I missed an important story last week, and so did most of the English-language news media on both sides of the Atlantic.

According to a story by Catharine Paddock for Medical News Today, researchers in England have sequenced the genomes of melanoma and small-cell lung cancer.

Thanks to Victor McElheny, former director of the Knight Fellowhips at MIT, for calling my attention to the story, which was based on research published in Nature last week.

“Both papers came largely from the Sanger Institute outside Cambridge, and got big play in London, little so far over here,” Vic wrote in an email. I’d challenge him on that a bit–I didn’t find a whole lot of play in England, either, although he’s right, it got more attention there than here.

This seems to be a very important development in cancer research, and it should have been front-page news. If you don’t agree, consider one interesting implication of the lung-cancer genome. According to Paddock’s story, the researchers found 23,000 mutation in the lung cancer cells. That works out to about one mutation per pack of cigarettes.

That’s so stunning I feel the need to say it again. A pack-a-day smoker adds one mutation to his genome every day. A lot of those land in places where there is no gene and they can do no damage. But would you like to fire a hole in your genome every day and hope for the best? Smokers are playing a more serious game of genetic Russian roulette than they realize.

That fact alone, aside form the importance of the basic science, should have attracted the attention of the news media.

As I said, I admit that I missed this story, too. Perhaps we’ve all written so many stories about so many genomes that we’re becoming jaded. We ought to struggle against that. We don’t want to miss too many like this.

- Paul Raeburn

Confusion, Sandra Bailey (source at bottom)

The Tracker will watch things over the weekend and try to post some sort of representative reporting on how it comes out Monday. In the meantime, should you want a super summary of something that defies summation, try the one at E&E’s Greenwire (via NYTimes) that Lisa Friedman and Darren Samuelsohn just filed. It’s lede: “Confusion reigns….” and it then goes on to describe draft texts flying hither and yon, minimal information, things overheard at lunch, high drama, Obama Obama Obama, hots shots steamed that they are out of the loop, and one participant’s hope for “consensus by exhaustion.”

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PIc: Source;

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- Charlie Petit

Robert Lee Hotz at the Wall Street Journal reports being charmed by Betsy Mason’s treatise at Wired News on geologists and beer (scroll down to the post on the SF AGU meeting), and promptly lets us know his column today brings another kind of seasonally-appropriate news on effervescent cheer.

Lee’s piece is on the “centuries of artisinal trial and error” among champagne makers that somehow has been unable to explain how the bubbling of bubbly affects its taste and aroma. He finds better answers in recent issues of such learned journals as Science, American Scientist, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Among other facts that might not turn up at the average wine bar conversation: if one pops a champagne cork and lets it fly unhindered, it will be propelled toward the ceiling, or toward one’s eye if one is really stupid about it, at around 30 miles per hour. And champagne out-bubbles beer by a mile. The piece has very scientifical-looking interactive graphics, too. Plus a video. Mad about mulitmedia, they are at the Journal.

- Charlie Petit

This is why theoretical and experimental particle physicists have been calling them wimps all along. If they’re there, in keeping with the most popular explanation for dark matter particles, they are indeed weakly interacting.

A short time ago The Tracker noticed (largely via New Scientist, see post) that a rumor-storm was sweeping physics blogs, watercooler corners in accelerator research centers, and other places where Feynman diagrams are the simplest scribblings on the chalk boards. It was, and is, of two teeny thermal blips in a big germanium-loaded detector tucked into the Soudan iron mine deep under Minnesota. It looked like maybe a dark matter WIMP had, true to its name, weakly interacted with the detector’s regular-matter and heated it up, just an ooonch. Or, maybe it was just regular radiation’s irregular flux. Yesterday, the long-awaited formal presentations of the data, at Stanford’s SLAC and at Fermilab near Chicago, put hardly any more meat on the rumors than they already had.

The NYTimes‘s Dennis Overbye tells the tale tidily and wisely focusses on both the data with its monster uncertainties and on the emotions dark matter data of any kind arouse in those who seek them. One participant told Overbye that the results, such as they are, were presented to a crowd of experts that had worked itself into “a high level of serious hysteria.” Such color comes amid his mentions of dark energy that he also says has nothing to do with dark matter, string theory, supersymmetry,  and “the architecture of the visible universe.” Good job on a super-arcane topic.

I’ll get to a general roundup momentarily, but in Minnesota this tale of the invisible cosmological gorilla (or would the real gorilla be dark energy? Gads) is a local story:

• Minneapolis Post – Sharon Schmickle: This could be big: Have researchers found dark matter at the bottom of a mine in Minnesota? ; A long and nicely-composed piece that forthrightly quotes other news accounts to fatten its own reporting. It’s good to see well-done science writing at the Post, a non-profit on line news outlet giving work to some good reporters evicted from fading main stream media (she’s refugee from the Star-Trib).
• Minnesota Public Radio – Bob Kelleher: U of M lab may have first terrestrial evidence of dark matter ; That’s a wise hed – all previous implications for it come via telescope and from far far away. It also takes the history of suspicion way back, to the 1930s, that there is more out there than meets the eye.
• Minneapolis-St. Paul  Star Tribune – Bob Van Sternberg: Key to the universe found on the Iron Range ; Written just before the Fermilab seminar.

Stories elsewhere:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: EXPERIMENT DETECTS PARTICLES OF DARK MATTER, MAYBE; Cowen smartly spends some time trying  to explain why a 75 percent chance something wonderful is true fails to remove skepticism from scientists. But with upgrades to the device, he and other outlets report, a few more hits in the next years or two would be conclusive. Cowen also shares, apparently from having witnessed it, a remarkable episode of live, streaming science analysis last month as the data were first circulated.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Dark matter’s tracks may be coming to light ; Berger starts with some real basics – clearly aware that few of his readers have the slightest clue going in what this is all about. So he leads them by the hand. Works, too. Didja know that if you pick up a coke can you’re probably (fleetingly) holding a WIMP?
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Scientists announce possible discovery of dark matter ; Another good explication why three-to-one is weak tea among particle physicists at the betting parlor. One also is unsure of the possible discovery in the hed – this is more like a possible confirmation of what the hell it is, not that it is there at all.
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne : Scientists shed new light on dark matter ; Some say “shed light” is a dreadful cliche, but when contrasted with dark matter isn’t it all right? Alleyne goes a little giddy too – declaring “Earth-shattering effects on our understanding of the cosmos” if the 75 percent odds are borne out. Hmmm. Really? Cosmologists already factor dark matter into their models, it hardly interacts after all so it’s not like we can put it under a microscope yet, even if it is all wimps these data don’t really explain it… After initial hyperventilation Alleyne settles down and tells it straight.
• Mail (UK) Claire Bates : Dark matter discovered: Scientists believe they have found elusive particle that makes up 90% of Universe ; Hmm. First, it’s not 90 percent unless you throw in dark energy. The story shades it as “90 percent of the mass,” which is a bit but not much better. But  even allowing for the hyperbole that is standard for this paper where no shades of gray appear to be allowed in ledes, how does one square the first sentence’s baldly proclaimed “Physicists have detected a particle of dark matter for the first time in human history” (and isn’t that “human history” a bit of empty piling on?) with the next sentence’s “Should the findings be confirmed it will have an Earth-shattering effect…” ???? After an opening paragraph like that, it’s a switcheroo to suddenly go all subjunctive on us.  And Earth-shattering, again? Where’s that from?
• Popular Science – Jeremy Hsu:   Dark Matter Search in Minnesota Announces Exciting Results ;
• Cautious reporting prize to Scientific American – John Matson: Dark Matter Researchers Still in the Dark at Underground Search Returns Uncertain Results ; Intriguing, no blockbuster, he says.

Grist for the Mill:

U. Minnesota Press Release;  MIT Press Release ; Cryogenic Dark Matter Search Results Summary ; Fermilab Today Article ;

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

The week-long American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco has its usual crowds of reporters – sans the newspaper types, who are  limited  this year by their industry’s collapse to a few local papers such as the Chronicle. Close to 200 reporters, p.r. writers, etc., showed up, one hears. It also has its usual lineup of press conferences and newsroom tables groaning with materials from university and gov’t research agency publicists on myriad things derived from Earth and solar system science.

It closes today. Let’s salute – unless it turns out this is another story driven by  handout – the BBC‘s Jonathan Amos. He appears to have scooped the rest of the press corps with a fried egg. That’s it on the right in the image here, or maybe the left, as it is unclear exactly from the text which one is the primary uplifted bulls eye that, surmise Portuguese researchers who found it near the Azores, is the mark left by a comet or asteroid strike. The story says the team presented its data in a poster session. The story does not “mean” anything, except to specialists, but it is engaging.  The mind’s eye puts Amos wandering around in these near-endless rows of research displays, gathering string. One hopes so. It is always a thrill, in covering this meeting or others like it, to find among posters and presentations something weird and interesting and, best of all, that the lot in the room with the coffee machine and laptops and handouts didn’t know because nobody was paid to tell them about it.

*Addendum: Friday evening Betsy Mason let me know that Wired Science “is still fighting the good fight and cranking out dailies from the meeting … we published 16 stories, nine of which were not from press releases, the hard-earned fruits of too manyh hours spent poring through the abstracts in the preceding weeks and browsing through the endless posters.”

The meeting newsroom, run by Peter Weiss and Maria-José Viñas, also maintains a blog, a blogroll, and a twitter site.

Without much further elaboration, here are samples of  stories filed this week from the meeting or from the press material that agents for its presenters have circulated. Who knows – some of these may be excloos too:

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Maps show where tsunami floods would hit state ;
• Oroville Mercury-Register – Heather Hacking: Satellite data shows groundwater levels are unsustainable in Central Valley:  I don’t care whether a press release triggered this or not – to see this little paper covering it is terrific. Ms. Hacking, apparently an ag writer, made calls and got local reaction.

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release.

• Wired  – Betsy Mason : Why Geologists Love Beer ; At a North. Calif. Sci. Writers Ass’n dinner Wednesday, UC Santa Cruz science journalism prof. Rob Irion made jokes about the beer-fueled geology trade (he warmed up for even funnier – and that’s not easy to be  – science comic Brian Malow). Hadn’t really heard of the beer-batholyth link before, but Betsy now reports that it is real and deep. The main schmoozing arena for the meeting goes through 175 kegs by week’s end. Betsy found a story right under her nose. No press release, for sure. I nominate this for NASW’s Science and Society journalism prize.
• Science News – Sid Perkins: Seismology In Your Backyard (and on your twitter feed) ; Tweets can let officials and scientists know where the damage is and how bad faster than almost anything else (if the power and cells and G3 networks stay up), and lots of ordinary folks and businesses are installing on line seismometers. Tracker adds, and thank you Tom Nash: didja know there’s even a seismometer iPhone app?
• Science News – Sid Perkins: Carbon Dioxide: Blame Where Blame Is Due ; A piece on a topic of central importance to the shouting and horse trading in Copenhagen this week.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: Over the Arctic, Auroras Collide ;

Grist: UCLA Press Release ;

• Wired – Jennifer Welsh: Shining Lake Confirms Presence of Liquid on Titan ; A fat caption for a terrific pic.

Grist – NASA Press Release ;

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Undersea eruption seen, recorded for first time ; SENSATIONAL VIDEOS, and Dave gets other info in to give the story heft. See Grist to see the show.

Other story: Seattle Times Maureen O’Hagen ;

Grist: NOAA Press Release (video #1 is something else)

• Wired – Alexis Madrigal: Mysterious Collapse of Reindeer Herd Blamed on Freak Storms ; also from him, Saving Earth From an Asteroid Will Take Diplomats, Not Heroes ;
• …. There are more, and I’ll update should I get tipped to other notable reports. Most AGU news, one suspects, will emerge over time as various freelance, feature, broadcast, and magazine reporters get published.

- Charlie Petit

Concerned about a shortage of tough reporting in Vermont, a group of journalists and citizens got together and started to do some. You’ll find it at Vtdigger.org.

I learned about Vtdigger in an email from Terry J. Allen, a reporter who writes for the website. She wanted me to know about a two-part story she’d done on Ashley Ellis (photo), a 23-year-old woman who was sentenced to 30 days in jail for a misdemeanor conviction following a car accident. Less than two days after she began fulfilling her sentence, she was dead. Vtdigger says that poor care provided by a for-profit prison medical company was responsible. (According to Vtdigger, the company was Prison Health Services, which had a contract to provide medical care. A public relations firm for PHS said in a statement that Ellis “received care that met applicable standards … and PHS did not deny her access to medications,” according to Vtdigger.)

I might have handled the story a little differently, and I’m going to resist the temptation to suggest a few edits here and there. That is beside the point. Here is what appears to be an honest effort to provide good journalism while traditional news outlets are crumbling all around us. Other reporters and writers have established online news sorts of all kinds, big and small, well-financed and non-financed, to try to produce good journalism for the 21st century. Some of them will prosper, I’m convinced. And in a decade or two these fledgling efforts will have become the established, “traditional” media of their time.

But until then, we have a problem. As I wrote in an email to Allen, “One of the problems with the atomization of journalism–in general a good thing–is that all kinds of websites pop up, some good, some atrocious. So I’m more skeptical than I would like to be.”

How are we supposed to tell which of these new sites are reliable, and which are incompetent? Or which are covertly funded by some corporate or other interest that wants to masquerade as a neutral observer?

In her reply, Allen said, “The site is solid and serious, and trying very hard against terrible odds to bring good journalism to Vermont.” I can’t affirm that personally, but after browsing around the site and reading her story, I take her at her word.

The story itself is painful to read. According to Allen’s report, Ellis, who suffered from anorexia, was severely undernourished when she was jailed. She knew that she needed potassium, a critical nutrient that can be depleted in those who are malnourished. She pleaded for it, according to Allen. Because of a series of accidents and failures, she didn’t get it. It was intended, according to Allen, to prevent her heart from shutting down. She entered the prison on a Friday. She was found dying in her cell Sunday morning.

Others stories on Vtdigger look at homelessness in the state, the state budget, taxes, and swine flu. The site also republished an article from the Johnson State College student newspaper on a police crackdown on underage drinking.

This is old-school journalism, and by that I mean it’s the best kind. It afflicts the comfortable and rights wrongs, without taking any particular point of view–except, I suppose, that the death in jail of a 23-year-old girl serving a 30-day sentence is a bad thing. Especially if it were the result of shortcomings in the prison health system.

We will need more of this as newspaper and magazines continue to fade to  black. It’s going to be difficult to assess these new news sources, until they have more of a track record, and we grow to trust them. But we must give them a chance.

- Paul Raeburn

Additions to the list of extrasolar planets have gotten so commonplace most get barely a glance from reporters, but this week is different. We have two whole new solar systems and one red dwarf star with a big wet (so they say) planet only a few times as hefty as Earth – reason to celebrate a universe that festoons itself with planets of baffling variety.

The news burst started Monday with publication in the Astrophysical Journal of reports, from researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science in DC, U. Calif-Santa Cruz, and other institutions, of nearby  stars much like the Sun and that have  as many as six planets among them -  including two s0-called superEarths in orbits that might permit hefty oceans. Data are mainly doppler measurements of the stars’ movements due to the planets’ gravity tugs.

Yesterday, for today’s issue of Nature, came a dramatic capper. The star GJ 1214, a red dwarf star (the most common sort, and considerably lower in mass and cooler than the Sun), has a planet that might be  mostly water orbiting close to it. It is just 40 light years away from us, right next door by galactic standards. Its mass, size, and density are all directly observable. Data are mostly from light variations in the starlight as the planet transits GJ 1214′s face, blocking some of its light. Most excitement seems to come from the red dwarf and its hot world – a sign that the most common and very long lived stars could provide more planets to study than do stars like our Sun. And it is so close that further study should reveal much more about it, its atmosphere, and its evolution.

Two wads of planet news that need to be reported together offered a challenge to reporters. I too am having trouble keeping straight who saw what and when. Some covered both. Some didn’t. Some added still other reports. One imagines that some reporters wrote up and got published stories on the ApJ papers early in the week – leaving them with little chance of adding another so-similar story later for the red dwarf and its planet that are in Nature. If so, maybe said reporters didn’t see the Nature stories coming despite plenty of advance notice that the magazine, as is customary, circulated. Other reporters wrote only on the planet in today’s Nature. I have a headache:  permutation concussion.

Stories:

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye : A Sultry World Is Found Orbiting a Distant Star ; Overbye likely didn’t write the hed – while all stars save the Sun are distant, this one is among the least so. His story manages to wrap all the reports together. The astronomy shares an interesting observation with Overbye about, in effect, I Love Lucy.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano : Astronomers discover 11 new planets ; It’s mostly a blogpost, filed Tuesday (and hence missing the red dwarf news in Nature but with other planets mentioned). I’m not sure exactly how he came up with 11, but believe him.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: “Super-Earths’ inspire hopes for alien life ; He helpfully provides the full name of the nearby red dwarf, Gliese1214, and points out that its planet (GJ1214b) just might, in principle, be habitable by the sorts of tough microbes found in scalding geysers and miles down in the Earth’s crust.
• BBC – SuperEarths orbit nearby stars ; Just the first set of papers reported here.
• Guardian (UK) – Ian Sample: Waterworld planet is more Earth-like than any discovered before ; He gets in only the last report, on GJ1214b.
• Wired – Brandon Keim : Most Earth-Like Estrasolar Planet Found Right Next Door ; Good job wrapping the red dwarf’s world into the bigger set of planets found in recent years – but nothing on the few reported Monday in ApJ.
• Voice of America: Jessica Berman: Astronomers discover Earth-Like planets ; Just the first ones, none of which is exactly Earth-like as in the hed. Her irrefutable bottom line: “..it is evident that planets commonly orbit neighboring stars.”
• Science News – Lisa Grossman: Super-Earth Found Close By, May Host Water ; She gets all this week’s haul in, and notes pointedly toward the end, “None of the new planets are likely to be habitable, though” while passing word that some fully comfy ones are only a matter of time.
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Planet GJ1214b – or Super earth – discovered in another solar system ; She gets an inside angle – it was a student who saw it first.

… There is plenty more, and could make further comment on the varying detail on the intriguing system of small, ground-based telescopes that gathered evidence for GJ1214b.

Grist for the Mill:

ApJ paper on two sun like stars’ planets: Carnegie Institution Press Release ; U. New South Wales Press Release ; Anglo-Australian Observatory Press Release ; (much the same release)

Nature paper on red dwarf star and planet; Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr. for Astrophysics Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) GJ1214b was discovered in Arizona and characterized with instruments in La Silla (a Chilean Observatory). A very few media haven’t resisted the temptation to title their notes as if the second earth-like extrasolar planet was found in Chile. Most newspapers get it right, and also explain that it is an important achievement, but it’s not yet the big breakthrough that we are expecting.

Nature ha publicado el descubrimiento del segundo exoplaneta –después de Corot 7b- con características similares a la Tierra. No se encuentra todavía en una zona habitable (que sería la gran noticia) ni existe sospecha de que pueda albergar vida (que sería el bombazo), pero sin duda nos fuerza a ser más optimistas acerca de la llegada del que será uno de los descubrimientos más importantes del siglo XXI: la existencia de vida fuera de nuestro planeta.

GJ1214b fue descubierto en Arizona, pero caracterizado el observatorio de La Silla, en Chile. Resulta tentador titular “Científicos descubrieron desde Chile segundo exoplaneta similar a la Tierra” como hace Cooperativa.cl o Terra. Sí subtitula bien La Tercera (Chile), “Para confirmar la naturaleza de este planeta, los astrónomos utilizaron el espectrógrafo HARPS instalado en La Silla, en el norte de nuestro país”. De todas maneras, no hemos visto que los medios escritos chilenos otorguen mucha relevancia a este hecho.

De todas las informaciones, quizás la más elaborada la encontramos en El País por medio de Alicia Rivera, quien subtitula “El objeto (…) ha sido detectado con telescopios de aficionado”, refiriéndose a que fue descubierto con telescopios pequeños, desde Tierra, y por el método de tránsito: el planeta se detectó cuando pasó por delante de su estrella. No es el método más habitual. Si ha sido exitoso detectando un planeta “pequeño” (sólo 2.7 veces el radio de la Tierra), ha sido gracias a su cercanía a la Tierra (“sólo” 40 años luz), y que la estrella que orbita es una enana roja, cuyo brillo es menor y permite estas observaciones. En El Mundo, a la nota de Rosa Tristán “Una ‘supertierra’ con agua helada y atmósfera” se le añade un video para ilustrar el tránsito. El interior de agua helada y la atmósfera de 200 km de grosor son las otras características destacables de GJ1214b, y que lo convierten en “El exoplaneta más parecido a la Tierra”, como titula Nuño Domínguez en Público, advirtiendo que sus 200ºC, atmósfera de helio e hidrógeno, alta presión y ausencia de luz, hacen que no pueda contener vida tal y como la conocemos.

El descubrimiento de GJ1214b sea una noticia notable, merecedora sin duda de aparecer en todos los medios, pero lejos todavía del “excelente”. Nos vamos acercando…

- Pere Estupinyà

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) “If Climate Were Bank, US Would Have Saved It” was the most reproduced sentence from Hugo Chavez’s speech in Copenhagen. Much more is happening during these final moments of the negotiation, but probably this will be one of the messages that people will remember from this Conference. Of course, all Latin-American newspapers are full of reports on Chavez’s and Evo Morales’s arguments that the only way to solve the climate change is to fight against capitalism. Nobody seems to take them very seriously, but still — all are talking about them.

Malos augurios en estos momentos de recta final de la cumbre. Esperaremos al último minuto para analizar valoraciones. Pero como detalle, detengámonos en la participación de Hugo Chávez y Evo Morales, que a destiempo, sin un contenido demasiado constructivo, y mostrando una falta de voluntad en llegar a un acuerdo que no implique destruir el sistema capitalista, han sido recogidas en todos los medios.

El Nacional (Venezuela) informa con tono neutral que Hugo Chávez acusó a los países ricos de irresponsabilidad y falta de voluntad política para llegar a un acuerdo. El Universal (Venezuela) añade la repetida frase “Si el clima fuera un banco capitalista, ya lo habrían salvado los países ricos”. La Razón (Bolivia) explica que Evo Morales propone la creación de un Tribunal de Justicia Climática para juzgar a los países que persisten en contaminar la “madre tierra”. Pide que los países industrializados bajen la temperatura del planeta 1ºC, acusa también al sistema capitalista, y arremete contra Obama por dedicar poco dinero comparado con sus esfuerzos contra el terrorismo. Los negociadores no les van a hacer caso a estas alturas, pero sin duda, ambos líderes sí manejan verdades incómodas.

Sin pretender ser exhaustivos, otras noticias que recojen su participación:

El Pais – Rafael Méndez: Chávez y Morales intentan ‘incendiar’ la cumbre del clima y culpan al capitalismo del cambio climático

La Crónica –México “Evo Morales y Hugo Chávez convierten cónclave en un foro contra el capitalismo”. Titular muy acertado.

Los Tiempos.com – Morales: Ningún acuerdo con los países capitalistas, y presenta una editorial en la que destapa las incoherencias de las palabras de Morales con los proyectos que defiende en su propio país.

El Salvador.com - Chávez fustiga a Obama y países ricos por contaminación

El Espectador (Uruguay) subtitula otra frase de Chávez: “Los ricos están destruyendo el planeta; será que piensan irse para otro”

Las palabras de Chávez y Morales no son las más necesarias en estos momentos, ni aportan mucho a las negociaciones, pero sin duda algo de razón contienen y serán uno de los mensajes que más calará en la población, especialmente al ritmo que no avanza la cumbre. Veremos qué ocurre en el último día.

- Pere Estupinyà

To depart almost utterly from science journalism, and for that matter to eschew any semblance of a statistically-robust, science-based remark, something good may have happened among movie reviewers that I had never taken time to notice before. I just scanned through a fistful of reviews of the sure-to-be-boffo (if not so profitable, given its budget) 3-D movie Avatar. Your Tracker is surprised that so few of them call it a science fiction or sci-fi movie.

I did the search figuring they all would, and that I would then mewl about how dated and senseless is the term “science fiction” for so much of what is often regarded as such. In the 1930s, maybe, it was plausible to extrapolate the time’s dirigibles and astronomy and crude rocketry to imagine when people would fly to other stars’ planets, and was forgivable to posit that the creatures there would look more or less like those on earth: same general body plans, and the bright ones bipedal with hands and joints and faces sort of like ours (eg, Klingons and Vulcans) and sometimes even very sexy and quite content to couple with an Earthling. Not any more. Stellar travel is scientifically a hyper-longshot, and nobody would presume alien life forms are likely to look like offshoots of the Earth’s own evolutionary bush.

One gathers that Avatar has aliens, mend-melding (that part – a sort of neural transference – might be barely plausible), a distant extrasolar moon, an attractive and admirable alien race complete with compatible DNA, and of course clunky dialog plus plain-as-day allegoric resonance with human history and our cultural foibles. Therefore this fantasy movie or space opera, which are the right sorts of genre for things like Avatar, seemed ripe for a sci-fi terminology rant. Yet most reviewers don’t call it sci fi, or fantasy for that matter, but merely and in various ways an imaginative movie. Maybe the s.f. term has been outre among reviewers for awhile. At any rate, that’s good. Science is badly enough understood by popular culture as it is without insisting that the average robo-transformer-predat0r-alien-giantsnake-evilgenius-JulesVerne-IsaacAsimov-based-etc. fantasy movie has reason to be called science fiction.

I just looked at a few reviews – no big statistical significance, but enough to show my expectation of lots of reference to science fiction was wrong. One term the movie itself definitely borrows from the actual community of science: Unobtainium. That’s wonderful.

Sample reviews, no science fiction ref:

• CanWest/Vancouver Sun – Katherine Monk: Avatar falls prey to sentimental silliness ;
• LATimes – Kenneth Turan: ‘Avatar’ .. restores a sense of wonder to the moviegoing experience …;
• Macleans (Canada) Brian D. Johnson : King of an alternate world ;
• Hearst via SF Chronicle – Amy Bioncolli : ‘Avatar’ is visually stunning – hurt by cliches ;

Sample reviews, with the s.f. term:

• Miami Herald – Rene Rodriguez : Effects are special – the story? Not so much;
• Telegraph (UK) Sukhdev Sandhu: Avatar, full review ; And the sci-fi ref is deep and couched – it calls this a “fusion of science fiction and environmental parable. “

I think I’ll see it, for the effects and the handsome, brave, underdressed aliens. After all I saw 2012, and that one didn’t even require goofy 3-D eyeglasses.

- Charlie Petit

NYTimes‘s Charles Duhigg, winner a few years ago of a George Polk, a Deadline, a Heywood Broun, and a bunch of other awards for a series on exploitation of the elderly, rolls out today the sixth installment in a Toxic Waters project (whole series including today’s) that, after a read-thorough, staggers one for its size, clarity, organization, and punch.

In a post in September on another segment in the water project, The Tracker shared uncertainty that the piece found the sweet spot where judicious alarm, enterprising investigative reporting, and clear caution against undue fright overlap. I thought some of that one’s reporting sat on the sensational side. Today’s segment, however, seems to hit the ball perfectly,  and shifts my perspective on the overall project too.

His topic this week is the vast amount of US tap water that, while legal under EPA standards, may be dangerous. The piece is huge and has lots of extra material on line. It jumps from an above-the-fold front to a densely packed double truck inside.  It ranges through examples from many places, but something like a singular hero emerges: the man in charge of drinking water in Los Angeles. He is battling budget cutters, furious industries, skeptical residents, tax-abhorrers, and others to try to reduce levels of selected pollutants even more. This is even though the city’s water already meets (outdated, he says) EPA clean water standards. The anti-photochemistry plastic balls episode (visible with the story’s main protagonist in the pic as a lesson in crystallography and packing) is brilliantly executed. The series, with extra resources on line including lists of the scientific literature alluded to in the mainbar, has previously raised flags over ag waste, overloaded sewage plants, Clean Water Act and related enforcement failures, and more.

This, all in all, appears to be stupendously competent reporting. Maybe scarier than needed. But today’s is so full of caveats and explorations of the uncertainties and nuances of determining what is dangerous and is not, yet also so emphatic in explaining why there is reason to worry (and spend a lot of money cleaning up water that is, for now, legal), that I have to salute it balance of toughness and caution. One hopes that at a few topflight university-level schools of public health, grad students dive into these things, check the background resources, and maybe learn something while seeing if there are any holes to poke in them.

A crusading newspaper series like this illustrates why one should pray that revenue via things like Kindle and Amazon’s thingie, or some other break-out business game changer that spews $$$$s, not only puts the NYT firmly in the black but somehow bring other once-muscular metros back from their intensive care units.

One must mention that this is the second immense and worthy dirty water project recently from the nation’s biggest news outlets – last year the Associated Press dove deeply into the hazards of medical and drug waste in the waters via its Pharmawater series.

- Charlie Petit

In yesterday’s Washington Post David Brown shared with readers a sentimental visit with a sojourning robot nick-named Scarlet by operators – but listed as RU-27 in the inventory.

The news is that a long-finned torpedo, packing batteries, instruments, and telemetry gear, is the first such device to cross an ocean. In 221 days the machine – alternately adjusting its bouyancy to either sink or rise slowly – bobbed its leisurely way from New Jersey to Spain. It dropped as deep as 600 feet, then rose again. At the surface it  used an Iridium satellite phone in its tail to refresh instructions operator scattered around the world, changing direction for each leg if so ordered. When they got their hands on it – or, on her as some seem to have regarded the machine – some of the machine’s Rutgers University handlers hugged it. There were tears.

Brown eventually breaks free of the sentimental aspect of the story, compares this one and those that follow to the weather balloons meteorologists use to track weather, provides extensive detail on how oceanography is finally finding ways to monitor the seas in real time and with massive data loads, and other important detail. He closes with a remarkable overlap of this voyage with another one long ago.

I’ve tracked stories of the meanderings of gliders before, such as here.

Other recent stories:

• Newark Star-Ledger (Dec 9) Brian Whitley: Spanish town celebrates Rutgers University ocean glider’s trip across the Atlantic ; This is good – the probe was star of a town parade.
• Newark Star-Ledger (Aug 22) Tomas Dinges: Unmanned submarines glide across the ocean, putting Rutgers at leading edge of exploration ;
• NYTimes (May 3) Lisa W. Foderaro : Rutgers Uses Robot Sub to Interest Students in Marine Sciences ;

- Charlie Petit