Earlier this week the LA Times’s Thomas H. Maugh II wrote up in generally fine style a tempest among archaeologists. It concerns environmental factors that may have spurred the Inca to climb high in the Andes and establish the region’s dominant civilization. Some say it was regional warming, others are not buying it. Fine, except one thing: why imply it is a lesson in global warming politics? His lede is an expansive Global warming is not necessarily always bad. Even in the context of his story, it appears to have been bad for the area’s non-Inca. But the important point is that his lede led to this hed: Global warming played a role in Incas’ rise, report says. 

Nothing in the story he wrote says the warming, if it occurrred, was anything but regional. And, when parsed, Maugh’s implication with his lede is merely that if warming was good for the Inca then maybe, in some ways, it might in some ways be good worldwide now for the rest of us. That’s arguable. To get back on topic, reporters should always keep in mind that a headline writer, presumably in this case somebody on the Times’s copy desk, has to get a quick hed from a quick read. Watch for nuances that might get blown into headlines that miss the mark widely. Put a note on the copy or just put out word to alert editors downstream to possible misinterpretation.  

    And just like that, in this instance, it appears that a possible moral to be drawn from Inca experience became a headline’s declaration that there was an episode of global warming during the first millennium. And it may have changed pre-Columbian history. So now, we have more ammo for the yahoos who comment on global warming stories by saying in triumph such things as, “Well, look at the ice caps on Mars. They’re melting and they sure don’t have any SUVs up there. So there. Global warming can’t be OUR fault.”  No SUVs or coal plants in the year 800 either, but global warming? Uh oh.

-CP

Chris Mooney and his regular collaborator Sheril Kirshenbaum have distilled just about every morsel of insight that’s been floating around lately into how the collapse – in the US primarily – of journalism and science journalism in particular is affecting how the public gets its occasional bit of science news. It is freshly on line in The Nation after a run in its print issue.

The spot-on title: Unpopular Science. The Tracker has been a bit surprised and gratified recently to have so many people who have no particular connection to our business ask about its situation and its prospects. Perhaps others in the trade have, too. This article is the best answer. It’s not particularly cheerful, and has the usual slim ray of hazy sunshine – the web and outfits such as university public affairs offices will pick up some of the load. The Tracker’s response is to hope that the genuinely journalistic and largely on line science news outfits that are soldiering along will gain popularity and a revenue stream (Sci. American, Wired News, Nature News, Science News, ScienceNOW, Nat’l Geo, etc.) And, eventually and somehow, a new popular media will rise, making money, and revive some semblance of the old, cohesive common conversation that one might argue is essential to a thriving society.

The most depressing part of their piece is a brief reference to the sites that in 2008 led the so-called science category in the annual Weblog awards.

-CP<

 Give the native oysters of Chesapeake Bay a tall place to stand, and they come roaring back (at least until viruses or other ailments hit them). So it seems at the five year mark of a project on one of the bay’s feeder rivers and overseen by researchers at William & Mary College’s Va. Inst. of Marine Science. The results are in Science, and are in keeping with its big package on fisheries management (see next post). The Washington Post’s David A. Farenthold calls the result a “vast, thriving reef of American oysters.” One supposed 87 acres is at least half vast. He gets lively quotes from researchers themselves amazed at how well it worked. He doesn’t say so, but the study also knocks a few tines off the mythic place the bay watermen hold in local culture. Their rakings of the original reefs were underwater bulldozer clearcuts of the worst sort, it appears. Silt prevented new reefs from taking root and the weakened oysterbeds fell prey to disease. Farenthold also gets a few gloomy gus types who think the new system is too expensive for wide use, or that diseases will pick these newcomers off soon enough. Dunno about disease, but The Tracker bets some clever new-era waterman will figure out a cheap scaffolding to deploy and to catalyze enough action to assure provender to every raw oyster bar in every trendy town and neighborhood in America.

Other stories:

• Bloomberg – Jeremy van Loon: Chesapeake Bay Oysters May Lick Extinction Risk;
• *UPDATE: New York Times – Henry Fountain (Aug 4): Oysters Are on the Rebound in the Chesapeake Bay ;  Well balanced summary of the achievement so far, and lingering worry these reefs too may succumb to disease ;

Grist for the Mill: Wm&Mary/Virginia Inst. of Marine Science Press Release ;

-CP

Nothing like a big report in Science Magazine, backed by four press releases from some very careful, muscular, and august agencies, to cheer up one who had begun to fear it is adios to the likes of salmon, tuna, cod, and toothfish; ‘nought but krill, dead reefs, and jellyfishes for the world’s oceans by mid-century. In November 2006 a big (and controversial) paper in Science identified a seemingly intractable continuing collapse of major fisheries worldwide. See previous posts here, and here. This new analysis - with its authors including some of the previously gloomy ones – says a good many fisheries are instead showing solid signs of improvement. International and national fisheries agencies, it appears, are getting dividends from the recent rounds of steep cuts in fishing allowances. In other words, contrary to some recent anxieties and a centuries’ long history of failures, regulation of fishing sometimes seems to work.

  Not that the report is terribly optimistic about what will happen. But it is about what may happen. Cod, the report concedes, may be past the point of no return in the N. Atlantic, but several other stocks that get strict attention have rebounded. There also is a fine back story of two willful researchers who, after spluttering fiercely at one another in public and even on NPR, are now on the same page.

     So sit down and read a few of these stories:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Fish for dinner: Overfishing easing in some areas ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: World fisheries collapse can be averted: study;
• USA Today - Elizabeth Weise : Survey: Edible fish won’t disappear if overfishing stops ;
• NYTimes – Cornelia Dean: Having Fish and Eating It Too ;
• Seattle Times – Sandi Doughton: Scientists who debated on fisheries team up for comprehensive study; One of the authors is a local, giving Doughton an inside track on insight to the personal dynamics in the study.
• NPR All Things Considered - Richard Harris: Imperiled Fisheries Make A Comeback, Study Shows ; Harris’s report is a good deal better calibrated than that rosy hed ;
• USNews and World Report (blog) Bonnie Erbe: Study Shows Worldwide Fisheries Are Failing, But There’s Hope Yet ;
• BBC – Mark Kinver: Fresh hope for world’s fisheries ;
• CanWest News – Amy Minsky: Atlantic fisheries show little recovery ; Her lede explains that is one of the dark spots among the report’s broader identifications of recoveries;
• Canadian Press – Alison Auld: Study: Fish less, have more later ; Smart hed, even if it does sound like one’s mother’s (wise) nagging.
• Gloucester Daily News – Richard Gaines: Fish study update: NOAA chief sees success in ‘firm limits’ ;
• Times (UK) Frank Pope: Fish will still be on the menu in 2048, if we are careful ; Here’s a beat – Pope is the Times’s official Ocean Correspondent. He seems to be jamming this report into a perhaps overstretched and overarching theme, declaring peace in the hundred years war. But it produces, to be sure, a majestic rhythm and confidence to the piece.
• Nature News – Lizzie Buchen: Battling scientists reach consensus on health of global fish stocks ;

Related News:

• Toronto Globe and Mail – Anna Mehler Peperny: Arctic debate heats up over fish / US to ban fishing in a part of Beaufort Sea claimed by Washington and Ottawa ; A new kind of fishing war – a war over NOT fishing.

Grist for the Mill: 

NSF Press Release ; COMPASS Press Release (a reporter new to the fishery science beat could start up a pretty good contact list just off this release) ; NOAA Press Release ; CSIRO (Australia) Press Release ;

Also see Univ. of British Columbia Press Release based on a complementary study in PloS One. ;  

-CP

Nothing good happens, is what happens. Almost any general purpose science writer who tries to make a living in daily news has, sooner or later, written of the gadgetry and forensic skills that art historians have amassed over the years to guide the preservation of old and deteriorating paintings and the like. X-rays, mass spectrometers, IR, UV, etc etc. Maybe PET scans too. Everybody in the Western World has seen the Shroud of Turin rendered in weird spectral imagery to show what it is and how maybe it occurred. Ditto for pictures of the pictures Old Masters put on canvas before they finished their ultimate pictures. At the Wall Street Journal old master Robert Lee Hotz takes a good crack at it by focussing on one particular piece of religious art owned by the Szepmuveszeti Muzeum in Budapest, and now under the careful multispectral analysis of the technology-laden conservators at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The pic is one frame of an excellent multimedia slide show embedded in Hotz’s story. This one is the painting – which doesn’t have that big gash when viewed by the human eye – as it appears via X-ray. The project is a springboard to, within the confines of one column, a wide-ranging look at the tools of science in the employ of art, and at the possible erosion of human talent to use it to full effect.

-CP

The current Atlantic has been brought to the Tracker’s attention for its big swaggering story by Graeme Wood full of dynamic adjectives and gripping imagery on what it might take to dial the Earth’s temperature downward, pronto, with the appropriate application of imagination, sun shades, reflectors, aerosols pumped through dirigibles, or other mega-machinery. People who follow such things won’t see many general concepts that have not been written up before. But Wood does have a fresh angle: compared to, say, rejiggering the world’s entire coal-and-oil based economy, it might be very cheap. One over-reaching billionaire might, plausibly, foot the whole bill. The story goes on to suggest, however, why cheapness does not a wise policy make. Plus, once one goes this route we could never let up.

The Tracker wishes Wood had acknowledged another reason why merely putting our finger on the thermostat, without altering the atmosphere’s buildup of greenhouse gases, could well be a non-starter. Acidification of the oceans depends only on air chemistry, not how hot the air is – and to push the ocean so much closer to eco-failure could be a colossal calamity no matter what the ice caps and packs do, where the storm tracks shift, or whether regular rains ever return to the Southwest US or wildfire-wracked southern Europe.

*UPDATE: GeoEngineering Today Dept:

I should have thought of this when I first wrote the post. In the NYTimes Felicity Barringer reports on another kind of geoengineering of climate warming that does nothing about GH gases. This is to paint roofs white. She reports on the highest authority: not Energy Sec’y Steve Chu, who she quotes, but the man he (and The Tracker) darned near worships: Art Rosenfeld of the California Energy Commission and of the Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab. This is sensible energy policy. It even (contrary to an earlier remark I had here) cuts CO2, potentially and assuming that the white-painted home relies on fossil fuels for electricity. A cooler home means less need for air conditioning, hence less electricity consumption and less CO2 emission. Plus, it saves money AND provides work for roofers. Wins all around.

-CP

AP’s Marilynn Marchione writes the somewhat itch-promoting news today that, in the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers in the Netherlands report that they were able to innoculate a small number of volunteers against malaria with the help of a vaccine delivered by … mosquitoes. And the vaccine is the malaria parasite itself. The story includes the caveats near the top that this is not merely a small study, but even if its results are confirmed no practical way to use mosquitoes as substitutes for syringes is in the offing. But it does indicate, she reports, that whole parasites’s seeming effectiveness as inocculates may help lead to other ways to get the same effect. Trial volunteers, it says here, were able to get the bites without malaria because they were dosed with anti-malarial drugs at the same time. Thus their immune systems could built up (due to mutliple challenges) while the disease did not take hold.

While we’re at it, to remind us of the scale and challenges of efforts against malaria here’s a round up of related, recent stories:

• Bloomberg – Simeon Bennett: Malaria Strain Resists Drugs, May threaten Millions, Study Say ;
• Reuters – Aaron Gray-Block: Curcell wins funding for malaria vaccine development ;
• AHN – David Goodhue: Malaria Vaccine To Be Tested At Walter Reed; It’s a live vaccine, with test funding from the Bill and Melina Gates Foundation.

Pic – source ;

-CP

The Toronto Star announced this week the opening of its Arctic Bureau, comprising for the moment, it appears, one man: Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent Paul Watson. The new Arctic bureau chief is best known as a photojournalist – and won the prize in 1994 for a gut-wrenching photograph from Somalia of the bloody results of the American incursion there into war lord factional fighting. He also has won awards for reporting for the Star, and recently was South Asia bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times.

  Watson’s first dispatch is from aboard a Canadian icebreaker. It’s a well-composed piece on exotic research in a tough environment. Watson swiftly takes readers through the lens of a microscope and into the realm of plankton whose behavior and future are crucial for understanding the changing polar sea. In a bit of random synchronicity, his mention of copepods and jellyfish comes as such plankton are in the news for other reasons too (next post down). One thinks he could have evaded one source’s eagerly offered cliche about yellow birds in deeply carved caverns of anthracite, but no matter. Better, one learns there is sometjihing called an arrow worm, “tiger of the zooplankton.”

  No doubt he’ll be engaged often enough with geopolitical wranglings, including competing claims of the seabed as sovereign territor. But it’s satistfying that this veteran war correspondent started off with a science angle. The readers comments are also, as usual with such things, tiresome and mostly anonymous. The Tracker says it again: why do newspapers slash their standards for on line letters to the ed, and not require that commenters identify themselves by their real names and home towns? It would take manpower to vet them, yes, including to exclude those far off topic. But otherwise – what’s the point of this undigested stream of a few thoughtful arguments drowning in a great sea of insult and irrelevant anger?

-CP 

Marine biology and physical oceanography are getting a bit more blur injected into the boundary layer between disciplines. New research published in Nature - featured on the cover - and led by researchers at Caltech concludes that it’s not just wind and winding currents that mix the ocean’s waters vertically. The daily cyclings of uncountable marine creatures migrating up and down from teeny copepods to big jellyfish, say the scientists entrain a lot of water. So much they say that their impact – if confirmed by further research – cannot be ignored in computer models of the ocean’s churnings.

   Several stories focus on jellyfish as the prime bio-motivators of this conveyor belt. And Nature itself titles its press blurb “Moving the oceans, one jellyfish at a time.”  That’s a little misleading. The researchers studied jellyfish closely because they are large and their ability to entrain water is easily observed. But, it appears from a close reading of the paper, krill plus  itty bitty copepods and other microscopic plankton may be doing most of the heavy lifting. It’s called Darwinian mixing, after the famed Charles Darwin’s grandson who proposed the possibility. His name was Charles Darwin, too. Hmmm. That’s an opportunity for reporters to miss a detail and attribute this to the famous one. Either way there is a symmetry to the oceanic phenomemon’s name, considering grandpa’s actual discovery of a highly analogous churning of soil by earthworms.

Stories:

• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts : How jellyfish may be stirring the ocean / A new study suggests the movement of masses of tiny marine creatures could have as much impact as the wind or curents on ocean circulation ; Ah, great minds (and feeble ones) think alike. After The Tracker penned the hed above for this post, it develops that Spotts too uses the mixmaster metaphor. And while the CSM hed says jellyfish, Spotts explains it’s the littler creatures that star as stirrers;
• Wired News – Bandon Keim: Jellyfish Are the Dark Energy of the Oceans ; Terrific hed for science groupies who know what dark energy is (Wired’s readership is full of such). Again, hed highlights jellyfish. The story barely mentions krill and doesn’t bring up copepods and their ilk at all.
• AAAS ScienceNow – Phil Berardelli : Little Creatures Can Stir Big Oceans;
• NPR Morning Edition – Geoff Brumfiel: Jellyfish May Help Keep Planet Cool ; The story almost completely evades the research’s conclusion that smaller plankton seem to be the main actors. 
• Discovery News – Michael Reilly: Jellyfish May Affect Climate by Stirring Oceans ; The piece is more on target than is the hed, and it has a deft reference to the study site: Jellyfish Lake in Palau ;
• NatureNews – Roberta Kwok : Jellyfish help mix the world’s oceans/Marine creatures could stir up seas as much as do winds and tides ; The magazine’s in-house news service does the best job pointing out this is theory – yet to be fully tested in the wild and some colleauges are skeptical.
• *UPDATE: Also out in the first rush was  good one from Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: Churning the Numbers/Motion of ocean’s small swimmers may be important for climate modeling ; No mix up here between how the researchers studied the dynamics of things with jellyfish, and the creatures they credit with so much of the ocean’s mix up. 

Grist for the Mill: Caltech Press Release ;

-CP

As an attention grabber, “Genome wide association study” is like a dead turbot: flat, inert, and (to American ears anyway), obscure in meaning. Maybe it should be relabeled genetic dragnet or something else a bit zippier. The Inquirer‘s Faye Flam today manages two salutory things - she buries the term deep enough not to scare people off, and provides a rare look at a scientific program in full medical research mode but without hyping any impending cures or other breakthroughs.

   The news is a profile of a hard-working doc at the local medical research powerhouse, Childrens Hospital of Philadelphia or CHOP to locals, and the center’s new storehouse of children’s DNA. One immediate focus is on scanning the growing library for alleles that correlate with the baffling cancer neuroblastoma. One suspects a lot of the associations turning up are spurious or, even if there’s a real functional association, not direct causes. But there are dozens of statistical blips already. Ack – this disease is complicated. Flam provides a good glimpse of what they are doing with an unspoken message: be patient. This is how applied, but fundamental, research works.

A long and detailed press release preceded the story. Journal papers on its essence have been out for some time. So it’s no scoop. But while the release at one point declares in over simple terms that some newly found variants “increase susceptibility” to one bad form of the cancer, Flam is more careful to tell readers only that the stats are suggestive.

Grist for the Mill: CHOP Press Release ;

Pic source ;

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A science journalist at Guatemala’s Prensa Libre checks regularly for science and technology research in the Universities and institutes from her country and brings it to her readers. Such a beat may be routine in US media but is not so common in some Latin American countries. There,   scientific information, if any, comes mainly from wires without much local processing. The tracker congratulates Lucy Calderon and encourages other outlets to pay attention to her work. Ah! And explain her latest story, about the biodiesel production developed in the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala.

Because the tracker is never fully happy, one compares the pdf with the online version and proposes a way to improve a little bit the web template.

El periódico Guatemalteco Prensa Libre tiene una sección llamada Buena Vida en que la periodista Lucy Calderón presenta periódicamente reportajes sobre las investigaciones científicas realizadas en Guatemala.
Antes de todo, loar esta apuesta de buen periodismo científico que no se limita a reproducir lo que llega de fuera, sino además utilizar un medio masivo para acercar a la población la ciencia que se hace en su país. Bravo por esta iniciativa, y felicidades a los que la hacen posible. Que crezca todavía más.

Una acotación antes de describir la nota publicada ayer por Lucy: Si descargas el pdf entero de la sección Buena Vida puedes ver una página y media muy bien ilustrada con fotos, esquemas, despieces… que permite una lectura muy dinámica del artículo. En cambio, si compruebas la versión web de la historia sobre biocombustibles firmada por Lucy Calderón, resulta un poco más aséptica y no aparecen todos los recursos gráficos preparados para la versión impresa. Una lástima, posiblemente dada por falta de soporte web. Que la calidad de estas piezas sea una motivación para mejorarl

Yendo al artículo, Lucy describe el proceso como los ingenieros químicos de la Universidad del Valle de Guatemala producen ellos mismos su propio biodiesel y han logrado reducir un 25% el gasto en combustibles fósiles.
El artículo no esconde que se trata de un proyecto universitario de pequeña escala. No es todavía de una repercusión comparable, por ejemplo, a la reciente nota publicada en Diario Co Latino (El Salvador), por Daniel Trujillo anunciando que El Salvador podría contar con las condiciones adecuadas para producir biocombustible a escala industrial partir de plantaciones de caña de azúcar (buen contrapunto, por cierto, sobre la posible deforestación e impacto ambiental de esta medida).

La pieza de PrensaLibre explica que el reactor diseñado por estudiantes universitarios fabrica el biodiesel todavía con los aceites de fritura de la cafetería de la facultad, pero que ya están investigando otras fuentes como las microalgas, y diseñando un nuevo motor estático que trabaje 100% con biodiesel.

Disculpad por insistir, pero la serie de 6 fotografías explicando de maravilla el proceso de producción del biodiésel sólo se puede ver en el pdf y no en la versión web:

1- Ingredientes= aceite + etanol + hidróxido de potasio; 2- mezcla del alcohol con el KOH; 3- vertido en el reactor junto con el aceite; 4- separación del residuo de glicerina al final del proceso; 5- Lavado del biodiesel con agua para eliminar impurezas; 6- aplicaciones finales del biodiesel.
Estas fotografías, que ya están tomadas, serían ideales para una animación gráfica web.

En definitiva, una muy buena manera de mostrar al lector los pasos intermedios de ingeniería necesarios entre la investigación científica básica y la aplicación industrial final.

Pero sobre todo, una excelente manera de mostrar a los Guatemaltecos la ciencia y tecnología que se está haciendo en su país. Felicidades de nuevo a Lucy, ánimo a ella y sus editores para que continúe y crezca su compromiso con el periodismo científico, y que su experiencia sirva de estímulo a aquellos que vean una posibilidad de ofrecer un producto parecido a sus medios respectivos.

That’s right, numbyism, or “not under my back yard” ism. At The Guardian Terry Slavin and Alok Jha report that the highly-publicized Schwarze Pumpe project in northern Germany – a small, advanced coal burning plant with big pumps and pipes for sequestering a big share of its CO2 underground – has been unable to get a permit from spooked local authorities. The story does not say exactly why neighbors are not buying assurances from the company and the government. Perhaps they have heard that CO2 is not always safe in large amounts - were the heavy gas to leak in a big burst from the depleted gas field that is to contain it, the result could, as has happened following the overturning and burping of lakes atop volcanic CO2 vents, suffocate people and animals trapped in the ground-hugging plume. But Slavin and Jha do imply that extensive environmental reviews conclude that no such abrupt, major leaks appear plausible.

   A more nuanced report, but with the same point, is a two parter at the Financial Times. In Part I Joshua Chaffin reports that both technical and regulatory hurdles bedevil the small plant, suggesting that “capturing carbon is one things, deploying a wide-scale CCS programme that is cost-effecitve and commerically viable is another.” Part II, today, visits another village, in the Netherlands, that sits 2 km above the porous formations into which refinery CO2 is to go. Boosters of the project insist will either keep it there or, if it does leak, won’t leak fast enough to hurt anybody nearby. He calls it a noxious gas. That seems to go too far. But the Dutch locals, it says here, don’t want it and are typical of the unwelcome mat such proposals are meeting elsewhere in Europe.

PIc: Schwarze Pumpe CCS plant ;

-CP