I saw the headline days ago but finally got around to reading the story beneath it. At Scientific American Karen A. Frenkel reviews a book and talks with its author about his argument that the internet free-for-all is pulling the plug on much of what was once known as intellectual property. It gets one to thinking about our business as science journalists and about many other businesses as well. Flash mobs and Facebook and rap mashups and other examples of hive thinking and feeding-trough approaches to others’ work may have their high points – but what if something horrible and insidious is eating away at individualism, respect, art, privacy, dignity, and more?

A smart commenter on Frenkel’s piece provides a link to another that resonates with the book and its author’s worries: Slate – Vaughan Bell: Don’t Touch That Dial / A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.

Grist for the Mill: Knopf Publishers You Are Not a Gadget/ A Manifesto ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A species of pretty but poisonous frog discovered in Peru’s tropical forest has become the first case of monogamy among amphibians confirmed by DNA tests. The authors of the study (from US and Perú) argue that such mating behavior is driven by pool size. But here is the funny thing that makes it worthy to comment in the tracker: BBC Latin America interviews the US scientist and writes a story saying that small pools demands both parents taking care of their offspring, and this leads to monogamy. But in wires and Peruvian newspapers quoting the local scientist, the argument is completely different: climate change promotes promiscuity in frogs. Pools are sinking, and the only inown monogamous frog is turning polygamous in order to reproduce as much as possible. First story says that small pools leads to monogamy, and other says its the road to promiscuity. We have read the original paper. It doesn’t say anything about climate change or changing behavior, and it only describes –as  does the BBC story- the characteristics of R. imitator, the first ever monogamous frog. It seems that someone made up the part about climate change being a factor.

Fijaos en este asunto tan curioso, alrededor de las primeras ranas monógamas, que han sido encontradas en Perú. No puede haber dos versiones más diferentes.

BBC Mundo explica por medio de Matt Walter que análisis genéticos han confirmado que la rana venenosa Ranitomeya imitator es la primera especie de anfibio monógama del mundo. Además, los autores proponen una tesis que lo explica: viene determinado por el tamaño de las charcas que habitan. Cuanto más pequeñas, más difícil es que los renacuajos encuentren alimento, y más se necesita la colaboración de ambos padres. Conclusión: charcas pequeñas = parejas cercanas = monogamia. Las otras especies de ranas que viven en charcas más grandes son promiscuas. Esto es lo que defiende en la nota el investigador estadounidense Jaseon Brown.

Atención ahora a lo que cuenta El Comercio (Perú): “El cambio climático vuelve promiscua a rana monógama de Perú”, o La República (Perú): “Rana monógama se vuelve infiel”, reproduciendo la nota de EFE: “El cambio climático vuelve promiscua a una rana de Perú”, que según El Mundo firma Belén Delgado desde Lima. Hace referencia al mismo artículo científico publicado en la revista American Naturalist y referenciado por BBC Mundo, pero la tesis es radicalmente diferente. En todos los textos se asegura que, debido al cambio climático, las charcas son más pequeñas y por eso la única rana monógama que existía se está volviendo promiscua. En este caso la nota de EFE entrevista al catedrático peruano Victor Morales argumentando que, como ahora hay menos agua y las condiciones son adversas, “machos y hembras sólo piensan en garantizar su descendencia y han pasado a reproducirse con más individuos”. Es decir: menos agua = poligamia. Lo contrario que la nota de BBC.

¿Quién tiene razón? Nosotros no tenemos conocimientos para juzgarlo, pero sí disponemos de una herramienta valiosísima: el resumen del artículo científico original. Lo leemos y… sorpresa: No habla para nada de cambio climático, ni de vuelta a la promiscuidad. Simplemente describe la primera rana monógama descubierta, en los bosques tropicales de Perú. Y el argumento coincide con la nota de BBC Mundo: charcas pequeñas = más requerimiento biparental = sistema de apareamiento monógamo.

Por tanto, ateniéndonos sólo al texto, la versión que están recibiendo los ciudadanos de Perú sobre su rana es incorrecta. Puede ser que haya alguna correlación con el cambio climático que el resumen no describa, o los investigadores sepan por otros estudios. Pero en todo caso, deberán mejorar los argumentos si no quieren contradecirse. ¿Qué pensamos nosotros, que somos unos desconfiados? 1- Que alguien ha querido “colar” el vínculo con el cambio climático al oír hablar de charcas pequeñas, 2- que si existe relación, en todo caso se debería titular el cambio climático vuelve monógama una especie de rana. Pero aquí, con el argumento de que esto es contraproducente para la lucha contra él, aconsejamos no utilizar el nombre del cambio climático en vano…

- Pere Estupinyà

This week the UN and IPCC lot got to work on ways to provide cleaner, more open, and faster collection of global weather and climate data so that critics have fewer reasons to argue somebody is cooking the numbers. I’ll get to that in a moment. First I must pause to consider a piece on the underlying issue that FOXNews and its Ed Barnes put up the other day.

It gathers opinion on whether Thomas Karl, the man tabbed to run a new NOAA agency to put federal climate science pretty much under one roof,  has been fudging data already, climate-gate style. Sloppy reporting, or perhaps editing, pops up immediately. The piece identifies the new outfit as the National Climatic Data Center. No, that’s what Karl runs now. The new one is to be the NOAA Climate Service.

That doesn’t derail the piece. It’s just irritating. A deeper flaw is that its lede declares that Karl “is coming under attack from both sides of the global warming debate over his handling of what they say is contradictory scientific data related to the subject.”

Both sides? The two examples here are, first, Roger Pielke Sr. affiliated with the University of Colorado, who is not an outright skeptic but is hardly a part of the scientific mainstream in line with IPCC-style reports. The other is Anthony Watts,  former TV weather man and blogger at “Watts Up With That?” who doubts global warming as our fault and serious. Nothing is here from other researchers, the bulk of them, who see the fingerprint of humankind on the planet’s fast temperature rise as plain as day and sure to get worse. This isn’t two sides, it’s two people – one a dedicated skeptic, the other pushing at sort of a right angle to the fray – and nobody from the other and entirely-non-skeptic side. And the nature or quantity of the data in question is not apparent from this story either.

Meanwhile, on the clean-up-the-mess front in and close to the IPCC itself, the AP‘s Jim Gomez and Frank Jordans report that at a meeting of the World Meteorological Organization in Turkey and elsewhere reform calls are loud. For one thing, officials from the UK’s Met Office urged adoption of far more frequent, and openly shared, data sampling of weather and other climate change-related data. And the UN Secretary-General is doing his best to be sure that skeptics don’t derail environmental ministers in leading nations from putting together a climate pact of the sort that fell flat in Copenhagen.

Another report on the same issue is from FOXnews‘s Ed Barnes, who wrote the piece addressed at the start above. This latest is : EXCLUSIVE: UN Climate Panel to Announce Significant Changes. Barnes opines that, given the IPCC’s “swift and devastating fall from grace,” the IPCC has little choice. Barnes also seems to concoct a false contrast to make his point about that devastating fall from grace. His lede” “Just one year ago a pronouncement from the … IPCC was all that was needed to move nations and change environmental policies around the world.”  That’s a little like saying that 40 years ago there was a consensus on an upcoming ice age. Never was any such thing, but the trope won’t die. And few of us have noticed the IPCC omnipotence that Barnes implies.  Barnes might argue that tiny movements and small changes fit his description, but the clear intent of this lede is to paint the IPCC as once capable of unilaterally ordering sweeping changes, and then it was exposed as an empty suit. Both ends of that contrast exaggerate things considerably. But such strident reporting as this has one thing right: the IPCC is in deep political muck.

- Charlie Petit

There was a moment Sunday evening on the CBS 60 Minutes program when host Leslie Stahl , after she already had dropped a “Holy Grail” cliche bomb, interviewed a Silicon Valley exec with a new “Bloom Box” fuel cell that could free homes and industries from the electric grid.The exec – K. R. Sridhar, a competent engineer and one time academic (see BIO) -  said it could run on many fuels including hydrogen, natural gas, garbage dump gas, other bio fuels, etc. Stahl was dazzled and asked, “Solar?” The company CEO’s brain may have frozen at such inanity and assured her, “You can use solar.” (Okay, maybe the solar makes hydrogen gas somehow directly without making electricity in the first place, but that’s gotta cut the efficiency.) Nobody expects Stahl to be an  energy technology expert. Somebody at CBS should have edited out that moment, and edited in a few things about efficiency, cost per kw-hour, likely continued dependence on a different kind of grid (the gas line to your house or company or neighborhood Bloom box cooperative), and a segment with an authoritative skeptic – like from Stanford next door, or the nearby Electric Power Research Institute – rather than a (pretty smart, yes) editor of an industry newsletter.

Bloom Energy is officially announcing its products today. They do make electricity. It’s not a scam, with savvy investors and  trial units installed at several big high-tech Bay Area companies. If the system is robust and pays its way and is more efficient than standard gas-fired combustion electrical plants, it could reduce pollution including CO2. But it’s still oxidation of carbon-rich fuels. Ergo unless amazingly vast quantities of gasified biofuel come along it is difficult to see it as carbon-free.

There are other advance stories out. Some do better than CBS’s gushing report. I hope the flow of coverage has fewer holy grails, less of the CEO’s blooming optimism, no interviews with that famed tech expert and company board member Colin Powell, and more context and analysis….    Hmm. Is there an IPO in the works? How does one get in on that?

Other Stories:

• Forbes – Jonathan Fahey: What Bloom energy Need to Prove ; He writes, “Hand it to Bloom, the company has managed to tap into the hype machine like no other clean tech company in memory…”
• USA Today – Julie Schmit: Clean, cheap power from fuel cells in a box? ; The company is ingenious, calling it a box. Why, isn’t that simple!  But what should one expect? A dodecahedron? This story, by the way, recounts the company’s ambitions without providing much else to go on.
• NY Times – Todd Woody: Bloom Energy claims a New Fuel Cell Technology ;  As does Forbes, the Times keeps its balance. It does say the company asserts it is so efficient that CO2 emissions would be half that of standard gas fired plants, “a claim that is likely to receive close scrutiny.”
• ABC News – Michael B. Farrell: Bloom Box Generates Buzz, Skepticism With 60 Minutes Spot ; Nice piece but that show Sunday was no spot, it was the program’s lead excloo and feature.
• …. There will be tons more in a few hours, probably already underway by the time most tracker readers read this. I’ll update it tomorrow.

ps – You want fuel cell game changers? There are companies out there (here’s one, secretive as can be)  working on direct carbon conversion fuel cells. There’s a good chance they won’t work in practice. But if they do you could put freakin’ pulverized coal in them or maybe lawn clippings and out would come electricity at, the energetics say, like 60 percent efficiency or twice that of burning the coal. And the CO2 stream would be pure and ready for sequestration, unlike filthy hot flue gas of a coal-fired boiler.

- Charlie Petit

Want to know the dent in superstition and other data and logic-free thinking left by more than a century of free public education, some of the nation’s better universities, a great big space center, and a few pretty talented science journalists over the years?

• The Texas Tribune – Ross Ramsey: Meet the Flintstones ;

Thank you Eric Bland of Discovery News for tipping us off to this story.

The Texas Tribune, by the way, is a non-profit, online journalism project of the same general sort as discussed in a post a short scroll down, in North Carolina. This story’s topic is a public opinion poll the outfit sponsored with the Univ. of Texas. Lots of mean snooty giggles here but, one is confident, Texans are hardly alone in their widespread certainty we didn’t evolve from anything other than god’s will, and that we even, probably walked with dinosaurs. One might find the same thing in, oh, Massachusetts. I’m not even sure how Berkeley would do.  The hed’s cartoon reference is explained in the story’s last lines.

Other Stories:

• Seriously fighting words in this – NewsBusters blog – Brad Wilmouth: Olbermann Mocks Most Texans as 15 Million Wasted Minds ; Lefty Olbermann’s big regret – Dems are just about as clueless as the GOP crowd.

And just for the record, Texas is not at all entirely ignorant:

• University Texas, Austin, Press Release: UTA a Partner in Evolution Study Funded for $25 Million by National Science Foundation ;

- Charlie Petit

I am sure I am not only not alone in not  caring about Tiger Woods’s non-golf conquests, but in further feeling that his marriage and libido problems are absolutely none of my or the public’s business. It ought to be left to gossip rags. But there it is, read it if you care, on p. 1 of the Science Times by Donald G. McNeil, Jr: An Apology with Echoes of 12 Steps. To be sure, McNeil makes it a general article on rehab strategies with little specific on Woods other than his televized, stock-exchange-stopping apology to a gossip-addled and privacy-scoffing public (and the media that feed it).

OK, onward.

The section this week is devoted largely to health matters. In fact, it is put in the shade by a health story on the paper’s front page. There one finds a cliffhanger. Anybody who read through the lo-o-o-o-ng and intimate portrait by Amy Harmon of the clinical trial of an anti-melanoma drug is now sitting on the edge of his or her seat. This is Part II. What will happen in Part III? Did it work? Stay tuned. Regular big pharma writers probably already know how this trial turned out. Hope they don’t blog it up with spoilers.

The section’s own p.1 is topped by Denise Grady‘s tale of partial and self-erasing liver transplants in children. As with the Harmon’s on melanoma, the story is propelled more by the pathos of the people involved than the clinical facts. Both are solid medical writing and illustrate, by their grip on readers’ attention, why medical and health writers will be among the last laid off.

Number three on the section p. 1, by Gardiner Harris on the diabetes drug Avandia, is handled or should I say adroitly skewered  in a separate post by Paul Raeburn today.

Other headlines to note:

• Science Illustrated: A Boat from Bottles; Big infographic, very absorbing, but who reported and wrote the captions? It’s about Plastiki, a catamaran about to sail the Pacific bouyed by plastic bottles in order to call attention to the pollution of the sea by other bottles. It carries credits to outside sources and a graphics studio.
• John Tierney: When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. Good for Tierney – a rant that makes total sense, to me anyway.
• Gina Kolata – A Murder Suspect’s Worth to Science ; This is a small story, but maybe the most riveting and original in the whole section. Kolata looks at the transference of ideology, cultural myth, and politics on to the persona of the woman who shot up a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Turns out, she writes, the woman’s background is too enigmatic and ordinary to support the role she’s been given in many conversations.
• Abigail Zuger, MD: Books/Doing an About-face on “Overmedicated’ Children ; as per the previous bullet, an examination of popular myths and prejudices that infect even the most well-trained professional minds. A journalist’s must-read, and warning.
• Dennis Overbye – From the Clash of White Dwarfs, the Birth of a Supernova ; Handled today in a separate post.
• John Markoff : Turning Flat Photos Into 3-Dimensional Buildings ; Spooky news here in a way. And bad news for companies that make 3-D maps of cities or anything via laborious laser scans from every which way. New algorithms, and notions of cloud computing and flash social networking and more, permit detailed 3-D, rotatable rendering to arise via processing of hundreds of disorganized photos taken at various scales. An iPhone app is on the way. Of course.

- Charlie Petit

As usual, lots more (really, lots): Whole Section;

Here’s an idea – put a gene in disease-carrying mosquitoes that produces females unable to fly, but the males can. Release a mess of the eggs into the wild. The males will hatch and fly off to get busy, eroding the local, native, and genetically intact population by intermingling and fathering female larvae that will never get out of their birth ponds to get some blood unless they walk. The proposal is in a recent Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy from a UC Irvine researcher and a colleague at Oxford in the UK.

The Orange County Register‘s Garry Robbins – who published his own stuff just about and maybe exclusively on line via his blog ScienceDude – wrote it up.

For that matter, to get a deeper look at Robbins’s prolific and relentlessly local output on science, weather, and general oddities, take a look at his whole ScienceDude blog site.

There are other versions of this news, including:

• BBC : ‘Lame’ mosquitoes to stop dengue ;
• Reuters – JoAnne Allen : Flightless mosquitoes may curb dengue: study ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Without a wing, no prayer for female mosquitoes ;

Grist for the Mill: UC Irvine Press Release ; Univ. of  Oxford Press Release ;

Yesterday I posted on a tidy little story in the Raleigh News & Observer about a Japanese man’s inventive ways, and remarked on pleasure at finding the newspaper still publishing original, local science writing even though it has cut its own staff  into the bone. I speculated about the exact provenance. This site’s readers are the best and smartest in the world. Several – including former U. North Carolina- Chapel Hill  p.r. woman and now freelancer in California Becky Oskins and N. Carolina freelancer Delene Beeland who works in the same “co-op” filled me in. Then I received the following email from the story’s writer, Sabine Vollmer, with more on the remarkable effort by a team of writers in her area to keep reporting breaking science without a newspaper, wire, broadcast station, or other corporate-solid paycheck:

Hi Charlie,

Denise Gellene, a former L.A. Times science writer who now writes for the online publication Xconomy, e-mailed me the link to your Knight Science Journalism Tracker post. I noticed you had some questions, which I’ll be happy to answer.

I’ve written about science and technology in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area for nearly 10 years, 5 1/2 of them for the News & Observer in Raleigh. A year ago, I found myself among 70 newsroom employees the N&O laid off or bought out. The layoff was one of six or seven cutbacks the N&O has gone through in the past two years. The business and science desks were particularly hard hit. The business desk has gone from 11 to four reporters and four of five science writers are gone. The medical writer is the only one left on staff to write about science.

The story you noticed about the “green” silicone is on the Science and Technology pages, a double truck that comes out every Monday. It’s actually a project of the N&O’s sister paper in Charlotte, the Charlotte Observer. I’m one of a few freelance contributors to the SciTech pages.

Science in the Triangle is an online publication that tries to step into the science reporting void the local newspapers have left. The Web site has three part-time science writers who write about events in the RTP area. Every Monday, I put out a Weekahead calendar with all the public science-related events I can find on Web sites the local universities, museums and other organizations maintain. We’re trying to get people together and build community by pulling local science-related events together in one place. My particular expertise is the business of science, turning ideas into drugs and medical devices and bringing these products to market, and the FDA.

Science in the Triangle is an experiment, because the publication in its current form has been around for only a few months and we’re not fully funded. So far, we’ve gotten one source of funding, which is the Research Triangle Foundation, the nonprofit that was established 50 years ago to manage Research Triangle Park. But we need more sponsors to pay for more content and do this vibrant area justice.

The writers are independent. There’s no editorial control and no editor. We are more like a coop, we pick what we write about and how.

Yesterday I promised to round up some cosmic and ultimate-laws-of-nature-at-its-most-fundamental news so here goes. First off is word from a UC Berkeley physicist who interferometrically shuffled the uncertainties of quantum mechanics and wave equations of matter with the ridiculous precision with which cesium atoms – used in atomic clocks – vibrate. To an accuracy 10,000 times better than anything seen before, as reported formally in Nature and near as I can tell,  it confirms Einstein’s calculation in his theory of generally relativity of how much gravity affects the passage of time. It seems that, with clever interferometry, one can see the different rates of time’s tickings between two atoms in turn vibrating back and forth in a laser’s electric field by an absurdly small amount in their distance from the Earth’s center.  This appears to be metrology of sublimely high order.

Einstein is the public’s secular substitute for wizards of old, hence tests of his big theories and his successes and failures are trials for mankind’s collective capacity to understand and interact with who and what kind of creation we live in. That fact he passed the test and we can read, even in plain English, hints of the depth of his insights and the strangeness of reality is news. PLUS, it’s news because a certain Nobelist, Steve Chu, formerly of Stanford and UC Berkeley’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab and now Secretary of Energy, played a part in the paper. That’s news too. Two hooks, one story.

First I heard of this was in the local paper, the SF Chronicle, where old friend David Perlman landed this local story on the front page yesterday morning. Right in the second graf, after noting Chu’s role in the first, he notes the history of things like this. “Einstein’s theory of general relativity has already been tested and confirmed to a degree as a true picture of reality, even since he proposed it ot he world nearly a century ago.” He then refers to its pertinence to science today before getting around to the latest tests. His description of the atom alternately “sunken in Earth’s gravitational well” and “pushed upward (hence) experiencing time passing swiftly” seems a vast exaggeration of the difference. I’d guess Perlman did that deliberately, a sly joke.

When I saw the Chron story front page, with Chu a co-author and the paper in Nature, I assumed there was a big burst of writing about this. Turned out not to be so, but there were a few others.

Other stories:

• AFP – Richard Ingham: Relative values: Einstein theory proved in 21st-centry test ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Einstein’s gravitational redshift measured with unprecedented precision ;
• Physics World – Edwin Cartlidge: Gravity’s effect on time confirmed ;  This is an inside-the-academy site in Britain (Institute of Physics) and has lots of detail from Cartlidge, listed as based in Rome. Notable is its attention to the German author, its offhanded-reference to Chu and his celebrity, but more important its description of why Chu is the right man to be involved. It employs laser trapping (sometimes called optical molasses if memory serves) to levitate the cesium in one place – one of the techniques that got Chu his Nobel.
• Softpedia (Romania) – Tudor Vieru: Einstein’s Relativity Proven with Atomi Clock ;

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

IN OTHER COSMIC NEWS:

This is a day for catch-up on last week’s Nature. Also in that issue was word from a team in Germany that the best standard candles in cosmology, supernovas of a type called 1a that involve the explosions of white dwarf stars that get loaded with extra fuel from a neighbor, may not be as identical as had been presumed. If that’s right, it makes it harder to tell how far away they are by how bright they look. Several sorts of measurements of the size and expansion of the universe may get wobbly. This, in principle, effects study of and, maybe, belief in an outward-accelerating universe driven by mysterious dark energy field that (him again) vindicates Einstein for years ago proposing (but later rescinding) a term in general relativity he called the cosmological constant. The news is fresh evidence that not all, perhaps only a minority, of SN1a’s detonate due to extra hydrogen dumped on them by a bloated, nearby red giant star. Mergers of two white dwarfs, a less reliable kind of blast, could explain many or most. A media teleconference last Wed. pushed coverage.

Stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II : Scientists shed light on supernova origins ; Maugh is equivocal on what this means, noting at the end that it leaves unchanged belief in dark energy’s reality or the search for its origin.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: From the Clash of White Dwarfs, the birth of a Supernova ; Clear job explaining that the evidence for a preponderance of white dwarf collisions as SN1a causes is limited, so far, to just one class of galaxy. He quotes one fellow to say emphatically that this won’t change the fundaments of dark energy and cosmic acceleration inference.
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Chandra Illuminates a Different Kind of Supernova, Re-Evaluating a Principal Cosmic Measuring Stick ; Apparently, from the tag line, a rewrite of Dennis Overbye’s piece in today’s NYTimes.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Supernova explosions triggered by star collisions ; Brief story, and he gets one of the original discoverers of expansion and dark energy saying “this is a problem…” , but mostly a problem for the models of standard SN1a’s, not their homogeneity.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: What makes a supernova? Scientists thought they knew. Another one in which astronomers seem to have it both ways. Says here they are embarassed to see a tool revealed as perhaps unreliable, but still have faith that what they’ve achieved with it is true.

And here’s one with a wider stance on the news

• Science News – Ron Cowen : Study Raises Questions About Supernova Origins; Cowen adds info from another recent study, also in Nature, to the mix. Same essential news, but with a more context than was provided by one teleconference and one study. He’s written about this before, too – last summer: Stars Go Kaboom, Spilling Cosmic Secrets ;

Grist for the Mill:

Max Planck Inst. for Astrophysics, Garching,  Press Release ; Computer Simulation of merging white dwarfs ;

- Charlie Petit

Gardiner Harris has an important story in this morning’s New York Times science section, in which he reveals secret recordings of drug execs in a meeting with a scientist-critic.

At least, I think it’s important. I’d like to tell you that Harris’s story provides fascinating insight into behind-the-scenes drug-company dealings with outside researchers. Or that it reveals blatant hypocrisy, or even illegal activity.

But it’s hard to tell.

Rather than putting the news in the lede, Harris begins with history–often a bad idea in newspapers, a warning that we’re entering a poorly organized story: ”Readers, beware: Twists, falling rocks, and speed bumps ahead!”

Harris gives us three grafs of history and background, in which the only news is that Dr. Steven E. Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic wore a wire during a 2007 meeting with execs of GlaxoSmithKline, where they discussed potential heart risks of the diabetes drug Avandia.

Then Harris tries to assess the importance of those recordings, before we know what they contain, saying they “have suddenly become keenly relevant.” Next, more recent history about Avandia, and its sales figures.

We’re now four fat paragraphs into this story, and we still don’t know what it’s about. The headline doesn’t help, either: “A Face-Off on the Safety of a Drug for Diabetes.” The Times was apparently unwilling or unable to say that the drug is safe, or it isn’t, leading to the uninformative “face-off.”

In the fifth graf, Harris reports that the execs said on tape that they would release a safety study within days, but still haven’t released it. That’s a little suspicious, but we’re still waiting to find out what the tapes say about the safety of the drug.

If I were not tracking this story, I would have already turned the page. Too many speed bumps for me. So let’s drop the graf-by-graf analysis and get to the good stuff, if we can find it.

It turns out that the most interesting things in the conversation were said by Nissen, who says he’s found an increased risk of heart deaths in patients taking Avandia. “Now what am I going to do…Do I sit on it?” he asks. That’s no different from what Nissen has repeatedly said publicly–so no great revelation here.

The next most interesting thing I spotted in the story came not from the tapes, but from Congressional investigators, who said the execs had been faxed a copy of Nissen’s unpublished study by a reviewer–a serious violation of scientific practice. That’s an unexpected turn; I thought this was a story about the tapes, not a Congressional investigation.

So what do these newly revealed tapes tell us? That the execs were unhappy about the critical study, and the author of the critical study was unhappy with the execs for not doing better studies on their own. Each side said what you’d expect it to say, and what they’ve said many times publicly since this 2007 meeting.

Maybe not such an important story after all. Sometimes a poorly organized story is a reflection of reporting that doesn’t have much to tell.

- Paul Raeburn

Yes, yes, I know that a pretty good spot of relativity news broke yesterday and today on yet another test of Einstein’s theory tying gravity to time and to trajectories of light through space. But time ran out. It’s first on the list for tomorrow …  along with any additional spicy spacy supernova, dark matter, and other cosmic news I can round up. Any advance tips to such yarns that I might miss if I don’t get assistance are welcome (use the suggest stories function on the tracker site).

- Charlie Petit

People paying close attention might have seen this coming. After Katrina, and amid debate whether such devastating hurricanes can be laid at the feet of global warming (not specifically, we’re talking statistically here), two schools of thought emerged. One was simple: hotter sea surface temperatures provide more energy for tropical cyclones, ergo there should be more. Another was more subtle: Warming should lead to greater contrast between surface winds and those in the high troposphere or stratosphere, shearing such storms apart before they can fully organize.

Thus it looked possible that perfect storms might get rarer but when things come together ju-u-u-ust so, watch out. The big play for this comes from the AP‘s Seth Borenstein, who acknowledges the history of the debate as he reports the latest news – a consensus study in the journal Nature Geoscience. He also notes, properly, that the authors of the study are well known and have been important participants for years in the general study of such things. And, he reports, in summary the bad news of worse storms outweighs the good news of fewer of them. Coastal areas will need to prepare in the long haul for somewhat worse worsts.

What the report does not settle, it says here, is whether the impact of global warming is yet apparent in the statistics.

Other stories:

• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Fewer, fiercer tropical cyclones are in our futures, study finds ; Rice has one of the lead authors suggesting that the upshot is that things won’t change all that much.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts : Number of storms may drop, but more could be intense, study says ; Spotts makes a good if subtle point – the uncertainty of any trend already underway applies particularly to the Atlantic basin. Which suggests that in typhoon and cyclone country – the Indian Ocean and far western Pacific – maybe things are shifting even now.

Nothing in climate science these days seems possible without repercussion in the blog and right wing / skeptical assaults on the idea that climate change is sufficiently likely or serious to be worth trying to stop it. And this report does undermine the last IPCC report’s declaration that it already seems apparent that hurricane peril is already tracking higher. Thus another ding in the IPCC’s policy of embracing only robust conclusions drawn from a full sampling of peer-reviewed literature.

- Charlie Petit