Older Americans who concern themselves with the stereotype of older Americans losing their memory perform worse on memory tests than those who don’t.  Researchers at North Carolina University figure that the worry itself fulfills the prophecy, that mental resources are diverted from memory to worry.

As lead researcher Tom Hess told LiveScience editorial director Robert Roy Britt, in “Worrying Over Fading Memory Makes it Worse,” focussing on the negative stereotype is the key.  “They may not necessarily buy into it, but the simple concern that they themselves might be stereotyped by others is thought to lead to the sorts of effects we observed…”

Accentuating the positive, confidence breeds better performance.  Britt notes that other studies have shown that there are several ways for most people to keep their brains, and memories, sharp, including continuing education, improved diet and exercise.

A North Carolina University news release and a mere abstract of the article in Experimental Aging Research drew a scattering of other coverage on the subject.

pic: UC Davis, Jay Leek and Karin Higgins

-JDC

Drought is giving rise to a burgeoning western movement by homeowners in parched cities and towns to fend for themselves, the way westerners do, and capture their own rain runoff.  But nothing is so simple, and probably never was.  There’s more than a little historical substance in Mark Twain’s old saw, that whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting over.

In the current issue of Popular Mechanics, Andrew Moseman — in Who Owns the Rain? — explores the thorny political and legal issues that are rearing their heads as increasing numbers of people put barrels and buckets under their downspouts to conserve for watering lawns and gardens.

If the rainwater capture movement really takes hold, the political strife could get nasty, because several states such as Colorado and Utah have old water rights allocation systems that run head-long into the idea of personal ownership of rainwater.  In the face of long-term drought, as Moseman writes, “the legal battles over who owns the rain won’t go away anytime soon.”  Whether it really takes hold as a widespread conservation strategy is a question the climate itself might answer.  It goes without saying, of course, that you can’t capture rain that doesn’t fall.

Popular Mechanics has another keeper this issue by online editor Tyghe Trimble – The Running Shoe Debate — that describes how “running rebels are shedding their shoes and reporting years of injury-free miles.”  So what the implications of this radical turn of events for the $25 billion running shoe industry?  Trimble has it all.

- JDC

From the lake bed of a warmer Arctic comes a “walking seal,” 23 million year old fossil that is an early ancestor of modern pinnipeds, reported in Thursday’s journal Nature, and widely circulated by the wires.

The fossil was found on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic.  The artist’s rendering of the skeleton is from the Canadian Museum of Nature.  The new creature is Puijila, as in the Inuit word for young sea mammal, and darwini, as in Charles.

At the AP, Malcom Ritter wrote that scientists thought they had found a “missing link” in the early evolution of seals and walruses and quoted one expert who called it a “fantastic discovery that fills a critical evolutionary gap (from) when terrestrial carnivores traded limbs for fins and moved from land to sea.”

At Reuters, David Ljunggren called it “a previously unknown web-footed carnivore that helps explain how seals developed from land-based mammals.”

At LiveScience, Andrea Thompson had a great angle on the accidental discovery of the fossil by a team led by paleontologist Natalia Rybczynski, which was on Devon Island to visit a meteor crater.  “The team’s vehicle had run out of gas, and the first bone of the animal was found while waiting for team members to return with fuel.”
Grist for the Mill:  Like any self-respecting celebrity, Puijila “the walking seal” has his own website

-JDC

As they go, it seemed like a dry and dreary Earth Day, caught in a raft of stories about falling river levels and drought and other impending weather extremes provoked by a changing climate.

Lots of link and air time was devoted to reports about the latest findings by researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research showing that the supplies of fresh water are flowing away from the planet’s thirty populations and toward the sparely peopled polar regions.

In the American west, where the drumbeat of drought continues to reverberate, the story shared space with a new advertising pitch by the State of California: “Save Our Water,” and a study by Scripps scientists warning that some of the 27 million people who rely on supplies from the Colorado River are going to face shortages in the years ahead, even without climate change. (That’s Hoover Dam, courtesy of the Bureau of Reclamation, holding back a shrinking Lake Mead.)

Across the Atlantic, the stories came on the heels of a report by Oxfam International that the number of people impacted by extreme weather has doubled in the last 30 years and warning that aid agencies could be overwhelmed by climate-related disasters within the decade.

The new NCAR study is the most comprehensive of its kind — an analysis of 50 years of data and modeling work that measures the flow of 925 rivers that carry 73 percent of the world’s running water.  While an earlier, smaller study had suggested streamflow in the world’s rivers might rise with global warming, the new study shows a net loss in freshwater flowing into the world’s oceans.

The stories:

In the Guardian, Susanne Goldenberg quoted author Aiguo Dai that the NCAR analysis “settles the question regarding long-term trends in global streamflow.” Co-author Kevin Trenberth in her account says hardest hit will be Africa, where rainfall will likely be heavier, causing more floods, but less frequent, prompting more droughts.

For the BBC, Matt McGrath noted the link to climate change, which is altering rainfall patterns, and the warning from the scientists that falling water levels “will have a major impact as the human population grows.”

For the Christian Science Monitor, Peter Spotts ably led with the Scripps study of the Colorado, quoting research Tim Barnett’s description of the river as “the life’s blood of today’s modern Southwest society and economy.” The Scripps researchers estimate that by 2050, it says here, even without climate change, the Bureau of Reclamation will be unable to meet delivery schedules 40 percent of the time. If runoff falls by 20 percent, shortfalls will occur 88 percent of the time.

For the Arizona Republic, Shaun McKinnon noted that the gloomy outlook by the Scripps team foresees Colorado shortages even without climate change. “The result in either case would be tough choices among water agencies about who gets water and who gives it up,” McKinnon writes.

For the AP, Randolph E. Schmid, reporting the rivers story from Washington, quotes the director of the Chesapeake Biological Lab at the University of Maryland that many of the major rivers where streamflows are falling “have large populations and drought-stressed ecosystems.”

Grist for the Mill: NCAR release, Scripps release, Oxfam report

-JDC

Astronomers using the European Southern Observatory in Chile, notably Swish exoplanet pioneers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, announced at a meeting in England today discovery of the least massive exoplanet yet. It is in a nearby red dwarf system – Gliese 581 just 21 light years away – where astronomers had already recently inferred three other planets (see earlier post, April 2007). Two of those appeared to be small enough to be regarded as rocky ‘super Earths’. But this one, at an estimated 1.9 to maybe 3 Earth masses, is the lightest yet among the more than 300 such planets now listed around other stars.

That mass range, incidentally, is not made clear in the press release. This may explain why many reporters went with a flat 1.9 Earth masses. But right at the top (see Grist below), the actual paper explains that 1.9 is merely the lower limit. Snarky sarcasm alert: It does help to read the paper, not just the press release. It seems that, paradoxically, many people are uncomfortable encountering science and uncertainty linked – yet uncertainty is part of science’s soul.  Also: Few reporters made note that Queloz and Mayor reported, 14 years ago, the first, confirmed planets around another star.

It’s in a tight orbit, going around the small star every 3.15 days. To be that close, even to a coolish red dwarf, would make it too hot to easily imagine it supporting life.

As this broke early today US time, more press may follow. Here are some, so far:

• New Scientist – Stephen Battersby : Sibling worlds may be wettest and lightest known ; Good man, that Battersby – he sized up the news for himself. He doesn’t lead on the new nearly-midget planet, but on one of its previously-known siblings. That one had been regarded as too far from its feeble sun to qualify as habitable. Now, along with the fourth planet discovery, the team says it had this larger world’s orbit wrong – it’s closer than they’d thought. It just might be warm enough to bear liquid water, an enormous ocean even. Life? That’s anybody’s guess.
• *UPDATED – AP – Jennifer Quinn: Scientists discover an Earth-sized planet.  This initial one is almost devoid of information. Its confidence that Gliese 581-d has less than twice Earth’s mass is misplaced – the team says as little as 1.9 Earth masses. Depending on the angle we’re seeing the orbit, it could go to 60 percent above that level. The later version, with both Quinn’s name and Seth Borenstein‘s (bottom credit) is much more complete, plus outside comment from the leader of the world’s most prolific planet-hunting team. Story still has it at 1.9 unqualified Earth masses.
• BBC – Paul Rincon, Jonathan Amos: Lightest exoplanet is discovered ; Good enough, but again takes the lower limit of the mass as the certified quantity. Smartly, the story brings up NASA’s new planet-hunting satellite Kepler and the European Extremely Large Telescope project for context.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Smallest Exoplanet Yet is Found ;   And good man that Cowen too. He declares it “could be as tiny as 1.9 Earths and isn’t likely to exceed twice that amount.” And he explains other pertinent conclusions clearly too.
• Wired News – Brandon Keim : Astronomers Closer to Exoplanet “Holy Grail” ; Tracker will suppress remarks about our planet’s multiplicities of holy grails. Keim takes the 1.9 Earth mass figure with excess certainty, but redeems himself by noting that just a short while ago, great attention was paid to another smallish exoplanet. Now, it’s fame is gone ;

Grist for the Mill: ESO Press Release ;  Astronomy & Astrophysics journal article ;

Keeping the Press Releases Straight and Collated Dept: Just curious. Here’s a Royal Astronomical Society press release related to another paper at the meeting. This one speculates that gas giant planets can get so close to their stars that their atmospheres pretty much evanesce or boil or otherwise sublime away into space. That’d leave behind bared, rocky cores. The Tracker doesn’t know if Gliese 581 has the radiant power to do that – but one hopes somebody asked whether it’s possible we’re seeing in Gliese 581-d the remnants of a once much-larger planet.

-CP

The Tracker took one look at this morning’s Science Times and in a millisecond thought, “That’s no car. That’s a freakin’ F-104.” The Tracker was 12 years old, an aviation nut, when the Matsu Quemoy crisis (you can look it up) was at its height. I knew about these Starfighters – every fighterplane-besotted kid did. The missile with a man in it, some called it. Fighter jocks called them Zippers. They were stupid fast. The LA Times ran a story one day about the brand new US warplanes sent out on patrol over the disputed islands and speculated that radar operators in mainland China must surely have been dumbfounded and maybe struck blind or been ready to surrender on the spot or something like that. The reason: US fighter jets going twice the speed of sound. I was so proud.

As it turned out, the planes were swift but not particularly good as fighters. Science Times today has a piece by Guy Gugliotta on a semi-amateur team that has saved an F-104 from the recycling bin, put aluminum wheels on it, painted it prettily and shaved its wings off. Lots of other mods, too. Maybe it’s a terrific car and still stupid fast. Their goal is a land speed record on a dried, clay lake bed. It’s a diverting tale – almost utterly devoid, by the way, of science. One meets no professors, no PhDs; here are just some enthused fellows who really know their way around machinery and hot rods, going for a record. Their static test stand for checking engine thrust is a stout tree and a strong cable. It mentions a rival Brit team’s rocket-jet car – that one, one suspects, has the science. Good luck, North American Eagle (and one hopes the ejection seat mechanism has been removed … or inverted).

One suspects the most controversial piece in the section is some non-newswriting by columnist John Tierney. It is non-newswriting because few citations of sources and no opinions counter to his theme appear. It is a column. He channels the late and smart economist Julian Simon while arguing that the way to a greener, low-carbon future will be automatically followed if we just encourage national – and presumably individual – wealth. He doesn’t say it this way, but the implication is that individual self-interest and the hidden hand of Adam Smith will deliver us from the evils of a hothouse world. There is much truth in the piece: that wealth permits nations to maintain their environments, establish and maintain nat’l parks, provide healthy air and water, perform eco-tourism, etc. Which is why The Tracker firmly believes that right now, while we still have some wealth to gather up with our taxes, it is time to spend trillions and trillions of dollars in gov’t money (and stimulate even more in private capital) to transform the economy – by deliberate, political decision. Unfettered new coal plants ought, as soon as possible, be illegal. Tierney’s example of wealthy-means-green is the cleanup of sulphur from the air. That was by government cap-and-trade fiat. But Tierney’s approach appears more on the laissez faire, relax-already side. He says more on his blog. And there, readers have a lot to say in reply.

Other notable headlines:

• Jim Robbins : As Wild Horses Multiply, a Voice for Contraception ;
• Henry Fountain‘s Observatory: Why Mussels’ Grip is Stiff but Stretchy ; His whole roundup is fine – this one is not only a good example of Fountain’s gift for economy in explanation, but worth singling out for its biomimetic resonance with the spider story in the Plain Dealer, tracked two posts down.
• Claudia Dreifus : A Conversation With Richard Wrangham / From Studying Chimps, a Theory on Cooking ; Or, there’s a reason why most of those with the willpower to stick with a raw food diet are skinny.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr. : Avian Flu Cases in Egypt Raise Alarms ; Or not.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

Last week we missed a terrifically evocative news burst that an article in Science magazine spawned. Researchers from several universities have analyzed rust-colored waters that sporadically spurt from the snout of Taylor Glacier in Antarctica’s dry valley of the same name. They conclude that the reddish color of Blood Falls derives from a long-trapped colony of microbes in a former arm of the sea, its brine remaining liquid beneath the glacier. They they have evolved to survive without sunlight, living on iron and other reactive minerals. It’s a creepy, inspiring story of life’s resilience. No time for analysis, but if I don’t compile a list of some of the many folks who jumped on this now, it won’t happen. The headlines say enough:

• Christian Science Monitor: Judy Lowe: Antarctic discovery: Microorganisms live millions of years without light or oxygen ;
• Chemical & engineering News – Sarah Everts: Blood Falls Explained / Scientists reveal some chemical secrets behind a crimson-stained glacier in Antarctica ;
• Voice of America – Art Chimes: Scientist Finds Microbe Colony Under Half-Kilometer of Antarctic Ice ;
• AP: Randolph E. Schmid: Bacteria found thriving beneath Antarctic glacier  ;
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Iron-breathing microbe colony thriving under Antarctic ice ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Microbes that ‘breathe iron’ are found in Antarctic / Unique organisms have developed from more than a million years in isolation ;
• National Geographic – Mason Inman: Glacier ‘Bleeds’ Proof of Million-Year-Old Life-Forms ;
• LiveSCIENCE – Andrea Thompson : Million-year-old Microbe Colony Found Under Antarctic Ice ;
• NYTimes – John Tierney : The Dark Secret at Blood Falls ; Blog, and comments in today’s tracker’s Science Times post are not to be taken as absolute: Tierney does do newswriting just fine.
• Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger : An Organism Survives Antarctica, and Maybe Mars ;

Grist for the Mill:

Harvard Press Release ; NSF Press release ; Montana State U. Press Release ;

Lately The Tracker’s been grousing about the low quality and high anger of so much of readers’ commentary that accompanies news media stories. The Plain Dealer‘s John Mangels has a yarn out now that suggests one way to mute the braying: write about spiders. He has four comments on this, which isn’t many, but they are both brief and friendly. It’s well earned praise. Yes, as a science writer he can hardly not write about the wondrousness of spider silk – flexible, strong, even edible, and possessing a combination of low-temperature fabrication and incredible mechanical and elastic properties that no engineer has yet been able to approach. But the story goes well beyond saluting arachnid weavery.

The graphics (just a small part reproduced above) and an embedded video are ambitious, too. The story, it says here, is inspired by a University of Akron professor’s report – with colleagues at several other institutions – on spider evolution and how the characteristics of various spider weaving styles (orb weavers, cobweb makers, jumping spiders that don’t use the webbing to catch prey at all, etc) help to illuminate genealogy.

Grist for the Mill:

PNAS Reconstructing web evolution and spider diversification in the molecular era Abstract, Full PDF Text ;  Univ. Akron Press Release (via Suburbanite.com)

-CP

Tracker isn’t sure how I missed this the first time around. But a catch-up is at hand.

Up on the Chandra X-ray Observatory site is a blog by one of its public affairs staffers, Megan Watzke, on the changing ways that astronomy news reaches the public now — that is, since massive internet blogging and a flailing traditional mass media began its fade. That’s part of it, anyway. The other aspect of her post concerns a sort of replay of the hullabaloo over the face on Mars and other samplings of human imagination gone unhinged. You ought to read her essay on the changing media and public affairs landscape for yourself. But to dwell on the other part, see the picture to the above right? It shows a gas and X-ray-spouting pulsar with billowing gases and other pulsar wind lit up by powerful radiation.  Blue is hottest, purplish shows cooler “radio lobes.” Nice shot. The Chandra people say it combines their X-ray data with optical, infrared, radio, and other imagery from additional telescopes.

Ah, but then check out the one below. It’s the central field at higher resolution and showing mostly X-ray data. This is the one that the original Chandra Release used as its grabber image. The release noted a visual happenstance: if one looks at this rendition for awhile, one sees a blue cosmic hand reaching for an ember, or something. A hand? A hand in space? A GIANT hand in space? Uh oh. Tracker assumed it could be none other than the hand of Jerry Lee Lewis, still reaching for those goodness gracious great balls of fire. But no, not his. Not Willie Nelson’s either, but closer. Guess whose, or what’s?

Watzke believes the fuss may have something to do with how the news got out, unfiltered by mass media and, as so often happens, how it went straight to the blogs. The Tracker demurs. That’s because I witnessed what happened with the old Face on Mars, with the Eagle Nebula (Pillars of Creation), and with scorched tacos for that matter that behave as societal Rohrshach tests. And those all occurred  back when us august gatekeepers still barred the door. I suspect that no matter how this image reached the public a degree of rapture would surely have followed.

-CP

The Weather Channel and other cable outlets get a lot of mileage from various stripes of storm chasers – those thrill seekers and the occasional scientists who scramble their vans, bristling with navigation gear, cameras, and sometimes  big honking radar dishes when the National Weather Service spots a supercell or other factory for tornadoes. NOAA recently announced that it will launch a big effort this season, called VORTEX2.

The Washington Post‘s Kari Lydersen gives it a good ride today, including description of the impact a program more than ten years ago, just plain VORTEX, had on efforts to predict, and give warning of, these ferocious side-effects of convection.  She includes an impressive stat that makes clear why such studies are urgent: One analysis concludes that should Chicago get hit by a big one the death toll could extend well into the tens of thousands of people.

Other outlets have written on the program this month. Stories include:

• AP : Scientists to chase  tornadoes to learn secrets ;
• AAAS ScienceInsider: Tornado Hunters Loose Next Month ;

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Announcement ; VORTEX2 ;

-CP

 First a disclosure of conflict of friendship: Horst Rademacher, longtime North American science correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has been a close pal since we were both Knight fellows at MIT 25 years ago. He still writes from Northern California for die FAZ and does other mainline journalism, is a working seismologist, and blogs for the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab where his wife Peggy Helweg is on staff. So, looking in on the blog this morning The Tracker saw a stunning image from the earthquake-ravaged region around Abruzzo Italy that, so far as one can tell, evaded almost all other media. He explains how a super-sensitive topographic satellite captured the vertical displacements of the surface. It includes a marked boundary in the pattern of remanent ripples that coincides with an aligned pattern of surface rupture (along the yellow line).

Fascinating.

And it wasn’t a secret.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release Satellites show how Earth moved during Italy quake ;

The development did get some attention in Italian media. Tracker can’t read it worth an Olive buca, but the image is there in this: Fondaziona Italiani : Terremoto Abruzzo. Continua la solidarietà per gli sfollati. Tremonti: 5 per mille ai terremotati ;

Pic super hi res ;

-CP

Last week The Tracker saw a press release from the people operating the Chandra X-ray telescope and thought now there’s a great, escapist, holy-moly story of cosmic awesomeness. Surely it’ll get decent pickup. The news is that several teams of astronomers using Chandra and Hubble in space plus one of the Keck telescopes pooled data on an event underway 5.4 billion light years away. It is in the direction of the constellation Aurigae, which includes the far-closer, bright star Capella. There, three galaxy clusters are in collision making the plasma that permeates them exceedingly hot. That’s something in itself, but heating the hullabaloo to record temps, like a 13 million light year long line of squad cars racing at full throttle into a three-way gang war, an additional streamer of galaxies is pouring in from outside. The galaxies’ individual stars tend to miss each other and parade on through. But the gases among them mix it up and duke it out in huge blobs of X-ray glowing mayhem.

Somehow the sheer stupendous spectacle of this work, published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, did not get so much attention.  At least not in what remains of the mainstream press. One expects the astro-blogging community did it up.

English Language Stories include:

• Space.com: NASA spots most crowded space collision ever ;
• Press Association (UK) : Galaxy clusters collision found ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli: The Mother of All Pileups ;

NOT TO BE DETERRED. Here’s a multilingual angle this site hasn’t used before. The Tracker innocently put the event’s official designated name – MACSJ0717 – into Google. Devoid of language cue, the search engine delivered a bunch of heads that are riveting.

Galactic Collisions Look the Same in All Languages Dept – Stories Include:

• El Pais: Tres telescopios ven una colisión múltiple de galaxias / Cataclismo cósmico cuando el Universo era la mitad de antiguo  ;
• Der Tagesspiegel: Großer Knall im All / 5,4 Milliarden Lichtjahre von uns entfernt findet eine gewaltige kosmische Katastrophe statt: Gleich drei Galaxienhaufen stoßen dort zusammen ;
• la Repubblica: Una collisione fra ammassi di galassie / Lotta tra titani nel cosmo ;
• Lenta.Ru : Астрономы увидели самую крупную космическую аварию ;
• … okay, for most of us the Cyrillic is hard to read phonetically. But the next to last word looks impressively cosmic.

Grist for the Mill: Chandra X-Ray Observatory Press Release ;

Pic hi res ;