The last few weeks have seen many stories about the wolf hunts in Montana and Wyoming. Word is, hunters are having a tough time finding anything lupine to shoot. Another, and not at all ironic as in funny ironic, turn of events unrolled in Alaska. This is a disturbing and gripping tale.

• Anchorage Daily News – James Halpin: Rabid wolf attacks hunter in Southwest Alaska / BATTLE: Man wrestled lupine foe until brother shot, killed animal; Good thing for every one involved. That wolf was doomed, and the man fighting it was having a rough go, too.

Pic: animated cursor, source ;

Charlie Petit

Tomorrow NASA plans to brief reporters (correction, to release them from embargo) on what it and other among the world’s space agencies have learned recently about the geology and resources of the Moon. In advance of that, it’s worthwhile gathering up a spate of other stories that ran late last week and early this week on evidence that water ice – pure or well stirred into the soil – has accumulated in corners of the lunar south polar region. A NASA lunar orbiter detected plenty of hydrogen down there, a presumed marker for water ice.

Notable for its localized and tidy, feature rhythm is one at the Arizona Daily Star by Tom Beal. He focusses on a researcher at the University of Arizona in Tucson who helped develop the key, Russian-made instrument and is now scrutinizing its data.

Other stories:

• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Coldest place in the solar system? Look to the Moon ;
• Los Angeles Times – John Johnson Jr.: NASA scientists find hydrogen in moon’s sunlit regions ; And more of it in the dark ones.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: Tentative signs of water found on the moon ;
• Science News – Laura Sanders: NEW MOON VIEW . Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter released detailed images ;

Grist for the Mill: JPL-NASA Press Release ;

Other Moon Science News:

• Jerusalem Post – Judy Siegel-Itzkovich: NASA mission aims at finding ice on the moon ; A feature piece on Israeli participation in the NASA moon mission and its final act: the upcoming crash by a non-explosive  spent rocket stage, released from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, into the lunar crust. LRO will follow it in, sampling the plume in the instant before it also splatters.

Charlie Petit

Greenwire, one of the newsletter services from Energy and Environment Daily (with most of it available to subscribers only), surfaces out on the open once in awhile via the NYTimes. A good example right now is from Paul Voosen, a science writer who has appeared on these pages previously. He used to be at a little English language outlet in central Europe, the Prague Daily. Without even going on board the research vessel, he manages to get a feature feel into an account of a recent sampling trip in the Eastern Mediterranean by researchers from Israel’s National Institute of Oceanography. They caught “pucker-faced dragonet fishes, sprawling octopuses, and brown crabs, snapping their claws.”

And all were interlopers who came wriggling, scampering,  and squirming into the Med thorugh the Suez Canal from their haunts in the Indian and Pacific oceans. A startling stat reported via Voosen by the researchers: In trawls now in the southern Levantine Basin, about 80 percent of fish are of Red Sea origin.

Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) El Pais takes a critical look at private industry funding and at conflicts of interest in oncology research. One wouldn’t say that the data presented are completely unexpected, or that the “bias” introduced by industry funding is unusual, but the story goes into depth by talking to several actors involved. They seem, for all that,  to think “it’s not so bad…”

De 1534 investigaciones sobre cáncer publicadas en revistas científicas de alto impacto, el 29% tenían conflictos de interés con la industria farmacéutica. En el 17% de casos las empresas habían financiado trabajos, y el 12% tenían autoría compartida con empleados de las farmacéuticas. Esto es lo que establecía el pasado Mayo un estudio de la revista Cáncer, y refleja hoy El País en un muy buen reportaje de Hugo Cerdá: Demasiados conflictos de interés en investigaciones sobre cáncer.

Se hace difícil valorar si este 29% es “demasiado” o no. Como declara uno de los expertos entrevistados por Hugo: “El problema no está en declarar los conflictos de intereses o en que haya investigación financiada por la industria privada, sino en si esto produce efectos negativos”. Según el artículo, sí los hay. Uno de ellos es que los ensayos sobre cáncer financiados por farmacéuticas tenían más probabilidades de presentar resultados positivos de supervivencia, y otro que se dirigían más a la búsqueda de tratamientos que a la prevención. Algo, que por otra parte parece absolutamente lógico.

El texto de El País empieza crítico, con un titular agresivo y un pie de foto hiriente: “Los estudios pagados con dinero privado raramente son para prevenir enfermedades”, pero a medida que avanza e incorpora opiniones de hasta 4 expertos entrevistados por Hugo, se suaviza con expresiones como “la cifra del 29% no es de escándalo”, o “los expertos consultados dudan de que los conflictos de interés puedan estar condicionando los resultados de los ensayos”.

El asunto es complejo, y tan difícil de abordar como necesario. No solemos ver reportajes periodísticos que analicen de manera crítica los entresijos del mundo de la ciencia. Este es un muy buen ejemplo.

- Pere Estupinyà

The observation that the world’s hottest global temperature (or perhaps second after 2005) was 1998 has become a cause among greenhouse skeptics, who embrace evidence that perhaps global warming has stopped and may even go into a slide that proves it’s all a natural, statistical glitch. That position has received little scrutiny in general media. Today the NYTimes‘s Andrew C. Revkin takes it face-on. The piece is overtly coordinated with coverage of the UN climate summit, but is sufficiently distinct to merit a separate post. His theme is that, yes, right now the overall Earth temperature is about where it was ten years ago. But his report offers plenty of reason provided by researchers to believe the trend upward is alive and perilous.

It’s largely a data story, but includes quotes from the extremes of passion – from skeptic Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute, to Joe Romm of Climate Progress who is nearly frantic with worry (and a man who takes occasional pot shots at Revkin’s calibrated approach to climate news). Revkin’s piece includes the plot above right. It does make it look like things are taking a recent nose dive. The Tracker offers the busier plot from the Goddard Institute of Space Studies in Manhattan. Its robust five year mean smoothing, laid over the general year-to-year raggedness,  makes the recent excursion look like a perfectly normal wiggle on a rising baseline. The next five years will be intriguing.

Meanwhile, for contrast look at the AP wire at Karl Ritter‘s feature reader from on board an icebreaker in a Greenland fjord. A Woods Hole team is there measuring pulsations of tropical-waters nibbling away at the big island’s glacial tongues. Is it a fluctuation, or something more? His source suspects it’s the latter. The Tracker does have questions. If these are tropical waters, and since tropical waters are normally warm, doesn’t that imply some sort of temporary oscillation? And if tropical water moves north, a corresponding slug of cold northern water must head south? That is, it’s far more worrisome if northern regions start experiencing warmer home-grown currents, is it not?

Charlie Petit

The world’s press largely took this week’s UN climate meetings in New York, with many premiers and presidents on hand, as an exercise in cheerleading and heartfelt hopes that something soon will be done. But nobody, it seems, made a promise to jump out ahead, strap on the yoke, and pull this wagon as it heads for the more-important, extended formal negotiatons in December in Copenhagen.

It was called a summit, but a one-day summit seems to mean it was on a pretty small hill. Plus, today’s general-purpose speeches by world leaders at the UN, followed by the G-20 in Pittsburgh, rather overshadows more (and familiar) blather from politicians on climate change.

At Reuters, Jeff Mason and Claudia Parsons beefed up their initial dispatch (scroll down a bit to yesterday’s post), noting that “Analysits and green groups gave cautious praise to China and Japan but said Obama’s speech was long on rhetoric but short on specific pledges of US action.” When the attribution of a sentiment is that vague, one can be reasonably sure that the reporters share it.

At AP, special correspondent Charles J. Hanley began his analysis piece on one of the small guys, the man from the Maldives, and his accusatory speech to major powers who “are not really listening”  to peoples from nations like his as sea level rises. It is rather difficult to separate UN news from related other developments yesterday. The AP, for instance, also has from Seth Borenstein in Washington news that Obama will, at the G20 summit later this week, urge worldwide dismantlement of governmental subsidies to fossil fuel producers. That, it also says here, will be difficult. The Wall Street Journal‘s Ian Talley reports, by contrast, White House optimism it can happen.

Another entanglement of climate policy and real science news is at the New York Times. Back on p. 6 Neil MacFarquahar wrote of the “modest proposals” that hid behind what appeared to be “soaring promises” from heads of state. This is a world summit with more than 100 world leaders, on page 6? Well, as they said nothing new, that may be the right place. The Times also carries, from the aggressive service Climate Wire, an additional analysis of the meeting’s flaccid muscle from Lisa Friedman, Nathaniel Gronewold, and Christa Marshall, who cite the “Hazy Plans” laid out by the US and China.

Other headlines include:

• Newsweek – Sharon Begley: Climate Week: Don’t Celebrate Too Soon ;
• Washington Times – Jon Ward, Christina Bellantoni: Chinese plan upstages Obama at UN ; This runs against the grain of most coverage, which tends to be unimpressed by both.
• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: A Wind Shift Coming in the Global-Warming Debate? ; The hed is more optimistic than the story.
• NPR Morning Edition – Richard Harris: China, U.S. Try To Get Climate Talks Moving ; UN officials are angry, Harris reports, and the sound clips reinforce that.
• USA Today – Traci Watson: Deal on climate change is elusive ;
• Politico – Josh Gerstein: Climate speech’s tepid reception ;
• Climate Wire – Lauren Morello: POLITICS: Obama and his aides phase “greenhouse gases’ out of their vocabulary; Tracker is not sure whether this will open for non subscribers, but it’s a smart analysis of rhetoric.The new in terms heard in the UN speech: “carbon pollution” and “greenhouse gas pollution.”
• Guardian (UK) Suzanne Goldenberg : UN climate summit: Leaders take small steps toward action on climate change ;

Plus a pertinent one we missed a few days ago:

• NYTimes – Elisabeth Rosenthal: Danish Conservative Prepares for Climate Change ; With a good line: “A movement whose symbols were fuzzy endangered animals is now more concerned with oil futures and budget sheets.”

Charlie Petit

Finally, we have the definitive word on torture: It has a deleterious effect on the hippocampus, the frontal cortex, and memory. The phony idea that torture elicits good information is based on “folk psychology and folk neurobiology.”

Folk neurobiology? What’s that? Neurobiology discussed around a campfire? What neurobiological changes afflicted the magic dragon Puff, I wonder, when the kid grew up and didn’t come back?

Maybe this isn’t the definitive word after all.

The news stories on this were sparked by an article in Trends in Cognitive Science entitled “Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques.’” The journal posted a press release on Eurekalert, and reporters jumped on it.

USA Today‘s Dan Vergano picked up the release in a short item for the paper’s “Science Fair” section online. That’s an odd call. This story potentially has major implications for U.S. foreign and military policy. Seems as though it should be done right, or not at all.

Stuart Fox at Popular Science picked up the release and added some context, but his story was another quick-and-dirty piece. And woe to the headline writer (we won’t blame Fox) for calling this a “study.” It ain’t.

Ryan Sager of trueslant.com gives us a far more skeptical view of this report. He begins by saying the article “claims” to show that torture is bad science–a suggestion that the evidence is not necessarily convincing. In the second graf, he quickly says that O’Mara “did not examine the brains of victims of American torture.” Sager describes what the article is: Not a study, but speculation on what likely happened to the brains of people tortured, based on an understanding of the neurobiology of memory and a close reading of U.S. government memos describing the techniques that were used. Sager ends by raising some important questions about whether O’Mara has made his case. (Sager describes O’Mara as “she,” although O’Mara’s online biographical info says he’s a he.)

You might think that the first thing you’d do with a study like this–especially if you haven’t heard of the author, and I hadn’t–is call a few other experts to see whether the article sounds legit. I found that in the BBC story, near the bottom.The comments backed up O’Mara and made for a stronger story.

I’m having trouble finding somebody who interviewed O’Mara. Did he drop this thing out there and then maintain radio silence? Is the CIA hiding him in one of Cheney’s old underground bunkers?

The most comprehensive and intelligent story was Sharon Begley‘s in Newsweek. She walks carefully through O’Mara’s arguments, separating what’s known from what’s not.

Begley does a far better job of explaining the issues involved than O’Mara did. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. That’s our job, isn’t it?

- Paul Raeburn

Time for a break from the heavy environmental urgency of so much news today – and for a visit to what may have been one such episode millenia ago. In USA Today Dan Vergano this week reports on some remarkably unlooted, and not even packed up, ruins in Mexico’s Yucutan. They may, it says here, explain at least a part of the mass migrations and abandonments at the close of the classical period in Mayan history. It’s a fairly brief story, mostly on one team’s expedition and reports. Vergano gets some outside opinion. It, like most such archeology stories, takes one’s mind refreshingly far from today’s troubles for a visit to somebody else’s problems, long ago.

Charlie Petit

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

We’ll try a more comprehensive track tomorrow, but already this morning US President Obama and Chinese President Hu have made their speeches on climate policy at the UN. Both said their nations are moving fast and will pick up the pace. The world’s two leading wire services have their accounts out – tomorrow we may find more analytical news to list;

Stories so far:

• Reuters – Jeff Mason, Claudia Parsons: China pledges climate action, Obama says time short ;
  
• AP – John Heilprin: UN climate summit puts China, India in spotlight ; Heilprin reports that China’s pledges of action are more specific than those from the US.

Charlie Peitt

What a ruckus ensued about two years ago when, with states’ rights-oriented appointees from the Bush Administration in charge, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone Nat’l Park to be doing just great and no longer needing protection as an endangered or threatened population. Now a judge has sorted through the enormously long briefs from both feds and a throng of environmentalists who filed two suits, and now orders that the Obama team put the big bruisers back under ESA protection – where other grizzlies in the lower 48, namely those near Glacier Nat’l Park in N.W. Montana, have been right along.

Main reasons, according to the judge’s decision, are that the Fish and Wildlife Service’s quiltwork of local and planned protections, ostensibly able to assure the continued recovery of the bears, had no teeth and hence did not meet the ESA’s requirements for delisting. The judge also ruled favorably on arguments that climate change and loss of traditional food – mainly the nuts of high alttitude whitebark pines that are being killed by revved-up beetle attacks and a “blister rust” fungus – are a reason to keep the bears listed as a threatened species. The judge did agree with a few of the government’s positions, including the definition of the bear’s natural available range and that, while they are isolated, their genetic diversity can be maintained.

Funny how that part of the country has two glamorous and fierce predators, wolves and brown bears (aka grizzlies), in legal crosshairs. The animals remain precarious and yet are also reclaiming parts of old range – and running into landowners, hunters, tourism interests, and state officials who want few or none of them anywhere outside the park proper.

Stories:

• NYTimes/Green Inc. – James Freed: Federal Court Rules That Yellowstone Grizzlines Should Be Listed as “Threatened” ;
• LA Times – Kim Murphy: Court restores safeguards for grizzly bears ; Good info from the plaintiffs, including material amassed too late for the lawsuits such as the large fatality rate among Yellowstone grizzlies last year.
• AP – Matthew Brown: Fed judge says grizzlies still threatened ;
• Idaho Statesman – Rocky Barker: Judge orders Obama administration to relist Yellowstone grizzly bears ;

Grist for the Mill:

Montana District Court Judge Donald W. Malloy ruling ;

Ironically Related News:

Great Falls Tribune (Montana) – Karl Puckett: River bottom grizzlies spark warnings to hunters ; Well north of Yellowstone’s grizz, their conspecific distant cousins are wandering out into the plains along riparian corridors (aka creek beds). Hunters or others breaking bush through the vegetation need to be careful. Protected these creatures may be. They remain powerful beasts sharp in tooth and claw. If a bear comes charging out from 30 feet away, good luck getting your rifle or big-bore pistol out and aimed with the safety off, etc. Bear spray, it says here, is best.

Charlie Petit

Is ADHD a legit psychiatric diagnosis, or a label psychiatrists and drug companies have slapped on rowdy kids?

Addressing this question in a story is a little like addressing global warming a decade or so ago: There are two points of view, but one is held by an overwhelming number of people, the other by only a few.

Katherine Ellison, in a story in today’s Washington Post, addresses the controversy head-on with a report on a new study that found differences in the way people with ADHD process the neurotransmitter dopamine, when compared to people without the illness.

Ellison opens her story with the question I used above, except hers is more cleverly phrased: “For decades, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder has sparked debate. Is it a biological illness, the dangerous legacy of genes or environmental toxins, or a mere alibi for bratty kids, incompetent parents and a fraying social fabric?”

She follows with ADHD statistics, a graf of background on the increasing evidence showing that ADHD is a biological ailment, and then gets to the new study. She goes on to talk about the plausibility of the findings, and she notes that the research team was led by Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

I was a little distressed to see her then quote an ADHD skeptic who calls the disease “a fiction.” The quote is deep in the story, but I wonder whether such comment is still necessary in ADHD stories.

I suppose when Sputnick was launched, science writers could have called the Flat Earth Society to be told that “orbits” were fiction. For years, we called the Tobacco Institute to find out that smoking didn’t cause cancer. We finally jettisoned those comments.

Is it time to stop calling ADHD skeptics for comment on every story? Is it time to stop calling climate skeptics?

You might argue that the quote was necessary to back up the skepticism expressed in the question lede. I could buy that. The newsworthiness of the story depends partly on its refutation of the skeptical viewpoint.

So, it’s O.K. here. But we should be careful with our readers, exposing them to all relevant, informed points of view, but not wasting their time with nonsensical viewpoints.

The art is knowing where to draw the line.

—-

A few other versions of the story, published around Sept. 9 when the study was released. Note the different approaches:

Science Daily: Deficits in brain’s reward system…

WebMD: ADHD tied to brain’s reward pathway.

Discovermagazine.com: Why ADHD Kids Have Trouble Doing Homework: No Payoff.

Technewsworld.com: Different Brain Chemisty Mix Could Explain ADHD.

Grist: JAMA press release.

- Paul Raeburn