Two pieces in the section ought to be read together, with the one inside absorbed before reading the big feature up front. Inside, Jane Brody writes on fear and panic and the irrational way that people rank threats. Her first example? The immense flood of news and speculations about swine flu – an influenza variant that is turning out to be rather hum drum in virulence (if the 30,000 US deaths annually from influenza of the common sort can be considered hum drum). That prepares one to read, without too much anxiety or irrational exuberance, Andrew Pollack‘s detailed section leader on the hunt for what one source calls “The Universal.” That would be a vaccine that works pretty well against the great majority of Type A influenzas, perhaps including swine flu. Pollack explains in deep, if not ground-breaking news content, detail where vaccine specialists are focussing in efforts to make a vaccine that reacts to molecules that fast-mutating flu viruses have in common, rather than the easier ones to target that are unique to each strain. He includes a sidebar on the production hurdles that complicate making any vaccine, universal or not.

Other Stories:

• John Tierney : Message in What We Buy, But Nobody’s Listening ; a piece for straitened times. We get stuff fancier than we need, to show off. But the payoff is meager, it says here.
• Carol Ann Campbell: Health Outcomes Driving New Hospital Designs ; This might be reason, almost, for insurance companies to foot the bill for a private room at the hospital.
• Wallace Ravven: Antenna on Cell Surface Is Key to Development and Disease ; Purest piece of explanatory,absorbing science journalism in the section. Ravven, a Nor. Cal. freelancer, presents a seminar on how and why medical researchers have found, ot their amazement, that they had overlooked the one, tiny molecular, motorized pole sticking from each (or almost each) of our cells and its crucial role in its operation.
• Carl Zimmer: Chemicals in Dragon’s Glands Stir Venom Debate ; A master of crisp, fast freelance news writing explains a new, speculated reason Komodo lizards’ bites are so bad.
• Tara Parker-Pope: Kept From a Dying Partner’s Bedside : Not much here on science or medicine, but a memorable, maddening account of obtuse cruelty in some hospitals where staffers’ whims or stiff-necked rules keep some patients’ most-loved ones away or out of the loop.

As usual, lots more in whole section ;

-CP

There is not a whole lot, for those of us who enjoy reading about science just about all day long, more diverting and often informative than the stories that run in Britain’s press. The Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Observer, Mirror, Financial Times, Independent, Mail, and Star, even the Sun, plus of course the good old BBC and Reuters, have a passel of science writers whose output on their little archipelago west of Europe are about as prolific as the whole of the US – esp. if one doesn’t count purely online outlets.

But one must read them through, as the tendency at several of these pubs is to ramp up the hed and the lede so high in volume that, if it were a shortwave radio, the feedback and distortion would prompt a turn of the squelch knob. Many tend to start out with a startler and then back into a more sensible body of writing.

All this comes to mind after an overall enjoyable jaunt through this brief one from The Sunday Observer‘s science editor Robin McKie: “How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans.” It is not just the headline. The lede is “One of science’s most puzzling mysteries – the disappearance of the Neanderthals – may have been solved. Modern humans ate them, says a leading fossil expert.”

Read on and one finds that:

• 1. The scientist never says their extinction is solved, only that some eating of Neanderthal meat may have occurred, with modern humans the likely perps ;
• 2. The evidence comprises cutmarks on a single jawbone ;
• 3. Even the scientist’s own close colleagues and team members include some who won’t go so far as to say cannibalism for sure (cannibalism comes up – in a quote – during  the piece.  It would not be cannibalism. This is H. sapiens supposedly eating H. neanderthalensis).

Given the way HIV ravages the immune system – opening the door to other viruses and microbes that are usually the proximate cause of AIDS symptoms – it seems natural to look for some way to induce immunity but without relying on T cells, B cells, antibodies, or other agents of the immune system. A sprinkling of stories out today, based on a report from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the journal Nature Medicine, reports progress along exactly that trail of logic.

The idea is to use a viral vector to genetically modify other cells so that they steadily secrete proteins known to hamstring HIV’s abilities. At the same time the work, while showing progress in mouse and monkey models, is a long way from providing anything clinically useful in people. So reporters have to forward the encouraging news without suggesting that, already in some lab, are the tools needed to render a person impervious to HIV and its disease AIDS.

Tracker does not know why none of AP‘s good medical writers did this, but ace science writing utility man Randolph E. Schmid handles it with a simile in his lede : “Like a general whose direct atrtacks aren’t working, scientists are now trying to outflank the HIV/AIDS virus.” Stressing the idea of a new tactic, rather than a new treatment, is a good way to blunt premature reader belief that if they just call the right doc, they can get this today.

Other stories:

• Philadelphia Inquirer – Josh Goldstein: Novel technique developed at CHOP may lead to HIV vaccine ; Good cautious story. He describes the proteins that the method induces as “antibody-like.” One might like to know if that means they are structurally similar to antibodies, or just perform the same general function of rendering the virus less dangerous.
• MIT Technology Review – Nora Schultz: Gene Transfer Offers HIV Hope ; Schultz explains in some detail what the new “antibody” is and, it appears, it does generally belong in one such class called immunoadhesins.
• Philadelphia Daily News – Kitty Caparella : Injection of hope for AIDS vaccine ; Feature style story – with some people news on the scientific process including welcome info on a grad student who did most of the work at the professor’s behest.

AND just for a reminder how this plays in the blogosphere:

Philebrity Blog – Holy Sh*t, Did CHOP Just Cure Aids?  Legitimate enough question. The legitimate answer is no.

Grist for the Mill: Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Press Release;

Related Grist for a Related Mill: Swedish Research Council Press Release (via ScienceDaily) on another approach to an HIV vaccine. It suggests that carrots might someday confer immunity. Another story that, if reported, calls for considerable care in doing so.

Pic: vector du jour, the adeno-associated virus. Source ;

USA Today‘s Dan Vergano last Friday stitched a bit of history about human embryonic stem cells with some samples of new research to make a useful point: While argument simmers on over funding, ethical guidelines, and underlying wisdom of studying or using such cells, things are far from static in the nation’s and the world’s laboratories. His specific angle for the story is a study in Nature showing an unusual, non-biochemical inducement for stem cells to convert into red blood cells. He also raises the troubling habit by stem cells of turning into tumors as a looming obstacle to clinical application – and an aspect that needs considerably more research. Looks like a good example of seeing a piece of spot news as opportunity to attend to a lot of other things to which one had intended to get. (And yes, Tracker knows the dangling preposition rule is dumb. I just like it and I get to edit myself).

-CP

The Tracker’s nose for news must be broken. Less then two weeks ago I was with a naturalist and traditional Northwest artist and carver, David Stephens, in a coastal woods near Glacier Bay in Southeast Alaska. He asked, “do you see what’s wrong with this forest?” Getting a blank look in reply he explained that the old growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock sort of peter out close to shore. A subtle bluff near the wood’s edge, he went on, is an old beach step. Post-glacial isostatic rebound is lifting the land so fast that the forest hasn’t kept up, its shrubby rim revealing where it is invading what had been below high tide just a century ago. I asked a cheerful geology professor who is nuts about the region’s glacially-carved gneiss and diorite, Harold Stowell of the University of Alabama, if the rebound is outpacing global sea level rise. He said sure, several places around here.

That was while cruising around in the little ship Lindblad National Geographic Sea Bird (exactly what Nat’l Geo Soc’y has to do with the ship is very unclear). Stephens and Stowell were among the vessel’s fine naturalists. I suppose I figured, not quite consciously, that’s interesting as can be but if these guys know it well enough to tell cruise passengers about it, ‘must not be news. Wrong.

Cue the front page of today’s NYTimes and Cornelia Dean‘s story “As Alaska Glaciers Melt, It’s Land That’s Rising.”  She explains it all in considerable detail (‘tho I would have rephrased that hed to say “….Its Land Is Rising” just to avoid two apostrophes). Dean alertly smelled news where I merely smelled mossy woods. She keeps it moving fast with plenty of local color. Her main example is Juneau’s local, rapid uplift, tying the rapid retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier (and by inference its feeder, the huge Juneau Ice Field above the capital) to the shallowing of an important shipping channel and to coastal landowners’ acreage gains.  Dean does not explain how much of the uplift is due to recent acceleration beyond its slow rise since the last glacial maximum 13,000 years ago or whenever the ice around there was an astonishing mile or two thick. But the land really is popping up, and the glaciers really are galloping back. Wonder how long before Alaska’s last tidewater glacier kisses the sea a last goodbye and pulls its nose back up into the high country?

Pic: From a float plane out of Petersburg AK and the nearby, retreating LeConte glacier, its bergs floating past, May 4.  Most of the flats are due to low tide. But the small trees on the forest edge at the points of land and the stepped shoreline are evidences of uplift. So I heard.

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Scientists from Costa Rica explain in La Nación that its country’s wood industry produces 190.000 tons of waste that could be transformed in biofuel; They say that their research shows it is possible and is economically sensible. It’d be interesting to know why they refer to methanol instead of ethanol though.

Los biocombustibles, la idea de generar etanol a partir de materiales de origen vegetal, irrumpió con fuerza hace algunos años. Sin embargo, las extensas plantaciones de maíz que EEUU dedicó a este fin no parecen representar una mejora económica ni medioambiental. Y es poco eficiente. La caña de azúcar presenta un mejor rendimiento, y las algas marinas podrían ser una solución todavía más efectiva, pero sin duda la gran esperanza está depositada en el reaprovechamiento de los residuos forestales o agrícolas. El llamado “cellulosic biofuel”.

Si se lograra solucionar los varios problemas técnicos que de momento limitan esta posibilidad, sin duda sería una opción muy válida para países con gran densidad de bosques e industria maderera.

En un muy buen reportaje para La Nación de Costa Rica, Alejandra Vargas explica la propuesta de científicos Ticos de la Universidad Nacional de generar metanol a partir de los abundantes desechos de madera de teca, melina y ciprés que existen en su país.

Costa Rica comercializa 1339 millones de metros cúbicos de madera al año, generando 190.000 toneladas de desechos que podrían convertirse en combustible a razón de, según los científicos, 300 litros de metanol por tonelada. Una cantidad muy considerable, que además de solucionar el problema del “qué hacer con los desechos”, podría reducir la contaminación y generar nuevos empleos.

Esta iniciativa podría encajar muy bien en un gran numero de países de Latino América. Pero todo indica que falta solucionar varias limitaciones técnicas antes. Una de los principales es el rendimiento. Generar etanol a partir de azúcar es muchísimo más fácil que hacerlo a partir de madera. No hay color por el momento. En esta dirección van las investigaciones.

Si se le pudiera pedir un poquito más al artículo de Alejandra Vargas, sería los motivos por los que los investigadores hablan de metanol en lugar de etanol (el biocombustible por excelencia), y qué indicios les hacen pensar que esto “podría implementarse a mediano plazo en todo el país”. Sin duda se trata de una opción prometedora.

The Sixth Extinction is a term one has heard increasingly, and chillingly, for the last several years. There was the Late Devonian, Permian, Cretaceous-Tertiary, and others. Now it’s we who are doing it. Maybe it will be the Anthropocene extinction. The persistent word-crafter Elizabeth Kolbert gives it a wider reach in the current New Yorker. She gives it particular heft by expanding the scope of human culpability far beyond the overarching spectre of global warming. Our lethality has found expression with the loss of megafauna wherever humans showed up in the last 50,000 years. It is seen with most immediate particularity in the fungus wiping out frogs (could be physicians who did that!), and bats falling dead from another fungus in their cold winter caves. The dyings of the frogs and of the bats got a personal visit by Kolbert. Fine reporting, this. Can’t link to the whole story on line – it’s for subscribers – but here’s the abstract.

It’s not, in truth, fully evident that humanity’s presence is why the bats are dying in so many N. American hibernacles. Nonetheless….probably. That’s just how things are going.

-CP

Gautam Naik‘s first words in a paleontology story today are “In what could prove to be a landmark discovery…” which says two things. If he doesn’t spell it out immediately, its potential landmark status won’t jump right out. Second, maybe it has landmark discover potential, but it’s not there yet. The news he relays in the Wall St. Journal is based, he writes, on a report coming up in the on line Public Library of Science journal about a new find from the Messel Shale Pit Germany, a World Heritage Site that has yielded fossils for more than a century.  New material hints that the lineage that led to today’s lemurs – small primates – is more likely to include our direct ancestor (along with that of monkeys and apes) than is anything in another primate line: today’s tarsirs. This apparently is a topic of considerable debate among specialists.

The meat of the story is interesting. But the Tracker has objections to one of the story’s angles. Naik makes this out as fresh fodder for debate “between evolutionists … and creationists”. First, a quibble. The Tracker seldom hears evolutionary biologists refer to themselves as evolutionists, as the term seems too parallel to the dogmatism of, say, creationists. But they presumably are evolutionist in the same sense that when one hears “Democrat Party” one knows who is being referenced and one has a hint of the political coloration of the person using the term.

More important than the nomenclature is his expectation of sharper conflict between evolutionism and creationism. Hmmm. The two fields, one of doubt-based scientific inquiry and one of faith-based declaration, don’t really debate. They hardly speak. As Gould said, different magisteria. The only time sparks fly is at the behest of a third party – a school board, a court room, a blogger’s imagination, maybe a Larry King show, etc. It’s not as though they routinely call one another up or challenge one another in academic forums. Plus, what’s to debate? Evolutionary biologists say we’re descended from earlier, non-human creatures; creationists say we’re the singular product of divine will – many say all species are similarly separately created. How far back science traces our genealogy and in which direction is not germane to a schism deep as that.

A smaller quibble is that the story comes with a picture of a black and white lemur with a caption saying “humans may be descended from an animal that resembles present-day lemurs like this one.” The bones are 47 million years old! Tracker is no paleontologist, but it seems very likely that whatever it looked like, it bore little resemblance to a black and white, modern lemur.

So much for grousing. I did enjoy learning of the news. I want to know more. There is word here that the skeleton has been kept a big secret for two years. What’s that about?

Pic: Random pic of Messel Pit, source ;

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The glaciers from Popocatépetl volcano in Mexico have vanished. Climate change? That’s the fast answer. An excellent story in “¿CómoVes?” magazine explains that there might be other factors involved.

Que desaparezca un glaciar no es noticia. “Hombre… Sí lo es!” podéis pensar. Sí, claro. Efectivamente lo es. Pero me refiero a que no es algo que ocurra de un día para otro. Una sección de noticias científicas puede reflejar uno de esos insulsos estudios que anuncian el ritmo al que están decreciendo, pero nunca veremos un titular del estilo “Ayer desapareció el glaciar X”. Por eso, a veces son tan importantes los reportajes que ofrecen un contexto al lector.

Un buen ejemplo es el artículo escrito por Patricia Julio Miranda, Hugo Delgado Granados y Lucio Cárdenas González sobre la desaparición total de los glaciares del volcán Popocatépetl, publicado en la revista Mexicana ¿ComoVes?, dirigida por Estrella Burgos.

Tras una introducción muy detallada e informativa -pero que sería recortada sin contemplaciones en un formato de noticia- sobre cómo se forma un glaciar y con qué herramientas son estudiados por los científicos, el reportaje pasa a escudriñar los motivos de su desaparición del Popocatépetl.

Sé lo que estáis pensando: Calentamiento global! No corramos tanto…
El artículo deja claro que los glaciares son testigos directos de los cambios climáticos, y que la tendencia generalizada de retroceso glaciar a ritmos nunca antes vistos va de la mano del aumento global de la temperatura de la Tierra causada por la actividad humana. Pero los investigadores rehúyen zanjar el tema de una manera tan simple. La ciencia no se conforma fácilmente. Y hay otros dos factores a considerar en la desaparición de las enormes masas de hielo del Popocátépetl. Uno es el efecto regional en el clima que puede haber generado el crecimiento desorbitado de la Ciudad de México durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX. Y el otro es la actividad volcánica que se produjo en la zona hacia 1994.

Ambos participarían, junto al cambio climático, en la desaparición de estos glaciares. Pero resulta que los científicos todavía no saben en qué proporción. ¿Qué editor de periódico permitiría titular así una noticia, ofrecer tanto espacio, y no terminar dando una explicación? Los valientes. Porque resulta que así es la ciencia… con menos respuestas claras de las que nos pensamos.

Score one for a traditional remedy. The Tracker personally abhors the taste of ginger (but ginger snaps and ginger ale taste fine), and thus sat up on reading on the AP wire a report from Marilynn Marchione that had some good news about ginger as a medicine. Capsules of ginger extract appear to appreciably reduce the nausea associated with chemotherapy. The results, from a Univ. of Rochester team, are in a report from the American Society of Clinical Oncology in advance of its annual meeting later this month.

Medical science tends to test, and then dismiss as a placebo at best, potions derived from natural plants and extolled by healers of various sort. But once in awhile an herbal remedy gets imprimatur. Foxglove yielded digitalis, aspirin’s ancestry goes back to willow tree bark, morphine of course arose from poppy cultivation, taxol from yew trees, and quinine was born from the “fever tree.” People also have their hopes up for Cannabis and a fully legit anti-nausea drug untainted by marijuana hysteria. Marchione writes the news on ginger well, including a tincture of surprise – even by the researchers – that it did so well in initial trials. Herbal supplement companies already sell ginger extract for motion sickness (and a lot of other maladies – so many that a cynic might suggest they had to be right about something. Let’s see if herb peddlers ever take one of its bruited uses OFF their list).

A tip to the story is the ASCO’s guide to news at its annual meeting (see Grist below), and the organization held a press conference yesterday. Her story appears to handle the news in lively fashion without overdue hype of a substance that will likely need a good deal more work before it will get the FDA’s endorsement.

Other stories:

• Chicago Sun-Times – Monifa Thomas : Ginger cuts nausea in chemo patients ; Good enough story, hed is too emphatic ;
• CNN – Jacquelyne Froeber : Ginger may help chemo patients with nausea ; That’s how to write the hed.

Grist for the Mill: ASCO Press Release ;

Pic source ;

Maybe it got plenty of new data, but nonetheless this may qualify for the “it sounded like a good idea at the time” sweepstakes. A trio of British adventurers has been slogging and sledging across the Arctic ice pack for some time, heading for the North Pole. Word just broke they gave it up. The idea was that if the sea is getting thinner, let’s go out and measure it close-up – even though satellites are able to keep pretty good track with less frostbite. They confirmed that it’s thinning, and then some, or least on their path and this year. The pair were flown out Wednesday, to Canada, after stopping several hundred miles from their goal but also with lots of measurements in hand. The summer melt, they say, was setting in early.

Reuters‘s Allan Dowd leads forthrightly with the affair’s lasting importance, writing as his angle that the thick multiyear ice whose abundance they expected to measure turned out to have no abundance at all. They found themselves crossing only the thin ice left by the freeze of the immediate past winter, rather than some sections that have built up over several years.

Other Stories:

• AP – Charmaine Noronha :British explorers cut short trek to North Pole ;  Mostly about how happy they are to be off the ice.
• Independent (UK) : The Catlin Arctic Survey Team are on their way home ;
• Bloomberg – Alex Morales : Arctic Explorers End 73-Day Trek to Meausre Sea Ice ; This one says they made 16,000 measurements adn observations.

On the Other Hand Dept:

• Telegraph (UK) James Delingpole: Global warming explorers in Arctic get nasty shock: polar ice caps blooming freezing ; Mr. Delingpole specializes in snark and sarcasm.

Grist for the Mill: Catlin Arctic Survey ;

The Tracker swore to steer clear of the nuts and bolts stories emerging from ongoing labors  by Atlantis astronauts to take all the broken and obsolete pieces out of Hubble and put shiny new upgrades and replacements into it. But the Post‘s Joel Achenbach today does such a good job with a story literally about a bolt that I can’t resist. It’s not so easy to fabricate a narrative story with protagonists, crisis, resolution, redemption and other literary adornment plus a torque wrench on deadline and in proper order.

Grist for the Mill: Servicing Mission 4 Hubble Space Tel. Page ;

Pic: Wide Field Camera 3, now installed. Source;