With Southern California so dry lately, one cannot blame local reporters for grasping at any sign of a break in the weather. One came this week with an analysis from the US Climate Prediction Center suggesting that, after years of absence, the El Nino hinted at a few weeks ago now seems to be building at a rapid pace.

The OC Register‘s “Science Dude” and science editor Gary Robbins writes this could mean “an unusually wet winter” on the way, and perhaps some rain in the meantime too from a stronger summer monsoon. And closer to San Diego, the North County Times‘s Dave Downey reports his readers might be able to resume over-watering their lawns as usual (actually, he just refers to watering them) within a few months due to a “good chance” of above-average rainfall. He also throws in a “no guarantees” line.

Both stories are full of ifs. But if this works out, that’s good for us. Not so good for those places in the world that tend to get hit by drought during an El Nino.

Grist for the Mill: Climate Predication Center 2009 Monsoon outlook ;

-CP

 Here’s news that has not been much reported, but sure catches the eye. A press release from Oregon State University has revealed the latest from a research team that infers the scale of Japan’s whaling industry – covert and “scientifiic” – from DNA analysis of whale meat on sale in public markets in Japan and Korea. Only the Indian service ANI has carried the story, but it is only lightly rewritten from the release. They conclude that the quantity of bycatch whales – where bycatch refers to fish, turtles, mammals, or other animals caught accidentally while fishing for something else – equals Japan’s legal catch under so-called scientific studies authorized by the International Whaling Commission. But bycatch can be anything. It even includes the rare western, or Asian, gray whales. And huge fin whales. Humpbacks too. Unclear is how one accidentally catches so many of them.

Grist for the Mill: Oregon St. U Press Release ;

Other recent whaling news:

• Science News (blog) Janet Raloff: Of ‘Science’ and Fetal Whaling ; Plus, a fourth of Japan’s catch in Antarctica is of pregnant whales ;  This doesn’t pretend to be a news story. It is an essay with a point, and with data.
• AP – Barry Hatton: Whaling talks said stuck on compromise deal ; Why whaling is in the news. The IWC is meeting.
• NYTimes (Dot Earth blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Whale Watching Trumps Whaling ; One of his good ideas – change the W in IWC to “Whale” rather than “Whaling.” And as with Raloff’s two dots above, it’s an essay more than a news story.

   NASA’s orbiting Chandra X-ray telescope appears to have gathered convincing data from strange, hot clumps of hydrogen gas observed at great distance appears to finally explain them, say astronomers led by a ma at Durham University in the UK. Formally they are LABs, or Lyman-Alpha blobs, named for the characteristic signature of hydrogen in their spectra. Since discovery ten years ago, the leading idea was that they housed the first stages of new galaxy formation and might be ingredients, via merger, for full scale galaxies. Now, it appears that their insides are not mere galaxy embryos but rambunctious young yet well-formed systems, with myriad new stars circling black holes that are consuming vast amounts of matter and spouting intense radiation in the process. The pic shows a NASA artist’s impression.

The news derives from a report in the Astrophysical Journal. Few stories The Tracker has seen appear to take the news a step forward – to see whether these glimpses of early galaxy growth may provide key evidence to how supermassive black holes help to coordinate the recently observed and surprisingly tight relationship between the masses of mature galaxies and the masses of the black holes in their centers.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Telescope finds space blobs are pubescent galaxies ; Seth lets readers in on his reporting – identifying which quotes are from email, and which from a subsequent phone conversation with the lead author.
• Nat’l Geographic: CosmicBlob Picures; Galactic ‘Coming of Age’ Revealed ; gallery of artists’ impressions, plus images.
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Gluttonous black holes power ancient ‘cosmic blobs’ ;
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Astronomers unravel secrets of space blobs . Massive burps of gas linked to formation of galaxies witih black holes ;
• AAAS Science Now – Yudhijit Battacharjee : Giant Glowing Blobs Yield Clues to Galaxy Formation ; This one does report the new interpretation as a hint to  choreography of masses of galaxies and of their black holes

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Chandra Press Release ;

Science News‘s Ron Cowen somehow got himself to France and “the genteel surroundings of the Blois chateau” in the Loire Valley. Underway there is a meeting on cosmic research under the title Windows on the Universe. He got a scoop too.  Which is: a new mystery surrounding the highest energy cosmic rays. As it is, astrophysicists have a hard time devising convincing explanations how particles can be accelerated to the energies of, as Cowen writes, “a big league pitcher’s fastball.” That’s tens of millions of trillions of electron volts, it says here, which is a lot of wham for a subatomic missile.

On Monday, he writes, arrived evidence from the receivers of the Pierre Auger Observatory, which is spread across a large piece of Argentine real estate, that many of the most energetic particles bombarding Earth’s upper atmosphere are nuclei of iron atoms. More than 400 scientists helped gather and sift the data. Until now, most such people assumed super cosmic rays to be smaller nuclei, perhaps mostly bare protons. Iron or other heavies are not easy to explain. Conventional theory proposes that such complex nuclei traveling at hypervelocity through space would be bashed apart by photon interactions. Many of them seem to be coming from neighborhoods of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei but precisely why is not known either. So it says.

Thumbs up – real reporting; no press releases appear to be directly involved.

Grist for the Mill:

Two pre-print articles on line at arXiv astro-ph: Here, with more than 400 authors,  and Here; General info at Pierre Auger Observatory.

Windows on the Universe meeting site ;

-CP

 Oh what is the poor science writer to do when handed press releases with nearly diametrically opposing conclusions? Rub hands in glee, one supposes. Nothing like a fight to attract eyeballs. All arise from papers in Nature. One by researchers at the Univ. of Colorado-Boulder argues that the icy spurtings from the south pole of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, well reported during the past year and directly examined by the Cassini spacecraft, are NOT from a salty, hypothesized ocean layer deep under the moon’s surface ice and driven to the surface by the heatings of axial, tidal creakings. Its evidence is a near-absence of sodium, hence no salt, hence no liquid water to be concluded directly. The spurts thus may be water vapor sublimating directly from ice. The other, from researchers at the University of Leicester in the UK and elsewhere, argues that there IS enough salt – which almost inevitably would be dissolved in any liquid water inside a rock and ice moon – in the plumes to endorse an ocean-sized interior liquid layer as most likely source.

Somewhat to The Tracker’s surprise, not too many outlets made much of this fine example of science in action: which is, scientists pointing in different directions. It’s more fun, and helps erode the idea that scientific publications are fonts of fact and truth, when in fact they are fonts of well argued opinion larded with doubt and arguments for more research. Among those that, although without byline, took it on as an unsettled question:

• World Science: Ocean’s in Enceladus? Scientists can’t decide ;
• Thaindian News: Does Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Harbor Life? ; The lede: Scientists are growing white, wondering whether on not there is an underground ocean on …”

Other Accounts with Less Doubt Up Front: (A legitimate enuf approach. the U. Colorado group does say that an ocean could be consistent with their results – but it does not follow from them)

• AP – Malcolm Ritter: Study: Saturn moon has liquid water below surface ;
• *UPDATE : Reuters – Ben Hirschler : Saturn’s moon may hide watery caverns – and life? ; Blends reports from both groups without exploiting the confrontational nature of the press releases that came with them ;
• *UPDATE: Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger : The Salty Waters of Saturn’s Moon Hint at Life ; theme: water all over the solar system.
• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Pete Spotts: Cassini spacecraft finds evidence for liquid water on Enceladus ;  He has both hypotheses, but stresses the salt=oceans=astrobiology(maybe) angle.
• Times (UK, blog) Mark Henderson: Cassini’s greatest hits: visions of Saturn ; Henderson leads on oceans as part of a larger package celebrating the upcoming 5th anniversary of Cassini’s operations among the moons of the ringed planet.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Are we alone? Alien life may be thriving on Saturn’s frozen moon ; The pooh-pooh no-ocean-we-can-see news comes up at the very end.

Old News Anyway? One point few make is that the basics of the argument for a salty ocean deep inside Enceladus are not new. What’s new is their formal publication in Nature. For instance, at Science News its astronomy writer Ron Cowen buffed up a story from last summer and re-posted it. It has essentially all the elements of this week’s burst.

Grist for the Mill:

• Pro-Enceladus ocean: Univ. Leicester Press Release ; Univ.College-London Press Release;  NASA-JPL Press Release ;
• Doubtful Enceladus ocean: Univ. Colorado Press Release ;

 The Tracker really does not know if “say wot” is much of a Britishism, and I toyed briefly with “blimey!” too but don’t really know if anybody says that. ‘Haven’t been there in awhile. But a few outlets in Britain have .. uh oh, almost said have their knickers in a knot .. are reporting in perhaps a wisp of dismay a study indicating that the US is doing better in the cognitive aging department than is the UK.

The wire service, The Press Association, has it under the hed “American OAPs smarter !than English.” OAP stands for Old And Perfuddled. Not. It means Out Aimlessly Peregrinating. No no no. That’s what I’m doing. It really means Old Age Pensioner.

The news is from a comparison of two large investigations done separately in the two nations -  a warning signal right that there that the two data sets maybe-might-so-be-careful have systematic differences in their innards. It is in the journal BMC Geriatrics by a team comprising authors at the University of Michigan, the University of Cambridge, and the Peninsula Medical School in the UK. And they say both data sets rely on the same cognitive tests of two population groups over age 65 – 8,299 in the US and 5,272 in the UK. By the time they are 85, it says here, Americans had a ten-year advantage in forestalling mental agility decline.
Other Stories:

• Telegraph - Richard Alleyne  : “US pensioners mentally ’10 years younger’ that those in England ; Maybe this lets the Scots and Welsh off the hook. The results, as he and the study report, are somewhat of a surprise. The seniors in the UK are otherwise healthier if one looks at such things as coronary disease and rates of diabetes. Americans, on the other hand, were less depressed on average than the English. And the English drink more.
• New Scientist – MacGregor Campbell: US grandparents ‘smarter’ than UK counterparts;
• In the News : American elderly possess better memories than the English ; Maybe that lets the Scots, Welsh, etc off the hook ;

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. Michigan Press Release (via Newswise) ; Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry Press Release (via EurekAlert, ScienceDaily) ;

Related News on how to keep an old brain young:

Yesterday the Association for Psychological Science in the US arranged a press conference in DC for results of a new study on keeping minds sharp as one ages. Results are in its journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

• HealthDayNews : Stay Upbeat, Active to Keep the Mind Young ;

Grist for the Mill: APS Press Release ;
PIc: by Neill Moffatt

Congratulations to the Washington Post‘s David Brown. He managed to write a story on genomic diversity within humanity without once using the word “race.” That may be smarter than bringing it up – usually, in such circumstances, a science writer might be tempted to say that race in its historical application to people has no biological meaning. To do so gets an intense reaction from some readers and hijacks the subject. In a broad take on the topic Brown reports research that divides peoples into “three genetic groups” associated in turn with Africa, with Eurasia about as far east as Pakistan and India, and a third with the rest of Asia (plus the New World and Oceania). Ah, one thinks, the old black, white, and yellow. But whether to call them races in any sense, that’s left on the floor for another day, another debate.

The point of his story is that however one can discern ancestry from genes, there is hardly any significant, systematic genetic variation among people across all ancestral homelands. Some, but not much. He mentions groups, populations, ethnic divisions, and the tripartite Family of Man. Again, no sharply demarcated races, now or ever. Smart, that. Comments from readers are all over the map. Some good, many rather confused. The Tracker was thrown off stride, while charmed, by one terse explanation: “Noah had three sons.”

Pic source ;

-CP

Nearly 100 years ago in the US involuntary sterilization of purportedly feeble-minded women and teenage girls was an accepted, legal response to fears they were propagating undesireable genes. Such eugenics practices have long since fallen into deep disrepute. But for USA Today writer Andrea Pitzer brings the era and its beliefs into dramatic relief with a contemporary news angle. A Georgia State University professor has made it his life’s obsession to fully reveal how, and why, such things were allowed to happen – and not just to women – in full view of judges and the law.

-CP

While the US lags several other nations in the deployment of wind turbines at sea, it seems to have now set the stage to make up some ground. The Dept. of Interior announced yesterday it is leasing five areas off New Jersey and Delaware to wind energy companies that want to put up test towers and to find which places are most suitable. This is a “major step forward” for proposed wind farms in the region, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Sandy Bauers reports,  and are the first such leases issued for the outer continental shelf. He got a nice, understandable but jargon-infused quote from one company executive. “Now we’re truing up the predictions.” He also reports that while such leases were in principle allowed for the last several years, the Bush administration failed to craft the regulatory system to do so. One wonders – did the Obama team whip out a big set of forms and instructions from scratch in just a few months, or what? One doesn’t learn that from this, but does find out some of the strange bureaucratic complexities that have been cleared up since the inauguration.

Other stories:

• AP – Wayne Parry : Leases awarded for windmills studies off NJ, Del. ;
• Reuters  – Jon Hurdle: US awards exploratory leases for offshore wind ;
• Financial Times (blog) Sheila McNulty : US catches up on offshore wind ;
• NY Times – Jad Mouawad : First Offshore Wind Leases Issued ;
• New Jersey Star-Ledger – MaryAnn Spoto: US awards four leases to explore wind energy off Jersey coast ;
• McClatchy Newspapers – Renee Schoof :  Wind energy companies test waters for offshore projects ; But, she reports, today’s turbines couldn’t take a Class V hurricane. Souces tell her they should be too hard to design.

Grist for the Mill: Dept. of Interior Press Release ;

Some other wind energy stories out now:

• Bloomberg – Mike Anderson: Wind Power Will Overtake Nuclear in UK, BWEA says ; that is the British Wind Energy Association.
• China Daily – Zhang Yu’an: China commits to offshore renewable energy ;
• Bloomberg : Wind energy infrastructure would raise price 20 percent, study says ;

And finally, some grist that may not yet have reached any mills:

• Stanford University News Service: High-altitude winds: The greatest source of concentrated energy on Earth; Tracker would have guessed uranium ore deposits, or perhaps coal fields. The story is about the energy in jet streams that might be tapped via turbines on huge kites.

The mineralized bones of a rabbit-sized creature with what look like little tusks in its lower jaw is the oldest member yet known of the lineage from which today’s elephants sprang, opines a French research team.  The mini-preelephant lived 60 million year ago. It would have likely lacked a trunk – maybe it could wiggle its nose but how could we know? The teeth and other skeletal features apparently make it a candidate for the Proboscidea order. Perhaps it is THE essential stem proboscidean, they say, on the scene 5 million years after the dinosaurs’ demise.

This makes today a day for catching up on elephant news (next post down: a whopper from Indonesia).Yesterday’s equipment malfunction prevented this and the preceding post from making it in till now.

Two outlets picked up on little Eritherium azzouzorum from the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Fossils of oldest elephant relative found ;
• National Geographic – Mark Anderson: Rabbit-size Elephant Ancestor Found – Oldest Known ;

Grist for the Mill: PNAS Abstract ;

Yesterday the AP‘s Niniek Karmini filed from Bandun, Indonesia on what its discoverers call the most complete elephant fossil - essentially the entire and  well-articulated skeleton – ever found in the tropics. It died on a riverbed in Java about 200,000 years ago. It either sank to its death in sand or was covered after death so quickly that scavengers and intense decay in the hot climate could not scatter or degrade the bones. And it’s big – considerably larger than today’s Asian elephants and perhaps more like a woolly mammoth in stature.

Paleontologists from Bandung’s Geology Museum and colleagues from Australia’s Wollongong University have packed it up and are planning to reconstruct it for display. This may take awhile. Karmini writes, “Indonesia, an emerging and impoverished democracy of 235 million people, cannot afford to allocate more than a token sum to its aging museums” and notes that the elephant project is hampered by “lack of funding, inadequate tools and poor expertise.” That’s a money pitch. This sounds like an opportunity for USAID, if it still does that sort of thing. Or, a private philanthropy. Maybe an Indonesian timber baron eager to partly make up for other natural heritage damages inflicted on his or her order.

While the news is only now getting wide global circulation, the local and regional press have already reported the essentials. Unclear is exactly how tall this animal was. Stories have its height ranging from 2.5 to 4 meters, or eight to 13 feet. Also unclear, due to the wide divergence in the stories, is the degree to which Indonesian and Australian scientists shared the work and who merits primary credit for getting the project moving.

National Geographic News produced a video that puts Indonesian scientists in a starring role.

Other Stories:

• Scoop prize to Jakarta Post – Suherdjoko (April 23): Fossils of prehistoric elephant, leaf found in Blora ; Interesting local yarn well ahead of the rest, with some bits on the local history of paleontology. The leaf, by the way, is pertinent to the age dating of the elephant.
• Jakarta Globe – Nurkika Osman (June 11) : Ancient Elephant Unearthed in Java ; Osman’s story has some detail, too, on other ancient elephants already on display at the museum.
• Illawarra Mercury (Australia June 10) Pamela Frost: Wollongong fossil hunters dig up ancient elephant ; Interesting contrast in coverage. This Australian account barely mentions the role of local and Indonesian researchers. The Jakarta stories have it the other way around.
• Times (UK June 9 from Sydney) Sophie Tedmanson : Extinct giant elephant skeleton discovered in Indonesia ; This is a little more balanced in attributing credit.
• Telegraph (UK June 10) Vikki Campion : Aussie team’s fossil dig – ancient elephant in the mud ; Again, it’s an all-Oz show. One suspects the Wollongong team provided spark and expertise – once suspicion subsided that they were archeology pirates. But aside from getting credit where it’s due, the existence of indigenous scientists and field workers, toiling alongside the visiting PhDs, is vital to telling a properly engaging, rounded story.

Grist for the Mill: Jun 9, University of Wollongong Press Release ;

-CP

Perhaps 9,500 years ago a thick glacier filled what is now Sam Ford Fiord on the northeast coast of Canada’s Baffin Island, the big rugged slug of cratonic gneiss north of Hudson Bay. It and the terrain holding it in place looked much like any of the many of today’s outlet glaciers along the shore of ice-capped Greenland, just to the east and across Baffin Bay. Within a few centuries during a warming time much like that now underway, says a new report in Nature Geosciences, it was essentially gone. Left behind was the deep narrow inlet about 110 km long with near-vertical walls that has become a dream destination for rock climbers and adrenaline-addicted base jumpers. For a prolonged time, says the team led by a State University of New York-Buffalo researcher, the tall ice front was backing up by an average 190 feet per year.

The report came out Monday, but has so far been picked up among major media outlets only, so far as a standard search reveals, by CanWest‘s Randy Boswell.  One of the researchers tells him that should such a round of catastrophic melting – occurring in a geologic instant – to afflict the myriad tidewater glaciers plowing their way to the ocean through Greenland’s deep border canyons,sea levels worldwide would accelerate upward “requiring vast re-engineering of leveees and other mitigation systems.”

Grist for the Mill: SUNY-U.Buffalo Press Release ;

-CP