Headlines at many agencies are remarking upon an apparent decrease in world CO2 emission, with the industrial slowdown of the now (hopefully) fading recession the reason.The decrease is more than 2 percent, the BBC‘s Richard Black reports.

An interesting one-two punch is at the Financial Times. Its Fiona Harvey was apparently among the first with the news, under the hed World Recession results in steep fall in greenhouse gas emissions. Secondarily, she reports a few grafs in that the International Energy Agency also reports that government regulatory policies also, for the first time, are having a bite that perhaps would, even without the recession, cut CO2 slightly in themselves.

That latter point may be the biggest news. Economic slowdowns (and wars) have cut carbon emissions before. But that governmental policies are having perceptible impact is newsworthy. This is especially true given the climate speeches set this week by world leaders, including the US president and Chinese premier, at the UN. Hence a blog at Financial Times‘s Energy Source site by Kate MacKenzie deserves a special nod for singling out the significance of government regulations.

Other outlets also tend to focus on the main reason, but not the significant reason, for the decline:

• AFP: Carbon emissions fall with global downturn: report ;
• LiveScience – Andrea Thompson: Recession Causes Steep Fall in CO2 Emissions;
• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: CO2 emissions tumble; leaders to meet on climate ;

Charlie Petit

There really isn’t much on the science beat that’s new to say about the Station Fire that has burnt a large portion of the mountains north of Los Angeles. The Pasadena Star-News‘s Thomas Himes has a good roundup today of where things stand now and the preparations at the Observatory: The fire is quiet and nearly contained but the weather is getting hotter, drier, and windier. So, firefighters are edgy.

The main reason for this post is simply to display this stupefying Modis image from the Aqua Satellite and posted by NASA’s Earth Observatory program. It’s one thing to say it covers 160,000 acres (as of Sept. 16), but another to look at how big that is on a photographic map of the entire LA basin and the Sierra Madre and San Gabriel mountain ranges.

*Amazing Update: A note at NSF’s Science360 brings attention, in turn, to a post by science writing blogger Jennifer Ouelette at her Twisted Physics who in turn links to a mesmerizing fast-forward video (YouTube, natch), amassed over several days, of the fire’s approach to the Mount Wilson Observatory, its  large dome (100 inch telescope, I suppose) in the foreground. Stunning. Really. This thing is getting around – as Ms. Ouelette credits it in turn to a posting at her husband Sean Carroll’s Cosmic Variance web log. It’s a bucket brigade carrying fire footage rather than fire dousing water.

Charlie Petit

This looks like a good scoop – at the least, resourceful reporting. The Casper Star-Tribune‘s Dustin Bleiseffer reported late Saturday that a trio of corporations believes it can build – and have in service in 2015 – a modest-sized 100-megawatt, coal-fired power plant that will sequester 90 percent of its CO2 emissions. The plant would use an advanced high-oxygen system called Oxy-Coal combustion that yields a nearly pure stream of CO2. The gas will go either for disposal in deep, saline aquifers or be pumped into oil fields to enhance recovery. The latter use would leave it there for a geologically significant time but, one thinks, doesn’t taste as green as just putting it in the ground for reasons other than to get more fossil fuels to squirt out.

The combine behind the bid, it says here, wants some government money to do the job. It has an application in with the Department of Energy through its overhauled FutureGen program. Word on it emerged, it also says, via a briefing by the governor’s office to a state economic development committee. Somebody at the local paper, it appears, had his ear to the ground. The two primary companies behind the project, which has been in the works for several years while looking for a place to do it, are Babcock & Wilcox and Air Liquide of France and Delaware.

Grist for the Mill: Babcock & Wilcox Technical Paper, 2008 “Commercialization of Oxy-Coal combustion…” ;

Pic: An oxy-coal combustor, Source ;

Charlie Petit

It makes perfect sense, what an editorial in the British medical journal Lancet said last week. But as a talking point for the conservatives in the US who for unclear reasons see global warming as a neo-socialist plot,  it has to be welcome fodder. What could better encourage the views of those on the right who see liberal politics as embracing a “culture of death” than this: contraception and birth control are gaining prominence among intellectuals as excellent weapons against climate change?

Maybe I’ve just been watching too much Rachel Maddow, progressive spear carrier for the US’s  MSNBC. Gad. Gotta regain my bearings.

The news got plenty of coverage. It stems from several studies, including one the Lancet itself sponsored (see Grist below). It also comes almost simultaneously with a study, also cited, from the London School of Economics. The conclusion is that if one wants bang for the buck, or for the euro or yen or any other denomination, one of the more effective ways to ease upward pressure on the planetary thermostat is to reduce population growth. Ergo, foreign aid that promotes family planning by such things as expanding access to condoms and other birth control measures would go far.

Stories:

• AP (no byline and not first published, but it’s what brought The Tracker’s attn to the rest): Birth control could help combat climate change ;
• LA Times – Karen Kaplan (blog): Can condoms combat climate change ; She smartly links directly to the big LSE study (see Grist) – and her piece is source of the rubber-parade  illus. ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Lancet: Hordes of patio-heater babies will doom planet / Forget windmills, only free johnnies can save us now ; Not much serious journalism here, mostly clever but easy  japery. His point is that Lancet has said screwy things before and more than once.  Page does bring up with relative gravity the down side of population control: a graying citizenry.
• Telegraph : Contraceptives can reduce impact of climate change says Lancet ; No signer, and sober reporting.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: Contraception vital in climate change fight – expert ; Fine job. She calls the man who wrote the commentary directly and gets a remark from Martin Rees, head of the UK’s science academy (as well as a knighted, astronomer royal).
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathious Jr. : African Condom Shortage Said to Worsen Climate Impact: Focus is on a World Health Organization study from the same people as are behind the Lancet edit.
• Portland Oregonian – Scott Learn: Boosting contraception would fight climate change, medical journal says ;

As for bloggers, and  yes I am one, here’s just one random sampling -  first one that came up in a search – of reaction from the right: The Lonely Conservative: Leftist Racism Helps Global Warming. It’s quite snarky,  but rather civil in these days of spittle-flying rants from all directions. This blog looks more libertarian than conventional conservative. And one must tip a hat for original contrary thinking to this woman. She regards the AP as an example of “fringe media.”

Grist for the Mill:

Lancet Editorial Sexual and reproductive health and clilmate change ; Lancet Commission Managing the health effects of climate change ; London School of Economics/Optimum Population Trust:  Fewer Emitters, Lower Emissions, Less Cost ;

Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Two fascinating stories today. Argentine researchers have a study in Nature Neuroscience saying that patients in vegetative states might still be able to learn via classical Pavlovian conditioned response. This can be used to predict recovery. La Nación (Costa Rica) explains in depth what an isotope of oxygen is, how it will be used to understand the hydrological cycle of the Tempisque aquifer, and thus how much water it can yield in a sustainable way.

Hoy destacamos dos notas, tanto por bien elaboradas, como por lo interesante de su contenido.

En La Nación (Costa Rica), se han atrevido a explicar en medio de un periódico qué son los isótopos. Bravo por la valentía, y por cómo lo han hecho (gran gráfico incluido). Pablo Fonseca explica la curiosa manera que tienen los científicos de saber de dónde procede el agua del acuífero del Tempisque, un dato fundamental para saber cómo explotarlo de manera sostenible. La mayoría de átomos de oxígeno tienen 8 protones y 8 neutrones en su núcleo, pero una pequeña proporción lleva 10 neutrones. Estos pesan un poquito más, y se evaporan menos. A consecuencia, su concentración en el mar, ríos, lagos o pozos es ligeramente diferente. Este “ADN del agua” (como de muy didácticamente lo llama Pablo) será utilizado por los científicos para conocer de dónde viene el agua del Tempisque, cuánta es capaz de recargar su ciclo hídrico, y en consecuencia cuánta se podrá extraer. Más detalles en los artículos.

La Nación (Argentina) presenta la nota de Gabriel  Stekolschik “Los pacientes en estado vegetativo pueden aprender”. ¿Quién puede resistirse a un titular así? El tracker no, y empieza a leer la noticia expectativo pero sospechando que esconde alguna pequeña trampa. Los primeros párrafos explican que según un estudio hecho por científicos Argentinos y publicado en Nature Neuroscience, algunas personas en estado vegetativo (sin evidencia de conciencia) mantienen una cierta capacidad de aprendizaje que puede ser utilizada para predecir sus posibilidades de recuperación. La intriga sobre este misterioso “aprendizaje” aumenta, y te conduce hasta lo mejor del artículo: una muy buena explicación sobre cómo se diseñó el estudio. Aplicando el condicionamiento pavloviano, a los pacientes les hacían escuchar un sonido específico y 500 milisegundos después les enviaban un ligero soplido de aire a un ojo, provocándole un pestañeo. Y así hasta 70 veces cada 10 segundos. Luego, sólo sonido ¿y sabéis qué? el paciente igualmente pestañea. Su cerebro ha asociado ambas acciones. Como explica Gabriel, el experimento puede ayudar a diagnosticar mejor los desórdenes de conciencia, y también a revisar cómo la categorizamos. Gran texto. Oiremos hablar más de este estudio.

- Pere Estupinyà

Larry Husten, author of the cardiology blog Cardiobrief.org, called our attention to a recent story involving the tricky subject of primary endpoints.

Here’s the lede of a press release from McMaster University, released at the European Cardiology Society meeting in Barcelona on Aug. 30th:

“A landmark international study led by McMaster University researchers found high doses of the blood thinner clopidogrel (Plavix) significantly reduce complications in heart patients undergoing angioplasty to clear blocked arteries.”

Impressive, right? Landmark! I’m thinking if I ever need an angioplasty, I want this drug. But as Husten notes, the study wasn’t designed to study complications. It was designed to study whether Plavix would reduce subsequent death, heart attacks or strokes–and Plavix didn’t do that. That reduction was the so-called primary endpoint: the thing the study was designed to find out.

The press release from the drug’s makers, Sanofi Aventis and Bristol Myers-Squibb, was much more careful.  The findings concerning “the primary end-point (cardiovascular death, heart attack, or stroke at thirty days)” were not statistically significant, the companies reported.

The study did indeed show a reduction in complications for some of the subjects, not all. But that’s nothing to crow about, as the university press release did. The companies — bound, unlike the university, by FDA regulations concerning what they can say — said the findings in the subgroup merely “add to the broad clinical experience with Plavix.” In other words, it’s interesting, and it might mean something, but we’ll have to do more research to know.

On Cardiobrief, Husten reported the story this way:

“The CURRENT-OASIS-7 trial missed its primary endpoint but found a benefit for high dose clopidogrel [Plavix] in the large subset of patients who underwent PCI.”

It’s jargony, because Husten is writing for a professional audience. But you get the idea.

The problem with emphasizing secondary findings, or findings that are significant for only a part of the study group, is that if you dig enough, you can almost always find something that’s different between the subjects and the controls. You might check eye color, hair color, height, and weight, and discover that the drug works best in tall, skinny, hazel-eyed brunettes. But such findings can be due simply to chance.

Consider the crowd sitting behind third base at any given Detroit Tigers game. (Hey, that’s my team, for better or worse.) It’s possible, by chance, at a Friday night game in July, that the crowd has an unusually large number of tall, skinny, hazel-eyed brunettes. And the Tigers win. It doesn’t mean anything (even if I do decide to give my ticket to a tall, skinny, hazel-eyed brunette the next time the Tigers play the Yankees.)

The right way to cover these studies is to say whether they did or did not show what they were intended to show.  Then, if there is something else interesting to say, that’s fine. But if the study fails to show benefits on the primary endpoint, step lightly.

- Paul Raeburn

Most of the bylines that show up at ksjtracker are from writers with health, gen’l science, or environment as their beats. But a lot are not. And the outsiders often bring a certain brio, the energy of the newcomer, as they sort through the combinations of passion, weirdness, surprise, and advanced degrees of education that our beats tend to comprise. To wit: Today’s NYTimes story by former New York City scene writer Dan Barry who for the past few years has been hoofing it around the country for a weekly This Land feature.

The latest is Weed Heroes: The War on the Invader Cogongrass. It’s a portrait in part of the rhythms and textures of the rural South, with intense focus in the minutiae in the plans of two Alabama state employees as they do battle with federal stimulus money against a tough, almost inedible (to anything), and spiky invasive grass that can, like kudzu, transform a landscape. He goes, one thinks, a little too far in search of humor at the expense of taking invasive species perhaps a bit lightly, but only enough to prove he’s from New Yawk.  A science writer might well have talked to a few professors and included a good deal more on where this weed is from (it says here it may have arrived from Japan nearly a century ago), its native range, what keeps it in check there, a bit on biological control strategies, and so on. But, it’s a reader, and hardly anybody who goes through it will fail to remember the gist of congongrass’s threat should they hear that word again. The closing vignette, featuring a shovel, is perfect.

- Charlie Petit

NYTimes reporter Charles Duhigg takes readers today to Wisconsin, a beautiful green state renowned for its cheese and other dairy products. It is an inspired choice to rub our faces in the dirty side of the livestock business, and one of the more potentially dangerous aspects of agriculture generally. Runoff from badly managed operations can get into water supplies, can make people sick, can lead to lawsuits that can shut down businesses whose operators have labored for decades to set up. And … can go unregulated or barely regulated for too long.

The crusading piece is part of Duhigg’s and the Times’s project  Toxic Waters. It continues to be a muscular, sprawling example of what newspapers can do to add an important new topic to the national conversation. But with this iteration I find myself scratching my head over the little things that bothered me about the last one (previous post). It is the close conjoining of specific examples of things gone awry – families or communities at hazard – with statistics that imply similar things are rife.

Examples:

• After reading of instances of disease from ag waste we read, “..An estimated 19.5 million American fall ill each year from waterborne parasites, viruses, or bacteria, including those stemming from human and animal waste, according to a study…” That’s alarming. But. Does the study estimate the percentage that’s from human and animal waste, or more important, from livestock alone?
• It describes a few wells in one town so heavily contaminated the water caused infections. One home owner had to dump bleach in his well. Some residents say they have seen cow organs dumped in the fields, presumably over the aquifers. And then a regulator says “More than 30 percent of the wells in one town alone violated basic health standards.” None of those sound good, but it is unclear how they hang together. Are 30 percent contaminated by manure? Do cow organs pose a particular health threat if dumped on a field?
• In California, we read, “up to 15 percent of wells in agricultural areas exceed a federal contaminant threshhold.” This is in a news story focussed on animal waste. But, as The Tracker understands things, the most serious ag. runoff comprises fertilizers and some pesticides from crop fields, not animal waste. So, what and how much contaminants dominate that 15 percent of wells?

To his credit Duhigg forthrightly tells readers, and more than once, that connecting such dots is challenge. He writes at one point “…it is often difficult to definitively link a specific instance of disease to one particular cause, like water pollution.” That is a vital caveat.

Such uncertainty may be inherent to the topic;, it may be impossible to overcome. And it should not deter a reporter from digging as deep as he can and telling readers what he found. The piece is a powerful alert to lawmakers and authorities to demand investigation. But it is not (and does not claim to be) the full story. Perhaps a few more explicit question marks would have been in order rather than this drumbeat of facts and observations assembled as though they, in themselves, are grounds for conviction.

Pic: It’s not as though the industry including feedlot and dairy operators, at least some of them, aren’t trying. This image is from the website of a company that tests water for farmers to help them stay within regulations.

Charlie Petit

Hey, we haven’t heard much lately from the University of Chicago’s paleontologist and ace science popularizer, Paul Sereno. That drought ended today. He reports in Science a tale of skullduggery and other sleuthing into the contents of a rock stuffed with fossils and circulating on the private market. They’re calling it Raptorex kriegsteini, after the collector who bought it and then brought its mysterious appearance to Sereno’s attention. Repatriation, apparently, is in the works. The 125-million-year-old specimen is to be returned to Inner Mongolia where it was excavated under cover for the fossil trade. The Chicago group says its physique strongly suggests it is a small ancestor, and template, for the far larger T. rex and other tyrannosaurs that followed.

Nine feet tall, maybe 150 pounds, and something that should remain extinct, one opines. Reporters had a good time with this. Scary dinosaurs do that to people. The big surprise, reflected in several accounts, is that the proportions are so much like those of T. rex, especially the small relatives size of the forelimbs. Some had assumed that the diminutive size of the big versions’ arms had appeared during, not before, their evolution from smaller ancestors.

There is a promotional angle to this. The study may be in Science, but Sereno’s latest is also a star on an upcoming TV special, “Bizarre Dinos,” coming on National Geographic Television Sunday Oct. 11.

Stories:

• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen: Fossil identified as mini-T. rex ; Starts off with a vignette, expands nicely.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Early, smaller version of T. rex discovered ;
• NPR – Christopher Joyce: Even T. Rex Started Small ; He reports the fossil is already back in China. The press release says it’s still in Chicago getting scrutinized.
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Unveiled: the Surprisingly Small Precursor of T. Rex ; Lots of detail here, including arguments among experts, and the trail that the specimen took from northern China to Sereno’s lab.
• Science News – Jenny Lauren Lee: Tiny T.Rex-Like Tyrants ;
• MSNBC – Alan Boyle: TINY T. REX? BIG SURPRISE! ; He has a strange quote from scientist Sereno: “.as close to the proverbial missing link on a lineage as we might ever get for tyrannosaurs..”. It’s not on Boyle for using a colorful quote, but that thought doesn’t cohere. If it’s proverbial, it’s not real, and is there one for dinos anyway…plus, isn’t the whole idea of missing links in bad odor among the pros?
• Prize for best coinage in a hed: Telegraph (UK) Kate Devlin: “Tinysaurus Rex’ just nine foot long and weighing the same as a human discovered ;

Grist for the Mill: U. Chicago Press Release ;

Other Commercial Dino Fossil News:

• Wired Science – Betsy Mason: Want Your Own Dinosaur? Place Your Bids ; amazingly beautiful mounted specimens to be auctioned.
• AP – Oskar Garcia: T. Rex for sale: Dinosaur fossil on block in Vegas ;

Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Due to an ambiguous title from EFE, several Spanish outlets are reporting about 10 new species recently discovered in the Canary Islands. But… and some journalists got it right… the species are not new at all. The scientists just did not know they are living on those islands)

Si bajas con cámaras a estudiar un rincón del océano poco explorado, es bien probable que encuentres especies que no sabías que vivía allí. Planteado de esta manera, no parece una gran noticia. Si quieres tener más impacto, puedes escribir un titular engañoso como el que ha distribuido EFE: Una expedición de Oceana halla especies desconocidas en aguas de Canarias.

Alguien como El Periódico de Catalunya puede clarificar el titular y dejarlo en: Halladas una decena de especies hasta ahora no detectadas en Canarias

Pero otros como Quattro puede convertirlo en un equívoco: Halladas en Canarias decenas de especies hasta ahora desconocidas

Si además Europa Press envía un video titulado Oceana descubre 10 nuevas especies marinas

es logico que algunos medios se confundan, como el Diario de las Palmas, y terminen titulando: Hallan una decena de especies marinas desconocidas

Cierto, tampoco es tan grave. Porque al final, estas noticias contribuyen a mostrar a la población la biodiversidad que esconden sus paisajes más cercanos, y la necesidad de preservarlos.

Lo que hoy nos cuentan en La Nación de Costa Rica tampoco parece un gran descubrimiento, pero Alejandra Vargas prepara una muy buena nota sobre la expedición que el National Geographic está realizando en la costarricense isla de Coco, recoge la sorpresa de los expertos por la carencia de peces de gran tamaño – “Esto significa que no estamos hablando de lugar prístino y que está siendo afectado por la pesca dirigida a especies de peces grandes”-, y contribuye en la concienciación de preservar los espacios naturales de su país.

Si no, ocurre lo que en un recomendable reportaje explica en El Periódico Dmitri Polikárpov: El mar de Aral ya casi no existe por culpa de la acción humana

El “casi no existe” no es un gran titular, de acuerdo. Pero ¿qué hacemos? ¿Esperamos a hablar de ello cuando tengamos una noticia más impactante sin el “casi”?

- Pere Estupinyà

Bear with me here. The Tracker this morning, in looking through AAAS Science magazine’s lineup of potential news fodder, spotted one that looks utterly fascinating but utterly daunting too. ScienceExpress yesterday featured a report on  three-color entanglement of photons and potential applications in extremely fast and compact quantum computers. Hmmm – now there’s a paper that may be among the most important in the journal but it is so hard to write fast and facile – unlike a mini-me T. rex from a swasbuckling paleontologist seen in another post today.  And I was correct – no major outlets wrote it up right away (AT LEAST NOT  IN ENGLISH – see addendum at bottom). Things like this are hard to digest.

BUT, in noodling around looking for coverage of that entangled development, I did find that I missed a small splash of rather solid coverage, largely in the UK, of quantum computer, optical processing news a few weeks ago. It’s good to see times that the daily press does tackle, with as much expertise as one can expect from the fourth estate’s scriveners when trying to explain such arcana, the hard and important stuff.

The news, from a paper in another issue Science, was that a team at Bristol University has managed to include on a computer chip a photon-based, quantum factoring system that, via superposition of states and all that sort of thing most of us understand only as metaphor and not as mathematical notation, employs Shor’s algorithm. The Bristol chips have little waveguides in them, entangled packets, the whole deal. And Shor’s algorithm factors numbers. So far it is still primitive. It can only factor little, easy numbers. But, eventually, maybe much larger ones of the sort useful in encryption.

Maybe it will help make encryption of sensitive online data streams more solid – or maybe it will allow mischief makers, con artists, and worse to crack the codes. Perhaps both. It’s hard to tell. But…onward:

Sample Stories (all from the first week of this month):

• BBC: Quantum computer slips onto chips ;
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: ‘Quantum Computer’ uses light as a fuel to calculate multiples in a flash ;
• ITProPortal (ok, not exactly mass media) Desire Athow: UK Boffins Perform First Optical Quantum Calculation ; The hed’s off, as this is the first time it’s been done on an integrated chip – bigger systems have done it before.

Grist for the Mill: Bristol U. Press Release ;

LATE ADDITION: Tracker does find one outlet in Brazil where the work described this week in Science Express was done. If you have Portuguese this is for you: Agencia FAPESP - Fábio de Castro : Emaranhamento colorido ;

Charlie Petit

The AP‘s man in Alaska is keeping his eye on walruses. Dan Joling‘s latest dispatch reports that US Geological Survey researchers counted about 200 dead ones on a beach bordering the Chukchi Sea – a sector of the Arctic Ocean along the state’s northwest shore. This comes a week after Joling  disclosed to the global public that the animals, usually seen resting on ice floes between dives to the shallow sea floor for molluscs and other food, are congregating on beaches instead(previous post). The ice has withdrawn many hundreds of miles off shore into water too deep for the walruses to find food.

Also on the story locally is Alaska Public Radio Network‘s Annie Feidt who provides an interview with one of the men who saw them from the air. He tells her one group of people who know walruses inside and out – eskimo hunters – ought to be consulted for their thoughts on how singular the event is.

No one yet, it says here, knows why the walruses died. Most appear to be young. Perhaps a ground team will go investigate. Both stories succinctly provide the context the story needs, and caution that little is known so far as to what it all means.

Pic source Nat’l Snow Ice Data Ctr.;

Charlie Petit