The polar bear may be the world’s largest land carnivore – and the focus lately of Endangered Species Act news – but not close behind is the American brown bear, or grizzly, and its ESA situation is perking along in an odd sort of parallel with its larger cousin.

The Star-Tribune‘s Cat Urbigkit caught up with a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who has been in the thick of struggle between the feds, starting with the Bush administration and continuing now, and various enviro groups over whether to put and keep the Yellowstone grizzly under the act’s safety net.

The common element here is that both bear subpopulations – Alaska white bears and Yellowstone brown bears – are primarily faced with ecological hazards of a changing climate. The northern bears are losing ice and the seals that live on it (plus the comfort and reliability of denning and living on the ice). The southern ones are losing food too. In their case beetles thriving in warmed-up heights devastate the high altitute white bark pines whose cone seeds, or nuts, provide the Yellowstone region’s bears with vital late summer and fall calories.

None of this polar-grizzly bear nexus is in Urbigkit’s piece. But the article  is a useful reminder that when the threats are so diffuse, managing them is not simple. It’s hard to stop global warming with things like hunting regulations. Mostly we learn here that the government’s local researcher sees no point in stiffening federal safety measures for the grizzlies when some figures show that the bear population is growing. The article also quotes lines from a local judge’s ruling a few weeks ago that puts grizzlies back under ESA regulation. But surely, in light of the specific figures that the feds’ biologist provides, a call for some specific replies would have paid off. After all the main plaintiffs in the case who favored relisting, including the Natural Resources Defense Council and the legal-minded EarthJustice organization, are not far away in Montana. While they get lots of ink, Tracker would like to have seen what they have to say in this article as well.

Related Grizzly Bear-country News:

• Jackson Hole Daily – Cory Hatch: Bear group scolds judge ; Same basic news. But Hatch did call up EarthJustice for a brief reply.
• Bozeman Daily Chronicle – Ben Pierce : Paradise Valley hunter mauled by grizzly bear ; He was hunting elk. The bear, maybe ditto, and she had cubs with her. Interesting is that this is not the first such recent incident, it says here.

- Charlie Petit

Oh, this is creepy. And I’m not talking about zombie ants and other insects that, infested with fungus, crawl up a tree branch where, after they die, the mushrooms that sprout from their bodies can better distribute spores. Haven’t we all seen that movie already.

No, The Tracker is shuddering over the snails that crawl into the sunlight, where their eye stalks swell and squirm to mimic “the action of bugs that birds like to eat.” Flatworms in the snails’ eye part are the reason. The worms need to be eaten by birds to maintain their reproductive cycles. Then there is the cricket that grows a whip tail and jumps in the water, or the ant whose internal parasites turn its thorax bright red – like berry. And more.

These are other tales of eeery, scientifically-validated animal behavior at at Scientific American News, in a tale by Katherine Harmon.Not much news, but enterprise of a timely sort.

- Charlie Petit

On the eve of Copenhagen talks to put muscle into international global warming response a paper at Science magazine today says greenhouse gases, particularly methane, may be kicking the thermostat higher even faster than the UN’s IPCC has supposed.

The six authors say in particular that methane, ozone, and carbon-rich aerosols interact in some ways that current schemes for which trading carbon credits and caps take no account. The upshot is that methane emissions have a ten percent bigger impact on the retention of heat – or radiative forcing – than current formulas assume they do. Thus, instead of having a ton-for-ton impact that is 25 greater than that of CO2, methane has a 33 times greater impact, the study concludes.

In the UK at the Telegraph, environmental correspondent Louise Gray has the news under a hed saying, in part, that this “could change the way the world tackles global warming.” USA Today‘s Dan Vergano puts it another way: today’s rules “blame carbon dioxide too much, and methane too little.”

This could, The Tracker sumises, be good news for operators of coal fired power plants. Methane emissions can, from many sources, be fairly easily abated. Hence, if this study’s findings make it into the rule book CO2 producers might find it easier finding, in methane abatements, a way to offset own production of CO2.

Other stories:

• Times (UK) Mark Henderson : Methane’s impact on global warming far higher than previously thought ;
• Science News – Sid Perkins: Aerosols Cloud The Climate Picture ;

Grist for the Mill: Goddard Space Flight Ctr/NASA Press Release ;

I was looking for a clear explanation of yesterday’s health reform news, and I thought I’d found it in a short sidebar on the AP wire: “Health Care Issues: Public Plan Compromises,” the hedline read. But the piece was a disappointment. Instead of a list of bullets on what is and is not in the House bill introduced yesterday, I got a brief rehash of the politics: It’s controversial. Dems think it will lower prices; Republicans don’t.

Then, in a paragraph labeled “What it means,” I got more politics, and discussion of triggers, liberals’ preferences, and state options that are not in the bill.

One of the better pieces I found was by Carolyn Lochhead of the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Washington Bureau. “There was rock music instead of trumpets as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and fellow House Democrats used every flourish Thursday to frame their new $894 billion health care measure as historic legislation on par with the creation of Social Security in 1935 and Medicare in 1965,” she wrote. That’s fair enough; yesterday’s announcement of the House bill was more fanfare than anything else, and Lochhead captures that.

Then she went on, in fewer words than the AP, to tell me what it means:

“The nearly 2,000-page bill would transform the health care landscape. Many of its consequences would remain unclear for years to come. There are serious questions about its effect on budget deficits, despite claims to the contrary, and it does not contain the most robust option of a government-run insurance plan that Pelosi and liberals wanted.

“But at a minimum, the 10-year plan would greatly expand coverage to an estimated 36 million more Americans – up to 96 percent of all citizens – and immediately ban insurance companies from canceling policies when people get sick and capping lifetime benefits.”

That’s a pretty good summary of a very complicated story.

Kaiser Health News, which specializes in health reform and health policy, was also disappointing. As far as I can tell on the home page, the staff-written stories are features off the news, including a piece on corporate wellness programs, on a detail in the Senate finance committee bill, a story on a Tulsa hospital, and a piece on women’s insurance rates. All good stuff, probably; I didn’t read it, because I wanted an explanation of yesterday’s news.

What Kaiser did have was a column called the Daily Health Policy Report. The lead item there was something hedlined, “House Democrats Hail, Question Health Reform Bill.” Some like it, some don’t–not exactly big news there. Below the hedline was not a story, but a roundup of news tidbits from other news organizations. It was chuck full of information–too much information, and too dense to read more than a few grafs without clicking elsewhere.

Janet Adamy does a nice job in The Wall Street Journal of laying out the principal items in the bill and the politics. But for some reason, she confuses the cost of the bill. In the second graf, she caught my eye with a sentence that said the bill “will spend $1.055 trillion, largely to expand health insurance.” Everyone else records that the cost will be closer to $900 billion.

That’s in Adamy’s second graf. In you scroll down to the 10th graf, she writes, “The CBO said Thursday that it estimates the net cost of the bill at $894 billion over a decade.” So which is it?

Others:

Ezra Klein blog in The Washington Post: Will the public plan have higher premiums than private insurance? It’s an interesting angle I didn’t see anywhere else.

Tom Curry of msnbc.com sets up a straw man: Fact or fiction? Pelosi bill in danger, is the hedline. Don’t bother clicking on it; it’s fiction, as Curry admits.

Jacob Goldstein of The Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog picks one piece of the Pelosi bill and explains it nicely: House Bill Would Allow Feds to Negotiate Medicare Drug Prices.

And to take back some of my criticism of the AP, Dave Espo, in what appears to be the main story, writes a nice, compact, informative lede: “House Democrats proposed legislation Thursday to extend health care to tens of millions who now lack it, impose restrictions on private insurers and create a government-run insurance option for consumers.” That’s the way it appears on the website of the Detroit Free Press.

- Paul Raeburn

The Tracker’s backyard, front yard, and both side yards are full of”em. I swept the front steps yesterday for a meeting of the board of the Northern California Science Writers Association and they poured in skittering brigades from the fissures in the concrete against the garage. They blithely thrive among the Grant’s ant stakes a man at the nursery recommended. They often wander around in the kitchen. They infest the passion flower vine. As an invasive species Argentine ants are not up there with kudzu or zebra mussels but they are a pain.

This week UC Berkeley put out a press release declaring that some of its researchers, in the Brit journal BMC Biology, are reporting discovery of the insects’ chemical friend-or-foe signal that, until now, has kept nearly all the myriad nests of these things from attacking one another. It seems that here in California they are essentially one big happy tribe or super-colony that hasn’t the collective brains or genetic diversity to know its outposts should fight over territory. Not that they’re pacifists – they have pushed out native ants from most places in well-watered urban gardens. But now: dose’em with the right elixir and they go into a fratricidal frenzy. Or so they hope.  Yay, I say.

Not many takers except old friend at the San Francisco Chronicle, David Perlman who called up an outside expert from the California Academy of Sciences and got a corroborating opinion. He spun for his readers the tale of the decoding of  “the secret chemical language” of these creatures “that march into Bay Area homes every time the weather turns cold or wet.” Maybe he has these things at his house too. Perhaps a new, targeted pesticide is in the works.

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

Pic source NSW Agricultural Scientific Collections Trust, Australia.

- Charlie Petit

A few outlets this week took a flyer into weird physics. Respectable theory has it that, way down near the Planck scale where virtual particles fizz in and out of the universe’s girdle, it may be that spacetime becomes quantized and where,  like energy,  distance and gravity are in discrete chunks. Electromagnetic waves might then find themselves subtly slowed by the ultimately tiny washboard road. If so, some wavelengths might go a teeny bit slower through the near-vacuum of space. The Tracker is a sucker for these tussles between the shades of Einstein and of the likes of Bohr and Schrödinger. I can’t do the math anymore, but I like the imagery.

In Nature this week a big team of astrophysicists reports that, judging by the essential tie between radiations of drastically different wavelengths from a gamma ray burst or GRB  billions of light years away and detected by the Fermi space telescope, the scale of any such graininess to our four dimensional latticework is far smaller than previous upper limits had set. This makes it, as far as the data permit one to say, a null result. If it had come out otherwise a lot more reporters would have needed to brush up on their quantum mechanics  metaphors.

Stories:

• Lede prize. At Science News, Ron Cowen reached for the palette of a pointillist for inspiration, starting off with “Georges, smaller dots, please.” As in Georges Seurat, whose paintings on close inspection break into dots rather than smooth brush strokes.
• NY Times – Dennis Overbye: 7.3 Billion Years Later, Einstein’s Theory Prevails ;  Fine job of describing why this GRB provided a rigorous, natural experiment to test the theory.
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Universe’s quantum ‘speed bumps’ no obstacle for light ; She expertly explains not only this result, but the reasons an earlier study, that reached a very different conclusion, may have been fooled by its data.
• Popular Science – Jeremy Hsu: Fermi Space Telescope Captures Glimpse of Space Time ; He ties the GRB test of quantized space to the Fermi team’s assembly of a new map of the sky in gamma rays, and also refers to another paper in Nature on the detection of the farthest GRB yet. Good stitching of several results. However, two questions from one sentence: He writes that one measured burst “created enough total energy to rival 9,000 supernova explosions.” The verb ought to be released, not created. The energy was there already, as mass. And the released energy’s total cannot be that high, can it?  – but only look that way due to the beaming of the GRB’s blast by happenstance in our direction?
• Symmetry Magazine – David Harris : Gamma-ray burst restricts ways to beat Einstein’s relativity ; A trade pub from SLAC and Fermilab – could as easily go in Grist. It points out that this paper has been out (see Grist) for awhile at the arXiv physics prepublication site.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford U. Press Release ; prepub of paper at arXiv .

Pic: Credit to Aurore Simonnet, Sonoma State University.

Other Fermi Telescope News:

• Sky and Telescope – Ivan Semeniuk: Is Fermi Seeing Dark Matter? ; A prepublication paper at arXiv reports a strange haze near the galactic core – possibly the result of dark matter annihilation, some say.

- Charlie Petit

California voters who strongly backed a measure some years ago to put their tax money into  stem cell research – at a time work with embryo-derived cells was off limits to federal dollars – may soon learn if it was worth it. The California Institute for Regenerative Medicine revealed $230 million+ in grants for research – previous outlays have been largely for setting up facilities. In something of an irony, little of it is going to the reason the institute exists – to work with human embryonic stem cells. The greater irony is, of course, that the ukase against US tax dollars for nearly all embryo-related research has evaporated with the change of administrations. The grants are coordinated with other agencies in Canada and the UK.

Clinical payoffs are a high priority, it appears. While human trials cannot be scheduled before results are in – much less before work even starts – the granting institute is requiring that the protocols be structured to permit human trials to start in four years or so.

New York Times‘s Andrew Pollack puts that aspect front and center, calling it a “tacit acknowledgment that the promise of human embryonic stem cells is still far in the future.” Only four of the 14 funded projects involve such cells.

By contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Erin Allday dives first into the wide variety of research avenues the grantees will pursue. It takes her until the seventh graf to tell readers that little of the money will go into the specific line of study that gave rise to the institute in the first place. She does report that even after “years of study and under a new administration, funding for all kinds of stem cell research is difficult to secure.”

With a Canadian institute also involved, the Canadian Press highlighted two projects in Toronto.

Other stories:

• San Diego Union Tribune – Thomas Kupper: S.D. researchers awarded stem cell funds ;
• Contra Costa Times – Susan Abram: Valley doctors among those receiving funding for stem cell research ;
• Bloomberg – Rob Waters: Stem Cell therapies Aimed at Patient Trials Get $230 Million ;

Grist for the Mill: CIRM Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Ask and ye shall maybe get lucky. A few weeks ago we posted on an account of a new Zeppelin that NASA hired as a science platform over the San Francisco Bay Area. The Tracker had a question in the back of his mind: how much is sacrificed by using helium rather than flammable (and Hindenberg-style) hydrogen as the lifting gas?  Today a gang at USA Today – Robert Ahrens, Anne R. Carey, Jerry Mosemak, and Dan Vergano – present a history of the Zeppelin brand of German dirigibles including a reference to the company’s new product, the NT, along with a fabulous embedded diagram of its first commercial airliner, the LZ-10 Schwaben. They also report that hydrogen has 14 times less (c’mon, that’s one 14th, an easier t o understand!) density than air, while helium is about one 7th as dense.

The Tracker still believes that, if dirigible or blimps are built a genuine commercial work vehicles, they should be filled with hydrogen. It’s not as thought they all burned up. How many others, aside from the Hindenberg, did that anyway?

Do go look at it, and twirl that big old flying sausage in your fingers.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker missed a chance yesterday to look smarter than the average bear. I noticed a little item on Xinhua/China View: Russia to build spacecraft with nuclear engine, datelined Moscow. It quoted the RIA Novosti news agency for a report that “Megawatt-class nuclear power systems for manned spacecraft” are seen as vital to maintaining that nation’s position in the top tier of space exploration. I took a pass, the stories being so brief.

This morning one notices that several other outlets have picked up and expanded a bit on the news. So NOW I’m tracking it but it’s always more fun to update a post that caught an early wave rather than ride the one so big nobody could miss it.

The news stories are not entirely consistent. Some, such as the Xinhua item, suggest the nuclear reactor power will be used for propulsion, probably by providing electrical power for plasma or ion propulsion systems (as also described in Tuesday’s post on the NYTimes science section and its graphic illus of a Vasimir system of electric rocketry). At least one says that the Russians envision space-trotting nuclear reactors as mostly useful for power aboard exploration vessels that does everything besides push them along.

The plans in Moscow may be far-fetched, but they are surely less ambitious by far than Cold War schemes in the US and presumably the USSR to build full-on nuclear rockets – monsters of stupendous efficiency and thrust that would heat propellant gases to extreme velocities by passing them directly thorough the fuel rods of a nuke in full (but controlled!) chain reaction. Or, for that matter, to the stillborn Project Orion of the same time that would have bumped a spaceship to Saturn by putting a big shock absorbing plate on its backside and tossing the radioactive real McCoy – small H-bombs – back there to smack it along. Talk about a pulse-jet rocket. Whump whump whump and hold on to your hat, you’re past the asteroid belt already.

Other stories that quickly followed:

• *UPDATE – here’s a later version than first up, from AP – Vladimir Isachenkov, Seth Borenstein : Russia hopes nuclear ship will fly humans to Mars ; Including atomic-electric rocket. Activists alarmed, experts skeptical.
• Wired News – Nathan Hodge:  Поехали! Russia Plans Atomic-Powered Spaceship ; What’s that Cyrillic part mean? My guess: it means holy cow.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Russia planning nuclear-powered manned spaceship ; He doesn’t think propulsion is the application.
• Daily Mail (UK) Russian space agency plan to build NUCLEAR space rocket ;

Not much naysaying by sources or anybody else to overtly dampen the enthusiastic news reporting. Maybe reporters  figure most readers already know that the Russians are not likely to do any such thing any time soon (note update that makes AP an outlier). Or maybe it’s like that old maxim – the one I have taped to my fax machine: DAMN THE FACTS FULL SPEED AHEAD / ….the stories that are too good to check.

Pic: Not the Russian design. An old US one. Source.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a gentle way to usher the reader into a geophysics and volcanology story, a lede found in the Seattle Times under Sandi Doughton‘s byline: In Native American lore, the volcanoes of the Cascade Mountains chatted with each other like girlfriends. The not-quite-new news is that remote sensing, via crustal conductivity measurement, implies that a single immense body of magma may be feeding those big conical things Mount Rainier, Mount Adams, and Mount St. Helens (well, the latter isn’t so conical since losing one flank and blowing its top nearly 30 years ago). So, she suggests, counter to standard belief these three do communicate directly. And if so, score one for local mythology. This would make the magma source roughly comparable to the so-called hot spot plume-topping reservoir beneath Yellowstone in the northern Rockies, often called a “supervolcano” for its long-ago, caldera-forming mega-explosions.

The scientific paper behind the news, first delivered at an American Geophysical Union meeting in June to some pickup back then, was also  in last weekend’s Nature Geoscience and is hence generating another blip of interest. Authors are primarily researchers from New Zealand.  Doughton gets a nifty graphic with hers, and  talks with several of the authors , including some in the US. She learns that the magma is more like semi-crystalline mush than runny lava, and that this magma pool – if it is really there and contiguous – has no history of outbursts on the scale of Yellowstone’s prehistoric, continent-shaking belchings. Good to know.

Other stories:

• McClatchy Newspapers – Les Blumenthal: Controversial study suggests vast magma pool under Washington State ; Dunno if it’s really a controversy, but some experts don’t see it this way.
• LiveScience: Pool of Magma May Feed 3 Washington Volcanoes ;

Previous Stories:

• New Scientist – David Shiga (June 10): Supervolcano may be brewing beneath Mount St. Helens ;
• New Zealand Herald: Alarm bells ring over volcano find ; Based largely on Shiga’s article in New Scientist.

- Charlie Petit

Genetic engineers, as we quaintly used to call people who tinker with genes, have crossed another scientific-ethical line. According to a study in Nature, Stanford researchers have used stem cells to produce the precursors of human sperm and eggs.

Rob Waters of Bloomberg is quick–perhaps a little too quick–to tell us what this means: “Stem cells were changed to form the precursors of sperm and eggs in a research advance that may lead to better ways of treating the infertility affecting 10 to 15 percent of would-be parents in the U.S.”

That’s a lot to pack into one sentence, even if it is a short, quick one. He repeats the accomplishment in the second graf, and it’s not until the fourth graf that he gives us the scientific import, quoting the researcher, who says “We now have a human system to examine germ cell development.” Waters goes on to explain that the new research could lead to the manufacture of sperm and eggs from patients’ stem cells that could then be used, in turn, with in vitro fertilization to make stem-cell babies, you might say. But he notes that “her goal is to use her new methods to study infertility in a laboratory dish and hunt for drugs that could correct it.”

It’s a solid story, but sometimes we need to hear the scientific news and be able to pause for a breath before having the practical implications heaped upon us. This is pretty cool stuff, and a little frightening, and should make news even if it had no applications in IVF.

UPI, in a very short story on upi.com, leads with “Stanford University researchers say they’ve discovered how to transform human embryonic stem cells into germ cells.” A confession: I know what germs cells are, especially if I’ve just been reminded. But, honestly, I’m not sure that I could have told you this morning, before I started this search, that germ cells were precursors of sperm and eggs. A little help on that in the UPI lede would be nice for the readers, like me, who aren’t always exactly sure what germ cells are.

Others:

Richard Alleyne of the Telegraph in the UK goes for the infertility angle in a lede that actually appears as a sub-hed on the web: “Scientists have moved a step closer to creating human sperm and eggs from stem cells in research that could end fertility problems.” That goes a little too far. The research might well help with some fertility problems, but I doubt it would end all of them.

The UK–which gave the world in vitro fertilization–seemed unusually interested in this story. The Press Association also went for the fertility angle: “Scientists have used embryonic stem cells to create the precursors of human sperm and eggs in an experiment they hope will aid infertility treatments.” In its third graf, however, it gave us a bit of science that most of the others didn’t highlight: “A technique called RNA silencing was then used to control the activity of key genes involved in germ cell development.” Some readers have heard of this, even if they don’t know exactly what it is, so it’s nice to mention it. It does, of course, require explanation.

I’d add a few more, but, sadly, I didn’t find too many more. A story of this importance should be covered by all the major news outlets, but most of their reporters were, perhaps, too busy studying the terms of their buyout offers.

Grist for the mill: Stanford press release.

- Paul Raeburn

A smallish story in the current New Scientist provides some badly-needed perspective on arguments over the fate of polar bears and how to do anything locally that offsets a diffuse problem, climate change, whose causes are far from their native habitat. Writers Stephanie Pfirman and Bruno Tremblay have it under the hed We still have a chance to save polar bears.

The authors are not, one must mention, science writers or any other kinds of journalists. Each is a professor of climate sciences. She is at Columbia in New York City, he at McGill in Montreal. The magazine labels the article “Opinion,” which it is. Their argument is an end run around the hand wringing by US officials and their state counterparts in Alaska over what’s the best way to protect US populations of the big bears – which occupy one of the regions of the circum-Arctic most heavily affected by loss of sea ice and dwindling polar bear prey. There are, however and as this piece notes, places that will remain secure for the bears for a good long time – and where other management actions such as establishing refuges against development, heavy hunting pressure, or other factors make good sense. Tracker’s inference of their subtext: the Alaskan polar bear is pretty much a goner.

The article accompanies a second, more conventional news piece in NS by Shanta Barley on the recent decision by the US Dept of Interior and its Fish and Wildlife Service to open hearings on a designated critical habitat along Alaska’s shores.

Ditto, another follow on last week’s habitat designation news is at the New York Times by Stefan Milkowski: Polar Bears vs. Development in Alaska. On this issue, The new governor up there is same as the old boss (followed in one’s brain by a riff from Won’t Get Fooled Again).

- Charlie Petit