Many people saw this coming, but major outlets are reporting now it is official executive branch policy embedded in the upcoming, proposed US budget. The billions of dollars already spent on the Constellation Program at NASA to build Ares rockets and Orion crew capsules for missions to the Moon and elsewhere won’t be followed by more. Rather, NASA is to buy such services from aerospace industry without prescribing the exact specs of the hardware itself. Further, it appears that, for now, a US  lunar base reverts to hypothetical long-term goal on slide presentations.

Many, and one guesses most, space scientists have long said human spaceflight has little scientific value. But its money comes from the same pot as do robotic missions, space telescopes, and the like. Perhaps we will soon learn whether NASA’s science budget will grow, or shrink, as (and if)  its direct  provision of space travel wanes.

Notable here is that this story managed to break and reach a lot of outlets, with a great deal of direct reporting, without the unifying goad of a press release or two. Some reporters appear to be rewriting one another, but many made calls to unnamed sources and others to flesh it out and dig up fresh tidbits.

Stories:

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Obama Plan Privatizes Astronaut Launchings ; After stating the main news, Chang turns to the anger and worry among many members of Congress.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA to get more money, but must scratch moon plan ;
• Orlando Sentinel – Robert Block, Mark K. Matthews: Obama to ax moon mission ; One interesting piece they dig up: The administration has stayed execution of the space station to at least 2020 or so. Official plans had been to ditch it, after $100 billion or so of int’l taxpayer money, in the Pacific Ocean in five years. Also read: Robert Block: Obama officials: NASA to get $6 billion for commercial rockets ;
• Palm Beach Post – Geroge Bennett: Nelson says he’ll fight any Obama proposals to cut NASA. It’s mostly about jobs. The “cut” verbiage in the hed seems to equate NASA with spacesuits. Far as one can tell, its overall budget won’t shrink, might even grow.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: NASA Former Administrator Weights In On Obama No-Moon Plan ;
• Talahassee Democrat – Burt Jansen: NASA’s course raises concerns ;
• SpaceflightNow – Stephen Clark: Obama’s NASA facelift faces tough fight in Congress ;
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: No Moon Trips: Obama’s Space Vision a “Paradigm Shift’ ; OK, a noted space policy expert used that paradigm line. Call me fussy – but really why quote it? The term is terribly misused here, and ought to be left with the original meaning that Thomas Kuhn gave it. Aside from that, a solid report on the overall space program and whether continued leadership by NASA in the now-routine business of making rockets is necessary. She gives Michael Griffin opportunity to defend, at modest length, use of government vehicles.

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill: Existing NASA Constellation Program site.

This week at  UC Berkeley a local seismic engineer told a conference that the Haiti disaster’s real cause was not an earthquake. It was an utter failure in Haiti to have any shred of a building code. Many poor countries in seismically dangerous regions fail to inspect new buildings, but most at least have some regulations. Initial reports about Haiti carried many generalities about the role of poor construction practices in the tragedy. This is the sensible followup: detailed confirmation by expert inspection.

Worse, the man said, during his visit he saw local people picking up the shattered bricks and other building materials and re-erecting heavy structures too flimsily fastened together to withstand quakes that should pose minor risk in a well-built city.

Local press gave it a ride:

• UC Berkeley Seismoblog – Horst Rademacher : Extreme Damage That The Didn’t Have to Be ;   This site, posted on occasionally here before, is written by a newspaperman. Rademacher reports that the engineer came back heartbroken upon seeing the same errors being mortared into the next disaster – bad concrete, minimal and badly applied steel reinforcing bar, and builders oblivious to ways to do it better. This was, Rademacher reports, the most devastating magnitude 7 earthquake in human history.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Port-au-Prince buildings poorly reinforced ; The only substantial  building in the whole city to survive without significant damage is the one built to standard int’l code, he reports. It is the US embassy.
• San Jose Mercury News – Doug Oakley: Engineer: Construction methods at heart of Haiti quake tragedy ;

See Also an engineering trade pub’s account of the engineers’ inspection:

• Engineering News-Record – Tom Sawyer, Nadine Post, Agnelle Bergeron, Pam Hunter: Haiti’s Quake Assessment Is Small Step Toward Recovery ; One surprise: the Presidential Palace is far from totally wrecked. Much of it is to be reoccupied soon.

The inspection results are reminiscent of news five years ago after a similarly moderate quake nearly flattened the ancient city of Bam in Iran. Some  reports said then that traditional building methods would no longer be tolerated ( BBC here). One wonders what a reporter’s followup in that city would find today. Additional reporting on success of other building practice reform efforts and lessons they teach seems a natural story assignment. Int’l efforts to overhaul building trades in struggling nations could to be a way for foreign aid to leave a lasting improvement.  Reporters could also find out how much private money, as from foundations set up by families made rich by great construction firms, has gone into philanthropy of this sort and whether it made any difference.

Pic,  source ; Shows one, incomplete but properly reinforced building project undamaged, another standard Haitian concrete structure on the ground in pieces.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker has been carping for the last year or two at reporters who insist on telling people that the big National Ignition Facility in Livermore, CA, exists mainly to demonstrate how to make electricity from inexhaustible fusion. No, it was built mainly to tend to nuclear weapons. And I’ve written that such stories overlook other ways to do fusion.

For all that, NIF’s attendants include plenty of very smart physicists who are very excited about fusion. They say their piece in today’s Science – declaring that early tests with dummy fuel pellets inside little X-ray focussing capsules called hohlraums indicate the machine is ready to make dramatic news. In the next year or so, its 192 monster lasers may be smacking the real thing – including fuel of deuterium and tritium – so hard and with such symmetry that pint-sized thermonuclear explosions will ensue and pump out more energy than it took to make them happen.

Stories:

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Focusing 192 lasers on one little target ; He deftly put the fusion in context of the weaponry priority, and then excitedly reviews the boggling power of this machine and of its potential as harbinger of “unlimited and clean energy.”
• New Scientist – Jeff Hecht: Giant laser reaches key milestone for fusion: Hecht interviewed Livermore people to get a well-assembled, tight narrative on the experimental steps thus far – and what they expect next.
• Contra Costa Times – Suzanne Bohan: Livermore Lab scientists report promising step toward fusiion ; Nice job, weapons work in context. One quibble – Bohan compares the 3.3 million deg. K temp in tests to the 6000 K of the sun’s surface. Its core, where its fusion occurs, is the more apt comparison (around 15 milliion K).
• MSNBC-CosmicLog – Alan Boyle: Is Fusion Success In Sight? ; He lets the Livermore man declare his machine a possible “game changer,” but Boyle also tells readers that turning a plausibility test into a  commercial power plant will require a long slog.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Laser fusion test results raise energy hopes ;
• Cosmos (Australia) – Kerensa McElroy: Clean power from fusion now one step closer ;  She gets right into the action in the upcoming fully fueled tests, describing a burning wave of fuel isnide the little hohlraums and gouts of neutrons flying out – their capture providing the heat that, in principle, could boil water or other fluid to drive turbines and generators.

Grist for the Mill: LLNL Press Release ;  MIT News ;

What’s this – a paper in Science from fully credentialed, mainstream climatologists saying that global warming has indeed flattened out for the last ten years or so – and that an unexpected water vapor feedback loop in the stratosphere is one big reason?

Two major US outlets are treading carefully as they phrase this. The paper does not suggest this twist can keep the brakes on global temperature for long, or that it is the only reason (among natural fluctuations or other factors) for the near-pause in the warming.

At the Wall St. Journal, Gautam Naik reports this as a partial solution to the “puzzling” flattening of global average temperatures lately. He promptly quotes the paper’s lead author, from the NOAA complex in Boulder, Colo., as saying in essence it is a blip – but one that her community of scientists did not foresee. And while he reports that GW skeptics will doubtless seize on the report, he quotes none of them.

The NYTimes, in a story well inside the front section by Sindya N. Bhanoo, similarly reports it in somewhat tempered (dare I say bland?) terms: the water vapor decrease “offers part of the explanation for a string of years with relatively stable global surface temperature.” She quotes only the lead researcher on the paper. (Correction Note: 1st version of post referred to Ms. Bhanoo as a he. A friend of hers set me straight.)

A broader effort at explaining the paper is in the Houston Chronicle, where Eric Berger stitches the Science piece to one in Nature yesterday that concludes that fears that oceans will lose some of their ability to absorb CO2 from the air are not being realized. His lead: the two papers “…may offer some hope that rising levels of carbon dioxide won’t imminently bring the planet to boil.” No scientists have said the planet is about to boil, but most readers will likely take his hyperbole for what it is. He then declares that this sort of good news reveals a moderation, from the world of science, that may ease the divide between “over-reaching catastrophic claims of environmentalists on one side” and “cries of global warming being a great hoax” from the other – and shows that among scientists there is a great deal of common ground.

One is unsure how to parse that “common ground” among scientists is  pertinent to arguments most fierce by people outside formal science. Berger does call one prominent global warming optimist and member of the National Academy, MITs Richard Lindzen, who is no doubt chortling a bit. Lindzen has been convincingly shown to be wrong about a few things. But in this case he is a sensible person for a reporter to call on a climate change story. For Lindzen has said before that water vapor feedbacks could drastically slow the rate of global warming – and that computer models are full of holes.

Lindzen’s long term optimism for a self-stabilizing climate is, one might rationally surmise, hardly vindicated.  But this paper is among the more prominent, refereed, non-bloggy assertions, from fully mainstream climate scientists, to say yes indeed the last decade may well be the hottest on record but during its course the world’s temperature showed no further strong trend upward. Water vapor did it, in part anyway. Plus, say the papers’ authors, climate models are bad at a few things and missed this one for sure. A lot of that resonates with Lindzen’s positions.

So, okay, in no way does this science torpedo anthropogenic greenhouse enhancement theory. But the news has to be that on top of purloined emails and badly vetted glacier forecasts, events keep giving doubters, who are confident that we cannot change climate by much, reason to turn up the volume and further befuddle politicians and the public.

Other Stories:

• Guardian (UK) David Adam : Water vapour caused one-third of global warming in 1990s, study reveals ; And the dek adds that the research “does not undermine” consensus on man-made climate change. The hed accurately reflects that paper’s corollary to the recent cooling effect due to H2O declines at high altitude – during the 90s, it seems to have blipped a bit upward. And the piece, while describing the research fairly, puts it firmly and explicitly in context of a “difficult time for climate scientists.” It quotes only the paper’s lead author, with no citation of other, specific authority or response.
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Water vapour is a major cause of global warming and cooling find scientists / … will spark further debate… ; She starts by saying NOAA is the “American weather service..” which shortchanges its importance (but, it is like the UK’s Met office, a better analogy). The story explains the paper adequately, but that hed is terribly misleading. It’s not quite a crock, but close. Climate scientists for decades have prominently recognized water vapor as the key feedback ingredient for amplifying the greenhouse effect kicked off by other greenhouse gases such as CO2. The news is that its detailed behavior has not been accurately handled in models.
• Mail Online – David Derbyshire: Water vapour a ‘major cause of global warming and cooling’ ; The piece takes the same overdone gotcha angle, aimed as mainstream climatology, as does the Telegraph. It asserts that scientists overlooked something and identifies it as “the amount of water high in the atmosphere is far more influential on world temperatues that previously thought.” I don’t think that’s right. One expects all climate models saw its importance – but not that it could change so much. He does get one outside source – but not commenting on this specific paper so much as declaring that it does not alter or challenge the basic science of climate change.
• Scientific American – David Biello: Is Water Vapor in the Stratosphere Slowing Global Warming? ;
• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Study: Water vapor may help ‘flatten global warming trend‘ : Nice job, has outsider remark, some reflective comments from the lead author of the paper.
• NPR – Richard Harris: Atmospheric Dry Spell Eases Global Warming ; That’s a near-perfect headline, clear and devoid of suggestions scientists didn’t know about water vapor’s feedback power. And Harris gets useful further info from an outside scientist.

For a dash of reality (the reality being public confusion) displayed for all to see, with humor and angst:

• Times (UK) -Frank Skinner: Come on scientists, get your labs in order ; A funny, honest, sad and in ways misguided column pertinent to but not specifically about the paper in Science. Skinner seems to believe that scientists are the ones to stand up en bloc and declare absolute confidence in this or that truth and thus stop the nonsense the rest of us embrace. Boy, what a mis-reading of a profession’s temperament that is. It’s one a lot of people share. If you want somebody to resolutely declare a truth, ask a priest, mullah, rabbi, or other faithful theologian. Or, in the US, one of those teabaggers out on the right wing (or, in the old days when there was a real left, a commie). If you want to hear a lot of talk of maybes, of error bars,  and of needs for further research, ask the people whose doubts, rivalries, and alternative hypotheses in the end point more reliably toward fact than scripture: scientists. Wiggle room is their specialty. That’s just the way it works.
• Business Week – Ed Wallace: Is Global Warming a Crock of S*%t? ‘ Wallace is a business reporter and a respected reviewer of automobiles for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He’s a bit out of his league with this piece – buying for instance the myth of scientific consensus in the 1960s that an ice age loomed. He summarizes several aspects of climate science incorrectly, in my view. But this again is a non-polemical, honest, reasonable effort by a layman to sort through the din about climate change. His opening bit on one GM executive’s spouted expletive, and the rest of what the man said, is terrific.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

Pic, from press release, high res here (One wonders how many reporters, much less members of the public, can make sense of this diagram).

- Charlie Petit

Hmm. Do medical science writers have to forget now a supposed truth of developmental biology – that most if not all cells in fully developed tissues have lost their capacity to rewire their gene expressions and turn into something else? That supposed barrier lies behind the fuss about stem cells in medicine, including use of induced pluripotent stems cells, or iPS cells, that can bridge the gap.

The news, in Nature, is that a team of Stanford Sch. of Medicine Researchers reports that with the deft manipulation of three genes, they prompted mouse skins cells to convert directly into functioning neurons. Stanford’s press release (in Grist below) declared “The finding could revolutionize the future of human stem cell therapy,” a theme picked up by reporters.

Time is short this morning and time to file is upon me, so let’s go straight to a few samples of outlets using this news (also see, a few posts down. Pere Estupinyà’s post on how it played in some Spanish language outlets).

Stories:

• Financial Times (UK) Clive Cookson: Skin cells turned directly into neurons ; He leads with Stanford’s description of this as a huge step.
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: A ‘huge leap forward’ for stem cell research ;
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Neuron breakthrough offers hope on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s ; The hed jumps ahead of the facts quite a bit while narrowing the news’s scope ; the story itself is well-reported.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Scientists transform skin cells to brain cells in a pioneering study that could benefit sufferers of Alzhaimer’s and Parkinson’s ; Hmmm. The hed is ambitious, as it Derbyshire’s leap to imagining that doctors can now hope to repair Alzheimer’s by injecting freshly-made nerve cells. “Hope” is a word with wiggle room, but still…
• Reuters – Maggie Fox:  Skin cells transformed directly to nerve in study ; Runs with a Fact Box and a  Q&A with the lead researrch,  Why Is This Important? ;
• HealthDay News – Amanda Gardner: Scientists Turn Mouse Skin Cells Into Nerve Cells / Finding could revolutionize stem cell therapy, but much research remains to be done ; She calls the findings radical.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: Cure for brain diseases closer as adult skin cells turned into nerves ; Hmm. Sometimes one can overdo desire to tell readers how this news matters. Curing brain diseases, sure, maybe. Also curing lots of other things, or nothing.
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Mark Johnson: Scientists convert cells while bypassing embryonic state ; This, he writes, is a feat of biological alchemy.

Plenty more too…

Grist for the Mill: Stanford School of Medicine Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

We’re all familiar with the latest trope in the rich field of commercial art depicting dinosaurs – brilliant plumage with colors that are entirely made-up by artists drawing inspiration from contemporary birds and lizard skins. Now, at least one little dead dino has yielded evidence of the hues on one set of bristly feathers down its tail. Looks like red, or maybe brick or terra cotta or similar shade, alternating with bands of pale gray or white, they say. A fossilized early, but genuine, bird also revealed similar evidence of its color.

The paper is in Nature, its lead author a University of Bristol paleontologist. The news is not complicated so doesn’t take much space, and is popular. It is just the thing for briefs and other distractions from the usual run of gloomy news.

Such plumage isn’t, one surmises, anything much like that of birds with their splayed flight feathers. Most birds anyway. Maybe its like a kiwi, a sort of fur, But it was, says here, definitely part of the evolution of feathers. All this from mineralized bits in the fossil that preserve the shape of cellular structures called melanosomes. Those shapes in turn carry clues to what specific pigments were once inside them. Reporters differ, as seen below, in whether the implied colors are all reddish, or include yellow.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Dino tail feathers were carrot colored, study says.
• NYTimes – Carl Zimmer: Study Offers an Insight Into Dinosaur Colors ; Zimmer adds a narrative angle, off his own reporting, about the history of discovery of  fossil melanosomes – even in squids.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Sverker Lundin: The Lost World, Now in Color ; Lundin provides some of the detailed, difficult work required for the research – and opinion from a feathered-dino skeptic that this paper proves nothing.
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne – Early dinosaurs had yellow and white stripes ; Dunno where he (or the headline writer) gets the yellow – at least, while scanning the paper, all I see are references to finding fossil melanosomes associated with reddish brown tones. Maybe I just missed it. Alleyne’s story mentions orange and white rings.
• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: The First Hints Of A Dinosaur’s True Colors ; Good text piece with some outside, and enthusiastic, opinion from another authority. Also at the link is a five-minute audio on the topic including an interview. No hints here of yellow.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Feather study highlights dinosaurs’ true colors ; Pretty short, with a puzzling sentence: “The find refutes recent suggestions that feathers on dinosaurs were simply part of their hide.” Maybe this got edited? If they are feathers, they are feathers (and derive from skin tissue). Maybe meant to write that it refutes the idea that what LOOK LIKE feathers are part of their hide?
• Science News – Sid Perkins: DINOSAURS, IN LIVING COLOR: Perkins, too, mentions yellow as a possibility. So maybe it’s there – and if that’s right, it means this one and the Telegraph’s went beyond the info provided labor-free by the press release.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deobrah Smith: Nothing dull about an orange dinosaur ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Feather fossils reveal dinosaur’s colour ;
• Guardian – Ian Sample: Dinosaurs show their true colours for the first time ; Which were, says here, stripes of russet and white.
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin: Steven Spielberg got it wrong – he should have had a ginger dinosaur ;
• Nat’l Geographic News – Chris Sloan: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed for First Time ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. of Bristol Press Release ;

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A recent paper in Nature showing that a fibroblast can be converted to a neuron without passing through a pluripotent stem cell state could be – if confirmed – as historic as Yamanaka’s 2006 report describing how to induce pluripotency. Strangely (or not) few Spanish language Media have covered it. We highlight two very good stories, and a too enthusiastic one saying that it might be the end of 12 years of adventures on stem cells research.

Esta semana se ha publicado un estudio en Nature que podríamos estar recordando dentro de muchos años: científicos de Stanford han conseguido trasformar células de la piel en neuronas sin necesidad de pasar por un estadio intermedio de células madre inducidas (iPS). Es pronto para valorar el alcance de este hito, pues faltan más estudios que detallen la potencialidad y limitaciones de esta técnica. Pero sin duda,  podría ser considerada la noticia científica del día. Sin embargo, su presencia en las secciones de ciencia es escasa. Podemos entender al menos uno de los porqués: el interés para el público general es limitadísimo. Es un notición para la comunidad científica porque abre una prometedora nueva línea de investigación. Por eso es publicada en Nature. Pero a un lector no especializado seguramente le interesará más leer sobre el color de los dinosaurios. ¿justifica eso que su poca difusión? De ninguna manera. El editor de una sección de ciencia debe saber distinguir cuando una investigación es más relevante o menos; cuando es un avance más dentro de la larga carrera científica, o cuando se trata de algo que puede tener gran impacto. El estudio de nature está dentro de esta categoría, y debe ser tratado como tal.

Público (Esp.) explica muy bien porqué por medio de Nuño Domínguez en “Un tejido puede crear otro sin células madre”. Un titular así refleja que se ha comprendido perfectamente el potencial alcance del descubrimiento: si son fibroblastos o neuronas no es lo más trascendente, lo fundamental es haber logrado transformar células adultas sin pasar por un estado de células madre. ¿Por qué es tan importante? Nuño cuenta de manera muy didáctica que el problema de las células iPS son la aparición de tumores, y estos se evitarían con esta nueva manera de reprogramación celular. Prometedor.

Tanto, que María Poveda se ha dejado llevar por la emoción y quizás ha exagerado un poco al abrir su artículo en La Razón (Esp) con la frase:“Las células madre eran una de las mayores promesas de la Medicina de este siglo y, desde hoy, están en riesgo de convertirse en meras intermediarias de las que se puede prescindir”. Hay muchas razones para argumentar que la investigación en células madre no va a sufrir tal varapalo, ni que “Si la estrategia prospera y se comprueba su seguridad en humanos, la promesa de las células madre habrá durado 12 años”, como arriesgadamente pronostica María. Quien sabe… quizás dentro de un tiempo resulta un comentario acertadísimo. Ahora no lo podemos saber todavía.

El Mundo también cubre la noticia por medio de María Sánchez-Monge “Un método más directo para ‘crear’ neuronas”, y el subtítulo: El nuevo sistema podría eliminar el riesgo de generación de tumores. Buena nota también, que termina con un experto reconociendo que es un paso muy importante, a pesar de que quedan incógnitas: son células de ratón e in vitro. Falta conseguirlo con humanas y realizar ensayos con animales. Cierto, pero así empezó Yamanaka en el 2006 con sus iPS…

Es de suponer que pronto otros periódicos empezarán a dar la noticia, pero éstos son los que por el momento le han prestado una merecida atención.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Tracker has been marveling at the immense flow of news recently on supermajority politics in the US Senate, wobbling prospects for new American resolve on health care and climate change, the storms roiling the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the credibility of what still seems like settled science, and the ructions roiling the US electorate. Also, I’ve been despairing at any way to sensibly track or analyze it all – much of which, after all, is already unmissable by the news-savvy regulars at ksjtracker.

I’ll start small by pointing to one exemplary piece of broad-perspective news writing. Business Week‘s Daniel Whitten and Kim Chipman, along with two editors given credit at the bottom, manage to put most of those moguls into one story today that can be skiied top to bottom in a few moments. It filed a few hours before the State of the Union address, but takes that into account too. This is efficient, instructive news writing.

By the way, maybe it’s all the noise before the storm. I had not seen it before but just read, at Grist, an angry column-essay filed a few months ago by a climate activist named Adam Sacks (a man with a background in politics and holistic medicine, sigh). It makes a fervent case that there is as much as or more delusion on the fix-the-climate side of conversation than there is among those who can’t see any sign it needs fixing. It not only provided the spooky pic for this post, it is well worth reading by anybody interested in the general topic. This goes particularly for reporters on the pertinent beats. Is there a far bigger story out there than such narrow-focus things as geo-engineering, cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and the imminent opening of the Arctic Ocean to commerce? Such as – that scientists worried about global warming, with a few exceptions, are keeping a secret? That they, in their hearts of hearts, think it’s too late to avert catastrophe with any program that is remotely plausible. Are eco-activists prattling along about a new, green, no-regrets economy enablers in denialism? Maybe night sweats fuel the sort of thinking behind any moves among IPCC report writers to slightly tweak the science to get policy makers off the dime. That’s a gloomy story. It, one surmises,  needs better coverage even if it does further paralyze a nervous public and its lawmakers into timid inaction.

- Charlie Petit

We interrupt the tracking of news to remind reporters that the deadline for the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT is coming up—March 1.

The Fellowships pay journalists a $60,000 stipend plus health care to come live in Cambridge and study science and health at MIT and Harvard for a full academic year. Families are welcome and spouses share the privilege of attending classes. Audio and video training is offered.

Find details at http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/fellowships/overview.html .

- Phil Hilts

I’ve spent all week trying to read Walt Bogdanich‘s story on medical radiation errors, on the front of The New York Times on Sunday.

The story starts in an above-the-fold box on page 1, and continues for two ad-free pages and another half page inside. I pasted it into Word and it came to 6,300 words. That’s modest for The New York Times Magazine–brief, in fact for a cover story–but overwhelming and almost oppressive in a newspaper. Every time I picked it up, I had to quit when the blood started draining from my arms, my elbows locked, my fingers turned white, I could no longer grasp the pages, and the paper drifted to the floor with–gasp!–columns and columns of Bogdanich’s piece still unread!

I finally read the piece comfortably and easily today using Times Reader on my MacBook. To focus on substance for a moment: This is another brilliant piece by Bogdanich, who must never sleep and for whom a fresh Pulitzer should be kept on ice every year. It follows a similarly persuasive and disturbing piece last June, the first in a series on medical radiation errors.

Bogdanich’s longstanding, proven technique is not simply to uncover one scandal, or one maltreated patient, but to discover another, and another, and bury the reader with detail so that, in the end, there is little doubt that what he is describing as a serious problem is a serious problem, not an isolated incident.

The problem is, I’m not sure I’ve ever finished one of his pieces, as compelling as they are. Not only does the problem of holding a broadsheet aloft for half an hour stop me, but part way through, I get it. I’m sold. I don’t need all the detail.

In a magazine story, a writer might focus on one family, or one hospital, to make the point, bringing in other characters and plot lines to enrich the main story line. Newspaper editors will tolerate some detail, but never seem to be willing to allow enough detail on characters to let the characters really come alive. They want the news, the statistics, the government reports, the court documents, the memos, the coroners’ reports. We don’t get enough detail to make us really understand and feel for the victim of a medical error, or for what his survivors are going through, trying to rebuild their lives. But we get detail that burdens the story and tends to blur the story line, not strengthen it.

This is a great story, and I hope Bogdanich is considered for the Pulitzer for this series, even though the first installment and this one appeared in different years. It’s another brilliant piece of investigative reporting.

At least, what I read of it.

- Paul Raeburn

It’s official. NASA says its Mars Rover Spirit is so bogged down in Martian sand that there’s no point calling it, or her as some would prefer, a rover. It is a stationary science platform. The machine has been in the Columbia Hills of Mars’s Gusev Crater for most of the six years since it landed. It busted one of six wheels not long after it got there and, after covering miles of terrain while gimpy, another wheel went kaput late last year in its sand trap. It apparently has no chance of ever regaining the mobility of a rover worth that title. Six years, 12 miles done and none left to go.

Just a couple of days after detailing how Spirit might eventually climb from its deep, soft rut, the NYTimes‘s Kenneth Chang this morning reports it with a simple lede: The Martian rover Spirit will rove no more.

At Popular Mechanics, in a more adventuresome piece, Daniel H. Wilson (styled at PM’s resident roboticist) writes it in the style of an obituary. It works well as amusement, except that the machine’s instruments and transmitter still function and it may, after a hibernation for a few months during Mars’s winter, send weather and other readings for a long time yet. Wilson’s story ought to have acknowledged that (the hed’s dek does do that – noting her downgrade to “operational science station”). The story’s closing graf on the machine’s survivors, mourning the loss, is good enough to earn the piece a passing grade. This is the only piece explicitly funereal, but many others have a hint of mournful dirge to them.

The news is not all that new – the machine has been stuck there for months and was clearly not destined for any major new excursions – but it’s official stamp attracted a lot of familiar bylines. Most also note that sister rover Opportunity, half way around the planet, continues to roll stalwartly on with more craters to visit before her itinerary is complete.

Other stories:

• NPR – Joe Palca: NASA: Mars Rover Will Likely Rove No More ; Palca reports, with reason, that it remains possible the machine will yet extricated itself from the sand and could perambulate it bit farther. But, one does think, it’s hardly roving if one is only dragging oneself slowly, awkwardly, and not far – perhaps to a sunnier spot nearby to spend its semi-retirement.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: NASA gives up effort to free Mars rover. This one focusses on the positive – as a fixed beacon, the Rover will help Mars geophysicists figure out whether the planet’s core is rock solid or on the sloshy, molten side.
• AP – Alicia Chang: NASA ends effort to free rover from Martian sand ;
• Wired News – Alexis Madrigal: NASA Gives Up on Spirit Rescue, Preps Mars Rover to Hibernate ;
• ABC (Australia) News: Mars Rover to remain stuck forever ;
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: NASA’s Spirit won’t be roving Mars anymore ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: NASA’s Spirit rover stuck in sand on Mars ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Nasa accepts Spirit Mars rover ‘stuck for good‘;
• MSNBC CosmicLog – Alan Boyle: Mars Rover Will Rover No More ;
• Nat’l Geographic Daily News – Victoria Jaggard : Mars Rover to Roam No More — it’s Official ;
• Florida Today – Todd Halvorson: Spirit rover, stuck in sand, faces harsh Martian winter ;
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Trapped Mars Rover Turning New Corner, Scientists Say ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

Here goes a scrambled post on a scrambled affair.

US media largely have had little in recent days on the troubles at the UN’s climate-watching IPCC – an agency under siege peripherally due to the largely dismissed flap over emails, right in the cross hairs for its Himalaya glacier melt forecast screw-up, and potentially over suggestions of systematic exaggeration of global warming’s signature in specific storms, droughts, or other natural disasters.

But the fracas continues making headlines in the UK, in Europe generally (see Sascha Karberg’s post here on German press), and especially in India, home of the IPCC boss and host to those melting glaciers.

The latest round of rebuff for IPCC, on purported exaggerated laying blame of disasters at global warming’s doorstep ran in the Sunday Times. Sci and Enviro Editor Jonathan Leake rounded up accusations that even if most IPCC reports and science are generally solid, some of their passages have consistently and for political effect gone beyond established science in declaring specific recent disasters as the likely result of global warming. The story reverberated powerfully in India, as seen in this from the Hindustan Times.

Other outlets are pumping out stories nearly every day. At the generally liberal-left UK newspaper whose coverage has been most aggressive in taking global warming seriously, The Guardian, Bob Ward argues that the Times’s piece is a sample of “opportunism” by long-time critics of the IPCC to dig up old complaints and thus pile on the beleaguered UN agency. At the Telegraph, a more right-leaning paper, Andrew Hough reports today, by contrast, that even the government’s chief scientist is calling for “a new era of honesty” in reporting scientific evidence by IPCC and other agencies. The adviser did not back down on his conviction that the peril is real, but said public confidence would be boosted by greater honesty about the inherent uncertainties in climate science. And the Telegraph‘s columnist, James Delingpole, as in polemics, goes full tilt after the IPCC as he asserts that Anthropogenic Global Warming theory is toast. That’s dumb, but he’s a columnist so has license. Just to show here that not everyone at the Telegraph is on the warpath, one must note that its environmental writer Louise Gray did a balanced job the other day.  in reporting that IPCC members have a “robust defense” to offer to charges its reports systematically exaggerate natural disaster and climate change associations.

One finds similar, continued backs and forths among reporters and columnists in Indian media. Two examples: In the Times of India columnist Jug Suraiya takes a decidedly sour view of IPCC, lumping it with rumors that WHO exaggerated H1N1 flu dangers at the behest of big pharma and the vaccine industry. The Business Standard ran two contrasting opinion pieces back to back – one by a man urging that the attention be on the science, not IPCC, as refereed literature continues to persuade him that the Earth is changing fast and things should be done to slow that down, another by a well-known British blogger, Bennie Peiser, who sees the IPCC as hopelessly captured by a cabal of true-believers.

Meanwhile in the US press lately one finds practically nothing aside from non-science-savvy columnists. The NYTimes’s former climate writer, Andrew C. Revkin, filed a thoughtful long post yesterday at his Dot Earth blogspot. To be sure, the emails were in the UK, the IPCC head is from India, and the Stockholm meeting supercharged Euro media into covering climate politics. But one would expect a bit more on this side of the oceans (well, here’s one from Canada: CANWEST NEWS SERVICE – Richard Foot: Canadian scientist says UN’s global warming panel ‘crossed the line‘.)

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT - but pertinent, and funny.

In the UK at the Telegraph, enviro writer, blogger, and wordsmith George Monbiot has invented his own Booker Prize (ie, not the one for best book). He awarded it to a US newspaperman who not only denies global warming is serious or our fault but, by Monbiot’s count, set an all-time record for errors on climate science in a single published story. In a followup, he offers the annotated evidence of this festival of factual misconstrual. This Booker Prize, as it happens, is named for Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker for what Monbiot calls a habit of climate change howlers. One is inclined to salute the  eponym as sensible – here is a collection of Mr. Booker’s recent offerings, including some on the IPCC’s latest spot of rough water. Thank you Seth Borenstein for bringing Monbiot’s wit to our attention.

- Charlie Petit