s Kepler Mission Primed to Hunt Earth-like Worlds ;

• Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; Univ. of Colorado Press Release ;

Related News:

• Register – Lewis Page : Boffin: Earthlike Worlds within 30 lightyears of here; From last weekend’s AAAS meeting. And it’s not just any boffin saying so, he says. Its a “heavyweight American boffin.” I don’t think we actually have boffins over here, do we? Does that word travel? Now, if he were also gobsmacked, that’d be fine. Great word. Needs more international circulation.
• AFP – Jean-Louis Santini : LIFESTYLE: SPACE / Earth-like planets around ; Same news as previous bullet. It’s found at a site called iafrica.com, where one has to salute a news category called Lifestyle: Space.
• Mirror (UK) – Greig Box Turnball : Astronomer says ‘trillions’ of planets could be supporting life ;

The Tracker has to confess to reading rather quickly through a long analysis on whaling and fisheries in Science magazine when it came in the mail this week. It was pretty clear that the authors have a low opinion of a thesis, gaining some currency among whaling interests, that whales eat such a tonnage of fish and other marine life – more perhaps than the entire world seafood catch – that therefore we need to kill a lot more of them. Cull leviathan, eat more hake and herring. Something like that. But it was difficult to catch its entire drift without – you know, sitting down and in my layman’s sort of way and  going through it half a dozen times to absorb the data and the arguments.

Somebody in the media did all the cerebration for me, Time Magazine‘s Bryan Walsh. His bias is clear from the top. The lede: Despite anything you may have heard to the contrary, whale meat does not taste good. I know from experience….” . He puts the paper’s thesis into plain English, which is his job. The whale-culling argument, in his telling, is nothing but a marketing ploy mainly by Japanese whaling interests, it has holes in its logic a mile wide (such as that if whales are a reason for the decline of fisheries, why were there so many more fish back in the days when there were so many more scads of whales?), and there are manifest other reasons for the collapses of fisheries.

Grist for the Mill: Arizona State University Press Release ;

-CP

   It’s not so often that a discovery in the labyrinths of molecular biology and metabolic chemistry lends itself to classic story-telling. One such is in the news today. A team at San Francisco’s Genentech Corp., following a lead turned up during a somewhat rare episode of basic research with no clear application at its start, write in Nature of a new Alzheimer’s-related pathway in the actions of a protein called APP. The protein already is a prime suspect in the disease, as it is essential in making the well-known amyloid plaques seen in the brain cells of those with the ailment.

What makes the story is an insidious, rather creepy element. It now appears that aside from the well-known plaques,  the protein’s production has an intermediate peptide chain whose behavior had previously gone unnoticed. It plays a useful and natural role in the body, but one usually limited to early brain development that then shuts off. And that role is to trigger the pruning of excess neurons in immature brains. At least, that’s how it works in mice. Thus the image arises of Alzheimer’s arising, at least in part, via the revival of the process in older people whereby axonal pruning wakens from its long rest. Gradually, it helps to take out the neuronal connections that make each such person who he or she is. The protein’s behavior fits nicely into an narrative arc – the good child gone bad in adulthood. Darth Vader, anyone? The paper includes micrographic images of neuronal networks in the absence of the protein, and the shredded results when it is there.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Bernadette Tansey not only spells out the work so far and its still-hypothetical payoff in new treatments. She sketches describes it as fruit of a company policy to turn postdocs loose, parttime, on fundamental biological research. Now a fulltime employee, one such former post-doc is the paper’s lead author.

Other stories:

• Wall St. Journal – Ron Winslow: A Prenatal Link to Alzheimer’s? Researcher Proposed Process in Fetal Development is Reactivate Later in Life ; Very clear explanation how this might work ;
• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen : Alzheimer’s may hijack chemical mechanism ;
• Bloomberg – Marilyn Chase : Genentech Finds Alzheimer’s “Death Receptor” Target for Drugs ; She plays up the moniker of one element in the chain of events, for good reason: “death receptor 6.” Her story mentions implications for Huntington’s disease as well.
• Forbes – Robert Langreth : Genetech Gets A Clue On Alzheimer’s ;

Grist for the Mill: Genentech media page ;

Much news this week, and ever since the election for that matter, on the prospect that the EPA soon will be regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This not only would comply with a G.W.Bush-era Supreme Court ruling that it makes sense, but would mean a thorny fight with industry and among lawmakers about how to do such a thing. And while many outlets tell the essential story – that this is sure to come – one also finds at least two major news outlets providing, on line, detailed and somewhat wonky explanations of the underlying strategies and pitfalls.

First the straight news:

• Washington Post – Steven Mufson, Juliet Eilperin : EPA May Reverse Bush, Limit Carbon Emissions From Coal-Fired Plants ;
• NYTimes – John M. Broder: EPA Expected to Regulate Carbon Dioxide ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko : US EPA reconsiders emissions rule for new power plants ;

For a better understanding what is at stake and how the game might be played, two blog-style posts on the sites of big outlets:

• CBS News – Andrew Cohen : The Politics of Global Warming ; a tidy walk through “simple, first-year law school stuff” on the difference between setting the EPA loose via executive branch policy declaration, or by Legislative new law. It’s a clarifier for those wanting to know what gears might be turning inside the beltway.
• Wall St. Journal – Keith Johnson : Power Play: The EPA, Congress, and Carbon Emissions ; As he says, now “the real fun begins.” If and the preceding bullet’s article illuminate who is doing what to whom and why.

*UPDATE (Feb 20): Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: The E.P.A.’s Move to Regulate Carbon: A Stopgap Solution ; Coal execs’ nightmare is at hand, he writes. Compared to putting a dollar penalty on carbon, this suggests, trying to regulate sources individually is a big, sticky thicket of wickets.

  For the last couple of years workers at the George C. Page Museum adjacent to Los Angeles’s famed tar pits have been sifting through 23 huge crates of fossil-filled muck excavated to build a parking lot next door. It apparently was no secret they have been doing so, but the other day they showed off some of the results so it’s news. Included is most of the bones from an elderly Columbian mammoth that were found very near the site of the crated dirt and in what once was a river bed. A few outlets say the demised one was a wooly mammoth. That’s probably the only kind the reporter or editor knew about (see this sample from the local ABC TV affiliate which has – wooly or not – excellent video).

In additioni, sabertooth cats, dire wolves, bison, North American lions and more are in the big crates. It’ll take years to go through them all. Reporters tend to follow the lead of the press release, emphasizing Zed the mammoth and other iconic creatures. Zed’s skeleton is the first nearly complete, more or less articulated mammothus to come from the vicinity so that’s exciting for the paleontologists. More exciting in the long run are almost surely all the little bitty stuff in the goo that will help fill out the broader ecotone in which these creatures lived during the late Pleistocene.

This latter aspect is sketched deep in the piece by the New York Times‘s Edward Wyatt. It’s his last line. One thinks there is plenty of opportunity here for a reporter able to spend a day or more gabbing with the researchers – and one who might also wait a few months or even a year or so for more stuff to come out. Then you’d have a science story. Those big bones are trophies; they will gin up more foot traffic for a worthy museum. But, one suspects, they reveal little that is really new. The little ones, as the museum’s chief curator told Wyatt, are the gold.

Other stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II : Major cache of fossils unearthed in L.A. ; Maugh highlights the little guys -and the lessons they promise to deliver – in the fourth graf. And he says the collection leaves the museum workers flabbergasted.
• AP – Alicia Chang : Cache of Ice Age fossils found in Los Angeles ;
• Reuters – Dan Whitcomb : Mammoth skeleton found nearly intact in Los Angeles ; and the story is nearly entirely about that big guy ;

Grist for the Mill: Page Museum Project 23 ; Press Release ;

These are confusing times at the energy technology and climate change nexus. A vast amount of media verbiage is flowing worldwide on the cumulative impact on green energy and low-carbon hopes by  the looming climate calamity, and extant fiscal calamity, and various government efforts to jumpstart, prime the pump, unfreeze credit, or otherwise kick or romance investors and financiers hard enough to make the industrial world saner and  more solvent. Depending on what one reads this crisis is either being wasted, or is just the thing, or nobody knows how, to get us on a course to efficiency and to putting a dent in climate change.

One cannot possibly gather up a significant sampling of the stories. But a few random pluckings seem to reflect a general uncertainty over what the story is. Compare these two from neighboring states. They don’t contradict each other, one may opine,  so much as they look at different layers of the sandwich:

• Kansas City Star – Scott Canon :The bloom is off ‘green’ in this withered economy ; not many stats in this, but plenty of opinion that Priuses are old hat, big used gas hogs are in, and solar roofing is a luxury homeowners won’t buy.
• Loveland Coloradoan – David Young : Stimulus touts ‘green’ jobs and clean energy / Solar, wind energy companies to benefit from package ;

In the wider world there is no shortage of more stories on governmental green energy stimulus efforts (or lack thereof) :

• Economic Times (India): Nagpur to become India’s first solar city ;  Not much more than an item. One has many questions. Just how close to energy-neutral can this city become? ;
• Melbourne Herald-Sun – Ben Packham : State rides energy wave ;
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Shawn McCarthy : Renewable energy left blowing in the wind / On the eve of Obama’s visit to Canada, green energy advocates say Ottawa’s lack of policy support leaves the sector especially vulnerable ;

What’s all this mean?  Beats me. It’s confusing. That seems to be the feeling reflected in one stab at it by the gray lady:

• NYTimes – Kate Galbraith : Will the Simulus Help Wind and Solar? ; There you go. Put a question mark on it.  Ms. Galbraith has another, closer look at such things out this week: The Secretaries, the Stimulus and the Smart Grid ; This one runs under twinned pics of Interior Sec’y Ken Salazar and DOE boss Steven Chu, both looking equivocal.

Yes, this post is just the Tracker venting while floundering. One thing comes to mind. What the world’s press and policy makers all need, and which may not be in the offing, is something new to chew on. Something great, something technical, something scientific, something one might call a game changer. Some kind of carbon fuel cell that runs at high efficiency and delivers cool pure sequestration-ready CO2 at a fraction the cost of a coal-fired boiler, or super duper batteries or flywheels that soak up and return energy like perfect buffers on intermittent wind and sun power, or an affordable nuke that is proliferation-proof and won’t run us out of uranium, or a dirt cheap thin film photovoltaic that is 50 percent efficient and rolls out of factories like plastic wrap, or a perfect insulator that’s thin as a cracker and even cheaper and turns old houses into little dens of efficiency, or some kind of freakin’ cold fusion (it’s 20 years since the last one) that actually works under the laws of this universe.  Then science and energy journalists could stop masticating the gristle we got and proclaim, gee whiz!! We see light! There’s a way out of this cave-in! In the meantime – it’s hardtack and a tough story.

pic source ;

-CP

Scientists are cautious people and it’s rare for them to stray beyond the strict confines of their results and venture much by way of the political or social implications of their work. So The Telegraph’s Lucy Cockcroft has scored a coup with a pair of researchers who – it seems from her report – were keener to talk about how their findings might be interpreted in the wider community than to talk about the study itself.

At issue is the use of forensic techniques to identify and then convict suspected child killers. In Britain, a number of high-profile convictions have been overturned after appeal lawyers argued successfully that autopsy findings said to be definitive signs of child abuse could in fact have happened naturally.

Cockcroft’s piece is based on an article from the journal Pediatric and Developmental Pathology, which describes an autopsy case series on stillborn babies and infants who died in hospital of natural causes soon after birth, in which doctors observed a pattern of bleeding under and into the dura (the tough exterior of the meninges that line the brain) with oxygen depletion in other tissues. This “triad” of features has been considered diagnostic of shaken baby syndrome, in which young infants whose necks cannot yet support their heads are brain-damaged by forces created inside the skull by vigorous shaking by a carer.

Dr Irene Scheimberg, who conducted the research, told Cockcroft: “When there is no evidence of physical abuse, apart from the haemorrhaging, we may be sending to jail parents who lost their children through no fault of their own.” Cockcroft found a lawyer who was planning to appeal a case of a babysitter found guilty of manslaughter, based on Scheimberg’s results.

No other media, in the UK or elsewhere, seem to have picked up on these findings. Too hot to handle?

Grist for the mill

• Results of the British Attorney General’s review of 88 shaken baby syndrome cases
• National Center on Shaken Baby Syndrome

Image is the Realityworks shaken baby simulator, in which LED lights in the head are acrtivated when the doll is shaken with sufficient force to cause brain damage. It is used in parenting classes to demonstrate the fragility of small infants.

- JR