A book about your “inner fish” might sound like a cross between Oprah and Jacques Cousteau, but it was good enough to take home one of the top honors in the 2009 National Academies Communication Awards (the Nackys?).

Other winners of the $20,000 academies awards included the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, NPR, and a team of documentary filmmakers who examined how racial and economic inequities affect people’s health care.

Here’s the list of winners and finalists, including the links to their work, which you won’t find on the official academies page:

BOOKS
Neil Shubin for a view of evolution from primitive fish to humans called Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Books).

NEWSPAPERS/MAGAZINES
Mark Johnson for his reporting on efforts by researchers to reprogram human cells, in his series Targeting the Good Cell in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

TV/RADIO/FILM
Larry Adelman, Llewellyn M. Smith, and Christine Herbes-Sommers for putting a human face on the impact of racial and socio-economic inequities on health, in a series seen on PBS: Unnatural Causes: Is Inequality Making Us Sick? (California NewsReel in association with Vital Pictures Inc.)

ONLINE/INTERNET
Vikki Valentine, Alison Richards, and Anne Gudenkauf of NPR for Climate Connections, a yearlong series of reports produced in partnership with National Geographic.
———————-
FINALISTS
Books: Thomas Hager, author of The Alchemy of Air: A Jewish Genius, A Doomed Tycoon, and the Discovery That Fed the World but Fueled the Rise of Hitler (Crown/Harmony Books).  And Kenneth R. Miller, author of Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul (Penguin Group USA).

Online: Andrew Revkin, environment reporter, author of Dot Earth blog (The New York Times).

- Paul Raeburn

One must doff a cap in gratitude to Mike Hodgkinson and his Sunday article at the Independent in the UK. He profiles and writes on the writings and life of Ray Kurzweil. For years I, for one and surely not alone among science writers, have appreciated that there are futurists like him around – imaginative people who see a lively, jaw-dropping future and seem to keep more or less up on current literature and events, and who have some appreciable accomplishments of their own and well beyond mere windbaggery. Such people have a capacity to comment vividly on almost anything dealing with what has not yet happened – a handy sort to have available at deadline. Plus, while I’ve never attended one, Kurzweil organizes regular conferences of other future-thinkers, usually rather optimistic ones, to say quotable things about a plausible future of astonishing difference from who we are today and what kind of gadgetry and bio-bots we”ll have at hand. It’s sort of like science fiction without rocketships.

This piece captures a lot of that and includes a sit-down to talk with Kurzweil, and also touches on the opinions of those who think of his prognistications sure, maybe, but almost surely not. We ought to be grateful people like him – very brainy, slightly unhinged, ever-energetic, are among us.

- Charlie Petit

The collision between water managers and renewable energy investors who need a lot of water to cool their solar power gadgetry has been getting more attention lately. The NYTimes‘s Todd Woody gave the issue particularly lucid and non-crusading explanation this morning in the business section. He starts readers off with a vignette from Nevada, and the amazing disparity between the water available from local agencies and the huge appetite for more by a developer who wants to construct some gigantic solar farms in the area. Most notable is that the story does not merely say solar energy can require a lot for cooling, but smoothly differentiates technologies that hardly ever need lots of water (photovoltaics), and others that sometimes do (solar concentrators with associated steam or other volatile gas turbines). It goes further to break things down into dry cooling for condensors, and wet cooling (ie evaporative cooling). All that while keeping it a biz story. One comes away thinking this is a big problem, but not a show stopper for solar power if done right and perhaps a bit less efficiently overall.

A related story, with a broader vision, ran a few days ago at NPR, where Jeff Brady reports in broader terms the “heartburn” among some environmentalists due to federal plans to carpet large sections of public lands out west in solar energy plants. Water comes up, as do such things as vegetation and desert tortoises.

Vaguely Related Discouraging News:

NYTimes – John Tagliabue: From Turbines and Straw, Danish Self-Sufficiency ; A feel-good tale of a little island that darned near is self-sufficient in renewable energy. But, as the story makes explicit, there is a down side. Even when one has a lot of advantages, it is very, very difficult to get a whole community off the grid and just about carbon neutral.

I am having déjà vu here – isn’t there an island in the Shetlands or Orkneys or somewhere doing about the same thing? I feel as though I already posted on it, but can’t find it. Gad.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) In Spain, the 2010 budget announced yesterday showed a clear drop for R&D. The Science Ministry argued that it is not a reduction but a different distribution than in previous years. Confusing; very confusing. Some newspapers believed her words, others went by the numbers, and some combined both interpretations and conclude that indeed there is a redistribution … plus a clear reduction that the Government wants to hide. Good reporting in La Vanguardia asked a broad group of well-known scientists about it. They unanimously consider the budget bad news for Spanish science.

Disculpad la expresión, pero menudo cachondeo en España con los recortes presupuestarios en i+D.

El gobierno actual llevaba 5 años aumentando considerablemente su inversión en ciencia, pero ya hace unos días empezó a rumorearse que en el 2010 iban a bajar.

La semana pasada en El Pais, Alicia Rivera anunciaba que el borrador del gobierno preveía un drástico 18% de descenso en los presupuestos de investigación.

La comunidad científica reaccionó y presentó un manifiesto en defensa de la investigación, como en La Vanguardia titula Josep Corbella: “Los científicos, en alerta roja”.

Ayer martes El País se mostraba muy crítico y anunciaba que dentro de los ajustes del gobierno ante la actual situación económica, el presupuesto dedicado a ciencia era el que más caía con una reducción del 15%.

Entonces llegaron las explicaciones del gobierno diciendo que esas cifras eran engañosas. El recorte del 15% es en “gasto no financiero”, y lo que ocurre es que la distribución presupuestaria es diferente a otros años. Confuso.

En El Periódico confían plenamente en estas declaraciones de la ministra Garmendia, y reportan absolutamente lo contrario que El Pais. Antonio Madridejos y David Placer firman un muy detallado artículo explicando que el dinero a los ministerios se reducirá un 3.9%, pero que esto no afectará al de Ciencia e Innovación «porque la I+D es una de nuestras prioridades».

El agua no está clara, y huele a juego de cifras rocambolesco del gobierno para esconder un obvio recorte en investigación. EFE distribuye la nota “El gasto en I+D i disminuye un 3% en 2010, aunque sigue siendo una prioridad”. Este 3% de reducción es la cifra que va cogiendo forma junto con los esfuerzos de los medios en esclarecer esta redistribución de dinero. En Cinco Días Carlos Molina hace un notorio esfuerzo en “El gasto en I+D+i baja un 3,1% y se centra en el crédito a empresas”

En titular de ABC es clarísimo: “Los científicos recibirán menos dinero pese al desmentido de Garmendia”. En el artículo se contrastan las palabras de la ministra con los números de los presupuestos, y se lanza un “las cifras hablan por sí solas”. En el mismo medio, N. Ramírez de Castro aprovecha para relacionar sin ninguna evidencia la merma en la financiación con el abandono como director del CNIO de Mariano Barbacid. En El País Javier Sampedro expresa textualmente “La dimisión no tiene relación alguna con los presupuestos del Estado”. Es la misma opinión que transmiten la mayoría de medios que cubren la marcha de Barbacid.

En La Vanguardia, Josep Corbella hace un gran trabajo consultando a diferentes líderes científicos y abordando el asunto de manera directa: ¿qué significa todo este baile de cifras? La conclusión rápida: malas noticias para la ciencia en España.

- Pere Estupinyà

The enormous earthquake southwest of American Samoa is mainly a disaster response story, with reporters focussing largely on tales of tragedy and lucky survival after a tsunami of considerable height hit American Samoa and Samoa. Relatively few stories are out, so far, detailing what seismologists and tsunami researchers can say about it – such as the sense and magnitude of the sea floor’s displacement and the tectonic setting, plus the role played by the newly beefed up Pacific Tsunami Warning System and the additional deployments of ocean buoy sensors including some near the Samoan islands.

Tips welcome to stories that do try for the science side of this natural event and disaster.

Some Examples Already Apparent:

• ABC (Australia) Science – Darren Osborne: Samoan tsunami caused by ‘shallow quake” : The report smartly uses the Google map, included here, to show locations. It also gives some seismology context, and a displacement at the fault of four to seven meters but not how much of that movement is vertical and hence likely to move a lot of sea water. But useful info, such as the name or plate tectonic setting of the fault, and the depth of the rupture, is absent.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: When two plates collide: rupture set off wave ; A good one. The paper’s science editor reports that the mag. 8.1 quake would have pushed the crust on one side as much as seven meters above the other, which sounds like a hefty shove on the sea. And she puts it on the Pacific-Australian plate boundary. Also of interest – the region is in tension, a source tells her, suggesting perhaps a graben forming event with an abrupt fall in the sea floor. Plus, she translates the 8.1 magnitude to a one-thirtieth energy release of that of the 8.3 Sumatran quake in the Indian Ocean nearly five years ago. That’s bad, she’s told, but not bad enough to send large tsunamis across an entire ocean basin. (Note: at last word, NOAA says Samoa’s quake was 8.3 moment magnitude).
• Honolulu Advertiser – Gordon Y. K. Pang: Tsunami forecasts quicker, more accurate ; He assures readers that the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, at Oahu’s Ewa Beach, is modern and quickly figured that no large tsunami was likely for the islands. But no detail here on how they do it or why exactly this quake’s sea wave was a major threat only to islands relatively  nearby.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Pac. Tsunami Warning Center (slow to respond this morning).

- Charlie Petit

In one of the most successful health advocacy promotions of all time, breast cancer advocates have persuaded magazines, newspapers, businesses, writers–us!–to do stories about breast cancer in October, breast cancer awareness month. And it’s not quite October yet, but here they come.

The American Cancer Society has joined the party, releasing statistics showing that breast cancer death rate continues to drop 2 percent a year, a trend that began in 1990.

Pat Wechsler at Bloomberg noted the drop and combined it with the additional news that growing obesity among women might derail the improvement in death rates.

Steven Reinberg‘s lede for HealthDay merged the falling death rates with yet another important piece of the story, that disparities in death rates still exist between whites and blacks.

The New York Times and The Washington Post inexplicably skipped the encouraging news from the cancer society, instead treating this as a sports story. The Post mentioned breast cancer in a column about how the Redskins hosted two dozen women with breast cancer at a luncheon on NFL players’ day off.

At a time when health care and outcomes is the top story in the country, the Times covered breast cancer this way, in a story by Judy Battista: “As part of the N.F.L.’s support of Breast Cancer Awareness Month in October, players will be wearing hot pink gear starting Sunday: gloves, sweatbands, towels. And cleats.”

The Los Angeles Times covered the drop in death rates–but only in an online brief. The Wall Street Journal ignored the real story and the sports story.

The Times has repeatedly written that the war on cancer has been lost, as I noted in a previous post. And now, when evidence to the contrary is presented, the paper ignores it.

The drop in breast cancer death rates is an important story. So is the disparity between whites and blacks. And the potential effect of obesity.

Why the bigs didn’t cover it is hard to understand. We clearly don’t want our agenda to be determined by advocates and fundraisers, and there is no reason that any journalist should pay attention to breast cancer awareness month. We don’t wear pink ribbons.

On the other hand, we shouldn’t avoid legitimate stories because we might be perceived to be collaborating with advocates and their special month.

The American Cancer Society is an advocacy group, and its agenda is not our agenda. But when it says something important, it’s our job to report it.

- Paul Raeburn

The movement to take as many dams as is safe and practical – or politically possible – off US streams and rivers seems to have its biggest achievement at hand. West Coast  headlines announce today agreement by the operator of four hydroelectric dams to remove them from the Klamath River that rises in Oregon and exits on California’s far northern coast. Some sources say it was once the third most productive salmon river on the Pacific coast (one suspects that excludes Alaska). Overfishing, silt from logging, diversions for farm irrigation, warming from removal of riparian vegetation – and dams whose ladders are tough swimming – have turned the once mighty fish parades into near-deserted avenues. Good news for fish – but the loss of a renewable, green electrical source keeps it from being a total environmental plus, one supposes.

Headlines make it seem this is a done deal. But the stories explain that much is left to be decided and approved by the Department of the Interior – and that if it does go forward, it would be at least ten years before the river begins to run free (and to start off by sweeping immense quanties of silt,  now trapped by the dams, to the sea. In the short run, the river could be worse for its anadromous visitors.

Stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Bettina Boxall: Utility agrees to removal of 4 Klamath River dams / … the decommissioning would be the nation’s largest and most complex dam removal project ;  First quote is from an environmental activist, the second a leader of the Karuk tribe that has lived along the river for a long, long time (it says 10,000 years, or maybe forever, but…). Tracker thought the preferred spelling is Karok, but looks like not. And, we learn right off, the utility PacifiCorp, is owned by Warren Buffet’s farflung Berkshire Hathaway investment conglomerate. The story has a lot of sources, none of them particularly unhappy with this news. There must be some who are.
• San Francisco Chronicle – Peter Fimrite: Deal to raze 4 Klamath dams ; He calls it perhaps the world’s biggest dam-busting project. And while the hed calls it a “deal” with an implied high certainty, Fimrite’s piece explains that many boards and other regulatory agencies must still sign off – and that doesn’t count the Dept of Interior’s ruling expected in 2012. His recounting of the recent, dramatic deterioration of the river’s remaining salmon run is well done. He, also, quotes nobody angry about the development.
• Oregonian – Matthew Preusch: Deal would removed Klamath River dams to aid salmon ;  Second graf gets right to the remaining hurdle to this dam development, “..many details needed to be resolved before any concrete is blasted … not the least of which is who would pay for it.” And he gets a bit in on the opposition (see letter below, in the Siskiyou County Herald).
• AP – Jeff Barnard: Utility Agrees to Terms Removing Klamath Dams ;

By way of background, at the little Mount Shasta Herald in far northern California staffer Paul Boerger a week ago ran a detailed, just-the-facts explainer of the draft agreement and results of preliminary studies on the costs and benefits of jackhammering the concrete off the river bed. The are lots of pros, and lots of cons. No style points for this, but the info density is high.

And, if any reporter wants to find a party deeply uneasy over the prospect of these dams’ demise, find the writer of this letter, sent on behalf of the county board of supervisors to the Siskiyou County Herald.

Grist for the Mill: American Rivers press release ;

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a bi-partisan science story form the Dispatch‘s Spencer Hunt with no breakthroughs, no policy conundra, no playing god, not even much cost to bother taxpayers. Just a profile of an ichthyologist at Ohio State University with a passion for oddball fish, and who has added a bit to scientific literature on them. Its tone introduces readers a bit to, one thinks, the naturalizing instincts that sent men like Charles Darwin and Robert Banks sailing the far seas, collecting gear in hand, long ago. Nicely done bit of informative story telling with no investigative edge  or agenda.

- Charlie Petit

Yesterday the Washington Post‘s David A. Fahrenthold had a solid head-scratcher for readers. He presents two camps in a debate whether early farmers kicked off a smaller round of climate change, much like today’s big one, by nudging CO2 upward through clearing of forests, slash and burn agriculture, and other practices.

The piece’s strength is its even-handed treatment of the two parties. His protagonist clearly has an uphill struggle, arguing that the relatively puny human population of thousands of years ago could not in any way alter the atmosphere the way modern, oil and coal-burning industry does. Arrayed against his small team is, apparently, almost the entire climatology establishement.

An unpersuasive section, and it’s not Fahrenthold’s fault because he had to pass it on, is that some critics of the idea fear that climate change skeptics will somehow distort the thesis. If we’re supposedly not changing climate now, then evidence that even farmers with wooden plows did it way back when seems  to argue for the ease with which modern  mankind might further mess up the planet’s thermostat.

A minor quibble: It might also have mentioned that Earth systems scientists have long held that mankind has had some climatic impact for quite awhile, largely by changing the albedo of significant stretches of countryside. Minoan-era deforestation of islands in the Mediterranean, the Tracker has read somewhere, can plausibly get the the blame for to a permanent shift to an arid climate in the region.

Pic source ;

At NPR All Things Consiered reporter Nell Greenfieldboyce has a report that no one else at the moment seems to have, and it’s an interesting one with connections to a host of issues in science, money,  and politics. NASA has only a few spacecraft mission’s worth of Plutonium-238 left in its warehouse, or wherever one keeps radioisotopes that glow a gentle red just from their own internal decay – the ultimate atomic compost.

This is not, she explains, the atom bomb fuel, Pu-239, which is hardly radioactive at all until it is squeezed and conformed to critical mass and then kerblooie. The isotope one atomic mass lower must be manufactured in specialized reactors and, it says here, America’s version has not run since the 1980s. Supplies are getting low. And with an 88 year half life, what one has on hand can decay away at a considerable clip. Russia used to make it too but its cold war era facilities, as in the US, are shuttered. The story’s meat is its account of political and budget maneuvers to restart production. It won’t be cheap. But, short of putting full-on reactors aboard outer solar system probes, a Pu-238 battery*  is, NASA says, the only way to keep those long sojourners warm and operating.

Greenfieldboyce’s piece, necessarily concise for radio, hasn’t anything on a question many listeners may have: Plutonium! Isn’t that dangerous? The answer is yes, of course – the stuff must be handled with care (and good gloves, one imagines). Reactors are always things to treat with caution. A longer, print feature on this issue could easily explore the technology necessary to make it and the safety measures that would be needed. Presumably others have covered this general Pu-238 issue  in recent months or years, but nothing pops up in a simple search.

*UPDATE:  As AP’s  Seth Borenstein gently reminds me, not only was this issue in the news a few months ago, this site – that is, I – posted on it.

*Formally, not a battery but an RTG – radioisotope thermoelectric generator.

Pic: Cassini probe RTG, source ;

- Charlie Petit

NASA’s increasingly frantic climate change gadfly James Hansen still gets plenty of ink, but not as much as he once did. His letters to heads of state, civil resistance protests at coal sites, harangues for a CO2 tax-and-refund system rather than fiendishly complicated cap and trade systems, and so on have made him as popular as Cassandra at a meeting of Optimists. At Grist – an activist hangout to be sure – a non-journalist but savvy environmentalist, Nell Greenberg, queries him rather expertly on what he’s doing and why. It’s a friendly interview, which is not the best kind, but useful. Plus, it links to a good NYTimes profile of Hansen that ran over the summer is still makes good reading.

– Charlie Petit

Who is Paul Thacker?

Some of you may remember that Sen. Charles Grassley, before getting tangled up in death panels in August, fought aggressively against conflict of interest in medicine. The most famous and notorious case was that of Charles Nemeroff, who was the chairman of psychiatry at Emory until documents revealed he’d accepted $1.2 million from drug makers that he hadn’t reported to Emory.

That information comes from an illuminating profile of Paul Thacker last week in Nature, written by Meredith Wadman of Nature’s Washington bureau. Thacker is the behind-the-scenes Grassley staff investigator who pursued Nemeroff, and seven other researchers, according to Nature, all of whom failed to disclose large payments from drug makers.

Thacker’s Nemeroff investigation has had a huge influence on the liaisons between academia and industry. Nature quotes the cardiologist Steven Nissen at the Cleveland Clinic, who says the investigation has “changed the practice of medicine.”

I took a quick look at the websites of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, for whom this might be considered a red-meat story, something they would want to rip into with their bare hands. The Times and the Journal reported on Grassley’s investigation of Nemeroff; The Washington Post mostly skipped even that. But I couldn’t find any mention of Thacker in these three. Grassley is the pretty face, but Thacker is the bloodhound, and it was fascinating to learn something about him. Kudos to Nature.

Immediately following the Grassley piece is an important story on Britain’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, or NICE. That’s the group that decides what will be covered under Britain’s National Health Service, and the story has immediate relevance to the current health care debate in Washington. The story was written by Daniel Cressey, a staffer based in London.

This is first-rate journalism. Alas, if you are not a subscriber to Nature, you won’t see it. Or you won’t see it unless you have a lot of disposable income.

Each story costs $32. The journal itself has a cover price of $10, yet two articles in it would set you back $64.

At that rate, six articles cost as much as a year-long subscription to Nature. I can scarcely resist using an inappropriate expression to respond, so I’ll paraphrase: What the heck?

Reluctantly, I take back the kudos I dished out to Nature. This is good journalism, but for those who can’t read it, it’s worthless.

(In an email, I asked the Nature press office for permission to link to full versions of the articles. I also asked whether the company could explain its pricing policy. See Nature’s response.)

- Paul Raeburn