With burning of coal still the biggest bad guy in the greenhouse – and barely anything being done about it worldwide – among the only bright spots in the energy sector for climate change worriers is growing hope for liquid biofuels. Two stories out today suggest that turning plants into fuel may not be entirely such a losing proposition after all. The more common word lately has been that, especially for corn ethanol, biofuel proudction only diverts cropland from food production and is so inefficient it barely makes sense in any case. but maybe, with new processes entering heavy duty industrial RD&D as described in these pieces, that downside won’t be quite so severe.

Reuters‘s Inae Riveras reports from Sao Paulo on major moves there to expand that nation’s enormous cane sugar to ethanol industry into production of biodiesel from the same  source. One also learns that one of the companies involved, called Amyris Biotechnologies, already has pilot plants working in Brazil and in California. It uses advanced breeds of yeast and other microbes to create a genuine petroleum-like hydrocarbon, rather than alcohol, from plant sugars. No word in this story whether cellulose is an immediate target as feedstock. Hope so. The reporter should have answered it.

A broader perspective on such biofuels ran last week and also on the Reuters site, under a “GreenBiz.com” flag, in first person by a savvy-sounding reporter named Marc Gunther.

In the NYTimes Business Section today Clifford Krauss reports a complementary story on a partnership between oil giant BP and a little outfit called Verenium. Its goal is to similarly turn cane-derived sugars into liquids that can be stored, piped, and burnt in engines that same as gasoline and diesel. Again, one wants to know more on cellulose question. (the Verenium site, in Grist below, says yes cellulose is a top priority). Most interesting – and appropriate for a business story – Krauss describes the practical, cost-cutting benefits that accrue to small, green-energy startups when they ally themselves with huge, old-line corporations with engineers who know how to build giant, complicated refineries at a cost that leaves room for profit. PLus, one plot of cane for the project is in the US – Louisiana.

Grist for the Mill: Amyris Biotechnologies ;  Verenium ;

-CP

Hints to the emergence of leprosy as a human disease, say archeologists from Appalachian State University and from Deccan College-Deemed University at Pune in India, may lie in a 4000-year-old skeleton of a middle-aged man uncovered in Rajasthan, a large and mainly desert state in India’s northwest. He apparently was of the Calcolithic people, an agricultural and small-village society. The man’s jaws and nasal structures are severely eroded in a pattern typical of infection by Mycobacterium leprae – leprosy. And that, the team reports in PLoS ONE, seems to make it the earliest case known to science and the first prehistoric case found in India. If true, that bolsters some interpretation of ancient Vedic texts, written later in India, as description of the disease there – before it entered Europe about the time that Alexander’s weary army dragged itself back from the subcontinent.

The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid writes it short. He starts with “Leprosy is one of mankind’s most ancient scourges, mentioned in writing form ancient India to the Bible to the Middle Ages.” With its slow disfigurement it clearly caught the imagination of ancient civilizations and their scriveners.  Schmid’s tidy piece smartly points out that, today, it is fairly easily treatable.

A somewhat more expansive take is in the NYTimes where Nicholas Wade reports that it may “help solve the puzzle of where the disease originated.” He also reports however that hypotheses for the virus’s emergence – its only other known hosts are armadillos – cannot tell if the contagion arose in Africa and was carried by the humans migrating out perhaps 50,000 years ago, or more recently in or near India. One wonders how the new find in India helps clarify things, as its presence in India 4000 years ago appears consistent with either speculation.

Other stories:

• Times of India (Press Trust of India service, datelined Wash. DC): ‘Oldest evidence of leprosy found in India’ ;
• The Hindu (IANS news service, also filed from DC): Oldest evidence of leprosy traced to India ; Oddly, this one says the skeleton is of a child. The PLoS paper estimates the man was in his late 30s.

Grist for the Mill:

Appalachian State U. Press Release ; PLoS ONE paper ;

-CP

Wide tracts of coral rise as much as 100 meters above the sea floor in the depths west of Ireland, say researchers from the Nat’l University of Ireland in Galway after a joint Irish-French deep water survey expedition. These days, to find such a thing on a known fishing ground – called the Porcupine Bank – without sign of heavy damage by bottom trawls seems to be good news.  The rough terrain, one is told, may have protected the 200 square kilometer area in which the corals and associated organisms seem to be thriving.

The Irish Independent‘s Paul Melia picked up the news from the university and, in a lede that seems a bit off topic, reports it “could lead to new medical treatments.” That would be a good outcome. But as an angle it seems a bit tangential, stemming from the chief scientist’s remark that coral reefs are full of organisms with complex biochemistry evolved for survival in harsh environments while competing with other creatures and microbes – hence could yield medically useful compounds and perhaps DNA that might be exploited by genetic engineering, who knows? Irish Times‘s Charlie Taylor, in a briefer dispatch built off the university’s announcement, puts the biochemistry angle at the bottom.

Bloomberg‘s Alex Morales writes the story from London and from a far less medical, more global perspective. As with other initial reports, several of the researchers’ quotes he uses are off the press release. But he provides perspective with mention of similar provinces known in other seas around the world including one coral rich region off Norway considerably larger than the discovery near Ireland. His story gets in the threats of bottom fishing and the extraordinary fragility of such things.

Grist for the Mill: NUI Galway Press Release ;

AN EXCLOO FOR YOU – another global cold water coral perspective:

Recently, as Tracker readers may be tired of hearing, I took a vacation to Alaska. Our small ship, the Sea Bird, docked in the tiny, friendly, fishing hamlet of Elfin Cove on Chichagof Island. Tied up next to us was a long-line fishing boat. A tall man on board was slicing herring as halibut bait. I spotted a lacy, pink spot of color. It was a coral spray about two feet across atop the aft cabin. I asked him if it is something he could sell. Not really, he said with a cordial grin. It is just pretty. He said he and his fishing mates pull such things up regularly when after bottom fish – laying the lines on the seabed hundreds of feet down. One wonders how old it is – decades at least. Centuries, maybe? The Sea Bird’s chef prepared some of the local halibut for dinner one night. Delicious.

Barely Related Underwater News from Ireland Dept:

• BBC – John Rainsford: Sub will explore undersea borders ; A new remotely operated vehicle will soon begin mapping the sea floor off the Irish Republic. It could map corals, one supposes, but provinces of oil and gas look like the more likely aims.

-CP

 For reasons unclear, The Tracker thought Komodo Dragons are restricted to some essentially uninhabited island wilderness in Indonesia where documentary movie makers feed them the occasional goat to show how fierce they are. Wrong again. Two days ago AP‘s Irwan Firdaus filed a possibly exaggerated tale - maybe by him or his sources or both – hinting a dragon uprising could be underway after generations of coexistence practically live among local people lounging about near schoolyards and under shade trees in town.

There have been incidents lately, it says here. Fear is rising. A young boy was killed while using the bushes outside his home as a latrine. A fisherman, cutting through the woods to get some wild fruit, died by lizard attack. A park ranger, sitting at his desk, was suddenly seized by one of the leathery beasts after it sneaked up the stairs. “They never used to attack us when we walked alone in the forest, or attack our children,” a villager says. Firdaus consulted an Australian professor for speculation why the reptiles seem more vicious (the answer: they’re hungry?). He cites a recent study suggesting the reptiles are not merely equpped with jagged,bacteria-laden teeth, but with venom. The suggestion that the animals have undergone some sort of alarming change is hard to swallow. The recent attacks have occurred over a span of a few years. But the tale overall is spritely, the reporting appears reasonably diligent.

At about the same time that the AP filed this story, it appeared in the Telegraph in Britain under the byline of its South East Asia Correspondent Thomas Bell. Quotes are the same as in the AP story. Only one is attributed to AP. It’s just a little piece and perhaps Bell made some calls to confirm the basic facts. But it seems from here that if a correspondent’s own ears (or signed email, letter, etc.) don’t bear first hand witness to an utterance or other declaration, the report ought to suggest as much.

Related News:

• Digital Journal (Australia) Paul Wallis: Australia’s ancient super lizard Megalania was venomous ;  The size of a horse, it was… and was perhaps ancestral or close cousin to today’s Komodo dragons.
• Popular Science – Laurie J. Shcmidt: Prying open the secrets of a giant lizard’s poisonous bite; More on the venom angle.
• NYTimes – Carl Zimmer (already tracked last week from ScienceTimes) : Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate.

-CP

Cap and trade worked pretty well in the US to quash sulfur emissions from coal plants during the 90s, but for CO2 etc. plenty of economists say that a straight tax is simpler, more honest, and less prone to being gamed or subverted by savvy business executives and brokers. In Copenhagen leading world business execs say cap and trade looks good to them and maybe for those same reasons. It appears that the world is soon going to know whether the system is efficient and effective or not. Things do seem to be congealing around that specific action rather than mere gassy words. The AP‘s John Heilprin reports this morning that the resolution at the World Business Summit on Climate Change adds “momentum to prospects of forging a new UN climate treaty” during meetings late this year and also in Copenhagen. At CNET.news Martin LaMonica reports the news, also focussing on the display of so much determination by so many high-level execs to do something about climate change.

More news is likely to flow on this. One reason to post on it immediately is to draw attention to a useful primer on cap and trade politics and complexity. It ran Saturday in the Wall Street Journal, by David Wessel with a focus on the US Waxman-Markey Bill and its authors’ politically expedient decision to soften its impact by giving away rather than auctioning most of the allowances.

*UPDATE: Washington Post – David A. Fahrenthold: Caps, Trades and Offsets: Can Climate Plan Work? ; With a snappy lede the story starts from scratch to explain cap and trade mechanisms – assuming readers know nothing about them or how they work. Not a bad assumption either.

Grist for the Mill: Copenhagen Climate Council Press Release ;

Related News: AP – Elaine Kurtenbach (fri May 22): China: Rich nations must cut emissions by 40 pct ; That’s a pretty stiff load for cap and trade to carry. Kurtenbach does not lay out the underlying rationale by the world’s current air pollution champ to forgive itself such a burden. China makes some points: it make stuff that the rest of the world orders, its per capita greenhouse emissions are not so high, and even though it is now the major source of CO2, its share of airborne fossil carbon that has been building up for the last century is still well behind US and other longtime, industrial regions.
pic source ;

-CP

One might argue that the US and NASA finally have a major league science triumph from the enormous, not particularly useful International Space Station – in the form of the new and improved Hubble Space Telescope. Not many others seems to be suggesting this, but without the space station and a large human exploration program it is doubtful that NASA could have even tried, much less pulled off, the repair and extensive upgrades for what many call the greatest telescope in history. The station program has accumulated within the space agency vast experience at microgravity construction. It has produced a small, standing army of clever problem-solving engineers, platoons of torque wrench-savvy astronauts, and test facilities to put them together. The men and women in spacesuits pulled out and replaced gizmos that Hubble’s original engineers never intended to be unbolted (thank goodness they didn’t weld them in). Five shuttle flights and 23 space walks have gone into Hubble over the years. As for this last one, whether the billions upon billions spent on the station was an efficient way to maintain such talent is a separate issue but the Hubble’s resurrection from its death bed, buffed and better than ever, is deeply impressive.

(And yes, The Tracker knows the down side:  Hubble was put into a less-than optimal orbit and trimmed to less than ideal size mainly as a make-work program to give the shuttle and astronauts rather than a rocket with no people the job of delivering it. But if it hadn’t been designed for human attention, it likely would have snapped its last pictures and spectra long ago.)
A few stories and editorials extolling the telescope’s new abilities have come out over the past few work days and the three-day weekend, including:

• NYTimes (editorial): An Even Better Hubble ;
• St. Petersburg Times (editorial): Grand achievement, with more to come ;
• Houston Chronicle (Editorial): This is why we fly ; Hubble repair mission showcases the value of the manned space program ; This one is a wee over the top even for my taste. The James Webb Space Telescope may outdo Hubble with nobody putting a glove on it after it leaves the launch pad. Human-tended astronomy instruments have never really caught on.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Hubble probing mysteries of deep space ; A detailed rundown comparing the old and new Hubble. Plus, SF Chron editorial – Hubble’s final triumph ;   Great typo here – story says the repairs were made in a meteoroid-infested “anger zone” rather than danger zone.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Final spacewalk leaves like-new Hubble ready for its final bow ; Better than new, in truth. As he writes, it’s also the beginning of the end, with Hubble to be sent plummeting into the Pacific within a decade.

Related: NEW NASA BOSS nominated:

Over the weekend news officially broke on President Obama’s choice for a new NASA Administrator, former astronaut and Marine Corps. Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden, Jr.; A naval aviator and Vietnam veteran, he flew aboard four shuttle flights. News that he was the likely man had been leaking already, notably via the Wall Street Journal and its reporter Andy Pasztor a week and one half ago.

Other stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein : Uncertain NASA gets familiar former astronaut boss ;
• BBC – Obama names US space agency chief ;
• LA times – John Johnson Jr.: Obama’s NASA selection is a boost for manned spaceflight ; Usage note: looks like the term “crewed spaceflight” and “crewed vehicle,” which sound crude to the ear, haven’t caught on. Johnson uses “manned” all the way. Johnson suggests that the goal of US astronauts’ return to the Moon and heading for Mars might be embraced by the Obama administration.
• Orlando Sentinel – Mark K. Matthews, Robert Block: Obama picks ex-astronaut Charles Bolden to be new NASA administrator. Matthews and Block report he was not the White House’s initial choice; the piece portrays the rocky political seas Bolden must navigate.
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Retired General Picked to Lead NASA ;

The extended metaphor is a standard item from the writer’s toolbox. William J. Broad heralds the upcoming dedication of the heroically-huge National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to lead the section this morning. He likens it from the start to a cathedral of light (ok, it’s more analogy than metaphor). New York’s St. John the Divine cathedral closes the piece, and the huge machine’s boss clearly likes the comparison too – expounding part way through on NIF as a modern equivalent.

The piece is solid, with plenty of nicely composed description of the boggling scale of the project and of the technical challenge, and mastery, it entails. But while it has half a dozen sentences to extend the cathedral comparison only one throwaway line, just a clause really and without embellishment, shares with readers the reason the great machine exists: “..would help keep the nation’s nuclear arms reliable without underground testing,..” and that’s it. This is more attention than some reporters have paid to the prime reason Congress and several administrations have pungled up billions of dollars for NIF and its predecessor inertial confinement laser fusion goliaths at Livermore. Broad – following a media pattern The Tracker has noted before – focusses almost exclusively on the glamour of a  longshot chance it will open the way for practical fusion-spawned electricity. But stockpile stewardship – a defensible motive, after all – is why it exists. It ought be presented as forthrightly as the machine’s potential to spur fusion energy and to mimic the processes that make stars to shine.

If lines like “..sporulating mildew, rot and blight, smut and rust, jock itch and athlete’s foot” fan your firebox, you might guess they’re from Natalie Angier. Her dithyramb on fungi shares the front page with Broad’s ode to churchish megalasers. One more sampling of her phrasemaking: she calls their spores “billions of wistful homuncular fungi.” Wistful? Ok.

Other tasty bits include Barron H. Lerner‘s recall of the old red line in academic medicine limiting the number of jews on the staffs of many research hospitals and med schools; Sandeep Jauhar‘s essay dissection of the chummy business system by which doctors refer patients to one another; and Brian Stelter‘s voyage into the world of super duper dooo-ooooper slo-mo film making that reveals fantastic events in everday life that our slowpoke eyes miss every time. Why the on line version doesn’t include a link to a few examples beats me.

More headlines to note:

• Claudia Dreifus : A CONVERSATION WITH Pauline Wiessner ; Anthropologist explains how social networking in the stone age helped preserve hunters and gatherers ;
• Katie Hafner : Texting May Be Taking a Toll ; one thinks, after the previous bullet, that maybe the !Kung people do a more fruitful job social networking than all those teenagers thumbing fixedly on their cell’s keypads.
• Jane E. Brody: A Brain Disorder Easily Missed ; Here’s a column that a lot of neurologists are going to be shown by worried relatives of stumbling oldsters.
• Henry Fountain: Winter Whereabouts of Basking Sharks ;

Plenty more in full Health and Science sections;

ONE MORE ON PAGE A-1 – Denise Grady – Autopsies of War Dead Reveal Ways to Save Others ; A delicately done report on a grisly, vital new database that military physicians are compiling with each, somber payload’s arrival at Dover AFB from distant battles. There may have been debate, one surmises, whether to run this yesterday – Memorial Day.

Tracking resumes Tuesday, May 26, following the three-day observation of Memorial Day in the US.

-CP

The last big post to the news and critique avalanche on a 47 million year old primate fossil has several updates worth reading. These include today (Friday) a well-reported, even-tempered account from Seed Magazine with information directly from the paleontologist in charge of the show – Norway’s Jørn Hurum – from the representatives of the journal PLoS ONE, and from executives at the History Channel. Also newly there is a fully fleshed narrative blog post at The Barista that arrived Saturday.

Rather than continue to nibble this media event away with small posts, for now I’ll keep most of it at this updated post that has been growing since Wednesday.

-CP

Not all that many years ago Tom Siegfried had one of the best spots in daily science journalism – running a section at the Dallas Morning News and columnizing extravagantly across the spectrum on topics few other reporters had open license to tackle with anything like intelligence. Then that job dried up in the first wave of visits by print media outlet visits to the intensive care unit (or worse, the morgue). After a wander in the wilderness Tom landed an even better spot as editor at Science News. He has out this week a muse on infinity, cosmology, inflation, multiverse, anthropic principle, and such. Much of it is synthesized from the big Arizona State University “Origins” symposium that physicist Lawrence Krauss hosted in Tempe (all sessions are on video archive).  Vintage Siegfried, including a flash back to the old Ben Casey TV show.

I write once in a while for Tom Siegfried and he edits me, so I’ll return the favor: he, at one point, misspelled (typo’d more likely) “spacetime.” 13th graf, I think. It’ll likely get fixed fast, now. It has a good arc, though – and even refers at the end back to his lede’s imagery.

-CP

Today’s Science got news mileage from two, very different reports about things in space.

Mars Rover Opportunity does Victoria Crater:

A gang of about 30 academics and NASA staffers running the mechanical methuselahs known as Mars rovers reported the results of a two-year-long inspection of Victoria Crater. The pit is so far from where rover Opportunity landed more than five years ago that the team never expected ever to get there (and now it is rolling along toward the even larger, farther crater Endeavour). Victoria, the researchers report, confirms what two smaller craters had implied: this region of Mars at times was soaked with a high briny water table and probably surface streams, had wild weather with periods of intense winds blowing desert sands into giant dunes, and has always been pretty cold. Spheres of hematite, so-called blueberries, are rife and are important clues, it says here. As news, this is solid, persuasive, but incremental. Thus arises a challenge for reporters to make it fresh enough, yet sensible, to get past editors.

Stories:

• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: NASA Scientists Find More Evidence of Water on Mars ; It IS hard to find a hed or angle on yet more water clues on Mars that don’t sound like the myriad such previous stories. After mentioning life as a possibility in her lede, she quotes the lead scientists thus: “we say water but this stuff was more like sulfuric acid” … and salty as hell, too. Habitable? Barely.
• National Geographic News – Ker Than: Huge Mars Region Shaped by Water, Rover Mission Finds ; Good idea to particularize the locale in the hed, a hint of newness in the details.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson : Entire Region of Mars Likely Shaped by Water ;
• PBS – Lea Winerman: Five Years Later, Mars Rovers Continue to Make Discoveries ; A vague, teaser hed may be the best idea.
• Grist for the Mill: Cornell U. Press Release via EurekAlert.

A pulsar gets spun up:

 Another huge astro gang – about two dozen from Canada, the US, Australia, Holland, Russia, amd UK – reported finding evidence backing the leading hypothesis for how spinning neutron stars of the noisy type called pulsars can go from merely turning round and round to spinning absolutely madly, hundreds to thousands of times a second. The lead author is a grad student at McGill (#2 is her prof). They  and the rest found a fast one amid all the suspected ingredients: a partner star and clear signs that the larger companion had dumped a river of its atmosphere – carrying a load of angular momentum – on to the neutron star. Various instruments glimpsed it over a nine year span, providing a stop-action replay of the process of getting spun up. Such neutron are ultradense and tiny, small enough to fit easily into, say, Los Angeles (But don’t try it. Just guessing here, but it might take one millisecond-turn or so before its gravity pulled LA, Hollywood, Orange County, and then the whole Earth into a thin, degenerate layer on its surface).

Stories:

• BBC : New  light shed on pulsar puzzle ;
• CanWest News – Amy Minsky : Astronomers watch star recycle energy / Dying pulsar is seen ‘gobbling up’ matter from a nearby star ; She takes an angle, suggested by a press release, and runs with it. This is “..a green trend (that) has, literally, reached cosmic proportions.”
• AFP: Scientists witness a cosmic recycling first: study ;
• ABC (Australia) Nicky Phillips: Astronomers find pulsar ‘missing link’ ; We need this – a story for the week on a missing link that is not a fossil and makes sense as a link that really was sought by science.
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Missing Link in Pulsar Evolution Is a Cannibal ; She tackles the topic with ghoulish zest;
• What- is-science-and-journalism-coming-to? Dept: North Denver News – Astronomers catch a star being revved up ;  Dunno what N.Denver News is, but it or its robot news aggregator gathered up a press release from Australia on this and ran it, left out the first graf but included some odd file management coding hanging from its hem.
• GRIST FOR THE MILL:  Nat’l Radio Astronomy Obs. Press Release via EurekAlert; McGill University Press Release via E! ; CSIRO (Australia) Press Release

Chris Mooney bored narrowly and deeply into the wreckage left by collapsing print, daily media – the science writing wreckage in particular – at Science Progress, a site and magazine from the Center for American Progress. He did so by visiting a carpenter, Tom Paulson, former science writer for the vastly shrunken and now purely on line news aggregator Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The Tracker thought about Tom during a very brief stopover a few weeks ago in Seattle and spotted, on the waterfront, the iconic, spinning blue PI globe sitting atop the former paper’s old building. Now I know what he’s up to. He’s burning through his severance, has returned to his old trade, and is planning, planning…

Tom is not wreckage, by the way (that’s a metaphor, like the Tracker’s habit of calling news coverage “ink” even though there is less inked newsprint all the time) but his building trades job may include some demolition. His history and his thoughts on science journalism are worthy. And Mooney recounts a pretty good story Paulson told him about his brief career at UC-Berkeley as a p.r. man. More important is Paulson’s recollection of the recent, steady retreat by his erstwhile employer from use of serious news, and his strategizing on how to rely on his handyman and carpentry hammer less so he can get back into the science reporting game. Good fortune on that – he’s one of the good guys.

-CP