NASA’s plans for sending people anytime soon to any place beyond low Earth orbit may be under review but, in the meantime, the advance work on another round of Moon landings continues. Yesterday afternoon and right on schedule an Atlas V carried a double-whammy payload into trajectory toward the moon. (See previous post for some of the mission’s advance stories.) In a few days it is to drop one payload, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter into a low-altitude path circling the lunar poles for an extended mapping mission. The upper stage Centaur rocket will then go into a looping orbit of Earth for a few months, intersecting the Moon’s orbital path again while a suitably dark and perhaps icy south pole crater is identified. It will hit that crater, followed quickly by its accompanying, instrumented LCROSS probe to analyze the first impact’s debris cloud for signs of crater-bottom ice vaporized in the crash. That’ll be in October. The flash could be visible from Earth!

To back up a bit, the moon impact mission received a lively write up in the San Francisco Chronicle by David Perlman, which ran two days ago. The LCROSS is “bound for deliberate doom inside a crater on the moon,” he wrote.  For him it is a local story as engineers and scientists at NASA’s Ames Research Center about 40 minutes drive south of SF designed and are managing the mission bound for glory in a cloud of dust.

In Britain, in contrast to the routine celebration in the US of a successful rocket launch,  the event received a duskier assessment at The Register from Lester Haines. Under the hed “The Moon? We’re going nowhere, says NASA official” he counters the happiness at the launch pad with the gloom in the budgetary office. Without a lot more money the Constellation Program on which moon plans depend cannot make it work, it says here. The evidence is in what one senior NASA program manager told a public meeting of the independent committee reviewing NASA’s plans for human exploration. Haines also filedon the launch, which the paper headlines “NASA unleashes Moon-attack probe.”

A few more samples of coverage of the launch:

• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr. : NASA launches mission to explore the moon;
• CNET News – William Harwood: Atlas 5 rocket launches NASA moon mission ; Particularly useful, vivid description of the astronavigation maneuverings prior to the Oct. 9 impact.
• Contra Costa Times – John Simerman: Bay Area space scientists celebrate moon rocket launch with public screening ; Spritely, light tale. Hayward Daily Review (a sister, ANG pub of the CoCoTimes) did the same tale but by Diana Samuels: NASA Ames satellite shoots into space, LCROSS will look for water on the moon; Both stories, in illus of the merger mashup in most Bay Area newspapers, are carried at yet a third ANG paper in the constellation, the San Jose Mercury News’s site.
• AP – Marcia Dunn: NASA launches unmanned moon shot, first in decade ; She brightly includes mention of  a country-rock (and vaguely Moody Bluesy) ode, “Water on the Moon” written by the deputy project manager. Good roundup.

Grist for the Mill:  NASA-Goddard LRO site ;  NASA-Ames  LCROSS site;

-CP

The last two million years have seen their share of heavy glaciations, inter-glacials, and generally dramatic variations in climate. But until the last century or so, says a new analysis in Science Magazine, atmospheric carbon dioxide hardly change – running between about 180 and 300 parts per million including few few rapid dives or rises between those limits. Now, in geological terms, it’s skyrocketing to 380+ ppm and, some fear, headed beyond 500 and perhaps to 900 ppm in the next century.

The finding offers varied ammunition for the arguments – largely conducted outside the circles of rigorous science – over what it means.

• Skeptics will say that if the last 2 million years worth of climate yo yos occurred without CO2 changes, why believe that the one now underway IS the fault of CO2?
• The oh-oh crowd (most climate experts, plus The Tracker among non experts) will say the correlation does hold through deep time, CO2 does warm things up, and our atmospheric fiddling is surely sending us into unknown territory.

The few outlets that picked up this news play up that CO2, if this report from a Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory geochemist and colleagues is correct,  is now higher than it has been for a much longer time than could be previously documented. Some suspect, the news release says (See Grist below), that it hasn’t changed much in 20 million years. The troubling abnormality of current CO2 levels is in fact the right main angle for any news account. But The Tracker suggests reporters ought to acknowledge and deal explicitly with a more comforting (mis-)interpretation that some circles will apply. That is that if climate variability has not required large changes in CO2 for this long, it follows that the temperature charts of the last century are showing a natural fluctution. That leads to ergo #2: we can burn all the coal we like.

Stories:

• Houston Chronicle – Jeremy Van Loon:  2.1 million-year high measured for CO2 in atmosphere ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Maggie Koerth-Baker: CO2 Levels HIghest in Two Million Years : A better story – gets into the logical complexities of documenting CO2 and global temperature correlations. Has a quote that the skeptics will enjoy reading: “…we don’t know how sensitive the surface temperature..is to CO2.”

Grist for the Mill: Earth Institute at Columbia U. Press Release ;

Related News: At The Australian, Mike Steketee takes a long look. His lede: “The evidence of global warming keeps piling up that that seems only to embolde the climate contrarians and scpetics to pres their case harder ;

Barely Related News: AP – Randolph E. Schmid (with Ron Todt, Everton Bailey Jr.):  An exceptionally soggy June for many in US ; How often do you see a weather story closing with lyrics from Creedence Clearwater Revival? ;

-CP

A few reports on mysteries in astrophysics are in press (or metaphorically so, on line). In the spirit of a neutron stars’, white dwarfs’ and black holes’ efforts at sending anything toward degeneracy if not blacked-out enigmacity, This post somewhat randomly squashes them into one semi-related degenerate mass. Included in this relativistic quantum weirdness mayhem are strange embargo policies. So Here goes:

• Twisted Physics (via Discovery Channel) – Jennifer Ouellette : Twinkle, Twinkle, Neutron Star ; The writer of wise and wise-cracking blog Cocktail Party Physics apparently has time for another bloggy avenue (beyond her book writing). This post is a shorty that covers a lot of ground. She built it off an article from researchers in Spain who put it up on the ArXiv astro-ph on line watering hole. Ouelette not only reminds us that neutron stars are exceedingly strange dense little beasts, but informs us of a clever way to perhaps directly sample their ridiculously hard, seismically frisky crusts of ultracrushed and maybe monolithic crystalline iron stuff.
• Wired – Betsy Mason: Mysterious Gamma-Ray bursts May Have Ties to Failed Black Holes ; It’s not peer reviewed yet, she warns in her second graf, but Mason found on arXiv an imaginative hypothesis of how a vacuum of a very unusual type could appear in a collapsing stellar core and, somehow or other, stop a black hole from forming while at the same time triggering one of those mysterious explanation points in space known as gamma ray bursts.
• Science News – Ron Cowen:  SUPERNOVA MAY BE IN A NEW CLASS ; Cowen, as did Ouellette and Mason, harvested a good one off arXiv astro-ph. A weak new category of supernova appears to have lit off in the scanty outskirts of a far galaxy. It appears to be sort of like a Type Ia supernova – the result of a white dwarf hosting a detonation after loading up on material filched from a companion star – but the spectrum suggests very strange physics and great loads of helium were involved. The ejected debris is full of calcium, which is peculiar, it says here. Notably, the authors say they have a paper under review at Nature so they wouldn’t talk to Cowen, it says here. He made do with explanations from other authorities of what it might mean.
• Which brings up: at the Cosmic Variance blog, University of Washington astronomer Julianne Dalcanton posts: If a Paper is Submitted to Nature, Does it Still Make a Sound? ; Delicious. She has just the right explanation of the jam authors of many arXiv papers face. They must in effect tell the press, “Well, we’ve submitted this to Nature…so can all of you reading this just not actually, you know, tell anyone?..” and more in that vein. It’s a delightful romp through the labyrinth of rules imposed by the lofty Nature (and Science and NEJM and a few other journals) as compared to the loosy goosy acceptance of freedom and 21st century instant preprints at the Astrophysical Journal and many others. Dennis Overbye comes up, too.

Grist for the Mill:

arXiv astro-ph Bragg diffraction and the Iron crust of Neutron Stars ;  arXiv astro-ph A new type of stellar explosion ; arXiv hep-ph QCD against black holes?  ; MIT Tech. Review physics arXiv blog : “Burning Walls” May Stop Black Hole Formation ;

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) El Pais (Spain) has put one of its top science journalists for two weeks on board a Norwegian ship in the Arctic. Also on board are  scientists working with an international project to evaluate Arctic ice, waters and its microscopic inhabitants. In just her first four days Alicia Rivera has sent daily reports, a couple of videos, and interviews with scientists that show their professional and personal motivations for such research. It’s great reporting so far and perhaps we shouldn’t ask for more. But even more video, and maybe some twitter or other modes might be even better. The question is profound and the Spanish Lang. tracker has no clear answer; If a reporter with the tools now available is spending 15 days in the Arctic following this adventure, it is reasonable to ask why other ways to report, using the latest technologies, would not have enhanced the reporting beyond the “classical” 800 words of written text?

El Pais (Esp.) ha enviado a una de sus periodistas estrella a pasar 15 días a bordo del buque Noruego Jan Mayer, siguiendo las peripecias de 24 científicos de 11 nacionalidades diferentes que navegarán por el Ártico tomando muestras de microorganismos, midiendo temperaturas, y evaluando el panorama de los hielos para analizar los cambios bruscos que se están produciendo en esa zona como consecuencia del calentamiento global.

Alicia Rivera es una de las grandes el periodismo científico en España, y lo está demostrando con el prolífico trabajo realizado en sólo 3 días. El lunes Alicia Rivera hizo su primera crónica en la que describió las características de la misión. Quizás la primera entrega quedó un poco aséptica, pero en la segunda “El sol de medianoche” reflejó las interesantes explicaciones de un científico alemán sobre las consecuencias de que el Ártico se esté calentando 3 veces más rápido que la media del planeta, y sus augurios que dentro de 2 décadas los hielos árticos se formarán durante los inviernos pero podrían quedar por completo derretidos a finales de cada verano. También nos obsequió con el primer video grabado por Manuel E. Vidal: un ensayo de seguridad a bordo. Pero además, antes de terminar la jornada llegó una tercera crónica donde nos explica cómo funcionan los dispositivos utilizados por científicos para tomar muestras en las profundidades del mar, profundiza en la base científica del Ártico como indicador del cambio climático, y empieza a dar datos sobre el financiamiento de la campaña y los perfiles de los investigadores españoles a bordo.

Dos regalos más el miércoles. “En la isla del Oso”, nos describe más peripecias de los científicos y los motivos de sus pruebas, y nos presenta una entrevista en video al biólogo marino Jorge Felipe Álvarez. Ésta, y otra entrevista en papel a la investigadora noruega Helisabeth Halvonsen nos permiten conocer más de cerca las motivaciones profesionales de los científicos, pero también su satisfacción personal.

Muy recomendable ir siguiendo la amplísima cobertura de Alicia. No se puede pedir más, pero a uno –reflexionando sobre el momento de revolución en que se encuentra el periodismo- le surge una duda irresuelta: Si vas a pasar 15 días en el Ártico siguiendo tal aventura… en adición a las excelentes e insustituibles crónicas diarias… ¿se podría añadir alguna otra plataforma tecnológica (twitter?), o explotar todavía más las facilidades actuales de producir y distribuir contenido audiovisual? ¿Cómo informaremos dentro de 10 años en una situación parecida?

Most of the permit applications in recent years to build new nuclear plants have come for sites in the Old South, so The Tracker sat up a bit on reading in the Cleveland Plain Dealer a report by Aaron Marshall that Duke Energy (yes, rooted in the Old South) held a press conference to announce its intent to build a new nuclear plant in Ohio (yes again, it’s southern Ohio, at a former DOE uranium enrichment planet site, but not Dixie). The story – one of several but the first I saw – hits squarely all the reasons given by nuclear energy fans for building at least a few new nukes and, if manufacturers manage to erect them at anywhere near their advertised budgets, build a bunch more of them. They don’t emit CO2 for one thing. That’s the main thing, actually. Plus they don’t have all those coal trains rumbling through the local town nearly every day. This one’s reactor will come from the big France-based company, Areva – presumably after learning some lessons from its overdue, overbudget effort to put up an advanced plant in Finland (see Times – Robin Pagnamenta:Landmark nuclear reactor will be three years late).

And last week a Republican congressional group called on the US to build 100 new nuclear reactors in the next decade or so (for one, Wyoming Star Tribune – Dustin Bleizeffer: House GOP submits energy plan centered on nuclear). That’d about double the number we have now – and which produce roughly a fifth of US electricity.

The Tracker would like to see a few new nukes just to learn whether they go as advertised, but suspects that the political will to guarantee loans with public money is lacking in Washington, and the gambler’s spirit absent on Wall Street to justify such private investment.  But…maybe. In that spirit, here are a few more samplings of recent pro-nuke developments in the news, including some more on that Ohio plan:

• Salt Lake Tribune – Patty Henetz: Energy secretary sees nuclear power in America’s future; Steven Chu spoke at a Western Governors’ Ass’n meeting in the state.
• Wall Street Journal – Mark Peters: Duke, Areva Propose Nuclear Power Plant in Ohio;
• NYTimes – Matthew L. Wald: New Nuclear Plant for Ohio Pondered ;
• Wall Street Journal – Rebecca Smith: US Chooses Four Utilities to Revive Nuclear Industry ; Seven nukes in all,  from NRG, Unistar, Scana, and Southern. One is surprised that Entergy, which was among the first to submit preliminary applications, isn’t there.
• Bloomberg – Tina Seeley : Southern files to build 2 reactors ; In Georgia ;
• Cincinatti Enquirer – Mike Boyer: Nuclear plant would cost $10 billion ; The Ohio news again.
• Columbus Dispatch – Mark Niquette : Piketon nuke-plant effort begins ; and by Ashley Lutz : In Pike County, it’s about the jobs;
• Dayton Daily News – Tom Beyerlein: Plans unveiled for Ohio’s first nuclear reactor in 2 decades ;

Grist for the Mill:

Ohio governor’s office Press Release ; Duke Energy Press Release ;

-CP

Spot news that sticks with the spot that made the news can make for pointillist reading. Except that the points don’t always add up to a coherent image. For a change we’ll list the grist first by looking at the press releases that produced two spots that remained disconnected.

The first, which Oregon State University released June 6, is entitled “Discovery raises new doubts about dinosaur-bird links.” One of OSU’s professors – who has a long history of raising such doubts (eg June, 2000 press release), argues that the distinctive way that birds’ hip and upper leg bones support their respiratory systems strongly implies a much earlier and separate branching from the dinosaur lineage than common belief asserts.

This earlier, OSU story got little pickup. The only ones The Tracker can find are at the Examiner, an online descendent of the old SF Examiner, with Meg Marquardt writing “New doubts arise over the dinosaur-bird link,” and at the Daily Mail in the UK as “Why birds are NOT descended from dinosaurs.”

The second news development, from a report in this week’s Nature, is boosted by a National Science Foundation release called “Beaked, Bird-like Dinosaur Tells Story of Finger Evolution.” It describes discovery in China of a theropod dinosaur dubbed Limusaurus inextricabilis whose name means lizard that got stuck in a mire. Its preserved, distinctive finger bones appear to show “how the three-fingered hand of birds evolved from the hand of dinosaurs.” How that happened, if it did, appears to have been a mystery. It was thought that birds and theropod dinosaurs each have three fingered hand, but not the same three fingers (derived from a five fingered form). The new fossils seem to clear that up.

More outlets wrote up the birds from dinosaur news from Nature. None however acknowledge that it comes so close on the heels of another report – widely promoted by press release – that slaps around the very idea that birds evolved from dinos. Arguments among scientists are natural fodder for reporters, even the ethical ones who don’t stir up or exaggerate such conflicts. They give life to various hypotheses and illustrate the method and doubts of science. But nobody took that tack – a missed opportunity, one thinks.

Stories on Bird-Dino Hand Evolution:

• Telegraph (UK) Fossil could be missing link between dinosaurs and birds;
• Wired – Brandon Keim: Fossil Catches Dinosaur Red-Handed, Evolving Into Bird ;
• National Geographic – John Roach: NEW DINOSAUR: Fossil Fingers Solve Bird Wing Mystery? ;
• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Fossil Solves Mystery of Dinosaur Finger Evolution; The hed ought to have hinted why one should care about this – BIRDS.
• BBC: New dinosaur gives bird wing clue ;
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Limusaurus may be the missing linke beween dinosurs and birds ;
• Science News – Sid Perkins: BIRD IN THE HAND ;
• Discover Magazine – ok, really it’s The Loom blog by the irrepressible Carl Zimmer : Of Birds and Thumbs; And his lede says what all regular science reporters should have known, but clearly some didn’t: “It is not – I repeat NOT – the missing link between anything.” I was getting fed up reading references to missing links when, blessedly, noticed Carl put things straight. Then he explains in great cladistic detail exactly why the three fingered lemosaurus is an important link, even if not a so-called the .. missing .. link. AND, one of his commentors asks what about that OSU study too?

And just to be fair and yet unbalanced if not deranged, one more for what it’s worth:

• Opposing Views (from the Religion in Society Center): Creationists Say Birds Didn’t Evolve from Dinosaurs ; This has to be insult injury for the OSU professor and his group. First their story pretty much sinks like a stone in the major media. then the ID crowd picks it up and runs with it. Life can be cruel that way.

A divergent health message Monday accompanied publication in the American Journal of Psychiatry of results of a study of sudden, violent death among youngsters. Eight physicians and other specialists, led by a woman at the NY State Psychiatric Institute, found a markedly higher history of using such stimulants as ritalin among children who suffered sudden death generally than in a category presumably indifferent to such drugs: deaths in automobile accidents. That sounds disturbing. But within hours of the study’s publication the Food and Drug Administration, which helped pay for the study, issued a statement downplaying the small study’s meaning (“not a robust finding..” a top FDA doc said) and urging parents whose attention deficit – hyperactivity disorder diagnosed children have been prescribed such drugs not to suspend such meds. And the lead author of the study goes along with that advice.

At least one of the advocacy groups suspicious of pharmaceutical solutions generally was quick to jump on the journal report – as seen in this essay released by an enterprise called Natural News: “Ritalin ADHD Drug Linked to 500 Percent Increased Risk of Sudden Death in Children.” Its first sentence uses the phrase “so-called ADHD” so you know where it stands in relation to standard medical practice. It then veers into screed. None of the stories from established news outlets got that worked up – or so mistreated statistics as to stress a 500 percent increase without caveat or perspective (Small numbers: a 1.8% stimulant use generally among sudden childhood deaths compared to 0.4% among car accident victims). The Tracker did no numerical analysis, but the trend of coverage since then seems to have shifted a bit from the wait-a-minute tone of initial reports toward stronger implication that such stimulants are now under a deeper shadow or peril than before. Plus, opportunists are jumping in. The study likely would have hit media radar anyway. It appears however that the initial surge was triggered by the FDA’s effort to curtail worry over its findings.

Stories, in rough chronological order:

June 15:

• AP – Matthew Perrone: FDA urges caution in weighing risks of ADHD drugs ;
• Reuters – Lisa Richwine : FDA questions heart risk findings on ADHD drugs ;
• AHN – Melvin Baker : FDA Backs Away From Study Linking ADHD Meds, Sudden Deaths ; This small on line outlet’s offfering is lively, sensible, and brings attention to the editorial in the paper’s publishing journal, which seems to throw its own grains of salt on to the study.
• Wall St. Journal – Jared A. Favole: FDA Cites Limitations of ADHD Drug Study;
• CNN – Amanda MacMillan : Study links some ADHD meds to rare deaths ; Nicely done melding of caveats with the chance the risk is real.
• Los Angeles Times – Melissa Healy (blog) : ADHD stimulants raises (sic) kids’ heart attack risks, FDA holds its fire on safety warnings;
• Bloomberg – Shannon Petty Piece: Attention Drugs May Be Linked to Sudden Death in Kids;
• USNews & World Report – Nancy Shute : Is Ritalin Too Risky for Kids With ADHD?: Shute inverts the question in her lede and answers: Probably safe enough.
• USA Today – Rita Rubin: Sudden death in kids, ADHD drugs linked ; Lots of qualifiers and backs and forths, but stresses the risk side a bit more than most of the first day’s stories.

June 16:

• Health Day News : Stimulants Linked to Sudden Unexplained Death in Youths ;
• Medical News Today – Catharine Paddock: Study Links ADHD Drugs to Sudden Death in Children ; Written at a higher level than most news accounts (which means more technical and murkier), but it lays out the uncertainties and regulatory context.
• Washington Post – Shankar Vedantam: Study Shows Possible Link Between Deaths and ADHD Drugs ;

June 17

• NY Daily News – Rosemary Black: Children taking ADHD medication may be at risk of sudden cardiac death, study finds ; Written largely for parents who already saw the headlines and are worried sick. Black tells them experts say results are not conclusive enough to necessarily take kids off their medication. That necessarily in there somewhat muddies the usefulness of the advice.
• Huffington Post – Dr. Peter Breggin: Stimulants for ADHD Shown to Cause Sudden Death in Children ; This is not a news story but is on an influential outlet. The author says the study’s results are as “dramatic as they are tragic.” He takes them as personal vindication for his highly public crusade against widespread use of Ritalin etc. for ADHD and against what he sees as overuse of drugs in psychiatry generally.
• and one more from outside the usual journalism haul – Chiropractic Economics: ADHD drugs pose serious risk to children ; But, it says here, chiropractic poses no such risk and “shows promising results.” Somehow, this makes me think of our fellow, Brit science writer Simon Singh, embroiled in lawsuit by by the spine-aligners under UK libel law for saying chiropractic makes many bogus assertions.
Grist for the Mill: FDA Press Release, formal  Communication on the study ; American J. Psychiatry Article ;

Pic: Most interesting source ;

-CP

On Monday the Boston Globe‘s Beth Daley and AP‘s Clarke Canfield reported a US fish and Wildlife Service and Nat’l Marine Fisheries Service decision to add wild Atlantic salmon in three of Maine’s largest river systems to the endangered species list. As each reported, the decision is not getting hosannahs from many in Maine itself. The state’s governor for one believes it merely hobbles local, and effective but flexible, measures to reach the same end.

Further insight is found in the Bangor Daily News. Staffer John Holyoke has the news greeted as a “kick in the teeth” for a treasured Maine pasttime. The fishing season is cancelled. Fishermen (women too presumably), it says here, feel they were doing more than anybody to maintain the salmon. Now they can’t even fish.

But….considering that nearly every wild salmon fishery in the world (save perhaps Alaska’s) has been mismanged to the brink of collapse or beyond, one should hardly be surprised to see the Feds stepping up their game.

Grist for the Mill:

USFWS Press Release ; Represenative Mike Michaud (plus Sens. Snowe and Collins) Press Release ; Ctr. for Biological diversity Press Release ;

Pic source ;

It is a fixed fact in journalism: the corrections and retractions of big stories seldom get the play that the original news did. Some exceptions exist but not many. But the correctives do occur and we’re seeing one this week. In 2003 great fanfare greeted news, originally published in Science, of a gene variant that appeared to give its carriers more vulnerability to depression. Plus, the gene variant seemed activated by life’s experiences, making one round of clinical depression set the stage for more of them. Now, as published in JAMA, further study along with analysis and meta-analysis of the original data and other scrutiny suggest it was an error. Not that genetics has no role in depression, but that the specific genes responsible remain elusive.

The AAAS‘s and Science‘s own Constance Holden merits a first look. Catchy lede: “Why do some people sail happily through life and others are brought low by its slings and arrows?,” followed forthrightly by word that the answer provided by Science yeras ago has been called into question. But, as she writes, the original study’s authors are sticking to their guns.

Other stories:

• NYTimes – Benedict Carey: Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted ;
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Researchers Find No Link Between Defective Gene, Mood Disorder ;
• Forbes – Robert Langreth: Hunt For Depression Genes Goes Into Reverse ;
• Time Magazine – Anita Hamilton: Study: ‘depression Gene’ doesn’t Predict the Blues ;

Grist for the Mill: NIMH Press Release ;

The new-old report, “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States” from the US Global Change Research Program calls itself “the most comprehensive and authoritative report of its kind.” It is emphatic in tone, as seen right off the top at its “key findings” page – additional links in Grist below. Wildlife is migrating or otherwise responding, rainfall and temperature patterns have changed, heavy rains are up, and things will only get more intense, it says without equivocation.

(The Tracker, always on the lookout for places that ought to use more good rewrite people, wonders in style dudgeon why in the world the report’s succinct intro lapses blowsily by saying “impacts in the US are already occurring and are projected to increase in the future….” Oh, it will happen in the future. If it’ll be today, or this week, or not for 50 years, that’s value added. But there should be a law against writing an empty “in the future” in sentences that use the future tense plus employ such words as “are projected,” as though changes that will or might happen have an alternative than in the future to do so. The report overall, one adds, appears commendable for its direct use of plain English without too much passive voice).

Many outlets wrote the story. Biggest circulation is likely to go, as usual, to the AP. There Seth Borenstein handles it without hyperbole and with a useful angle. Compared to the last administration’s circulation of what is essentially the same report, mandated by some kind of law , he writes that this rollout “is paradoxically more dire about what’s happening and more optimistic about what can be done.” His story stresses reactions by various players in the climate politics world, with only enough samplings of the report’s conclusions to show what his sources are talking about. Several tell us there are a few tipping points already upon us, and that cannot be undone.

Interesting it is that a British newspaper, The Guardian, perhaps taking some of its info and a quote from AP, nonetheless has one of the sharpest takes on the report’s substance as well as its careful crafting and tactical presentation at the Tuesday Press Conference, from Suzanne Goldenberg : Obama targets US public with call for climate action . A version of this report, with an additional byline for Adam Morton, runs in Australia’s The Age.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Jeff Mason: US climate report details energy, agriculture harm;
• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: New Climate Change Report; From Bad to Worse; Not really a news story. Tracker agrees with it, but it’s a column.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano, Doyle Rice: ‘Game Changer’: Report on climate change urges action ; Notable for including a sidebar snort from James Connaughton, head of the Bush White House Council on Environmental Quality. He says, with justification one thinks, that the new report is exactly what the former administration compiled – but the new gang didn’t even acknowledge that.
• SF Chronicle/ Hearst – Jennifer A. Dlouhy: New report stresses immediacy of global warming ; Immediacy? Wonky hed, urgent but somewhat awkward story.
• AFP – Karin Zeitvogel : Climate change is happening ‘here, now’ : US report ;
• Washington Post – David A. Fahrenthold: Report on Warming Offers New Details / Estimates Specify Effect on Different Regions of U.S. ;
• NYTimes – Lauren Morello (with ClimateWire): US Study Proejcts How ‘Unequivocal Warming’ Will Change Americans’ Lives ;
• Voice of America – Kate Woodsome : US Government Scientists Call For Urgent Action on Global Warming ; She gets in a riposte from meteorologist William Gray at Colorado State.
• Baltimore Sun (blog) – Tim Wheeler : US report: climate changing here now ;
• Wired – Alexis Madrigal : From Sewage to Salmon, Climate Change Hitting Here and Now.
• PBS Newshour: White House Says Cliamte Change Already Affecting U.S. ;

And elsewhere, a climate change politics reality check:

• Deseret News – Lisa Riley Roche: Herbert challenges reality of global climate change ; He’s state lt. governor. But in Utah, lots of people scoff at G. Warming.
• To be fair about Utah: Salt Lake Tribune – Judy Fahys  : “Report: Climate change is here, should be dealt with now.”

Grist for the Mill:

US Global Change Research Program Newsroom Site ; National Academies Science in the Headlines ;

-CP

Two launches are currently scheduled from Cape Canaveral this week. The shuttle is bound for another construction visit to the space station, now set to shove off tomorrow, while on the day following a mission pregnant with significance to the shuttles’ scheduled retirement near year is to go up. That latter is the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. It sits on an Atlas V (and there’s a rocket with an ancient, ballistic missile pedigree. Like the Deltas still in the stable, and Russia’s R-7/Soyuz, its roots go back to the 1950s!). The LRO is to scout the moon’s surface for minerals including water near the poles, a vital step should the new administration endorse the Bush White House ambition to put astronauts back on lunar regolith within ten years and to push on expeditiously to Mars. Bolted to it is a second probe, or impactor, called LCROSS that will take months to get there. It will rip right into a crater within the moon’s south polar region at nearly 6000 mph (9000 kmh) to raise  dust and perhaps shattered ice for inspection.

Several outlets have recently run advance dispatches on the lunar orbiter and its companion nose-diver.

• Baltimore Sun – Frank D. Roylance: NASA to launch 2 spacecraft to the moon ;  Telling graf up high: Says that this is the first NASA lander (crasher, really) since the last Apollo mission in 1972, but this time it’ll have company. Orbiting the moon already are Chinese and Indian machines, and Japan just finished smacking the moon with one of its own probes.
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Orbiter to Map Moon, Looking for Ice and a Home for Astronauts;
• Space.com: Debate rages over moon water . Two NASA spacecrafts, expected to launch this week, may give answers ;
• LA Times – John Johnson Jr.: NASA delays moon-mapping mission by a day ;
• AFP – Jean-Louis Santini: NASA probes lead way back to moon ; Not sure, but one thinks he has the one-two punch of LCROSS wrong. A “shepherding spacecraft” packed with instruments releases and then trails the spent rocket main impactor not so that it can burrow as deeply as possible, as AFP has it, but to fly through and quickly sample the debris cloud, relaying data just before demolishing itself.

Grist for the Mill:  NASA-Goddard LRO site ;  NASA-Ames  LCROSS site;

-CP

A satisfying and mind-challenging story on plausible first steps from pre-biotic chemistry to the real thing leads the section. Nicholas Wade provides it with a feint of a start. He starts off with the history of frustration among researchers trying to show or merely imagine how any soup of chemicals might spontaneously lead to living cells with protective membranes and a bunch of self-copying RNA or DNA or something like that inside. Life’s origins, he writes, bristle with puzzle and paradox. One almost thinks he’s leading up to a big explanation that it really is  tough and with a resulting theme along the lines of rare Earth or we and our blue marble are pretty near alone.

He snaps such fear of tedium however with this news: several teams of researchers recently have concocted scenarios that might simultaneously do two slightly contrary things: make membranes that keep important innards from leaking out while also letting the important ingredients for their reproduction to leak in – but without the fancy and highly evolved machinery that living cells now (and for a few billion years) use to police the gates. The story takes a stab at describing actual chemistry but not too deep – a quick and nearly incomprehensible-to-the-unwary reference to bases, sugars, phosphate groups, and nucleotides. Well okay then. One tiny quibble: he has comets “careening” into the early Earth during the late great bombardment. The Tracker, as I occasionally sigh, is rooting for careering to retake its former place as widely preferred and realized usage.

Other notable headlines:

• Anthony DePalma : An Unsightly Algae Extends Its Grip to a Crucial New York Stream ; Also called rock snot or abbreviated from the Linnaean to “Didymo,” it is moving fast or, as we used to say while careering around Vietnam in Hueys and picking up a few local phrases, it knows how to didi mau. One more thing: According to at least one style manual (Nat’l Geo), the hed should say alga to fit the article’s and verb’s singular senses.
• Roni Caryn Rabin : Alcohol’s Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It ; Good succinct second graf (“But what if it’s all a big mistake?”). Just ask yourself how you’d answer this question and what it might to do a survey’s stats: “Do you feel more like having a drink when you feel great, or when you feel like crap?” ;
• Claudia Dreifus : A Conversation With Bert Hölldobler / Insects Succeeding Through Cooperation ; This is the other ant guy (and his best bud is Ed Wilson). Best line: “Karl Marx was right, but he picked the wrong species.” ;
• Henry Fountain : A Plant That Thrives When Used as a Toilet ; Another of his roundup-model gems.

Plenty more as usual. Whole Section ;

-CP