The Tracker, before the Raleigh News & Observer got rid of its science staff of one or maybe two (other than health and medical writers), used to see a steady flow of distinctively original reporting in it on high tech and science generally. Thus it is notable to find a piece today, even though  from a writer labeled as a correspondent, which usually means freelancer.

It’s a decent little story about curiosity and innovation. Sabine Vollmer introduces readers to a visiting researcher from Japan attending a conference at Research Triangle Park. He works oncatalysts for making  plastics. He says he has an alternative to standard production techniques and does not pose such a problem for waste disposal and the environment. Vollmer calls the result “friendly silicone.” It even has a secret sauce.

Being not at all sure who Vollmer is or who she works for, I found a collection of her recent posts and blogs at a site called Science in the Triangle. I am still unsure about the business model or independence of that organization but it does look busy. It explains itself here - saying it is “an evolving experiment in community science journalism and scientific-community organizing” and has been at it for nearly two years.

A regular media paycheck seems better – but this looks like an illustration why enterprise and gumption can keep the eager science writer in business too.

- Charlie Petit

A pitter patter of stories in recent days and months have described separate decisions within federal agencies to go fairly easy in pushing for protection of species and sub-species that are having a tough time. The San Jose Mercury News‘s Paul Rogers sat down and bundled them and the accumulated irritations of wildlife advocates for a solid feature story for his paper’s Sunday edition.

Maybe others have had this, I don’t know, but it’s a heck of a gem. Last year the Obama administration added two species to the endangered list, a little butterfly on Molokai Island and the Idaho slick spot pepper grass. That’s it – the lowest number by any president in his first year since Ronald Reagan in 1981. Now maybe the pace will pick up in this, second year. In fact, a source tells him there could be as many as 55. But that Rogers, a veteran enviro writer, chose to play this stat up says something of what he thinks. He even finds a top member of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, James Watts’s old outfit dedicated to protecting the rights of land owners to do almost anything they want inside their fences, saying something sort of approving about Obama performance so in defending wildlife protection decisions under the previous administration.

Good, tough story with a kicker that suggests the new guys might just be undoing the mess they inherited (a trope we’ve heard a lot) before starting afresh.

- Charlie Petit

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A bit down I have a roundup of news from AAAS. One bunch either merits a post of its own or I randomly chose to do so. It’s on new results on the oceans’ biodiversity richness and a report – in PNAS and spotlighted at AAAS -  on the role of protected reservations in keeping it rich.

The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid gives the census treatment long by daily wire standards. Its gist is that while species abundance may be in trouble, so far the sheer number of known varieties keeps going up. The report at the San Diego meeting is an advance peek at a study now in its 11th year and due for release in October in London. The piece provides a good sense of the wealth out there just waiting to be put in the ledger – with 5,600 news species added last fall and perhaps another 100,000 more yet unfound. That does not even count microbes, but who could possibly count all the sea’s microbe varieties?  That’s a job for statisticians and others who extrapolate from the known to the sure.

The same basic news gets a very different take in the UK’s Independent, where Steve Connor runs it under a succinct hed: Great whites more threatened than tigers. But can it be true that the sharks’ number is now smaller than that of wild tigers?  Shark deficits similarly grab the lede for the Guardian‘s Ian Sample . Sample, after noting that the poor image of sharks erodes public worry about them, helpfully runs the picture by Getty’s Brandon Cole above to show exactly why some people think their disappearance might be fine. Not helpful. I too couldn’t resist.

The taking of sharks whether white, blue, gray, leopard spotted, tiger striped, hammer headed or whale-sized is surely among the more dismal excesses of the fishing industry – especially those knife-wielding boat crews provisioning fins to the makers of soup. But one thinks this claim of fewer great whites than tigers merits sharp scrutiny and ought to be borne by more than a few sources as the authority for it.

Grist for the Mill: AAAS Press Release 1, Press Release 2 ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Yesterday the Spanish El Mundo launched a Sunday Magazine that aims to be one of the most complete journalistic source of science, health and environmental stories. We review them. Some aspects can be improved, but we really like the contents a lot. Congratulations to Eureka for its birth. We’ll be tracking you. For instance, one journalist visited the island of Flores to interview the paleontologists who in 2004 presented the fossil remains of the much-debated Homo florescensis. Teams still excavating in the area say that they will soon publish in Nature a paper arguing definitively that Homo floresensis is indeed a different species than H. sapiens or erectus and first showed up on that island 1 million years ago. If this is true, it shall be big.

Ayer domingo El Mundo (Esp.) lanzó el primer número de la revista Eureka, cuyo objetivo de convertirse en uno de los grandes referentes informativos en el ámbito de la ciencia, salud, medioambiente y tecnología. 20 páginas -8 de las cuales corresponden al excelente suplemento de salud que antes aparecía los jueves- para aunar periodismo y rigor científico con un estilo ameno que llegue directamente al ciudadano. Eso es lo que anunciaban sus responsables en el Mundo. Muy buena iniciativa. Felicitemos a Eureka, por descontado, y demos un repaso al primer número para valorar su arranque.

Entre las páginas dedicadas a ciencia, percibimos una primera voluntad de la revista: tomar noticias actuales y darles un contexto. Esto es algo que agradece el lector, y hace muy bien desde Cabo Cañaveral Miguel Corral en “La ilusión de la NASA se desmorona…”, acompañado del texto “… y los chinos se lanzan a pisar la Luna” de Aritz Parra desde Shangai. Buena manera de cerrar un tema que ha estado en el aire durante los últimos meses, y muy interesante que Miguel nos cuente la perspectiva desde su visita al emblemático Cabo Cañaveral. Esta presencia física está todavía más presente en el artículo de David Jiménez: “Eureka encuentra a los ‘hobbits’, nuestros parientes diminutos”, que viajó a la Isla de Flores para investigar la comunidad de pigmeos de 125 cm que está convencida de descender del Ebu Gogo –como le llaman ellos- o Homo floresiensis – como dicen los paleontólogos que aseguran descubrieron en 2004 los restos de una nueva especie de homínido-. David explica muy bien las disputas entre estos últimos y los que consideran que los restos fósiles de la hembra sepultada hace 18.000 años en la cueva Liang Bua eran de un Homo erectus pigmeo; pero hoce otra cosa todavía más valiosa: habla con los responsables de ese hallazgo, que continúan excavando, y le explican que pronto publicarán un artículo en Nature demostrando que efectivamente los floresensis son otra especie y habitaban en esa isla desde hace 1 millón de años. Esto puede ser grande. Estaremos atentos.

Muy adecuado también para una revista de estas características el reportaje de Rosa M Tristán con un aficionado que tiene 3.000 Kg de meteoritos en su casa, acumulando la mayor colección de toda España. Ameno y original. En una línea parecida, y ya entrando en el apartado de medio ambiente, Pedro Cáceres se aproxima al cambio climático desde una perspectiva también novedosa, la de un fotógrafo madrileño que lleva 20 años retratando el cambio climático por diferentes parajes. Interesante y muy atractivo para el lector, aunque un pelín flojo en la exposición de causas de la problemática. No importa, no era el motivo del texto.

La Salud, posiblemente por la solidez con que ya contaba el suplemento de los jueves, es el punto más fuerte de la revista. Promete dar mucha importancia a la nutrición (análisis por Cristina G Lucio a la guerra contra las bebidas azucaradas en EEUU), al ejercicio físico (reportaje sobre el fitness funcional –que podría llamarse ejercicio personalizado- por Cristina de Martos), y a la importancia que está adquiriendo hablar de sexualidad desde una perspectiva científica (muy completo trabajo de Isabel Lantigua: ¿Soy adicto al sexo?). También hay sitio para investigación científica básica –aquí podría reforzarse un poquito más- , y un muy necesario espacio de denuncia. Jose Luis de la Serna califica de retraso intolerable la vergonzosa lentitud en que se defiende en España los derechos de los no fumadores. El tabaco continúa siendo el mayor enemigo prevenible de la salud. Importante también el trabajo periodístico de Ángeles López sobre el comercio ilegal de medicamentos en España, y otro de Cristina de Martos sobre una investigación que consigue conservar vacunas a altas temperaturas y puede suponer un gran beneficio para países Africanos.

Encontramos también una sección de consultorio que bueno… sí, puede funcionar y dar un toque dinámico. Sólo nos sorprende que hayan definido al Universo como todo lo que existe físicamente y por tanto es infinito. En principio teníamos entendido que “el todo” era el cosmos, y nosotros vivíamos en un universo en expansión con unos límites.

Este es un burdo repaso inicial, y podéis leer más notas en esta dirección, que se renovará cada domingo. Sería fantástico si permitieran leer el pdf con un sistema como hace La Tercera (Chile) con su suplemento de amplio contenido científico Tendencias. De todas maneras, muy buen arranque de Eureka. La incluiremos en nuestro rastreo semanal, a ver qué nos ofrece más allá de ciencia muy bien contada. Seguro que irá añadiendo todavía más valor a este producto.

- Pere Estupinyà

A look at the news flow from the hundreds of reporters in the press room at the AAAS meeting in DC finds no surprise – they and their editors figure the quickest way to capture eyeballs and ears is to tell people about things that make their health better or worse. That fits with the trend in cash-strapped media outlets to keep their health and medical beats staffed while letting go the people who write on climate, earthquakes, quasars, energy, archeology, and other fields with long technical words but that don’t connect to doctors of medicine.

I’ll round up some examples. But first Ralph Cicerone, the former UC Irvine chancellor, frustrated baseball announcer, namesake of the campus diamond where the  Anteaters play (and when’s the last time an NAS boss showed such good form on the mound?), atmospheric chemist, former AAAS boss and now National Academy of Sciences president did get some attention. He spoke glumly about the public’s sagging respect for scientists of all stripes, especially non-medical. He was on a panel of apparently like-minded colleagues including the UK’s Martin Rees. Climate science’s recent skid on the political front figures large. (See Grist below for AAAS’s stance on the science of climate).

Stories:

• BBC – Victoria Gill: Science damaged by climate row says NAS chief Cicerone ; Nice phrase in here to describe the contagion of doubt: the “knock-on effect.”
• Discover Magazine – Chris Mooney (blog): Attacks on Climate Science Now “Completely Out of Hand” ; Some more pithy terms: feeding frensy, whore for the global warming crowd….
• Guardian/Observer (UK) – Robin McKie: Attacks on climate change research are damaging the public’s faith in science ;
• Press Association via Independent (UK) John von Radowitz: Scientists hit by climate doubt fallout ;
• Financial Times (UK) Clive Cookson: Public are losing faith in science ; Brief item.

Notice a pattern? Lots from the UK, not much from the US press corps at the meeting – presumably mostly freelancers or magazine writers without breaking news outlets as clients. Two things on this particular panel to ameliorate the resounding silence from American media. First, Cicerone has said much the same thing already in an op-ed in Nature (see this, on that, from the NYTimes). Plus, a better account on this isn’t from a quick writeup off a AAAS panel, but a feature story in Business Week by Kim Chipman who took some time to call around and give the tale some texture.  A solid source tells Chipman that climate change regulation has suddenly hit a stone wall. Do tell.

Samplings from AAAS Medical and Health Coverage:

HIV testing, vaccines etc:

• CNN – Elizabeth Landau: Expert: Using antiretrovial drugs early may curb HIV/AIDS spread ;
• Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg : Rapid HIV Treatment Could Slow Growing TB Rates ;

Naps are good :

• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Don’t knock naps, they make you smarter ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Kipping at your desk is highly productive, say boffins / ‘The hippocampus is like an email inbox’ ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: People learn more after a siesta, say scientists / Psychologists say sleep clears the brain’s short term memory and makes space for new facts to be remembered ; Amazing how the Register’s and Guardian’s heds and subheds say exactly the same things in drastically different words and tone.

Whattayaknow – the more bars and liquor stores, the more drunks, the more trouble for the neighborhood…

• Health Day via Business Week: More Bars Equals MOre Assaults, Study Finds ;
• BBC – Victoria Gill: Cincinatti study links violence to take-away alcohol ;

Test tube babies compared to the regular kind: (it seems the IVF crew is mostly fine. Some outlets stress that, others highlight the differences…

• AP: Randolph E. Schmid: Most ‘test tube’ kids are healthy ; A well-balanced piece by a pro and not quite as reassuring as the hed might suggest.
• Science News – Eva Emerson: IVF Kids Show Shift in Gene Activity / Team finds differences realted to metabolism and growth ; The study finds 90 percent of such babies show no big differences. The equivocal news here is the other ten percent.
• And a brief that should have been a lot briefer, as in zero – Top News – Jason Ramsey: Research Proves Test-Tube Offspring are Normal and Fit ; This brief from a minor outlet is thoroughlyconfusing.

Music is good for children’s, and others’, brains ;

• Independent (UK) Kate Youde: Music has the power to shape a child’s mind ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Victoria Jaggard : Making Music Boosts Brain’s Language Skills ;
• Money Times (India) Jaspreet Virk: Singing helps stroke patients reocer speech- study ;

There is more. No doubt the freelancers and magazine writers in that jammed newsroom will turn up less ephemeral news stories than these with their narrow concentration on health, fitness, and sickness. And the meeting is terrific for journalism students who can get hooked up with the various mentoring programs. But on the face of it, pretty thin gruel breaking news reaching the public so far. The meeting ends today. One big story from the meeting it tracked separately today – on the value of marine preserves for maintaining biological diversity in the sea.

Grist for the Mill: AAAS News Room ; News Summaries ; AAAS Press Release on support for evidence for climate change ;

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

I waited too long this morning to check in on news from the big AAAS meeting in San Diego, which had nearly 800 pre-registered media types (and where, one learns, about a third are working journalists, one third students, and one third public information officers). The usual warren of rooms and tables groaning with press releases and up to half a dozen press briefings daily. And parties. Wish I’d gone…sort of.

The general press room site gives further info on this annual feeding frenzy for the trade. Here is a taste of the coverage so far – much and perhaps most of it from the meeting directly but, with teleconferencing and wide circulation of press releases, some doubtlessly filed from desks far outside San Diego. And in accord with the trend of recent years, an outsized share of daily news science journalists who still have travel budgets seem to be arriving from the UK. The meeting ends Monday at noon.

Selected and slightly RandomTopics and Stories:

DOLPHINS and Human Health Lessons:

• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Key role as disease partner likely for dolphins ;
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Dolphins provide disease model ;
• Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: Dolphins May Offer Cludes to Treating Diabetes ;
• Nature (blog) Rex Dalton: AAAS 2010: Sun, dolphins, delusion ; a wrap-up of sorts as the meeting opened.

Blood tests for Cancer (from a briefing by AAAS on the eve of the meeting for a piece in its new journal Science Translational Medicine) ;

• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Personalized blood tests for cancer ‘could soon transform the way the disease is treated.”
• Science News – Eva Emerson: Tumor Tracking Gets Personal ;

Nuclear Disarmament:

• AAAS ScienceNOW – Eli Kintisch: Nuclear Disarmament Science: How to be Dumb Enough to Be Smart ;

Other kind of nuke news:

• AFP: Europeans eye deep underground nuclear waste repositories ;

Electric Car Batteries-for-hire :

• Science News – Janet Raloff: Leasing Car Batteries to the Power Company ;

- Charlie Petit

The long nightmare of mainstream science and policy makers over the selling of climate change as something worth slowing down got a bit worse this week. Early yesterday Dutch civil servant and UN functionary Yvo de Boer announced he will become a consultant for the firm KPMG, thus quitting his job as of July as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. That latter is not one convention but the whole system of meetings and workshops and accumulated agreements coordinating international response to the warming and other disruptions blamed on greenhouse gases. Given the dismal results from the recent meeting in Copenhagen that De Boer says left him depressed, the turmoil over disclosure of errors and exaggerations in reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drive much of the UN’s climate agenda, hacked e-mails revealing the at-times intemperate fury by some climate scientists at their doubters, and vehement political counter attack against doing much of anything about greenhouse gases – well, again, the nightmare continues for many. Meanwhile, glee spreads in the right side pews of the US Congress and their blogospheric counterparts.

One thousand parts per million CO2, here we come? Looks like all those dire computer models might get a real-life test so cross your fingers.

Stories:

• Der Spiegel (Eng. edition): ‘De Boer’s Resignation is Catastrophic,” a sampling of reaction in Germany and in its media.
• NY Times – Neil MacFarquhar, John M. Broder: UN Climate Chief resigns ; They don’t even bother to hide behind a source or two in declaring that this seems to further herald the end for the UN framework strategy.
• AP – Arthur Max: A weary UN aide quits climate post ;
• Wash. Post – Juliet Eilperin, Steven Mufson: Climate pact appears increasingly fragile; UN official quits ; This looks to be a deeply analytical piece that was ready to go when de Boer’s resignation came along like a package-topping lagniappe. One source says it’s the “death knell” for the UN process.
• Guardian (UK) Mark Lynas: Yvo de Boer’s resignation compounds sense of gathering climate crisis ; The lede: How can everything have gone so wrong so quickly? ; The last line: No wonder Yvo de Boer wanted to get out. Also at the Guardian: John Vidal: Yvo de Boer’s successor has big footprints to fill ;  Tove Ryding (a climate activist with Greenpeace): After Yvo de Boer, what are we looking for in our new climate chief? ;
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Yvo de Boer quits UN climate change body ; The Telegraph, its coverage tending more to the skeptical side of the climate wars, does not put as much effort as did its more leftish counterpart in the Guardian into chronicling de Boers demise as climate honcho. But Gray’s account is balanced, sober, and strictly on topic.
• Toronto Globe and Mail:Resignation of top climate official clouds future of global-treaty talks ;
• Financial Times – Fiona Harvey: UN climate change chief quits;
• Agence France-Presse – Richard Ingham: No regrets, says UN climate chief after resignation ; The hed seems correct. Ingham talked to de Boer directly. Wonder what he’ll say in a month or two…

Here’s one with a different angle:

• ABC (Aus) Nance Haxton: Climate chief’s resignation sparks treaty talk ; Some say this could invigorate the UN process.

Meanwhile, a pertinent story to admire:

• Guardian – Jeffrey Sachs: Climate sceptics are recycled critics of controls on tobacco and acid rain / We must not be distracted from science’s urgent message: we are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth’s climate ; It’s an essay by a Columbia U. profesor and UN adviser, not journalism with attributions and bolsterings of its assertions. But reads true to me.

- Charlie Petit

The Daily Telegraph in London, we learn here from Richard Alleyne‘s account, sponsors an annual Scientists Meet the Media party. Last week it was at the Royal Society. Paid for by big pharma – Novartis. Dunno if that exactly passes ethical muster, but I’ve spent a few days in my life hitting up not only publishers but industrial sponsors for AAAS science writers’ parties, so I can’t bring myself to tut tut the Telegraph.

Looks like a grand party. If old coots, as in the pic, can go to it and get their arms however briefly around comely women in little black dresses, I would say it was a pretty swell affair (I’d ID the women in question, journalists presumably, but already tried blowing the pic up to read their name tags. No luck).

It also has in here a quote from Lord Rees, head of the Royal Society, as he discoursed on journalism and science. “I know how hard it is to explain some things – and I understand them.” What’s that last bit, Sir Martin? You do and we don’t!? Er…Quite true, too often. That’s a science writer’s secret specialty at deadline: Explaining clearly things about which he or she, should  push come to shove, is deeply, hopelessly baffled. By the end of this surely well-lubricated party one imagines that all sorts of arcane things were being explained by the assembled scribes with an impressive gloss of confident, apparent clarity.

- Charlie Petit

In the US, say to  anybody who stayed awake through high school “My kingdom for a horse,” you’ll get at least a mumbled Shakespeare, right? In the UK, and England for sure, expect a discourse not so much on the play as the Battle of Bosworth, and dawn of the Tudor dynasty, and the end of not just King Richard III but of  the War of the Roses in 1485.

Ergo, reporters there jumped upon an announcement, well-publicized in advance, by archeologists that they have nailed down, amid a slew of newly found buried cannonballs, sword mounts, spilt coins and other regalia of both sides including a tiny fierce boar sculpture of the sort the doomed king handed to supporters, the place where he fell and English history pivoted. I have some peevish semi-apologetic remarks below about my lack of interest in the latest King Tut news. But this bit of archeology is fun and, to American eyes, quite fresh. It’s even better than Little Bighorn sleuthing.

I have no reason to doubt the claim’s accuracy. But few press stories in the UK seem anything if not convinced. Don ‘t miss the last two bullets below.

Charge! (ie, Stories) :

• Guardian – Maev Kennedy: Archaeologists pinpoint long-disputed site of Battle of Bosworth ; And not just the general place, she writes, but the bog where the last Plantagenet King went down, his crown rolled off, and it promptly reached the victorious head of Henry Tudor.
• Times – Ben Hoyle: Battle of Bosworth location finally uncovered ;
• Register – Lester Haines : Archaeologists nail Bosworth Field, Finally reveal site of Richard III’s downfall ;
• BBC – Bob Walker: Snowbound fields hide true Battle of Bosworth site ;
• Daily Mail: Is this the field where Richard III lost his kingdom for a horse? Real locaton of Battle of Bosworth finally revealed after 500 years.

This news announcement has been in the works awhile:

• Leicester Mercury (Jan 25): Experts pinpoint true locationof Battle of Bosworth ; But they were keeping it secret till now.

And Finally, in the Japery Dept – Two satires:

• NEWSARSE: Site of really old thing pretty much where we thought it was all along ;
• The Spoof!  Chris James: The Battle Of Bosworth Was Bollocks ;

Grist for the Mill:

Leicestershire County Council Press Release, main site Bosworth Project ; Neither brooks doubt that this is the place, for sure. Hmmmm. Wonder how it’ll do in the refereed journals, if it goes into such a one?

- Charlie Petit

My colleague Sascha Karberg rolled up his sleeves and did for German media today (scroll down for his post) what I should have done for the English language outlets which, in my myopia, generally means US-US-US plus Canada-UK-Australia press. He has a post in today on the extensive coverage of why King Tut is dead, or at least got dead so young, with the answer being malaria probably.

I just hadn’t the energy to slog through the stories. Call it fatigue over knee-jerk and manufactured news. Or more real – after all there is some news here that is fairly science-based – my eyes just rolled back. I didn’t care. Tut may still attract other eyeballs to the news but it sure looked to me like the same old from the same old. That is, while the news’s germ was in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the chief of antiquities in Egypt once again had his big slouch Lost Ark Raider hat in the middle of it.  Maybe the Nat’l Geographic Society had a role calling the steps for this square dance too, as it has for so many other media Egypt hops. And there was some new news elsewhere to cover. But still. Could’a would’a should’a.

While my favorite posts shine light on news stories you readers might not hear about at all but are particularly well (or sometimes badly) done, another pleasant core duty is to let general readers know of the ways many different outlets cover the same essential  news. This includes to subversively provide the raw material that lets some reporters slide by on (albeit, often clever) rewrite of press releases alone, while others display pluck and sometimes brilliance  in going beyond handouts to find their own angles, insights, counter-punching sources or other material and similes to aid in  explanation. I also want people in the business who covered some piece of news to be able regularly to sample how their colleagues tackled it.

Tutunkhamen filled the bill, but he again and forever? Will he and his pharoanic trope and his family’s obscure machinations never die? Sascha was a better man. Lassitude overwhelmed me….

Pic of mummy puppet, source Animateclay.com

- Charlie Petit

NOTE:

Egad and apologies to you and myself. More than two weeks ago I composed this post, put it in queue, and … forgot to publish it. This morning the NYTimes ran an editorial on tiger farming which rang my ever-duller bell. It also refers to a NYTimes story by Andrew Jacobs that ran Feb. 12.. So I asked myself:  Where’s that post I wrote about such news? Well, here it is, dredged from limbo.

(Written Feb. 1, I think) –   One is unsure why this is, but the last few days have seen a spike in tiger news – little of it good.

On the good but not true yet front, the Bangkok Post‘s Apinya Wipatayotin reported yesterday a pledge by 13 Asian countries to double wild tiger populations by 2022. More than 100 delegates at a Thailand-hosted conference made the vow as a preliminary, it says here, to a global tiger summit in Russia in September. If this happened, according to figures in this story, wild tigers numbers would climb to about 6,400 – compared to 100,000 a century ago. Another version of this news, with a bit more history and context, is at Voice of America from Daniel Schearf.

Meanwhile in the bad but probably true category is this from National Geographic‘s Daily News feed: Tiger Trade Slashes Big Cats’ Numbers ; It is a report, including a video, on conditions along the Mekong River of Southeast Asia, where reports say the tiger population is down to about 350. The source of this is the enviro group WWF. Hunters are killing the cats for body parts in high demand by traders in traditional medicine potions.

Which brings us to the distressing, definitely true, and just maybe not necessarily bad news from BBC‘s Patrick Jackson. His topic is the farming of tigers in China. His lede: For very one wild tiger alive in the world today, there may be three ‘farmed” tigers in China. The farms raise tigers for hides, so-called medicinal extracts and organs, and even for the amusement of the public (one can watch the big cats chase cattle, chickens, etc. Doesn’t say here what happens when they catch them but a reader’s comment has one example). One big market: wineries that put tiger bones in the barrels to infuse the wine with who-knows-what but it does bring a higher price. The only thin angle I can think of that might bear fruit is whether, in a rather dismal possibility, tiger farms provide body parts so cheaply that it undercuts the motive for hunters to find and kill wild ones.

- Charlie Petit

The news about the recent examination of the mummy of Egyptian King Tutenchamun (see JAMA paper) was a must for newspapers and online outlets in Germany. Not only because a German geneticist (from Tübingen) was involved, but because news about the mystic times of pharaohs can capture public attention as well as space or health news here. Lots of the articles were based on copy-paste-information spread via the agencies (dpa, AFP or ddp, who were fed with press releases from Zahi Hawass, the head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo), but some took the effort to add a personal or local note:

The Tagesspiegel (Hartmut Wewetzer) starts with describing the fascination that seemed to grip the public, which longs to know the circumstances of the famous young pharaoh, nicknamed “Tut”. Was he a son of Echnaton (yes) and Nofretete (probably not, because the mummy identified as Tut’s mother is also Echnaton’s sister, but could not be identified any further)? Did Tut die by murder (no) or due to a disease (probably, because he suffered malaria and a variety of inherited diseases)? Because of the new insights into the kings pathology, the Tagesspiegel article is headlined “The new sorrows of young T.”, (playing with the title of Ulrich Plenzdorf’s famous adaption of Goethe’s “The sorrows of young Werther”). Wewetzer makes it very clear from the beginning, that the Hawass team’s “answers” are not final, but raise a lot new questions. He quotes a Swiss scientists, that Hawass’ conclusions exaggerate the data. The finding of malaria traces do not hint directly to the assumption, that malaria was the cause of Tut’s death. Wewetzer enriches the discussion about the walking impairment of the king with quotes from the former director of the famous Berlin museum of egyptology (where the bust of Nofretete is kept). He is confident, that the tomography analysis of the kings bones, which showed an osteonecrosis as well as a club foot are mirrored in drawings of the king, where he uses a cane doing sports or sits during archery.

Zeit-Online (Alina Schadwinkel) also called the museum and included quotes of the current director, who is “dissapointed” about the results of the genetic analysis, which make it less likely, that Nofretete was king Tut’s mother, because this disturbs the notion of “perfect unity” between Echnaton and Nofretete. Nevertheless, it is not one hundred percent certain, that the mummy with the long head in grave KV55 actually is Echnaton, says the director, but the circumstances support it.

The report of the Handelsblatt (Jan Dönges, spektrumdirekt) included quotes from an egyptologist at the University of Göttingen, whose interpretation of the data is, that the identity of Echnaton is now confirmed.

Some of the links to the ink (mostly just versions of the pieces from the agencies):

stern.de, focus.de, FAZ, Zeit, Welt, Bild, Spiegel-Online, Hamburger Abendblatt, Standard, Rheinische Post, FTD, Frankfurter Rundschau and much more…

Also:

Bloody tweets and blown-up algae

New media and medicine was featured in the science section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. Nicola Kuhrt wrote about an operation at St. Luke’s Hospital in Iowa, that was live twittered last August. It’s an interesting piece about how cautious and somehow repellent Germans are, when confronted with new (media) technology. Whereas other hospitals in the US seem to be open minded enough to give social media like twitter a chance to try to improve public communication, the head of the German Surgical Society is not only “discomfort” with twittering the OI status, he actually issued a warning. Communicating  complications won’t help the family of the patient, the physician is quoted. And he also asks for the protection of privacy of the patient. Other surgeons frankly name it “horseplay”. But the article also features some examples of physicians, who try to use new media to teach patients with chronic diseases about their disease (and how to distinguish good and bad information on the web!). Two weeks ago, FAZ colleague Joachim Müller-Jung used the announcement of Apple’s iPad to write about new media in medicine, too.

And I have to (briefly) mention another article of FAZ (Müller-Jung, too), because he wrote against the mainstream of optimistic articles (and hundreds of millions of dollars governmental support) promoting algae as the next big  source of renewable energy. At a meeting of German chemists he harvested such quotes as “makes no economical sense”, “charlatanery”, “algae perpetuum mobile”. Worth reading.

- Sascha Karberg