I didn’t expect to be tracking fiction here, but now that the opportunity has arisen, I’m eager to do it. In the Jan. 25th edition of The New Yorker, E.O. Wilson has one of the most interesting pieces of science writing I’ve seen in a long time. I wouldn’t call it journalism, but he uses his reporting (a lifetime studying ants) and his literary powers so expertly that I thought it was worth spending a few minutes this morning looking at what he’s achieved. (And if anyone wonders whether Wilson, a scientist, qualifies as a science writer, I remind you that he has won two Pulitzer Prizes for non-fiction. He qualifies.)

Wilson’s New Yorker piece is fiction, an excerpt from a forthcoming novel, called Anthill, to be published in April. The excerpt, called Trailhead, begins with the tragic death of the queen of the Trailhead ant colony, made especially poignant because the workers scurrying around her, all of them her children, don’t yet know she’s dead. Her horny exoskeleton remains unchanged:

Her stillness alone failed to give warning to her daughters that a catastrophe had occurred for all of them. She lay there, in fact, as though nothing had happened. She had become a perfect statue of herself…Hence the workers were at first unaware of their mother’s death. Her quietude said nothing, and the odors of life, still rising from her, signalled, I remain among you. She smelled alive.

He goes on to relate the 20-year history of the Trailhead queen, how she had once had wings, how she’d joined a swarm of flying males, and how one of them had clamped his legs around her body, sending them spiraling to the ground. In five minutes, he had given her all the sperm she would need to foster a colony of 10,000 ants. She would never need to mate again.

Wilson has to walk a couple of tightropes here. One requires him to balance narrative and exposition. The ellipses in the quote I highlighted above replace a couple of sentences explaining why the queen’s appearance didn’t change.

While humans and other vertebrates have an internal skeleton surrounded by soft tissue that quickly rots away, ants are encased in an external skeleton; their soft tissues shrivel into dry threads and lumps, but their exoskeletons remain, a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone.

I might have shortened or excised that, on the grounds that most people, however ignorant they might be about ants, understand that they would look unchanged at the moment they died; we’ve all seen dead ants. On the other hand, I would have hated to lose “a knight’s armor fully intact long after the knight is gone.” I’m picturing those creepy, empty suits of armor at the Metropolitan Museum; it makes me shudder.

Part of Wilson’s achievement here is that he mostly makes the right judgments about how much exposition to leave in, and so we learn an enormous amount about ants without losing the narrative drive. And because this is a story, I’m sure I’ll remember much more of the science than I would have if I’d read it in a biology textbook, even one by Wilson.

Another balancing act Wilson performs is to make the characters come alive without anthropomorphizing them, as a lesser writer might do. Describing the colony’s early history, he writes that some pioneers, “guided by instinct, because no one existed to teach them, set out to forage for food.” He doesn’t say, “brave pioneers decided leave the colony and hunt for food.” Humans decide; ants don’t.

When some soldiers begin to lay eggs to replace those formerly produced by the queen, Wilson writes, “Their fertility might renew the energy of the Trailheaders, but would it save the colony? The ants could not know. All they could do was react.” Wilson makes us care about these tiny creatures without endowing them with human attributes. That’s high art. And it must come not only from his literary skill, but from his decades of dedication to the study of ants.

Wilson goes on to chart the gradual decline of the colony without its queen, including a war reminiscent of Thoreau’s war of the red ants and the black ants in Walden. (Another literary precursor that occurred to me while I was reading this was Watership Down, the story of a rabbit warren forced to find a new home.)

Near the end of this excerpt, Wilson’s Trailheaders even sound scarily reminiscent of some human societies. With their queen gone, Wilson writes, “the ants were a doomed people in a besieged city. Their unity of purpose was gone, their social machinery halted…the order of the colony was dissolving.”

All the ants knew was that they had a choice–fight, or run.

“There was nothing else left in their collective mind.”

- Paul Raeburn

A study that the National Science Foundation paid for,  comparing the math confidence of girls and boys as a function of their teachers’ anxieties on the subject, is getting wide pickup. In the Proceedings of the Nat’l Acad. of Sciences a team from the Univ. of Chicago reports that young girls appear particularly vulnerable to a loss of arithmetic confidence if their own teachers are nervous about math. All the teachers in the study were women. Boys seemed unaffected by teacher math anxiety. Girls whose teachers felt fine when numbers were around seemed to come out unscathed too. What a lot to digest.

The biggest ride must be going to the AP version, by Randolph E. Schmid. He phoned the lead researcher and has opinion from an outside authority. However, while he gives the size of the study population – which seems big enough to warrant a story – he does not have any other numbers. Such as, by how much were the anxious girls’ scores in math tests, after a year of teaching by math-nervous instructors, below the scores of others with math-happy teachers? And how much more anxious were they, and more likely to agree that girls are better at reading but boys are better at math?

At the LA Times, Karen Kaplan does a little better on relaying the numbers, but she also uses a loaded term when she reports that they are “significant.” That can mean to statisticians that the difference looks real but is not necessarily big enough to matter much, while to the public it means not only real but real important. She also provides the test score differences of the pertinent populations, but one is unsure how big a deal is a the gap between 107.8 and 102.5. She also, smartly, reports that the researchers are unsure exactly how teachers unnerved by numbers betray their worries to their pupils.

The Tracker, being slightly math-phobic himself (Mrs. Tracker is the whiz in this household), is not sure how to handle these figures either, much less whatever statistical significance chi-factors etc. mean. But the topic is so close to home with many readers that care is required in reporting them.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Graeme Paton: Fear of maths among teachers damages pupils / Female teachers with “maths anxiety” are fuelling the stereotype that boys are better than girls at the subject, according to research ; Just curious – why put quotation marks around a phrase, a pure Britishism, when it’s not a quote or a hypothetical concept?
• Chicago Tribune – Kristen Mack: Study: Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls students ;
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise : Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers ;

As there were no male teachers in the study, a variable has been left out of this study, leading to ambiguity in the permutations of possible causes and effects. Yet the heads all imply this might not have happened were it not for women up at the front of the room. The Press Release in Grist does the same thing. That looks like a leap ahead of the data.

Grist for the Mill: U. Chicago Press Release ;

Pic Getty source;

- Charlie Petit

Lots of  ink about the flaws in the IPCC-reports in the German language media. In a paragraph of the report, the IPCC wrote, that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 – a statement, that was not based on peer reviewed science.

“From “Emailgate” to “Glaciergate” ?” asks Stefan Schmitt for Zeit.online, and tries to answer three key question: How did the mistake happen? How did it find its way into the IPCC report? Why did the mistake stay in the report?

Schmitt summarizes what is known so far and he finds a way to describe systemic errors without raising the notion, that the whole IPCC report might be wrong. E.g. he makes clear, that the IPCC is part of the United Nations, which means, that not only scientific rules (peer review process) but also political considerations influenced the report. Less developed countries with less access to high ranking peer reviewed journals used political influence to allow the inclusion of reports, which were not peer reviewed – like the report from WWF-India, where the wrong 2035 date came from (originally published by the popular science journal NewScientist). Schmitt quotes the journal Nature, that the IPCC won’t change this procedure to prepare the 2014 report! Regarding the public reactions and the shade, that such mistakes leave one an (hopefully?) overall correct report, the IPCC should think about this twice – there is no alternative to scientific rules in science.

Spiegel Online (Christoph Seidler) quotes Austrian glaciologists Georg Kaser, who told the IPCC about the mistake in 2007, already!

“Voodoo instead of Science“, headlines the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Ulf von Rauchhaupt). The article explains, that the mistake did not came from the climate researchers (atmospheric physicists, oceanographer from workgroup I), but from scientists from the workgroup II, who try to predict the outcome of climate change for ecological and socioeconomic systems. Obviously this workgroup accepted unaudited “data”. “Voodoo Science” – that’s how the head of the IPCC Rajendra Kumar Pachauri should call this part of the IPCC report now, because these were the words he used in November 2009, when he tried to discredit a study from the Geological Survey of India. The study came to a different result than the IPCC regarding the Himalayan glaciers but wasn’t peer reviewed, too. Interestingly, Rauchhaupt writes, that the flaw should have personal consequences, because the mistake had been reported to the IPCC a long time ago, but it seems, that someone chose to keep it from the public.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, with an article from Christopher Schrader (who follows a scientist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who struggles to deal with the “Glaciergate”).

Der Standard writes, that the IPCC is looking for more mistakes in the report, heavily quoting (but not linking) the “Sunday Times”.

More ink: Tagesspiegel, Financial Times Deutschland, Rheinische Post online, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (with an interesting additional commentary, that discusses the system of the IPCC), Basler Zeitung, Kölner Stadtanzeiger (Interview), Wiener Zeitung…

- Sascha Karberg

Henry Fountain leads the NYT science section with a long piece on Hispaniola’s seismic history and prospects. It’s composition and style are notable for an instructive, almost pedagogic air. He explains what’s known about Haiti and Dominica quakes  as well as general Caribbean tectonics. But he leaves for deep in the story several passages that would have supported pure news lead angles. One that stands out (and has been reported elsewhere, more or less) is that the quake, while near Port au Prince, probably increased chances for a major rupture directly through the city “during the lifetime of structures built during the reconstruction effort.”  One could build a whole story around the need for a massive, well-disciplined program to replace the fallen buildings with much better ones. This includes the opportunity for major aid donors such as megabuck foundations to pay for training of carpenters and masons and local architect-contractors (no doubt already starting the rebuilding) and to provide lightweight structural beams, fasteners, and other materials to erect safer neighborhoods. Fountain might have a smart way here to write it – as a well-composed argument rather than an urgent, angle-based news story this long after the event. But there is more than one buried lede.

Other notable headlines:

• John Tierney: Corporate Backing for Research? Get Over It ; Tierney has a talker here, sure to polarize. His point appears to be that as most people with potential conflicts of interest behave rather ethically anyway, policies to expose such avenues toward corruption are seldom necessary. He makes a good point – conflict of interest accusations may be and often are lazy ways to avoid substantial examination of actual behavior. But if he’s suggesting the issue is empty or unworthy of concern most of us, I suspect, disagree. He does defend the IPCC and Al Gore, an interesting diversion.
• Dennis Overbye: Physicists’ Dreams and Worries in Era of the Big Collider ; In Los Angeles, glamorous and publicly well-exposed cosmologists and physicists got together, while some rich and famous tech business people plus Overbye listened in, and shared angst and hope. The Standard Model lives. Nobody knows what’s next but the SM surely will die soon. This is a story about bated breath.
• Kenneth Chang – Engineers Plot the Future of a Hobbled Mars Rover ; Plenty of outlets recently have relayed news from NASA that the rover Spirit is stuck in the sand. Chang went to JPL and brings a detailed update on her prospects. Not good ones, it appears. A creaky machine, heroically long past its assigned lifetime, so sad. The science still rolls in, for now. Note that the hed says engineers, not scientists. They’re in charge of the ICU and life support activities, including the “fish swim”. News is better for sister rover Opportunity.
• Abigail Zuger MD: Book Review: Abusing Not Only Children, but Also Science ; Recommended reading to inspire hard thought on a thorny topic ;

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A Spanish journalist, after an Astrobiology conference at the Royal Society,  suggests care in searching for intelligent extraterrestrial life because if it exists it must have evolved –an evolutionary biologist says- to be similar to humans. Aliens would be as violent, envious and prone to invasions like us. We could have problems if “they” locate us… This story raises the issue: what to do when a scientist eager for notoriety says something stupid at a conference? Maybe it is better to ignore him…

Hemos encontrado una nota que no sabemos si nos genera gracia o crispación. La firma para  ABC (Esp) Emili J. Blasco: “Llamar a los extraterrestres podría ser peligroso…”. Emili está cubriendo en Londres un congreso de la Royal Society, y hace muy bien en buscar algo original más allá de las palabras de su presidente Sir Martin Rees, que tantísimos medios han reproducido sin objetar: en 10 años sabremos si estamos solos en el universo o no (El Pais). Mal expresado por Rees o mal interpretado por Europa Press, quien sabe, pero resulta obvio que como mucho, dentro de una década podremos saber si algo vivo nos acompaña en este vasto Universo, pero de ninguna manera confirmar que estamos solos.

Disculpad por el inciso. Regresando al interesante texto de Emili, parece serio al explicar que algunos científicos proponen regular la búsqueda de vida fuera de nuestro planeta, por si a los extraterrestres se les ocurre venir a visitarnos no en son de paz. Uno de ellos opina “Dadas las consecuencias que un contacto puede tener, necesitamos que los gobiernos y las Naciones Unidas estén implicadas en cualquier discusión”. Rebuscado, pero puede tener un pase. Lo que sí resulta absurdo es el párrafo: “la vida extraterrestre, de existir, habrá evolucionado de modo muy parecido a la humana, por lo que los “aliens” serán tan envidiosos, violentos y proclives a explotar a los demás como los propios especímenes humanos. Su llegada a la Tierra significaría entonces una guerra a muerte por el control de bienes necesarios para subsistir “. Esto es una elucubración científicamente insostenible, por mucho que la haga un tal Conway Morris en busca de renombre y aparecer en los periódicos.  Está claro que Emili sólo refleja las opiniones de científicos asistiendo al congreso, pero en ocasiones como ésta quizá sea mejor no darles tanta cancha. O si se hace, equilibrar un poco más la información. Algunos científicos son buenos estrategas con los medios..

- Pere Estupinyà

Physicists from Columbia and MIT, after ten years of labor and longer than that doing calculations, say in Nature Physics they have oonched maybe a little bit closer to practical fusion power. That’d be a potentially big story except that various teams of similarly smart people have been saying similar things for more than half a century. This one ought, one thinks, to get a ride in the press anyway. The machine, called LDX, is aesthetically appealing and technically audacious. It produces something called a turbulent pinch – a feeling a lot of people have sometimes but this one is a good thing. The outside of the device looks like a movie set version of a physics experiment, sitting in a well-lit hall with room to walk around it. Inside is a geometrically pure, donut-shaped and superconducting dipole magnet that hovers, held free of mechanical struts or other restraints by a second,  levitation-inducing magnet. Around it white hot, rarefied plasma buffets about. The  ring-magnet’s dipole somehow induces usually-dispersive turbulence to drive knots of denser plasma inward, giving them long enough lifetimes to, eventually, sustain fusion. Something like that. Robert Heinlein would approve.

It has a good institutional  pedigree, an exotic angle in the device’s inspiration from interplanetary fields including Earth’s magnetosphere, and a press release to announce a successful first test run. But so far the only name-brand US news outlet giving it much of a ride is Popular Science. There writer Clay Dillow has a presumably deliberately droll lede: “It’s amazing no one thought of it before — nuclear fusion from a levitating tire-sized magnet surrounded by 10-million degree plasma.”

You’ll need to read this and other pieces, as well as the Grist down below with the release and links to more detailed info, to get an inkling how this thing works. But one is filled with questions that go unanswered in anything I’ve read. Such as – are Van Allen belts and the aurorae, held against the planet or plunging toward it as solar storms buffet our space neighborhood,  natural examples of the stability this geometry is supposed to provide to magnetically confined plasmas in the lab? If the thing is superconducting, how does one keep it cold for very long in that scorching plasma? And if it has a current racing around in it that generates an H-field that modulates the external plasma, what keeps the current going in this free-floating magnet while it expends energy on that job? A curious reporter should, after asking around, venture answers to such questions for readers who remember a little bit of electricity and magnetism from a physics course years ago.

In the UK at the Register, Lester Haines offers his usual homage to boffinry and with a knowing but wise-guy subhed. The dek is “Turbulent pincher” to bitchslap tokamaks, pellet lasers? Aside from the sass, that’s a pretty good summary. He also has an amazing assumption when he writes, “Most Reg readers will be familiar with the idea of fusion reactors…” Hmm. Really? He includes a kicker, or “bootnote” that is so far off topic it ought to be done longer to explain more, or omitted. Haines seems comfortable with the topic but as far as I can tell, the new info is straight off the press release with little additional reporting (as I’ve noted before, Haines is not given a lot of time for such diligence. He has two other pieces in the paper today, and three yesterday).

At a specialty news outlet whose focus is mainly consumer electronic gear, Romania-based Softpedia, science editor Tudor Vieru gives it a serious rendering, but also lacking apparent effort to do anything but translate the press release.

More are sure to come. Aren’t they?

Grist for the Mill:

MIT News Office Story, MIT Press Release (See comment – ‘tho I don’t see the difference between the story and the release/CP) ; Columbia Univ Press Release ;   LDX Experiment page , Nature Physics abstract;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) We discuss 4 stories today: We have the environmental impacts of gold mines in the Andes with more opinions than scientific data and one from Colombia explaining how a tobacco plant changes its habits to fight certain worms. From Argentina is a good article about local researchers showing that people in vegetative states still have circadian rhythms. And  from Spain is a very complete analysis of NASA’s predicament as it makes further human exploration plans.

Reporteros científicos, preparémonos para cubrir qué ocurrirá en las próximas semanas cuando Obama tome por fin una decisión sobre el futuro de la NASA y su programa de exploración espacial con humanos. Buenas noticias: no hace falta buscar cachitos de información aislados para poder conformar un retrato global. Público (Esp) lo hace por nosotros –y para sus lectores-, con el gran análisis de Daniel Mediavilla “Crisis en la NASA”. En él da buena cuenta de los dos informes que el presidente tiene sobre su mesa, proponiéndole alternativas que difieren sustancialmente en aspectos importantes: El panel Agustine le recomienda que abandone el desarrollo del cohete Ares 1 y las cápsulas Orión, y que permita el acceso a iniciativas privadas. El Panel ASAP está en desacuerdo en ambas medidas, y sólo coinciden en no alargar la vida útil del shuttle. No es tan simple como este burdo resumen, pero podéis ampliar información en el texto de David, destacado en el tracker como buen análisis que de contexto al lector.

También en Público encontramos otro interesante reportaje que vale la pena comentar, esta vez de temática ambiental. Nazaret Castro desde Buenos Aires firma “La fiebre del oro destroza los Andes”, un artículo muy crítico con la actividad minera en una región de los Andes. El texto está bien redactado, y aunque cuenta con opiniones de ambos bandos, se nota una clara preferencia por la visión ecologista. Exagerada, incluso, con el título del reportaje. El tracker no tiene elementos para valorar si las minas de la Biosfera de San Guillermo son tan perniciosas como opinan los grupos ecologistas o inofensivas como sostienen los técnicos de la empresa. Más bien intuye que lo primero, pero desearía encontrar referencia a algún trabajo científico independiente que ofreciera luz objetiva al debate. Ésta es una buena nota, muy bien trabajada, y con un punto interesante sobre la falta de seguro ambiental. La valoramos positivamente pero con ánimo constructivo hacemos la observación de que además de las opiniones subjetivas o interesadas pediríamos incluir un poco de ciencia.

Sin salir de Argentina nos fijamos en un artículo de La Nación de Nora Bär “Algo de luz para el misterio de la vida vegetativa”. El título no es tremendamente llamativo, pero se ajusta perfectamente al contenido de la investigación que describe: confirmar mediante medidas de temperatura corporal que pacientes en estado vegetativo mantienen sus ciclos circadianos no es un hallazgo científico espectacular, pero pista para diagnósticos más certeros y para comprender mejor esta misterioso estado. El reportaje de Nora Bär introduce muy bien los antecedentes de esta investigación, y avanza con fluidez hasta darle al lector una comprensión global de este trabajo realizado por científicos argentinos.

Y terminamos con El Colombiano saboreando un nuevo artículo desenfadado de Ramiro Velásquez Gómez “La planta que no se deja fregar la vida”, donde demostra que sabe disfrutar de la tan interesante profesión de periodista científico. En su texto explica que las plantas de tabaco modifican sus hábitos de apertura de flores para hacer frente a las polillas. Tampoco es para tirar cohetes… pero alabamos el dinamismo y las reflexines sobre los sentidos de las plantas, más desarrollados de lo que a veces creemos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Science News‘s Sid Perkins came up with an unusual item at the meeting of the American Meteorological Society last week - a climate change story that’s has little to do with greenhouse gases. But it’s still our fault, or maybe to our credit. Researchers presented two studies that see a link between crop irrigation in the American midwest and cooler, wetter summers in recent years. Good, interesting story that nobody else seems to have had.

The researchers say a rising crop of thirsty corn, soya, and other plants in the region – which naturally transpire right into the air most of the water they get via sprinkler, dripper, and furrow – could be shifting the weather. Perkins also gets from the scientists a rather eye-popping number: during the last century irrigation wells pulled more than 300 cubic kilometers of aquifer into the air. (Actually, the story reports it as more than 333 cubic km. One  wonders what kind of unit conversion produced such a precise number.)

At the same meeting Perkins picked up another piece of news nobody else, far as I can tell, had (thus the benefits of a travel budget and time to take in a meeting):

• How Better Weather Models Can Save Peanut Farmers Money ;
• *UPDATE (missed this one yesterday and Sid says he likes it better’n the peanut story): Minor Air Traffic Delays Add Up To Big Costs ;

- Charlie Petit

Cotton with the label “Eco” is more expensive, but a constantly growing crowd of consumers in the European Union is poised to pay more. They hope to do a good thing. The feeling is that Eco-labeled cotton is free of genetically modified (GM) cotton. But apparently it is not, report Jens Brambusch and Hannes Grassegger in an exclusive article for Financial Times Deutschland. Even the biggest distributors of clothes like H&M are not sure whether they sold so-called Eco-clothes with traces of GM cotton. No one in Germany or EU realized, that a year ago (April 2009) local media in India reported about a fraud, where GM-cotton was sold as Eco-cotton. The Indian Fairtrade company Raj Eco Farm and the companies, who are responsible for the “100 percent Eco”-certification (Ecocert from France and Control Union, Netherlands) were sued by the Indian governmental authorities. But the cotton was already distributed in Germany.

It’s a nice story with some investigative effort, but it lacks a certain amount of science (journalism). It is of course right to blame companies for selling something under a false label. And it is good, that they explain to the reader, that it is more or less impossible to make sure that Eco-cotton is “100 percent” free of GM cotton, because a mix up with GM-pollen could not be ruled out completely, e.g.. And it is important to know, that the amounts of produced and sold Eco-labeled cotton differ greatly.

But I think the article lacks a paragraph about what is the actual health risk of wearing a T-shirt made out of Eco-cotton contaminated with a tiny amount of GM-cotton. What kind of genetic manipulation is it?  BT-cotton, I assume? (They don’t mention it.) Anyone out there, who knows about a study proving a health risk of wearing (or eating?) a T-shirt made out of 100 percent BT-cotton? Never heard of this…

Basically all the leading newspapers simply picked up (say: copied, more or less) the FTD-report:

Hamburger Abendblatt, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Wiener Zeitung, stern.de, zeit-online and so on. Even the Süddeutsche Zeitung did not make the effort to explain much about the differences of “Eco”- and “GM”-cotton, despite the article use of some new quotes – but mostly from politicians like the Green party’s agriculture expert.

At least Die Welt (Michael Miersch) wrote against the mainstream and what Miersch calls “artificial agitation.” In a short but sharp commentary (headlined “O cole bio” he puts together quite an quantity of facts: Isn’t Bt-cotton even more “eco” if the farmers use less (41 % less, according to Miersch) pestisides, he asks? And regarding the possibilities of health risks, Miersch writes, that “no one got creeps or a cold” from wearing a T-shirt containing GM-cotton.

Another article, where the author (Stephan Börnecke) took some effort to do some research (but running under the teaser: “gene-cotton”) was published by the Frankfurter Rundschau. In one paragraph Bt-cotton is explained, and also how difficult it is to guarantee (or certificate) 100 percent GM-free cotton.

- Sascha Karberg

In the Post yesterday its India correspondent Rama Lakshmi gets a timely update on the beleagured head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one week after news broke that the agency made a pottage of its internal rules for vetting important scientific prognostications, and said the glaciers of Himalaya are likely goners in less than 30 years. We’ve posted on that snafu already. This is a solid update.

There is much more coverage on this, including in the Indian press, and one expects to see a good deal yet in coming days and weeks.

From another worldwide news outlet: AP Ashok Sharma: UN panel chief won’t quite for Himalayan melt error.

The fallout on this has hardly stopped. In the UK‘s Daily Mail,  David Rose brings word that some IPCC members knew the 2035 date has little substance, but included it deliberately for political impact. If this holds up, uh oh.

- Charlie Petit

The AP’s Alicia Chang appears to have an enterprise excloo that puts the last week of rainy weather in drought stricken (maybe ex-drought stricken now) California in perspective. A workshop held at Caltech last week to construct the worst sort of plausible storm assault that might hit the region and to start work on a contingency plan for such a thing, almost got rained out as many participants called in stranded. That’s the hook. The news is that meterologists say that a rather simple confluence of meterological mayhem could dump as much as eight feet of rain on the state in a few weeks.

Splish splash and I jump back in the past. The story has an element of deja vu. Back in 1997-98 during the last big El Niño storms several of us reporters dug up historical reports on the winter of 1861-62 when, as Chang reports again now,  just such a thing occurred. As I recall from the old records, not only did the Central Valley turn largely into a gigantic lake but so much runoff surged from the San Joaquin and Sacramento drainages and through the Delta that it flushed SF Bay of marine water. The muddy flood ran out the Golden Gate full time – even when the tides tried to come in.

As Chang reports, the extreme floods “temporarily moved the state capital from Sacramento to San Francisco and forced the then-governor to attend his inauguration by rowboat.” In recreating what could have occurred to do such a thing, she reports, the scientists called their model “Frankenstorm.”  What’s really new here is that, while no good meteorological data reveal how it happened that time, researchers didn’t have much of  a struggle to come up with how it might happen the next time.

Man the lifeboats. It’s raining again.

Grist for the Mill: USGS ARk Storm Project ; That’s one of the best project names seen in awhile. The site includes a YouTube scenario called MASSIVE STORMS.

- Charlie Petit

Up at Quirks and Quarks at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., host Bob McDonald had his usual slew of segments – including a dandy on the strange genome of the photosynthesizing sea slug Elysia chlorotica. Producer Jim Handman, thank you very much, tipped me off to it. The other segments may be great too – but this one is the only I listened too (it’s so much easier to scan and read fast than to listen fast!). It’s worth streaming to your laptop or uploading to your audio player for the next jog or commute.

Several other outlets ran news on this too in the last few days – and one did so two weeks ago- but the Florida professor is a delight and worth listening to directly. His wit builds as the interview goes along.

HOWEVER - Note added just as this post neared completion. THIS IS NOT ENTIRELY NEW NEWS. There must be a press release on this latest news on E. chlorotica. I couldn’t find one. However, the search did uncover one on EurekAlert, a release from Oct. of 2008 from Texas A & M. It’s down there in Grist. Sure looks like the same essential news, although the USF team seems to have delved deeper into the slug’s genetic tools to confirm that it makes its own chlorophyll.  That earlier release from TAMU churned up some media interest. Plus: one finds, from way back in 2006:

• NY Times Op-Ed – Olivia Judson: Why I’m Happy I Evolved ; Reporters should have, in the latest round, acknowledged that the slug’s strange endowments have been attracting scholarly interest for some time. The trail is, like that of a terrestrial slug, easy to see. As grizzled editors used to tell newbie reporters, Don’t Forget to Check the Clips.

Other stories:

• Science News – Susan Milius: Kleptomaniac Sea Slug Makes Chlorophyll Like a Plant ; Hurrah – Milius notes that this news has a history – and she delineates what is new. She got it more than two weeks ago, firsthand and first out of the gate, at a meeting in Seattle of the Soc’y for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Other reports appeared after the journal published it.
• McClatchy/Tampa Tribune: USF finds sea slugs can live on sunlight, like plants.
• USA Today – Doug Stanglin (blog): Sea slug found to be half-plant, half-animal ; Oh for the love of mollusca. Why not tell a semblance of clear truth: part-plant, part-animal?
• LiveScience – Clara Moskowitz : Surprising Sea Slug Is Half-plant, Half-animal ; Maybe this 50-50 thing is a play off of old horror movie promos (Sting of Death! Half-man, half-jellyfish)? Moskowits tips her hat to ScienceNews, too, for getting the story before she did.
• CBC : Leaf-like sea slug feeds on light ; Promo story for the Q&Q show.

Grist for the Mill:

On the latest – Journal paper abstract ; Full journal article ;

And from two+ years ago: Texas A&M Univ. Press Release – Solar-powered sea-slugs live like plants, prof says .

- Charlie Petit