Following ast week’s big media hurrah for the Australian amateur who brought to world attention a comet or asteroid impact near Jupiter’s south pole NASA has released the best-yet photos. The Hubble Space Telescope got them. The imagery reveals not just a dark blemish, but a turbulent-looking splash getting stretched out by wind shear. Notable is that Hubble’s managers, while still immersed in the checkout phase of getting the new instruments recently installed by shuttle astronauts into tune, paused to allow planetary astronomers on Thursday a few hours at the helm to see what’s up on Jupiter. There is not a great deal of new news to it but the photo along (super high res. here) is worth putting up in case ksjtracker reader’s missed it. Plus, we can gather up a few stories that, after the initial burst of news, took a deeper look at its implications.

   By the way, a rare double sort-of byline, complete with misspelling, ran at Saturday’s Kansas City Star site. The top credits “Star news services” and the bottom identifies them, notably, as Dennis Overbye of the NYTimes, David Pearlman (cq) of the SF Chronicle, and the AP. Neat to see two veterans in one signer except, of course, it’s Perlman.

Other Stories:

• CBC (Can) News : Hubble captures Jupiter’s new spot ;
• AP: Hubble image shows debris from Jupiter collision ;
• NY Times – Dennis Overbye : Jupiter: Our Cosmic Protector ; The pic, plus an engaging back-and-forth discussion with Overbye’s sources where, on balance, Jupiter deflects more impactors away from Earth than its gravity slingshots in our direction.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Jupiter collision packed a huge wallop ;
• SpaceflightNow – Stephen Clark: Rejuvenated Hubble spied giant impact scar on Jupiter ;  
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: Hubbble snaps fallout from Jupiter impact ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-HST Press Release ;

-CP  

What happens when a big journal’s love of embargos runs smack into the love among astrophysicists and physicists generally to pre-publish their papers at the on-line watering holes known collectively as arXiv? What might happen is another chink in the embargo system embraced by several prestigious journals.

      Science News‘s Ron Cowen is out this morning with a story based upon a report from a Harvard-Smithsonian team. It addresses how ancient, dwarf galaxies wound up with a whopping large ratio of dark matter to stars. It’s at arXiv’s astro-ph collection, dated July 15. It also, as of this morning, is still embargoed at Nature magazine’s press site for release no earlier than the usual time,  1 pm Wednesday afternoon US time.

    The news here is not of the sort that would get the wires and big dailies buzzing in any case, one suspects. It is a somewhat arcane theoretical simulation of the behavior of stars and of dark matter should two dwarf galaxies fall into orbit with one another. The team reports that gravitational resonances between the pair’s orbital period, and the period of internal rotation by the smaller of the two, will strip many of the stars from the latter and spray them into space – many to be captured by the larger dwarf galaxy. The strippee would then be left a dim little thing – of the sort seen often orbiting larger galaxies (such as the Milky Way) with far fewer stars than would ordinarily accompany their invisible cocoons of dark matter. One notes that Cowen did not, and perhaps was unable to, quote directly any of the paper’s authors. But he did talk with a few outside experts who also are among those whose work is cited in the article’s footnotes. It was also all public, seeming to clear him of any accusation he broke the embargo.

   The paper is interesting and The Tracker has quesions. Cowen’s sources seem to have a few somewhat similar doubts. If such stripping works only on the smaller members of orbiting dwarf galaxies, and if it depends on certain details of the alignments and directions of their releative spin axes, does it then explain well the observed fraction of such galaxies that have a paucity of stars?    

Grist for the Mill: At arXiv: Resonant stripping as the origin of dwarf spheroidal galaxies ;

-CP

  In Nature and in Cell Publishing’s journal Stem Cell comes attention-grabbing news this week that teams in China have not only made what look like pluripotent stem cells from mature skin cells – which has been done before - but went and turned some of them into embryos, put them in mouse uteruses, and came up with complete mice. If so, that’s pretty good proof of their pluripotency. The Wall Street Journal‘s Gautam Naik is not alone in pointing out the up and down side of this news. It means less reliance on “controversial laboratory techniques” by which he, farther down, explains as the need for embryos to supply the stem cells. On the other hand, if it proves fairly reliable this could “make it easier to create human clones and babies with specific genetic traits. 

   The image, from Nature, shows Xiao Xiao (“shau shau”), which means tiny, and is the first baby mouse created from reprogrammed skin cells.

 Other Stories:

•  Xinhua/ChinaView – Mu Xuequan : Chinese scientists create live mice from skin cells;
• Washington Post – Rob Stein: Researchers May Have Found Equivalent of Embryonic Stem Cells ; Nicely complete, including news that the dozens of first generation mice cloned from skin cells have also produced a second generation of seemingly normal mice. He also report insistence by the Chinese researchers that embryonic stem cells remind vital laboratory needs during further research and validation that the induced pluripotent cells are fully equivalent to embryonic ones. “The culture wars are not over,” one source tells him.
• ABC Science (Australia): Fertile live mice grown from skin cells ;
• Wired (blog) Brandon Keim: Living, Breeding Mice Grown From Skin Cells ;  
• Popular Science – Jeremy Hsu: Scientists Create Mice from Reprogrammed Skin Cells ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Stem cell feat revives ethics debate on human cloning ; Pithy quote – “We are fast forwarding to the era of designer babies…we have gone from science fiction to reality.” Here’s another, from the same source: “If you have a piece of skin from anybody – Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson – you could create a child.” Wow. He immediately follows with one of the Chinese researchers saying she hopes ethical boundaries stop any such thing.

Grist for the Mill: Cell Press Release ;

-CP

The ksjtracker’s Spanish Language Tracker Pere Estupinya, one post down, sent this morning an item on the inauguration of what is, for now, the world’s largest telescope at visible and IR wavelengths. To let our non-Spanish readers in on the news, here are a few English language accounts from the Canary Islands:

• Discovery/MSNBC Irene Klotz: New telescope is world’s largest …. for now ;
• AP – Carlos Moreno : Huge telescope opens in Spain’s Canary Islands ;
• Best hed award to E!TB (Basque news) Igor Lansorena : An eye as powerful as four million human eyes to map the universe ;  

Grist for the Mill:

 Gran Telescopio Canarias (Eng language) Inauguration Site ; Univ. of Florida Press Release ;

-CP

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) From all the stories about today’s official inauguration of the world’s largest (for the moment) optical-infrared telescope in the Canary Islands (Spain), two caught the eye of the Tracker. One by Pablo Jáuregui (El Mundo) because it’s a very good example of how to integrate videos, graphics and new stories in a really attractive online special section about the subject. The other because it’s written in El País by the director of the telescope, about the whole history of it’s construction. And although it’s a laudable effort and it gives us some details that are difficult to get for a reporter, it proves that journalistic skills can be better than deep scientific knowledge for writing a story that is both informative and engaging to the public.

Como explica Álex Herrera desde Las Islas Canarias en un par de notas para ABC, hoy los Reyes de España han inaugurado en el Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos el mayor y más avanzado telescopio óptico construido en el mundo (el GTC, GranTeCan, o Gran Telescopio de las Canarias), cuya misión será liderar el estudio de las grandes cuestiones pendientes en la astrofísica sobre agujeros negros, los sucesos posteriores al Big Bang, conocer nuevas galaxias, saber cómo nacen las enanas marrones, o descubrir planetas extrasolares. Su gran arma, un enorme espejo de 10,4 metros de diámetro que permitirá observar detalles sin precedentes.

Muchos medios han reproducido la noticia, pero el tracker querría destacar dos.
Primero en El Mundo un excelente especial preparado por Pablo Jáuregui. Es muy recomendable darle una ojeada para ver cómo se pueden integrar noticias, videos y gráficos en un entorno online muy atractivo para el lector. De todas sus notas, resaltar el gráfico interactivo sobre el funcionamiento del GTC. Un muy buen trabajo de Pablo, que le permitirá ir ampliando información (quizás falta un poquito más de ciencia) e integrándola en este prometedor portal sobre el GranTeCan que le perimitirá aunar todas las noticias al respecto.

La segunda nota a destacar es la que El Pais presenta destacada en su web; un texto escrito por el que fue director científico del GTC hasta su puesta en funcionamiento, José Miguel Rodríguez Espinosa, sobre el proceso de gestación del Telescopio. El tracker empezó a leer el texto con ilusión, expectante de recibir informaciones que ofrecieran una perspectiva diferente a la del periodista. Pero terminó el artículo con cierta sensación agridulce. Decir primero que debemos aplaudir el esfuerzo de José Miguel y todos los científicos que inviertan horas de sus trabajos intentando acercar la ciencia a la sociedad. Les necesitamos, es una labor importantísima, y pueden complementar sobremanera la función del periodista. Sin ir más lejos, El País tiene una buenísima sección de astronomía alimentada por muchos expertos que realizan una encomendable labor, con resultados de enorme calidad. Pero volviendo al texto que comentábamos, nos damos cuenta que para comunicar ciencia lo más importante no es tener grandes conocimientos, sino la experiencia y el saber hacer de los periodistas especializados.
Si nos excedemos injustamente en una cierta crítica constructiva del texto, vemos que su autor cumple con el cometido de profundizar en cuál ha sido el camino recorrido durante los últimos años, pero descubrimos también algún inconveniente importante. Primero, el texto no fluye. A no ser que el lector esté muy interesado, hay una serie de pausas y detalles poco relevantes sobre instituciones y procesos internos que le distraerán y hará que difícilmente continúe leyendo el texto. Además (y eso posiblemente es responsabilidad de la edición posterior de El Pais), a medida que avanzan los párrafos la redacción está menos cuidada y aparecen las típicas frases que debes releer para no perder el hilo. Luego aparecen algunos aspectos técnicos sobre los espejos que no quedan claros. Son el ejemplo habitual de información compleja que el autor quiere introducir, porque él sabe que es importante, pero no cuenta con espacio suficiente para explicarla suficientemente bien. Ya sabemos que en esta situación, si se trata de informaciones secundarias, aunque duela es mejor eliminar el concepto de cuajo que dejarlo a medias interfiriendo con la fluidez del texto y aletargando al lector. Pero hay más: si tenemos al máximo responsable del GTC explicándonos su gestación desde una perspectiva periodística, no queremos que obvie los motivos de los varios retrasos en su inauguración, explicaciones bien documentadas sobre la inversión y beneficios que aportará a España, una comparativa con los telescopios espaciales que el tracker no ha visto en ningún sitio (aquí hay historia..), y quizás un poco más de jugo científico sobre lo que será capaz de realizar.
Buen texto, sí señor. Y excelente complemento al resto de informaciones que están apareciendo. Pero también buen ejemplo para justificar el oficio y la necesidad del periodista especializado.

Dicho esto… sorpresa! El tracker sigue revisando piezas que aporten algo diferente, y encuentra una en El Cultural donde se detalla uno a uno y de manera muy didáctica los detalles científicos sobre cómo el GTC descubrirá enanas marrones, supernovas distantes, planetas extrasolares, o cúmulos de galaxias. Se propone referenciarla para alabarla, mira quien la firma… J.M Rodríguez! El tracker se come las palabras del párrafo anterior, pero no las elimina porque lo que más le interesa es la reflexión en torno a ellas.

Muchísimas otra informaciones de calidad. Fuera de las fronteras españolas, en El Tiempo (Colombia), Carolina Lancheros Ruiz entrevistó a 4 ingenieros colombianos que participaron en la construcción del telescopio y sus instrumentos.

Y la corresponal de El Universal (Mex) en Madrid, Ana Ababiarte, explica que las instituciones mexicanas UNAM e Instituto Nacional Astrofísica de Puebla han participado en la fabricación de Osiris (el primer y único instrumento instalado por el momento) y en Frida, una cámara infrarroja que se instalará en el GTC. También informa que México podrá utilizar el telescopio un 5% de su tiempo.

Semana cargada de ciencia en manos de explorar el espacio exterior. Con posibles viajes tripulados a la Luna y Marte, o con potentes telescopios escudriñando los confines del Universo. No estaría mal una historia comparando ambas aproximaciones…

 The AP‘s Marcia Dunn packed so much interesting info into an account of spacewalking astronauts that The Tracker is compelled to break his usual compulsion to ignore shuttle and space station news as irrelevant to science (or to much of anything else except to all the science that is going untended at NASA as it pours money into those dead-end engineering extravaganzas). The story has a good pace, breezy feel, and clear language. It lets us in on why an outdoor work party got cut short earlier this week after CO2 started building up in one man’s spacesuit. He’s a hyper-fit Navy Seal, was going leatherneck over turnbuckle to switch out those batteries in a jarhead jiffy. He so revved his metabolism that he overwhelmed the lithium hydroxide canister that scrubs CO2 from the breaths of more ordinary mortals. Alarms went off, the astronauts were ordered to go back inside to join the 11 people in there (the station’s six plus seven from the docked shuttle Endeavour). Now the Navy man, a member of the Endeavour’s crew, is being told to go slow, take it easy out there, etc.

For technology buffs the piece also provides a whiff of info on exactly what those batteries are and what they do.

Other spacewalk stories:

• AFP: Astronauts launch fourth spacewalk ;
• Voice of America : Astronauts Begin Long Spacewalk ;
• Reuters – Irene Klotz : No heavy breathing, NASA tells spacewalkers;

  Just a thought here. Those men and women are working so hard to get the station finished. Has it yet penetrated the general public that the whole amazing if not terribly useful mega-billion dollar complex of labs and occasionally balky toilets with its huge solar panels and thousands of gadgets and gizmos spread through heroic labor across a football field’s worth of acreage is to be turned into a gigantic fireball in about seven years? Just ditched into the Pacific? That’s NASA’s plan. Are its international partners okay with that? Is there any chance it can be sold or signed over to some other agencies that can figure useful employment for it? And, if you check the next post down on public tendency to over-worry about contamination, the EIS of a ditched space station – and it must contain a few heavy metals or other things that if vaporized in the planet’s air supply will look scary on paper – might be a bit of a p.r. problem, right? Are there any regulations anywhere on what a nation can just trash into the atmosphere? Maybe there should be.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Int’l Space Station site ;

-CP

Who knew that in 2013 it will become illegal for the US to export surplus (recycled, etc.) elemental mercury? It’s the law: Mercury Export Ban Act of 2008. A Senator named Obama sponsored it, a President named Bush signed it. Seems to be a good idea – it tends to wind up in industrial uses, such as ore processing (gold) – and in many countries to then make its way in toxic forms into the general environment. But such a ruckus is arising here in the US on where, therefore, to store the estimated 7,500 to 10,000 tons of quicksilver likely to build up as US industrial leftovers in the next 40 years. The total could go to 17,000 tons. It is nasty stuff and industry is being forced to use less of it. The Department of Energy has been assigned to take care of the overage. It has drawn up a list of seven places, in seven different states, it might go – mostly government properties. Hearings are underway.

The NIMBY monster is roaring.

The AP‘s science wire carries a story by  Shannon Dininny reporting the near-universal resistance at all government and many non-government levels in the seven candidate states. Dininny’s story has an interesting fact, too: Even 17,000 tons of the heavy metal would just about half fill one Olympic sized swimming pool. Of course it wouldn’t all go in one pool.

You’d think the feds wanted to put surely-evil-doing terrorist suspects in unlocked half way houses in the suburbs, or to put nuclear reactor waste in cardboard boxes at the city dump, the way governors and many activists have responded.  All this to the idea of a few big reinforced concrete storage pits full of barrels of cold, liquid metal, barrels so strong that the building could fall in on them without denting them (The Tracker does not know exactly how it’d be stored but it would be something like that). Even if such a site flooded and the doors to the storage rooms leaked you’d know one thing for sure: the heavy liquid metal would stay put under the silt at the bottom of its containers.

The story, while on the science wire, carries essentially no info on how the mercury will be stored, in what kinds of containers, the plausibility it will escape storage by deliberate or accidental means, or such context as the other toxic materials that industry and government handle routinely in far larger amounts. It is a political story, and well enough done. What is lacking is any evidence of any additional, technically savvy, careful reporting that gives people a sense of what this is all about and the chances something could go terribly wrong. How does this quantity of mercury, for instance, compared to the tonnage spewed into the air by burning of coal over the years, too? Perhaps my blase attitude is misplaced. But nothing in the news goes deep enough to explain why storage of mercury is anything beyond an ordinary industrial engineering problem.

One also guesses that DOE will be shown to have been tone deaf to normal, public concerns in the way that it prepared for these hearings.

Other, regional stories on the growing controversy include:

• Kansas City Star – Chad Day: KC residents urge Energy Department to look elsewhere for mercury storage ; Lots of worried people’s quotes – nothing from a professor, industrial engineer, or even a DOE spokesman, addressing the storage methods and weak points  in any detail.
• *UPDATE (See comments) Kansas City Star – Karen Dillon (July 5) : KC is a candidate to store nation’s waste mercury ;
• Denver Post: Ritter opposes storing merucry in Grand Junction ;
• Grand Junction Free Press (Colo) – Wyatt Haupt Jr. : Proposed mercury storage facility draws opposition ;
• Grand Junction Sentinel – Gary Harmon: Feds vow cooperation on mercury / Opinions split on idea of storage near GJ ; Not bad – due respect for worried residents, but it does quote a retired physicist who testified that it’s not as though it will be poured in a hole in the ground and that it’s not so hard to seal it up.
• Idaho Statesman – Rocky Barker : Gov. Otter furious over federal proposal to store mercury at INL ; Nobody, it appears, called the gov. in advance of the public announcement – in the newspapers – that the Idaho Nat’l Lab is on the list.
• Idaho Statesman (editorial): Our View; How not to palm off 17,000 tons of mercury; Big gripe – DOE is running things with “Cold War era secrecy” and clumsiness. And, the paper says ominously, INL sits over an aquifer supplying water to residents.

Grist for the Mill: DOE Mercury Storage Environmental Impact Statement  ;

An exotic bit of news set The Tracker off on this post. A press release (see Grist below) that Oregon State University (note: early version had it down the road at Univ of Oregon) posted Monday on EurekAlert carried an intriguing suggestion. Researchers there suspect that the ecosystem in the Scottish Highlands, home of big red deer (pic) that are very similar to American elk, could be fixed up with some wolves. No wolves have lived there in centuries. But if they did, it says here, the overgrazing red deer would get a bit less numerous and a whole lot more skittish. In a “landscape of fear” where deer and their young stay clear of areas where wolves might easily ambush them, trees and browse shrubs would flourish. Returning too might be a more normal mix of smaller animals that frequent dense stands of trees and brush. And so on.

Nobody was picking it up, until today one notices that at AAAS ScienceNOW  Constance Holden wrote it up handsomely. That gives green light to share an irony that I noticed early in the week, while looking for any sign that the OSU release had gotten traction. In a converse illustration of how wolves do mix things up in an ecosystem, a howl has gone up in the Rockies of the US over the decline in elk population. Wolf predation has gotten much of the blame. So…the exact same solution proposed for Scotland, in the form of a more natural red deer population, is viewed as the problem in and around Yellowstone Nat’l Park (OSU researchers, in suggesting wolves in the Highlands, explicitly use Yellowstone as a template for such a test). Hunters in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho etc. like to shoot elk and the more wolves, the fewer (and more nervous and hence harder to shoot) are the elk.

The best piece on the wolf and elk predicament ran in the Billings Gazette, by its staffer Brett French.  Citing a Montana State University study that the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published, he reports that while wolves may be a reason, direct predation is not what is directly causing most of the elk decline. The elk may be unable to get enough to eat to sustain the population seen through most of the last century – and that may be because they are afraid to go everywhere that good browse and grazing is to be found. Even the hormone levels associated with fear, it says here, might reduce chance a cow elk will carry a calf to term.

Grist for the Mill: OSU Press Release ;

-CP

That little Saturnian moon Enceladus with the plume-spurting south pole just keeps popping into the news. In today’s Nature researchers using data from the Cassini spacecraft, including fly throughs (flys through?) of the frozen plumes of vapor rising from peculiar, polar “tiger stripes,” say they have an explanation how the frigid world might have a watery, liquid layer under its gelid crust. Which is: evidence that the plumes’ source contains significant ammonia and salts. They could make a pretty good antifreeze. This would ease the amount of tidal heating required to maintain a layer of melt inside. And where there’s melted watery stuff with organics, there could be a smidgen of possibility of life or something like it. And then NASA plugs the bejeezus out of the news.

We’ll get to how this is not entirely new, but first the outlets that pick up the latest include:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano (ScienceFair blog): Saturn’s mystery moon may have hidden ocean ; A brief, and focussed on ammonia.
• ABC Science (Australia) Sara Phillips: How Enceladus got its stripes ; She focusses on the Australian contribution to the study. She may have mixed up what antifreeze does, saying resuls “suggest chemistry plays an important role in raising temperature,” but the Tracker’s not sure. One suspects the chemistry is just lowering melting temperature. It might also be that chemistry makes liquid which changes the crust in a way that focuses tidal frictional heating near the pole. It could be clearer.
• ABC News (US) Ned Potter : Hidden Ocean in Saturn’s Moon? New Clues ; He includes an important element – that this is just the latest bit of research on a puzzle that has been bounced about for four years.

Less than a month ago, a similar bit of news arose on Enceladus and the elusive explanation for its unproven ocean – see Previous Post. That time, the news was the iffiness of evidence for salts in the spray.

Rubbing his hands in mirthless glee may be Science News‘s Ron Cowen, who this week buffed up and reposted a story he did last May on much the same info as in this week’s Nature. He does that every one in awhile. If you look at the previous post linked in the preceding graf, one sees he also was ahead of the pack on that one. One says “mirthless glee” for a reason – it is satisfying to get a scoop. But some of the edge goes off it when many other reporters, later, write it as though it’s new. What’s the good of a scoop of it doesn’t carry the day first time around? (Such scoops that don’t quite take are, one must add, a common experience in this business). The relatively light pick up to this week’s chapter in the saga of an internally damp Enceladus, one presumes, may reflect a feeling by many reporters and editors that they’ll just wait for somebody to drill an entry for a submarine into Enceladus to see what, or who, is in there.

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. of Arizona Press Release; NASA Press Release ;

-CP

The Tracker got great enjoyment this morning reading the San Francisco Chronicle‘s account by reporter Jim Doyle of a visit to the people in San Diego developing an America’s Cup contender for BMW and for Larry Ellison, flamboyant founder and CEO of Oracle. But little things kept coming up that made me wish that Boyle – a fine reporter and wordsmith – had a little more background in sailing technology and in ordinary techno-scientific sense. It’s a bright yarn, it shows initiative, but….

For instance – and admittedly I’m just picking on a non science-writer here so what it has to do with our craft I dunno, except perhaps it underscores why specialists are handy in a newsroom – the hed dek says “Ellison’s new boat outruns the wind.” The copy desk writes those things, yes. But the story itself sets the tone. That is, unless one has a motor or has a powerful current on one’s tail, it must be impossible to go straight downwind in a sailboat even faster than the wind is blowing. Boyle does report, in apparent surprise, that the monster trimaran with its 16-story mast catapults itself along “at speeds far greater than the wind.”  The sailors are exuberant. The exuberance is understandable. It sounds scary fast. But when sailing across the wind in a near reach or even hard into it, sailboats have for a long time achieved speeds above the wind’s velocity. Ever see an iceboat?  Actually, I haven’t either, but I hear they really rip along when reaching or tacking into the wind. Windsurfers, ditto. Even a few monohulls, some say, can attain cross-speeds greater than the wind itself – but none can outrun it. I don’t care how many spinnakers this thing carries straight downwind, a dandelion floating in the air will drift along faster. It’s a little like a water skier who can whip back and forth across the wake at speeds greater than the tow boat’s – but he or she cannot outrun the tow.

To get more specific, I want to know better what Boyle means when he says Ellison’s big boat nicknamed Dogzilla “makes its own wind.” And that the faster it goes, the more wind it makes. I sort of get it, but don’t really. Either way there’s no reason to think Ellison’s boat is doing anything fundamentally new. One thing is clear. It can make all its own wind it wants, but if there is no wind it will be as becalmed as any other sailboat. You could tow it till it feels a gale but take off the line on a windless day, Dogzilla will stop. The actual term is apparent wind – the sum of the real wind and the relative wind on board resulting from one’s motion. A couple of other things. Doyle reports on the 50-ton pressure the stays can endure. What he means is tension. And the 2500 variables that the 500 sensors on board relay to the computers? Surely there are far fewer variables than that – even if one is measuring different values for them at different places. Every datum is not a fresh variable.

Again, it’s a general assignment feature and perhaps had to be rushed into the paper. I hope this California sailing machine, or beast as Doyle rightly calls it, creams the Swiss catamaran. But a call to a sailboat physics or engineering specialist for clarification and context on how this boat does what it does would have paid off.

Grist for the Mill: BMW Oracle Racing ;

-CP

Much is being made today of a US and international study of urine, feces, and corpses of wild chimpanzees in Tanzania that reveals that the animals – contrary to common impression among primatologists – can develop and die of what looks like full-blown AIDS. It is due to a version of simian immunodeficiency virus or SIV. They pass it to one another via sex, and mothers may pass it to their young while nursing. The virus is believed to be closely related to the ancestor of HIV. The finding would refute the wide sense among researchers that primates, especially most monkeys in which SIV evolved and eventually led to a relatively recent jump by its HIV variant into humans, have evolved an ability to suppress the lethal impact of SIV that untreated HIV has in nearly all people.

The chimps, while discovered to often die of AIDS, at the same time seem able to handle the infection better than people. Plus, the study at Gombe Preserve in East Africa’s Tanzania runs counter to evidence that chimps in West Africa have yet higher resistance to AIDS from SIV. Hence the Gombe genomes and physiologies may provide clues to how resistance develops and perhaps how to somehow trigger it in people. At least, that’s the most prominent angle in press reports. The report is in today’s Nature with its pickup aided by news releases from three of the institutions whose researchers are behind the nine-year study, the Jane Goodall Institute (including Dr. Goodall herself), the University of Illinois,  and the U. of Minnesota (see Grist below).The lead author is at the University of Alabama.

The NYTimes‘s Lawrence K. Altman elevates a different aspect above hopes for better clinical results in people. AIDS thus, he reports, may be significant among reasons why chimpanzee populations are falling in African forests.  But he gets rapidly into hoped-for insights to HIV and AIDS treatment that may follow.  The AP‘s Seth Borenstein calls the chimps cases the “missing link” in the evolution of the virus that causes AIDS. The term is overused, trite, and largely empty of meaning in its classic Descent-of-Man sense, but for this application it works as an eye-catcher. One tiny possible quibble – he calls chimps “man’s closest relative among primates.” Aren’t bonobos or pygmy chimps, not the species at Gombe Preserve under study here, our closest kin?

Not addressed much is an implication that would disturb many people. It is that AIDS research with chimps could permit experiments not possible on people. But, a large scale program of deliberately infecting such close and brainy relatives to ourselves with a lethal virus could stir intense protest, and not just from hard-core animal rights advocates (such as those at PETA who, with tongue only slightly in cheek, want to re-label fish as sea kittens to discourage their use as food.)

Other stories:

• Bloomberg – Rob Waters: AIDS Can Sicken, Kill, Chimpanzees After All, Researchers Find ;
• Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: Chimpanzees die from primate version of HIV ;
• *UPDATE: Nat’l Geographic News – Matt Kaplan : Chimps Do Get “AIDS,” Study Finds ; Well-selected quotes. The Tracker apologizes for an earlier suggestion that Kaplan picked some up from the release w/o attribution. One quote is very close but, it has been pointed out by the service’s managing editor Ted Chamberlain, it is not the same. Sometimes after all a person does use the same key phrase twice. All, I am assured, were gotten first hand. Ergo, nice job.
• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen :   Chimps dying from AIDS-like disease, study says; Some of the tissue studies were at the Lincoln Park Zoo, making it a local story. One wonders – why call it AIDS-like because a virus distinct from HIV causes it? One can have pneumonia from a variety of organisms.

Special kudos to:

• NPR-Chicago Public Radio – Gabriel Spitzer: Scientists Discover AIDS-like Disease in Chimps. He popped over to the zoo with his mic. One thing about radio – you can tell when a quote is original, not off a press release. You want a sense of what it’s like to see a (small) paradigm crumble? Listen to two women who took part and recalled for Spitzer their amazement as the work went on. Or read the transcript – it is word for word.

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. Minnesota Press Release (via EurekAlert) ;  Univ. Illinois Press Release ; Jane Goodall Inst. Press Release ;

-CP

The Tracker thinks to himself – I sure miss a lot of good stuff. SEJ announced its winners this week of its annual award for reporting on the environment. Some categories are well outside the usual trap line – book, TV, etc. At least the winner closest to the heart of this site, Outstanding Beat Reporting, Print, which went to the LA Times‘s Kenneth Weiss, does appear alongside some of his winning entries in this site’s archives (check for yourself via the Search function).

All the details on the SEJ prizes are at that preceding link, along with further links to not only the winners’ entries but those of  second and third place finishers, details on prize money, the day of the gala presentation, and other critical facts. Congratulations to all.

-CP