Here’s hoping…..

Pic: Cartwheel Galaxy via Hubbble, Spitzer, and Chandra spectral mashup. Source.

(First iteration: Dec. 23) It’s that time of the year, and we’ll update this a few times by January 1 – and once or twice move it back to the top of the post queue. Maybe even attempt a meta-analysis (UPDATE: nope, forget the master list mega meta). One story that does make nearly all top science lists: Ardi, the bipedal tree climbing and not terribly apish human ancestor aka  Ardipithecus.

Additional suggestions welcome. Here, in no particular order:

• AAAS Science Magazine: Breakthrough of the Year and nine runners up ; Password-blocked. But Ardi takes the cake.
• ABC-Lauren Cox/MedPage Today-Peggy Beck: The top 10 Medical Advances of the Decade ;
• Time Magazine -  Bryan Welch: Top ten green ideas; Eben Harrell: Top 10 Scientific Discoveries ; Michael Lemonick: Top 10 New Species ; On line layout is a little awkward – the winners are at the specific links but to see all of each list, you must go to the top 10 of everything 2009 and scroll to the category.
• National Geographic has multiple top tens : New species ; Space finds ; Archeology finds ; Photo galleries ; Dinosaur and Fossil Finds;
• Scientific American Top 10 Science Stories of 2009 ;
• Council for Advancement of Science Writing list of Top 50 Science Sagas in 50 years to celebrate its 50th ann’y, main author is MSNBC Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle, a member of the CASW board,  along with a few others including, notably, Science News‘s Tom Siegfried.
• MSNBC – Alan Boyle Year in Space including a contest to name the top story of all ;
• MSNBC – John Roach: Top 10 science stories of the decade ;
• LiveScience – Sally Law: The 9 Most Provocative Sex Science Stories of 2009 ; Ardi didn’t make this one.
• Science News News of the Year
• Popular Mechanics – Eric Sofge :  The Top 5 Engineering Projects of 2009 ; Plus, the magazine’s annual Breakthrough Awards.
• BBC – Paul Rincon :  Science news highlights of 2009
• Discover Magazine - Rolling out its top 100 stories of 2009, with the site being updated regularly.
• Cosmos Magazine, Australia: Top science news stories of 2009 (ie most-read) .
• Mother Nature Network – Ken Edelstein: Top 9 eco-stories of 2009 (that have nothing to do with climate change) ; Small site, but a thoughtful, personal list.
• just for fun, Cryptomundo – Loren Coleman: Top 10 Cryptozoology Stories of 2009 ;

*UPDATES:

• Nature Magazine: News picks of the year ; Great Beyond Most Clicked Stories (Reader’s Choice)  ; Newsmaker of the Year (Steve Chu, with a hell of a profile by Eric Hand ) ; This and more at Nature’s 2009 Review of the Year.
• PBS Newshour – ed. by Lea Winerman: What Were the Science Breakthroughs of 2009?: Experts, plus yours truly, were asked their opinions. Ardi wins, hands down, opposable thumbs and all.
• New Scientist: 2009 Review: Most popular articles of the year; Sex, as always and to our collective credit, comes up a lot. Plus, Maggie McKee: Top 10 space stories of 2009 ; and several more top tens at the same site (I ran out of my free three story limit, and don’t remember my log in):
• Popular Mechanics: Breakthrough Awards ’09 including  Most Brilliant Innovators of 2009 ;
• MinnPost.com – Sharon Schmickle: The Top 8 Science Stories of 2009 ;
• Phil Plait/Bad Astronomy blog: Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2009; His #1 pic is well justified. My fave is his #5.
• Live Science – Jeana Brynner: The 9 Most Controversial Science Stories in 2009 ;
• Science News Examiner – Meg Marquardt: Top 10 science stories of 2009 (she’s not put up the top four yet, as of mid-day Dec. 31);
• Chosun Ilbo: Space Launch Tops Korean Science, Tech Stories of 2009 ; Yes and alas, the launch failed.
• Alex Wild – Myrmecos Blog: The best insect photos of 2009 ; Thx to Carl Zimmer, who noted it at his The Loom.
• ABC (Australia) Science Show w/ Robyn Williams: Marcus Chown’s silly science awards for 2009 ; Actually not much to do with 2009, but silly and sensible too.
• SciDev.Net – Aisling Irwin: Hit stories of 2009 ; Another list of best-read stories on our site. As one would expect of this non-profit outlet, it’s stories are on the earnest, development-tech side. But Irwin points out one that broke that mold: Tomatoes thrive on urine diet.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Review of the Year 2009 -Discoveries ; Neat – he ties in the Darwin centennial and the strangely shrinking sheep of the St. Kilda archipelago.
• Religion Dispatches – Lauri Lebo: Top Ten Religious & Science Stories of 2009 ; Not what you might expect…

And for something different:

• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Ten Science Letdowns of the New Millenium ;

- Charlie Petit

A remarkable report on antibiotic resistant bacteria, especially the staph called MRSA, is been running on the Associated Press wire. I just noticed it today. It deserves follow up and, one hopes, leads to a new and surprising way to counter the surge in drug-resistant infections. And as seen at the end of this post, this dispatch is part of a larger AP project.

Reporters Martha Mendoza and Margie Mason (the latter a current Nieman Fellow at Harvard) report on and update a remarkable, government-mandated behavior change imposed on doctors in Norway that has radically reduced rates of infection. Norwegians are now the least infected people in the world, it says here. And their method is being replicated in many other places. A telling lesson, provided by one of the story’s sources, is found in a Norwegian hospital pharmacy. It stocks plain old and affordable penicillin. Using it against many infections in other parts of the world could get a doc sued for malpractice. It wouldn’t work against today’s superbugs. In Norway, it still does just fine.

The Tracker does not know how widely the Norwegian strategy has been reported before. But this story sure catches the eye as at least one example of the power of government in simultaneously  improving and reducing costs of health care by telling docs what they must not do. Also notable is the clear, emphatic language and anecdote with which the story builds its case.

This pair of AP reporters has been going at antibiotic resistance hard recently – preparing for six months for stories now landing. One finds a related story, on agricultural practices, another on the appearance in the US of TB that is highly resistant, and yet another on resistant malaria in Southeast Asia. Woops, here’s another, on HIV in South Africa.  This is a project with depth, sweep,  and clear journalistic vision. It is a five-part series called When Drugs Stop Working, one finally discovers, so it’s now all done. AP must have promoted it but I can’t find its site where it has them all together. It is nonetheless impressive.

Pic: (not from AP series): source ;

- Charlie Petit

One post down The Tracker takes on a different story from the UK, and notes that its writer also bit on news from Oregon State University on robotics research. There, professors are inspired by the skillful, unthinking manner by which cockroaches skitter about. Who else wrote about the possibility of roachlike robots?, I wondered.

The local paper in Corvallis, for starters. At the Gazette Times, under David Stauth‘s on line byline, there it is. Yikes, the credit line id’s Stauth as at OSU’s News and Communications office. This goes well beyond lifting a story from the release – this is the release unvarnished and undisguised. There is a streak of honesty in that – but sad to see, too. You mean that the local newspaper has no writer whose beat includes the big U and its research? Maybe it does, I dunno. The release is well done. But too bad nonetheless to see such a thing put up on the newspaper site,  even if it does not go in the print edition and it’s unclear on that score. Times are tough in the newspaper biz.

The news, for all that, is pretty interesting. It does offer readers a glimpse into the world of robotics and the superiority, despite biomimetic efforts, of the simplest nearly brainless bugs at moving over rough terrain compared to the best gaits that human inventors have been able to instill in mechanical things.

Other stories:

• ABC – Lee Dye (Opinion): Anybody Need a Robotic Cockroach? Hey hey hey, way to go Lee. He called the engineer at OSU for more info – and this for an opinion piece. He’s on old-time and respected newsman, by the way. He turned a press release into a wider-ranging featurette.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Oregon profs plan giant robotic space cockroach warriors ; Delightful read, much of it made up, harmlessly enough. How does he know the prof is “lovestruck”?  Page, in this case, does mention or at least imply that his info is mostly from an OSU “statement.” Plus, a tip of the hat as he provides a link to the pdf of the whole paper (see Grist below). That paper, full of Lagrangians and Taylor series expansions, is a load for serious engineering pros only. Maybe he’s japing with his readers.
• Runner’s World – Mark Remy: Your New Running Role Model: the Cockroach ; Mostly jokes, no fresh reporting.

Grist for the Mill:

OSU Press Release, Bionspiration & Biomimetics Journal Article ;

Pic: Not OSU’s, but a Stanford U. roach-robot.

- Charlie Petit

In the UK’s Register this morning Lewis Page pivoted on a press release from Thomas Jefferson University. He whipped out this snappy, only-in-Britan lede: Boffins in Philadelphia have come up with a radical new plan for biofuels. Rather than the cars of tomorrow running on various forms of alcohol, sunflower oil, algae etc., the scientists propose that they should instead be fuelled by burning tobacco. Were tomorrow not the New Years holiday, I’d wait a day to post on this to see who else runs it and how they handle it. The research effort is worth reporting and at more length than this.

There are many things off-kilter with those few sentences, aside from finding boffins in America. His story appears lifted entirely from the press release – although he liberally substitutes “baccy” for “tobacco.,” That’s okay stylewise, and the non-reporting has to be given a pass  in these wearying days when running stories almost entirely off handouts has come to pass ethical muster at many mainstream outlets. More serious is that the TJU news release says nothing about dropping any specific other biofuel sources in favor of burning tobacco – but it does offer the tobacco work “as a model for the utilization of other high-biomass plants for biofuel production.” And anyway, whatever is extracted or distilled from tobacco plants won’t be baccy in any common sense of that word.

Not picking on Page – he’s a spritely writer who covers the gamut of science news and whose editors appear to expect him to deliver reader-grabbing copy at a stunning pace. He has three stories in the paper today (one tongue in cheek, on robot cockroaches), eight in the last week.  Just yesterday this site delivered him a kudos for finding his own angle in an exo-planet story. But one would like to know a great deal more about the gene modifications to Nicotiana, or tobacco , partly by inserting DNA from the lab-rat of botany,  Arabidopsis. One also wonders, given the press release’s offer of the high percentage of oil feedstock in genetically engineered tobacco leaves, how many tons per acre this would produce if the modified plants grow like regular tobacco. And how does that compare to, say, sugar cane ethanol?

Most important is the release’s assertion that “the idea is to use plants that aren’t used in food production.” The story quotes that, and moves on. One wonders, why not food plants? The bigger issue seems to be diversion of arable acreage to fuel production, not what kind of crop does the job. Plus, if a plant with edible fruit could be made to pack its foliage and branches with a petroleum substitute too, that sounds like a bonus worth pursuit. This release, as are most, is a tip that ought to send reporters scrambling for more complete info.

Other stories:

• Times of India (via ANI): Tobacco plant leaves can be used to make efficient biofuel ; Another light rewrite of the release.

Grist for the Mill:

Journal article abstract ; Thom. Jefferson U. Press Release (via Newswise) ; One of the  authors pages has more detail on yield (This man, Hilary Koprowski, is already noted for such things as  rabies and live polio vaccines).

- Charlie Petit

The Wall Street Journal published a tangled bit of intrigue over the Christmas break (it seems to have been published Dec. 23, but it’s now dated Dec. 29 in the version I found on the web) concerning two Northwestern University cardiologists who were once collaborators and are now at war. The fight concerns a decision to implant a new heart valve ring, and whether FDA approval was required.

The Journal story, by Alicia Mundy and Jared A. Favole, uses the Northwestern battle to highlight shortcomings in the FDA’s approval of new devices.

It’s a good piece, but it’s not as good as the series of articles that Shelley Wood has been writing for more than a year at theheart.org. She’s covered every twist and turn of this tale, in stories you can find by searching the site. (You’ll need to register, but registration is free.)

In June, Wood’s stories were recognized with the 2009 National Institute for Health Care Management (NIHCM) Print Journalism Award.

The Wall Street Journal writers did not acknowledge that much of their story had already been told elsewhere. Nobody says they had to do that; but it would have been generous, and it would have been fair.

More than that, it would have protected and enhanced the Journal’s credibility. Readers who had seen Wood’s reporting might feel that the Journal was quietly taking credit for somebody else’s work. And in these dark days for newspapers, we don’t need to engender that kind of ill will.

Further, Journal reporters Mundy and Favole were not shy about mentioning other prior reporting. Near the end of their story, they trumpet a previous Journal story, noting that the FDA had taken action on another device “citing a Wall Street Journal investigation.”

Is it possible that they didn’t know about the stories at theheart.org? Their sources at Northwestern–cardiologists among others–certainly would have known. I put the names of the principles in this story into Google in several different ways, and Wood’s stories appeared in the first two or three search results each time.

And when Wood received the award for her series, three reporters from the Journal received an award, too. Maybe they mentioned Wood’s stories to their colleagues; maybe not.

Thanks to Larry Husten for calling my attention to the Journal’s story and Wood’s earlier reporting.

- Paul Raeburn

A few years ago The Tracker developed a slight crush on Stirling engines as the key to affordable solar energy. This was because of the sales job a company in Arizona laid on the media. Then…pffffft. Hardly heard anything about it. But thanks to Scientific American‘s Cynthia Graber, some of the reason becomes apparent. They didn’t work, as reliably or cheaply, as advertized. But the company is still perking along. Maybe it can still work out the kinks.

Grist for the Mill: Stirling Energy Systems Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

No paraphrase could do justice to John Fauber‘s latest investigative piece on medical conflicts of interest in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Here are the first three grafs:

“In 2002, Thomas Zdeblick, a University of Wisconsin orthopedic surgeon who has pocketed millions of dollars in royalties from the spinal device maker Medtronic, took over as editor-in-chief of a medical journal about spinal disorders.

“It would be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

“In the years to come, Zdeblick would receive more than $20 million in patent royalties from Medtronic for spinal implants sold by the company. And the medical journal he edited would become a conduit for positive research articles involving Medtronic spinal products, a Journal Sentinel analysis found.”

He goes on to say that studies funded by Medtronic or related to Medtronic products have appeared in the journal “at least once per issue, on average,” under Zdeblick’s editorship. And “readers of the journal were not told that he was receiving millions of dollars in royalty payments from Medtronic at the same time.”

Fauber reports that Zdeblick declined to comment. A spokesman for the journal’s publisher said because of the journal’s strict peer-review policies, the company “had no concern” about Zdeblick’s relationship with Medtronic.

Fauber acknowledges that he got some of his information on Zdeblick from an investigation by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa. But Fauber went beyond that, looking at every issue of the journal published during Zdeblick’s editorship, and analyzing documents from the University of Wisconsin.

Fauber deserves high praise for this story. But this is only the latest in a series of stories he’s done on medical and drug-company conflicts of interest. The Zdeblick story is accompanied by links to 9 other investigative pieces, if I counted right.

I live in New York City, and we like to think we’re at the center of the universe. (And we are.) But that’s no reason to overlook outstanding work by journalists who happen to live in the heart of the country, and whose newspapers don’t fall on our doorstep.

Thanks to Charles Choi and to Andrew Van Dam at the Covering Health blog for alerting me–and now you–to Fauber’s work.

- Paul Raeburn

AP‘s Vladimir Ischenkov has on the wire from Moscow today a sketchy report that Russia’s top space program official urges that his nation and international partners consider a mission to nudge an asteroid even farther off course from hitting the Earth.  The space boss, it says here, said on a radio program that it aims to nudge the Earth-orbit-crossing asteroid Apophis from its current trajectory, one that (as has been widely reported) has a slim and fading chance of crossing said orbit at the same moment and place where Earth is occupying it, a few decades hence.

The story responsibly relates that most authorities think that Apophis’s threat already has been discounted by more refined calculations of its path. It also, reasonably, reports that Earth-asteroid collision scenarios are fodder for movies, have happened before, and probably will again if nothing is done to stop them. It also reports that the Russian space agency discloses no particular strategy for deflecting such a thing were it deemed a genuine threat.

But the reporter should have checked clips – that is, used a good search engine to see what else has been in the news on the topic lately. Maybe the story got past the AP science desk without somebody flagging it for further context.

Earlier this month a whole session at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco dealt with possible strategies for doing the job, featuring former astronaut Rusty Schweickart’s review of some of them. A good writeup ran Dec. 16, on Wired, by Alexis Madrigal. One would think that the AP story could have alluded to this meeting, and others, on how various authorities think one could nudge, tow, or otherwise urge an asteroid onto a path without foreseeable Earth collision. As it happens, on Dec. 4 another Wired dispatch, by Adam Mann, laid out one conceivable way, involving a lasso and a shift in center of gravity, its force integrated over many years to get the jobd done. Mann also helpfully links to the original Russian radio program’s transcript and audio – not so helpful for most of us, it’s in Russian.

Even Wired itself put up a post today, by Nathan Hodge, on the Russian plan. This one, natch, does refer to Madrigal’s report.

Further in the synchronicity department, an op-ed in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, by a local politician, urges an international program of Earth-threatening asteroid detection and deflection.

Other stories on Russia’s asteroid steering ambitions:

• Guardian (UK) David Adam: Russia’s Armageddon plan to save Earth from collision with asteroid ;
• Toronto Star – Cathal Kelly: Giant asteroid to pass earth at close range ; The headline writer missed somehow that Apophis’s close miss has been well-reported. The news, as the story says, is Russia’s plan to make it even less close.
• AFP – Russia in secret plan to save Earth from asteroid: official ; One is unsure whether “secret” is too strong. There is mention of a closed-door meeting, which is not quite the same as classified secret.

Pic: JPL Source ;

- Charlie Petit

When the movie 2012 opened – and well before – a fair number of science writers and even scientists rushed to explain to readers that no, don’t worry, the Mayan calendar or the likes of Nostradamus and left-over New Age apocalypso-weirdos did not and don’t have the inside scoop on planetary alignments, neutrino beams of strange cross section, or doppelganger planets that are about to cut the Earth’s crust tectonically asunder and drown the Himalayas and most everywhere else in a mega-Noachian flood.

Ah, but Avatar, this month’s eye-popping 3-D spectacular exploration of mankind’s exploitation of nature – wrapped up in a thin guise of space-opera at Alpha Centauri A – that’s different. In the past of week a few outlets have gobbled up an enterprising press release from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It provides an argument, plausible enough, for the existence of habitable moons of distant giant planets that might be as fecund as Avatar’s paradise, Pandora. Its hook is that the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope could deliver spectroscopic evidence not only of large moons of Jupiter-sized extrasolar planets of the sort now know to abundant, but perhaps disequilibrated atmospheric biosignature signs that these moons bear life (intelligent or otherwise). A preprint by a CfA researcher laying out the argument went on line December 17. It says nothing about Pandora or the movie. Don’t know if the woman who wrote the research paper thought that angle up first but the press officer went with it.

Nothing wrong with either spate of news stories. They fall in staple categories of news that, while not exactly enterprising, fill a need. 2012 was entertaining nonsense, but did trigger some public anxiety. Avatar is a loftier sort of fable. It provides reporters reason to report, honestly, on some aspects of extrasolar planetology that would ordinarily interest few outside the fraction of the public that follows research progress avidly. In the last week, potentially, millions of movie  fans lapped it up.

Reporters did not fail, with one exception that I can find, to tie the paper to the movie’s fictions. If anybody saw another popular piece that did NOT take that as its angle, please tell me. And nobody explored much one angle suggested by the release: that a tidal lock peril for giant planets of red dwarf stars would not apply to their moons. That merits a short excursion into orbital dynamics and discussion of how short the exo-’year’ would need be to make a moon habitable while its planet half-broiled.

Forthwith, this news mini-burst’s writeups include:

• Space.com/MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: Moons like Avatar’s Pandora could be found ; He ties in the new, occulting planet-finder Kepler orbiter as well as the upcoming Webb Space Telescope tightly to plausible detection of such moons.  And he adds Star Wars’s moon Endor to the list of fictional precedents. Some quotes are attributed directly to interview of the paper’s author, others are identical to the press releases without identification as such. But it does appear that Charles called her up. Not all, clearly, did much more than rewrite the release.
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Avatar’s ‘Pandora’ Could Be A Reality ; A pure press release-rewrite, and typical of accounts that indulge a feigned, guilty ignorance. The hed says “could be” and the lede says “may,” but writers who hide behind such weak qualifiers must know that readers often confuse maybe with probably. And this maybe – a real Pandora perhaps complete with beautiful big blue bipeds – is among the maybiest maybes and very-surely-probably-nots-to-the-max hedges in the universe. He writes that the paper verifies this movie as seriously based on science fact. No. It is fiction. Period. Habitable moons do not blue aliens prove – or even make likely.
• Press Association (UK) Avatar moons may be science fact ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page : Aliens more likely to live on moons than planets, say boffins / spacegoing exomooononauts voyage around ringed primaries? ; Kudos! Page not only coins exomoononauts, but dismisses the press release’s Avatar angle in an endnote as a little silly and anyway, it’s not the best cinematic angle.
• Coventry Telegraph (UK) Geek Files blog – David Bentley: Avatar’s science fiction world may soon be science fact ;

*UPDATE:

• Thx to the welcome comment below from Charles Choi, we learn that a terrific, if adulatory, roundup of the plausibility arguments the movie team assembled is at Popular Mechanics, by Adam Hadhazy. The explanation of exo-armor and super-hydraulics is gravy for all weapons-tech fans. My feeling: How else can one stage this fantasy without pushing the propulsion and travel boundaries, even to the nearest sunlike star, beyond the reach of any arm-waving with known physics? Maybe the floating mountains represent the requisite suspension of disbelief? As one of the PM article’s commentors said, the plot  goes completely off the science rails mainly by, and forgivable in a parable like this, making the aliens humanoid and sexily mammalian and with compatible DNA and neurology. In a literary sense these ought not be taken as aliens. They are our own better sides (so I gather, having not seen this show).

Grist for the Mill:

Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics Press Release ; arXiv paper preprint Characterizing Habitable Exo-Moons ;

What a yeasty diverse lineup in the New York Times’s sciwriting corps has delivered this week.

The Tracker starts by by momentarily skipping the manure on the front page (that’s literal, not a value judgment) to the one that got my motor running. Carl Zimmer, on the print section’s p. 3, provides a breathtaking glimpse of what genetic diversity really can mean. Years ago, before Norman Pace left Berkeley for the U. of Colorado, he told me he could not get very excited by those who say we need to save all the frogs or funguses or sponges we can because for one thing their genes may hold cures or industrial processes of fabulous potential. There are reasons to avert extinction but as far as Pace was concerned genetic diversity is way down the list. All eukaryote genomes, especially those of vertebrates, are by Pace’s reckoning virtually identical. In microbes – bacteria and archaea – that’s where nature has put the goods, he said. I always regretted not getting back to him for a deeper exploration of the point. Carl’s story, in a remarkably efficient package, does so and gives a sense of the vastness of evolution’s chemical wizardry in this story today. He quotes Pace along the way while describing an embryonic, international drive to chart “genomes of microbes from remote reaches of the tree of life.” I suspect WE are on the remotest reach, but never mind. What beckons, this story explains, is illumination of an “enormous stretch of biological darkness.” Indeed.

This merits much longer treatment, a whole book even. One thing Zimmer leaves out are the categorical mine fields in charting microbe species and genealogies, what with DNA clumps so easily able to leap barriers among phyla and families and such, scrambling a given species’s ancestry. But still, this article is easily worth the read and it won’t even take very long. And as the prolific Mr. Zimmer appears to have written about everything on the beat at one time or another, one can be sure he knows a lot about microbial gene mixing.

Back to manure. If your environmental sensibilities have you wondering why we are crapping up the planet, Henry Fountain provides an intimate and detailed visit to dairy farmers who have to rake and scoop and pump cow paddies and urine up by the thousands of tons every year and find some place to put it. Fertilizer, mainly, but you can’t just dump it on farms willy nilly. Never will you interpret the word “Zamboni” in quite the clean fashion, with visions of ice rinks, again after reading this.

Other notable headlines:

• Nicholas Wade: In New Way to Edit DNA, Hope for Treating Disease ; One must hold enthusiasm in check, as this “zinc finger” method for precision cut-and-paste of living genomes is patented and forms the heart of a start-up company’s plans for riches – and the company is a primary source for the story. But, even with that proviso, it sure reads as though it is legit. Wade has a history of weakness for recombinant DNA’s more exotic potentials, such as dreams of reverse genetic engineering ourselves a mammoth, or dinosaur, a sea scorpion monster, or Neanderthal even. Nothing wrong with that, of course.
• Claudia Dreyfus: A CONVERSATION WITH FRANK WILCZEK/ Discovering the Mathematical Laws of Nature; Funny isn’t it, how totally brilliant prodigies of prodigious intellectual output wind up, in interview, often sounding like modest, nice guys? Definitely recommended.
• Dennis Overbye: ESSAY: The Joy of Physics Isn’t in the Results, but n the Search Itself ; Wht’s the LHC good for? He was asked, here’s the answer. The hed may mislead. He writes that the payoff results are NOT the spin-offs, mainly, but the things like force fields and symmetries and new rules that wind up in journals and are fully understandable only to a few – and not always to anybody. But still worth it.
• Syndya N. Bhanoo: Findings on How Plants Breathe May Save Water; A CO2 and stoma conundrum may have a solution – in genetic engineering.
• Front page Gina Kolata: Old Ideas Spur New Approaches in Cancer Fight ; see separate post and analysis today by Paul Raeburn, just scroll down a bit.

As always, lots more. Whole section .

- Charlie Petit

The Climate Conference in Copenhagen is history, and after expressing huge frustration most German newspapers have quit reporting about the “results”. Time for a summary therefore on  how the German media handled it.

First of all: Every newspaper, every news magazine, every online outlet covered the conference with special sections, special reports, and special attention generally (and not only in the science sections). The national media’s hope, that humankind might be able to come up with a global contract for a greater good, was the message that one could read between all these lines. Commentators couldn’t hide their disappointment that politicians couldn’t achieve more than to take notice of the “Two-Degrees”-goal (the temperature shouldn’t rise more than two degrees Celsius by 2050). But here and there some (incorrigibly optimistic?) journalists emphasize that Copenhagen could be the first step and that some agreements might be possible in Bonn, Germany, where the next climate conference will take place in July 2010 (the Hamburger Abendblatt, e.g., quotes a professor from the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, who still has hopes for an international agreement.)

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Patrick Illinger, Christopher Schrader) provided two scenarios of the future in 50 years, based on current studies: Illinger drew a picture of the future world without any global agreement on carbon emissions, Schrader tried to describe a more responsible world. Illinger (head of the science section at the Süddeutsche) later added a comment on Copenhagen’s results. The headline sounds like: “We always knew that this conference would fail.” But Illinger describes an experiment with a group of students at the Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, which explain why humans just don’t act for the greater good, but always put their individual goals first – the phenomenon famously called  the tragedy of the commons.

For the introduction of his comment, Ulrich Schnabel (Die Zeit) took a comparable approach, quoting research of the anthropologist Michael Tomasello (same Max-Planck-Institute), that humans behavioral abilities to save the world are limited.

The comment of the Austrian Standard sees political reasons for the failure of Copenhagen. Christoph Prantner writes, that Copenhagen was a “laboratory for the global politics of the 21st century“, the “pacific century”, where nothing works in global politics without an agreement of the two super powers China and USA. And China used Copenhagen to demonstrate this new role.

Joachim Müller-Jung wrote  for the science blog Planckton in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, from Copenhagen. With a very clear voice, using words like “climate hallucinations” and “self-denial” (of politicians), Müller-Jung described the frustrating last days of the conference. It’s interesting (and sometimes funny) to read. The pictures help to get an insight into life at and around the conference in the Danish capital. His article for the newspaper heads with the German short-cut for FYI – for your information – or z.K. (“zur Kenntnis”), in describing the minimal agreement that emerged at Copenhagen, and says that it is just a formula. Some nations like Bolivia frankly said, that they do not accept the agreement.

The FAZ correspondent from Brussels, Michael Stabenow, writes, that the European Union will try to build a “coalition of the likeminded“, despite the failure of Copenhagen.

Axel Bojanowski, a freelancer specialized on climate issues, visited Copenhagen and gave a detailed description of the formation of the “disaster” for the online issue of the weekly magazine Stern, stern.de. But at the end, he says, that climate protection did not die in Kopenhagen. Local solution should be found after the global attempt collapsed. Research and development of new and better green technologies should be boosted – the money should be there, because emission trading is omitted now.

This post may be updated as more gets digested.

- Sascha Karberg