George Johnson, as many long time readers of the NYTimes know, is a Santa Fe-based writer of grace and deep curiosity about the natural as well as the made world. He provides, on p. 1 but below the section’s fold a fine display of his relaxed but punctilious approach to story. But one infers, while speculating, that it ought to be read while keeping in mind a common dilemma of reporting. Which is, just because one’s protagonist is the most charming, engaging, imaginative person one has recently met does not mean he or she has the facts straight. It is a Scientist At Work piece, about an archeologist with a maverick, not quite outre, unifying hypothesis tying together pre-Columbian ruins from Mexico to Colorado that happen to be nearly on a straight north-south line. It is engaging but, as Johnson keeps saying, while most in the field read of it avidly, they aren’t buying it. Yet its author is so bold and confident that … well, one can almost feel the conflicts caroming like scattershot in Johnson’s cranium as he balances what is enjoyably stimulating with what is persuasive.

The lead story, with a big picture of two fireflies backed up against one another real friendly-like, is a detailed piece by the exuberant Carl Zimmer on the scintillating love and evolution puzzles to be found among these insects. The Tracker had absolutely no idea that half a dozen different species might be blinking in one American meadow simultaneously, or that there are thousands of kinds of them around the world. This also is largely a scientist-at-work profile, of a woman transfixed by glow bugs since grad school. One thing confused: Exactly how can it be simultaneously true that adult fire flies never eat, and yet (as we’re told three paragaphs later) one species eats other fireflies? An answer to do with defensive toxins is implied but it threw me for awhile.

Other notable headlines:

• Amy Lee: Tibetan Monks and Nuns Turn Their Minds Toward Science ; Terrific account, not of any specific science, but of science as a way of thinking. Plus, it seems that Tibetan monks usually get all the ink. Nice to read about the nuns.
• Kenneth Chang – Paleontology and Creationism Meet but Don’t Mesh ; So imagine you’re at this big meeting of bona fide fossil scientists and they decide to take a field trip to a Biblically-inspired museum of deep time, where the staff meets them with agreat friendly hello. You’d go along, right? So did Chang. Nice story, with no surprises except perhaps that it stayed rather friendly.
• Donald G. McNeil: New Flu Vaccine Approved – for Dogs ; An unusual context for describing some flu basics.  Also, another reason why it is cruel that dog breeders came  up with pug-nosed varieties.
• Abigail Zuker MD – BOOKS/ The Puzzle Of Spaces That Soothe ; Conversation fodder. Almost fringe medicine, too. Why do some environments – just by their color and composition, settle the mind, maybe ease healing?

Plenty more. Whole Section ;

The Gainesville Times‘s  Melissa Weinman on Sunday reported what one might guess from instinct or first principles, but apparently nobody had reason to think about it. It surprised a University of Georgia researcher when it popped out of some statistics he gathered on tornadoes in the US Southeast. In and around Atlanta, he found, if the latter half of a year is dryer than normal, the following spring’s tornado season is almost always light. Now he and colleagues will see if the pattern holds for other areas as well. It is in Environmental Research Letters. The Tracker doesn’t know his fugacity from a latent heat sink, but this seems to make some sense – thunderstorms arise from convection and condensation in moist air, so dry soil might mean less moisture for the updrafts. Or not. Just guessing.

This news has another wrinkle in the media. That striking image to the upper right was taken in Wyoming early this month during an exercise called VORTEX2 sponsored by NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. On the Washington Post‘s site is  long and admirably detailed write-up of that by enviro writer and weather blogger Andrew Freedman. He joined researchers for the field study, no doubt hoping to be there when they came across some dreadful F-awful funnel lofting cows as it darted from the black skirt of a supercell billowing over the western plains. No such luck. The pic is the ONLY tornado the effort, with its fleet of storm chasers, captured and Freedman was there. It was, he writes, the most intensely observed tornado, scientifically speaking, ever.  But overall the spring tornado season in the Great Plains may have been the sparsest in at least half a century. Freedman cites the Georgia study as a pertinent, possible, partial explainer, too. Really partial. Last year was rainy in parts of the western U.S. that VORTEX2 prowled so as a data point, it may be problematic.

Freedman provided a dramatic photo album from VORTEX2 in an earlier post. Give me California and earthquakes any day. Just thinking about being in the way of one of those twisters gives me the vapors.

*UPDATE: A prominent daily writer of science news tells The Tracker that he looked into the story and, consulting with a climatologist of note, demurred because of a strong hunch that while there may be true correlation between drought and tornado, it reflects neither cause-and-effect nor mere coincidence. A stronger possibility is that both are succumbing to the influence of the El Nino – Southern Oscillation in the far Pacific. ENSO clearly tilts the odds back and forth on drought all across the US. There also are suggestions it changes the likelihood of tornadic collision among air masses. So, in places drought may precede or accompany fewer tornadoes but that does not mean it is the cause. It’s like – um, well, the Fourth of July brings more sunburns from going to picnics and watching parades. It’s a day when more Americans eat hot dogs. But that does not mean hot dogs cause sunburns. And for both cases, only more research can say for near-sure.
Grist for the Mill: U. Ga. Press Release ;

-CP

Any science reporters – or those just interested in the state of the craft – with a smidgen time on their hands ought to check in this week on line for doings at the World Conference of Science Journalists, sponsored by a whole slew of organizations including the World Federation of Science Journalists. The preceding link goes to a page that, at its top, links to a news feed including twitter info.

The Tracker just filled out the meeting’s survey on science journalism for those making a living, or part of a living, at it. It’s not painful, and asks some reasonable questions whose answer statistics I look forward to seeing. It doesn’t take long and is open to all whether you’re there or not.

Anybody blogging the meeting and thinks his or her offerings are can’t-miss, let me know via the suggest stories link up top and I’ll take a look.

-CP

 In yesterday’s Inquirer science and enviro writer Sandy Bauers presents about as easily read and memorable an example one might like on how to chop a somewhat technical and obscure chemical pollution problem into manageable bites. She starts it off with personal recognition of the exasperations of worryng over carbon footprints. She then says there’s another for her, and you too dear reader: the nitrogen footprint. She mixes local references to why it ought to matter with a few big-picture asides – such as reference to something The Tracker did not have on the radar, the International Nitrogen Initiative. She inflicts nothing like that diagram to the upper right. But she mentions overfertilized lawns, ag runoff, NOx and other airborne fertilizing species that rain onto the landscape from the collective exhaust of coal and other fossil fuel combustion, and  eutrophic impacts in waterways. A few things that disturb The Tracker aren’t in here so much, such as the shifts from wildflowers to grasses as that airborne stuff we make settles into the soil. But nearby crabs in a tailspin are. Nitrogen, she writes, is a good thing. But if it runs amok, “…it turns evil.”

Readers who know the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen anyway may wonder how it is we can mess things up much by distributing a bit more of it. So a sentence or two mentioning the difference between relatively inert N2 gas, and more problematic, N-rich molecules like ammonia, oxides of nitrogen, etc., would have been good. It’s a column – a format with only so much room.

Grist for the Mill: Int’l Nitrogen Initiative ;

Speaking of Philly, another (blog) on the Inquirer‘s site provides a different way to handle an enviro issue. Bauers uses a style akin to a friendly chat across the backyard fence. But in his Attytood column blogger Will Bunch, on the same day has a more in-your-face assault against forces resistant to eco regulations. He takes on a Rush Limbaugh, and salutes Paul Krugman‘s furious column the other day in the NY Times. Its theme: “Treason against the planet.” Wonder which column will change more minds?

Pic – source ;

-CP

Cancer has been cured 100 percent of the time many times – in mice. Also in rats. Thus a pre-clinical, pre-human test success in lab rodents is not news in itself. But when one adds genetic engineering, anti-sense RNA, nanotechnology, assertions that they add up to a bold new tactic against cancer, and an apt Trojan horse metaphor right there in the press release,  it becomes hard to resist. Plus, the report from an Australian biotech company is the Nature Biotechnology cover story, accompanied by a laudatory News and Views explainer by two MIT researchers, all an implication it has jumped high peer review hurdles.

The news is complicated, but the idea is that a one-two punch of specially made mini-cells (sort of like cells on the outside, only tinier, and packed with anti-cancer weaponry) can infiltrate tumor cells, disable their ability to become chemotherapy resistant, and then hit them with the poison. Clever exploitation of selective antibodies keeps normal cells out of great peril. Another good part: the treatment demolished a variety of human tumors that had been implanted in the test animals. So it says here. Human trials are set to start.

Australia Stories (very boosterish):

• Melbourne Herald Sun -  Bruce McDougall: Trojans outsmart tumours ; a “world breakthrough…” it says ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith : Killer ‘Trojan horses’ get inside cancer walls ; It worked in dogs, too, she reports.
• Brisbane Times-AAP : Device hopes to cut cancer chemotherapy ; This story looks like a pastiche – as though a routine clinical trial story got hastily updated by reporters and editors unsure what they had. No byline either.
• ABC – Ashley Hall: ‘Trojan horse’ therapy combats chemo resistance ; All enthused and positive till the punultimate graf that says few than 1 percent of promising treatments actually delivers for patients.
• Cosmos – Elizabeth Finkel: Killer ‘minicells’ fight drug-resistant cancer ;

Other Stories :

• National Business Review (NZ) : Australians develop potential cancer killing ‘trojan horse.”
• Reuters – Michael Perry (from Sydney) : Scientists kill cancer cells with ‘trojan horse” ;

Best job:

• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: New Cancer Treatment Shows Promise in Testing ; Wade injects a cautious note throughout, moderating but not stifling hope – best effort of the bunch, and on a Sunday yet. He has a Trojan Horse too but in a quote that he attributes, in correct full disclosure, to Reuters.

Grist for the Mill:  Nature Biotechnology abstract ; EnGeneIc homepage ; EnGeneIc Press Release (via The FULL story) that includes Trojan Horse metaphor – one that few outlets could resist ;

-CP

For the past few weeks California media have reported a NASA-Jet Propulsion Laboratory-orchestrated campaign to use powerful radar to map in hyper-detail the changing wrinkles and creepings of the Earth’s surface along some of the state’s more dangerous, active faults. The Tracker didn’t notice until this morning. Then the local paper, the SF Chronicle, landed with a piece by the ever-running Energizer science writer, David Perlman, detailing how the program works. He puts sharp focus on the Hayward Fault that runs more or less through my backyard but don’t tell the realtors’ clients if and when we sell the place.

Perlman localizes the news skillfully. Good to read, if again: The Hayward is creeping in our section, relieving stress. It turns out that in Southern California the press has given the project and that section of the San Andreas fault a pretty good ride already.

Other stories:

• Los Angeles Times (Jun 24) Jia-Rui Chong: Radar system maps movement along California faults / The technology won’t be able to predict specific quakes, but will allow scientists to spot five- or 10-year seismic hot spots and ‘figure out where to target our retrofitting,’ JPL geophysicists say ; That dek in the hed provides xlnt explanation and caution not to make too much of the technology.
• Orange County Register (Science Dude blog, Jun 21) Gary Robbins: Airborne radarto monitor O.C. earthquake threats ;
• La Canada Valley Sun (Jun 25) Mary O’Keefe: Earthquake studies take to the skies ;
• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: Jet-Mounted Radar Looks for Earthquake Zones ;
• KTLA Fox News: NASA Hopes to Predict Major SoCal Earthquake / Scientists give the San Andreas Fault a 3-D close-up ; Well, hmmmm. Well, it’s local TV. Nowhere in the text associated with this do any NASA or any other agency’s scientists say they hope (which in newsspeak means expect), as the lede says, to predict “the big one”.  Similarly the press release below uses “forecast” of earthquake in an exceedingly circumscribed way. Ditto, print media versions kept prediction, in any precise sense, at more than arm’s length.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-JPL Press Release ;

-CP

 The Tracker this morning, on seeing on the AP‘s feed the hed on a story by Michael Casey : Forgotten evolutionist lives in Darwin’s shadow, thought to myself “Wow, a third person besides Darwin and Wallace?” No, it is about Wallace. The headline is not entirely supported by the story – it says he is known in scientific circles but not outside them so much. But the dominant, opening theme nonetheless is that perhaps he deserves equal billing in the public mind with the far more accomplished Darwin – who after all discovered and offered far superior documentation for natural selection as the driver of evolution even if Wallace, an accomplished scientist, prepared the first paper on it intended for publication (frightening Darwin into finally putting pen to paper for real).

Casey starts off with a vivid profile, including on the scene reporting, of the small bandwagon calling for Wallace’s elevation to the top ranks of science fame. He rights the course a bit deeper with quotes from those – in the majority – who feel no matter how one cuts it, Darwin is the main man by far. The piece provides a good profile of Wallace’s contemporary lionizers, hoping to boost his fame. However, I offer, so what if he’s “forgotten” by the general public? No shame in that. So are most great scientists. How many deceased yet immortal scientists can the average person name: Darwin, Einstein, Pasteur, and ummm…. Sagan? Maybe they get the likes of Newton and Galileo. But as for Fermi, Boyle, Descartes, Rutherford, Maxwell, Avogadro, Mendeleev, Ptolemy, Galen and a myriad or so more: blank. Scientists and those who follow science closely know of Wallace’s achievements. A particularly odd passage is Casey’s comparison of Wallace to other evolutionists he calls forgotten: French scientist Jean Baptist LeMarc and Patrick Matthew. Who? LeMarc turns out to be the same fellow sometimes spelled LeMarck (or more often as Lamarck) as in Lamarckism, a man of great learning but who is exceedingly well known for having been very wrong about the inheritance of new traits. Matthew I had to look up. He had a good idea, anticipating natural selection’s essence,  but seems obscure for good reason.

-CP

Late last week a small squad of reporters relayed news from French researchers of a rarity in climate change science: a surprising link between the Antarctic ozone hole and the absorption of CO2 by the Southern Ocean. It offers a lesson in the unpredictability of the exact course of climate change. Whether it is also clearly good new or bad news, or neither, is not entirely clear.

The recent lot were not however the first to make the news public.
For more read Discovery News and its Michael Reilly. He had the essence of the story on line back on June 12. Looks like a salute is due. Perhaps somebody else had it that quick or quicker too. He attributed the news break to an upcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters – perhaps one of those that the American Geophysical Union’s press office routinely tips to reporters.

The news: The Antarctic ozone hole – which many science writers have tried to drill into their audiences is NOT the result of or much of an exacerbater of global warming – appears to be having a profound local impact on CO2 in the atmosphere and its sink in the nearby sea. The low stratospheric O3′s alteration of the thermal structure over the south pole has so stirred the circumpolar vortex  that altered surface winds are bringing deeper water, near saturated in CO2, to the surface. This thus shuts down those waters as a sink for yet more CO2. So we all  get a slightly moderated overall acidification in the ocean (ah complications: but relocation of the existing acidification to vulnerable Antarctic surface waters), and a slightly greater warming of the troposphere. What’s it mean? Perhaps that climate is really complicated.

On June 24 the French research agency CNRS issued a press release (see Grist), which triggered a few More Stories:

• New Scientist – Kate Ravilious : Ozone hole has unforeseen effect on ocean carbon sink ;
• Science News – Sid Perkins: Ozone Hole Trims Polar Water’s CO2-Absorbing Power ;
• ANI news service via Thaindian: Ozone hole responsible for saturation in Southern Ocean’s CO2 absorption ; Very accurate hed.  How many readers could guess what it means before reading the story?

Grist for the Mill: CNRS Press Release via ScienceDaily.

Pic: Huge seas of the Southern Ocean,  © Australian Antarctic Division 2008, by Wayne Papps. Source ;

 A US district judge yesterday sentenced Nathan Murphy, a well-known, self-taught dinosaur hunter and dino-tour businessman,  to four months in a half way house and three years probation plus a $17,325 restitution penalty for filching 13 dinosaur bones from Bureau of Land Management-administered parts of Montana’s Hell Creek Badlands. He pleaded guilty. The story got main circulation via the AP‘s Susan Gallagher and Matthew Brown. It appears, in their telling, that the man got off easy – his prosecution was underway too soon to put him in jeopardy of a new bill signed by President Obama in March. It provides a penalty of up to five years for such crimes.

The case has received attention for some time. See Also an earlier story on Murphy by the AP’s Brown, sketching the case further and reporting his intention to plea guilty.

Other stories:

• Billings Gazette – Ed Kemmick: Dino hunter gets 4-month sentence ; Story has info on other legal problems the man has encountered – and provides overall a rather sympathetic portrait of a man who loves fossils too much. He’s not going to stop looking for them, either.
• Great Falls Tribune – Zachary Franz (+ AP) : Dinosaur bone thief gets 120 days ;

The BBC‘s earth news editor, Matt Walker, seems very sure of himself – or at least his headline writer is. Under the hed “Legless frogs mystery solved” he describes research – published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology Part B etc. – by researchers at Hartwick College in New York and at University of Plymouth in the UK. The most likely culprit, despite furious suspicion for years not that it is industrial pollution of some sort, is entirely natural, and unworrying : dragonfly nymphs. It appears these predatory, aquatic youngsters have mouth parts just the right size to snack off a tadpole’s leg – with the first-to-grow hind legs most commonly gobbled. Plus, the researchers worked with toads that can excrete toxins, but don’t do that so much from nearer their tails.  Combined with earlier discovery that certain flatworm parasites are able to trigger growth of extra, often deformed hind limbs in tadpoles, the new work likely explains the problem. So it says.

Not addressed in the story is why deformed frogs seemed epidemic in the 80s and 90s but had not been noticed earlier. Maybe it was some sort of hysteria and coincidence? A giant basin full of PCBs or selenium from ground water or other industrial stew, combined with a close look at its residents including toads and frogs and discovery many are  messed up, plausibly could trigger an erroneous ah ha!. One bets this research will get a riposte from those whose research has linked the deformed amphibians to pollutants.

-CP

The otoliths or so-called earbones of the inner ears of fish, like the calcium carbonate-rich shells of molluscs and other marine creatures, ought to be harder to grow the more acidic the environment. But in a surprise that has marine biologists scratching their heads, researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography report in today’s Science that the otoliths of at least one fish species grow larger when grown in laboratory tanks set up to mimic the expected CO2-enriched and acidified oceans expected in coming decades.

Nobody seems to know whether a bigger otolith is good news, bad news, or just sideways for the animal. Apparently the young fish showed no obvious problems in maintaining orientation in the water, an ability due in part to the functions of their otoliths. But as NYTimes‘s Cornelia Dean writes, such a change in the fundamental anatomy of living creatures due to predicted rise in CO2 illustrates why experts “worry about impacts, big and small, that no one has thought of.” That’s on top of all the impacts that many have thought of.

Other stories:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Surprise: Fish in acidic waters grow bigger ears ; Uses quotes in the press release – but made a call too for more ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Changing ocean chemistry might jam fish ears ;
• Voice of San Diego (nonprofit) David Washburn: High CO2 Levels Cause Big-Eared Fish ;

It’s understandable to see reference to fish with bigger ears in the headlines, but still not very useful to readers. The imagery is all wrong – AP’s Schmid at least makes immediate light of the intuitive reaction to the idea by noting this will not mean anglers will see a Mr. Spock of the sea on the line.

Grist for the Mill: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC-San Diego Press Release ; Science abstract ;

Other Otolith News:

• Mobile Press-Register – Ben Raines: Red snapper off Alabama are growing faster these days ; Univ. of Southern Alabama researchers used otoliths the usual way – to measure a fish’s age from the growth rings – and conclude young snapper are bulking up sooner than they used to. Other fish aren’t. Hypotheses abound.

Pic: Yes, a few people make jewelry from otoliths. Source ;

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Three years ago when the Knight Science Journalism Tracker was picking up speed, the clear omens of big trouble for our trade and journalism generally seemed like an inside tip – we knew about it but not too many outside the business did, or much cared. Now all of a sudden we’re getting a slight taste of what it’s like to be a politician caught taking bribes or having affairs, or a Hollywood celebrity taken to the hospital for grave reasons, and pursued by the 24-hour web and cable news non-cycle. All my neighbors and relatives now ask in sympathy what’s going to happen after the last big metro newspaper in town hits its last front walk.

But like reading one’s own advance obituary to be sure the names and dates are right, we keep reading the news from this ongoing wake. This week a particularly knowing spread on us, with new articles and links to recent ones on the same theme, runs in Nature under the theme line Science Journalism. It is stimulated by the meeting next week in London of the World Federation of Science Journalists.  My old boss on this job, Boyce Rensberger – now retired from the Knight program at MIT – has a column in Nature  on the history of the trade, along with former BBC correspondent Toby Murcott on the continuing tension between the urge among many of us to essentially promote scientific literacy and the need by journalists to bring a flinty eye to  coverage of news and the flawed people who make it. Lots more is there.

Best and freshest of the lot to these eyes, filling either the misery-loves-company or schadenfreude slot or perhaps both, is a piece by Nature’s own senior news reporter Geoff Brumfiel. It is not so much about science journalists as the void being filled by the self-organizing coverage of scientific meetings and event by researchers themselves. These amateurs (which doesn’t mean unskilled) are twittering and live-blogging while, in some cases, participating in the news. Whole proceedings of meetings, it says here, have been stitched together largely by turning a near-inchoate mass of tweets into a cohesive narrative. Editors of journals that seek to publish papers that have actual new information for readers, sometimes formerly assured by embargoes, are unsure what will happen to their businesses. Meeting contents, even those designed as off-the-record retreats and including digital snapshots of slides can hit the internet and social networks essentially live and almost entirely unfiltered. Our anxiety as reporters, it appears, is mirrored by the anxieties of old institutions that ruled the once, reasonably orderly way that information circulated within scientific institutions before most of it reached journalists. Journalists’ problem is difficult but much simpler. All we need is a way to charge money for our output across the landscape of technologies and multimedia and we’ll probably be fine. A greater sea change from the information revolution, one thinks, is within science itself.

Grist for the Mill: World Federation of Science Journalists 2009 ;

Related News: Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media: “Sense of Crisis” in U.S. Science Jouranlism … But Cris Russell See Some Hope Overseas. 

-CP