Great stirmash in India’s political and nuclear weaponry circles today in the wake of one retired atomic bomb scientist’s declaration that a 1998 underground hydrogen bomb test was a failure – or at least partially so. Some outside monitors have suspected as much. The issue goes deeply to India’s self-image as a legitimate world power that merits full and honorable membership  in  the nuclear club. The former researcher is adamant. So are the denials from on top. The issue appears to be whether the test site explosion reflected only the atomic fission trigger’s detonation, or included significant thermonuclear fusion energy as well. The test – its preparations performed with deep secrecy and camouflage against US surveillance satellites, put nuclear relations between India and the US into a deep freeze from which it has only recently emerged.

   It’s vital news there. Account have some of the feel of stories in the US and Great Britain back when the nuclear armament race between them and the Soviet Union was hot and was a regular station on the science reporter’s beat. For India and Pakistan it’s a mini-cold war. For the moment, most outlets in India are giving their ledes over to denials of the claim. The Tracker cannot find, and hopes someone forward to us, a link to the original story in which the assertion went public.

Stories:

• Zee News – Linco Hills : Pokhran II tests not fully successful: DRDO scientist ; Filed from Hyderabad, it reports that this “has blown the lid off” India’s official claims of its nuclear weaponry prowess ;
• Indian Express: Pokhran II was a success, insists Naval chief ;
• Hindustan Times: Indian Hydrogen bomb was not a dud: Barjesh Mishra ;
• Times of India/ IST: Former NSA disagrees with scientist, says Pokhran II successful ;
• Thaindian – Manish Chand: Kalam defends India’s nuclear deterrence capability ;
• BBC – Sanjoy Majumder (from Delhi): India nuclear test ‘did not work’ ;

-CP

Those who follow space and space policy news closely know that next week the Norman Augustine-chaired, independent NASA review panel will release its conclusions about the agency’s exploration program – the one that sends people to space. Several outlets have covered those hearings heavily. Some have already run their own readings of the tea leaves to let readers in on what to expect.

    Today the AP‘s Seth Borenstein has one such curtain raiser out. It is a bit on the gloomy side, seems sensible from here, and shows some initiative. But, and for entirely subjective reasons that are opaque even to me, one quote he got seems so different and bracing it alone is worth the post. A long time ago a good friend, now a newly naturalized citizen, told me that the US press is too dependent on quotes to say the most banal things, and often to say things that the reporter ought to just say on his or her own two legs without hiding behind the false authority of another source. This one easily clears that bar.

   He has some other good ones, including a comparison of NASA’s  exploration program and budget to a size 14 foot in a size 10 shoe. But the sterling one is from Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and a former top NASA official, and in its entirety: “NASA has been like a star athlete that’s broken world records back in the 1960s and is stuck in the bleachers ever since, unable to suit up for what it does best.” Ouch. One can object that the robotic and space telescope side of the agency has never stopped busting records left and right. But that assessment is a keeper.

-CP

High-risk jobs on Wall Street are dominated by men. Sexism? Or an expression of hormonal differences?

That’s the question the Economist raises in a story on research finding that women with higher testosterone levels are more likely to take financial risks and to seek jobs in the financial industry.

The Economist isn’t the only publication to immediately raise the specter of hormones and sexism.

• The Wall Street Journal‘s Deal Journal blog headlines its story with “Was the Financial Crisis Caused by Hormones?” It summarizes the findings by saying “biology– not just society or culture –drives individuals to pursue financially riskier careers and make riskier decisions.” Wow. That’s wildly overstating the conclusions of one study of 550 students at one business school in Chicago.
• Reuters is far more guarded: “Higher testosterone levels might explain why some women seek out risky financial trading jobs while others stick to more stable business careers,” it reports.
• Jeanna Bryner at LiveScience.com has fun with the story, writing that testosterone brings out the macho in women. Again, misleading, but in her case she quickly follows up in the second graf with a more sober report of the actual news. Fair enough.
• Veteran reporter Randolph E. Schmid must have been the only reporter in AP‘s Washington bureau not working the Kennedy story yesterday. He writes a nice, compact AP lede: “Women with more testosterone tend to behave more like men when taking financial risks.” But then oddly follows that with a quote saying exactly the same thing.

Grist for the mill: Northwestern University Press release.

- Paul Raeburn

Suicidal Planet. Death Spiral. Tango of Death. Kamikazi Planet. Death Throes. It should have burned up, it should not exist, yet it lives (so far).  And more – such a lather of emotionally-freighted verbiage to lay on discovery of a huge, gassy, bloated world called WASP-18b that has gotten a strong streak of frothy attention in the world’s science press today. The idea it will die, for sure and soon, is broadly but not universally freighted. Death? As Tik Tok the copper man told Dorothy, cruel King Evoldo “was not able to kill me, because I was not alive, and one must first live in order to die.”  To be sure, inanimate fires and stars die; despite heroic measures and a long stay in ICU that were not covered by insurance one of our laptops has died an ugly death here at Tracker central.  But the verb is more instinctively associated with living things. Ergo it is being ever so slightly hijacked here to tickle readers’ nerves with suserations of horror. But its fix does appear to warrant at least some of this drama. The planet seems doomed, and even overdue, for demolition by resorption into the star that gave it birth. It’s now zipping around so close as to nearly graze the plasmatic edge of its parent. (And there I go too, using “birth” and “parent,” words from the living, applying them to things that are not).

    It’s a homerun in news coverage – particularly in a field as rarefied as extrasolar planetology – for Nature magazine. The star WASP-18 is 330 light years away and at least a billion years old. But a UK research team says this one’s planet B is special: in its present orbit it cannot possibly survive for much more than a few hundred thousand years, maybe a million. Some say it should have been sucked forthwith and kersplash into the star before even getting this close. So while planetary incineration in stars appears a normal part of the evolution of extrasolar systems, to catch one on the brink like this runs against the odds. To be sure, as seen below, not every reporter  wrote this in the tone one would report a man on a raft at the brink of Niagara Falls. Let the march of space amazement begin:

Omigod a Death Spiral, etc Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Suicidal planet seems on death spiral into star ; Nice, fast entry into the dynamics that are hauling the planet down, with reference to “tremendous plasma tides.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Kiss this planet goodbye! (No, not Earth) ;
• Nat’l Geographic News – Brian Handwerk: New “Imposssible” Planet May Be on a Death Spiral ;
• Science Magazine – Phil Berardelli : Kamikazi Planet ;  Other than a reference to “doomed to die,” a straightforward piece – and quite clear on the wiggle room in tidal interaction models that may make it not so paradoxical a situation.

Amazing, but skip the excess drama , Stories:

• LA Times – John Johnson Jr.: Astrophysicists puzzle over plant that’s too close to its sun ; Every news burst has its honest outlier. Johnson has the courage to write this as a straightforward astrophysical puzzle, focussing on the dynamics and not bothering with any kamikazes, death spirals, or other intimations of reckless mortality and unfolding tragedy.
• Independent (UK) – Steve Connor: Planet found that defies the laws of physics ;  Again, solely on the bafflement of this; no extrasolar Perils of Pauline.
• Scientific American – Cynthia Graber: New Exoplanet Shouldn’t Exist ; A brief item with a nifty piece of composition in street lingo: the planet is “crazy close to its star.”
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: Newfound world may plunge to fiery doom / Exoplanet seems to be near immolation … but is something holding it back? ;

Grist for the Mill: University of St. Andrews Press Release ;

The BBC is one of many news organizations reporting a new study in Nature on gene therapy that might sidestep some of the ethical problems associated with other genetic tinkering in humans.

The BBC is so quick to jump on the ethical issues and the implications and the idea that the genetic changes would be “passed down through generations” that it leaves us with only a fuzzy notion of what the heck happened.

The therapy is intended to correct mutations in the DNA for mitochondria, the power plants inside cells. Faulty mitochondria can give rise to cancer, diabetes, infertility and other serious ills.

The mitochondrial DNA is not in the nucleus of a woman’s egg–where our DNA blueprints lie–but in the gooey cytoplasm surrounding it. The Oregon researchers took the nuclear DNA out, leaving the faulty mitochondrial DNA behind, and put it in a healthy egg from which the nucleus had been removed. Voila: nobody has messed with the blueprints (reducing the potential ethical hazards), but they are now in an egg with healthy mitochondrial DNA. This was done in monkeys, and four healthy young monkeys testify to the success of the technique.

Here is how some news organizations handled it:

• Rob Stein at The Washington Post leads with the idea that the monkeys had two mothers, an interesting notion, but beside the point, and misleading. Technically, they have three parents. But they don’t really have two mothers; they have one mother, one father, and a few genes from somebody else. Stein quotes David Magnus, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Biomedical Ethics, who says, “This will create the potential for legal and social conflicts.” Sounds ominous, but will these conflicts be any greater than legal and social conflicts associated with divorce and child custody fights?
• Atif Haque of ABC news online gets the news right: The research could lead to a cure for some inherited ailments. He notes that there are 150 illnesses associated with mutations in mitochondrial DNA.
• Technology Review tells us there are 200 to 250 diseases associated with mitochondrial DNA.
• Many newspapers seem to have ignored the story. The AP did file a story, so the papers knew about it–but many apparently decided to pass.

*Update and correction: Because a newspaper website incorrectly identified somebody else’s story as an AP story, what I said about the AP story was incorrect. I’ve deleted that comment. And after looking at the real AP story, I see that my former colleague Malcolm Ritter focused on the news, bringing in consideration of the ethical issues below that.

Grist for the mill: Oregon National Primate Research Center press release.

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Many Spanish language outlets have covered the case of Caster Semenya, the World-champion runner whose sex identity is “not clearly determined”. But only some of them go deep into the scientific roots of the biology of gender, and spend a good amount of lines discussing about X and Y chromosomes, the gene SRY, the effects of testosterone, and other reasons that the categories male and female can be difficult to establish. A few outlets report cases similar to Semenya’s in athletes from their own countries.

Resulta interesante dar una ojeada a la polémica sobre si la ganadora de los 800 metros en los Mundiales de Berlín, la sudafricana Caster Semenya, es más mujer que hombre o al revés. (si algo puede haber sacado en claro el lector interesado, es que las categorías de “masculino” y “femenino” no son estacas, y entre el blanco y negro existe una extensa gama de grises).

He aquí justamente lo más atractivo del caso desde la perspectiva científica: aprovechar el revuelo para abordar los diferentes mecanismos que pueden generar esta diversidad.

La mayoría de notas sobre el caso Semenya citan cromosomas, genes SRY, síndromes… pero muestran la típica pereza (o temor ante la reacción de sus lectores) a la hora de profundizar el trasfondo científico del asunto. Extraño, porque es justamente esta “versión científica de los hechos” lo que distingue con un grado extra de información de calidad a un artículo de otro.

Por ejemplo, Carmen Moreno y Mónica Tragalete firman una crónica sobre el sexo de Caster Semenya tremendamente completa, con gran cantidad de detalles sobre su vida, pero con una muy pobre versión científica.

Pero no nos quejemos, porque el mensaje de que ni el cromosoma Y, ni la apariencia física, ni incluso la testosterona determinan claramente el sexo de un individuo, sí parece haber llegado a la población.

Destaquemos algunas notas que lo han hecho posible:

La sección de Salud de El Mundo presenta un buen artículo, en el que Cristina de Martos hace lo contrario que otras notas: introduce de manera muy breve el caso que todo el mundo ya conoce, y va directa a los temas científicos, que es donde está el jugo de verdad.

Lo primero es resaltar que lo que ofrece la masculinidad del cromosoma Y es un gen llamado SRY (Sex-determing Region Y). Éste es el que en una etapa embrionaria envía señales al feto para decirle: “desarróllate como hombre”. Si no lo hace, el embrión continúa su crecimiento como mujer.

Sin embargo, hay ocasiones en que el SRY está inactivo o falta, y aparecen mujeres con XY. Otras veces el SRY existe y funciona correctamente, pero el individuo tiene una insensibilidad a las hormonas andrógenas y se genera una especie de pseudohermafroditismo.

En el otro extremo, una mujer XX puede segregar cantidades de testosterona inusuales que le otorguen características masculinas. Conclusión: no hay una frontera clara entre sexo masculino y femenino.

El País presenta el reportaje más extenso sobre el asunto. Carlos Arribas y Emilio de Benito dan un muy completo repaso histórico a varios casos de atletas estigmatizados por la incertidumbre de su identidad sexual. También expone los entresijos cromosómicos y genéticos de la intersexualidad, y luego se dirige al aspecto social. Citando la ley de identidad de género aprobada en España en 2007, según la cual cada persona debe poder decidir – independientemente de su físico – con qué género se identifica y quiere vivir, defienden el argumento de que todas las personas que desde su infancia o prepubertad han sido consideradas legal y psicosocialmente mujeres deberían poder participar en competiciones deportivas femeninas independientemente de lo que digan sus cromosomas.

Por último, alabar el esfuerzo de Público en introducir la ciencia en la sección de deportes. Ignacio Romo contacta a un experto para esclarecer el tema, pero como resultado transmite al lector que Semenya apunta a un caso de síndrome de Morris (insensibilidad a la testosterona, o ausencia de ella según el doctor…). Un poco confuso, sobre todo porque los análisis a la corredora revelan 3 veces más testosterona de lo normal, y porque todavía no se ha logrado esclarecer cuál es el origen de los rasgos masculinos de Semenya, si es que resulta factible hacerlo.

- PE

At Science News this week its physics and astronomy reporter Ron Cowen filed a story that is a gamble - the risk not being that it goes beyond fact, but that the facts as he presents them are so clearly declared to be ambiguous.  The Tracker is unsure what to make of it. But this magazine* and on line news service has, under the sure hand of its editor Tom Siegfried, cultivated an unusual environment. It appears to give its staff reporters latitude to write stories with plenty of maybe’s in them and little of the overheated certainties and sensational exaggerations that competition with other kinds of news at more general outlets - sex, crime, political scandal, celebrity nonsense  - insidiously encourages. This means they can write on developments that may not pan out at all while telling the readers how iffy it all is. Some will in fact be strikeouts. It also means, on occasion, that the pub. will be first to have reported, and in well-qualified fashion, the glimmerings of spectacular discoveries or inventions.

   The news Cowen reports is that a statistically uncertain excess and asymmetry in leptons and other subatomic particles, emerging from a small fraction of collisions between electrons and positrons in a Japanese accelerator, gently implies that maybe a supermassive particle is shading the outcome in ways the go beyond the Standard Model of Physics. Capital letters are employed for this edifice of constants and particles, for it is a grand thing. Yet it, as far as my lay mind can tell from what I’ve read, contains inherent conflicts in the predicted behavior of things under extreme conditions that a major rewrite appears inevitable – but can’t happen until new machines expose which parts are flawed. This could be one such machine and data set. It may also only be a fluke of low-number statistics or other happenstance. (Pertinent example:  one of these days one of the hints of the Higgs particle  that circulate in the news will lead somewhere).

  This is no scoop, nor a gem that Cowen dug up in the arcane recesses of the arXiv repository of on line preprints and non-peer-reviewed sallies into the unknown. But as you’ll see in Grist just below, the press release is heavy sledding for reporters who prefer a press agent spell out the essence all in words of one syllable and in a form that can be assessed at a glance.

Grist for the Mill: High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (Japan) Press Release ;

*Disclosure – I am an admirer of Science News and its crew of science writers and editors but am not a disinterested judge -  I have recently written a few articles for it and may well do more.

-CP

Science News‘s Ron Cowen has expanded significantly on recent reports of a so-called backward planet – one that goes around its star in a direction opposite, or nearly so, to the star’s own rotation. For a sample of that single case’s coverage, see the Aug 17 story at  Nat’l Geographic by Rachel Kaufman.

   Cowen’s piece reports a long list of such planets turning up in the astronomical literature. A primary source has a good quote: “ This has been the summer of tilted planets.” Or as Cowen calls them, wrong-way planets.  The message is that while planets almost surely form with orbits in close fealty to the angular vectors of their stars, those orbits can get tossed out of whack by close encounters among such planets. Now it appears that it not only can happen but does happen – a lot. All, it appears, are roasting worlds that orbit close to their stars.

      Nice job, with one nag. One would like an explanation of how one tells, from spectroscopic and luminosity data, the sense of a planet’s orbit compared to the rotation of its star. They’re all buried in one single, point source’s light signals as seen with instruments available today, right?  So how does one tell whether the star is rotating left to right while the planet orbits right to left, or whatever?  One can imagine doppler data that is out of synch in eclipsing systems. But The Tracker isn’t sure precisely how that would work. Maybe it’s a long and tedious exercise to explain it in a story of this size. Nonetheless, a curious Tracker and probably many other readers want to know.  

*UPDATE – Cowen informs us of the answer: “…which is about how the transiting planet would preferentially block blueshifted starlight first, as it began the mini-eclipse, then block redshifted light as the mini-eclipse ended, if the planet was orbiting in the same sense that the star was rotating. Opposite case if the planet orbits backwards.”  . That’s clear enough. A well-done yarn would have been even better had this idea been shoe-horned in /CP) 

-CP 

Southern California grows lots of citrus – oranges and lemons mainly – and the Los Angeles Times‘s Jerry Hirsch has a scary update on something that has citrus ranchers already tossing and turning and asking themselves whether it’s time to rip out those trees and plant something else. A little insect called the Asian citrus psyllid has been found in Santa Ana, Orange County. It marks their steady spread north from the border in recent months. The problem is that what is a minor pest by itself becomes a lethal blight if they get infected with and spread the virus for citrus greening disease – a contagion also feared to be on the brink of swacking zones of death through Florida’s groves.

    It’s a pretty good story and on more than the economics at stake. He has important tidbits of the aphid-sized insects’ and the virus’s natural history. But one thing stopped the eyes. The insects, it says here, are “asexual” and don’t mate to reproduce. That does not sound right. And a check of a few citrus psyllid websites finds plenty of mention of males, females, and mating.

*UPDATE: On Wednesday LAT’s Hirsh filed more -  its “inexorable march north” has carried the pest into the heart of LA County – in Echo Park.

Other Stories:

• AP – Michelle Rindels: Bad citrus pest found in new S. Calif. location ;
• Riverside Press-Enterprise – Insect discovery elevates fears of psest problem ;

Grist for the Mill: California Citrus Research Board Info Page ;  

    Full disclosure: Perhaps the Tracker would have noticed this news anyway, but cousin Robert in Santa Paula, Ventura Country, who runs the family ranch of which I have a smidgen of a share, called my attention to it. Robert, orBob as his farmer pals call him, has grown lemons on the place nearly all his life but is tearing them out now. Int’l competition from Chile and the like is the reason. But good call, looks like. He’s going with more avocados. ‘Hope there’s not a virus-packing avocado psyllid on the horizon.

-CP

 Want a really big drumstick?

  At Popular Science‘s Popsci.com Stuart Fox tells of a McGill University professor with plans to reverse engineer a dinosaur from a chicken.  At CanWest news service Ken Meaney writes a lot more soberly that the professor “is working to produce chicken embryos with dinosaur-like features within five years.” AFP declares flatly that the man plans to show he can create a dinosaur.

  The silly phrase award goes to a story attributed to “News Staff” at the CTV service in Canada, declaring the vertebrate paleontologist will take the first step “towards hatching live prehistoric animals.” Maybe the News Staff parked its brains outside the door labeled enter here to boost ratings by forsaking truth.  Nothing that arises from such work will be a prehistoric anything, so why say it? Just because someone reminds one of somebody doesn’t make him or her that person.  A chicken’s spawn with teeth and claws would be many things. But not prehistoric.

   The reason for all this?  The Canadian news magazine MacLeans last week featured a long story headlined “The quest to build a dinosaur.” It imagines pet dinosaurs in its lede. It says flatly that scientists are planning to hatch dinosaurs from chicken eggs. Really? Did the scientists say they would BE dinosaurs, or be instructively a lot LIKE dinosaurs but of no species of dinosuars that ever lived back in the mesozoic? This is science writing for pure sensation, with flashy bits on the meteor that hit the Yucutan 65 million years ago, and “evo devo’s” “startling discovery that most creatures share many of the same genes.” That’s startling? One finds lots of overheated adjectives in the piece. There is mention of the harebrained idea that Neanderthals might be summoned from the human genome, too. It’s giddy with amped verbiage. Yet, it coheres. Embryonic chickens do have fingers, teeth, a tail, that all get resorbed and morphed into chicken bits. The story might even inspire a few high school slackers to hit the books and become scientists so they can do things like this.

  Speaking of ancient history, this is not exactly a fresh story. The general facts raised a media ripple at least once already, in March this year.  It is the Dinochicken project loosely organized by famed and flamboyant Montana paleontologist Jack Horner. He’s an author of a book, “How to Build a Dinosaur.”  The idea is to take a contemporary bird species – and why not a chicken? – and see if one can revive from its DNA a few remnent sequences left over from its and all birds’ ancestries in the Mesozoic. Maybe get embryos or even whole bird-things without flight feathers, perhaps a few teeth or three working fingers on their wings-cum-forearms or long tails. Thus would be demonstrated the trail of evolution all creatures carry in their genomes plus undeniable proof birds are dinosaur descendants.

Earlier Stories:

•   Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas (March 5, ’09): ‘Dinochicken’ Scheme Puts Evolution in Reverse ; She has it right. The aim is to “create a dinosaur – or something like a dinosaur.”
• Wired – DamonTabor (Feb. 23): Q & A: Jack Horner Wants to Recreate T. Rex From Chickens – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?; And Horner doesn’t say jack about T. rex in the interview.

  Tracker’s idea: If if works in chickens, then as Horner seems to suggest in MacLeans, let’s try it on ostriches or emus. Maybe we’d get rough facsimiles of velociraptors. They might be like llamas are to sheep and coyotes. Just let a fox TRY to wreak mayhem in the chicken coop if one of these gene-juggled monsters is hanging around with the hens. Cock a doodle to you, buster. One question – unless there’s some reason other than sheer luck that instinctive behavior changes would accompany a new morphology, what’s to prevent a DNA-edited  bird from trying to peck cracked corn with its snout and gums? That could get ugly.

-CP

The Tracker’s first daughter and her husband plus three kids are visiting us in Berkeley. They live in Orange County south of LA. She mentioned how muggy the weather down there has been. That has to be an exception to the rule, I thought.

         Oh no no no no no. It can’t be, mustn’t be, but maybe she’s on to something. Word from the brainy climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography is that California’s Mediterranean climate – blessed by rainless warm summers that also are LOW IN HUMIDITY, is trending toward Gulf Coast-type muggy awfulness. Heat waves are commonplace and one is resigned to seeing more of them most places, but around here we’ve just about always gotten a cool night in the dry air – which lets heat radiate easily into space –  to give us a break. We’re not full-on sticky yet but this means maybe we’re getting closer.

         Leaping on the story at Reuters, Steve Gorman starts right off, “Bouts of extreme muggy heat lasting for days, once rare in California, are becoming more frequent and intense.” And due to what? High on the suspect list: Climate change. More specifically to warmer waters off Baja California. Resulting humidity can blow our way and set up a feedback loop intensifying and prolonging heatwaves. Nevada’s getting hit, too. So they say at Scripps.

     First out of the gate may have been the San Diego NPR station KPBS, where reporter Ed Joyce got a brief report out on it. LiveScience also has a non-bylined write-up that provides additional source comments and context.

  The news had, it seems, been floating around. The fresh press release (see Grist below) reports that the researchers’ paper was published late last month. It started as a study of a record-breaking 2006 nighttime heat wave and wound up with broad conclusions arising from study of 60 years worth of climate data and trends. It was in on line edition of the Journal of Climate.

Grist for the Mill: Scripps Inst. Press Release ; Journal of Climate Abstract (Notable: the journal received this paper in February 2008. That seems like a long gestation in edit) ;

-CP

You might think the New York Times has created a special medical news section if you open to pages A12 and A13 today. The paper runs three interesting medical stories, including a swine-flu follow-up worth noting here, especially because I posted on the coverage yesterday.

The CDC, according to a piece by Donald G. McNeil Jr., is casting doubt on Monday’s frightening swine flu predictions–30,000 to 90,000 deaths, 1.8 million hospitalizations, and so on. In addition to quoting a CDC official on the record, he adds comment from a Harvard epidemiologist who notes that the epidemic seems to be fading in the Southern Hemisphere. Seeing this in print, it’s clear that everybody should have raised questions about those fantastic numbers–as I should have in yesterday’s post. A sharp piece of reporting.

On the next page, Gina Kolata reports on a JAMA study this week finding a steady drop in rates of hip fractures over the past two decades in Canada. She includes a thorough discussion of why this might be happening, and concludes that it is “a medical mystery.”

She writes that the osteoporosis drugs called bisphosphonates, which became available in the mid-1990s, do not explain the decline. She does not, however, tell readers what those drugs are. I would suggest that most people taking Boniva or Fosamax do not know they are taking a bisphosphonate. We should give our readers the brand names they are familiar with, even though the medical journals don’t.

And Roni Caryn Rabin rounds out the trio of medical stories with a problematic piece on a study in Cancer Research showing that tamoxifen (one brand name is Nolvadex, but this one is probably better known by its generic name) increased the odds that long-term users will develop a rare but aggressive new breast tumor. Several experts caution that the benefits of tamoxifen outweigh the risks.

Rabin, unfortunately, leaves out the absolute risk figures. She says long-term tamoxifen users were “possibly four times as likely as nonusers” to develop the new tumor. Meaning a 4 percent risk, compared to 1 percent? Or 40 percent compared to 10 percent? The figures are missing from the press release and the abstract, too.

Rabin does say the number of women who developed the unusual tumor in women who took tamoxifen for five years or more was small. And the risk was not found in women who took tamoxifen for one to four years. Both of those points mean “the finding of a four-fold increase was questionable.”

Here’s the judgment call: We don’t want to hide this kind of news from our readers, and they would be unhappy with us if we did. But if the finding was “questionable,” is it worth a story? And should it have a headline that reads, “Rare Side Effect Is Seen in Long-Term Use of a Breast Cancer Drug”? That hed doesn’t sound questionable to me.

And, I’ve saved the best stuff for the kicker: Thanks to Gary Schwitzer and Ivan Oransky, who’ve been calling attention to this on the web, I found Dr. Len’s Cancer Blog, written by Dr. Leonard Lichtenfeld, Deputy Chief Medical Officer for the national office of the American Cancer Society.

He doesn’t solve my absolute risk problem, but he notes that the increased risk reported in the study was a range–between 3 percent and 1900 percent! (See his post for further explanation.) And similar figures had been reported by the same researchers in 2001.

The title of Dr. Len’s post? “When the ‘News’ Isn’t News.”

- Paul Raeburn