During Charlie Petit’s well deserved nonworking vacation this week and next, this site will be under the uncertain management of back-up Tracker, Boyce Rensberger. His antennae for appropriate stories is not as well tuned as is Charlie’s. So please feel free to “Suggest Stories” by using the button at the top of this page. Suggest your own stories even.

Even if you’re not a journalist (we know lots of scientists and science watchers read us), suggest stories, good or bad. We’ll take appropriate action.

Switching from pathogen-human violence to human-human violence, an interesting little piece on the CBC’s Quirks and Quarks ran recently, reviewing the research in recent years on the attractions of violence. Richard Wrangham of Harvard University recalls the terrible moments when scientists realized that chimpanzees were not, in fact, so peaceful as they seemed, and could be murderously violent. It then describes the more recent research that suggests violence is actually pretty attractive at times, at least to males, akin to pleasures like the sight of “scantily clad women.” Some of the same reward centers are apparently activated.

Some lively writing reviewing an always-provocative subject.

–PJH

I thought I’d just ask, what would Google do?

Imagine a non-news-versed teenager looking for news of the swine flu outbreak—what would she or he find? Searching the term swine flu early afternoon produced 146 million hits, beginning with the Wikipedia entries, followed by CDC hits, followed by an agglomeration called “news results for H1N1,” then a bundle of blog posts about H1N1.  A reasonable starter kit.

Slightly better would have been to google “H1N1″ itself (about 790,000 hits), which brings similar items at the top, but right up there a nice little historical piece by the Federation of American Scientists.

Sinking down through the deep waters, I think calm largely prevails in flu news. Reports like that of AP from Texas, Reuters and Reuters hed, Yubanet, on the “struggling to Even calmer was the calm our readers side,” was billingsgazette.

Even calmer was the Discovery channel’s main news (they call it “news main”) let the flu pass by entirely, leaving readers to go down to the section called “human animal”, where fitness buffs are first and swine flu second.

BBC provides a flashy, multi-media version of info from CDC and WHO; no undue alarms here,  but reasonably useful information. CNN suggests that Twitter feeds may be fueling needless alarm or at least bad information.

A number of sites, including the Pocono Record, among others, reported a company, in this case it’s nearby Sanofi Pasteur, is “ready” to work on a vaccine if WHO says its needed and the NYT reported on flu stockpiles and companies getting a boost from their work on flu drugs.

The Australian online paper says the Hong Kong researchers who worked on SARS can soon produce a diagnostic test for the current H1N1 strain of flu.

The Red Orbit blog reports that FDA has authorized use of a diagnostic test even though it hasn’t passed full muster for approval yet.

Some looking for angles got ahead of themselves. The Associated Press, among others, suggests that ground zero for the epidemic is in La Gloria, Mexico, or at least that citizens nearby believe so; facts on this one are not in yet, and the story probably goes too far on vapors.

When epidemiology becomes a political, The facts can get roughed up. A Washington Post blog says that “public alarm has brought on the first non-economic domestic crisis” of the Obama administration; this speculation is in the lede of a story which reports on poll numbers which contain no such information. Speculation first, facts to follow.

A few outlets such as  Alas a blog and Huffington Post refer to some of the ludicrous stretching to make the rise of the flu a problem about Mexicans and immigration. The H1N1 “news tsunami” reported by crofsblogs, and other places show more of the politicizing of the virus. For another twist, those following the former potential pandemic, H5N1, are chagrined that their favorite virus has been so totally upstaged, writes one of those faithful bloggers, the tyee : those hoping for more concern about H5N1 “got sucker-punched” by the unexpected new rival.
Yesterday, maps of the spread began to proliferate, here’s pigflumap, and a U.S.  Google map and a Google Earth version. Any guesses about the accuracy of these?

–PJH

     The last few days have seen several outlets cover news that the Aurora Borealis light up not merely because ions are hurled by Earth’s magnetic field at the Earth’s northern regions (ditto for Aurora Australis), but that the hurling process arises from enormous spinning vortices of plasma. Some call them electrical tornadoes.

We’ll get to more on that in a moment. Tracker me – Charlie Petit – is taking the first non-working vacation in the three years of this site’s operation. I was looking for some kind of polar-type news on which to sign off. Mrs. Tracker and I are taking a somewhat delayed (long story) 40th anniversary cruise from Seattle up the Inside Passage to Glacier Bay and other southeast Alaska sights aboard a small “expedition” class ship. We’ll see if we can still manage to paddle kayaks and not drop our cameras in the water at the same time. Dunno if there will be enough nighttime to get a good look at the aurorae. Hope so. Backup Tracker Boyce Rensberger (-BR) – backed up in turn as needed by John Cox (-JDC) or Phil Hilts (-PJH) -  will ably take over the daily postings till CP returns May 11.

Back to space tornadoes.  Researchers in Germany, Finland, and at UC Berkeley reported in Vienna late last week that data from NASA’s five Themis satellites revealed what The Sunday Times‘s Jonathan Leake called “giant electrical tornaoes spinning at more than a million miles an hour and stretching thousands of miles into space.”

Other stories:

• New Scientist – Michael Brooks: Giant space tornadoes create Earth’s auroras ;
• Telegraph – Matthew Moore: Northern Lights caused by electrical tornadoes, scientists discover ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Kate Ravilious : Giant “Space Tornadoes” Spark Auroras on Earth ;
• Space.com -Clara Moskowitz: Electricity Measured Inside Space Tornadoes  ; Nice job in a short story introducing some broader context on space weather.

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

Other Closing News:  With travel on my mind, this is what I’d originally imagined using as a vacation sign off post. Nothing to do with Alaska. But it pertains to travel, travel writing, and more important, travel writing with a science angle. This week the American Automobile Association’s Via Magazine arrived with a surprise cover. Against a Grand Canyon backdrop it says “Rock stars! Geology’s Greatest Hits.” This just goes to show that a science story can find a home in almost any sort of pub. Inside, a biologist and pretty good, Montana-based writer, Chris Woolston, gives the magazine’s readers brief but exceedingly readable, informative guides to what the hed calls “Golly Gee, Geology” in the western U.S. The samples in the printed mag are Devils Postpile Nat’l Monument, Yosemite Valley, Bryce Canyon, Palouse Falls, Mono Lake Tufa Towers, and natch, the Grand Canyon. On line are even more. No idea why so little of the magazine’s snappy photos are on line. But kudos to the magazine’s editors for providing some roadside eye candy with a lot more accompanying, rigorous information than is the norm for the genre.

See y’all later – CP

Rumor has it that San Francisco Chronicle‘s management called its 90-year-old science editor, David Perlman, into the front office to tell him he’d better NOT take the paper’s offer in its latest round of layoffs. So there is his picture in today’s NYTimes biz section, marching to work. Reporter Corey Kilgannon quotes him as saying he’s not quitting no how anyway – “I’ll keep working till I drop dead at my desk – unless the paper dies first.” The Tracker worked alongside this yoda of science news for 26 years. Recently I told him that if he and the paper managed to hang on another six years, he will have worked there for more than half its existence (not counting his time out for WWII). It was founded in 1865. He signed on as Chron copy boy in 1940.

It’s a warm, gentle yarn. Of course, since (and before) turning 90 at the end of last year, Perlman has gotten a lot of happy birthday attention. This one does capture Dave’s essential, unwavering vitality. The guy  gets up in the morning and wants nothing more than to go see what’s happening in the news room and to write a piece of it.

*Updated – Other old science writer news: The Economist (not Nature) magazine’s tribute to John Maddox, The man who reinvented science journalism.  Sir John’s news peg is that he died. Perlman’s is the other way around.

-CP

The Tracker stands behind no one – well, maybe Jim Hansen with his jeremiads of apocalypse – in the scared-spitless by climate change department. But a note of resigned cynicism greets the news that broke, over the weekend, from the Asian Development Bank. It released a 250-page analysis of what Southeast Asian nations can reasonably expect from unfettered global warming. The region seems to face a tougher task than most.

The issue has gotten so polarized in the public mind that one wonders whether such stories, when it comes to anxiety or determination to do anything, move the needle at all. It got plenty of pickup. None of the outlets that did it treats the news much differently than, to first impression, any of the other thumps in our time’s drumroll of such stories. And I don’t know how I’d make this stand out, either. Its inherent advantage is that it is focussed as an economic impact story, which provides it with one well-aimed punch rather than a laundry list of miseries to come. Still…..the topic is getting repetitive. If media are going to hammer at climate change as they must, perhaps a few enterprising reporters need to delve more deeply and persistently into the characters and thought processes within the varied factions in the public discourse over climate change.

Stories:

• Financial Times – John Aglionby: ADB warns of Asian climate change disaster ;
• Wall St. Journal – Patrick Barta, Leigh Murray: ADB Warns of Climate Change Impact on Southeast Asia ;
• AP – Michael Casey: Study: SE Asia will be hit hard by climate change ;
• Aljazeera: Climate change threatens SE Asia ;
• Xinhua: Southeast Asia urged to take action against climate change ; Sigh. How is it that one of the world’s largest news agencies, from the largest and perhaps most dynamic nation, a prime player in climate change, is barely even rewriting news releases (while picking up long passages unchanged) and slapping its imprimatur on them? Xinhua’s managers should be given budget and permit to staff bureaus with some real reporters and give them room to make a few calls and to do some work. China has no shortage of journalists champing at the bit to run with the news.
• AFP : Climate change threat to SEAsia development;
• NYTimes – Thomas Fuller: Study Says Warming Poses Peril to Asia ;
• The Nation (Thailand) Chalia Ekvitthayavechnukul : ADB urges Asia to focus ;
• Reuters – Rosemarie Francisco (filed from Manila): Global warming threatens economic chaos iin SE Asia: ADB ;

Grist for the Mill: ADB Press Release ; ADB report The Economics of Climate Change in Southeast Asia: A Regional Review ;

Other Climate Change News: A salute is in order to CBS‘s 60 Minutes and its reporter Scott Pelley, for its segment broadcast last night, The Dilemma Over Coal Generated Power. It features a utility man (Duke energy’s Jim Rogers) resigned to building many more coal plants, and the NASA scientist (Yep, Jim Hansen) who demands not a single one more of those things, starting now. No skeptics here – just two versions of realist. The Tracker would have liked the stress be on Hansen’s views, but this isn’t bad.

-CP

Reintroductions of once-common animals are not so much news as just interesting. More notable is the length to which AP permitted reporter Jon Gambrell to go in describing how black bears faded from and have now returned to a place once called the bear state in recognition of its big examples of Ursus americanus. It’s a good piece – mainly because Gambrell seems to have put on some good boots and gone out in the woods to watch a couple of Arkansas state wildlife biologists run part of their regular bear censuses.

Maybe Arkansas was called the bear state, but The Tracker’s California has a big old grizzly right on its flag – called The Bear Flag. It’s the official state animal. The Cal Berkeley Golden Bears mascot (and the goofy undergrad prowling the sidelines in a furry suit, aka Oskie) honors the extinct California grizzly, Ursus arctos californicus. UCLA’s Bruins: ditto.  But the chance that, by policy, any variant of brown bear will return to the wild here? At a guess: vanishingly close to absolute zero.

Grist for the Mill: Arkansas Game & Fish Commission Bear page ;

-CP

The Tracker is not sure, but the 20,000-plus hits that a Google News search with the terms H1N1 and mutation elicited may be a record to these eyes for any medical story. The search terms were intended to ferret out the more savvy ones on the underlying medical science. But no dice. The Google algorithms seem to dislike subsets of stories if there is a whole pile on the same general topic. Up rose the whole pile.

This is so early in this nascent pandemic that one merely expects media, properly, to focus on public health measures, declarations of emergency, practical advice, and on accounts of the platoons of epidemiologists and other medical sleuths attempting to log cases and to find patterns. That’s pretty much what we have so far. But soon enough there will be new science: Are there geographic variations in the A,H1N1 virus’s genotype and behavior, what are its components, is its virulence and lethality trending up or down, what is behind the substantial death toll in Mexico, where did the new strain arise, what ingredients from what preexisting influenza types combined, mutated, etc. to make this one?

Practical advice in fact sheet and question-answer formats are common. An example is a patched-together one from the Washington Post, which attributes it to staff writer David Brown plus material from all over: AP, Reuters, LA Times, and the CDC. It has basic facts, but not much that would interest a clinical epidemiologist or other authority on pandemic causes and prospects. US outlets also must deal with the virus’s split personality so far: 100+ deaths in Mexico, none so far (and many fewer cases overall) in the US. AP‘s Lauren Neergaard leads today on President Obama’s declaration that at this point the disease for Americans is “not a cause for alarm,” even while, formally, the CDC declared it a health emergency – a legalistic move that frees money for fast action. Moving with that story is one from AP‘s Daniel Woolls, filing from Madrid, on European Union efforts to discourage travel to the US and Mexico both.

A progress report, under the hed Research team cracks genetic code of virus, comes from science writer Leigh Dayton at The Australian.

Angry writing is showing up. An example of opportunistic news writing fo this sort with a frightening flair is at the UK’s Guardian. Writer Mike Davis starts it off, “..a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty…” and one suspects right off the fellow has an agenda. In the course of a reasonable summary of the news, the story takes aim at what the hed calls the  “meat industry’s monstrous power.”

Davis’s piece refers to the Washington Post‘s perceptive and sharp report from David Brown on the puzzle that it took nearly a week for the CDC to learn of the outbreak in Mexico – even while that nation was imposing emergency measures against it. Canadian agencies responded quicker than did the US, it says here.

One of the better atmospheric stories from Mexico is in the UK‘s Times, where its travel editor Kathleen Wyatt recounts the scenes the met her upon arrival in that nation’s capital. She calls a visit to the tourist-favored Independence Column so eerily quiet “It was like a scene form The Day of the Triffids.”

The NYTimes‘ Donald G. McNeil Jr. has carried the spear for his paper on the story. In yesterday’s edition he tackled the puzzle over the large numbers of deaths reported from Mexico and possible reasons for it – including underreporting of overall infection (thus making lethality’s rate hard to gauge), conflation with other ailments, and something distinctly more dangerous about the specific substrain of 5,H1N1 there. Today McNeil and Anahad O’Connor (and a passel of writers credited in a tag line) review the spasm of travel advisories – and arguments whether they are needed – that various world health agencies are implementing or discussing.  The story also uses a variant on the formal name for the virus. CDC and some media do it with a comma – A,H1N1 – while the Times makes it easier to interpret while reading with A(H1N1). One also finds use of A/H1N1. Tracker wonders which will stick, and whether eventually a more precise label for this virus will supplant them all.

Want a contradiction? The last item in a CNN Answers to swine flu questions list says one cannot contract swine flu from eating prepared pork.  Somebody tell that to authorities in Ukraine. The Kyiv Post in that country reports that the State Committee for Veterinary Medicine has ordered not only a ban on import of live pigs from the US, Mexico, Canada, and other nations with confirmed cases, but of their pork too.

While we await some heavy duty medical science, and corresponding reporting, here is one that for a moment took this goy by surprise. Shouldn’t have, though. The AP runs it under the hed: Israeli Official: swine flu name offensive. The gov’t minister did, one must add, ecumenically say Jew and Muslim will be offended alike. The official suggests it be called “Mexican influenza.” No offense intended, one is sure, but the battered Mexican tourist board might already have sent the fellow a remark or two.

CDC  What’s New on the Swine Flu Site (includes opportunity to use rss or email alerts to keep up with new info) ; Public Health Agency of Canada – National Microbiology Lab Press Release ;

Pic: From Reuters, of army patrol in Mexico.

-CP

While the rising acidity of seawater across the globe is a story that has been around awhile — and won’t likely be going away anytime soon — the subject seldom gets the kind of comprehensive treatment Robert Lee Hotz gives it in his Science Journal column of the Wall Street Journal.

His story begins with a study reported in Nature Geoscience from the unlikely locale of an undersea volcano near the Mariana Islands where bubbling carbon dioxide has turned the water into an “acidic broth” and created its own extreme ecosystem over the millenia.  In such an environment, Hotz writes, “mollusks cannibalized their own shells, leaching from them the carbonate needed to maintain their internal muscle chemistry.”

While sea life has had time to adapt to such an extreme case, Hotz notes, “many oceanographers worry that increased CO2 — likely created by burning fossil fuel — is changing sea chemistry worldwide more quickly than most marine life can adapt.”  At Tatoosh Island, off the Washington coast, for example, where seawater chemistry has been changing rapidly, mussel beds (pictured here) have been overtaken by more acid-tolerant algae.

Another Wall Street Journal keeper: Jim Carlton reports on plans by a small town in Nevada to repel an impending attack of desert pests with blasts of a special acoustic weapon.  Mormon crickets, it says here, can’t stand rock and roll.

-JDC

The parallels between the tobacco industry’s notorious approach to the science of cancer and smoking and the industrial response to the science of climate came into focus in the pages of the New York Times.  Environmentalists have long held that the oil companies and other carbon-fuel interests were using the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition through much of the 1990s to sow a false sense of public uncertainty about the science behind global warming.  If there is a smoking gun to this assertion, it surfaced in the front page story by Andrew C. Revkin: “On Climate Issue, Industry Ignored Its Scientists.”

While the Climate Coalition was maintaining in a scientific “backgrounder” distributed to politicians and journalists that the “role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood” and “scientists differ” on the issue, the internal message from its own scientists was quite explicit:  “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.”

What is new about all of this is not the argument but the bald evidence — the documents from the industry group’s own scientists that did not see the light of day in the mid-1990s, which The Times displays in full online.  How effective was the Coalition’s doubt campaign?  At a time, when the Kyoto Protocol was before the U.S. Senate, the message of scientific uncertainty was what a lot of politicians wanted to hear.  It certainly influenced the coverage of journalists trained to “balance” their stories with two sides of a controversial issue.

This subtracker was willing to suppose that the tobacco analogy was over-reaching…until he turned the page.  In the West Coast edition, at least, Revkin’s report jumps to a page with another interesting story across the top: “Smoking May Have Role in Breast Cancer After All, a Science Panel Says.“  Roni Caryn Rabin describes the findings of Canadian researchers that contradicts long-standing and still-prevailing doubts among many that smoking plays a role in breast cancer.

Related Times stories:

Gina Kolata examines the elusive progress toward a “cure for cancer” and implications, fiscal and otherwise, of political commitments from Nixon to Obama to cure the disease.

Cornelia Dean writes about a report from a coalition of business and other groups who maintain that climate change, especially rising sea level, poses a threat to trillions of dollars in coastal property in the U.S.

Technically, it is the “extended Lyman-Alpha Blobs,” which doesn’t sound very technical as astronomical titles go, but there you have it — one of the oldest, most distant objects in the universe, and nobody knows what it is.  Its discoverers, led by Masami Ouchi, leader of an international team at the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution, dubbed it Himiko, after a mysterious, legendary Japanese queen.

The research is published in the May 10 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, but it was Carnegie’s finely crafted description of the discovery on Wednesday that made for widespread coverage.

The sheer immensity of the thing — some 55 thousand light years across — challenges conventional Big Bang theory.  The idea is that things started off small in the early universe and then merged into larger forms over time.  But here is this whatever-it-is, as far back as astronomers can currently see, already as big as the Milky Way Galaxy.

It is the kind of story that can challenge a writer’s knack for making some fairly arcane cosmology and astrophysics accessible to an average reader and led to a variety of treatments.

Among the stories:

At the AP, Seth Borenstein zeroed in on the relative youth of the object — “astronomers looked back to when the universe was only 800 million years old and found something that was out of proportion and out of time.”

For the BBC, Jason Palmer took the opposite tack, describing the blob as “one of the most distant objects astronomers have ever seen, 12.9 billion light years away.”  He describes the serendipity of the discovery, how the scientists almost didn’t select this big, bright “weird candidate” among 207 objects to choose.

At National Geographic News, Rebecca Carroll describes scientists “puzzling over what exactly the bizarre object might be.”  They say it might be a gas cloud or a massive black hole or a stable, mature galaxy or a galaxy collapse onto itself or somethig else altogether.

*UPDATED – We failed to notice that at Science News, Ron Cowen had the story, and a clear rendering of its cosmological angle, on Monday, ahead of the pack, and the embargo.  Noting that the story had been on The Astrophysical Journal website since last year, Cowen said he and his editor concluded that the embargo was invalid.  Say what you will — 12.9 billion light years — who’s going to argue about a day or two here or there?

-JDC