The Tracker opened the local paper yesterday. The brow furrowed. The Chronicle‘s business writer David R. Baker, a new byline for energy stories, had a front page spread on a new proposal to get an old idea w-a-a-a-a-y off the ground: capture solar energy in space with photovoltaic arrays or maybe thermal generators and beam the energy down via microwave. He writes with a good, clean style. The news peg is legit: one of the state’s largest utility companies has agreed to buy power from a Manhattan Beach start-up company that proposes just such a thing.

All the company needs to do, one thinks, is raise the necessary billions from our time’s loan-leery financial big boys, decide what kind of crystalline or thin film or unobtainium or other material to use for the PV, build a prototype on the ground, hire a giant rocket launch company, do some test flights, get its (modest – 200 megawatt) power station into far orbit, and have a set of antennas all built on the ground – with permits from local authorities – to convert the power back into electricity. AND do it in seven years or so to meet the proposal’s specs. Right. Oddly, in a region lousy with genuine authorities on space photovoltaics and rocketry economics, Baker called a man at the Natural Resources Defense Council as his only outside expert to assess this idea’s feasibility and hurdles. The NRDC fellow said nothing dumb but let’s hear from an actual, ace technologist or scientist or two or three. That’d be  professors, academicians with a lab or other facility where they do relevant work, etc. and are positioned to assess whether this idea is even remotely possible and simultaneously, plausibly profitable. Tracker can think of several of them, off the top of his head, who could have weighed in sagely. I don’t know for sure whether this proposal is sound or not. It’s possible in seven years (almost inevitably doable, eventually). But the b.s. meter is blinking. Other outlets were carrying the story so Baker was in a hurry – but this could have waited a day and gotten a deeper look.

Baker is nothing if not prolific. Today he’s back in the paper with another gee-whiz, big-idea story.  He expands a bit on recent news – some of it triggered by Energy Secretary Ken Salazar’s comments on the large potential for renewable energy on the continental shelf. Wave and wind power are Baker’s topic. This time it’s not so outlandish an idea. The story handles it considerably better. He cites figures from the Nat’l Renewable Energy Lab, and stats and history on other projects that feel reliable in the gut. It’s much more a conventional business story – but once again he turns to NRDC for an outside opinion.

Other Solar Space Farm Stories:

• Wall St. Journal – Cassandra Sweet: PG&E Looks to Outer Space For Solar Power;
• Fresno Bee – Tim Sheehan : Satellite may send energy to Valley ;
• MSNBC – Alan Boyle : PG&E makes deal for space solar power / Utility to buy orbit-generated electricity from Solaren in 2016, at no risk ; Boyle had his b.s. meter blinking and gets some opinion that this idea won’t pay off. But he’s not snarky about it – handles the story straight.
• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Chris Gaylord: Solar power captured in space, beamed to Earth ;

Grist for the Mill: PG&E NEXT100 weblog ;

-CP

NASA is finally getting the all-hands-on-board treatment from reporters in their coverage of the International Space Station. It may stand as one of the bigger news events for the space-suited set of the year – aside from the rather seriously scientific and generally consequential mission set for next month by Atlantis and its crew to service the Hubble telescope. You must have heard the news: Rather than renaming a new and final US node for the station after a certain cable-TV comic, NASA has elected to ignore the public’s vote and (wisely) chose Tranquility (thanks to AP’s Seth Borenstein, Tracker learned he’d accidentally dumbly typing-fast-and-thinking-slow written ‘Serenity’ in an earlier version of this post). . The name is not sappy as it may sound – it honors the Apollo 11 landing site. For the runup to this announcement, see earlier post.

The patch there shows NASA does have some wit. Soon to go into space will be the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill. An astronaut broke the news to Colbert on his show last night. Tracker thinks it should have a first name too: STEP Here for Embarcation to Nowhere via Combined Operational Load … etc. There’d been talk of naming the commode after Colbert. Now THAT would be a challenging acronym to compose. Hmm. Compose…Compost! There’s the first word already.

Just to show there is still a mass media hunger to cover US Space Exploration (the kind with people) even if it’s from entertainment writers who regard the space station as a punchline – Stories Include:

• ABC News – Gina Sunseri, Ki Mae Heussner: Colbert Treads Where No Comic Has Before ;
• AP – Jake Coyle : NASA names treadmill after Colbert ;
• NPR Morning Edition: NASA names treadmill after TV’s Stephen Colbert;
• The Guardian (UK):  Colbert, We Have a Problem ;
• TV Guide (via Seattle PI, yes it lives .. on line) Mickey O’Connor: Colbert’s NASA Dreams Are Crushed … Hilariously ;
• Reuters – Sheri Linden: Colbert lost in space when NASA names station node ;
• AFP: NASA defies comic to name module ‘Tranquility’ ;
• ITWire – William Atkins: Name of Space Station Node 3 surprise to Stephen Colbert ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; Colbert Report ;

-CP

University College London researchers are reporting in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that in tests on five patients with Alzheimer’s disease a “small molecule” drug called CPHPC, already under study for use against amyloidosis, not only entered the brain but removed a key player in growth of protein plaques that accumulate in people with the disease. This is potentially great news. Also potentially not much, as any medical writer ought to see – five patients, no sign yet that any of those getting the shots improved, and a lead researcher saying in plain English in the press release that the next step is “clinicial studies to see whether longer term treatment…protects…against Alzheimer’s. The lead researcher is also working under contract with the pharmaceutical company, not damning but a sure clue to a reporter to move carefully.  The task of the journalist is to explain why the results do demand followup, and also to explain that so far the doctors have zero to promise.

So we get, in one instance, this from the Daily Mail in the UK: “New Drug that could stop Alzheimer’s in its tracks” and a lede saying “a jab that could revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimers … has been developed by British researchers.” That, fortunately, seems to be the most extreme in its coverage. Other outlets salt their coverage with a few more ifs up front:

• Telegraph – Matthew Moore: New Alzheimer’s drug ‘slows development of condition’ / A drug which could slow the development of Alzheimer’s has been developed by British scientists.  ;  That’s two ‘coulds.’ The reference to ‘condition’ is hazy – it seems to be the plaques but is more easily read as Alzheimer’s itself – an equation that remains unproven.
• Reuters – Ben Hirschler: UK drug shows early promise against Alzheimer’s ; Here’s a question: when does ‘promise’ not mean anything like ‘promise’? A: when it’s an experimental medication saying very loudly ‘maybe’.
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Alzheimer trial yields positive results ; That’s well enough honed for an editor to run it, but without hype or exaggeration.
• Times – Mark Henderson: Drug study offers hope for Alzheimer’s treatment ;

Other Alzheimer’s drug test news:

• Cleveland Plain Dealer – Brie Zeltner:  Cleveland’s University Hospitals testing two Alzheimer’s treatments ;  An enterprising job with some spot, local news. Zeltner provides a lot less promise but much more explanation why people are so hungry for at least a little promise. A key line, in light of the above: “There is significant debate, however, on whether the amyloid plaques … are a cause of the disease or just mark its presence.”

Grist for the Mill: U.College London Press Release (via ScienceDaily) ;

Pic:  source ;

-CP

It’s a good thing that Burt Rutan’s and Paul Alan’s SpaceShipOne won that X-Prize a few years ago – for the first private vehicle to take a person to space and back – with a winning altitude of about 125 kilometers or nearly 70 miles. The prize rules themselves only demanded 100 km at apogee. Maybe that was lax. This is because a team of rocketeers from the University of Calgary have published results of a payload they sent up from an Alaska missile range in 2007 looking for the altitude where the ultra thin air lost its entrainment in Earthly weather and started looking more like solar wind. Answer: 118 kilometers, or around 65 miles. Thus, they say, they found the edge of space. Maybe SpaceShipOne crossed it – barely.

Of course, if one sent such sounding rockets up every week or so for a few days to measure molecular velocities and electric fields the edge would surely be seen to wander.  Right now, with the sun so quiet, the calmed atmosphere might not reach nearly that high (just Tracker’s guess). When sunspots return it may puff way up. Some reporters, seeing the report in the AGU’s Journal of Geophysical Research or alerted to it by a U. Calgary press release (see Grist below), are telling readers that the exact edge of space has now been defined at 118 km. And the press release does say “Edge of Space pinpointed.” Dunno if it means pinpointed on that day at that latitude and longitude, but ‘pinpointed’ sounds precise enough to be dangerous. Reporters ought to have asked if this is THE edge’s altitude, or AN edge’s altitude. Anyway, to get a little huffy, edge is a sharp word but “transition” has appropriate precision for this job.

The story hit twice in the last few days. The bigger splash was the first one, with the paper’s publication in JGR and the university press release’s appearance on the AAAS EurekAlert service. A second, smaller one followed this week’s direct release to media of the release by the university. The bigger puzzle is why most major media ignored this. Even if a reporter had to knock down that “pinpoint” business, the idea of an edge to space is a reader-grabber no matter how it’s qualified. The genuine science and history involved are more than worth sharing.

Stories:

• IANS (via The Hindu) : Scientists pinpoint ‘edge of space’ , 118 km above earth ; Or, it was there at 3:45 a.m.on January 19, 2007, over Poker Flat, Alaska, anyway. Similar wisecrack applies to most of these pieces.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson : Edge of Space Found ; Same precision problem as others, but superb short rundown of how various agencies now define it ;
• ZDNet – Chris Jablonski: Scientists accurately measure the ‘edge of space’ ;
• Canadian Press : Calgary scientists determine outer space only an hour’s drive away ; Has some pertinent remarks at the end, by an outside astronomer, that should have injected some more fuzziness into the lede.

Grist for the Mill:  JGR abstract ; U. Calgary Press Release ;

Pic source ;

-CP

Dennis Overbye does idiocy today in two pieces – the real kind and the perceived kind. In the real idiocy department, he nails the grandeur and history of NASA’s upcoming astronaut and shuttle visit to fix the Hubble Space Telescope one last time. It gets new, abler hardware for taking fabulous pictures and spectra from across the cosmos, replacements for worn out parts, and an orbital adjustment.

He sets it up expertly with a lead vignette  – involving one vivid and heroic astrophysicist-astronaut, a totally dedicated space man profiled throughout the article. The fellow is organically central to the servicing mission. The first passages focus on one of the most colossally short-sighted and arguably idiotic decisions ever connected to that telescope since somebody twenty years ago omitted a quality-check on its main mirror before launch. The more recent one was a since-removed NASA boss’s election to let the Hubble die rather than to risk astronaut safety or to delay construction of the space station. One more thing. The Tracker was in Arizona a week or so ago (so was D. Overbye) to goggle at the lineup of science stars assembled for ASU’s “Origins Symposium,” and while there grabbed a rolled-up copy of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo. A man promoting Hubble’s replacement, the James Webb Sp.Telescope due for launch about the time Hubble finally does poop out, handed them out. Yesterday I unrolled it for three grandsons ages 8, 6, and 4. Our daughter promised to frame it and hang it so the boys can ponder this boggler. Ten thousand galaxies of all shapes and colors, in a spot of space that looks blank to the eye and so small you could see it all through a drinking straw, ranging to 12.7 billion light years away. Holy cow. And taken by HST’s since-busted Advanced Camera for Surveys. Of course history’s most revolutionary telescope since Galileo counted Jupiter’s moons should get repair and keep going – and with even better eyesight. Risky? The US is supposed to be home of the brave.

Oh yes, Overbye‘s other encounter with idiocy. Inside he relates his occasional visits to a NY art gallery where technology and biosciences get mixed up with bold and sometimes-creepy aesthetic sensibilities. Like the idiot who got docs to sew and wire a new ear on, or in, his forearm. What a doofus (which is how us middlebrow dimwits always tend to regard arteests who push our boundaries and our buttons.) He calls artists the antennas of society. Good one.

This is going on too long. Other notable headlines include:

• Kenneth Chang – Earthquakes’ Many Mysteries Stymie Efforts to Predict Them ; ie it’s easy to say a new dam triggered China’s recent great quake, harder to prove. And that Italy prediction was for the wrong town, wrong place.
• Natalie Angier – Taxing, a ritual to Save the Species: You know that relative of yours who routinely cheats the tax man? Rhesus monkeys would have beat the chump up by now. Superb fairy wrens would peck the dodger for a day straight. Turn the self-absorbed one in. Take that, Norbert Norquist.
• Perri Klass M.D. – Another Awkward Sex Talk: Respect and Violence : A doc addresses the decline in civility (has any older generation ever thought it wasn’t declining) at a much deeper level than just opening doors for people. It’s mostly about how to not have a feral, brutish son.
• Nicholas Wade*: Evidence That Mice Produce Egg Cells After Birth ; Most striking part in Wade’s rendition of this news from China is its routine mention of dying offspring green via genetic engineering to reveal activity of egg stem cells. Not so long ago, that tool itself was sensational news. Excellent job of stuffing a lot of info into a fairly brief yarn.
• Henry Fountain: Observatory / Sonar Can Cause Temporary Deafness in Dolphins ; A model item – interesting, informative, yet reflects doubt and uncertainty inherent in the scientific process.

As ever lots more in Whole Section ;

*NOTE: This news on infertile mice growing new eggs got plenty of pickup elsewhere yesterday and today.  Examples include Independent (UK) Steve Connor who used extended menopause as his angle ; USNews & World Report – Deborah Kotz ; NatureNews Brendan Maher ; Australian Leigh Dayton ; HealthDay Amanda Gardner ;

  As the morning closes, just a quick note on news that is making a lot of news – the Obama adminstration’s posture toward quick and strong, or maybe-we-should-focus-like-a-laser-beam-on-the-economy, response to climate change urgencies. Here are just a few of many pertinent links.
Kent Garber, a USNews & World Report energy and climate writer, got some mileage the last few days on the new White House and its campaign promises to get cracking on carbon caps or other ways to slow down global warming. Friday, he was Ira Flatow‘s guest on Science Friday broadcast by NPR (for the audio, the control bar is toward the upper left). And today he has a blog post out on White House energy and climate change adviser Carol Browner’s explanation during a meeting at MIT of what is likely to be coming. She promises, it says here, that the new administration will be aggressive in international talks but adds a note of realpolitic: the nation’s stance will be “driven by what we are prepared to do domestically.”

That latter aspect got a good rundown Friday in the NYTimes by John M. Broder, who wrote that for all the campaign bluster the new man in change “has taken a cautious and rather passive role…proclaiming broad goals while remaining aloof from details of climate legislation now in Congress.”

A note of patience, and faint skepticism, seems to be slipping into mass media coverage of the braver new green world in the US>

-CP

This sounds like something from When Worlds Collide … because actually it is. Not the 1930s sci fi book and 1950s movie. The hypothesized actuality – the mighty blow struck upon the young Earth by a Mars-sized planet dubbed Theia that, some say, not only vaporized much of the Earth’s crust and melted most of the rest but gave birth to the Moon.

Two spacecraft launched in 2006 and separately, slowly enroute to orbits optimized to view the Sun in stereo – hence their collective mission name, STEREO – are a few months from passing through near-magical little knots in the interactions of Earth and Sun. Those larger masses choreograph several gravitational wells moving through empty space. The particular two in the news now are the L4 and L5 libration, or Lagrangian, points. One is ahead of Earth in its orbit and the other behind. Things in L4 and L5 can stay there held in place by nothing there. Here’s the spooky part: maybe a whole planet was there, billions of years in the past. And it got jiggled loose, perhaps sprung by Venusian gravitational meddling and sent careering at Earth (shades of psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky’s fevered dreams of the comet Venus).   Researchers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight center will use the Stereo pair’s instruments to check for any leftovers still there since before Theia met Gaia and spawned Selene. And, no dummies, mission managers put out a press release to give their Stereo pair a bit of news before their main job, to watch the sun from points well beyond L4 and L5, gets underway (they are, one must add, already sending plenty of solar snapshots to Earth).

Stories:

• LiveSCIENCE – Clara Moskowitz: The Search for the Solar System’s Lost Planet ; The story has a good, moody feel to it. One thing though: she writes that nobody is sure whether Earth was hit by a planet-class thing, or perhaps an asteroid or comet. Tracker’s not positive about this, but would not any comet or asteroid big enough to excavate a Moon and more from Earth’s hide automatically be far beyond cometary or asteroidal girth?
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts (blog) : Stereo spacecraft set to search for lunar origins ;

Hope the two find something interesting at those Lagrangian points, whether it is a remant of Theia or not.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Goddard Press Release, Stereo Mission ; and if you really want to know in mathematical detail how a planet could form at L4 or L5 and then whack Earth just right to eject a lunar mass into orbit: Here’s  Where Did The Moon Come From? by two Princeton scientists.

Pic source Wikipedia ;

-CP

Here’s a story that engages the imagination. US planetary observers have found clear, white evidence to back an “iceball Mars” hypothesis that the Red Planet once was largely caked with ice – and that much of it is still there just under the dust and dirt. The tale is at AAAS’s ScienceNOW site. Veteran Science magazine reporter Richard A. Kerr picked it up at last month’s Lunar and Planetary Science Conference north of Houston. There is nothing arcane about what the researchers did, although they needed some very sophisticated gadgetry. They looked for fresh smudges on Mars in satellite photos that might signal recent, small impact strikes.  Then they took a closer look with orbiting spectrometers and imaging cameras. Two papers, Kerr writes, delivered the news: little impactors left patches of white and all signs point to nearly pure water ice. While the Phoenix Lander confirmed such shallow ice deposits in one place, these things provide a strong hint they are widely spread.  Short piece, nifty too. One would like to know how large an object is needed for such excavations. One would suppose a fist-sized or even smaller rock might do it – if it’s still going fast enough through the thin Martian air.

-CP

Here’s a salute to science philanthropy, if such a term exists for the practice of using private money for public good works.

Most big-league science and its discoveries depend overwhelmingly on government financing.  Several fields are exceptions. Paleoanthropology gets much of its support from the likes of the Leakey Foundation and National Geographic Society. Its parent specialty paleontology enjoys similar sorts of extra-governmental support.  Big-animal systematics and population biology – especially expeditions into remote places to see what lives there – is propelled largely by such outfits as Conservation International, Natural Resources Defense Council, World Wildlife Fund, Wildlife Conservation Soc’y, Nature Conservancy, and others The Tracker should probably include. Until recently, one astronomical sub-specialty, the radio and laser-based efforts to detect extra-terrestrial civilizations got along almost entirely on public donations including those from a few millionaires and billionaires. A few major, straight-science astronomy observatories – the Keck in Hawaii comes to mind – got built with private foundation dough. The results can be exciting (‘though we’re still waiting on SETI) and the stories gripping. The downside is that journalists may be shut out until the scientists get clearance from their funders to talk (Nat’l Geo. Soc’y particularly. Just try showing up at one of its field research sites and getting an advance look-around). Results may arrive via press release, not from the normal peer review and double-check process of academia. But it’s better than the research not having occurred at all.

This all comes to mind on reading press accounts yesterday and this morning on discovery in Indonesia of a remote forest where orangutans thrive. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of the typically red apes are there – in this case, of a subspecies with darker hair than the more common variety. The population presumably has persisted there for a very long time, unappreciated by scientists who census rare animals. The news was issued by The Nature Conservancy. The news’s flavor resembles that late last month from the Wildlife Cons. Soc’y upon discovery of thousands of rare Irawaddy estuarine dolphins in the mangrove-tangled sloughs of Bangladesh. This time, on orangs, the locale is what AP‘s Robin McDowell calls “forests nestled between jagged, limestone cliffs on the east edge of Borneo.” Limestone may be a clue to explaining its lack of people. Karst country tends toward poor soils and not much surface water for farming. McDowell appears to have contacted a few primatologists outside Nature Conservancy for comment. One speculation is that the high concentration of newly found apes is due in part to flight from fires set in nearby forests by palm oil plantation owners and other farmers, plus the big wildfires of the late 1990s drought.

Other stories:

• AFP – New orangutan population ‘found on Borneo’ ; and congrats to the reporter and editors who let stand one less-than-entirely-worshipful description of these animals, perhaps aimed just at this one subspecies by one member of the WCS team: “…we always joke that they are stupid…”. One tip for the search engineers at Google: drop the automated map insets showing locations of datelines on news stories. They often have no relationship to the news itself – such as this one letting readers know where Jakarta is.
• BBC – New rare orangutan find in Borneo ; It could be, it says here, a “kind of orangutan refugee camp,” the kind of description that cries out for outside, expert assessment. Vivid, though. And it took ten hours by car, five by boat, and another several on foot to get there. These days, that is remote. But somewhere Charles Darwin’s ghost is shaking its head and chuckling.
• CNN – Saeed Ahmed: New population of endangered orangutans found ;

Grist for the Mill: No press release is to be found so the exact way this got into the press is not clear. But it’s been circulating for two weeks. A Nature Conservancy blog, by one of the researchers, has been up since late last month. It includes a YouTube video of the big fella in the pic up there.

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) BBC Mundo explains that Cuban ophthalmologists use simple, cheap and 10-minute eye surgery that could restore vision to half of the 37 million blind people in the World. In the story, we do miss the standard “according to Dr. X who is not involved in the research…”

En periodismo científico, en muchas ocasiones al final de una noticia se suele utilizar el recurso “Según el científico X no relacionado en la investigación…”. La idea es contrastar la notoriedad del anuncio con las opiniones de otro experto neutral, ya sea para confirmar que se trata de un tremendo hallazgo, o para constatar que existen opiniones diversas y el asunto no está tan claro todavía.

Hay veces en las que este elemento de contrapunto es más necesario que otras. De hecho, en ciertas ocasiones, una nota sin él resulta claramente incompleta.

Esto es lo que ocurre en este buen reportaje de BBC Mundo, en el que Fernando Ravsberg explica que la mitad de los 37 millones de ciegos en el mundo podrían volver a ver con una operación sencillísima y barata que no toma más de 10 minutos.
Desde la primera frase del artículo, estás esperando que “un oftalmólogo X no relacionado con la investigación…” te confirme que esto es una proeza y deberíamos anunciarla a todas las autoridades sanitarias, o matice las afirmaciones de los protagonistas. Son tan contundentes, que resulta inevitable que el lector neófito se quede con ciertas dudas.

Como en otras ocasiones, no se trata de desconfianza hacia un profesional determinado. Además, son de sobra conocidas los loables esfuerzos que Cuba realiza en temas de salud pública más allá de sus fronteras. Según la nota de BBC World, la “Operación Milagro” impulsada por los gobiernos de Cuba y Venezuela ha devuelto la vista de manera gratuita a 1.500.000 personas en 61 centros oftalmológicos donados y atendidos por Cuba en 20 países de Latinoamérica y África. Bravo por la iniciativa. Pero aquí no analizamos la noticia en sí, sino su tratamiento.

Simplemente se trata de solicitar el pequeño grado de desconfianza intrínseca que el periodista debe tener ante todo aquél que le cuente un avance de tal envergadura. Más cuando no se habla de una investigación sobre la conducta social de las larvas del pepino de mar, sino de devolver la visión a la mitad de todos los ciegos del mundo.

En el artículo se menciona que “Las autoridades permitieron a la prensa extranjera entrar al hospital”. Todos sabemos que ante una visita importante siempre acicalamos bien nuestro hogar; y aquellos periodistas a los que alguna institución les ha invitado a conocer su trabajo habrán percibido que lo expuesto es siempre fabuloso.
No estaría de mal que además de las declaraciones de varios médicos y de pacientes, como muy bien hace el artículo, se incluyeran también algunos datos provenientes de otras fuentes.

De nuevo, no es escepticismo malintencionado. La operación milagro es sin duda un éxito. Como informa Panactual ya ha beneficiado más de 38.000 panameños,  y más de 24.000 uruguayos según El Espectador, pero si alguien no relacionado con el centro hospitalario cubano aportara más datos al reportaje, seguro que ésta ganaría un grado más de entidad a la afirmación de que podrían llegar a los 18.5 millones de cegueras corregidas. Si tenemos la oportunidad de viajar a un hospital de La Habana para cubrir esta noticia, seguro que también hay tiempo para una llamadita…

It’s the International Year of Astronomy. Big deal, one might say. Astronomy is among the most glamorous and, per-researcher, heavily reported and publicly appreciated fields of science. Its practitioners need no publicity boosts. The Wall St. Journal‘s Robert Lee Hotz may beg to differ, if his tidy, swiftly-paced, and wide-ranging column this week is any guide. If the Tracker were assigned to write in one column about one of Galileo’s original telescopes now on display in Philadelphia, the Kepler and other new NASA observatories, the history of the first telescopes (no, Galileo hardly invented them), an inexpensive new telescope inspired by Galileo’s desgin, and a lot of other astronomical history spanning four centuries – I would say no can do. It’s a well-crafted, well-sourced piece of writing on an ancient science that has few practical applications. But it engages the soul. Hmmm. That WSJ picture there…. looks like Lee hisself peering through the eyepiece. Must mean the Journal, for one, still has some money in its travel budget. Lee also narrates a polished video.

-CP

A vista of a vanished time come gradually into focus in the Times (UK) today. Reporter Charlene Sweeney has the story, relying largely on research reported in British Archaeology magazine about a paleolithic site called Biggar. She marches readers in simple declarative sentences through work that pushes the documented occupation date of Scotland back by 3,000 years. The story grows as it goes along. The reader accumulates such facts (or inferences) as that England itself has signs of human or pre-human presence going back 700,000 years (it sure was not H. sapiens) to belief that early humans or their close kin tried to settle the British isles seven times before that last one took, about 12,000 years ago. As for Scotland, it says here that the scattering of flint blades, newly dated, may have been left by big game hunters from a future Denmark or northern Germany. They would have ambled across the ice-age plains, now deep underwater, to what are now coastal lands. Maybe they were chasing giant elk. Could be.

Other stories:

• BBC – Signs of earliest Scots unearthed ;
• Glasgow Daily Record – Lucinda Cameron : Archaeologists find 14,000-year-old settlement at Biggar ;
• Scotsman – Jenny Haworth: Scotland’s most ancient home found – at 14,000 years old. Might even have been rhinos on the scene, she says ;

Pic source Biggar Archaeology ;

-CP