At AAAS-Science’s ScienceInsider a blog by its  Europe news editor John Travis reports on a new “Human Provenance pilot test.” The UK’s Border Agency is testing cheek swab DNA from arriving asylum seekers. The idea is that a genetic test will shed useful light on whether somebody saying, for instance,  he or she is a refugee from genocide in Sudan is really just an impoverished, perhaps desperate, and opportunistic somebody from Nigeria wanting in, and so forth. And this, Travis writes, is making a lot of heads to shake in scientific circles. For one, such tests cannot be expected to be terribly precise. For another, says a source but not in so many words, the moral and ethical aspects are on the creepy, disturbing side.

Travis further reports that the border agency is considering isotope tests on hair or fingernail tissue that might be clues to where a person has been recently – ingesting food and such from environments where the ratios may be distinctive. Such techniques are common in forensics to help lead investigators to further and more solid clues. But to apply them even in a small pilot program to nationality tests, most of Travis’s sources tell him, is a mistake.

Most odd is that Travis with his blog appears to be the only science writer in the broader press to have jumped on the issue. It first surfaced a week and a half ago in UK press but without much technical examination. One example of initial coverage ran Sept. 20 in The Observer, by Jamie Doward.

- Charlie Petit

All of a sudden The Tracker is imagining Lagrangian coherent structures all over the place.  I bet they are what shepherd riptides from the shore to beyond the surf line, that wrap smoke rings, and that keep the vortices from a paddle’s tip so persistent. Or not. But a new term for something that one didn’t know was just one thing can suddenly make things seem clearer. This after ogling the remarkable image (High Def here) of surface currents in Monterey Bay, with a meandering boundary between the waters that are just sloshing here and there and those that are headed for the open sea. Writer Bina Venkataraman has the NYTimes Science Times’s lead story and it’s an unusual and superb one – an adventure through the mathematically dense world of physical oceanography but without the equations. Behind the seeming chaos of swirling, tidal pumped waters (and many other fluid situations), she writes, are “moving skeletons embedded in complex flows.”  Those are the Lagrangian things. Air turbulence, blood flow mixings, all kinds of swishings and sloshings are apparently becoming more explicable. And these boundary layers are observable with the right tools. I’d like to know what those paddle things along the Monterey Bay shore that, a caption says, are detectors. Maybe some kind of phased array radar or something. It’s a transfixing tale of roiling movements.

Other notable headlines:

• John Markoff: Wanted: Home Computers to Join in the Research on Artificial Life ; If you want to imagine your PC or Mac running all night growing self-replicating and self-perfecting worms, and not the pernicious hacker kind, this story’s for you.
• Carl Zimmer: Can Evolution Run in Reverse? A Study Says It’s a One-Way Street: Carl’s piece run’s right under Markoff’s, an evo two-fer. It’s persuasive – but could have used an outside expert remarking on the study. And: does this have any bearing on talk of reverse-engineering birds, chickens maybe, to be sort of like little theropod dinosaurs?
• Natalie Angier: Give Birds a Break. Lock Up the Cat ; A convincing revisit to the problem of housecats and songbirds. It’s the morning’s most emailed story in the lineup. One suspects relatively few people, however, will read it and decide to shut an outdoor cat inside.
• Fran Schumer: After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away ; Mental health professionals wondering whether a not so rare, persistent, and incapacitating grief may merit its own categorical name.
• Nicholas Wade: Quest for a Long, Long Life Gains Scientific Respect; Resveretrol and its mimics, again. And he makes some judgments on how two doctorate-toting restricted diet fans look to the eye. One, apparently, is pretty dishy; the other bears a mien a little bit like death. The piece is a bit of a promotion. Wade explains his motivation well with his closing line (The end of this post’s hed comprises part of it).

As usual, plenty more at whole section ;

- Charlie Petit

In the Contra Costa Times – a publication with considerably more readership than its own circulation on the upper rim of San Francisco Bay – science reporter Suzanne Bohan this week declared a “turning point” for health worries over cell phones. Brain cancer has been linked to the devices by activists and a few health researchers for years. As far as The Tracker can recall, no major epidemiological study has confirmed the link, and no one has convincing evidence of a plausible mechanism by which such weak radiations might trigger a noticeable change in cancer rates.But this story circulated to a string of Bay Area newspapers published by Denver-based MediaNews.

Bohan’s primary source of authority is a report from a crusading public interest organization, the Environmental Working Group. Its “senior scientist” tells her that worry over brain cancer peril from cells phones is “at a new level”. Plus, as further reason to worry, this senior scientist notes the powerful response from the public to its concerns.

Agitation for legislation in Washington has picked up recently, as the story notes. Bohan does quote some industry sources attesting to the implausibility of a cancer-cell phone link, and statements by the FDA and the American Cancer Society along the same lines.

Her most telling quote may be from a veteran State health department official, who says he is “suspicious” of the phones’ dangers, and is trying to lower his own exposure. That is interesting. The man has credibility. But overall, the piece tends toward raising public anxiety without reporting any new, solid information that shows the phones are causing cancers, or how they might do so. This story’s news value is, to The Tracker’s mind, low.

Other Stories:

• Science News – Janet Raloff: Cell Phones: Precautions Recommended ; She treats the limited data as a puzzle, not a reason for a turning point against doubt.
• NYTimes – Roy Furchgott: Senate Asks: do Phones Cause Cancer? ; Rekindled controversy he writes … but no new conclusions.

And from the Bloggish side of things:

• What’s New – Bob Park: Cell Phones: “Inconclusive” Means They Found Nothing ; Park, the snorting, columnizing gadfly physicist and crusader against crackpottery of many sorts, has long taken cudgels to any study purporting guilt by cell phones for cancer. He has not changed his mind.

- Charlie Petit

Several recent spurts of news on the disappearing bats of the eastern US have managed to get past The Tracker. However today I happened to note a roundup in the Boston Globe by Beth Daly, which includes a deft summary of the situation and moves the ball forward a bit on strategies to help the bats recover. As has been the case for years, the prime suspect is a fungal infection that gives afflicted animals a tell-tale white nose.

- Charlie Petit

Whaling news these days is almost all from the Int’l Whaling Commission, and from the non-signatory nations to IWC rules who want to reestablish industrial whaling. Or, news of smaller whales beaching themselves. Just to break that monotony,we present, from the Anchorage Daily News,  its Kyle Hopkins reporting Sunday that whalers from the North Slobe Borough set out Saturday in their aluminum and sealskin boats with their antique-design brass whale guns and grenade-tipped harpoons. They came back and hauled out four bowhead whales, all perfectly legally under rules of the IWC and the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. Their skulls and other bones, one might guess, will be added to the several collections that decorate the town of Barrow.

The law requires the whaling crews to sell nothing from their harvest, and to distribute it free to the greater community. One captain – the mayor of Barrow – called his team’s catch “The ideal whale.” The 37-foot female his crew brought in was expected to feed 400 people. The region’s quota for the year, it says here,  is 22 strikes of a whale with a harpoon or grenade dart. Estimates vary but the species’s regional population is generally put at well above 10,000.

-Charlie Petit

New evidence of birds’ meandering descent from dinosaurs is in the news, this time in the form of a four-winged flying feathered theropod from northeast China. Researchers from Shenyang Normal University announced it Friday, according to a report on the Xinhua news wire.

The new report was picked up by several other outlets around the world, too. Only one, so far as The Tracker can tell, checked their electronic libraries or search engines to see if this is the first four-winged flying dinosaur to have been reported. It’s not. But the age of the fossil, as all stories note, is a new record. As for earlier-discovered, if more recently evolved, biplane dinos we”ll get to that below.

First, other stories:

• Reuters – Tan Ed Lyn : China finds bird-like dinosaur with four wings ;
• MSNBC – Alan Boyle: Dino-Bird Link Strengthened ;
• AFP - Four-winged dino may be missing like in bird debate ; As Boyle says in preceding linked story, it’s predictable but nonensical to see missing link in a fossil story. It has become meaningless.
• Telegraph (UK) : Scientists hail new species of feathered dinosaurs ; No byline, and it avoids calling it four-winged, says it merely had profusely feathered feet.
• The prize goes to Science News – Sid Perkins : Feather-covered Dinosaur Fossils Found ; Ah, Sid does some homework and gets it. The news is not four wings, it is that the fossil is the oldest heavily feathered dino so far. As he writes, other dinos had the same general configuration. He covered the meeting in England where the paper was presented. Being there can pay off.  Kudos.
• NPR – Science Friday – Ira Flatow : Paleontologists Unveil New Fossil Finds: Ira has the news and his guest is: Sid Perkins from Science News.

Deja Vu Dept: Earlier four winged feathered dinosaur news merited recollection in the latest media burst:

Well over a year and a half ago a Texas Tech researcher got coverage by declaring, in the Proceedings of the Nat’l Acad. of Sciences, that four-winged feathered dinosaurs that, even then, were old news probably were the first biplanes – flying while holding the leg-mounted flight feathers below and just behind the front-limbed flappers. We had an earlier post on that spot of news. Most of its links have died, but one sample story that is still on line at its old address is this one by The Guardian‘s Alok Jha. The pic to the right is from a Nat’l Geographic spot on that news, also still on line, that dates from 2005.

- Charlie Petit

Last month a Moose Advisory Committee to the state of Minnesota’s Dept. of Natural Resources issued a report on how the world’s biggest deer are doing in the land o’lakes. Okay, came the reply, but not great and badly in some areas – with climate change the best explanation for their struggles.

The Tracker’s not sure if the report got much attention at the time, but today the AP‘s Steve Karnowski has it with an anecdotal lede from a field trip to go see an actual moose. The story’s theme is given by the hed, Warmer weather threatens moose in Minnesota. In the state’s northwest they’re nearly gone, and while still abundant they are fading a bit in the northeast.

The piece is packed with info on moose in Minnesota and generally in the US and Canada. Most places where they exist, he reports (lots of the them in Canada and Alaska, plus in the US northern Rockies and in Maine and somewhat in other New England states). Given the piece’s inclusion of many confounding variables that muddy the thesis – geography for one – it appears it would have been wise to call a few moose experts outside the state and this study to comment on the idea that warming is hindering moose in Minnesota. Looks a little iffy from here.

Grist for the Mill:

Minnesota DNR Press Release. Moose Adv. Comm. Report ;

Pic – Hooked wall hanging by Sally Kallin, source ;

- Charlie Petit

Ununquadium means 114-ium, a placeholder name for super heavy element number 114 should its existence be confirmed. It was asserted ten years ago in Russia by accelerator-wielding nuclear physicists at the Dubna Joint Institute for Nuclear Research. Now maybe the Russians can apply for a name. Physicists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab say they found in a cyclotron’s target signs that they had duplicated what the Russians say they did long ago.

At one time, reports of new elements, especially if it is the heaviest yet, was big news. And Berkeley was at the heart of the contest to add to the list. But not so much anymore. Perhaps it’s that, 1) This is a confirmation, not a discovery,  and 2) How does it really matter? This elements last only a brief moment before decaying. That it can exist is fascinating to nuclear physicists but, absent a cold war or other nuclear race, not so much to others. But still….

One major media reporter in the US perked, up. The Los Angeles Times‘s Thomas H. Maugh II wrote it, birefly but included the disappointing news that the half life seems to mean a long-sought “island of stability” is not occupied by ununquadium. Such an outpost of fairly long lived elements is imagined to be where enormous atomic weights of protons and neutrons hit a “sweet spot” of balanced strong and electromagnetic forces that allows their bloated nuclei not to fly apart right away. Good for Tom. This deserves, perhaps, longer treatment. This was a long wait for the Russians for someone to drop a second, confirming shoe and cement their claim.

Now some say the best candidate synthetic element that could confirm that the island of stability exists has atomic number 126. That one’s moniker pro tem is Unbihexium.

Grist for the Mill: LBL Press Release ; PRL journal abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

Late last week news broke from the National Institutes of Health and the US Army medical research branch that a vaccine trial in Thailand produced the first persuasive signs, from any vaccine, that it worked at all. The numbers were underwhelming, but significant in a statistical sense. About 8,200 people got the vaccine, about that many did not, and the number of those who, in the course of going on with their lives, became infected by HIV was somewhat higher in the non-inoculated group: 74 compared to 51. Those are slivers of shares of the bulk population involved, but it does translate to a very fuzzy reduction of risk by 31 percent.

The Tracker was remiss in not noting the wave of ink for this on Friday. But it may be better to have waited anyway. Over the weekend arrived a calm perspective at the NYTimes Week in Review section, where Donald H. McNeil wrote of it under the tantalizing hed: If AIDS Went the Way of Smallpox.  He manages to turn from the near fantasy of imagining how momentous an effectve and affordable anti-HIV shot would be, to examining why last week’s results could be both momentous but also rather unimpressive. As he writes, the margin of evidence that the combo vaccine works is a mere 23 Thais out of 16,000+. He provides other reasons to salute the study, but also to keep the celebrations in check. He also reported the breaking news last week under the hed: For First Time, AIDS Vaccine Shows Some Success.

That said, many of the stories a few days earlier do dwell on the statistical frailty of the study, while giving it big headlines. That’s having it both ways, and reporters can’t be blamed. If it turns out to be a true opening toward a vaccine, one doesn’t want to have missed it – or if not, to have oversold it. That’s not an easy needle to thread.

Samplings of Previous Stories:

• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik (Sept 24)  Vaccine Shows Promise in Prenting HIV Infection / Thai Experiment Represtents ‘Modest’ Success but Offers Much-Needed Encouragement AFter Decades of Failed Efforts; Also Ron Winslow (Sep t25): Another Benchmark in AIDS Fight, but Not Yet a Landmark;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II (Sept. 24): For first time, researchers report some AIDS vaccine success ; Lots of cautions but first quote calls it “a historic day…” ; Followup Sept 25: Thomas H. Maugh II, Karen Kaplan:  HIV vaccine feat leaves more questions than answers; This dials thing back even more, noting that for all the encouragement in the results, an effective and available vaccine remains far off.
• Seattle PI – Monica Guzman: AIDS study hopes to build on trial’s success ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – Victoria Colliver: AIDS vaccine promising; experts urge caution ; Also, Tom Abate: AIDS researcher knows the value of persistence (a profile, complete with a holy grail,  of Dr. Don Francis – an old soldier in the AIDS battle and a principle developer of the new vaccine candidate;
• NY Newsday – Chau Lam: LI experts express cauiton on AIDS vaccine reports ;
• Reuters: Q&A: In a first, an HIV vaccine works – but why? ;
• Newsweek – Mary Carmichael: Good News From the HIV Vaccine Trial: The Sucess That Came From Failure;
• NPR – Scott Hensley: Hope For AIDS Vaccine Rekindled By Thai Test ;
• Washington Post – David Brown: Scientists Puzzle Over Minor Success of AIDS Vaccine ;

Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Three stories today. A National Geographic expedition in Cocos Island has found illegal fishing and damage to protected species. The scientists are explaining it in their blogs, and La Nación is using them effectively as background information. BBC Mundo has a story where one can see that Latinamerica needs more adaptation than mitigation on climate change. Some Argentine mathematicians are using computer technologies for a modern version of the classical Freudian studies of words associations.

Una expedición del National Geographic está explorando los fondos marinos de la remota isla de Coco en los mares de Costa Rica. La Nación está reportando a partir de los blogs que los propios científicos están escribiendo en sus webs. Excelente idea que seguro puede inspirar historias en otros países de la región. Alejandra Vargas publicó una primera nota en la que transmitía el entusiasmo de los exploradores al encontrar un ecosistema tan rico y equilibrado entre especies pequeñas y grandes depredadores. Pero el pasado viernes le tocó preparar una noticia más desagradable: Enric Sala, el líder de la misión científica, reportaba que habían encontrado redes de pesca ilegales y mostraba en su blog videos donde se veía la actividad de pescadores furtivos y daño a animales protegidos. Alejandra termina su nota explicando que la expedición no encontró respuesta del Ministerio de Ambiente cuando intentaron contactar con ellos. Buena excusa para continuar la labor periodística y ampliar la información incluyendo opiniones de responsables y población local.

BBC Mundo presenta un artículo de Verónica Smink con una lectura adaptada a Latinoamérica sobre el cambio climático. El texto sobre redes meteorológicas en Brasil no es tremendamente interesante, pero vale la pena destacar la nota por el esfuerzo de tratar el cambio climático desde una perspectiva local, y hablar más de adaptación que de mitigación. La mayoría de informaciones que vienen de países desarrollados hablan de cómo reducir la emisión de gases de efecto invernadero. Esta no es la tarea principal de la mayoría de países latinoamericanos, cuya misión es empezar a adaptarse a los efectos del constante aumento de temperatura.

En La Nación (Arg.) encontramos un muy curioso artículo de Nora Bär sobre la aplicación de métodos de computación a los estudios clásicos de asociaciones de palabras iniciados por Freud y Jung. Físicos y Matemáticos argentinos están rastreando textos con un total de 50 millones de vocablos con el fin de medir las distancias existentes entre palabras, para establecer mapas que representen el pensamiento humano y ver cómo una idea nos conduce a otra, esté más o menos aparentemente relacionada. Interesante y muy original el reportaje, al que quizás le hubiera ido bien un ejemplo concreto para visualizar más claramente el objetivo final de los investigadores.

- Pere Estupinyà

Thirty miles from Washington, in Gaithersburg, Md.,  in a neighborhood of “$300,000, light-filled homes” on Linden Hall Lane, Washington Post reporter Brigid Schulte discovers that everybody has a problem with health insurance.

“These are the people President Obama counted on to give his signature health-care reform effort the grass-roots oomph it needs to get through Congress,” Schulte wrote in a story published Sunday. “But no one on this cul-de-sac in Montgomery County has taken his or her private frustrations to a public meeting; no one has lobbied a lawmaker.”

The Post does something important with this story: It steps away from its usual political take on the health reform debate to look at what’s happening in the homes of people who will be affected by reform. Schulte didn’t have to go far; suburban Washington had all the ripe issues she needed.

One resident is eager for change. Another fears that any change could jeopardize coverage she has for a chronic condition. One had a heart attack after her employer dropped insurance coverage for employees. Another has an insurer that covered a drug he needed but wouldn’t cover the costs of a nurse to administer the drug. A family with three children is about to lose its coverage after the father and sole earner was laid off (from a job with a church).

Schulte ends with the contrast between Capitol Hill and Linden Hall Lane: While lawmakers talk of “socialism” and “Waterloo” (Republican lawmakers, she should have said), the people of Linden Hall Lane “keep their worries to themselves.”

Schulte accomplishes something important with this piece. She describes health insurance so it’s recognizable to people like me, and, I suspect, many of her readers. I follow the debate in Washington, but when I think of health insurance, I think about a child my wife and I are expecting in November, and I worry about what bills we’ll be stuck with.

Too much of the health reform coverage, not only in the Post, concerns the battle between Democrats and Republicans, and what the effect will be on the Obama presidency. When was the last time you saw somebody like the Linden Hall Lane folks on cable television?

It’s my job to have a few quibbles, and I do. Reading the story on the web, I found it a little too “list-y.” One family, then another, then another, without enough of a narrative thread to keep readers engaged. I fear some readers might have read the first couple of examples and quit, because they thought they got the gist of it. And a small point: She refers to one resident with “a rare genetic condition called Alpha-1.” That’s slang; the condition is called Alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency. Made me wonder whether Schulte had looked it up to double-check that she had it right.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice job by the Post. A fruitful step outside the beltway.

- Paul Raeburn

On the BBC‘s web site is a well-intentioned, engaging, and perhaps useful report by Anthea Rowan on environmental degradation, climate change, and in particular on Africa’s trade in charcoal. The yarn is also attributed to Focus on Africa Magazine. It is rich in atmosphere. Ms. Rowan did some on the spot reporting and it shows. It has much in it that is distressing and probably true, including discussion of the conversion of forest land to agriculture and to charcoal and the benefits of keep forests as forests.

But the piece lacks any stab at putting numbers on its assertion that the charcoal trade results in a substantial,  net increase in carbon emissions (and by how much), and on the ability of mature forests to continue acting as carbon sinks for a long time.  After all, if a region’s trees are growing as fast as their limbs are lopped off for charcoal, then the net impact on atmospheric CO2 is roughly zero. And if a mature forest’s trees are dyng and rotting as fast as news ones sprout up and grow, the net carbon impact is again zero.

Thus, to attach a major onus to a traditional, renewable, non-fossil fuel ought to depend on more attention to numbers than this story provides. This is true especially as the article boosts another traditional fuel – processed animal dung – as a greener and more efficient alternative to charcoal. Its production, as in woodcutting, is an interference in the natural cycling of carbon in the environment. It may be superior, but the reason is unclear here.

Charlie Petit