Were they right, or sort of right, all along? Could be, a little bit, very maybe. Twenty years ago  Univ. of Utah electrochemist Stanley Pons and his British mentor, Martin Fleischmann, said they had found a tabletop form of nuclear fusion that hinted a new era of limitless cheap energy. The field burst wildly into enthusiastic support, mainly from fields other than nuclear physics, only to founder and fade amid accusations of sloppy technique and self-delusion. This week, new evidence is being reported of nuclear reactions in an electrolysis set-up that echoes the original. It’s not the first such claim from the hardy band of researchers still pursuing the Pons and Fleischmann effect. Adherents are steadily asserting results, steadily getting the cold shoulder from the scientific establishment. But this one is dramatic. While a session on low energy nuclear reactions, nee cold fusion, is common at meetings of the American Chemical Society, this year’s gathering is in Salt Lake City. How appropriate.

The paper producing most of the news is from a team at the US Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center. It reported evidence of excess high energy neutrons in its device. The triple-headed tracks in a plastic detector are, says the researcher in charge, a compelling sign of nuclear fusion where standard text-book physics says it should not occur at these rates. It’s not a big flow of neutrons – not enough to boil the pot of tea that longtime cold fusion skeptics such as Richard Garwin demanded of the original P&F episode’s enthusiasts – but it’s something. Even if real, it would not vindicate the original claims of abundant excess energy. It’s more like the teeny flow another cold fusion researcher, Steven Jones of Brigham Young University, asserted he saw 20 years ago. That would be something in itself.

An indirect indication of the tough row this finding has to hoe, before it garners wide conversion in the technical community, is to observe who does NOT cover the news. NYTimes, LATimes, AP, Reuters…? Nope. But it is getting circulation. A fine thoughtful review of the new results is at Newsweek. There Sharon Begley runs it under the hed ‘Cold Fusion at 20: Hope Springs Eternal.” Smartly, she refers readers to a five-year-old story from the Washington Post by Sharon Weinberger (plug for my employer: she’s now a fellow at the MIT Knight Sci. Journalism program). It intimately profiled some of the main people certain that cold fusion is real. Both women’s pieces are stiffly skeptical, but don’t quite repudiate the possibility something real is being ignored by the mainstream. Begley also links directly to several of the 30 papers on LENRs at the ACS meeting, including one paper co-authored by Fleischmann.

Other stories:

• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger : Navy scientist announces possible cold fusion reactions / But evidence also could indicate another type of nuclear reaction, she cautions ; And one of Berger’s sources says the work, while also published in a refereed journal, is still full of holes ;
• Fox News: Navy Chemist May Have Rediscovered ‘Cold Fusion’ ; Pretty much right off the press release ;
• Wired DangerRoom – David Hambling: Navy Scientists Zip Lips on Cold
  Fusion Tests ; Best part of this scoffing news analysis is its brilliant inclusion of a plot element in the sci-fi (ie, made up) movie Iron Man.

Grist for the Mill: American Chemical Soc’y Press Release (via EurekAlert);

Full Disclosure: The Tracker knows first hand the difficulty of revisiting cold fusion. I had a piece in the Mar. 14 Science News on the 20th anniversary of the P&F press conference. The difficulty is that if something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck it probably is a duck – but after all, it’s not dead certain that it is a duck. Same with scientific blind alleys. Cold fusion and its offshoots look like a misstep. I’m no physicist or chemist. But so many very smart scientists say this line of research is a waste of time. Good enough for me. But that doesn’t make it 100 percent positively so. To some people, conceding that yes maybe there is cold fusion, or even more extreme, UFOs flying in from distant civilizations or Yetis in Tibet, is as good as saying your guess is as good as mine.

Take a look at that picture. Ah ha, one thinks, one of the famed Earthrise shots brought back by Apollo astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders in 1968. And those are the ones sometimes hailed as the first-ever pictures of Earth as it appears from deep space. But no, this one was taken by a humbler, robotic workhorse, Lunar Orbiter 1, as it scouted landing sites for the astronauts who were to follow.

The LATimes‘s John Johnson Jr. this week provided a paean to the NASA archivist who saved this and many other original pictures and data from destruction by NASA workers faced with bulging warehouses and tons of old recording tape.

This is not, one must note, the first time she’s been given a public hurrah. Here, for instance, is a space.com account from November. Keith Cowing at NASA Watch has a close, personal involvement in this saga. The NYTimes even wrote an editorial saluting the project last year.

The project to mine the data, now ensconced at NASA’s Ames Research Center north of San Jose, is doggedly coaxing ancient, rebuilt tape drives to unleash info from the crumbling old records. Its members recently released a second, sharp, oblique image of the Moon’s Copernicus Crater. Johnson gives it a deserved, good ride.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project ;

-CP

Much is being written on the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez’s collision with a rocky shoal in Prince William Sound, Alaska, and the immense oil spill that followed. The outward signs of oil pollution are long gone. Much of the wildlife is back. It looks for the most part like an episodic insult that Nature is shrugging off. But if anybody has felt complacent – The Tracker confesses it – Science News‘s Janet Raloff has today a sterling and plausible account of why sea otters in at least one locale are still suffering and still unusually hard to find. Just because the remaining oil is out of sight does not mean it is inaccessible except to microbes and a few burrowing worms and clams. Sea otters, it appears, like clams. And they go clamming. Raloff runs this report as part of a multipart series reviewing the whole event. On Monday was Part I, and yesterday Part II.

A few other Exxon Valdez catch-ups, remembrances:

• Reuters – Yereth Rosen : Twenty years after Valdez spill, Exxon grows in Alaska ;
• Wired – Brandon Keim : The Exxon Valdez Spill Is All Around Us ; Treats accident as metaphor for what occurs elsewhere, every day ;
• USNews & World Report – Kent Garber : Oil Drilling Debate Rages on, 20 Years After the Valdez Spill ;
• NYTimes – Andrew C. Revkin (DotEarth): Valdez Legacy: More OIl Moved, Less Lost ; Some needed, quantitative context. Source of graphic above.
• *UPDATE: Yale e360 – Doug Struck: Twenty Years Later, Impacts Of The Exxon Valdez Linger ; Struck covered the spill for the Baltimore Sun when it happened. This is a super re-visit to the scene and its lingering impacts. One interesting aspect of this is the account of profound changes in the management of tanker traffic through the area since the spill.  ;

At the much heralded session on Mars and its possible liquid brine during the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference near Houston this week (see previous post), researchers told reporters still on the story that it’s still likely perchlorate salts are keeping part of Mar’s soil wet. Not frozen. Wet. At SpaceFlight Now Craig Covault runs it under a whip-saw hed, “Mars water story spawns kudos and controversy.”  Best part is the story’s matter-of-fact explanation that this is a mere hypothesis with a long way down the peer review road before it might meet general acceptance or rejection. The formal presentations of results were in a standing-room-only hall jammed with 500 people. (Tip to newby science reporters or any kind of reporter: If the back of the hall is full of people standing up, work your way boldly to the very front row. Unless things were severely jammed even before the meeting started there are usually a few seats there. Must be old memories of being called upon by teachers at a bad time…). Covault provides deep detail in his account.

Other stories:

• BBC – Paul Rincon : Briny pools ‘may exist on Mars” ;  Another piece with extensive detail beyond what advance stories suggested, including description how the perchlorates would affect chances for life and for finding its traces ;
• Sky and Telescope – Kelly Beatty : (Drops of) Water on Mars! ;

In Singapore, Reuters has set up David Fogarty as its Climate Change Correspondent, Asia. That’s quite a handle. He also is quite busy. The latest stems from a phone call – or perhaps email – he made to a meeting set for Friday in Perth. It is a climate change conference called Greenhouse 2009. There Australian researchers reported results of their climate model’s predictions for the way weather might run in Sydney given an expected increase in summer temperature of 1 to 4 deg. Celsius in another 50 years. It’s a sunny forecast, and that’s not good.
Other stories:

• Sydney Morning Herald – Danny Rose : More heat-related deaths ‘likely’ ; And, he writes, it’s not just in Sydney.

Grist for the Mill: Greenhouse 2009 ;

Pic: An annular eclipse, from a pertinent site ;

Few of the Bush administration’s green and energy-conserving initiatives (there were some, after all) made as little immediate sense as its proclamation of high-tempo research into running automobiles on hydrogen fuel cells. Such things may make sense some day, but the energetics and economics were so far around the bend as to make their application impossible to see. (Even if, somehow, one found a way to make oodles of hydrogen gas, to choose cars and replacement of the entire liquid vehicle fuel infrastructure a first choice on using it seemed silly – when converting natural gas electrical plants to hydrogen would be so easy).

The previous administration’s program could hardly be expected to last long. Today the News‘s David Shepardson reports from the Washington Bureau that much of the money that had been assigned to hydrogen fuel cells is being diverted to research on plug-in hybrid and other electric vehicles. He does get in the nascent hydrogen vehicle industry’s opinion that the idea still makes sense, and to tar it with a Bush brush is “baloney.”
In other electric car news, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Sandy Bauers reported earlier this week, in more standard and less overtly political terms, the wide range of electric vehicles that the private sector is doing its part. He lists many of the models already in, or on their way soon, to showrooms near you. And the Los Angeles Times‘s Ken Bensinger reports that the small Fisker Automotive company, maker of luxury electrics and hybrids, has signed up 32 dealerships to carry its sparky, swoopy new Karma model. That’s one in the picture.

Grist for the Mill: Only because The Tracker drives  past this place regularly, and met its owner recently in a local key shop, here’s a place where you can buy an all-electric car (some are like spiffed up golf carts, others look like shrunken Hummers) right now: Green Motors;  The owner admitted the trade’s business model is stinko by usual auto dealer standards. Most such make lots of money off their service garages. Electrics just run and run and run and hardly ever break down. Go flat maybe, but don’t break.

-CP

Its a double-punch week for the coal industry in the US. After yesterday’s big news on the EPA’s plan to regulate CO2 as a pollutant – and no bigger offender exists than coal combustion – today comes official word that mountaintop coal mining may soon find its Army Corps of Engineers’s permits blocked by EPA reviewers. The AP‘s Dina Cappiello reports that hundreds of permits are on hold already.

A tightly focussed local look at the issue is on line at the Charleston Gazette, posted by environmental reporter Ken Ward Jr.. Ward also provides a fine roundup of Obama comments on the issue, gathered by regional reporters Monday, including “I will tell you that there’s some pretty country up there that’s been torn up pretty good“.

Two potent regulatory routes are in play – the Clean Air Act that appears certain to embrace CO2 as a pollutant, and the Clean Water Act that may be employed anywhere that the feds see too much degradation of streams and other waterways by the spoils of mountain top mining. Since the practice appears by design to rely on dumping dirt in nearby canyons, such degradation may be easy to spot.

New York Times‘s Mireya Navarro writes the news in an authoritative, clear narrative on who is doing what to make this happen – including the flash point. The latter is a review already in process for two specific proposed mining operations in West Virginia and Kentucky, and in which the EPA’s spine has suddenly stiffened.  She includes mining industry worries that this amounts to a moratorium. The feds say it’s not quite that. Wall Street Journal‘s Siobhan Hughes and Mark Peters write this as “the latest sign that the Obama administration is recalibrating the balance between environmental concerns and mining and oil-drilling interests..”  On the WSJ‘s Environmental Capital blog, Keith Johnson provides a recap of worries from the US Chamber of Commerce and other industry organizations. The theme: Can a stimulus really be green?

Such stories as this are the necessary first step when news like this breaks. Pretty soon should come analyses of the question raised by that WSJ blog. Whatever the long term benefits or necessity, what are the upfront costs of new laws that radically change how and were a nation gets its energy? The question is inspiring revolts in Congress, even among some Dems, as Obama’s budget proposals sink in. Or, in household terms, just because double paned windows and a new energy star refrigerator make sense in the long run doesn’t make it any easier to buy them when times are tough.

Other stories:

• Knoxville News Sentinel – Tom Humphrey: Bredesen proposes coal mining limits / State measure would bar such work near streams ; The state governor moves in a similar direction. EPA action serves as context for the story’s local focus.

Meanwhile, at the back-end of the coal business:

• Dallas Mornng News – Randy Lee Loftis: Environmental agency says Texas leads nation in production of coal ash waste ;

Grist for the Mill: EPA Press Release ;

Alaska’s Mount Redoubt southwest of Anchorage is still jumping, with flood waters roaring into nearby watercourses as its hot ash fall melts snow and ice.  Wired Science‘s Betsy Mason wrote it entirely as captions to some of the dramatic photos that the USGS’s Alaska Volcano Observatory released – including the one reproduced here showing an ash-flooded valley after a volcanically melted glacier’s liquefied remains roared through. The Anchorage Daily News‘s Richard Mauers reports that dikes protecting a downstream Chevron terminal, evacuated but containing 6 million gallons of crude, held back – but not by much – the Drift River as the volcano’s outpourings raised it 25 feet. The AP followed with news that an environmental group worries that, with more eruptions near-certain, the terminal could still suffer damage and perhaps a spill. Best and easiest quote here: “It makes no sense to store oil at the base of an erupting volcano.”

Plus, as proof that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer still lives despite its shuttered presses – columnist Joel Connelly writes in the on line-only edition today, Don’t sneer at science — volcano monitoring saves lives. Yes, the name Bobby Jindal is in the lede. The column is a welcome come-uppance to politicians who cherry pick funny sounding project titles from federal science grants for thick headed laughs about wasted tax money. A longer analysis of Alaskan politics and federal money, featuring a long discourse on the object lesson from Vulcan, is at the New York Times blog The Lede by Katharine Q. Seelye.

Grist for the Mill: USGS Alaska Volcano Observatory including an image gallery ;

-CP

Maybe this says something about the inherent news value of the vastly expensive, lavishly well-built if scientifically puny, and nearly-done International Space Station. Ever since Reagan, a string of administrations has gamely encouraged NASA and an international consortium of other country’s space programs to build it, scores of astronauts wearing various (mostly American) flag patches have put up with great deal of risk, bother, and headache building it, and now a late night comedian is generating wider (but, yes, shallow) media interest than anything else in recent memory. The news, as readers of this site no doubt have not failed to notice, is that a NASA contest for a name on one of its upcoming new modules (‘node 3′) has a popular winner: the political satirist Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central television. Would-be, low-earth-orbital eponym Colbert asked his audience to enter his name and zoom zoom zoom, it ran away with the thing. NASA now must make the call. Abor’ Colber’ ? Mais non! The agency, as several outlets report, is trying to have it both ways – to take advantage of the publicity without quite naming its whole module for the man. A floated alternative is to consider putting the name on the station’s loo.

No wonder Colbert won: NASA’s suggested choices were Serenity, Legacy, Earthrise or Venture. Sheesh.

Stories:

• Space.com – Brian Berger, Jeremy Hsu (a double signer for this!?)  : NASA might name toilet for Stephen Colbert ;
• Houston Chronicle – Lana Berkowitz : What’s in a name? Ask Colbert fans ; Includes a few other things sporting a Colbert moniker.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Stephen Colbert may be honored with a namesake space toilet ;
• Entertainment Weekly – Margaret Lyons : C’mon, NASA, name that space thing after Stephen Colbert ;
• Popular Science – Stuart Fox: A News ISS Module Named…Colbert? ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein : Oops: Colbert wins NASA space station name contest ; Borenstein set the table for this a week or so ago with Can NASA take a joke? Try space station Colbert.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Node 3 Naming Contest ; Comedy Central Self Congratulatory Story ;

A few weeks ago The Tracker posted on a few, small bits of battery news while wishing there were a big story on them to which to link (earlier post). Over the weekend the Christian Science Monitor‘s Mark Clayton filled much of that void. His topic is the electrical utility industry’s need to find a way to store – or to buffer, in essence – the irregular energy output from solar and wind farm operations. Managing a grid while one of its larger suppliers is likely to fade away to zip at any time is not easy. Clayton’s story describes one incident in Texas to illustrate the point, and then gets into some of the mega-battery options that private and government researchers are pursuing.

-CP

The Tracker is not sure, but it looks like the Associated Press‘s H. Josef Hebert was first out of the blocks early yesterday with news that the EPA’s expected new regulations governing CO2 as a pollutant have left the building and are headed for implementation (Maybe it was the Wash. Post?). The new regs  are at OMB now, Hebert reports, and knows so because he got confirmation from the White House. By later yesterday and this morning the story had grown long legs. But Hebert’s story covers important bases including nervousness in industry. He quotes a US Chamber of Commerce man saying it means a “cascade” of new permit rules and that it may halt many projects including coal plants, new highways, and more. An attorney for EarthJustice replies that the sky is not falling.

Other stories:

• Wash. Post – Juliet Eilperin : EPA Presses Obama To Regulate Warming Under Clean Air Act ; Covers all bases, with a hint that when one appoints a bunch of activists to the EPA, they may get just a bit ahead of even this White House’s wishes;
• NYTimes – Felicity Barringer :  U.S. report ties human risk to climate change ; She reports “elation” among enviro groups, and that she confirmed that the rules are circulating by consulting a web site that lists pending federal rules. (Style question: The story capitalizes Web site. Is web, as in WWW, a proper name?) ;  Kate Galbraith (Green Inc. blog): EPA Proposal Calls Greenhouse Gases a Danger to the Public – This one has additional policy-wonk detail ; And an excellent p. 1 news analysis by Galbraith and Barringer: The Fight Plan for Clean Air ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko : EPA finds greenhouse gases endanger health ;
• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: EPA Calls CO2 a Danger – At last ;
• AFP : White House seen reviewing greenhouse gas dangers ; This one says the proposal was “leaked to the media last week.” Unclear if that was to just AP, or to lots of people.
• Bloomberg – Catherine Dodge : EPA Greenhouse Gas Declaration May Pressure Congress ;

Nicholas Wade‘s lead, art-heavy piece in today’s Science Times is a children’s delight. That’s ok even though sex is its theme. He and the Times’s graphic art crew describe, and illustrate, how Charles Darwin’s surmise on why, for instance, peacocks have such absurd tails might best be illustrated by nature’s horns, antlers, oversized claws, whopping pincers, tusks, and more. Nearly all are carried to greatest extreme by males. Some make the daily routine a pain but are great for impressing females and for intimidating rival suitors. Plus, the fearsome weaponry, it says here, is more often for threat of violence than for anything lethal – except to rival males’ genomes. The story has a reach as broad as an Irish elk’s fossilized antlers. At heart it is a profile of a University of Montana researcher.

Other notable headlines:

• Carol Kaesuk Yoon: Oozing Through Texas Soil, a Team of Amoebas Billions Strong ; It’s not as yucky as it sounds. Weirdest part is the single creature composed of myriad, united, mutually absorbed microbes. It’s the sort of story that can enourage a kid to stick with science, as in ‘you can make a living studying slime? Cool.’ ;
• Donald G. McNeil Jr.: Botox Frees Muscles for Stroke Patients in the Know ; Fine reminder of two things we ought to know – Botox is not just for assuaging vanity, and off-label prescribing can be a very good and respectable thing. Story doesn’t say so, but it leads one to think: even those of use in favor of a national health plan must admit that procedures like this may get bogged down in red tape and fine print.
• Cornelia Dean : Scientist at Work : Jane Lubchenco / NOAA Chief Believes in Science as Social Contract ; While new Obama-ite scientists Energy Sec’y Steve Chu and Science Adviser John Holdren get more ink, Lubchenko may be the most interesting of the big three. Dean brings out her history, strengths, and goals well. See also yesterday’s post.
• Lawrence K. Altman MD : The Doctors’s World / A Quandary in Sweden: Criminals in Medical School ; The Tracker has to concede telling himself, who cares? But the story is long, detailed, and serious.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;