Earlier this year Britain’s chief science adviser, John Beddington, warned of a “perfect storm” arising that may bring food, water, and energy shortages and competitions to simultaneous global crisis in another 20 years. Today the BBC began an examination of that assertion, with an overview from its correspondent Stephen Mulvey.

     Its population graphic alone is powerful – look at Europe and Northern America (does that include Mexico, or is it included under Latin America? Answer: No. The UN’s demographers put Mexico in Central America).  Populations there are pretty stable; Europe’s in fact is expected to slip a bit further despite some signs that having babies is enjoying more status even among the prosperous. The rest of the world is basically Asia, with Africa a distant second, both growing like topsy. (And another question – does this include a supposition that China continue it’s strict controls on childbirth? Answer: UN has China adding only about 60 million by 2050. India alone grows by  another 500 million or so.) The Tracker wouldn’t have guessed it wildly different – but to see it plotted is nonetheless sobering.

  Other pieces of the package’s opening day include:

• US Dustbowl; From California, drought and diversion of scarce water to save fish leaves farmers without irrigation.
• China’s CO2; Corresponent Quentin Sommerville stands in a huge Mongolian windfarm and says don’t let it fool you. Coal plants are springing up even faster.
• Leasing Land: Jeremy Cooke finds, in Ukraine, an expanse where farming has changed little in centuries. Now big money is rolling in from distant places aiming to install  huge mechanized wheat operations  for a world food market that smart money says will yield big returns.

Grist for the Mill:  UN World Population Prospects, 2008 Revision.

Pic hi def ;

-CP

  Ocean acidification is, by The Tracker’s reckoning, going to be the aspect of CO2 over-emission that will have the most people furious that it came with no warning while the ocean reefs dissolve or fishing banks turn into jellyfishing banks or somethng else awful happens at sea. Well, there is warning aplenty for those paying attention,  but it doesn’t come up in casual conversation like global warming does. And wildfires and insect blight as two of the horsemen of this particular apocalypse don’t get quite the star billing as do, for instance, drought and tropical cyclones. But the AP has, perhaps by design, a one-two punch on the wire this morning that brings localized, and hence vivid, word on each from Alaska and its neighboring Yukon Territory.

• AP – Dan Joling: Research finds higher acidity in Alaska waters;  His story filed from Anchorage captures an undestandably irritated thought:  Now what!? It does seem that climate and related geophysical changes are piling on.  The Tracker can’t recall seeing the term “basicity” in a story about pH (alkalinity might have been better), but he provides the basic chemistry at work: cold water can absorb more gases, and faster, than can warm water. Hence polar regions are accomodating more CO2 than tropical waters, mixing is fairly slow, hence carbonic acid is rising up north (and presumably way south) faster than at the equator. It’s already bad enough to hobble crustaceans, molluscs, etc. ability to build shells, it says here. The apparent genesis of this story is seen below in Grist.
• AP – Charles J. Hanley: Beetles, wildfire / Double threat in a warming world ;  This is an enterprising feature. And right now near Haines Junction, he writes, it’s the spruce beetle laying waste to the local boreal forest. They have turned a “deathly gray even in the greenest heart of a Yukon summer.” Hecalls the spectre of fire and dead, dry, insect-killed trees twin plages consuming northern forests, a preview of the future. He takes them as a springboard into other blights and firestorms around the world, including the devastation of lodgepoles and other pines in the western US and in British Columbia and Alberta to its north. Ditto for Siberia. One source calls it the “fingerprint of climate change.” Clenched fist might be more like it. One forester and pest specialist tells him of the multiple armies of insects rising up across the Yukon:  “Weird things, unprecedented things are happening.”

Grist for the Mill: The on line Capital City Weekly in Juneau last week ran the presumed catalyst for Joling’s AP story on acidification, which the Weekly in turn got directly from, and credits to, the newsroom of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks : New findings show increased ocean acidification in Alaska waters.  The AP story includes some extra reporting and also has some quotes identical to those in the university’s pub, but attributed only to the person quoted. The intermediary story  is by the public affairs officer, Carin Stephens, in the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences. Her original is here.

Related Western Wildfire News:

     Readers can be pretty good writers. Here’s a letter to the Summit Daily News in Frisco, Colorado, by a recent visitor tothe region – Mike Benefield: The coming conflagration; a prophesy;

  Pic source, CBC: Fire situation not an emergency, premier assures public;

-CP

People live on more metaphorical planets than just Mars and Venus. Never was this more apparent than in the ongoing investigation into whether the shy teenage winner of a women’s sprint race at the world championships in Berlin is really a young woman. Her South African birth certificate apparently says she’s right about that. Her family says she is a she and always was. But she’s fast, quite tall, a bit muscular, has a largish face, and, well … she’s just so fast.

   Tests and talking are underway. In the meantime a few outlets have explored how the biology of sex can be decidedly ambiguous, and perplexing when a strict sorting is demanded by rules. With many in the public and some within the press seeing this merely as a possible case of fraud, several responsible reporters see it as a chance for some public education – and an intimate, gripping human interest meditation.

Stories:

• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II : Row over South African athlete highlights ambiguities of gender ;
• NYTimes – Alice Dreger: (Essay) Where’s the Rulebook for Sex Verification? ; The theme – this young person’s life has suddenly become far more awkward, difficult, and emotionally painful.
• NPR - Scott Hensley (blog) :  Gender Questions Hover Over Champion Runner ; partly a round-up from other media with additional reporting.
• BBC: The complexities of sexual identity ;
• Daily Telegraph – Andrew Webster: World rushes to classify Caster ; This story gets off to an ambiguous start itself – is it a common-sense (meaning wrong) look at what could be a con, or is it sympathetic and nuanced? Webster provides no physiological or genetic specifics why gender is not straightforward for everybody, but puts some heart in the piece as it closes.
• LATE ADDITION: Guardian (UK) Sarah Boseley: What determines Caster Semenya’s sex? ;  A sensible, somewhat clinical and, for its length, thorough look at the genetic and physiological reasons for the overlap of male and female in a substantial number of births.

For more on athletes and science and the races in Berlin, scroll down to Paul Raeburn’s post on the upper limit of human speed, male or female.

-CP

The Times‘s Nicole Santa Cruz this week put an intriguing lede on a local nature story: A recently discovered email cougar could be a princess. The story also reveals there are mental hazards when wild animals are not given familiar names (which has its own anthropomophic-related problems.) It’s not as bad as a list of Biblical begats, but we have here a chronology of events starring P-3, P-12, P-6, and P-1. That’s enough to peeve one off. The resident lions of the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area have been in the news off and on for years – and made a few previous appearances in the tracker. This is a good revisit to learn the clan’s latest doings.

In Science magazine today comes a matter-of-fact account of alteration of natural genes and their transplant into microbes. No big news in that, it sounds like genetic engineering 1A, but important enough at face value. It should ease the engineering of microbes generally to do tasks evolution never got around to. But the report is from the J. Craig Venter Institute, with Venter an author. It explicitly says that the specific  procedure’s success seems to clear the way for construction of entirely synthetic genomes and their installation, and presumed vivication. This seems to mean Venter’s reach for creating artificial microbial life is close to its brass ring.

      The specific news is that the researchers succeeded in removing the genome from a bacterium that is hard to re-engineer and putting it into yeast where such manipulation is easier. They changed it just enough to make it recognizably different, applied some further chemical seasoning, and put it back in another bacterium. It took. That seems to clear the technical path to putting an entire synthetically constructed genome into bacteria, perhaps giving them novel behaviors and proteins. And the group already has made at least one such genome from scratch.  The Tracker expected to see some news accounts with a spooky don’t-play-god angle in them, but found little along that line in mainstream press.

The Tracker expected to see a few stories focussing on the eerie, playing-god angle. But there is not much of that. One is at the Brisbane Times in Australia. Science editor Deborah Smith has it under the hed, Scientist warns of genetics danger. One suspects she did not write that hed. The concerned person  she quotes is described only as being with the environmental group Friends of the Earth with no hint what her science training is. Terrorist attacks come up. One would be more convinced to see such concerns from a clearly expert researcher identified as an authority in a pertinent field.

    By and large elsewhere, reporters put  effort into explaining this news.

Other stories:

• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Artificial life is only months away, says biologist Craig Venter ; With direct quotes heard by the reporter himself. He also explains a bit about the methylation process required to make genomes suitable for transplant into bacteria.
• BBC – Victoria Gill: A step closer to ‘synthetic life’ ; She also made a call and talked directly to one of the authors and even better, some non-author experts - what should be the rock-solid standard required for getting a byline on a story but, alas, is less and less the case.
• Nature News – Erika Check Hayden : Scientist device new way ot modify organisms / Yeast cell surrogate may help scientists to engineer synthetic life ; If you want a simple, narrative explanation and some outside comment, this is the one. And one outsider with whom she talks explains that while synthesizing a genome by, in effect, plagiarizing the genome of a natural organism may be impressive technically when it happens, it is far from concocting an operable genome from scratch. So far only evolution has done that.
• Bloomberg – Rob Waters: Gene Pioneer Venter Takes Another Step Toward Synthetic Life ; Good scope to the yarn, outside comment, some corporate context, and enough detail to provide a sense of what happened.
• MIT Technology Review – Emily Singer:  A Step Forward for Microbial Machines / A novel approach to genetic engineering could aid the creation of fuel-producing bacteria, and edges closer to artificial life ; She talks with the same outsider as did Hayden at Nature.

Grist for the Mill: J. Craig Venter Inst. Press Release ;

-CP

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A deep-sea report of not  just one species, but a whole new phylum, of swimming worms that, when disturbed, drop chunks of flesh from their heads that light up and glow a brilliant green is getting pickup from news outlets today. The report is in Science magazine. A Scripps Inst. of Oceanography researcher and colleagues from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute and from Sweden found seven species. They live at widely scattered locales thousands of feet down in the Pacific Ocean. Scripps gives it a boost with a press release and various illus (see Grist below).  Here’s a mystery: Why couldn’t the researchers and Science timed this for America’s Independence Day on July 4?  The journal received it back in February and accepted it in early June. That’d have been opportunistic press agentry.

    Likely to be widest read, as it is on the AP, is  Randolph E. Schmid ‘s account. With the worms providing the pyrotechnics he doesn’t need to dress it up with overdone verbiage. Just learning in the lede that “Researchers have dubbed the newly discovered critters ‘green bombers’” is plenty enough to grab readers. And the worms, he relates, are not teeny things. Some reach four inches in length. The name of one species says it all: Swima bombaviridis, or swimming green bomber.

Cute story, reminder of Earth’s wonders and biodiversity, a glimpse of the adventure and joy of  scientific discovery, all that good stuff. No scandals or vanishing species. Not big news, no investigative swagger involved -  just worth a snappy short that is diverting and abstractly important. Done in several renditions:

Other Stories:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Deep-sea Worms Release Glow-Bombs When Disturbed ; He calls the bombs “green glow sticks,” apt metaphor.
• BBC – Victoria Gill : Glowing ‘bomber worms’ discovered ; Hmm. Not sure the intact worms glow. But their bombs do.
• LiveScience – Clara Moskowitz: New worm species found: the ‘green bomber’ ; NIce job of really reporting the story – no quotes from the release. The ones she has are similar – but you know she’s quoting a person, not a script provided on paper or computer screen.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Elizabeth Pennisi: The Prettiest Bomb You Ever Did See ;  Nice.
• Times (UK) : Scientists discover sea creature that uses ‘bombs’ to defend itself; Nice simile to airplanes dropping flares to decoy missiles, but otherwise right off the release.
• ANI: Scientists discover oceanic worms that throw “green bombs” on predators. Purely a press release rewrite.

Grist for the Mill: Scripps Inst of Oceanography Press Release;

The SF Chronicle’s David Perlman has on p. 1 a good example of a sort of story that once was a recurring theme in science writing – the science of mummies. X-rays and forensic unwrappings of dynastic Egypt’s long dead notables, some recovered from tombs in the shadows of Giza’s pyramids, have been going on for a long time. Perlman writes in high style why a 2,500-year-old, linen-wrapped minor priest from the city of Akhmim – site of many ancient burials – was passed through a CT scanner at Stanford U. yesterday. It’s for an upcoming museum exhibit on medicine and mummies aptly titled, in part, “Very Postmortem.”

• See Also: AP – Brooke Donald: Stanford scientists scane 2,500-year-old mummy;

    It is a minor irony – although not, one ventures, an ethical contradiction –  that the story runs while the Chron’s  letters to the editor page of the paper carries fury over another piece of foreign-corpses-for-science news that the Chron uncovered recently. The University of California, Berkeley, has a scandal on its hands. Why is it hanging on to the bones of Japanese war dead from the Battle of Saipan? This is of course a very different kind of news – these dead belong to people whose immediate descendants and family members are very much alive. Body parts as war booty is just plain creepy, too. Beyond that,  the university has already returned portions of its extensive collections of Native American remains and artifacts to the custody of pertinent tribes. So the idea of piling up bones for science is already in a pretty bad odor around here.

       That story broke with a strong strain of disapproval  last Sunday in a story by Jim Doyle: Japanese war dead skulls at UC museum.

Its lede argues that keeping them violates the Geneva Convention. A Navy doctor brought them – and not just skulls – to the US and eventually gave them to the university. It has them in underground storage at the Phoebe A. Hearst anthropology museum – its eponym another minor irony given that her family now  publishes the Chron. Some were taken from the bottoms of cliffs after residents of Saipan jumped to their deaths rather than be captured by US troops – surely one of the saddest episodes in a brutal war.  The Saipan Tribune’s Haidee V. Eugenio promptly picked the story up back where the doctor gathered the disputed remains. And the UK’s Telegraph‘s Julian Ryall filed from Tokyo on it, including news  that the Japanese government has made no official comment.

       Doyle‘s  follow-up  today relates UC’s offer to return the remains. This looks like an episode reaching proper conclusion with no small credit due to the Chronicle’s reporting.

Other News Arising from Ancient – very Ancent – Skeletons:

• Science News – Bruce Bower: Exhuming a Violent Event / Scientists glean clues to a lethal prehistoric raid from skeletons excavated at a German site ; 4,600 years ago an undefended hamlet was attacked. Bower reports on what happened next, according to authors of a paper in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.

-CP

How fast can humans run?

Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt’s new world records in 100 and 200 meters this week in Berlin didn’t just surpass his own world records set at the Beijing Olympics last year — they surpassed them by a lot. Philip Hersh of the Los Angeles Times reports that nobody in 88 years has lowered the 100 meter record by more than Bolt did in Berlin.

Fertile ground, perhaps, for a science story looking at how this could happen?

I found it not in the MSM, but at astrophysicist Ethan Siegel’s Starts with a Bang blog: The Math of the Fastest Human Alive. (Siegel’s blog appears on Seed Magazine‘s Science Blogs.)

Siegel recaps the news, then graphs the men’s record times for 100 meters over the past century or so. He fits that to a mathematical curve and suggests that the theoretical limit–the fastest anyone can possibly run–is about 9.2 seconds. And Siegel says that’s not likely to be reached for hundreds of years. According to Siegel’s analysis, Bolt is running much faster than anyone ought to be running right now. He’s a statistical outlier whose record will probably stand for a generation–unless he breaks it again himself.

It’s a good follow-up to the week’s sports news. But the post is only part of the story. The comments–29 when I checked this morning, less than 24 hours after Siegel posted–add immeasurably to the story.

You’ll see the familiar questions about possible drug use, suggestions to improve the math, and intelligent speculation about where the improvements might come from. (Muscle coordination? Blood volume? Lung capacity?) Some of the commenters include links to other relevant information, and more comments are surely to come, keeping this story alive.

It’s not just Siegel’s post that makes this story; it’s the whole package of post and comments, though Siegel deserves the credit for sparking the discussion. It’s a fine example of how online journalism can take a story in directions that a newspaper or magazine can’t.

- Paul Raeburn

July’s ocean surface temperature hit an all-time record, reports NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center. (See Update below for which news service advanced the ball beyond NOAA’s ken).The news arises in a regular NOAA monthly analysis (see Grist below)  that appeared without, apparently, heavy effort to promote it to the press. But somebody noticed. Now several outlets have it.

The reason is mix of the general upward trend in temps, the report says, and the building El Nino in the tropical Pacific. That latter factor, one must add, means that there has been no sudden surge in the ocean’s heating. The heat, most of it, was already there. But El Nino’s suppression of cold water upwellings in much of the equatorial Pacific allows more of the heat that the ocean already had absorbed in its depths to express itself at the surface (more or less. The Tracker admits to winging it a bit.) In any case, a warm ocean this year, one suspects, will eventually translate to a spike atmospheric temperatures, too, just as did the huge El Nino of 1997-98.

Headlines, natch, say just ocean temperatures are highest seen. No sense confusing people with the proviso that this is the surface temperature. And that’s what drives hurricanes and higher humidity (and, eventually, rainfall).  One suspects a paradox may be underway however. If El Nino is spreading the heat over more of the surface and letting it therefore radiate into the atmosphere and space, then does this suggest that overall the bulk of the ocean, its cold currents more safely sequestered down deep, is an itty bitty bit cooler for the moment? Ah well – nobody gets into that somewhat irrelevant, if interesting, surmise.

Stories:

• (*UPDATED) AP – Seth Borenstein: In hot water: world’s ocean temps warmest recorded ; In the Gulf of Mexico – far from El Nino’s direct expression, surface waters are “dancing around 90 (F)”.  That’s amazing. NEW: More impressive is that NOAA, reporter Borenstein informs us, only recognized it as the hottest July ever. Presumably looking through the records for hottest month ever, Seth discovered and got confirmation from NOAA that July was also the hottest month ever. Another Tracker question: considering that it is now winter in the Southern Hemisphere, where most of the ocean is, does the record become even more impressive? In any case kudos to AP and Seth B.
• NYTimes – Cornelia Dean: Ocean Temperatures Are Highest on Record; Further Late Addition: She also has this as the hottest month ever. It is not clear if this was an independent discovery at AP and NYT.
• McClatchy Newspapers – Brendan Doyle: June’s record ocean warmth worries fishermen, environmentalists ; He says June, and filed this story last weekend. The new report is for July. So it looks like Doyle got the jump on this SST story.

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; NCDC State of the Climate July Report ;

Another excellent image of Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies, in high res from the US Navy, is here.

-CP

Many of us urbanites who don’t grow rice may think rice paddies are pretty much always flooded. Not so. Sometimes they’re flooded a little bit, and perhaps only briefly, to suppress weeds, or flooded during fallow times (The Tracker thinks after a quick search). But deep water kills most rice varieties – except a few that can rapidly grow taller fast enough to stick their tops into the air again. Those strains however don’t have high yields of grain. Now, in Nature, researchers in Japan say they’ve found genes – dubbed Snorkel1 and -2, that can provide such flood tolerance to high yielding rice.

One question: if the rice has to put on a growth spurt to endure a flood in a river plain etc., what happens when the water goes back down? Won’t the tall and spindly snorkelling rice tend to flop over?  A hungry reader wants to be able to picture the whole cycle of  field to flood and back. No reporters appear to have asked about that.

Stories:

• AP – Eric Talmadge: High-Yield, Deep Water Rice Developed ;
• Reuters – Tan Ed Lyn: Gene experts see high-yield rice in flood zones ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Helen Fields: Snorkel Genes to the Rescue ;  She notes that what farmers, and hungry billions, could really use is a salt tolerant variety, perhaps irrigatable with sea water (and tolerant of storm surges in such places as Bangladesh).
• BBC - Snorkelling rice ‘to feed millions’ : Mainly a fat caption to a video of the growing rice.

See Also:

• The Daily Inquirer in the Philippines’s Anselmo Roque had a different spot of news on flood tolerant rice, earlier this month: New variety can grow even in floodwaters.
• The same news is in the Philippines’s Business World On Line by Neil Jerome C. Morales: First flood-tolerant rice variety approved for RP use.

-CP

Feeling disheartened by the rancorous debate over U.S. health care reform? Could things possibly be any worse?

Yup. Laurie Garrett, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist turned think-tanker reminds us in a piece in The Lancet this week that if achieving good, universal health care is tough in the United States, it’s going to be far tougher in the developing world. (The article is available on The Lancet’s press site, for those who have access. The Lancet’s press release on the article is available here. You may also purchase the article from The Lancet for $31.50 for 24 hours’ access. Are they kidding?)

Of the 32 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, 12 have no health care coverage, and 11 had less than 10 percent coverage, Garrett and her colleagues report.

They also make a couple of points that haven’t been given much, if any, attention in the MSM:  In addition to the 47 million Americans not covered by health insurance, another 25-45 million have coverage so inadequate that a major medical problem would drive them into bankruptcy.

And here’s an eye-opener: Health care in Costa Rica, Cuba, Gambia, and Gabon compares favorably with care in China, India, and the United States. And Mexico is on track to achieve universal health care coverage by 2010.

One might question whether Garrett’s piece is journalism. I’d call it a hybrid: a combination medical journal article and opinion piece. Much of it is written in formal prose that our editors would crumple up and heave at us if we still wrote stories on paper.

But it reports a few important and surprising things that haven’t been covered much anywhere else. So for our purposes here, I count it as a kind of journalism.

- Paul Raeburn

There’s been talk for years of setting up a journal of null results and of hypotheses that failed in experiment. Good demonstration that an absence of data is not an absence of meaning is in Nature this week. The long-running Laser Interferometer Gravity-Wave Observatory, with two gigantic and delicate machines sprawled across chunks of Louisiana and Washington State, still hasn’t seen a consarned single distant thump via  gravity waves, the things that physicists will swear on a stack of first editions of the general theory of relativity are snickering through our bodies right now. Of course, the  more sensitive advanced LIGO iteration is not yet in operation. Hope that one sees something.

But the detector does work. As does a similar machine in Europe called VIRGO. The absence of detected gravity wave signals from the LIGO and VIRGO devices  induced a two-headed team of physicists working on both projects to report in Nature that this puts an upper bound on any concentrations of matter that some theories say congealed shortly after the big bang. And it looks as though those theories are, consequently, wrong. So here we have a null result that really did nullify something. Maybe it’s like suspecting your lost cat is in the hamper. You look in the hamper. No cat. Null result. That narrows the hypothesis list.

Only a few reporters saw this instructive exercise in squeezing blood from a turnip as a pretty good example how science works. But some did. And as seen below, some reporters reported one angle in the story in different and incompatible ways. And several omitted entirely the VIRGO collaboration and its machine. It is similar to LIGO, which is in the upper pic, with VIRGO to the right here.

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Mirrors two miles apart measure microscopic movements ; This brief is a puzzle. The lede has the news, the head does not, and nowhere in either is there mention that the big instruments saw nothing – which in this case is something. And no VIRGO.
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: ‘Non-discovery’ of space-time ripples opens door to birth of the Universe ; In the hed and in the story, an account that gets right to the paradoxical nub of this news. Only passing, buried mention of VIRGO.
• Cosmos (Australia) Heather Catchpole: Gravitational waves project yields first results ; She bravely employs some of the jargon of the work, citing parameters of stiff energy, stochastic backgrounds, and equations of state. The story, even without explaining such things as those, induces a sort of visceral understanding of the news’s essence. However, she reports that the instruments saw the stochastic background signal. Not sure that’s right – see next bullet. No VIRGO.
• Sky and Telescope – Alan MacRobert: New Limits on the Big Bang; He reports it was failure to see the stochastic background is what puts upper limits on its magnitude, which in turn sends ripples through the fields of science dedicated to the early universe and to inflation theory. Virgo mentioned clearly.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: New Limits on Gravitational Waves From the Big Bang ; Ditto, no stochastic background signal. And no VIRGO.
• Nature News – Calla Cofield: Gravity waves ‘around the corner’ ; She has the news and also the significance of the LIGO-VIRGO collaboration.

Grist for the Mill:

Caltech Press Release ; University Florida Press Release ;

-CP