Due to a recalcitrant PC, things went slowly this morning, ground to a halt, and eventually ate a pretty good post on reports from Indonesia of a large fossil elephant. The Tracker will reconstruct that one first thing tomorrow. I believe I just pushed two many buttons at once and flummoxed the blue-screened ogre that still lurks in the heart of the latest from Windows. Here’s all that got done today….
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The lead art piece for the section, about ice skating and its injuries, by Pam Belluck is at first blush an outlier to the Science Times’s usual range. What has science to do with ice skating, and some also scoff what has ice skating to do with athletics? Answers to both questions arise on actually reading it. It’s a tough sport, one learns, rife with injury to go with the grace of a well-executed axel. Most interesting part, to The Tracker’s mind, is buried near the end: a bit about the gyroscopic advantages, precisely measured, of a slight adjustment of elbow. I’d have used that as a lede.
Speaking of ledes, it is hard to resist (I haven’t done so) writing any story on the Vatican’s Advanced Technology Telescope on Arizona’s Mount Graham without putting right in the lede some variation of an obvious play on words: The Pope got an Angel to build the heart of his telescope. That’s too easy for George Johnson, who instead takes ownership of the story without such japes. He describes how modern optical astronomy is done, with the Catholic church’s involvement providing a surprise setting to get readers to pay attention. Johnson provides a brief history of why the Vatican has an observatory in Arizona, or anywhere, at all. Condolences, however, to George. In the printed story – at least the one that hit door steps in Berkeley – one finds the wrong photo got pasted up. All that work and they run the wrong picture! You won’t find it with the on line version. Ironically, the one on paper is another Mount Graham instrument, the Large Binocular Telescope. Is also sports mirrors from the lab of U. of Arizona optics wizard Roger Angel. The correct telescope is the one to the right (pic source) .
Other notable headlines include:
As usual lots more in whole section ;
Haven’t heard many stories lately about space elevators – great in concept but hard to build lifts that would rely on stiff cables of superstrong unobtainium reaching beyond geosynchronous orbital altitude, stabilized by a huge counterbalance weight at the top flung centripitally by the rotating Earth to maintain a taut structure. Nobody knows how to make one even if the dynamics make sense. Jim Handman, who produces CBC‘s Quirks and Quarks Saturday radio show, sent us a message early this week to boost a story on a “crazy Canadian scheme” that goes part way to space. Program host Bob McDonald spoke with the York University man who has the swell idea. It is that a considerably smaller tower built on a mountain – and reaching to around 20 km altitude or “only” about 65,000 feet – but able to hold thousands of tons of weight might be entirely feasible. It would be a lighter-than air structure made of up hydrogen or helium filled cells, inflated to enough pressure to provide some rigidity. Careful manipulation of pressure in cells would make it an adaptable structure able to lean into the wind if needed. Kevlar might be a suitable material. The professor and his students and other team members already have built a prototype in the stairwell of a campus building.
One question is, so what? So this: it’d be great as a tourist attraction and a launch pad on its top would reduce the demands on rockets to get payloads into actual space, it says here. The full paper – rather detailed and interesting – is in the journal Acta Astronautica with a link below in Grist.
By no stretch of definition is 20 km in space even if it does provide an incredible view of a dark sky and brilliant clouds far below. But the York group believes such towers could be built much taller than this design.
Other Stories: Q&Q’s show came first to my attention, but it’s not the first to have this news.
See Also: A blog called Next Big Future (June 8 ) combines news of this balloon tower with a review of another idea that apparently has been around: a “space pier” of inflated structure.
Grist for the Mill: Acta Astronautica journal Paper ; York U. Press Release ;
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We have noted several times over the years the steady stream of well-constructed, first-person doctor columns from Tennessee by physician Manoj Jain. He writes for the local Commercial Appeal, and his stuff runs regularly at such places as the NYTimes and Washington Post. His latest offering, “Alternative care isn’t safe as a substitute,” does not of course recommend alternative practitioners. But it also does not have the hard line against folk remedies and traditional healers’ advice that one might expect.
As his name suggests, his ancestry goes back to India and specifically to followers of Jainism – a spiritual belief a bit like Buddhism, very dharmic, and that believes there is no divine creator but that all people are capable of achieving something called in English “god-consciousness.” It has wonderful temples, too. I don’t know if he’s Jainist himself, so don’t know how much its tenets infuse this fully modern scientific doctor. Yet his own father and grandfather, he writes, have him drinking warm water every morning to flush out his toxins. He doesn’t think it does so, but he drinks it. His mother is into healing energy. Okay. Many of the patients he sees every week have all sorts of extra, semi-logical bells and whistles they add to the prescriptions he gives them. Okay. The essay suggests a man with a well-balanced gait and, clearly, a sure style when telling a story.
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The AP‘s Jeff Barnard reports from the scene of a coming-to-terms in the timber wars of the Pacific Northwest. It appears to be an enterprise story. He took the pictures too. It also falls into the feel-good category. Everybody in it appears to be getting along. A search finds nothing else on this topic and example.
The news: recent stimulus money, it says here, has reached into the Rogue River-Siskiyou Nat’l Forest in Oregon and revved up a forest-thinning effort called the House Hope Stewardship Project. It is an exercise in sustained and ecologically robust forestry – selective logging, efforts to replant with a diversity of trees and shrubs, and an eye to jobs in lumber but also plenty of wildlife for birders, hunters, anglers, and hikers who just want to wander through a rich landscape. Plus, one aim is to make sure that wild fires can run wild most places but at minimal peril to towns and cabins.
The organization behind the project has gotten local attention. One well-done example, still on line, ran June 1 last year. Medford (Ore) Mail Tribune – Paul Fattig: Evolution in the Woods ;
Grist for the Mill: Lomakatsi Restoration Project ; LRP Press Release ;
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Haven’t heard about fab labs for awhile. These are personal fabrication laboratories, smaller scale versions of the fancy machine sets used by industry and research universities etc. to make fast prototypes straight from the blue prints. Computer guided lasers and other tools cut the parts to spec from wood, plastic, sheet metal, and so on, and even do some assembly. If somebody has an idea for a new widget, he or she can draw it up and see the machine disgorge it. Comparct versions have been seen, aside from their utility in industrial nations, as good things for foreign aid programs to buy and send to developing countries to jump start small-scale innovation and manufacturing.
Late last week the Plain Dealer‘s John Mangels got room for a long piece on the proliferation of fab labs in his circulation area. His story leads on a parade of examples of garage tinkerers, small manufacturers, community college technical training programs, and others that have found the $50,000 and more that it takes to buy one. One guy made a hydrogen generator destined, he hopes, to run his pickup truck. A small business woman is cranking out specially designed knitting supplies. Mangels’s story has all the links you might want to learn more. Nice job, good to see it done at length too.
Grist for the Mill: MIT Fab Lab ;
Pic: MIT researchers pioneered Fab Labs, put one in a truck. Here it is at 2007 Burning Man festival.
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(English intro to Spanish lang. post) On May, 24 newspapers in Israel said that Venezuela and Bolivia supplied Iran with Uranium. The Bolivian government ended one arm of that controversy, saying “only a clown can imagine such a madness”. But there is news. Four weeks later, Bolivia announced that it is considering reopening Uranium mines that last operated during the 70’s and 80’s. The newspaper “La Razón” has a very detailed and comprehensive series of stories explaining Uranium reservoirs in the country, the government’s reason to reopen extraction in Potosi region and perhaps around Velasco, an overview of the history of Bolivia’s exploitations, and an analysis of uranium resources and producers around the world.
El 24 de Mayo de este año los periódicos israelíes difundieron un documento de su viceministro de relaciones exteriores en que se aseguraba que Bolivia y Venezuela suministraban uranio a Irán. El ministro de la Presidencia boliviano fue tajante: “solamente a un payaso se le puede ocurrir semejante barbaridad” (La Razón).
El Ministerio de Minería de Bolivia aseveró que Bolivia no producía Uranio. Sin embargo, semanas después se anunció la intención de reiniciar las explotaciones de las minas de la región de Potosí, y estudiar la viabilidad de los reservorios existentes en Velasco.
El periódico La Razón (Bol.) explica muy bien cuál es la situación de las 10 vetas de Uranio en sendas regiones. Abre su texto principal con una utilísima introducción en la que se da un repaso histórico a las explotaciones que tuvieron lugar en los años 70 y 80, y los motivos por los que 25 años después se van a retomar: potente combustible.
El artículo viene acompañado de una serie de notas muy interesantes. En una de ella se repasa la historia de la primera explotación de Uranio en Bolivia en el año 1974, y cómo en los 80 se detuvo por la caída de su precio.
En otra se analiza cuál es la situación en el mundo. De los más de 2 millones de toneladas de reservas mundiales de Uranio que existen, Australia es el pais más rico, seguido de Kazakshtán y en tercer lugar Canadá. En Latinoamérica, Argentina y Brasil, y también Bolivia, cuantan con reservas.
En otra nota se detalla el proyecto de búsqueda de Uranio en el yacimiento de la mina de Cotaje, y en otra se repasa la polémica con Israel, asegurando que dicho país desconfía del enriquecimiento que lleva haciendo durante 6 años Irán, declarado con fines pacíficos.
Trabajo muy completo en La Razón, que además acompaña los textos con dos grafismos. En uno de ellos explica que el uranio se puede enriquecer con objetivos industriales o para la fabricación de armamento atómico. En el otro se intentan resumir posibilidades energéticas, riesgos para la salud, problemas medioambientales, proceso de enriquecimiento… aunque la verdad, este segundo da la sensación que tal síntesis puede confundir más que ayudar al lector neófito.
The Tracker, on seeing first just one version of news getting wide play this morning, thought “boy, that’s a depraved angle.” The human serial killer evokes such moral revulsion that it seems an unfortunate metaphor for the habits of a wild carnivore that has no alternative to fresh meat. But there it was on the AP wire over Seth Borenstein‘s version: “Great white sharks hunt just like Hannibal Lecter.” But don’t blame Borenstein – looks like most everybody highlighted the parallel to murder. The reason: researchers at Univ. of Miami and Univ. of British Columbia explicitly applied a criminal investigation algorithm – used to narrow searches for serial killers – to discern the hunting habits and preferred home bases of the big sharks. Borenstein, as do several writers in one way or the other, does declare the difference: “great whites attack to eat and survive, not for thrills. And great whites are majestic creatures…”
I doubt I’d have had the nerve to ignore the serial killer angle had I gotten this to write, either. (After all I fell for the man-killer shark mood in that pic – see bottom for more on that.) The serial killer angle in this case is inherent in the news. But it does seem to be seized by some outlets with unseemly glee. There is a sort of deliberate stupidity to that – reporters know that the commonality is membership in the larger set of hunters but, hey, we have a free pass on this one so why not throw in Jack the Ripper! Ah well. So let’s see if anybody did NOT play up the psychopath simile.
Other stories:
AND THE WINNER OF THE COOL HEAD IN A FEEDING FRENZY PRIZE IS:
Grist for the Mill:
Journal of Zoology Abstract, U. Miami Press Release ;
Pic: Source (with analysis of its provenance. It’s real, it’s from scientific research, and the nervous kayaker knew, in theory, that he was in little danger)
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The Tracker spotted a story on AP this morning by Lisa Rathke with a very familiar feel and a few similar (but independetly obtained, it appears) quotes. A quick head scratch led me to recall a piece a few weeks ago in the NYTimes. Its Leslie Kaufman wrote of a Vermont organic dairy operation that required its milk suppliers to stop feeding the cows corn and soy and to instead give them flaxseed and alfalfa when they weren’t out eating grass. Kaufman’s story was the lead example of a roundup on cattle and methane – see previous post.
The Vermont initiative merits more, wide attention and gets it from Rathke. The news is its large scale confirmation from actual business experience that a more natural feed for cows makes them healthier, may increase milk yield, doesn’t cost much more (so far), and reduces the methane in their steady production of ruminant burps and belches .
However neither story looks into larger implications to the bovine diet and methane question. Maybe the answer has been reported already – but how important or difficult would it be to extend such dietary change to the three-times-larger beef cattle industry with its large feed lots? That’s an immense industry, well-heeled and professional in its study of efficiency and productivity in the feeding and marketing of cattle products. It may have something to say. The availability of flaxseed and alfalfa may be high enough to easily satisfy one segment of the Vermont dairy industry without much impact on market price – but can there be enough to keep costs reasonable should owners of millions more steers and cows decide to buy that feed? What would happen to the corn market? How do the acreage requirements to grow this low-methane feed compare to soy and corn? Is there an organized movement to so transform the feeding of the American herd? In sum, is feeding cows this sweeter and healthier food practical only for boutique dairies in parts of the world where most everybody is not lactose intolerant, or a switch that can have big impact on the contribution by such livestock to global warming?
*UPDATE: A pal at AP politely told The Tracker late this morning that, ahem, Rathke’s story is a sidebar to another cow burp story also on the service’s wire and that I’d overlooked: Dina Cappiello‘s piece headlined THE INFLUENCE GAME: Excuse me! Lobby wins on burps. This is a good one, on the stiff battle from the livestock industry that will face any EPA effort to impose significant methane limits on beef cattle and dairy cows – pigs and sheep too. Maybe llamas (my sister, who owns llamas is visiting this week so they’re on the tracker brain). Lots in here on the nicely framed term by opponents for any such effort: The cow tax. That’s as evocatively clever a term as death tax. But it still leaves unanswered the practical hurdles to any wholesale shift in animal diet as a tactic to slow global warming.
Grist for the Mill: Stonyfield Farm Greener Cow Project Press Release ;
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Too late for the regular Friday email newsletter The Tracker had pointed out to him a disturbing – if lively while painfully on point – summary in Science magazine’s news section of a May 1 AAAS Policy Forum. It focussed entirely on the collapsing institutions of major media science journalism (along with most of the rest of mm journalism). The panel had few if any answers for the business model question, but laid out well the consequences should the tattered army – down to a brigade by now – of traditional science journalists at newspapers, broadcasters, and similar independent commercial, big-picture outlets disappear entirely. Anybody in the business or interested in maintaining a semblance of shared conversations in this nation about science and other matters ought to read this.
The panel comprised several prominent and experienced members of the trade. One, Chris Mooney, has his own take on the panel’s message – prompted by the AAAS posting - and a string of useful and invective-free responses from readers at his blog hangout, The Intersection. The illus top right is ripped from one of Mooney’s previous postings, late last year, on the topic.
Incidentally, in other trade news, the 6th World Conference of Science Journalists is coming up in London June 30-July 2 and no doubt will generate a great deal of discussion on topic #1. If you can buck your way through the AAAS log in procedure, another panelists at the Policy Forum, Cristine Russell, President of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, has a Science Magazine editorial on the London meeting and related issues.
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The iterative and wandering path from data to conclusion doesn’t get much media attention. The process can be slow, agonizing, cerebral, and tedious. National Geographic‘s Brian Handwerk this week took the time to sort through an essay in the current Nature, by a well-known paleoanthropologist, recounting how he turned from his previous and controversial assertion that a variety of early Homo species may have arisen in SouthEast Asia. The evidence – just a jaw and a few teeth – now looks to him more like an ape. An interesting ape, for all that, but it is not always easy for a scientist to abandon a conclusion into which he’d publicly staked a lot of evidence, and go for the alternative a few colleagues preferred. For one thing, it meant recasting a much broader interpretation of the region’s ecosystem, one that had emerged from the original hypothesis. It’s a good, quiet story of research and its dead ends, detours, and reversals. All of which can add up to progress. The essay itself, below in Grist, is more than worth reading and merits wider attention.
Grist for the Mill: Nature essay, The mystery ape of Pleistocene Asia ;
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The Tracker once again notes with regret that NPR’s estimable Science Friday with the ineffable Ira Flatow seldom get note here. It’s Friday after all, too late for my morning run, and long gone by Monday. But today the site put up one of its often remarkable Featured Videos. Produced and narrated by the program’s NPR video maven Flora Lichtman, it is what they are calling Fluke Footage. An underwater camera caught a sneaky sperm whale delicately filching a sablefish from a boat based in Sitka, Alaska. The fishing crews up there for years have asserted they are losing catch to sperm whales. Sea lions, that makes sense, but those great big whales plucking fish one at a time from lines? And without making a big mess? Far fetched. But here’s some pretty good evidence. The general site for the video programming is here.
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