The Los Angeles Times has a heartbreaking piece this morning on a 7-year-old girl (January Schofield, photo) with child-onset schizophrenia. The child’s latest accomplishment is managing to stay out of the hospital for 56 days–her longest stretch at home in 15 months.

Shari Roan does a nice job with this piece, a follow-up to a much longer feature she wrote last June.

It’s not entirely fair to criticize Roan for writing the story she wanted to write, rather than the one I would have preferred. But I’m going to cross that line anyway, and argue that she might have put the story in the context of the current health care debate. The family is surviving on umemployment. The county mental health department has offered the girl placement in a mental health facility–first in Texas, then in Florida. Understandably, the family declined. Can it be possible that there is no alternative available in Los Angeles?

With a different health system, and a different social support system, the father might have kept his job, and the girl might be getting much better treatment. Or maybe not. But a story about this troubled young girl and her desperate family might want to at least briefly explore the reasons behind this tragedy. And one of the reasons might well be the fractured American health care system. And the legislation about to be passed by Congress might–or might not–make a difference. I would like to know, and I wish Roan had told us.

But don’t let my complaints stop you from reading these stories.

- Paul Raeburn

Gina Kolata weighs in today in The New York Times with what seems to be the 10th piece in her series on the war on cancer, which began in April. As I’ve noted here before, she has been relentlessly pessimistic about the outcome, despite a recent AP story–published in the Times–that reported that the cancer death rate has been declining for 20 years.

Now, in the latest installment, Kolata has finally found some room for hope. She has discovered the work of Mina Bissell (photo) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on how the microenvironment of the tumor can influence tumor growth. Kolata calls it “a major shift” in thinking about cancer and how it might be stopped. It is presumably only one of many new approaches toward fighting cancer, but she focuses nearly her entire story–including a full, ad-free page inside–on this particular development. (She does take a short detour into new work on a kind of breast cancer.) And she can’t help but continue to be pessimistic; “The war on cancer drags on,” she writes. And she repeats what she’s said before, that the death rate “has barely budged for most cancers.” There is probably a way to square that with the AP story reporting that the death rate has been declining for 20 years–an apparent indication of the success of the war on cancer. But she doesn’t bother; she ignores the statistics reported by the AP.

The work by Bissell does seem to be important, and Kolata does a reasonably good job of explaining it and lining up others to vouch for its importance. But she might have done a broader story on various new approaches to cancer, rather than focusing on just one.

It reminds me of all the excitement about tumor angiogenesis in 1998 and how that was going to be the one thing that was going to cure cancer. Oh, and, uh, this IS embarrassing–that was Kolata’s story, too.

One other quibble. In an accompanying graphic entitled “Shifting Ideas on Cancer,” Kolata and her editors note several advances in cancer since the 1800s. You’ll notice an outstanding omission: there is no mention of chemotherapy. I guess I’d be pessimistic about the war on cancer, too, if I didn’t count the progress in chemotherapy.

- Paul Raeburn

At Science News Ron Cowen has a short piece notable for its being the only story, far as one can tell – and it’s been there for about a week – on the earliest observation yet of a star’s conception. This could be a genuine seminal event – no baby yet, but things are cooking.

The news in somewhat more detail  is that a team based in France has published on line, at the astronomical pre-journal parade ground that is the arXiv site of works in progress (see Grist below), an analysis of unusual radio telescope data from Taurus. They find, from the doppler shifts and isotopic variations of molecules chiefly including  carbon monoxide,  a distinct blob now named L1506C. It  appears to be “decoupling” from the larger cold, dusty interstellar cloud filament L1506 that enshrouds it. The blob is rotating in a distinctly different orientation than its surroundings. It seems to be contracting. It is not very turbulent. It has a diameter of about 30,000 astronomical units (one AU is the Earth to Sun distance) and a mass about four times that of the Sun. Diagnosis: it looks set to keep collapsing, heat up, and deliver a new star in its center in about a million years.

That’s pretty exciting. It seems to merit a slightly longer treatment that Cowen gives it – and as Science News has a dedicated science-manic readership,  this is the site for it. A salute is due for having recognized this as a story. But this tells us only that it is 400 light years away, contracting, might produce a star, and seems to be at the earliest phase yet observed in such a process. Those are the main things. But its size, mass, and rotational plus turbulence oddities are not addressed here. Neither are magnetic field hypotheses that might explain some of its peculiarities. Cowen is a skilled reporter and could have rendered those aspects in succinct, plain English. That would have left readers with a sense of the mysteries left to be solved. I, for one, would love to hear more on this thing. I guess that’s one sign of a good story – leaves readers hungry for more.

The paper’s link is in the story, but it is pretty tough sledding for us laypeople.

Grist for the Mill: arXiv astro-ph Paper.

Pic – NASA artist’s impression of generic stellar birth ;

- Charlie Petit

I wanted to use this post to call attention to a good story I missed last week, but I’m now thinking it’s more important to warn science writers to be careful if they publish in England, give a talk there, or maybe even eat Stilton cheese.

England and the U.S. are divided by a common language, as the old joke goes, but, more importantly for people in our business, the two countries are divided by a wicked difference in libel laws.

I’ve heard this before, and I’m sure many of you have, too. England doesn’t have anywhere near the protections for journalists that we have, and we don’t have enough.

This issue was newly raised for me by an excellent piece by Jeff Gerth and Jon Ungoed-Thomas, which appeared on ProPublica and in The Sunday Times in the UK. The story is about a drug called Omniscan, made by GE Healthcare (part of General Electric), which enhances images produced in MRI scans. According to Gerth and Ungoed-Thomas, it has been linked to a rare, incurable, and potentially fatal disease called nephrogenic systemic fibrosis, or NSF. The piece doesn’t claim that Omniscan causes the illness, merely that the disease appeared in people who had taken the drug.

Two years ago, one of the researchers who helped to find the link between the GE drug and the illness–Henrik Thomsen of the University of Copenhagen–gave a 15-minute presentation on the link at a hotel in Oxford. But you won’t find him eager to be interviewed for a follow-up story, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s been sued for libel in England by GE.

If you’re feeling smug right about here because you’re a reporter or editor, not a researcher, wipe that smirk off of your face. According to the article, Simon Singh, a British science writer, is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for describing some of its treatments as bogus. [*Update: Tracker-in-Chief Petit calls my attention to previous posts on Singh's legal troubles, which you can find here and here, or by searching Singh's name above.]

Ah, jolly old England. Too much fun, wot?

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Two stories about addictions today. One in Argentina discusses whether obsessive sexual behaviors should be called addictions. From Chile comes a report that  39% of twitter users are addicted to it. Both stories are well documented but present the term “addiction” in different ways. If one goes by medical manuals and wants to write rigorously, there is no way to say that 39% of us are “addicted” to twitter based only on  frequent use or even obsession.

Recuerdo un profesor de escritura periodística quejándose de cómo a menudo banalizábamos las grandes palabras si empezamos a utilizarlas en contextos menores. Un ejemplo cotidiano que seguro entenderéis es cuando nos quejamos de estar estresados, y llega un médico y te dice “no, tu si acaso estarás tenso o nervioso. El estrés es una enfermedad seria con unos síntomas específicos”.

Es absolutamente normal que en nuestras conversaciones frivolicemos con estos términos, pero en nuestra redacción sí deberíamos ser cuidadosos, especialmente siendo periodistas científicos.

Lo digo por el muy buen artículo en el suplemento Tendencias de La Tercera de Jennifer Abate “Para el 39% de los usuarios, Twitter ya es una adicción”. Está una nota muy buena y original, pero de ninguna manera Twitter puede ser tratado hasta tal punto como una adicción. Twittear puede convertirse en una conducta obsesiva, pero una adicción es un estado patológico serio, que implica pérdida de control, síndrome de abstinencia grave, y deterioro sustancial de la vida de las personas. La pueden causar sustancias como las drogas o conductas como el juego, pero los expertos se quejan de que a menudo aparezca el término con demasiada frivolidad. Podemos utilizarlo “como una manera de hablar”, pero el 39% de usuarios no pueden considerarse adictos porque “twittean más de 10 veces al día”, como dice Jennifer. Lo expongo sólo como un matiz, en los interesantes artículos a que nos tiene acostumbrado “La Tercera”.

Veamos otro artículo reciente que habla de adicciones, esta vez al sexo y publicado en La Nación (Argentina) por Sebastián A. Ríos: “Adicción al sexo, un trastorno cuya existencia está en discusión“. En él parte del supuesto caso de adicción al sexo del golfista Tiger Woods y se pregunta “¿existe realmente lo que ellos llaman adicción al sexo?”. Sin duda existe, pero ciertamente en la prensa a menudo ha sido exagerado y confundido con trastornos obsesivos que no llegan al grado de adicción. Un experto entrevistado por Sebastián dice “En la actualidad, el manual diagnóstico de enfermedades mentales DSM-IV no contiene ninguna categoría en la que se haga referencia a la adicción al sexo”. De nuevo, una adicción no es sólo repetir muy frecuentemente una conducta. Como explica el artículo debe implicar pérdida de control y continuidad a pesar de las consecuencias destructivas que pueda tener para la persona, familia y trabajo. Quizás en el caso de Tiger Woods sí es así, pero no es tan habitual como a menudo leemos.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Tracker does love the term biomimicry, both for its gentle syllables and its meaning – the scrutiny of nature for clues to how to solve engineering problems. But seldom does one see it in a headline. But there it is in the tale at the Plain Dealer by Michael Scott today on strategies that are bringing the Cuyahoga River back to vibrant health. As no writer can resist relating in almost any story about this river, it is the one that caught fire 40 years. It ever since has been emblematic of the extremes to which people can let pollution go before taking action (Maybe if the AIR started catching fire we’d try to really fix global warming).

I am unsure that this is at all a typical expression of biomimicry, but the story does take a detour to explain the term. It therefore provides a high-concept philosophical gloss on a story that could have been yet another remediation yarn. And biomimetic awareness  appears to be helping researchers, including students, come up with something better than a bunch of rubber baskets.

The piece completes a quarter of stories for a worthy project called Year of the River. Follow the link to them all.

- Charlie Petit

Based on a Nature article (here) and a summary done by the news agency ddp, Spiegel Online, Sächsische Zeitung and Rheinische Post picked up the news, that the melting glaciers in Alaska gunk the oceans with old organic matter. Scientists from the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau analyzed the runoff of eleven glaciers and found, that it contains 2500 to 7000 years old organic material that was once frozen in the glaciers. The glaciers add about 130000 tons of carbon material to the Alaskan gulf every year, an “important source for the coastal ecosystem”, the lead scientist Eran Hood is quoted. The fish industry might like this fact, because more food will be available.

It would have been interesting to hear the voice of German (or at least European) experts on this new piece of science. Glaciers melt here, too, so did anyone measure the organic runoff and the consequences for the European coastal ecosystems? Unfortunately, all three newspapers did not make the effort to call or add a European perspective to this US story, as so many times before with Nature or Science stories, leaving the impression, that only US scientists work on questions like this…

- Sascha Karberg

USA Today‘s Dan Vergano provides today an ode to Voyager 2, prompted by a piece in Nature last week on its discoveries as it exits the inner solar system and pierces the heliosheath way out there past Neptune and Pluto. It’s a tidy piece, packed with wonder, and a scientist telling Vergano that the 32-year-old spacecraft is on a “magic mission.” One must also note that – unless there was a press release I failed to find – that this was among the least heralded stories in Nature’s weekly press pack, and hence Vergano and the folks at Space.com read through the whole thing right to the “ALSO IN THIS ISSUE” link and clicked it. Not exactly investigative reporting, but it is due diligence beat checking.

Space.com: Fluffy Mystery at Edge of Solar System ; The fluff is an an interstellar cloud, wafting through the solar neighborhood, knitted into surprising resilence by magnetic fields measured by the probe.

- Charlie Petit

Janet Raloff, among the world’s more reliable science and environment reporters, was amid the throng earlier this month in Copenhagen. On Saturday last she placed on her blog at Science News the results of one break from that tendentious and revealingly unproductive meeting. Near the Tivoli Gardens, in the Danish Design Center, she discovered a “sustainable clothing” show.

Terrific, and to my mind as it’s a blog and all, just fine. It gets a prize for offbeat enterprise. But what’s best is the reaction in comments from one reader who writes rather clearly but is just dreadfully dyspeptic, to judge from this, and humorlessly insistent that such tomfoolery as Raloff’s fashion break has no place anywhere on a site devoted to science (and a site where he’d prefer  writers would just keep their green p.c. sentiments to themselves)! Janet, in reply, gives him a dose of courteous but firm what-for.

- Charlie Petit

On All Things Considered host Guy Raz yesterday got an entirely lucid science report just by asking a few sensible questions, and sat back to record the answers (twice I tried to type his name by memory and wrote Ray Guy each time! He’s an American football punter, you know). The topic is Yellowstone, the magma reservoir beneath it, and the plume that feeds it. The latter two, his professor tells him, are considerably larger than had been thought. The press release below says that this means eruptions may also therefore be larger than had been thought. One wonders about that – wouldn’t forecasts rely mainly on the geologic evidence for the size of past ones, hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago?

The report was in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research, and results also were presented earlier this month at the American Geophysical Union meeting. A few other outlets picked the story up:

• Jackson Hole News & Guide (Dec 9) Cory Hatch: Park’s giant magma plume eating up mountains ;
• Salt Lake Tribune – Brian Maffly: Yellowstone’s underground “plumbing’ comes into view ;
• National Geographic – Richard Lovett: Under Yellowstone, Magma Pocket 20% Larger Than Thought; Includes a fine video animation of the data, rotating, and another eye-popping interactive graphic.

Grist for the Mill: University of Utah Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Health risk violin

Charged with traditions Christmas eve is one of these opportunities where one dusts off violin or piano, cello or flute to play some tunes like “Silent Night” or “O Tannenbaum”. Some are eager (and able). Others feel kind of forced to revive a love-hate relationship with their instrument. Christmas ’09 is over now, and if some amateur musicians feel some back pain now, or developed sore spots, then you got an insight into the health problems of professional musicians. Music might be recreation and even a therapy for auditors, but making music on a professional basis causes various health problems, reported Julia Harlfinger in an article for the Austrian daily Der Standard.  75 percent of orchestra musicians develop a chronic disease during their career. To make a living with making music “is like doing competitive sports”, Harlfinger quotes a clarinetist and physician at a clinic in Vienna, specialized on health problems of musicians. The constant psychological pressure to be good enough to be selected for a well-known orchestra or to be competitive enough for a soloist career could cause depressions, alcoholism or misuse of psychotropic drugs e.g. Also, students learn early to ignore hints from the body – like neck pain caused from the not so ergonomic position playing a transverse flute. A survey with 350 students showed that 50% of them have to deal with various pain problems due to exercising their instrument. But it’s not only about some head or neck aches, musicians face serious health risks, e.g. glaucomas due to a higher intraocular pressure during trumpet sounding. Whereas pianists have little hope to prevent the relatively common finger spasms, other problems could – in theory – be easily avoided: earmuffs for tuba players to prevent tinnitus or hearing loss, stretching before exercising, and teachers, who take care of healthy posture as well as the music.

So, if you hear some bad sounds in a New Year concert, don’t just boo! Perhaps the soloist was depressed or the conductor suffered a severe back pain. Better tell them about the clinic in Vienna or the “Performing Arts Medicine Association” in the US.

- Sascha Karberg

(who didn’t risk his – and others -

health by playing the violin this year)

The UK accounts for about 6 percent of this site’s regular visitors. The Tracker supposes most of those there who follow climate politics closely saw Mark Lynas‘s eye-witness account last Tuesday in The Guardian with the hed, “How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room.” The room in question held the big semi-secret huddle that President Obama ‘crashed,’  as many accounts have it, in his effort to get something good from the conference. For the rest of our readers in the US and around the world, I’d recommend it.

It’s worth reading mainly for the strong, unvarnished point of view it presents. It wasn’t the only perspective, one must note, to have been found in this left-leaning paper. The Guardian not only threw a small army of its own sci and enviro writers at the meeting, it has used quite a range of additional writings since Copenhagen’s meeting hall shut down the climate confab. Much of it is feisty.  For instance:

• This authoritative letter to the paper from one John Prescott of the Council of Europe urging a stop to finger-pointing ;
• Today, by Martin Khor: Blame Denmark, not China, for Copenhagen failure ; This one pins the last-moment chaos on the host nation for convening the smaller side-meeting in the first place.
• And last Monday, one angry, progressive writer’s diagnosis – Naomi Klein: Copenhagen’s failure belongs to Obama; The American president has been uniquely placed to lead the world on climate change and squandered every opportunity ; The piece – perhaps syndicated widely but in The Guardian is where I found it -  by this noted Canadian journalist and analyst for The Nation seems to suffer the illusion that Obama can run things by fiat. But she knows a lot more of politics than I do…
• Then there is the ultimate old soldier in this fight, the honorable James Hansen with Copenhagen has given us the chance to face climate change with honesty ; He wants a carbon tax with its revenues handed out, more or less, on the street. The Tracker would jump at the chance for a few thousand bucks a year from the big carbon users, while cutting my own use and pocketing the change. Maybe this idea is too good to become true.

I should take a deep look, I know, at the Telegraph‘s lineup of post-Copenhagen writings, to get a sense of what this conservative-leaning paper has to say in contrast to the distressed Guardian. But its Earth feed (environment) has nothing at all like the Telegraph’s round of blame naming. One must say that the enviro writers at the Telegraph tend to do a straight-up job on global warming science. On Christmas eve, for instance, Louise Gray brought this: Little egret arrives in Britain thanks to global warming. Yes but as her lede points out, adios turtle dove. Also on her list of vanishing Brit birds: marsh warbler, and arctic skua.

Pic source: Climatic Research Unit, Univ. East Anglia.

*UPDATE: Thanks to Andy Revkin at his Dot Earth blog, here’s China’s version of Copenhagen’s salvation, thanks to Premier Wen Jiabao

• Xinhua/People’s Daily – Zhao Cheng, Tian Fan, Wei Dongze: Verdant Mountains Cannot Stop Water Flowing; Eastward the River Keeps on Going; The Premier Wen was, it appears, everywhere in Copenhagen even though other outlets had him holed up nearly the whole time. At any rate, he is in nearly ever paragraph of this very long chronology.

- Charlie Petit