The human brain is eerily adept at spotting patterns and repetitions in imagery. Astronomers assembling huge surveys of the visible universe are overwhelmed with data. Recently they found a solution: find ordinary folks with the stick-to-itiveness to pore through sky images by the hour. Who better than amateur astronomers? Many such are among the 230,000 volunteers signed up to look at and classify images of more than one million galaxies.

   The latter, now giving themselves such names as the Peas Corp. and the Peas Brigade, found in the vast archives of a project of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey called Galaxy Zoo several hundred little green dots that they called green peas. No ordinary team of professiional astronomers, not even post-docs and grad students strapped to their chairs, could have done it. Perhaps no robot scanner could plausibly have been programmed to notice them as somehow odd. But the volunteers, comparing notes, did. Somewhat starlike in a naive and fast glance, the green peas turn out on close examination to be small galaxies far away that are, for their size, churning out stars much faster than do typical galaxies. The results are in a paper – its lead author a Yale grad student working with the volunteers - due for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Stories:

• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: New class of galaxies: small, green, and bursting with new stars; A feather in the cap, he writes, for ‘citizen science’. The green color, he explains further, arises from highly energized oxygen atoms churned to frenzy by the high concentration of new stars.
• Science News – Ron Cowen : Galaxies Going Green ; Nice job getting into the mystery of the little galaxies’ relative close distance combined with a behavior more typical of an earlier epoch in the universe. He also provides some context, via separate, new reports on more distant “Lyman-break” galaxies also forming stars fast.
• National Geographic – Rachel Kaufman: ‘Green Pea” Pictures: New Galaxy Class Discovered ;

Grist for the Mill:

 Yale University Press Release ;  arXiv Article Galaxy Zoo Green Peas: Discovery of A Class of Comparct Extremely Star-Forming Galaxies ;

-CP  

   It was dry in California and much of the Southwest this year, last year, and the year before that. Fires have been getting worse with, says a forecast from researchers up in comparatively rainy Corvallis in the Willamette Valley at Oregon State University and the US Forest Service, still worse to come. It’s a national study and it fingers most of California, some regions in Oregon and Washington, and bits of North Carolina and northern Wisconsin as most likely to have a fiery late summer and fall. Much of Texas and the Southwest generally also look like tinder. One factor, the reports says, is a budding El Nino in the tropical Pacific and a shift to a positive mode in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its north. Both tend to heat and dry the southwestern US.

Stories:

• San Jose Mercury News/Media News Group - Mike Taugher : Fire danger extreme for Northern California;
• AP – Jeff Barnard: Forecast: fire danger up in California, down in NW ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Dire forecast for fire season in the West ;
• Orange County Register – Gary Robbins: Scientist sees hint of rain for O.C. by end of September : Writing from near Disneyland, Robbins is not doing a fantasy alternative. He simply adds to the new forecast’s large scale warning of fire the local angle – a chance of coastal storms bringing rare summer showers to Orange County.
• Reno Gazette Journal – Jeff Delong: Forecast calls for bad Sierra fire season ;

 Grist for the Mill: OSU Press Release ;  

Related Grist: AGU Press Release (Damage, pollution from wildfires could surge as western U.S. warms) ;

  And when the droughts end, and end they will:

• Long Beach Press Telegram: Dan Bartholomew: Scientists plot and prepare for Noah’s Ark-like floods ; Wonderful mix of exigency planning, and historic precedent.

-CP

Check out the cheeky column in the Los Angeles Times by one Jonah Goldberg, a man with a worry on about asteroids and, it appears, a very low opinion of what he regards as egghead liberal scientists and their eco-freak toadies who dream of throttling unregulated economic growth (he means free enterprise, one is confident) and thus overdo it on climate change as a vehicle for anti-capitalist regulation. Or something like that.

   The recent smack on Jupiter’s bottom is his immediate inspiration. The result is a fairly well-founded fantasy on the rear view mirror wisdom that would ensue should a modest asteroid strike Earth in 100 years. That, he proposes as a mental exercise, is to occur just as we’re celebrating a near-draw with global warming. There are problems with it – such as his suggestion that G.W. might only raise temperature one degree in coming decades and ergo supposing that a “quintillion dollar effort” to snub said warming would be possible by mere reduction of Earth’s temp by that amount (he doesn’t specify F or C degrees). The man also works for National Review. The Tracker finds the political flavor of his discourse unpleasant. But I must hand to him admiration for colorfully pointing out that mankind has many things to worry about – and to act upon (one must add: collectively). His overall theme’s biggest weakness: a major meteor strike’s odds may be as high as ten percent, he figures. Does he correspondingly think the odds of global warming being on the catastrophic side of forecasts are less than that, thus giving higher priority to a space guard program?.

  Goldberg is admirably not in the same league of reality-denial as George Will put himself in persistently of late in his columns on human-caused climate change as hokum. But, and just speculating further here – is this what happens when a conservative cedes that global warming might be problem but cannot bear the prospect of smug celebration by lefties should it be conquered? So he mollifies the pain by imagining them smited from the heavens at their moment of triumph?

Pic – copyright Don Davis ;

-CP

At Aviation Week‘s site yesterday Frank Morring, Jr., was among a parade of reporters relaying early indications of the new NASA future that the Augustine Commission might urge. His story’s hed is U.S. Spaceflight Gap Wider Than Thought. It nails the primary structural problem that the last administraiton imposed upon the space agency – the years’ long interval between the last shuttle flight and the first operation of its successor rockets from the Constellation Program. All this to save money while not flying shuttles so that the new launchers can be built – and while closing the finally finished, essentially brand new space station after tens of billions of US dollar invested and inveigling overseas partners to build labs for it on their dimes. 

Former astronaut, and now UC-San Diego physics prof., Sally Ride told the review panel, at Johnson Space Center, that the new rockets will likely not be ready to go to work until 2017, two years longer than on the official sked. That means, it says here, a seven year gap during which any US astronauts heading for the station will have to get rides on Russian rockets or, just barely conceivably, vehicles from other nation’s (or private) space programs. 

 What to do? Fly the shuttle a little longer, and keep the space station going longer too (if only to give the next gen. rockets and their crews a place to go). Another: perhaps scrap the whole Constellation program architecture in favor of a new heavy lift booster derived directly from shuttle program components including the big external fuel tanks – which could then stay in production and make a few more shuttle flights possible. Nobody with great suasion on policy, apparently, is advising that the US just forget human space exploration and give exclusive stardom to our best-traveled and most accomplished emissaries: the rovers, weather stations, semi-autonomous sample grabbers, and other rising robots.

Other Stories took a variety of angles, with the essential, same message: the old plan won’t work.

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Longer Life for the Space Station is Advised ;
• Florida Today – Todd Halvorson: Extending shuttle program through 2014 among options ;
•  ABC KTRK – Kevin Quinn: Space travel future discussed in League City ; Not a bad write-up from the local TV station in Houston.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Committee hopes to spare shuttle and space station ; For one thing, he reports of panel testimony, to get the station finished (and scuttle-worthy?) by the end of next year would require launching the lame-duck shuttles at twice the rate NASA has ever achieved before. Such conundra, one must add, were inevitable the moment early in the first Bush II administration when the outlines of current policy were embraced.
• Orlando Sentinel – Mark K. Matthews: Ex-astronaut Sally Ride: Maybe shuttle should fly amid Ares delay ; His lede quote from Ride is that she had, in her own phrase, nothing but gloom and doom to report. Matthews provides a jobs angle to his readership, & also gives a small ride to a hobby horse his newspaper has in its stable – worries that the Ares launcher will suffer terrible shakes as currently designed.
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Panel backs NASA bid for bigger shuttle budget ; Int’l partners on ISS, she reports, unanimously opposed a 2016 fireball-into-the-Pacific fate for the giant, custom-designed complex of solar panels, labs, and other stuff built at great risk, and for perhaps $100 billion.
• Chicago Tribune – Mark K, Matthews: Sally Ride, former astronaut, says space shuttles should fly longer ;

  As it happens, this news comes just a few days after The Tracker mused on the public relations problem that will likely occur when said public becomes aware that after years of heroic footage from NASA of astronauts building the station, it would be trashed. (see earlier post.)  It is, many including me would agree, a pig in a poke anyway – delivering almost not decent scientific or technology payoffs. But now that it’s built, just dump it? Maybe we could sell it to that Las Vegas hotelier that wants to put up a franchise in orbit? Otherwise, as Wm. Bendix used to say on the Life of Riley, What a Revoltin’ Development This Is.

   For a great look at the station’s costs and context, see MSNBC‘s Alan Boyle three years ago in a review of the money spent on it in comparison to other science mega-projects.

Grist for the Mill: At NASA Watch, Keith Cowing provides a look back, to 1999, at NASA’s plan on How to Splash the ISS.

-CP

 One post down is a roundup of today’s NYTimes Science Times including its lead article, an account of frustration, near-hysteria, and rigid authoritarianism in the face of  spreading A(H1N1) influenza, or swine flu. Many outlets are writing on one aspect of response: production of vaccines and of strategies for offering them. Here is an unsorted, small sampling of such stories:

• AP – Mike Stobbe: Pregnancy likely to be swine flu shot priority;
• AP – Maria Cheng: Europe fast-tracking swine flu vaccine ; Some worry it’s so fast that safety of vaccine will be difficult to measure.
• Daily Mail (UK) : ‘Dangers’ of the fast-track swine flu vaccine ;
• Guardian (UK) David Batty: Fast-tracked swine flu vaccine will be safe, officials insist ;
• AP – Lauren Neergaard (Jul 23) : Md. Medical Center to Take Part in NIH Swine Flu Vaccine Study;
• Reuters – Anurandha Ramanathan: Shares of flu drugmakers rise on latest WHO stats ;
• Montreal Gazette – Charlie Fidelman: Province on H1N1 standby/Will wait for federal vaccination plan ;
• Xinhua: Spain to vaccinate teachers against A/H1N1 influenza ;

-CP

  Science Times has an unusual selection for its lead item today – a diary-like journal in the form of an electronic conversation between medical writer Sheryl Gay Stolberg and her 14-year-old daughter Olivia Robinson. The girl took a school trip to China for a course in culture and language. What she got was a fever, and that got her locked up in a swine flu-quarantined lodging with other westerners including other half-scared and all-bored students, terrifying her mother and pretty well wrecking her trip to China. The Chinese were courteous and thoughtful, it appears, but it still was a case of confinement in a totalitarian state. Neither young Ms. Robinson nor mom Stolberg with all her media savvy and pull could do a thing about it. Stolberg is able to weave in context on swine flu hysteria generally, and on the likely wrong-headedness of the reaction in China – where memories of its lax, secretive mishandling of SARS are still raw.

  For science fans who like their news richer in gadgetry and cleverness than in pathos and frustration, the section has three helpings that stand out:

• Graham Roberts: A Modular Robot That Puts Itself Back Together Again ; This is tagged as “Science Illustrated,” part of it is above right, and maybe the section should let its illustrators fly solo more often. Roberts is the graphics editor. He put together a captioned, visual, interactive explainer of a University of Pittsburgh walking robot that, if one slaps it so hard pieces fly apart, they crawl and wriggle their way back together. Then it stands up and marches on. Hmmm and uh-oh. Remember that Terminator movie where our governor’s character blew a silvery robot into a satisfying spray of droplets – that in turn flowed together and re-created it? Gad.
• Matthew L. Wald: A Quest for Batteries to Alter the Energy Equation ; The Tracker for one needed this clear explanation from some advanced battery shops. I mean, lithium sounds so perfect, so why don’t we have batteries that are light, that hold tons of energy safely for a long time, that can deliver it with the power to get to 60 miles per hour in under ten seconds, that recharge in a jiffy, that are highly efficient to boot? The answer is: we do. and they do more than that too. We just don’t have a single battery that does it all. But, yes, hopes remain high.
• Chris Nicholson: Linguist’s Preservation Kit Has New Digital Tools ; A sign that all that multimedia database mashing, social networking software, and instant analysis that lets people do damned near anything with smart phones is good for the soul? Yes, sort of. Thank goodness, some out there are using such clever devices – not phones, but the clever digital analysis part - to record and, perhaps, to help preserve vanishing cultures. The piece also takes us vividly to remote areas of tropical West Africa.

Other headlines to note:

• Carl Zimmer: Scientists Find a Microbe Haven at Ocean’s Surface ; Zimmer gives us an early look at a paper coming out soon, on the waxy buildup and strange life forms that occupy the thinner-than-paper topmost layer of the sea. But why is there no explanation, in the text, of the nifty little toy catamaran in its illus?
• Denise Grady: In War and Isolation, a Fighter for Afghan Women ; Excellent job of turning statistics and an interview, in the US, with a heroic midwife and teacher from near Kabul, into a riveting, anguishing account of life in a poor nation with a shattered culture.

One Other Thing About NYTimes non-Science Times: Wonder how many others read through the big advertising section, laid out sort of like an inhouse-supervised news section, in Sunday’s Times entitled THE FUTURE OF CARS / Rethought, Retooled, Remarkable. I wish I could fine an on line link to this 16-page supplement about new directions in automobile design. More important is the difficulty finding info on the person and organization identified in tiny type as its author. Who, exactly, paid for it? One simply wonders about the provenance of a section like this that includes the following unqualified advertorial declaration:

 When the oil runs out, the world must run on electricity. No other source of energy makes any sense. Burning coal or fuel oil to generate electricity is not a long-term solution, while solar panels, wind farms and other fringe technologies are so inefficient they simply can’t produce enough electricity to meet our demands. Only hydroelectric power stations and nuclear reactors can produce the vast amounts of electricity that we’ll need. At that point, we really will have achieved the exciting green future that the revamped auto industry is starting to build today. 

This is buried in a blizzard of verbiage on the auto industry. Nonetheless, to see such a vaguely cultish, peak-oil-fringe reminiscent, and to these eyes entirely overconfident statement without much hint of who, exactly, is behind it, is unsettling. It could be true, it’s a defensible proposition to make in polite company. But even in a paid ad, to state as fact a scenario this narrow as the only one that makes sense and to do so in near-anonymity in the nation’s leading newspaper makes one suspicious.

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) La Nación (Costa Rica) describes a very complete 21-year study by Harvard and local Universities of diet and cardiovascular disease among 20.000 Costa Ricans. It finds a clear relationship between less healthy food consumption and the last 3 decades’ 35-40% increase of heart problems in the country. The story includes an interview to the director of the study, plus secondary text with data reviewing heart diseases in Costa Rica, graphics, and even a video where you can see that, if you believe what people say in front of a camera, they all eat healthy vegetables, fish and frijoles (beans).

Un día en el que bastantes secciones de ciencia han aparecido con el pobrísimo estudio que relaciona el consumo de vino tinto con el deseo sexual de las italianas, en el Costarricense La Nación encontramos una nota excelente sobre un completísimo estudio que relaciona los cambios en la dieta Tica con el aumento de enfermedades del corazón.

Comparémoslos brevemente, antes de profundizar en el que se lo merece.
Según el artículo de BBC Mundo, los investigadores italianos simplemente han separado unas pocas mujeres (798) en tres grupos según su consumo diario de vino y les han pasado una encuesta sobre la calidad de su vida íntima. Con eso, y sin dar detalles sobre la toma de otras bebidas alcohólicas, algún tipo de análisis médico, u otros factores – incluso socioeconómicos- que puedan interferir entre la relación directa del vino y el deseo sexual, deducen que quizás ciertos componentes químicos exclusivos del vino tinto pueden mejorar las funciones sexuales al aumentar el flujo sanguíneo hacia áreas “clave” del cuerpo. A nadie se le escapa que beber vino puede inducir un aumento de libido, pero la metodología de estos investigadores no parece aportar pruebas mucho más contundentes que la sabiduría popular.

Sin embargo, en el suplemento Aldea Global de La Nación (Costa Rica),  Irene Rodríguez refleja un estudio con 20.000 personas realizado durante 21 años por la Universidad de Harvard, la Universidad de Costa Rica y el Instituto Costarricense de Investigación y Enseñanza en Nutrición y Salud, que relaciona el 35-40% de incremento de enfermedades cardiovasculares de los últimos 30 años en Costa Rica, con un empeoramiento generalizado de la calidad de la dieta.
Tampoco es un resultado que nos sorprenda, pero en el apartado ¿Cómo se hizo? del texto de Irene podemos leer un resumen de la metodología seguida por los investigadores, y entender porqué es un estudio que sí establece evidencias científicamente sólidas, y por tanto merece aparecer en los medios de comunicación en un grado de detalle como el que le ha dedicado La Nación.

La nota explica muy bien porqué el descenso en el consumo de frijoles, verduras, pescado, vino y aceite de soya, y el aumento de carne, grasas, carbohidratos, cerveza y aceite de girasol está asociados a más infartos de miocardio. Además añade un apartado muy interesante sobre las investigaciones genéticas por las que va a continuar el estudio.

Pero la cobertura no se detiene aquí. I. Rodríguez firma otra pieza con cifras sobre la situación de las enfermedades cardiovasculares en Costa Rica. Lo más destacado: aumento en mujeres e infartos en personas cada vez más jóvenes.

También presenta una entrevista a Hannia Campos, la investigadora de Harvard responsable del estudio. Si nos toca ser un poco quisquillosos, no aporta nada extremadamente novedoso y quizás se podría haber buscado un nivel de profundidad mayor, pero complementa perfectamente la serie de piezas al aprovechar la autoridad de la investigadora para transmitir un mensaje de salud pública a los costarricensesm y recomendar ejercicio y hábitos alimenticios más saludables.

Como regalo final, en la web se puede ver incluso un video interrogando por su dieta a personas corrientes, que a el tracker le recuerda esas encuestas donde todo el mundo asegura ver documentales en televisión a pesar de que los datos de audiencia muestran que lo más seguido es el cotilleo, ya que a los ticos que les pusieron una cámara y micro delate preguntando qué comían habitualmente respondieron: verduras, pescado, frijoles…

The low-oxygen “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico got a seasonal diagnosis this week from the Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin. and its boss, oceanographer Jane Lubchenco. It’s changing, for better or worse. It covers less than half the square mileage that had been forecast, but in several areas the low oxygen levels that form near the ocean floor are being found unusually near the surface. Plus, its small only due to a fortuitous combo of weather and currents, not a drop in the pollution causing it. Wires and daily papers including a few local and regional outlets covered it, helped out by a NOAA teleconference. 

   The St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Kim McGuire gave it good coverage with a graphical explanation (right, hi res here) of how it forms. Her readership is deep in the agricultural region blamed for the fish-killing zone (most everything killing, actually). Fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi River, say experts, triggers  algal overgrowth near the gulf’s surface that reacts with and reduces oxygen in deep waters after it dies, sinks, and rots. She covers it straight, but has nothing from farmers or ag. reps. One wonders how hard it will be to meet deep reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus runoff that a task force has deemed necessary. Perhaps the paper has covered that angle in other stories.

But it is notable that, at the smallish (circ. about 65,000 daily) Naples Daily News on southern Florida’s Gulf Coast, reporter Eric Staats did quote a farmer, in Iowa, for a plough’s-eye view of things. He got a good statment from a man cutting his own use of fertilizer, but who thinks a lot of his neighbors don’t see the point of that (the farmer in no random selection, but a fellow well known in conservation circles). Staats turns a press conference into fodder for an engaging opening vignette on what it’s like to take one’s boat over a really dead zone. It is eery.

Other stories:

• Wired News – Brandon Keim: Gulf Dead Zone Looks Smaller, but Appearances Deceive; Good piece, terrific illus (right), and it links to four other scary stories on dead zones Keim has done in the past year or so.
• AP – Janet McConnaughey : Gulf’s ‘dead zone’ much smaller than predicted ; Filed Sunday in advance of the teleconference.
• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Dead Zone in Gulf is Smaller Than Forecast but More Concentrated ; A smaller footprint, he writes, but perhaps greater volume. 
• Reuters – Timothy Gardner: US ‘dead zone’ smaller but more severe: NOAA ;
• Sarasota Herald Tribune – Kate Spinner: Pollution still feeding Gulf dead zone ; Spinner localizes it nicely with asides on Florida’s own, smaller dead zones, and deftly uses a few statistics to sketch the bigger picture.
• Bloomberg – Brian K. Sullivan: Gulf of Mexico ‘Dead Zone’ Is Smaller Than Expected ; Solid job with extra transparency on the story’s sourcing. He id’s quotes as coming from a teleconference, and stats from a press release.
• Baton Rouge Advocate – Amy Wold: Gulf’s ‘dead sone’ smaller, more severe:
• Houma Advocate (La) Nikki Buskey: Dead zone is much smaller than expected ; Datelined Sunday. It’s unclear how much is from NOAA handouts or from interview with study participants, but Buskey got an early copy of the ship expedition report on Friday and has been covering dead zone stories for some time. Included is good description of a marine “jubilee” that looks like a festival to people who catch fish, but comprises deep water organisms frantically looking for oxygen near the surface or in the shoreline’s surf zone.   

-CP

Climatologists the last few weeks have been talking about a report that 55 million years ago a sudden spike in warming cannot be explained by any corresponding scale of increase in CO2 concentrations. That is a long time ago, data cannot be all the precise, but it nonetheless suggests that temperatures can rise well beyond what models say should result from CO2. Other factors may reinforce, or act independently. The report is not a refutation of standard theory, one must add explicitly, but it does suggest there are wrinkle yet to be found and they might be big ones.

   The Star Bulletin‘s Helen Altonn tracked down the University of Hawaii oceanographer who led the research, published in the Nature Geoscience. And, he does say, while the Paleocene-Eocene warming may be an enigma, there is no doubt that CO2 is the prime reason for the warming now underway.

Grist for the Mill: U. of Hawaii Press Release ;

 -CP

  Irony and contradiction, like satire, must be handled with care in public media. Trying to tell one story, especially if doing so with tongue in cheek - while not obliterating another equally true and seemingly contrary story is the rub. In Sunday’s NYTimes Week in Review Natalie Angier had a section front page piece on the world’s on going age of discovery of mammals. Some 400 furry new species have been added to the list – a 7%+ rise - in just four years. The piece’s lead art, shown here, is an exotic Amazon monkey.

   The temptation would be to tackle right off the bat the story’s irony – that this age of discovery comes amid and despite a simultaneous but not quite contradictory great mass extinction. She, instead, gives the straight news on discovery first and unblemished.  Then comes the caveat parade: “…on the one hand … antithetical as they may seem …. on the other hand.. most of the things going extinct are things we didn’t even know existed…” We find the expected yet always surprising Angier turns of phrase, too. Who else would declare that naturalists are sorting through a “whole phylogenetic swag.” Well, ok then. 

-CP 

  The AP‘s Malcolm Ritter – usually on the non-medical side of the science beat – has a solid and what looks to be an enterprise story on a drive by some mental health workers to spot and perhaps interrupt the first signs of schizophrenia. He provides it via an opening vignette and followup info from several sources. The news is that a constellation or “prodrome” of possible, impending serious illness has been long-recognized, and that now hopes are rising that they might trigger effective, early intervention.

Domentation of how well treatment for mental illness works, particularly non-drug regimens, is notoriously difficult to put together. This one is no exception. But, it says here, the first step is to assemble an organized system for recognizing the first signs, and to get doctors and the general public alert to them.  This piece is solid and sympathetic. It appears to have been written explicitly as a public service; it includes in on line versions a direct link to a program devoted to the effort.

 One is reluctant to encourage such a potentially worthwhile program be knocked down at all. Ritter does not oversell it. But the story might well have sought sympathetic but critical outside experts to comment further on the hurdles it faces and on the merits of trying to expand and publicize the program of intervention before statistics on its effectiveness are out. 

Grist for the Mill: PIER (Prevent Mental Illness with Eartly Detection) ;

-CP 

The growing recognition that the A(H1N1) swine flu, already declared pandemic by the World Health Organization, is not a notably deadly virus is being overwhelmed recently by stories on its rapid spread and potential to, nonetheless, kill substantial numbers of people purely because so many may get it.

 On Saturday, the AP‘s Mike Stobbe reported, for instance, that specialists at the Centers for Disease Control in the US think that as much as 40 percent of Americans will contract it within the next year or so. His story contains verbiage that could, if widely imployed, put a dent in back-to-school days around the country: “Health officials say flu cases may explode in the fall when schools open and become germ factories..”  Yikes. Germ factories. The corollary of such projections is the rising pressure to manufacture and stockpile plenty of vaccine. Given an effective shot, Stobbe sources told him, the US infection rate is unlikely to reach the 40 percent. A roundup finds intense attention esp. in UK media to both the numbers and to the public’s perception of their meaning.

Related Stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Swine flu could kill hundreds of thousands in U.S. if vaccine fails, CDC says ;
• HealthDay – Steven Reinberg: Swine Flu Could Eventually Affect 40 percent of Americans: CDC ;
• Mirror (UK) : 2 billion may get swine flu virus worldwide ;
• Voice of America:  WHO Says Swine-Flu Virus Count Infect 2 Billion ;
• Telegraph (UK) Rebecca Smith : Swine flu: 100,000 infected in a week ;
• Mirror (UK) Mark Austin: Flu fear at fever pitch ;
• Mirror (UK) James Lyons: Experts urge parents not to panic over swine flu ;
• Telegraph (UK) Melissa Kite, Laura Donnelly, Alex Ralph: Swine flu: ministers blamed for chaos ;

 Here’s a level-headed editorial:

• Independent (UK) : Leading article: Keep calm and carry on ;

On the Other Hand Dept:

• Rockwell County Herald Banner (Texas) Brad Keller: H1N1 flu still not seen in county ; no, but it is one county west, and one county south.

  The Tracker needs to do a corollary roundup soon on coverage of vaccine efforts. One notes in Europe particularly worry that the innoculate is being rush into production without sufficient safety testing.

-CP