According to a study presented Monday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting, “heart disease patients who practice TM [Transcendental Meditation] have almost 50% lower rates of heart attacks, stroke and deaths compared to similar patients who don’t practice meditation.” That’s from Shari Roan on the Los Angeles Times blog, Booster Shots.

I bet you can guess where I’m going with this. That 50 percent drop represents what–100 heart attacks in the control group and 50 in the meditators? Or two in the control group, and one in the meditators? Roan doesn’t say.

I wasn’t at the heart association meeting this year, so I went to the press release from the Medical College of Wisconsin. There I found the following bullet point: “A 47 percent reduction in the combination of death, heart attacks, and strokes in the participants.” But no actual numbers. (While I’m at it, why say “almost 50%,” as Roan did, when 47% is more accurate–and shorter?)

Roan also backs into her story, beginning by telling us that TM is one of the most studied meditation techniques, and the new work adds to the evidence that it’s helpful. But she never tells us what those earlier studies said. She does include a few words on a separate study that found TM-associated reductions in blood pressure in college students.

There is no evidence that she interviewed anyone from either study. She evidently rewrote the releases. That might be excusable for a blogger who lives on 50-cent refills and free wireless at Starbuck’s, but it’s hard to justify from the LA Times.

Jue Wang of the AAAS news service ScienceNow provided more detail on the study, but still did not say how many heart attacks and strokes occurred in the experimental group and control group. Wang did helpfully include comment from others who were apparently not involved in the research.

Most other news outlets ignored it. The story has only scattered presence on Google health news. I’m not terribly surprised by that. I suspect fewer news organizations are sending reporters to the heart association in these difficult financial times. And perhaps many science and medical reporters were too cynical and skeptical to spend time on this, especially while they are swamped with mammography this week.

But this study was done with a $3.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. That’s a lot of money, and we should be paying attention to how it’s spent. Besides, this seems to be a legit study, and it offers hope of a relatively easy and inexpensive way to prevent a lot of heart disease. At this moment, the Congressional Budget Office is calculating the costs of health reform. Shouldn’t we be reporting on research that could potentially affect those costs?

- Paul Raeburn

Grist: Medical College of Wisconsin press release; Maharishi University of Management release.

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Many Spanish language newspapers have mentioned controversy in US about guidelines proposing to postpone mammograms from 40 to 50 years old. Only a few have included data about the situation in their own countries. One exception is found in Spain, where recommendations have already been to start screening at 50 (for the low risk population), and do it every 2 years.

Ayer todos los medios estadounidenses discutían la polémica recomendación de que las mujeres sin antecedentes familiares de cáncer de mama, retrasen el inicio de sus mamografías a los 50 años. El papel de expertos que realizó el informe aseguró empezar a los 40 años es innecesario, y puede ser contraproducente. La sociedad americana del cáncer se ha posicionado en contra de esta recomendación, argumentando que la detección temprana es la mejor arma contra el cáncer. En Infobae se puede leer un buen resumen, y algunos otros medios han tomado notas de agencias o realizado traducciones. ¿Traducciones? ¿No merece una noticia como ésta incluir, al menos, unas líneas sobre la situación específica en el país? Obvio que sí, y algunos periódicos lo han hecho, pero muchos menos de lo que sería deseable .

La mejor pieza la firma MJ Pérez – Barco “El dilema de las mamografías”, en ABC (Esp). Explica la polémica en EEUU, y que en España las autoridades sanitarias ya aconsejaban empezar los controles a partir de los 50 años, salvo que se detecten antes problemas. Para no confundir al lector, el artículo muy bien empieza con un tajante “Entre los oncólogos y autoridades sanitarias españolas no hay lugar a dudas: la mamografía es la prueba diagnóstica más eficaz para detectar precozmente la aparición de un cáncer de mama”. Luego se puntualiza que quizás o es necesario empezar tan pronto como a los 40 años, y que la verdadera preocupación en España es que el 30% de las mujeres mayores de 50 años no se hacen mamografías, a pesar de ser el tumor más frecuente en España. Muy buena reacción de MJ Pérez a la noticia de EEUU, incluyendo declaraciones de expertos españoles.

La Voz de Galicia titula “El último informe sobre las mamografías da la razón a España respecto a la selección de edad”, en un artículo que concluye: “Antes de los 50 años, el pecho de la mujer es más denso y por tanto la mamografía resulta menos útil en estos casos, pues da muchos falsos positivos que solo se aclaran a través de las estresantes biopsias”.

El Mundo (Esp), por medio de Laura Tardío ofrece muy completo artículo en el que recomienda las mamografías cada dos años, también para evitar falsos positivos que conduzcan a biopsias innecesarias.

La Nación (Argentina) traduce el artículo del New York Times, y añade una nota diciendo que en Argentina se recomiendo empezar las mamografías a los 40 años, y los expertos locales opinan que debe continuar así, para evitar que la detección llegue tarde.

La Nación (Paraguay) da un buen resumen del estudio y la polémica. No ofrece demasiados detalles sobre su país, pero transmite que su Ministerio de Salud apuesta por la detección precoz.

En El Periódico (Guatemala) Diana Choc preguntó a un experto local cuya opinión difiere de las estadounidenses, y una radióloga que incluso aconseja empezarlas a los 35 años.

El Espectador (Colombia) se salta la controversia y titula directamente “Recomiendan hacer menos mamografías” en su espacio “Vivir”. Ni siquiera cita las voces contrarias a la recomendación de retrasar las mamografías, y transmite a sus lectoras un peligroso mensaje.

El Nacional (Venezuela) también utiliza sólo agencias, pero por lo menos incluye las opiniones contrarias, balancea muy bien la información, y cita una frase que El Espectador debería haber considerado, (y que sin duda hizo MJ Pérez de ABC a tenor del inicio de su artículo): “Lo que nos preocupa es que, como resultado de esa confusión, las mujeres opten por no someterse nunca a las mamografías. Y eso, para mí, sería un problema grave”

– Pere Estupinyà

A month ago, Gina Kolata had an exclusive front-page story in The New York Times saying that the American Cancer Society was secretly revising its guidelines on screening for breast and prostate cancer. As I noted in a post at the time, the American Cancer Society denied any such stealth plan.

Kolata’s exclusive, at least regarding breast cancer, now looks misguided. The government’s announcement this week that women in their 40s should no longer get mammograms has provoked widespread controversy and argument.

But contrary to what Kolata predicted, the American Cancer Society has not changed its guidelines. It has vigorously defended them.

Meanwhile, the news is full of predictable reaction stories this morning–nobody much likes the new guidelines. The Washington Post instead produced a very nice piece putting the controversy in context. Who remembered that the same recommendation was proposed in 1997, with similar consequences? Kudos to Dan Eggen and Rob Stein.

- Paul Raeburn

Do you know whether women in their 40s should have routine mammograms? A lot of our colleagues think they do.

Tuesday’s papers carried stories on new guidelines issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force that suggest that women in their 40s should no longer have routine mammograms, that women over 50 should have mammograms every two years, not annually, and that women should no longer be encouraged to examine their own breasts.

It’s not the last word on the subject; the American Cancer Society, among others, disagrees. As with most things in science, certainty is elusive, so researchers do the best they can with the evidence they have.

Some reporters and writers are not nearly so careful.

On the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton summarizes the findings and throws around statistics, but she prejudices her story from the start. The news is wrapped around the story of a 42-year-old woman whose cancer was caught early by a routine mammogram, and who pleads with doctors not to throw away this useful tool. Ashton did not show us a woman who endured months or years of uncertainty and turmoil because of a false positive.

If that weren’t enough, Ashton goes rogue and tells us herself that the guidelines are bunk. ”As a medical professional,” she tells Couric, “I can understand the statistical thinking …but I think I’m going to have a hard time recommending that they don’t get screening.”

At Forbes, Mary Ellen Egan also knows better than the experts. In a piece headlined “Breast Cancer Screening: The Wrong Message,” she calls the guidelines “a dangerous precedent.” Sure, screening in women in their 40s might not save many lives, she writes, but “what if you’re that one woman whose life is spared? What if that one woman is your wife, your mother or your daughter?”

Adam Tschorn, in a Los Angeles Times blog, tells us where to buy $14.99 T-shirts protesting the new guidelines, and gives us this: “Anyone who has suffered through breast cancer — or had a loved one who has — will probably tell you that performing 1,900 preventive mammograms to save the life of one woman isn’t too big a hurdle.” Any word from the 1,900 who had mammograms for nothing, some of whom tearfully–and wrongly–told their husbands and children they had cancer? Not from Tschorn.

I’m not arguing against opinion pieces, or saying that we shouldn’t be able to discuss the pros and cons of the new guidelines in our copy. But this isn’t the way to do it.

For an example of a ruminative, personal piece that works well, check out the excellent blog post by Deborah Kotz on the US News website. Kotz turns 40 next year, and she wonders, in the post, whether she should get a mammogram. She notes that the American Cancer Society disagrees with the new guidelines. She informs her speculation with reporting, and concludes with “we have a complex decision to make about when to start mammography—40 or 50? I’m still uncertain, though I’m leaning towards waiting.” She’s tentative in her conclusion, and she never claims to know more than the people she’s interviewing.

Others:

David Olmos of Bloomberg tells it straight: “Annual mammograms for most women in their 40s have more drawbacks than benefits, said a panel of U.S. doctors that recommended women wait until age 50 to start getting breast cancer screening tests every two years.”

Liz Szabo at USA Today: “Most women don’t need to get mammograms until they reach age 50, according to a controversial new report that recommends that far fewer women undergo the breast cancer screenings.”

Alice Park at Time: “Most women don’t need to get mammograms until they reach age 50, according to a controversial new report that recommends that far fewer women undergo the breast cancer screenings.”

Julie Steenhuysen at Reuters: “Sweeping new U.S. breast cancer guidelines released on Monday recommend against routine mammograms for women in their 40s, but several groups immediately rebelled against the recommendations.”

- Paul Raeburn

Reading along through Denise Grady‘s section lead on experimental, direct-application of drugs to glioblastoma tumors – threaded there by microcatheter via the femoral artery and subsequent branchings – one is pleased to read that the key drug is Avastin which in turn is an angiogenesis inhibitor. This is reassuring because, while such things hardly have been the revolutionary drugs that were briefly expected after Dr. Judah Folkman gained immense publicity while proclaiming their potential some ten years ago, they are finding application. Grady does not dwell at all on that. But she attempts the near- impossible: to not unduly raise hopes – not quite false hopes, but very slim ones – while writing in a positive tone about one front where some progress is being made against this devastating brain tumor. Her story again and again says it’s too soon to know if the doctors are on to something big – but it also says more than once that in early trials the scary bright spots in brain scans tend, at least for awhile, to vanish. But what she does say of Avastin is that what is needed are even better drugs.

Below the fold on the front page John Tierney in his Findings column sifts through the international antiquities theft and trade industry. The story’s axis is that Egyptian swashbuckler in the cowboy hat, Zahi Hawass, head of his nation’s Supreme Council of Antiquities. The story raises vital issues about why and whether nations, on whose territory somebody who belonged to a very different culture  made something nice thousands of years ago, still have locked-tight legal right to said relics no matter where they are housed now or pretty much regardless of how they got there. But it’s also largely about Hawass. Alert readers will know what’s coming next – for even more on this smart and smooth operator, check out the superb New Yorker article on him by Ian Parker, entitled The Pharoah (and from which this little thumbnail was lifted). You may have to pay to get that full article, or go borrow an issue from a friend or head to the library.

Other notable headlines:

• Kenneth Chang: Scientist at Work – Nathan Myhrvold: After Microsoft, Bringing a High-Tech Eye to Professional Kitchens ; Holy Crepe! Chang totally buries the lede, or else like a dessert he saved the best for last. Which is confit cooking is utter overkill, baseless in rationale, and its effect can be achieved much more simply. This is the one story in the section which The Tracker found a complete surprise. Didn’t know what sous vide or confit meant before reading this, and not what molecular gastronomy is either. But if you want to know and to see what happens when a lot of brains combines with a lot of money to pursue a complex hobby while employing vastly entertaining gadgetry – this is the thing to read.
• Dennis Overbye : Is Doomsday Coming? Perhaps, but Not in 2012 ; Overbye eschews condescending outrage that anybody would mistake movies and Maya calendars for prophecy, and just has a good time.
• Guy Gugliotta: An Air-Traffic Upgrade to Improve Travel by Plane ; Another gadget and technology lover’s kind of story.

As usual, lots more, whole section;

- Charlie Petit

Out in the side halls of the debate, such as it is, over global warming is the issue of CO2 fertilization. That is, aside from warming things up and turning oceans more acid, CO2 can stimulate plant growth (unless their growth is squelched by some other nutrient or water shortage). Ergo, CO2 good, IPCC bad.

Now along comes news that one iconic species, the Bristlecone pine tree of which some individuals are thousands of years old, appears to be putting on growth rings now that are fatter than any they’ve ever been before. Soon’s I saw the headlines I thought CO2 Fertilization by golly!!

Or, maybe not. The lead hypothesis, it appears, is that it’s simply gotten warmer, and hence more hospitable for the trees, high in the White Mountains along the California-Nevada border and in other Great Basin peaks where they grow.

Anyway, a few outlets jumped on the news given extra prominence by press releases including one from the National Science Foundation (in Grist below).The formal publication, by researchers at the universities of Arizona, or Western Washington, and Minnesota, is in the Proceedings of the Nat’l Acad. of Sciences. Which I just looked at as I write. The news stories below don’t say very much about CO2 fertilization but the paper does. It calls it an unlikely cause. The growth spurt is restricted to the uppermost part of the trees’ range. Temp changes are distinct there, not so for CO2.

In fact, the paper has far more ifs and maybes and other qualifiers than does the press release. But its authors are emphatic: at and near treeline the late 20th century has seen bristlecone pine growth rings of unprecedented width. And they looked at more than 20,000 rings.

Stories:

• Arizona Daily Star- Tom Beal: Tree Growth Faster At Higher Elevations / Rapid Warming Cited ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Bristlecone growth may reflect global warming ; Perlman cites another phenomenon in his lede – coral growth – which as it happens is topic of another post a few items down. Story is written by a man who has looked at bristlecones himself, back when they were younger, and who called the PNAS paper’s editor, a Stanford man, for more detail.
• Redding Record Searchlight – Doug Craig: Meanwhile, Some Trees are Thriving ;  This tiny paper gives the story a nice ride, but mainly by rewriting (with citation) the version in New Scientist.
• New Scientist – Shanta Barley : Climate change gives ancient trees growth spurt ; Barley gets a distinct angle – by growing faster the old trees may be flirting with a quicker demise. But there’s a big maybe on that.

Grist for the Mill:

NSF Press Release ; Univ. of Arizona Press Release ; PNAS paper ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker recently got access to the newsletters that Energy and Environment Publishing sends out to subscribers in return for a hefty price. Most of them contain serious journalism, heavily reported, and within a business model that will never work for true mass media (see “hefty price”). But they offer  encouraging evidence that the internet is not always fatal to old line publishers who cannot survive without profit. (And one of its writers, Lisa Friedman, is winner of the on line category among this year’s AAAS Kavli science journalism awards)

Today one of those newsletters, ClimateWire, has an intriguing write up by staffer Annie Jia. She went to a meeting underway in Washington DC: the 3rd Annual Behavior, Energy and Climate Change Conference. Her hed: People are irrational about climate, but teachable.  I can’t link to the whole thing, but will update this post if I can get an open link sprung for me by the publisher. (*UPDATE, we got it, the previous headline link should take you to Jia’s story. ) It’s a well done report with insights useful for understanding why the hell so many people are too dumb to see that anthropogenic climate change is real and a crisis, and others are too dumb to see it’s either a fraud or too far down the priority list to matter.

However, it led me to look for any other coverage of the meeting. I found just one, a blog, well-crafted, with its own twist on the meeting’s news. It’s at theenergycollective website, by Marc Gunther: What’s for lunch? Behavioral economics meets climate change. He refers to one narrow aspect of the meeting, and will, so to speak, presumably be reporting in further posts on the meat of the meeting. But this one is about meat, the kind one eats, and the irrational but predictable ways that diners’ choices of meaty or vegetarian lunches can be manipulated. It’s all about choice, and about the perverse ways we make them.

And what a wandering trail led to this post!

Grist for the Mill: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy Behavior, Energy & Climate Change Conference.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker is not exactly looking forward to December 6-18, the days in Copenhagen that will see the world’s nations discussing, shouting about, and perhaps obligating themselves to action against carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. The news rush will be impossible for any single site to digest daily. Already, the flow of advance stories, most of them on the pessimistic side for those wanting vigorous mandatory action, is daunting. Climate policy devotees can glue themselves to any of several specialized rss news feeds or sites that will be more comprehensive than anything this site might do.

But I can keep an eye out for outlier or well-focussed stories that deal with specifics, or refer in some way to fresh science, or otherwise make the broad issues more vivid.

One such is on the wires and feeds today. It concerns Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. It has nothing new in general terms. However it does have some governmental proclamations of urgency along with numbers that, while loose, concentrate attention.

The news is that a huddle of respected Australian reef and climate experts told Parliament there is a 50 percent chance that the immense string of coral shallows off the nation’s east coast will suffer mass death and ecological pauperization unless global CO2 emissions fall by 25 percent in just the next ten years or so (and 90 percent by 2050).  The domestic message is that if Australia itself – a major emitter per capita if not in absolute quantities – cannot do its part, its citizens have no business complaining if the rest of the world does not make a serious effort.

The announcement provides press, particularly in Australia, a pivot point on which to mount a review of efforts to set up, or block,  a cap and trade program to get started toward such goals. The arguments over legislation are much the same as one hears in the US, Europe, and elsewhere – and the bill in play would only aim to cut emissions 5% by 2020.

Stories:

• Reuters – Amy Pyett : Great Barrier Reef survival “requires 25pct CO2 cut” ; Cuts won’t be cheap – but the story mentions that the reef brings in $5.4 billion annually from fishing, tourism, and recreation. One wonders how many of those dollars are from Australian tourists – most of which would just get spent elsewhere in the economy were there no reef to visit.
• ABC News (Australia) : Academic warns of Barrier Reef emissions threat ; Rather mild, generic hed for such a dire proclamation.
• Canberra Times – James Massola: Climate experts give reef 50/50 chance ; A sly, brief hed – a reader might think 50/50 is the bad news only to learn from the story itself that it is the best case scenario. Given the report’s assumptions, actual odds are lower. The story gets into the “high moral ground” that Australia might occupy at Copenhagen and subsequent climate negotiations.
• Telegraph (UK) Bonnie Malkin, datelined Sydney: Great Barrier Reef “will die” unless carbon emissions slashed ; Best hed of the bunch, with proper use of qualifying punctuation ;
• AAP via Brisabane Times: Barrier Reef needs emissions cuts of 25% by 2020 ;

Grist for the Mill: University of Queensland Press Release ;

That press release has a round number in it of another sort. It says atmospheric CO2 has now hit 390 parts per million. The Tracker has had 370 somehow cemented in the brain for awhile now – but of course it jiggidy-jags its way up, year after year. It was 370 just 10 years ago. It was around 340 when I first began reporting on it. Keeling curve source.

- Charlie Petit

A huge splash of news stories reported late Friday on NASA’s revelation that its disappointingly unspectacular plunge of a booster rocket, followed closely by an instrumented probe, into the moon last month did in fact turn out solid science. Or, more accurately, it showed that solid water  is fairly abundant in at least one of the deep and permanently shaded craters near the lunar south pole. There isn’t much room for analysis of these stores, as the news is simple and was predigested for reporters by NASA: We found water, and it’s a bit of a surprise given the initial failure of observers to see the plume of debris.

It turns out, it seems, that much of the impact’s energy threw ejecta sideways across the crater floor. But enough did go high enough for the trailing LCROSS spacecraft to detect water – and for scientists to calculate that about 25 gallons worth of ice got pulverized and tossed into the sky by the experiment.

But so many reporters wrote it up, it is still worth it a few days later to list a bunch of them:

Stories:

• AP- Alicia Chang : Splash! NASA moon strikes found significant water.
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Satellite shows signs of water at moon’s pole ;
• NY Times – Kenneth Chang: Water Found on Moon, Researchers Say ;
• San Jose Mercury News – Lisa Krieger : Water found on moon by NASA’s Ames Research Center ; For Lisa, a local story so she gets in local color – and splashed it, so to speak, across the top of page 1A.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: NASA: Water found in moon crater ;
• LA Times – John Johnson Jr. : ‘The moon is alive,’ NASA says after water discovery ; Dunno what that hed means. Catchy, though.
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin:  $79m NASA blast finds enough water for man on Moon to have bath ;
• Wired – Alexis Madrigal: Lunar Impactor Finds Clear Evidence of Water Ice on Moon; and no wonder nobody saw it through their binocs. It was clear.
• Telegraph (UK) Rebecca Lefort: Google doodle: water found on the moon by NASA ;
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: NASA Moon Crash Found “Significant Amount” of Water ;
• NPR – Mark Memmott: NASA Says Crash Turned Up Evidence of Water in Moon Crater ;
• The Nation – Jon Wiener: Water on the Moon – and Money for NASA ; And I don’t think the Nation has ever before been tracked at this site. The story is a departure from the others above too – it’s all about the policy incentives for NASA to have found water up there.
• Scientific American – Paul Sutherland: Space crash confirms water on Moon ;
• Arizona Republic – Anne Ryman: There’s water on the moon, probe reveals ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman :  Moon strikes found significant water ;
• could do lots more….

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina (photo) likes biotech. “One of the reasons I have long supported the U.S. biotechnology industry is that it is a homegrown success story that has been an engine of job creation in this country.”

Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer of Missouri likes it, too. I needn’t bore you with her quote, because it matches Wilson’s word for word.

According to Robert Pear of The New York Times, they were both using “language suggested by the lobbyists.” In a front-page story in Sunday’s Times, Pear reports that 42 members of the House–22 Republicans and 20 Democrats–repeated talking points suggested by Genentech.

It’s a remarkable political achievement: Genentech found the bipartisan consensus on health care that has so far eluded President Obama.

I guess we all knew this sort of thing goes on, but it’s still striking to see it spelled out, as Pear does in this excellent piece of reporting.

In our business, the sanctions for using somebody else’s language can be severe. Not so in politics, apparently. Pear doesn’t address the question of what the gentlemen and gentle ladies in Congress might have received in return for parroting Genentech.

Polly want a cracker?

- Paul Raeburn

Its difficult for many people to look at, without dismay, photos of those giant wholesale fish markets in Japan, Spain, and elsewhere and their carcasses of bluefin tuna, often as big as prize-winning hogs and some the size of horses without legs, lined up for inspection. One needn’t be a vegetarian to worry about such a beautiful – plus tasty – species whose numbers are clearly plummeting world wide. Several news outlets have been following deliberations, in Brazil, by the Int’l Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, as it debated the quota that fishing boat operators ought to have for the upcoming season.

It made up its mind over the weekend and cut the quota substantially, but not enough, say critics. Those critics includes, as seen in the press release from NOAA down in Grist, the U.S. government.Media reports tend to include the numbers and a lineup of environmental and other critics who wanted either a total ban, for now, on catching the giants, or a number about half the size agreed to by the delegates from 45 countries. Critics tend to note that the agreed on catch is only half the problem – the other half being the fraudulent record keeping and other cheating that makes the actual catch much larger.

Stories:

• Reuters – Douglas Engle, Stuard Grudgins in Recife, Br: Fishing body agrees to cut in Atlantic tuna quota ; The cut is about 30 percent from what it’s been. Straightforward, but quotes nobody outside the regulating body as welcoming the new limit.  Greenpeace and the Pew environmental group get in their licks however.
• AFP - Bluefin tuna quota cut not enough: environmentalists ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Tuna body shies from fishing ban ;

Non-power of the Press; A few editorials’.,columnists’ calls went unheeded:

• LA Times (Nov 13): Saving the bluefin tuna ;
• New  Scientist: Tuna in peril as catches reach triple the limit ;
• NY Times: Last Act for the Bluefin ;
• Times On Line (UK) – Charles Clover: Tuna vanish as their protectors samba on . Sometimes it is a mistake to write, for publication, when one is seething mad. Lawyers may react, retractions may follow. Sometimes it works out fine. This seems to be in the latter category. How often does one get to read  which agency is “arguably the most dysfunctional environmental organization on earth”?

See also:

• Politics of the Plate (blog) Barry Estabrook: Tuna Diplomacy ; Filed before the final decision, and including some bloggy but actual reporting. Best part is its alternate translation of the fishery managing organizations acronym. Such a thing illustrates one way in which blogging – or columnists -  can more easily cover some aspect of news than can mainstream media news writers.

Grist for the Mill:

Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin Press Release ; Booooo, it says.

European Union Press Release; Ya-a-a-a-y, it says.

- Charlie Petit

Two very different snippets of jellyfish news hit the last few days.

The larger one seems particularly sound.  AP‘s Michael Casey filed it from Japan after a visit with a fishing crew. His enterprising story aptly applies the appliance measuring stick. Its lede: “A blood-orange blob the size of a small refrigerator emerged from the dark waters, its venemous tentacles…” and so, creepily, on. One is uncertain that blood-orange is a color, and orange is itself a metaphor, but there are blood oranges. A terminological tangle, that is.

Back on topic:  The story gains heft as it moves past its vignette lede, introducing readers to a scientist who has devoted much of his career to trying to understand the recent proliferation of these huge jellies, their impact on the fishery, and blips of data from around the world that suggest a global surge in jellyfish populations with warming one overarching common factor. The piece does not however proclaim a single cause for the case in Japan, but cites temperature’s rise, overfishing, and pollution that triggers plankton growth as possible co-factors. Nice balanced job – despite the usual and exasperatingly, often ignorant, carping and wisecracks one finds in, as one example, The Arizona Star‘s  list of readers’ comments. One continues to think newspapers and other outlets ought toss out any comment that does not include the commenter’s full real name (exceptions for those in totalitarian nations voicing dissent that could put them in jail, or worse.)  This paper appears to require partial names and initials. That’s a start.

On the weird news about jellyfish front, one finds diversion at BBC. There Jody Bourton reports, with the video evidence, discovery that some coral polyps are able to eat jellyfish. None of the gelatinous victims appear to be of refrigerator size but that, too, is a start. Maybe Gaea will somehow bail us out of a jellyfish-dominated oceanic future.

- Charlie Petit