What The Tracker wants to have is a fuller explanation of the flagpole sticking straight out from the nose of this hypothetical supersonic airliner. One is forced to intuit that it spreads the sonic boom shockwaves more broadly than would a hornless airplane, yielding maybe more of a brief rumble than a big ka-WHAM on the eardrums.

The pic is in today’s Plain Dealer. Staffer John Mangels provides news, mainly via the NASA Lewis Research Center, that a steady federal effort toward commercial supersonic aircraft continues well after the money-sucking Concorde jets last flew and long after worries over ozone depletion and other matters killed the official US supersonic transport program. The main story comes with a sidebar on two small companies pursuing investors to help them build business jets that can fly faster than sound.

Mangels writes it with a slight, bemused skepticism that befits a time when money is short and environmental worries, including concerns about fuel-guzzling new airplanes, are rife. One thinks the puzzlement could have been more emphatic. But it’s sensible, one also thinks, that NASA maintain a low-key placeholder program going just in case such fast passenger carriers start to make sense.

As for the long nose on the artist’s impression, he does provide some info. It’s called a quiet spike, would probably telescope frontwards well after takeoff, and has been tested by NASA on an F-15.

Grist for the Mill:

The story carries embedded links to the official NASA program site. However, satisfying the urge to hyperlink:  one finds down a layer or two in the NASA websites a majestic video, without narration but with a soaring orchestral musical score, that is guaranteed to stir the emotions of any lover of futuristic visions of sensational machinery. It even has a flying super schnozzistic transport in it.

- Charlie Petit

In a recent blog post for the U.S. News Brain & Behavior blog, Ford Vox, a doctor and journalist, took his interview in a direction many of us might never have thought of–and would be afraid to pursue if we had.

Howie Mandel, the host of television game show Deal or No Deal, has just written an autobiography called Here’s the Deal: Don’t Touch Me, published by Bantam in November. The book deals, in large part apparently, with Mandel’s obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention-deficit disorder. Whether it’s a consequence of Mandel’s frankness or Vox’s interviewing skills, the interview is particularly revealing, and an interesting example of a story on mental illness that avoids the usual cliches.

But what caught my attention, more than anything in the interview, was that Vox persuaded Mandel to take a medical test to gauge the severity of his obsessive-compulsive disorder. “Mandel scored 21 out of 40, putting him in the ‘moderate’ range,” Vox reports in a postscript.

As a journalist, I wonder whether Vox could not have obtained that information more easily by getting Mandel’s permission to talk to his doctor, who presumably has already done some testing.

On the other hand, it’s given me some ideas. After interviewing a geneticist, ask him or her to provide a genome scan so we can discover whether the results favor his or her own alleles? (A clear conflict of interest.) Ask our editors to submit to testing to determine totalitarian tendencies?

Perhaps we should ask writers to submit to a basic assessment of their sanity?

Nah. We know how that one would turn out.

- Paul Raeburn

The Tracker has been told by clever acquaintances, more than once, that they heard that rooftop solar panels require more energy to make than they ever return as kw-hours. Also, that a Prius and its batteries are so energy-intense in manufacture they are a net green losers, and that corn ethanol takes more fossil fuel in its crop and conversion than it saves. (Answers are that solar panels are clearly on the green side of the energy ledger, ditto Priuses, but corn ethanol just barely clears the bar).

Such life cycle issues are engaging, and useful to report as they get readers to think about big pictures and interconnections. A good example is seen today in the NYTimes. Eric A. Taub reports (and essentially nobody else does) that light emitting diode or LED bulbs apparently do in fact save far more energy over their lifetimes than they consume during manufacture. They not only beat incandescents, but outdo compact fluorescents too, it says here. He qualifies the result slightly, calling this “evidence” but not proof. The reason is clear – a German lighting company that hopes to sell a lot of these lamps also did the study that concludes they are environmentally friendly.

But the reported margin by which the devices save energy is so huge  that it seems likely the general conclusion will stand. The study, it says here, even took into account the energy used to put lamps made in China in ships and transport them to Germany. Plus it looked at other enviro metrics beyond energy, such as chemical pollution, water eutrophication, and more.

It’s unclear how much the things cost, but it looks like the equivalent to a 40-watt incandescent is more than $20, perhaps a lot more. Thus it’ll take some advertising genius to get them flying off the shelves. Maybe requlations that require them in new construction would prime the pump.

Grist for the Mill: OSRAM press release Aug 4, 2009 (in advance of the report) ; OSRAM LED life-cycle assessment report ;

- Charlie Petit

For a while on the day after Thanksgiving, while visiting offspring and grandchildren in Southern California, The Tracker thought a climate policy, Copenhagen-energizing piece of amazement had occurred. On page 1 of the Los Angeles Times I slapped down on a kitchen counter in Orange County was the headline China vows to cut greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2020. Under the bylines of reporters David Pierson in Beijing and Jim Tankersley at the DC Bureau the lede confidently and flatly said, “China vowed Thursday to cuts its greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half over the next decade.” Common sense should have shouted inside my brain, Impossible! Instead I thought wow, that’s some change of course. A dek in the hed said, “China meets, beats U.S. on emission reduction goals.” Here is a wordfile that I kept that morning of the original LATimes piece.

Then thud. A check at other outlets found dramatically different news.

China did something newsworthy, but not that.  The Times’s original version is still on line but now it has a “For the Record” correction inserted in it . The paper ran a correction the next day in the printed issue.

This is one example of the intense nightmares that can befall people in the news business when they wake up. Pierson and Tankersley have been covering climate change and policy for quite awhile. They say they know -  and that seems utterly likely -  exactly what China’s government did and wrote it accordingly. Which is that it said it would reduce carbon intensity by 40 percent in the next decade. That may sound the same, but it is not the same, as emissions. It means that it will stretch the carbon it does burn, via efficiency improvement, to get a lot more bang for its yuan (or renminbi, but who calls Chinese currency by its right name?). Over the next ten years it hopes its economy outgrows the improved efficiency. Hence its emissions might go UP. Some say the goal is merely business as usual as new equipment goes in. The Bush administration was good at taking credit for the increased carbon intensity it promised merely by extending trend lines into the future.

In what only underscores the error, the LATimes ran on the front page with its initial version a little comparison info box, equating President Obama’s goal of decreasing US carbon emission 17 percent by 2020 unfavorably to China’s 40 percent vow. The story itself, deeper, reveals the two reporters do know the difference between carbon emissions and carbon intensity. Apparently editors tidied up the lede a bit, threw in a dramatic hed and that graphic illus, and poof, like that, millions of readers were led astray and two reporters turned the air (at a guess) a distinct shade of blue.

Lesson: Define clearly anything that might be misconstrued before filing copy. Send a memo. Anticipate what the copy desk or other editors – particularly the holiday crew – might make of it. Otherwise you might pick up the paper the next morning (or fire up the NYT app on the smart phone) and blow coffee all over the table upon seeing how your story got handled.

No sense doing a full wrap-up on the news as reported elsewhere, but here are two examples:

• Wall St. Journal – Jeffrey Ball, Shai Oster: China, US Square Off on Climate Proposals ; Ironically, the Journal had some corrections, appended to this copy, to make of its own.
• Times (UK) – Jane Macartney: China announced first greenhouse gas target ;

One can hardly forgive the Times’s error but gaffes like that do happen among good people. To stress that point, here is a sample, from the same edition, of the paper’s recent and excellent enviro-climate coverage.

• Edmund Sanders: Kenyans draw weapons over shrinking resources ; An enterprise story of pastoralists and farmers going at it it with AK-47s as rains fail. The lede: “Have the climate wars of Africa begun?” That’s plural – Sanders cites Darfur as number one, with Kenya’s spreading violence the second. The illus that accompanies the story is haunting. Saunders has visited this general topic previously and recently: Oct. 25: Fleeing drought in the Horn of Africa.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Spanish and German scientists had three interconnected papers in Science last week. They reveal in great detail protein complexes, metabolic patterns and ARN expression in Mycoplasma pneumoniae. The bacteria have one of the smallest genomes known among free-living organisms. The big discovery is that by all these three measures, it is much more complex than the researchers expected. A well-done story in La Vanguardia explains what these findings mean to the field of Synthetic Biology.

Si un investigador de tu país publica 3 artículos científicos en el mismo número de la revista Science, sabes que debes hablar sobre ello en tu medio. Pero puede ocurrir que empieces a leer la nota de prensa, y sea uno de esos temas complejísimos que no sabes por donde abordar. Tienes varias opciones; desde esconderte, a tomarlo como un reto y demostrar qué significa ser un periodista especializado.

Una situación parecida se ha vivido en la prensa española con la publicación por científicos locales de un completísimo trabajo en el que se describía el funcionamiento completo de una de las bacterias más simples que existen, el Mycoplasma pneumoniae, que causa neumonía en humanos. La investigación es notoria por varias razones, pero el tema es denso, muy denso. ¿Qué hacer? Puedes ignorarlo, como han hecho algunos medios. Otra opción es copiar la nota de prensa sin demasiadas variaciones, como hizo El País en un texto bastante complejo. También puedes intentar simplificar y hacer una nota cortita para por lo menos dejar claro al lector cuál es el descubrimiento principal de la investigación, como hizo en Público Nuño Domínguez, explicando que a pesar de ser una bacteria procariota muy sencilla y con sólo 689 genes, el metabolismo del M. pneumoniae es muchísimo más complejo de lo que se podía esperar, e incluso llega a emular en algunos aspectos al de las eucariotas. Esta inesperada complejidad de un organismo tan sencillo es lo más destacado de este trabajo que ha analizado la bacteria a tres niveles: el transcriptoma (todas las moléculas de ARNm producidas por el ADN), el metaboloma (todas las reacciones metabólicas en su interior), y el proteoma (identificar cada proteína producida por la bacteria). Pero hay más. En El Mundo, Rosa Tristán se salta los detalles técnicos sobre la investigación y va directa a su utilidad práctica: buscar una “píldora” con vida, son sus palabras. Desvelar el secreto de la vida es un gran reto intelectual, pero esta investigación se enmara en el campo de la biología sintética cuyo objetivo es diseñar organismos vivos con las funciones que deseemos, en un grado muy superior a la ingeniería genética convencional.

Y aquí es donde encontramos la mejor cobertura de este asunto, realizada en La Vanguardia por Josep Corbella: “La biología entra en una nueva era” parece un titular ligeramente exagerado, pero contextualiza perfectamente qué significa esta investigación, y da paso a una serie de textos en los que se ahonda en el asunto. En “Más allá del genoma” (texto íntegro en esta versión online), Josep Corbella empieza contundente: “Todos aquellos que pensaron que el genoma aportaría la respuesta a los grandes problemas de la medicina y la biología humana se equivocaron”, explicando que si algo ha quedado claro durante la última década, es que la información del genoma por si sola es bastante pobre para pretender entender el funcionamiento celular. Según Corbella, así lo demuestra la quiebra de la empresa Decode Genetics, que  a pesar de haber descubierto decenas de características genéticas relacionadas con enfermedades no consiguió desarrollar ni un solo fármaco útil a partir de sus descubrimientos. Esta complejidad celular a menudo subestimada (y demostrada por el trabajo de los investigadores españoles y alemanes) es la mala noticia. La buena es que entender los requisitos mínimos en el funcionamiento completo de un ser vivo nos servirá para modificar esta estructura básica creando organismos que puedan sernos de utilidad médica.

El trabajo del equipo dirigido por  Luis Serrano, del Centre de Regulació Genòmica (CRG) en Barcelona no marca una nueva era en la biología. En absoluto. Pero sí es un paso muy importante dentro del novedoso y revolucionario campo de la biología sintética. Y bien merece una tercera nota de Josep Corbella titulada “hat-trick científico”, en la que se habla de la carrera internacional de este investigador, y las claves de su retorno a España.

- Pere Estupinyà

Tomorrow – Thursday, Nov. 26 – is Thanksgiving Holiday in the US and therefore, as we take Friday off too, there won’t be much if any new stuff on ksjtracker till next Monday.  Happy Thanksgiving all of you here in Yankee Doodle Dandy land and equally to all of you among the 44% of our readers in other lands (fyi, our readers, in rank order for the first ten after the US, are from Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia, Spain, Netherlands, Switzerland, Sweden, and India with scores of more nations on the list).

The Tracker was planning a round up of several stories about turkeys. But one is so good it will do. It is like a junior high school report, except that it’s by a grown-up, thorough reporter. You all probably remember the style. State a fact (or what sure looks like one). State another one. Then the next one. Keep on going. Use a lot of declarative sentences. Transitions need not appear. Don’t confuse readers with complex imagery, roundabout syntax, or efforts at jokes (the story below  does essay some sly humor re the alleged stupidity of turkeys).  After reading this, I know a lot more about turkeys.

It’s by a reporter at a little paper in the hills inland and north of San Francisco and not far from where we live. At the moment, however, Mr. and Mrs. Tracker are with a daughter, son, son-in-law, and three grandchildren near Disneyland. A butterball totally non-wild, almost surely factory-raised and not particularly well-treated-when-it-was-alive turkey is in the fridge while onions and other stuffing stuff are made ready.There are cranberries too. Another mother-in- law will bring mashed potatoes. A brother-in-law of daughter and his new wife have pie duty. Carrots and green beans are on view. Mrs. Tracker is chopping things. Everything at hand is good. Thank you very much.

• Lake County Record-Bee – Terry Knight: Domesticated, wild turkeys have little in common ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker this morning happened on a lively piece at DiscoveryNews by Irene Klotz, called Lightning’s gamma rays may destroy matter. The news is that, earlier this month, users of NASA’s Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope reported at a meeting that – while mainly gazing into deep space – they picked up bursts of gamma rays from Earth’s atmosphere. Their spectra suggest they arise from the decay of positrons, and those in turn are the debris from energies so intense that subatomic particles fly around (Tracker is too lame to look anything up, hence the vagueness of that). And that’s not the sort of thing that happens often on Earth outside of big accelerators, or at least so it was thought.

Neat story, and The Tracker figured this has gotta be a scoop or I’d have heard about it before. But not so. For one, hints of such gamma rays have been around for more than ten years, but not with the positron antimatter angle. More important, this specific bit of weird physics antimatter-related data has been making low-key news for weeks. But it has not made the wires or other major services, near as I can tell. Klotz gives the news the well-rounded composition that it merits. But one or two outlets did jump on it already.

And the Bing, Google, and by Golly Search Says:

• Science News – Ron Cowen (Nov. 6 via Wired Science): Signature of Antimatter Detected in Lightning ; Also in SNews’s hardcopy Dec. 5 issue.
• Symmetry Magazine – Calla Cofield (Nov 6) : Antimatter from lightning flashes the Fermi space telescope ; This is Fermilab’s and SLAC’s trade magazine, but includes a very tidy explanation of what’s new in this, and what has been surmised before about so-called Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes, or TGFs.

Grist for the Mill:

• 2009 Fermi Symposium abstract: Fermi-GBM Obsservations of Terrestrial Gamma-ray Flashes.
• 2008 NASA Press Release on another satellite, more on TGFs.

- Charlie Petit

The beat goes on as media hunch up to cover the Copenhagen talks (even if it’s become unlikely to do much beyond set a date perhaps to get something tough done). The AP and BBC in particular rolled out two hefty enterprise yarns.

• AP – John Heilprin : CO2 curve ticks upward as key climate talks loom ; This, one infers, stems in part from a journalism workshop/fellowship at Honolulu’s East-West Center. He starts off on the slope of Mauna Loa, at the climate observatory that keeps the globe’s best record of CO2. Tracker learned something – unlike a recent post where I asserted it’s hit 390 ppm, says here I’m way off. That’ll happen in a few months. He fills it out with broad perspective and glum expectations from scientists. The lede refers to a “troubling upward curve.” The last line says, “…it’s going to stay there for thousands of years.”
• BBC – Michael Hirst, Kate McGeown: Rising sea levels: A tale of two cities ; More of a report than polemic or yarn, the package offers a summary of sea level worries up front, then visits to two cities with a common problem but drastically different plans and means to deal with it – Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and Maputo in Mozambique. Read the section called “adaptation.” One nation is building schools with strong roofs – to hold people during floods. The other is building monster barriers so the floods may not come.

A few other stray climate stories for the day:

• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Climate change quickens, seas feared up 2 meters ;
• Reuters – Dina Zayed: Climate change to hit water-scarce Arab world hard ;
• Reuters – Stuart Grudgings : Amazon forest schemes await strong climate pact ; Or, a visit to the other end of your carbon offset. Fine, evocative, atmospheric lead vignette.
• AP – Julie Pace : Obama to outline US climate goals at Copenhagen ; This heavily covered news, which broke this morning, may get its ledes from the President’s plan to be there but the real news is that Obama plans to vow, with or without legislation, a  cut in US fossil carbon emissions below 2005′s level that will reach 17 percent by 2020.

Meanwhile….another kind of worst case scenario.

• Fox News – John Lott: WhyYou Should Be Hot and Bothered About ‘Climate-gate” ; If you’ve wondered how an economist who wrote “Freedomnomics” sums up the Univ. of East Anglia emails, here it is.

Grist for the Mill: COP15 Copenhagen official site ;

- Charlie Petit

In New Scientist its former editor in chief, Alun Anderson, essays on the past and future Arctic with an expert’s eye. He starts with only a thin faint knell of foreboding, in a reminiscence of a polar bear he met as a postdoc aboard a research vessel years ago, he works through well-observed if somewhat standard signs of change and how they will work out; writing like the pro he is he works the reader into sharing his vision of a world coming to evermore abundant life – yet also a drum-pounding scene of death.

The punch in the face is just a short section, a surmise really, that makes sense (and while this is primarily essay, he does cite an authority to give his speculation some heft). As the climate changes, so will the wildlife. The new creatures up there will be, The Tracker appreciates fully only after reading this, familiar ones to us. Salmon and haddock – and killer whales with bold dorsal fins slicing through the nigh-iceless main. Polar bears, walruses, beluga, narwhal? Fade, fade, fade. One can extend his musings. Adios ringed seals on the floes, ditto for harp seals that no Greenpeace campaign may save from the clubbing of the new maritime regime. Fin whales and blues may find a new place to prosper. Gray’s will frequent the whole Arctic shelf. But what of the bowhead? Sigh.

Be thankful to have lived when the old Arctic could still be glimpsed – if you can put up with the collective guilt.

Pic: Ocas off Antarctica, photo by Jeanne Cato, NSF ; source;

- Charlie Petit

One quickly gets over a first suspicion that Cornelia Dean scored a soft assignment to visit a tropical paradise for an eco-tourism semi-vacation writing and frolicking assignment. She lands the lead spot in the section following a trip to what she describes as an impoverished, decidedly non-luxury, and polluted town on the Dominican Republic’s coast. Invasive species are even mucking up the waterways. But, she writes, it has enormous geographic appeal as a potential tourist hot spot. The story is one of environmental tactics for handling with grace an almost certain wave of change. Locals and rather academic outsiders are trying to find a way to bring in tourists without, one gathers, the town’s own people being shoved aside and left dispirited by developers, giant hotels, and private beaches while limited to marginalized jobs as maids, trinket sellers, and tour guides in a place they can barely recognize anymore. Success, she writes, is no sure thing.

Other notable headlines:

• Sean B. Carroll (noted biologist): In Snails and Snakes, Features to Delight Darwin ; A fascinating and well-done look into biology and evolution’s convoluted dance. (By the way, and pertinent to a post Paul Raeburn put in a short scroll down on NYTimes puzzlements, and on which I put an overlong comment, Professor Carroll does a great job but quotes no authority other than Darwin and he cites few others. It’s a newspaper story, but not typical news reporting. )
• Natalie Angier : The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness ; Oxytocin and  Thanksgiving ( and the way a few molecules can seriously upset one’s vain belief in one’s free will and cool logic).
• Nicholas Wade - Museum Is Displaying Treasures of the Other Evolution Pioneer ; The treasured but long-unappreciated chest of specimens gathered by Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin’s fellow discoverer of natural selection, are going on view. He tells the back story well (One must note that it’s been told before. As by Joel Achenbach at Wapost.)
• Kenneth Chang – How Hummingbirds Get Their Nectar With Tiny ‘Straws’: One of several briefs for The Observatory roundup. Its basic news – how animals manage to sip through teeny straws – as it happens has another illus circulating but this one involves butterflies: AIP/EurekAlert Press Release ;
• Pam Belluck – Sounds During Sleep May Aid Memory, Study Says ; One of the more surprising articles. But no, one can’t receive instruction very effectively while asleep, her sources say. But one may be prodded into cementing better the things one sort-of just learned while awake.

As usual, much more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Many of us on the science beat have bit time and again on entrepreneurial efforts to build cheap space ships that aim to usher in a new and genuine space age for the rest of us. Most come to nothing, and those that don’t start getting pricy. But maybe, huh? And for those of us who follow these things, one of the big kahunas who has eluded press inquiry most successfully is the Blue Origin project based near Seattle with testing grounds in Texas. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos has nurtured it for years while providing hardly any detail.

This morning a few outlets, most prominently MSNBC thanks to the CosmicLog site with Alan Boyle at the helm, brings word that the venture has announced selection of three research payloads for what could be its niche-market entry into full-on commercial space exploration. Its first rockets will be suborbital, vertical take-off and landing jobs, rather reminiscent of Pete Conrad’s old DC-X thing that flew over New Mexico in the 1990s. As reporteda year or two ago by several outlets it calls the prototype, now making test flights, New Shepard. Boyle’s piece includes some context, including a list of some other small companies hoping to do roughly the same thing.

Other stories:

• Orlando Business Journal: UCF experiment to fly on new rocket ship;
• Space.com – Leonard David: Jeff Bezos’s Secretive Rocket Program Picks Science Projects ;

Grist for the Mill:

Blue Origin Opportunities for Research announcement ;

Univ. Central Florida Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

This is more like it. The Large Hadron Collider is getting the sort of coverage in keeping with merely turning the thing on. After two episodes in the last year or two of slavering and long curtain raisers by writers utterly blown away by the machine’s physical grandeur, we’re getting tidy stories saying it seems to work. It is a bit like the commissioning of the first of a new class of aircraft carrier. It’s news, but the heart of the event itself is that it floats, doesn’t sag at the stern or bow, the screw turns, elevators work, the whistle toots. It hasn’t however as yet stifled a war by sheer threat or defeated any on-coming enemy armadas. A throng has written that the LHC seems to be floating this time – more precisely, the protons go around, they respond to increased urge from the magnets and electrical coils, and they can be made to hit one another head on. So, in a pro forma exercise pending news that this cathedral of high energy physics and natural philosophy has found a Higgs boson (or, better, something completely unexpected …. or has found nothing at all despite working perfectly), which will merit extravagant headlines and column inches, here  is… A sampling of the latest coverage:

• AP – Alexander B. Higgins: Big Bang atom smasher starts speeding proton beams ; Must give pride of place to a reporter whose very byline sends a resonant shiver down one’s synapses, prepping one to expect a reference to the elusive Higgs. But he doesn’t do it – perhaps because he does not have to.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Collisions at LHC! Tevatron record to be broken soon? ; Quite aside from a hed evoking competitive tension, Page is in full-on overheated Brit speak mode here. How can one not relish such concoctions as “since…an unfortunate electro-burnout liquid helium superfluid explosion mishap, top boffins have toiled like gnomes in tunnels buried deep…” and so extravagantly on. Do read it. It is a light but introspective look into the heart of journalism as seen from the “particle-punisher desk” and a clean look at LHC’s agenda.
• Reuters – Jason Rhodes: Big Bang machine achieves first particle collisions;  One wonders who first dubbed it the big bang machine. A publicist, or news writer? ; Rhodes suggests, while not quite saying so, that it will be coming to full power in the next few months. Other reports are that, pending rewiring of critical circuits, full power may take a year or more.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Near Geneva, Particles Finally Come Together With a Bang ; He writes, “Call it first bang,” and neatly tells us that this time the commissioning is going surprisingly quickly and smoothly. The news is reported comfortably inside the front section – not even in the science section.
• AFP: Success for Large Hadron Collider as first atom smashed ; Smashed an atom, huh? Technically, a proton is an ionized hydrogen atom. An anti-proton, that’d be a stretch. The hed, one guesses, is one that the writer did not write.
• Times (UK) – Mark Henderson: “Big bang’ machine achieves its first particle collisions ;
• Christian Science Monitor (blog) Pete Spotts: Large hadron collider awakens after long repair outage ; No hyperventilation from Spotts – but it is light and to the point and, in its bloggy way, links to archived stories with more detail.
• …. could go on all morning….Let me know if any particularly astounding stories remain that ought to be recognized.
• Oh, one more: AAAS Science Insider – Adrian Cho: Physicists Back Where They Started As Supercollider About to Circulate Beams ; Written a few days ago, before the beams circulated, but it does bring us up to speed on the status of legal challenges from those worried that a mini black hole will drift from the LHC to the Earth’s core and doom us. And in the comments is a link to two German chemists’ explanation why they think so (yes, it’s dense).

Eventual Big Science story angle department: The Tracker needs not be clever to predict that, if the Higgs with its mass-manifesting scalar field shows up, its eponym Peter Higgs of the UK will be on the short list of speculation for a Nobel. But there are, a quick check shows, half a dozen scientists who did seminal work leading to today’s rendition of the Higgs hypothesis. So that’ll be a tangle – who gets a prize from a committee that so far hasn’t ever split it more than three ways? (Plus, how to recognize the boson’s discoverers, should it occur – there will be perhaps hundreds of  author names, many of them big cheese PIs, on the paper).

- Charlie Petit