First off, was it just yesterday The Tracker posted on news from Wyoming that a few big companies are hoping to build the world’s first commercial-scale coal fired power plant that will sequester a lot and maybe most of its CO2? (yes, here). Then smack top left of this morning’s NYTimes one finds Matthew Wald‘s account of a honking big monster of a coal plant in West Virginia whose operators have built alongside it a chemical plant to extracting some CO2 from its flue gas and drilled a hole a mile and a half down into porous sandstone and dolomite. Pretty soon the pressurized, liquefied CO2 will be pumped down there to see what happens.

It’s about time, one thinks. Somebody’s gotta stop talking about sequestration and just do it. Best way to learn how to do something right is to get it wrong a few times. Wald talks to some skeptical enviros worried that the stuff might leak out or form caustic chemicals that might get into important aquifers, and some separate concerns that earthquakes could ensue. Some of us would like to know exactly what the geologists and geochemists on the project think will happen – might the CO2 mineralize into some sort of solid or what? But considering the piece is more about policy than about technology, it strikes a fine balance.

Meanwhile, back in Science Times.

The section lede is Dennis Overbye’s news story about the Cassini Mission to Saturn mostly, and simultaneously mostly about the woman in charge of imaging – the effervescent Caroline Porco of NASA contractor Space Science Institute in Colorado. Overbye jumps about among this and other missions and her life’s arc. Sometimes its best to save the best quote till the last – because then it’s context is fully sketched. You can skip to the end, it’s a stand-alone comment by Porco, but try to read up to it as Overbye intended. It has a much more satisfying embrace of the brain that way. For me, it captures a big part of the reason that, because I’d have made a crummy scientist, I feel that it was my good, and purely happenstance, fortune to wind up writing about what scientists do. A few other writers might feel the same way. For more on Porco here’s some Grist for the Mill – a Huntington Library (In San Marino near Pasadena) Press Release on her science writing fellowship there.

Other notable Science Times headlines:

• John Tierney : To Explain Longevity Gap, Look Past Health System ; The Tracker, deep-dyed liberal that is I, has to concede that the section’s contrary skeptic of progressivism hits some targets here. One wants to disagree with this apologia for US health care’s epidemiological success, but has to agree it’s well put, even plausible, and manages to make its points with hardly a whiff of rant. Food for thought. More at his Tierney Lab blog where a good set of comments from readers are piling up.
• Claudia Dreifus: A conversation with Martin Chalfie ; Smart – to talk with one of last year’s Nobelists on the eve of this year’s lot.
• Nicholas Wade: With Genetic Gift, 2 Monkeys Are Viewing a More Colorful World: I read this once. I don’t get it. It says here that two-color monkeys now have three-color vision, thanks to gene-altered cones. But how this imprints technicolor in their original monkey brains eludes me. Are their visual cortices really so flexible?
• Andrew Pollack: Benefit and Doubt in Vaccine Additive ; This is all new to me, that an argument exists over use of an adjuvant in US stockpiles of H1N1 vaccine. It could amplify the vaccine’s impact, allowing supplies to go further. One wonders – could Pollack have found somebody to pin American hesitance on the daft but remarkably effective argument that other vaccine additives are behind a lot of the autism seen among US children? Is that irrationality now scaring us away from a sensible move with swine flu?

Lots more at whole section;

And Last and Least: Mother of All Holy Grail Alerts at the NYTimes!?:

• It is good for the soul perhaps to face one’s own impotence as a thwarter of bad usage. I have railed for years against the proliferation of holy grails. To no, or very little, effect. As witness the cover of the Sunday NY Times Magazine with a story by Sara Corbet under the hed: THE HOLY GRAIL of the UNCONSCIOUS. It’s about some old book by Carl Jung. I read a bit of it. Nicely written at the top. Didn’t finish though so can’t say whether to recommend it – Jung and Freud and all that connect them just don’t prevent my eyes from slowly falling shut.

Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm and is filed under Science Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.