The Seattle Times‘s Craig Welch on Sunday published a story linking – with lots of caveats to be sure – a troubled oyster gathering industry in Oregon and Washington to a recent increase of relatively acidic waters that well up once in awhile and surge into the bays where oysters are raised.

That Welch accepts the cause and effect as more than plausible can be seen in the story’s structure. It does not start with scientists who find it somewhat believable, and also seem to be saying that it’s a suggestive pattern but is far from as persuasive scenario. To them things look suspicious. But Welch takes readers first to the oyster farmers and their fears. The story builds the ominous signs on a stage occupied by the sturdy oysterfolk and their kids who they want to see follow them into the business. After letting the omens play a bit he declares that this “could mean shifts in ocean chemistry associated with carbon-dioxide emissions from fossil fuels may be impairing sea life faster and more dramatically than expected.” That’s one “could” and one “may” in one sentence, which is a lot of maybe. But the tone implies probably.

The Tracker would not have the nerve to write the story this way. I’m a cautious guy. Time will tell if Welch’s gamble on such dramatic telling of an inherently iffy but legitimate hypothesis will find vindication. With the speed with which research on ocean acidification is moving it may not take too long.

*UPDATE: Woods Hole Ocean. Inst. Press Release July 17 on acidification, implications for shellfish industry. See comments below – could be Mr. Welch is getting his story’s angle and tone vindicated pronto.

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Argentine scientists have genetically modified a potato plant so that it is resistant to a broad spectrum of microorganisms. They used  three genes that codify for antifungus and antibacterial proteins. It seems that it’s a great achievement because such a genetic package may prove useful in such other crops as corn and soy. The newspaper La Nación explains very well the origin of the genes, the procedure followed by the researchers, the reason why it’s a big improvement, the complete names of the microorganisms to which the plant is resistant … but shockingly it doesn’t say anything about any potential health risk for consumers. Ok… probably the answer is “of course it’s safe!” But people will wonder. Only a short sentence is needed to clarify this obvious issue.

Científicos de la Universidad de Buenos Aires han desarrollado una planta de patata transgénica resistente a un amplio espectro de hogos y bacterias. Lo han conseguido incorporando 3 genes que codifican la producción de proteínas antifúngicas y antibacterianas, algo que puede significar un buen “paquete” para ser utilizado en otros cultivos, como maíz o soja.

Varios periódicos reproducen notas de agencias, pero La Nación (Arg.) presenta el artículo más elaborado –y con diferencia- en letra de Gabriel Stekolschik.
En él no se escatiman detalles sobre los nombres de los géneros de los microorganismos a que la “superpapa” (así bautizada por sus creadores) es resistente, explicaciones de la enorme ventaja que significa tener protección frente a un espectro tan amplio, una descripción del proceso seguido por los investigadores durante 5 años, el origen de los genes foráneos y los motivos de su elección… se trata de una muy buena y completa nota, sin lugar a dudas. Pero… en ningún momento se menciona si las futuras patatas estarán libres de riesgos potenciales para la salud humana. Ok… posiblemente las 3 proteínas antifúngicas y antibacterianas que la patata produce son inocuas, y los científicos ni se han preocupado en mencionarlo. Pero esto es algo que los lectores quieren saber de todas todas. Sin duda prefieren esta información a la de los nombres específicos de los géneros microbianos. Y debemos dársela, porque si no, se crea desconfianza. De nuevo, no debemos transmitir sólo lo que nos quieran contar los científicos, sino también indagar en lo que la población querría saber acerca de sus investigaciones.

The peril, one is tempted to say, of writing with eyebrow cocked and tongue in cheek is that people might think you are serious. Ah, but tempted does not necessarily mean fallen. Sometimes the possibility that people might take you seriously is the joy of wry writing. In that spirit, please glance at what the UK Register‘s Lewis Page wrote under the hed, ‘Alien’ life form wakened from 120,000 year Arctic slumber / Meddling boffins refuse to heed sci-fi common sense.

It’s a far more diverting take on news that a few other outlets covered with resolute sobriety.  The story is that researchers at Pennsylvania State University carefully coaxed back to vitality a race of tiny brown microbes that have been sitting torpidly gelid deep in the Greenland ice cap for about 1,200 centuries. Their success is of considerable astrobiological interest, for it suggests (as if further suggestion is needed) that life on Earth is the best illustration how life might survive and even flourish elsewhere under conditions most of us would consider unearthly.

Other stories:

• Independent (UK) – Steve Connor : Microbes found miles beneath Greenland ice given new life / Discovery raises hopes of lifeforms enduring harsh conditions on other planets ;
• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Microbe wakes up after 120,000 years / Bacteria may hold clues to what life forms might exist on ohter planets ;
• Scientific American Skymania blog – Paul Sutherland: Bug resurrected after 120,000 years ;

By the way:

Lewis Page at the Register isn’t the only one talking about this news giving them the willies – but here is somebody more serious about it. At SF Gate, the internet companion to the SF Chronicle, a “City Brights” column by a lawyer named Michael Yaki dwells on the fraught downside of these revivified ancient microbes.

Grist for the Mill: Soc’y for General Microbiology Press Release ; Journal abstract ;

-CP

 Usually Science magazine and its publisher, AAAS, don’t issue full-blown press releases for the individual reports in a given issue – authors’ home institutions generally do that. But the Large Blue, not to be confused with IBM, got special treatment this week. It is a pretty butterfly once common in the UK, then extinct in the wild, and now back (via Swedish import) in considerable numbers. The reintroduction was a quarter century ago. The Wildlife Trust that orchestrated their return is celebrating its success. Part of that is, apparently, the first full explanation published on the biological reasons it faded away and how its singular dependence on one species of ant provided the avenue for its revival. And Science has it.

Not to be churlish or to suspect such of others, but one’s idle mind wonders. Is Science’s trumpeting of its pride at hosting the reports in any way propelled, just a teeny weeny bit, by self-satisfaction that another journal with headquarters in Britain did not carry them? Speaking of hosts and to get back on a surer topic, the ants that willingly offer their homes to orphaned Large Blue infants get treated entirely brutishly by their small, duplicitous guests. The adults are pretty things but the species is decidedly not among the nice butterflies that eat naught but green shoots and sip only nectar. One should check emotion at such a tableau. Nature is not cruel. It merely does not care.

Stories tended to be entirely nice:

• BBC (two pieces): Celebration over insect’s revival ; Blue butterfly colonies thriving;
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Buttterfly that mimics ants gives conservation clue ;
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne : Large Blue butterfly flutters back form extinction, thanks to a tiny ant ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: The blues are back: Butterfly species reborn 30 years after ‘extinction’; One supposed quote marks on extinction means the copy editor really means extirpation, a word not suitable for a headline.
• Independent – Michael McCarthy: The butterfly that came back from the dead – thanks to the red ant; The tale is as much about the stately home of a butterfly-saving trust, and Sir David Attenborough’s participation in the celebration, as it is about large blues.
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Rare butterfly returns years after extinction ;

And a special salute to:

• Wired – Brandon Keim: See Them While You Can: Endangered Butterfly Gallery ;The Large Blue, yes, is pretty and all. But Keim takes opportunity provided by this news to present a gallery of other, even lovelier butterflies that lack such celebrity and  face possible extinction. Brandon, a twitterer, also provided more via this tweet;

Grist for the Mill: AAAS Science Press Release ;  Centre for Ecology & Hydrology Press Release ;

-CP

Two weeks ago a submersible called Nereus made the news by exploring the Marianas Trench in the Challenger Deep east of the Philippines, the ocean’s deepest place and so forbidding that it has only been visited, either by researchers themselves or their robots, a few times. (earlier post). Today the Post’s Kari Lyderson runs a long feature on the achievement with a remarkable illus showing, to scale, how far down this thing went compared to, among other things, the deepest that a blue whale can dive.

A good part of the piece is devoted to the telecommunications and control “cable” that ran from the ship up top to the machine down below. It can reach as far as 25 miles and is about as sturdy as the tiny leader line one might use to go dry fly fishing on a quite pond full of spooky trout.

Eventually, it says here, descendants of Nereus may use similar technology to plumb other deeps – one candidate being the ocean believed to lie under the frozen surface of Europa, moon of Jupiter. That would be something.

-CP

The Daily News‘s Mike Campbell on Saturday reported that the US Fish and Wildlife Service officially has – if tentatively – declared mission accomplished on Rat Island. Norwegian rats that arrived on a Japanese boat have been on the windswept place in the Aleutians laying waste to nesting birds for more than two centuries. The victory may have been worth it, but came with a price. The poison that killed the rats also, it seems, killed more than 200 birds – mostly gulls but including several dozen bald eagles. The assumption is that the birds ate some of the dead rats, their bellies and tissues loaded with rodenticide. On the brighter and intended side of things, some seabird species that the rats had extirpated appear to be returning, it says here.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Yereth Rosen: Alaska’s Rat Island rat-free after 229 years ;
• LiveScience – Robert Toy Britt: Rat Island Mission One Thing: Rats ;
• Scientific American – Brendan Borell: Did the Rat Island restoration effort kill 41 bald eagles?  ;

A tip of the hat to The Great Beyond  at Nature‘s site, where Daniel Cressey‘s roundup caught the Tracker’s eye before this news did.
Grist for the Mill: Fish and Wildlife Service Press Release ;

It used to be news that nearly all the world’s temperate glaciers are retreating. Now it is news to find one that is not. It’s not all that temperate: the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina periodically surges across its terminal lake and shows no clear sign of backing off, the AP‘s Jeanette Neumann reports. The report is more of a travel story than a glacial science yarn – and has what looks like uncareful reporting. She says one reason for the glacier’s health is that it is “nourished by Andean snowmelt.” It’s hard to see how that would work. She likely meant to write snowfall (or did, and an editor changed it).

-CP

A University of Hawaii astronomer last week told the American Astronomical Soc’y meeting in Pasadena how he and far-flung colleagues have gotten images of some of the first, huge galaxies to form. The Star Bulletin‘s Helen Altonn got her version from him by email. They bring with them a mystery: the galaxies appear to have as many stars as do very large galaxies now, but packed into a much smaller volume. A second mystery is that if some galaxies formed from the get go at such mass, how does one tell the difference between their older versions now and those that took aeons growing their mass via mergers? The technical highlight of the feat is its use of a laser-created artificial star and associated adaptive optics system that removed most of the turbulence in the atmosphere during a long exposure to get the images.

In another development on the far-galaxy etc front, the European Herschel Space Telescope – optimized in the far infrared and sub-millimeter wave for such things as these first generation stellar agglomerations – has opened a key door on its cryogenically-cooled camera. That means the light from its 3.5 meter telescope is now, in eyeball terms, reaching the retina. Among outlets with the news, BBC‘s Jonathan Amos renders it at notable length considering that it is basically an engineering update and nothing’s been seen yet. It is now en route to a Lagrangian point where it will be able to gaze at the cosmos relatively unbothered by solar or Earth-reflected heat (earlier post).

Speaking of New Telescopes: A California consortium is planning to build a really gigantic, thirty meter telescope (and yes, the Europeans are aiming even larger). It could be either atop Mauna Kea not far from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, or on Cerro Armazones in Chile – a peak near the Atacama Desert. A few weeks ago the project released its draft EIR for Hawaii. The Honolulu Advertiser ran a story on it, by Peter Sur, a staffer at the Hawaii Tribune-Herald.

Grist for the Mill: Keck Observatory Press Release ;  ESA-Herschel Press Release ; Thirty Meter Telescope Hawaii EIR Press Release ;

-CP

As traditional mainline print journalism continues its struggle and awaits a superhero to save it, another sign came Friday of the spontaneous exploration by some outlets of new ways to commit daily and investigative journalism with or without profit. The Associated Press announced that it will be sending to clients stories not only generated by its own staff (or rewritten from its clients’ own output), but stories provided by four non-profit journalism enterprises. These are the Center for Investigative Reporting, Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica, and a new one at American University, the Investigative Reporting Workshop.

The service’s announcement stimulated a NYTimes report by Richard Perez Pena. At Framing Science, Matthew Nisbet also shines a light on the new effort.

Other such sources are to join the list. Initially, the first four all looked to The Tracker like good places to find muckraking on government and private sector malfeasance etc., but not so much anything within the Knight Science Journalism Tracker’s primary field of view. However, a quick look reveals that the smell of scandal, crookedness, coverup, disingenuousness, or just plain suspicious mystery has occasionally led each into our wheelhouse.

Examples include:

• Inv. Reporting Workshop – Caroline Stetler : Thyroid cancer report ; Why are rates rising so?
• Pro Publica – Abrahm Lustgarten : New York State Drilling Bill Would Override State Regulators to Protect Water ; One of a series of Lustgarten’s pieces on the immediate enviro hazards of oil and gas drilling.
• Center for Inv. Reporting: Waking to Warming ; Truth is, CIR hasn’t much, but this is one fascinating video version of a 1958 Frank Capra film with stunning prescience re the CO2-driven climate fright we’re now living.
• Ctr for Public Integrity – Marianne Lavelle : The Climate Lobby’s Nonstop Growth ; part of a larger project at the center.

The Tracker, seeing on Saturday’s Daily EurekAlert! Express a rather odd press release on moose speciation (or lack of same) that the University of Alaska-Fairbanks sent wide and far, wondered if anybody used it. Eureka indeed:  Randy Boswell got it out for CanWest News Service. It’s not just Regurgitanius pressreleasii either – he phoned the UAF protagonist in the argument. His lede has it exquisitely correct: “some scientific head-butting” has erupted over this Linnaean affair. In The Vancouver Sun it sports the hed “Scientists lock horns over moose classification.” Trivial aside: that headline has me feeling like those dreary souls who hoot at noisy space operas, “Har har, everybody knows there’s no sound in outer space.” Ditto with horns – everybody knows moose don’t have horns!

The news: It appears that Russian scientists and some others, after discovering a small difference in the genomes of Old World vs. New World species, declare that the world has two mooses. An old presumption that all moose in the world are one tribe – all Alces alces – with a few subspecies would be discarded. In would come A. Americanus. Other cladisticians or systemists or whatever the detail-men and women of natural classification call themseles, say the big deer really are a single trans-Arctic species, kind of like caribou and reindeer are all the same species. Tracker votes for two species. Americanus has a ring to it. Lots of people in Europe already call them elk anyway.

The UAF man who is thumping to preserve the one species standard is to present his arguments formally on campus at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Mammalogists.

Grist for the Mill : UAF Press Release via EurekAlert!.

-CP

Quite a long set of useful comments and expositories by authors followed the post the other day on Nature Biotechnology‘s essay paper on the future of science communication.  As that paper proposed that conventional science journalism’s fade might usher in a new era of non-profit, foundation-, or government-sponsored outlets for independent (?) science journalism, it is in order to look at two pieces out now that reach us from precisely such a mode.

Yale Environment 360 is produced by Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, a rather progressive place. It publishes a stream of on line articles, many by familiar bylines in journalism. Right now the exemplary ones up are:

• Orville Schell: The Challenge of Copenhagen: Bridging the U.S.-China Divide; Schell of course is the old China hand who for many years ran the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Readers serious about keeping up on climate policy issues, and who read the Rolling Stone profile of Steve Chu also posted today a few scrolls down, should read this too. It explains why Chu is not optimistic about reining in CO2 levels this side of purported tipping points.
• David Biello: For Greening Aviation, Are Biofuels The Right Stuff? ; The Tracker was among those giggling last year over Virgin Atlantic’s flight of a jetliner burning some coconut oil along with the kerosene. Biello, a regular at Scientific American, explains that a renewably-fueled airliner fleet is a stretch, but it’s not a joke.

The Tracker does not know how many people are reading Yale e360′s stuff (it’s likely a very elite crowd), and also does not know how much it pays its writers. But as a platform for real journalism – if only on enviro and related science matters – it has clear merit. Thus a tip of the hat to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and other donors paying for the effort.

Can this be true? That without any fancy genetic engineering or bio-processing with exotic materials, ordinary spider silk can be made to shrink its length with more power than is generated, pound for pound, than by human muscle? (Ah, but as much as orangutan muscle? One time a baby ape redhead grabbed my coat button. That little bugger was STRONG! Never mind…).

The Plain Dealer‘s John Mangels spells it all out today. It says here that wetting or drying the fibers causes contractions and other movements. By extension, derivatives of such silk, installed in robots with dimensions more or less like those of human arms, could lift tons.

It’s in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The piece is fascinating. Except…. Missing is any explanation how this lines up with the law of conservation of energy. It is hard to dodge that rule. Which is to say, surely one cannot get some kind of perpetual motion machine of mighty power and driven only be a cyclical change in humidity? One gets the idea from this, or almost does, that for the cost of a few crickets in spider food, one gets enough silk to power a metropolis. Okay, that’s an exaggeration. One is quite willing to believe that spider silk might be the basis of some very interesting new machine abilities. But the energetics are a puzzle. One finds the full text of the paper is available, linked in Grist. But the morning is gone, gotta file. Maybe it’s in there.

Grist for the Mill: Journal of Experimental Biology Insider ;  JEB Article , PDF ;

-CP