Here’s sort of good news: Maybe most of Florida, and maybe even a lot of Bangladesh and other low lying areas, will stay above the waves should West Antarctica’s ice sheet collapse. A new estimate in Science Magazine, revising downward the amount of ice that might plausibly run into the sea, estimates an increase of a bit more than three meters, some ten or 11 feet, should the region’s glaciers radically speed up, melt, and otherwise go to pot while ocean waters infiltrate their footings. The study also confirms what many researchers have been saying – a wide collapse of the region’s ice would take many centuries, making it hardly a leading reason to confront global warming. The changed estimate arises in part from conclustion that, while much of the ice is grounded upon continental shelf bedrock below sea level and might plausibly go, its loss would not necessarily bring down the vast glaciers atop adjacent areas that stand above the sea.
Of some interest is the University of Bristol and Univ. of Colorado team’s estimate of the Earth’s response to less mass piled up in Antarctica. Its changed shape, rotation, and distribution of mass – and hence local gravity microvariations – would, they say, in some places enhance whatever sea level rise does occur. That includes along the coasts of North America.

Most outlets treat the topic rather, and appropriately, as an academic study. Interesting but no game changer. If warming continues, sea level is a problem no matter what. Not everybody takes that stance. In the ever-reliable Sun in the UK, a place where mere exaggeration and red-light alarm is as sober as it gets, the story runs under “Ice threat to United States.”  It’s just four paragraphs, but all one needs read is the first line: “Washington DC and San Francisco could be washed away…” Fun. But entirely misses the point.  Google news has recently enhanced the way it present results, breaking them down into categories by region, blog v. news outlet, etc. That’s good. Maybe it should add one bin helpfully labeled “Rollicking Tabloids.”

Other, straighter-shooting stories:

• Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger: Sea Level Rise Overestimated, But Things Still Grim; The story if fine. The hed misleads. Overall, the IPCC’s official projections are still likely on the low side, and an Antarctic ice sheet collapse has seldom been presented as among the more likely causes of sea level change this century.
• Telegraph (UK) – Louise Gray: West Antarctic ice sheet collapse ‘exaggerated’, scientists say ;
• AFP – Sea rise from Antarctic ice melt overestimated: study ; Still devastating, it says here.
• Independent – Steve Connor: Melting ice could cause gravity shift ; The world’s figure is his angle. Good choice.
• Christian Science Monitor – Moises Velasquez-Manoff: New study: Less sea rise expected from possible Antarctic melt ; Read this for a breakdown on the individual factors that led to the new estimate’s revisions.
• Reuters – Alister Doyle : West Antarctic ice threat revised down; still dire ;
• NYTimes – Andrew C. Revkin: Study Halves Prediction of Rising Seas ; Same hed problem as with the Time Magazine story. The halving applies to just one, not particularly urgent potential cause of overall sea level change.

Grist for the Mill:

Bristol University Press Release ; Univ. Colorado Press Release ;

-CP

This pic is something else. A French photographer – who previously has caught the Int’l Space Station in solar silhouette – managed to snap the shuttle Atlantis flying in formation with the Hubble Space Telescope while crossing the face of the Sun. This particular copy is picked up from the specialty site Universe Today in a bulletin from writer Nancy Atkinson. Several other outlets ran the image, too.

Another account of such photos is here, from Xinhua, with the shuttle at a different and more dramatic angle.

-CP

A storm seems to have broken upon best selling author, geographer, and physiologist Jared Diamond. A detailed account in the AAAS’s Science Magazine, with possible cautionary lessons for journalists and scientists alike, is brought this week by the pub’s longtime anthropology specialist Michael Balter. It has echoes of the swirling theories and counterpunches that long ago enveloped Margaret Mead and her rendition of the loving lives of teenage girls coming of age in Samoa, and that bedeviled UC Santa Barbara anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and his study of the Yanomamo people of the Amazon, whom he dubbed the “fierce people.”

The common thread: when western scientists, or journalists spend time with isolated, pre-industrial and tribal societies, do they sometimes get it very wrong? Answers can be hard to figure. Mead, some say, bought hook, line, and sinker some tall tales from the giggling young women she interviewed.  Maybe, it says here, Diamond got similarly snookered.

The difference is that the Samoan and Yanomamo clans apparently didn’t have members who also were practicing attorneys. Just because somebody is one generation out of the stone age doesn’t mean they don’t know who to call. Diamond is staring at a lawsuit for defamation and other civil wrongs, filed in the Supreme Court of New York by an attorney who is a member of the Handa Clan of the PNG highlands.

Some news articles have already reported the basic facts but not at this length. Examples of the spot news reports last month include:

• Guardian (UK) Ed Pilkington: New Guinea tribesmen sue The New Yorker ;
• AP – Samuel Maull: Author Jared Diamond sued for libel ;

At issue, Balter reports, is whether Diamond, and co-plaintiff New Yorker Magazine, did due diligence at fact checking for a piece that ran a year ago entitled “Vengeance is Ours.” (Available on line only to registered New Yorker subscribers. A public summary is here). Diamond’s piece recounted a tale of vengeance and inter-clan warfare, naming names and events, while relying largely on what he was told by a man who said he was a leader of one side – and also was his driver assisting with unrelated bird research in the country. Diamond is not an anthropologist – and he wrote this piece in a purely journalistic and personal memoir style. Its theme is the instinct to get back, personally, for perceived insult or other wrong. and how one’s society handles such urges.

Balter’s piece provides plenty of back and forth. It is not an indictment. It is a description of the state of play. Stay tuned for more news. The Tracker did read Diamond’s New Yorker article through last night. Diamond has already shown he is a good writer and a lover of large themes. This story spent too much time on the intricacies of PNG clan battles and their planning for my taste. Those got a bit tedious. But it makes worthy points from Diamond’s own “clan” pointing to universality of human nature and psychological satisfactions in revenge.

Who’d a thunk The New Yorker, famed for its persnickity fact checking, would be sued for, supposedly, dropping the ball? This will be interesting to watch.

-CP

Public health authorities and doctors need to “wake up” to the biggest threat of all, declared a 94 page report published this week by Lancet. Climate change packs such a collective load of potential ways to worsen human health that it exceeds any specific threat individually – including infection, water shortages, severe weather, or the debilitations of poverty, reports Bloomberg‘s Michelle Fay Cortez and Alex Morales. The news here is not that a warmer Earth will have health consequences, it appears, but that this study’s authors give it the top rank. The report is from medical researchers at University College, London. The lead author told reporters (via paraphrase in the release) that “failure to act will result to an intergenerational injustice, with our children and grandchildren scorning our generation for ignoring the climate change threat.” That does not sound good. Here’s a spot news story that practically writes itself.

Sampling of Stories:

• BBC: Climate change ‘is health threat’ ; Audio Interview on network’s Today show gives the lead author a full chance to lay out his convictions.  It’s bad now “and it is going to get much, much worse.”
• BBC : Climate ‘biggest health threat’ ; Standard written account of the news ;
• MedPage Today via ABC News – Michael Smith: Climate Change Could Be the World’s Biggest Health Threat ;
• WebMD – Salynn Boyles: Report: Climate Change Threatens Helath . Scientists Say Global Warming Will Increase Malaria and Other Diseases ; In a departure from media norm, the lede is stronger than the hed.
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Doctors warn of risks of climate change for the first time / Climate change is the biggest health threat facing doctors this century, the first medical ssessment of the dangers of global warming has warned; Hold it right there! This is not at all the first time or first assessment. Maybe most complete, but for instance see this 2006 warning from a well-known Harvard physician.
• AFP: Doctors’ health warning on climate change ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. College London Press Release ;

-CP

The double-barreled astronomy launch by the European Space Agency went off without apparent hitch this morning. An Ariane rocket propelled the Planck and Herschel orbiting observatories through the atmosphere over French Guiana en route to their parking spots about a million miles away. They will wander in different paths around the strange attractor known as Lagrangian Point 2. That will leave them near an outbound line from the Sun and facing constantly away from it, and well apart from Earth and Moon, in order that key detectors stay exceedingly close to absolute zero temperature. Twenty six minutes after liftoff the launcher’s upper stage cast loose Herschel, bound to study the early phases of star and galaxy formation in far infrared and submillimeter wavelengths. Two minutes later went Planck, equipped with submillimeter and microwave instruments to map with unprecedented clarity the distribution of matter before galaxies formed.

Most of the spot news is on the successful countdown and launch, but reporters are also giving readers short summaries of their duties. Of interest is the disinterest evinced in the US press, including no immediate AP story. The Brit press in particular is keeping up with rapidly updated dispatches.

Stories:

• Reuters – Laurent Marot (filed from Fr. Guiana): Ariane rocket launches two space observatories ;
• MSNBC : Europeans launch space telescope duo ;
• Time Magazine – Leo Cendrowicz : Two Telescopes to Measure the Big Bang ; A launch-updated feature on the cargo itself. The hed’s a little off – Herschel seems mostly aiming to study young stars, not necessarily the whole young universe. The story throws in an exciting morsel: Planck may permit calculation of the total number of atoms in all of creation. Plus it quotes Colin Pillinger, ramrod of the ill-fated Beagle mission to Mars a few yeares ago. Good to know he’s in good fettle.
• Deutsche Welle (agencies): Europe launches telescopes to study universe ;
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: Herschal and Planck safely away / Euro twin ‘scope launch runs on rails ;
• Guardian (UK) James Kingsland : Europe launches Herschel and Placnk space telescopes ;
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Herschel telescope blasts off to unravel secrets of the Universe ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Claire Bates : Lift-off! Telescopes Herschel and Planck launched ot seek out the origins of the universe ; When one’s imagination runs dry, trot out “seek origins of the universe” or “unravel secrets of the universe.” Story also conflates both telescope’s missions. Only one, really, might possibly, just maybe with a lot of luck “solve the mystery surrounding the origins of the universe,” as this one confidently proclaims for both.
• Swiss Info: Herschel telescope starts its star trek ; Yes, the Swiss helped build this one.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release  ; NASA-JPL Press Release (JPL’s engineers and scientists helped design and will use several instruments aboard both of the probes;

IF YOU’RE GOING TO READ JUST ONE SPACE THING DEPT, See Also:

Economist : Astronomy Peek-a-boo ;  Whoever covers the cosmos for this byline-allergic magazine knows his or her stuff. This essay manages to review the minimal scientific achievements of the shuttle and Int’l Space Station, the exception that proves the rule via the extraordinary achievement by astronauts in maintaining the Hubble (along with a salute to their current mission to it, including addition of a new ultraviolet-sensitive gadget to map the chemistries of cosmic nebulae and such), plus the launch “as the Economist went to press” of Planck and Herschel. It closes most edifyingly with a jaunt through germane astronomical history: a concise explanation who Hubble, Herschel, and Planck were and what they did. Very smooth job.

IF YOU LIKE TO READ UP ON THE EXCITING ARCANA OF ASTRONOMY DEPT:

Science News – Ron Cowen : Cosmic Dustup Settles ; How do comets, born on the icy frings of stellar systems, get their dusting of crystalline silicate grains cooked up close to their suns? Two new papers provide an answer. Complete with video graphic.

-CP

  Real news in birding would be an overall improvement in prospects for species at or near the brink of extinction. But no and alas, this year’s report from the Swiss-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature and its partner Birdlife International in England has no such welcome surprise. But bad news doesn’t have to be surprising to be news. Several outlets step up to provide the latest examples of wonderful creatures that seem on the verge of elimination – with the finger of blame pointed at H. sapiens and our habit of altering landscapes for farms or other use.

It’s not a universal trend. The marvelous image from Brazil above, circulated by IUCN with its press release, is of a pair of Lear’s macaw. Stepped up conservation programs by multiple agencies and landowners have quadrupled its population in recent years. As example of those in desperate strait, below is the gorgeted puffleg, a large hummingbird found in Colombia’s forests, its habitat shrinking as coca cultivation spreads. In the US, chimney swifts are declining markedly, they say.

It is worth noting, as with many environmental stories based on published reports, that these data are not from a standard, peer reviewed academic source. Given the times and the distinguished reputation gained by by the 60-year-old IUCN, the general picture strikes one as almost surely sound. Nonetheless, we jaded reporters ought bear in mind that the agencies involved probably do not thrive by urging satisfaction with the state of nature. Hence their agents may may, consciously or not, lean toward worse case conclusions. To little surprise, the reports listed below adopted a variety of angles but none appear to have strayed much beyond the info and quotes provided by the heavily detailed press releases or the agencies that issued them.

Stories:

• Times (UK)  – Valerie Elliott (who has the nice-sounding beat title Countryside Editor) : Cocaine Trade pushes gorgeted puffleg on to endangered Red List ;
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Birds more at risk; world faiing in conservation ;
• AP – Bradley S. Klapper : Group says 3 more birds close to extinction ;
• BBC – Mark Kinver: Birds at risk reach record high ;
• Independent (UK) Michael McCarthy: Hummingbird discovered in 2005 close to extinction.

Grist for the Mill:

IUCN Press Release ; Birdlife Int’l Press Release ;

Other Conservation News:

• Reuters -  Ho Binh Minh : Wounded elephant’s fate weighs on many Vietnamese ; Underlying story is that only 150 wild elephants are believed to remain in the country’s forests, less then one tenth the number there two decades ago.

Chris French isn’t a journalist as such. He’s a professor of psychology at Goldsmiths,  University of London, where he heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, and he also edits the British magazine Skeptik.

So perhaps his mind was already made up when he witnessed a recent controlled experiment to test the psychic claims of British woman Patricia Putt.

Nevertheless his account in the UK Guardian is gentle and charming, and – while firmly on the side of science – remains respectful towards Mrs Putt as an individual.

Putt is the most recent contender for the $1 million prize money offered by the James Randi Educational Foundation for any psychic or medium who can prove a paranormal claim under controlled conditions. (Randi, a magician and sceptic, put up prize money in 1964 to which others ahve since added).

Controlled conditions in this case involved a series of 10 women – all young so their voices could not be used to infer likely life experience and shrouded in burka-like cloaks with their heads covered to prevent Mrs Putt seeing physical features. They had to sit in Mrs Putt’s presence but faced away from her for 15 minutes. She produced a psychic reading for each of them. Then, all 10 women read all ten scripts and were asked to choose the one they believed to have been composed about them. If five chose correctly, the bounty was hers.

No prizes for divining she walked away without the money. Not one woman selected the correct reading, a result that left Mrs Putt “gobsmacked.” At the time, she did not object to the outcome. “We salute her for having the courage of her convictions and for accepting the outcome with such grace,” wrote French.

But in a postcript he wrote that she did later challenge the protocol, arguing that the women’s full body coverings might have constrained their spirits.

All excellent fun in the name of science. But aren’t the Randi people setting the bar a bit high? In an era when a 5 per cent treatment effect over placebo is considered a perfectly acceptable basis to market multi-billion dollar drugs, why should poor old Mrs Putt have to demonstrate such a high threshold of effectiveness?

More interesting would have been the same experiment in which each participant was asked to rank all the scripts in order of the likelihood she was the subject. Then all the results could be analysed simultaneously to evaluate whether – on average - Mrs Putt was performing above the level of chance.

Perhaps Randi are concerned they might have to give away the prize money ….

-JR

Other stories:

• Alison Swift’s account on the Randi organisation website.
• Richard Wiseman‘s blog entry on the same.
• Discover magazine blogged it too, on Phil Plait‘s BadAstronomy

   The common habit of idle males – some women too perhaps – to doodle boobs and stuff seems to go way, way back. Breaking this morning is word that a 35,000 year old piece of sculptured mammoth ivory found in a German cave is of a sexually exaggerated woman. Towering breasts, fat wide thighs, and other sexually charged aspects are leading to proclamation that the small, carved piece is not only the oldest portrayal of a human form yet found but, as the Times‘s Mark Henderson writes in the UK, the oldest “piece of Prehistoric pornography.” Researchers at Tubingen University and elsewhere have the report in Nature (which in its press advisory calls it a Prehistoric pin-up.)

Maybe it is just a fertility talisman designed for serious ritual, but it sure beats yet another cave picture of a mammoth or a guy with a spear.

Other initial stories:

• NYTimes – John Noble Wilford: Ancient Figurine of Voluptuous Woman Is Found ;
• Reuters – Michael Kahn: Sexy “Venus” may be oldest figurine yet found ;
• AP – Patrick McGroarty: Ivory sculpture in Germany could be world’s oldest ;
• Live Scence – Clara Moskowitz: Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years ; She notes that’s not all: “Early carvings of phalluses appeared in Europe at about the same time.”
• New Scientist – Andy Coghlan: Ivory “Venus” is first depiction of a woman ;

The Tracker will update this post if, as one would expect, a great deal more is made of this little lady.

-CP

In USA Today its staffer Rita Rubin this week provided a lot of caveats right up front in reporting that based on a new scientific study perhaps H1N1 flu is deadlier in Mexico because the people there are genetically more susceptible to it.

One wonders if caveats are enough. If it turns out to be true, of course, the story will be more than vindicated. But The Tracker is nervous about using such a preliminary hypothesis as the hook for the day’s swine flu story. There are so many other possible reasons for epidemiological variations that to plant the idea of special Mexican vulnerability could, perhaps, spawn complacency elsewhere, one thinks. “Maybe” usually means “probably not.” One can lead with a maybe, but bear in mind that to do so inevitably suggests “ah HA!” for many readers.

It is important to note that Rubin did not pick her angle for the story out of thin air. The press release from the institute behind the published work, forwarded by ScienceDaily (see Grist below), uses the same bait.

The underlying news, which got fairly wide pickup, is that Mexico’s National Institute of Genomic Medicine, or INMEGEN, released results from a study of genetic markers in 300 people who id’d themselves as Mestizos – mixes of European, Amerindian, West African, and other ancestries. It found them sufficiently distinct to make it plausible that some diseases rates and drug sensitivities may therefore be distinct to the population. Ergo, a more complete mapping is justified. The team reports the results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The published paper does not, so far as The Tracker could tell in a quick scan, say much if anything about flu.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Maggie Fox: New gene map shows big diversity in Mexico ; She waits until near the story’s end to bring up flue.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Mexican genomes show wide diversity ; Schmid also brings up the H1N1 question – one that many readers will ask – fairly well along. Both Fox and he use a quote from one author (from press release) who says there is no evidence one way or the other yet.

Grist for the Mill: PNAS abstract ;  INMEGEN Press Release via ScienceDaily.

-CP

Here’s one good example from the twists and turns in the swine flu story.

Nobody with any expertise has argued that pigs that have swine flu are dangerous to eat. But in Alberta the owner of 2,200 pigs wants to have the gov’t slaughter all his herd anyway.
CanWest news’s Darcy Henton has the story. The farmer, it says here, avers that to kill his pigs would be in the “best interests of his family, the Alberta pork industry, and Canada.” It doesn’t say explicitly whether the farmer has other motivations but it does provide some dots. Without elaboration it notes that the farmer wants the killing done by the nation’s Food Inspection Agency, and that the government pays compensation when it orders livestock be destroyed. So far, the agency can’t see any disease reason to do so, and that they should be slaughtered in a routine commercial manner for market once they recover from the viral infection. Whether anybody will buy them is, apparently, not at all clear.

’tis true. If I were told the pig had flu, I might hesitate in reaching for its bacon. I might do the same thing if told, “That pig was named Rosie.” Such info takes a bit of the abstraction out of the eating of meat.

-CP

The last few days bring us strikingly parallel reports from opposite coasts about the worry that wild salmon despite heroic efforts at conservation going back decades – centuries even – are continuing their slide toward extinction. Not that all stocks will get to that point. But recreating long-ago spectacles of fish so filling streams at spawning time that locals imagined walking to the other side on their backs may be but a dream. So one thinks today after reading the dismal news.

In the Nashua Telegraph in New Hampshire on Sunday David Brooks, the paper’s environmental writer (and Granite Geek blogger), delivered New England’s fish struggling to survive. One possibility, he reports, is abandonment of efforts to keep a wild (as opposed to hatchery-bolstered) Atlantic salmon run each year in the region’s watersheds including the Merrimack and Souhegan rivers.. If they are doomed by climate change, overfishing, such competitors as striped bass, or other factors, could be time to quit. And it’s not just salmon. Other anadromous fish including herring and shad are in the same fix.

Pic – Atl. Salmon Poster source ;

Similarly, the Idaho Statesman‘s veteran enviro writer Rocky Barker yesterday provided Efforts to save salmon may be undone by climate change.  Doubts are rising, he writes, that salmon in the Northern Pacific will survive at all. Climatologists who project river and stream temperatures reaching 70 degrees F by 2040 are thereby predicting conditions that spawning salmon cannot tolerate. The story suggests that if such rivers as the Snake were to continue taking water directly and unhindered from snowmelt, things might not be so bad. But with hydroelectric and irrigation district dams ponding the water in the sun for months, warming it (and providing barriers that fish ladders only partly ease), prospects are bleak. The best tactic, he reports, for holding open the possibility of someday returning Pacific salmon, of many species, to America’s West may be to focus on their strongholds in Alaska and Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.

Pic: Pacific NW Salmon poster source ;

Related, Somewhat More Hopeful News:

The Colorado-based (and non-profit) High Country News‘s Ken Olsen writes at great length of a possible Salmon Salvation / Will a new political order be enough to finally bring the dams down? . The story’s stats on the chinook, chum, coho, steelhead trout, and sockeye that once ran the rivers are staggering. The magazine is also running a decidedly non-scientific poll, “What should be done about the dwindling stocks of Columbia River salmon.” Its readers, presumably including not too many old line ranchers or electric utility workers, are voting 91 percent to breach the dams as soon as possible.

See Also – AP : Fisheries managers revising salmon projections; Hint: not upward.

-CP

The Tracker is a week late getting to it, but the Journal‘s Gautam Naik – who lately has been working hard on swine flu news – showed versatility, took a break from the health beat, and got  his teeth into an old-fashioned story of strange physics. Any story on such esoteric a topic deserves a salute. This is especially in these days when fewer mainstream media outlets pay attention to hard, math-rich, head-scratching research. It ran under the head Science, Spirituality, and Some Mismatched Socks – Researchers Turn Up Evidence of ‘Spooky’ Quantum Behavior and Put It to Work in Encryption and Philosophy. Naik indulges, one must say, in some needless and perhaps feigned japing. His lede refers to physicists’ crazy notion that two particles may communicate with one another instantly over vast distances – sort of like two dancers responding to each other’s moves, in real time, while on opposite sides of the solar system … or galaxy. Calling such entanglement weird is ok, but “crazy” indulges too much of the reptilian yahoo brain that we all have, and ought sometimes be suppressed. But behind the smirks about the “wacky ways” of fundamental particles is a good introduction to spooky physics at a distance and the hints of practical application arising from various laboratories. The story seems to describe only a little that quantum physicists would regard as fundamentally new. An example of what appears to be novelty is the way one encryption company detects when its decoding key has been compromised. If its collection of entangled photons flip their spins, mischief is afoot. The story provides readers with a bracing taste of esoteric science. As one source tells us at the story’s end and with a reference to Mozart, such things are not an encounter with wackiness but with “faint glimpses of ultimate reality.”

ALSO IN THE JOURNAL:

Jeanne Whalen yesterday took readers on a tour of the world of biohackers. Maybe that is what, as it says here, they are called in the realm of geekdom. Hack is one versatile, ambiguous verb. It can mean to drive a cab, to flail with a machete, to cough so hard the eyeballs bulge and the spittle flies. It can mean to succeed, for it is good to hack it in one’s profession or other activity. “I just can’t hack it” is such a sad thing to say. And I’m unsure that “biohacking” hacks it as wise usage. It is clearly borrowed from computer hacking, an activity that can mean just fooling around in a machine’s code but more often reeks of criminality and malicious intent.

As for Whalen’s story itself, it’s breezy, well-reported, and kicked off by a few anecdotal examples of what some people are doing in their spare time. They buy genes, scrounge for bargain prices on lab equipment (or build it themselves), and do a little genetic engineering for entertainment or to improve the world. The hed on the story refers to such folks as discovering their “Inner Frankenstein.”  A few government agencies, it says here, worry about this new kind of proliferation – not of nuclear skills, but of genetic manipulation skills. Plausibly, somebody might accidentally or even deliberately create new organisms the world really should go without having. Regulation may be in order.

The story however turns up nobody with malicious intent. And with so many high school students practicing recombinant DNA so they can win science fairs and maybe some day go on to Nobel Prizes, it seems premature to put such biotinkering in the same bucket as, for instance, those rumored Chinese spy agencies hacking their way at the portals of sensitive government and industrial computer systems.

(A thank you to WSJ’s Rob’t Lee Hotz for pointing us toward these pieces by his colleagues.)

-CP