(English intro to Spanish lang. post) News in Spain says that on one of the Canary Islands the highest vulcanism risk is precisely in the most populated area. The original study was published last October.The principal investigator says there is no reason to worry about it, but coming out so shortly after Haiti’s disaster it runs under an ambiguous title. Also: in Perú is an article about the health benefits of maca (a local root vegetable), and from Chile comes a great story describing how solar panels in the  Atacama desert are bringing energy to an indigenous community previously with neither electricity nor clean water.

El Mundo (Esp.) publica hoy una nota de Teresa Guerrero titulada “La zona más poblada de Gran Canaria es la de mayor riesgo volcánico”. En el segundo párrafo el autor del estudio asegura que no hay motivo de alarma social porque si hubiera erupción en la isla no sería explosiva, pero tras lo sucedido en Haití la semana pasada, quizás a más de uno le habrá sobrecogido el titular de este artículo, cuya investigación original fue publicada –como indica la nota de SINC- el pasado octubre. ¿habría salido a la luz esta información si no hubiera ocurrido el desastre de Haití? Quizás es casualidad, pero intuimos que posiblemente no. ¿en eso negativo? No necesariamente, pues la nota en seguida se dirige a explicar el trasfondo del estudio. Dudas parecidas encontramos en Perú.

En El Comercio leemos el buen texto de Sandro Medina Tovar “La maca mejoraría el aprendizaje y la memoria“, sobre un estudio de científicos peruanos demostrando que ratitas bebiendo extracto de este tubérculo durante 15 días tuvieron mejores resultados que los controles en la prueba de Morris. Todos sabemos, que de este indicio a la conclusión de que la maca mejora el aprendizaje y la memoria en humanos, hay un largísimo trecho. Sin embargo, muy bien sacada a relucir una investigación local. Ojalá hubiera más. Quizás contribuiría a corregir la fuga de científicos que denuncia en SciDev Zoraida Portillo, explicando que más de la mitad de investigadores que salen de Perú no regresan, y sólo en Brasil hay 2.000 de ellos.

En La Nación (Chile) aparece otra nota de carácter local que nos ha gustado, firmada por Cristina Espinoza: El sol de Atacama pone luz a pequeña comunidad indígena. En ella explica un proyecto que dotará de energía solar a una comunidad indígena sin acceso a agua potable ni electricidad. Muy interesante trabajo. Pequeñas historias, pero con sentido.

- Pere Estupinyà

Light tracking today as the US celebrates the birthday of Martin Luther King. See you all tomorrow.

- Charlie Petit

Destruction levels in the port district of Port-au-Prince after the earthquake from the German DLR-satellite TerraSAR-X

The bulk of the reports about the earthquake of Haiti concentrates on the situation and international help, of course. Not much room for science journalism, it seems. But here: The German news agency dpa (Deutsche Presseagentur) reports today (based on a press release and interview), that satellite-based pictures from the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt) help organizations with the transportation logistics.

Satellite based damage assessment for Port-au-Prince

With the pictures from the satellite TerraSAR-X organizations like the German Red Cross are able to see, which streets are still drivable or where is enough space for camp sites. This already helped during the Tsunami catastrophe and should help now, too, because the data are available for free over on the DLR-website.

Some newspapers did explain the cause of the earthquake. The Tagesspiegel (Ralf Nestler) raised the question, why Haiti was hit by such a strong quake now, despite hundreds of years without a major tremble. First, the type of rock beneath Port-au-Prince was so stable, that it could bind the pressure of the plate tectonics (according to an expert from the German Geological Research Institute, Potsdam). Since 1751, the last earthquake in Haiti, the rocks were “charged” with energy, which was relieved all at once last week. Another reason for the severeness was, that the center of the quake was in a depth of just 17 kilometers (usually, earthquakes are caused by movements in  depths of ca. 100 kilometers).

The Rheinische Post (Gaby Herzog, Ludwig Jvanovic) takes a little bit broader perspective and explains the plate tectonics of the Caribbean. It’s a good idea to start the article with the sentence, that the quake could have happened in the Dominican Republic, too – many Germans know this part of the island due to vacation trips. The article is a little bit more detailed than the Tagesspiegel one, explaining, that the carribean crust is like a “broken glass pane”, because it is under pressure from both the North- and South-American plate. The article closes with remarks, that despite the earthquake had a high magnitude, the main cause for the destruction is the “catastrophic” structure of the buildings, lack of safety regulations and an overall bad infrastructure.

Other science sections took the “psychology approach” to hastily cover the Haiti top news: ask a psychologist about post traumatic stress disorder, etc.

Zeit online, e.g., interviewed a psychologist from the University of Heidelberg, who struggled to answer, why people tend to be aggressive after living in chaos and hunger for days and how to prevent them to start riots (answer: information). But, for me, it is a bit odd to read about long-term psychotherapy for traumatized Haitian earthquake victims – in a country where people can’t afford live saving drugs like penicillin. The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Berit Uhlmann) describes the past and current health situation in Haiti in more depth, trying to judge, what kind of help is needed first – talking to experts from “Doctors without Borders” about the need for clean water or the Bernhard-Nocht-Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg about the risk of pandemic diseases.

- Sascha Karberg

It’s just another experiment, the scientists may have thought. Countless times before pigs had been sacrificed for the greater good, e.g. to test a new surgical method, because the organs of pigs resemble the human body some much. So, scientists from the University Innsbruck in Austria started an experiment to anesthetize 29 pigs and bury them under snow in the Oetz Valley – in comparison to victims of a snowslide and to learn about their physiological reactions when they suffocate or freeze to death. With the goal to better help people after a snowslide, of course.

But, what a surprise, Austrian animal welfare activists didn’t like the idea, when they hear about it in report of the Austrian public radio station ORF. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reported about the case (sort of ironical) and did not forget to mention, that about 16000 pigs have been used for science in 2007, and about 55 million pigs have been slaughtered in Germany in 2008 for consumption. The article was published online Friday morning at about 9:30, but in the afternoon the experiment was already stopped, 19 pigs were still alive. The Austrian Standard has a more complete story on this, with quotes from the scientists, that the pigs did not suffer, and that the experimental outline coincided with the regulations. Nevertheless, the experiment was suspended (but not cancelled) by the head of the university due to safety considerations.

The story itself is not unusual, but I think, it is unusual, that not the journalists, but only some readers wrote in the comment threads that this is an intervention into free research. The readers did the journalists job and discussed, why and under which circumstances it is acceptable to sacrifice animal life for research. This is a good way to make journalism superfluous, if we don’t go where it can get uncomfortable, because we fear emotional reactions.

- Sascha Karberg

I have to add a link, because meanwhile the weekly “Die Zeit” (Harro Albrecht) wrote a more detailed article. Albrecht explains the motives of the scientists as well as the emotional reactions of animal welfare activists. Both sides get an opportunity to express their opinions.

Over the weekend, the government announced that it would launch a $30 million study of the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, to determine whether it’s safe in food and beverage containers, including baby bottles.

The FDA has also changed its position on BPA–but what exactly has it done? The coverage offers multiple interpretations.

Beth Daley of The Boston Globe paints a relatively soft portrait of the FDA’s action, although she does get baby bottles in the lede:

Acknowledging there is “some concern’’ that a chemical found in baby bottles and infant sipping cups could cause adverse heath effects in children, Food and Drug Administration officials pledged yesterday to study the chemical far more closely but said there was not enough evidence to further regulate it.

Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post wrote a lede with considerably more oomph, saying the FDA”reversed” itself:

The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its position on the safety of Bisphenol A, a chemical found in plastic bottles, soda cans, food containers and thousands of consumer goods, saying it now has concerns about health risks.

Andrew Zajac in The Los Angeles Times wrote that FDA said the chemical “merited further study” but “no immediate restrictions on its use.” And Denise Grady at The New York Times wrote that the FDA “in a shift of position” was “expressing concerns” about bisphenol A, which it had “declared safe in 2008.”

The varying interpretations turn, I suppose, on whether “some concern” should be read as SOME concern, or some CONCERN. In the past, the FDA expressed little or no concern, so you might argue that any expression of concern was a big shift, or even a reversal. The other interpretation would be that the FDA had expressed some concern, but no particular alarm.

I’ll go out on a bit of a limb here, as someone who has written about the possible dangers of BPA in the past, and argue that this is a bit of an under-covered story. Environmental groups have expressed great alarm, and industry groups have tracked them very closely with press releases rebutting every argument. I’m making this claim without looking back over years of coverage; it’s just a feeling I have from being involved in the coverage. It was a little too easy to get a scoop on a new development, which leads me to think that not enough people were competing to cover this.

As a case in point, while the FDA announcement got a lot of coverage, I found much less coverage of a study that came out a few days earlier linking BPA to heart disease. Christine Dell’Amore of National Geographic News was one of those who did cover the study, writing: “In a sampling of U.S. adults, those with the highest levels of BPA in their urine were more than twice as likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than those with the lowest concentrations of BPA.”

Whatever the real significance of the FDA’s action, here was an actual study, and it was in PLoS One, a journal that isn’t difficult to find. I found the release on Eurekalert. I would love to have seen a third paragraph in somebody’s FDA story saying, “The FDA’s announcement comes just a few days after publication of a study linking BPA to heart disease…” and with a detail or two on the study.

Government is funny; there is a Democratic version of the facts, and a Republican version of the facts. And a Limbaugh version, and a Howard Dean version. And so on. Science writers are in possession of what I guess I now have to call actual facts, or real facts. Let’s not let the mouthpieces control the “facts,” when we know better.

*UPDATE: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Meg Kissinger: FDA says it’s unable to regulate BPA ;

Grist for the mill: Heart disease study (scroll down to Jan. 12).

- Paul Raeburn

The Tracker should have gotten this up last week. My old friend across the East Bay hills in Orinda, longtime German newsman Horst Rademacher, came upon two photos I had not seen elsewhere. Perhaps they are in some other outlets’ coverage. One hopes so. For they bring geology home emphatically in focus during this tragic time for Haiti.

Rademacher is a science reporter and  former full time North America correspondent for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung – for which he still does some work. Trained in geosciences, he also finds time to blog on such matters for the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory where his wife Peggy Hellweg is on the research staff.  The picture here may not have been so hard to get – it’s credited to Google Maps. It accompanied one of the two blogs Horst ran. It is stunning. There’s the gash in the crust, the surface trace of the fault that broke, not so far down, and wrought such damage and misery.

If you want to see one even more eye-popping, get yourself a pair of blue and red 3-D glasses of the sort that any science reporter ought to have sitting on his or her desk, go to the Seismo Blog site, and see how that view looks in binocular radar imagery.

For more basic background seismo info than you may have seen elsewhere much of it is in Horst’s previous post, also linked prominently in this one.

- Charlie Petit.

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) January, 15th celebrates “Science Day” in Cuba, after the speech that Fidel Castro gave in 1960 saying that “The future of our homeland necessarily has to be a future of men of sciences”. Some newspapers review the scientific achievements of Cuban scientists during these 50 years. We have used it as a good opportunity to track some science sections of the country, where we have  found stories about only Cuban research and scientists.

Como anuncian varios medios en Cuba, el 15 de enero es del día de la ciencia cubana desde que en 1960 Fidel Castro dijo en un discurso: “El futuro de nuestra Patria tiene que ser, necesariamente, un futuro de hombres de ciencia, de hombres de pensamiento”. En CubaAhora, Mariela Pérez Valenzuela afirma que “Cuba muestra hoy al mundo un adelanto científico similar al de países desarrollados”, y revisa algunos de los resultados obtenidos durante estos últimos 50 años, destacando varios tipos de vacunas y variedades agropecuarias de origen cubano “que siempre estarán al servicio de la humanidad y alejado del carácter mercantil que le imprimen en otras naciones”. En esta misma sección, su compañero Raúl Menchaca firma el artículo “Gotas contra la gripe” sobre un medicamento homeopático desarrollado en su país para “activar y estimular los mecanismos naturales de defensa del organismo contra la infección con agentes patógenos que causan enfermedades respiratorias”. La nota está muy bien escrita, pero no formando parte la homeopatía de la medicina científica, quizás se requeriría un esfuerzo en explicar qué mecanismo puede hacer que este remedio homeopático funcione.

En El Havanero, Leyanis Infante también celebra estos 50 años de compromiso constante de los científicos cubanos con la Revolución, explicando que las décadas 60 y 70 fueron dedicadas principalmente al desarrollo agropecuario, los 90 a la biotecnología, y en el siglo XXI Cuba se está integrando en el auge de la nanotecnología.

Yendo al diario Juventud Rebelde nos encontramos un excelente análisis de Mileyda Menéndez y Eyda Dávila analizando y comparando los logros de la ciencia mundial clasificados por Nature y Science. Deberemos seguirle la pista en el tracker a esta prolífica sección de ciencia. Hoy, otra nota de Juventud Rebelde habla de la extensión del electromagnetismo en Cuba. Según el artículo la magnetización del agua de regadío favorece la absorción por las plantas e incrementó los rendimientos en plantaciones de tomate, ají pimiento y pepinos. De nuevo, siendo una información que se escapa ligeramente de la ciencia convencional, sería conveniente explicar el mecanismo por el cual el agua magnetizada logra estos efectos positivos.

Interesante la nota en Mujeres de Regla Zulueta informando que las mujeres cubanas ya son mayoría (un 53,2%) en la ciencia del país.

También nos llama la atención -realmente, no mucho- que no aparecen noticias científicas generadas fuera de Cuba.

Cuba es un país con una considerable actividad científica, y que por motivos obvios no se comunica internacionalmente por las vías convencionales. Deberemos seguirla por la prensa local, e incorporarla a nuestro rastreo periódico, a sabiendas que no podemos esperar análisis periodísticos críticos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Just a word before we go to any reporters on the climate beat. Foreign Policy magazine has a long, tightly argued, and furious article to read. Its hed is The End of Magical Climate Thinking. It’s point is to skewer greenies who think that the road to a low-carbon economy is, if we would just take it, one big adventure in high-tech salvation, more jobs, more productivity, and no regrets. From the Breakthrough Institute, authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argue that failure of political courage by leaders and dissociation from reality by many advocates for lowering greenhouse gases have stifled the truth that to succeed in not only necessary but will be hard, costly, and it will take a long time.

I hope it’s easier than these guys say. But I suspect it’s not.

- Charlie Petit

One has to feel for the science reporters at BBC who, in The Tracker’s general impression, are doing classy work for a classy outfit. Imperfect, of course, but they no doubt have enough problems getting their stuff past editors. Now comes the prospect of a whole new layer of scrutiny from the BBC Trust  to be sure they don’t tilt the field overmuch while reporting on GMOs, climate change, vaccine science v. vaccine daftness, and other such publicly contentious matters.

Recommended reading at  Columbia Journalism Review’s Observatory blogsite is Curtis Brainard‘s report (with assistance from Cris Russell) on events behind a new Beeb science policy, including  links to yet more. It includes some barbed remarks from one of the (unnamed), embattled BBC journalists.  The piece in addition gets into a recent ruckus over the quality of the UK’s science press corps at large.  While there is, as viewed from here, a bit much over there of sensation-grabbing in headlines and lead paragraphs (not to mention some reporters’ fixations on boffinry)  the underlying grasp of most of the news as revealed by the material deeper in stories tends toward the quite high mark. This certainly goes for BBC’s coverage.

See Also: PressGazette – Oliver Luft: BBC Trust to review corporation’s science coverage ; Some extra context here. The Trust has done similar to other beats as well.

- Charlie Petit

A study in Science today forecasts a spike in San Francisco, and presumably elsewhere, in AIDS and full-bore HIV infections as use of retroviral drugs pushes the virus population toward those resistant to such medications.

As the study uses as its case study San Francisco – where one of the authors is based – it’s best to look first at the report in the Chronicle, from Erin Allday. Notable is that she does not overhype the hypothesis that drug-resistant strains might cause “mini-epidemics” within the overall landscape of HIV and AIDS. Her first reference to reaction to the study has local officials remarking that there is no change in the health crisis for now, but that the study is interesting. It’s a balanced and sober report. She fairly describes the dilemma that faces doctors and health programs when trying to decide whether to throttle back on medications for broad, epidemiological reasons while knowing that to do so risks worsening the health of people in their clinics and offices today.

Other stories:

• Time Magazine – Eben Harrell: New Study Raises Concerns About HIV-Drug Resistance ; Story starts off with a reflection on recent hopes that antiretrovirals make conceivable that HIV epidemics can be snuffed out. But now, it says here, this news “suggests that such thinking is too good to be true.” While that line seems to bald, even with the caveat that it only suggests, but the piece holds up fine. The least one should do, a source played prominently tells us, is to make plans for what to do if an established drug line falters.
• New Scientist – Andy Coghlan: Drug-resistant HIV set for rapid upsurge ;
• Bloomberg – Simeon Bennett: Mutant HIV Wave Threatens Decades of Drug Progress, Study Finds ; Biz writing is different – as here, where the names of the companies that make the drugs that seem to be faltering already are played up, presumably for stock traders and investors to chew on. The piece – as witnessed by its hed about mutant viruses and a threat to decades of progress – leans on the scary side of things. Too much so, one suspects. But one also notes that while the paper itself (see Grist) has a sober business-like title, Science Magazine labels the research, in its note to reporters, with a dramatic “The dire dynamics of HIV resistance.”

Grist for the Mill: Journal abstract ; UCLA Press Release ;

Personal note: I have a good friend, an intelligent and reasonable fellow, who nonetheless insists that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. He asked me to read his account of a man who, persuaded that it is the drugs that cause HIV, stopped taking them some years ago. He’s doing well. And, my friend reported, his story’s protagonist has a fresh hypothesis that imbalances in gut flora cause AIDS. I told him it was nicely written and composed, but not journalism. It was a single-source story, and with such a provocative them provided no counter-interpretation from some expert or other on HIV and AIDS epidemiology and why that connection is the most pertinent one. After a bit, he shot back, “How often do medical reporters quote an HIV skeptic when they do an AIDS story, for balance?” Pretty much never, I said. And I don’t suggest we begin doing so, no more than we call the Heartland Institute or similar outfit for comment on global warming news. Balance – such a slippery thing.

- Charlie Petit

It had been centuries since boar roamed wild in England, but a few dispatches this week tell those of us elsewhere that this has changed. Just ask the people near the Royal Forest of Dean and the Vale of Leadon in the nation’s west, near Wales. It’s also near Malvern Link, home of Morgan sports cars, one of which I once owned and whose birthplace I visited as a young man, but never mind that. It’s the pigs, and some other reintroduced and just plain alien species that are in the news.

At Reuters, Alexander Clare reports on the trouble that hungry boar – escapees from a farm and their descendants – are getting into as they raid garbage bins, rototill gardens, and do their natural piggy things.  The recent snows may be a factor in their sallies lately from the woods and into neighborhoods. Plus, the picture is striking – what a profile. A question: One not only didn’t know England has boar farms, but wonders whether the ones now are genetically close to or identical to those that were originally wild in the country.

Some of the same news is at the Mirror, which has a picture of a houseyard raid in progress, and where Richard Smith adds to his story a short list of other, but fully introduced creatures now wild in England. They include a wallaby and a parakeet. One wonders how some of them are doing in the cold.

Speaking of cold weather and invasive species:

• Christian Science Monitor – Patrick Jonsson (Jan 9, one of several stories on this): Snow in Florida: Big chill culling unwanted iguanas and pythons ; Let the lizards die and shoot the big snakes while they’re out sunning, say some of the same state officials who are running campaigns to rescue chilled natives such as manatees and sea turtles.

- Charlie Petit

This morning  The Tracker saw that one of my news alert search routines had hit on a piece at ABC News’s site about “hair on fire” efforts by outsiders to go to Haiti and help. I didn’t expect a story for tracker readers. I read it start to finish and changed my mind. It has a tough spine of common sense, explanation, sensitivity to priorities, public health policies, epidemiology, and appreciation for the spectacle of self-organization that gradually, one hopes, arises in the aftermaths of massive calamity. I resolved to make note of it on our site and finally looked for the byline.

It turns out not to be ABC’s piece, but an Associated Press article  by prolific science writer Seth Borenstein. This is first-rate reporting with a level of explanation that goes far beyond the inchoate, vignette-driven depiction at many outlets of tragedy, horror, social disorder, and the rising odor of death. For Borenstein the story is a return to his past – it was disaster coverage including the Indian Ocean tsunami that led him to the science beat.

Here is one small detail that stands out. It matter-of-factly reports that bodies themselves pose no appreciable disease risk. One expects there will be efforts by the people of Haiti to use lime, hurried mass burial, or other methods to reduce this minor if not mythical hazard (and divert people from more important urgencies). Many reporters will, one supposes, relay word of such efforts with an implication that it’s a sensible priority for practical, public health reasons beyond and perhaps surpassing such motives as simply to do the decent thing.

This one comes on top of another commendable job by Borenstein at putting the island’s disasters in one pot: Why Haiti keeps getting hammered by disasters ;

Other Haiti seismology news of things important, but irrelevant to averting disaster:

• AP – Rich Callahan: Scientists warned Haiti officials of quake in ‘o8 ; Quite interesting report on surface deformation that signaled a fault due to go, someday. But sources, inlcuding a Purdue seismologist on the group that saw the signs building, assure Callahan that the info came too recently for government action to make a difference – even if Haiti were a prosperous and effectively-run nation.
• WLFI TV (Lafayette, Ind) – Joe LePage: Group warned Haiti of possible quake ;
• Lafayette Journal and Courier – David Smith: Purdue scientist among those who sounded quake warning ;

Grist for the Mill: Purdue professor’s web page with links to technical papers on Haiti’s geology and quake risks.

• Time Magazine (blog) Justin Fox: Jared Diamond’s Haiti story ; A good rejoinder to some of the instant diagnoses in print to why Haiti is so persistent and being poor. Don’t blame voodoo, it says here.

*UPDATE:

• Los Angeles Times (Jan 14) – Carla Mia DiMassa, Alexandra Zavis: Tectonics and poor construction conspired to create devastation in Haiti ; A good, straightforward news explainer.
• Science News (Jan 16) Kristina Bartlett Brody: Scientists Scramble T0 Analyze Haiti Quake / Teams work to understand and model what could happen next ;

- Charlie Petit