Occasionally I like to get away from the dominant news sources that we look at every day, and scan through my RSS feed to see what I’ve been overlooking.

This morning I clicked on the feed from Research Blogging, and within a few minutes I’d opened multiple tabs with all kinds of things I felt I had to read before leaving. The site is part of the seed media group, which also includes ScienceBlogs, a destination that might be more familiar to Tracker readers. Research Blogging is an aggregation of academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research.

Those of us who have made careers in journalism–and who are not academics–might reasonably ask whether this is journalism. These are researchers, not journalists. So whatever it is, it’s not journalism–right?

I’m going to leave that discussion to others. In my view, if it’s a good story, it’s a good story, whether it’s written by a journalist, a scientist, or a bonobo. (Not that I’m comparing scientists to bonobos. I just like to say bonobo.)

Here are a few of the good stories I found on Research Blogging:

“Codon” is now a four lettered word, by Iddo Friedberg in Byte Size Biology. Car makers set up experimental assembly lines to tinker with the manufacture of a new model. Can we do the same with the machinery of life?

Citizen science: Recreational divers monitoring marine biodiversity, by Rob Goldstein in Conservation Maven. Recreational scuba divers are part of a large-scale marine biodiversity monitoring effort in the Italian Mediterranean Sea.

Whale Snot, by Jason in The Thoughtful Animal. It’s very hard to obtain blood samples from whales without killing them. So what’s the next best alternative?

What’s in a Name? Genetic overlap between major psychiatric disorders, by Kevin Mitchell in Wiring the Brain. Are schizophrenia and bipolar disorder different diseases, or different “dimensions” of the same thing?

Some of these posts use more jargon than we might like to see in something written for a broad audience. While some are clever and well crafted, others lack the kind of lively writing we should expect from a journalist. But they present a different set of perspectives, and sometimes offer us stories we won’t see elsewhere.

Subscribe the feed and see what you think.

Oh, I almost forgot one more:

Bonobos and the child-like joy of sharing, by Eric Michael Johnson in The Primate Diaries. A study of juvenile behavior of bonobos suggests that not acting our age may be the very reason why we’re so successful as a species.

Bonobo!

- Paul Raeburn

Today, at least, there is fog all over San Francisco Bay. I can see it from the front window. I should have taken a picture – all you could see of the city were the tops of the Transamerica Pyramid and the Bank of American Bldg. But it’s tule fog – blown from inland through the Carquinez Strait, not the cooling summer marine fog that so often hugs the cast from Big Sur to the Oregon border. And it’s the latter kind that a new study says is getting a bit rarer. This could be bad news for the world’s tallest trees, the coast redwoods that thrive during 6-month dry season largely on water condensed from the fog and dripping from their foliage. Funny thing is, some people have proposed that global warming – presumably making the land even warmer compared to the sea and thus drawing a stronger onshore wind -  should increase the fog.But this study says the land-sea temperature gradient is actually going down, not up.

The report is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It surmises that the major casualties among redwoods will be saplings. The mature ones have lived for 2000 years and probably have survived extended dry runs. Some say it will take a millennium or so for our era’s extra CO2 to clear. To a redwood tree, maybe that will be just a bad patch.

Stories:

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Less fog puts redwoods at risk, scientists say; He picks two years as illustrative: In 1952 the summer and fall dry season had jsut 13 days free of coastal fog. In 1997 it was 62 days. The examples may be at the extreme end, but on average the researchers found that early in the 20th century it was one third foggier than now.
• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Fog decrease harming California redwoods ;
• Wired News – Tia Ghose: Fog Decline Threatens California’s Towering Redwoods ; Ghose’s first source didn’t even do the study, although he says something the authors stress too – that a fog dearth will change a whole ecosystem, not one iconic species.
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Fog over San Francisco thins by a third due to climate change ; Brief piece, characterized as usual in UK press with an absence of qualifiers in the hed, followed by a reasonable story.
• NY Times – Henry Fountain : Around the redwoods, the fog is dissipating ;
• National Geographic – Rachel Kaufman: Giant Redwoods May Dry Out; Warming to Blame? ;
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Climate change threatens fog and redwoods – study ;

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

With the nation in recession and the federal budget perforce in even worse shape than usual, one would think the science section’s lead story by Pam Belluck on an immense study of maternal and infant health would work quite well on the front page too. The reason is money. I had to check twice when reading the price tag for the National Children’s Study that Congress authorized ten years ago and is just now getting into the pilot stage. $6.7 billion!! It does seem, if the protocol gets polished and confirmed as a good one, a great, longitudinal study of medical data gathered for 100,000 pregnancies from birth through the offsprings’ 21 birthday. Important – but that is a lot of money. She picks up an apt quote from a source:  This is “the magnitude of the accelerator in CERN, or a trip to the moon.” The story is not a huge investigative story, but it does pry deeply into a program and comes up with troubling questions. Such as – will the study be worth it? Will it change child rearing practices and other more general behavior, or just provide detail on almost insoluble problems?

Other notable ScienceTimes headlines:

• Kenneth Chang: Adding rocket man to his Résumé ; This says Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, is “smart, brash, and prickly.” You’d be prickly too if your fortune rides on two startup companies – one making pricy electric cars during a recession, the other making rocket ships in a time of declining launch demand. But it’s upbeat, and the images (photo, and written) of Musk’s rocket factory are impressive, and  the part about Iron Man is a gem of quick-sketch writing.
• John Noble Wilford: On Crete, New Evidence Of very Ancient Mariners ; H. erectus with boats? Could be. By the way, don’t bother thinking maybe they walked to Crete during one of those dry-Med salinity crises. I looked’em up. Those seem to have been too long ago.
• Laura Beil – A debate on gastric surgery for youths ; This story is hard to peg. The stats are impressive on the number of surgeons stapling obese teenagers’ stomachs. But, perhaps because there is no reliable answer, it leaves the question hanging whether it’s a good thing, not a good thing, or just sideways. The reader may get company, but not much help.
• Sean B. Carroll: Imitators That Hide in Plain sight, and Stay Alive ; Molecular biologist Carroll continues to cement his rep. as among our times most prolific, elegant essayists on the life sciences.
• Sindyan N. Bhanoo: This King-Size Frog Hopped With Dinosaurs ;

As usual, lots more: Whole section.

Note: Two stories, by Dennis Overbye on a superhot piece of big bang, and by Henry Fountain on fading fog in California, tracked separately today.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Last week in Spain European ministers declared that they will try to make the electric car a reality. They see a big industrial, economical, technological and environmental opportunity for Europe. Spain is in good position to lead and to find synergies with its broader bet on renewable energy sources (wind specially). Most of the Spanish press talked up the announcement. Some were a bit skeptical saying that nice words don’t always bring concrete action. And today we’ve found a story with a title suggesting that electric cars won’t necessarily reduce emissions, but with no strong evidence to back it up.

Uno de los deportes preferidos en España es quejarse. Siempre ante cualquier iniciativa suelen aparecer críticos buscándole pegas, e infravalorando los pros y sobredimensionando los contras. Quizás es una reacción instintiva que forma parte de nuestra naturaleza humana, pero no es algo en lo que debería caer el periodismo científico.

No se qué editor de ABC habrá seleccionado el subtítulo de la nota de Araceli Acosta “Los malos humos del coche eléctrico”, con la capciosa frase “El impulso de estos vehículos no implica la reducción de emisiones de CO2”, pero empobrece un buen análisis de Araceli. Y lo más grave, confunde al lector –sobre todo a los muchísimos que repasan sólo titulares y primeras líneas de texto-, con algo que a priori es una muy buena apuesta de la Unión Europea y el gobierno español. El argumento para defender este juicio crítico al coche eléctrico es algo tan pobre como que –según sólo el informe de una consultora- hay un resquicio en la legislación europea que permite a los fabricantes aprovechar la venta de coches eléctricos para sacar al mercado mayor número de convencionales. El punto clave, explican, es que la legislación pone límites a las emisiones medias de cada fabricante, no de los vehículos específicos, y esto puede ser utilizado para compensar la construcción de más coches de elevadas emisiones. Rebuscado. Muy rebuscado, y de ninguna manera sirve para dar a entender que los coches eléctricos no impliquen reducción de emisiones de CO2. El artículo también apunta que para tener un impacto medioambiental verdaderamente positivo la energía que impulse al coche eléctrico debe proceder de fuentes renovables, y ser distribuida por una red inteligente de puntos de recarga. Sin duda. Los gobiernos ya lo saben, y todos los indicios demuestran que se avanza en este camino. El coche eléctrico competitivo será una realidad en los próximos años, y quien primero apueste por él estará mejor posicionado en el mercado. No llegará a cero emisiones netas, pero sin duda contribuirá muchísimo en reducirlas, y eliminará gran cantidad de contaminación en las ciudades. Concretamente en España, habrá interesantes sinergias con la inversión paralela en las fuentes renovables, especialmente la eólica. Hay motivos de sobra para ensalzar la apuesta por el coche eléctrico. Claro que debemos mantener un espíritu crítico y no ser complacientes, pero posiblemente aquí se han excedido con la manera de presentar las legítimas dudas que analiza el artículo.

Un par de notas más sobre los planes de la UE sobre el coche eléctrico, anunciados la semana pasada en San Sebastián por el ministro español Miguel Sebastián con las palabras “El vehículo eléctrico ha nacido hoy en Europa”y “es una gran oportunidad industrial, económica, medioambiental, energética y tecnológica para Europa”:

El Pais – Mikel Ormazábal “Europa da el primer impulso político al vehículo eléctrico”. Se muestra cauto con la declaración de intenciones de los ministros y la falta de compromisos concretos. Buen texto, explicando la situación de los prototipos actuales y hacia dónde debe mejorar.

Público – Marta del Amo: “El coche eléctrico prepara su invasión”. Explica la iniciativa VERDE dirigida a investigar cómo integrar de manera efectiva el coche eléctrico en el sistema, y los efectos que tendrá sobre el consumo de electricidad.

- Pere Estupinyà

One can’t be too surprised that if one zips gold ions to just a hair under the speed of light and smacks them into one another head on, out will come something to put in the journals of science. After physicists at Brookhaven National Lab described the results yesterday at a meeting in DC of the American Physical Society (also in Physical Review Letters), however, reporters could not agree on what part is the most amazing.

Some liked the temperature, hot enough to melt protons and neutrons. It is inferred from the debris as reaching – for fleeting instants in tiny regions of the collision zone – 7.2 trillion degrees or about 250,000 times hotter than the Sun’s fusion core. USA Today‘s Dan Vergano called the result the hottest thing since the Big Bang. Over at MSNBC and his Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle calls the flashes of dismembered quark-gluon plasma matter the “hottest dollops of soup ever seen in the universe” and works in Big Bang references too. Soup seems a good metaphor – the cloud of stuff that forms – and dissipates almost instantly – appears to behave more like a liquid than a gas, it says here.

Others bit on notions of illegal physics. At the NYTimes Dennis Overbye maybe stretches things in making his point, which is that the material violated parity. That means it seems to favor left-handed motions over right-handed ones. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Either way defies the usual dictum that nature should work symmetrically, or the same way when viewed in a mirror as when looked at straight on. Overbye’s lede say it thus was able “to briefly distort the laws of physics.” The hed is more emphatic: “..Scientists Briefly Break a Law of Nature.” Hmm. More like the test rewrote a law that mere humans previously inferred incompletely, or perhaps it would best described as discovery of a loophole. That’s the thing about loopholes – they may violate the spirit of the law, they may be unfair, but they are legal.

There are other variations in coverage that implied a particularly feline-behavior (running in disparate directions) during an opportunity for herd journalism. That’d be great if this were an instant of reporters listening to the pitch and making up their own minds, and in different ways, about what is the news here. Ah, but the diversity was partly handed to the media. It turns out Brookhaven’s web site sports two press releases, linked down below in Grist. Each tackles a different way by which the experiment raised the researchers’ pulses.

That’s okay. Not many of us could chew on, digest, metabolize, and excrete original angles we thought up all by ourselves on a story like this in just a few hours and on a topic so arcane – not with much confidence anyway. I couldn’t. But somebody could – scroll down to the New Scientist bullet.

Other Stories:

• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Hottest Temperature Ever Heads Science to Big Bang; Ms. Fox offers spintronics as a possible practical application. Perhaps so. It doesn’t say how, though.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire : Scientists create hottest temperature since Big Bang – 250,000 times more scorching than our Sun.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Scientists cook up hottest ‘soup’ ever ;
• Science News – Laura Sanders: Hot and heavy matter runs a 4 trillion degree fever / Hot quark-gluon soup cooked up in collisions of gold atoms ;
• Science A Go Go – Kate Melville: Mirror symmetry broken at 7 trillion degrees ; Nice hed – two angles.
• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Atom smasher shows vacuum of space in a twist ; Cool in two ways. Ms. Courtland writes the story with a fresh angle – jumping right into quantum chromodynamics and the matter-energy equivalance. She or a copy editor also put the right term in the hed, atom smasher, so old-fashioned but in this case just right.
• Discover Magazine – Calla Cofield: The hottest science experiment on the planet ; Cofield shows a good sense of perspective here – explaining why this hot spot can’t melt a hole in the Earth, and why it is tough to separate data’s signal from the chaff during such tests.

Grist for the Mill:

Brookhaven Nat’l Lab Press Release by title:

1) “Bubbles” of Broken Symmetry in Quark Soup at RHIC ; 2) “Perfect” Liquid Hot Enough to be Quark Soup ;

- Charlie Petit

As journalism reinvents itself, journalists now need to learn multiplatform technologies, such as podcasting, blogging, digital video and audio. They also need an understanding of subjects that consistently rank high with readers—health, environment, medical research, technology and science.

Only one Fellowship offers the pick of scientific courses at MIT and Harvard, gives audio and video training, and sponsors research trips: The Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT.

Knight Fellows receive a stipend of $60,000 for nine months. Info and Applications are here. They are due March 1.

- Phil Hilts

In the mood for a nice little mystery this morning? If you don’t have time for The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle, check out Sandra G. Boodman‘s nice little tale in ‘smorning’s Washington Post. Something is wrong with Adam Hammerman’s memory:

One morning as Adam prepared to take a shower, he screamed after seeing himself in the mirror: He said he did not remember getting a haircut the previous day. He called his mother from school to ask what time she was picking him up, then called again five minutes later to ask the same thing…

It’s a very nice piece. Boodman manages to sneak in the science you need to understand Adam’s condition without interrupting the story line. Of course, unlike the girl with the dragon tattoo, Adam is real.

That means that the ending is…well, I don’t want to spoil it.

This is the latest in a series of Boodman mysteries. If you like this one, do not follow the link at the bottom of the story to find more. It’s a link to the health page, where you can see only a couple of them, if you try hard enough. The series, however, is here. (Memo to IT: fix the link.)

And if you’re in the mood for the master, at whose feet Boodman surely must have studied, check out this collection of stories from The New Yorker by Berton Roueche, who, if he didn’t invent the form, certainly perfected it.

- Paul Raeburn

If you are among the many outside the UK who wonder how distinguished science journalist Simon Singh is doing lately in his legal struggle against the nation’s chiropractors  and for the freedom to call many of the craft’s health claims bogus, here’s a quick fix:

• Online Journalism News – Judith Townend: Simon Singh calls for 100,000 people to sign libel reform petition.

By the way, here is the passage that has kept Singh tied up in court for the last year or so:

“The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.”

Not sure, but I think one sticky point is that pointed adverb “happily,” implying that the subluxation-obsessed docs not only make claims unsupported by good science, but know their supposed benefits are bogus while they continue cheerfully on anyway. Well, that is offensive. It hardly seems something to attract summonses and judges though.

*UPDATE:

• Globe and Mail (Canada) Elizabeth Renzetti: London, sue capital of the world; Amazing report on a newspaper in Australia whose editors, on their lawyers’ advice,  killed a story  based on an interview with Singh for fear that somebody in the UK would sue them.

Note on the pic: It runs with the piece linked above, and at first blush makes sense. Free Speech for Sale? NOT IF I CAN DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT!! But really, it is for sale y’know. We see the result all the time on TV and stage. It is called acting.

- Charlie Petit

I expect I’ll put the Stars and Stripes on the garage corner today, noodle around with a freelance story that is due in a week and a half, play some doubles tennis badly while trying to win anyway, read the newspapers a bit more leisurely than usual on a week day. I also will not do much if any tracking. I’ll check to see if our other three trackers offer something. See y’all Tuesday.

Please note my employer’s house ad – time is nigh to apply for the exceedingly useful and enriching Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT. If you’re in the biz and haven’t taken advantage of it, please consider putting yourself foreward. It is a can’t-miss career highlight.

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker caught a part of a special report earlier this week on CBS led by Katie Couric on antibiotic overuse in the livestock industry, thought “this is pretty well done,” and promptly forgot about it. But over at Sigma Xi, publisher of American Scientist, somebody didn’t forget and made a note of it at their Science in the News on line site. That’s where I got reminded and am thus happy now to join the parade and salute this package.

I can’t vouch for the specific studies whose results get concisely summarized in the piece (see Grist below for one, sour opinion). But it feels right and looks right as an example of big-outlet reporting that could make a difference. The truth is that antibiotics in animal feed, and the dangers they pose by force-evolving the appearance of highly resistant disease organisms, have been written up at length, well, and often at many outlets. But one doesn’t recall too many times (zero, in my recall) that it’s gotten featured treatment on the national evening news.

The package walks viewers through examples of the problem and the people who seem to have gotten sick as a result, the economics of antibiotics and livestock, what their ban would mean at the checkout counter (higher prices), and best of all a clincher from Denmark where such a ban has had, it seems, a dramatic impact on public health. CBS is to be commended for pouring resources into this special report.

Grist for the Mill: Among the comments posted at CBS is one with a link to a dissection of the data cited by the network. Released by Iowa State University, it is by a former USDA official and veterinary professor. He, for one, doesn’t think much of the network’s reporting.

- Charlie Petit

It is usually a sign of intellectual laziness to cite oneself as an authority with the line “I read some place that…”, but when standing about in chattering company you go with what you got. And this is all I got. I did read some place that if a paleontologist were to be handed a tiger skeleton it would be very hard and maybe impossible for him or her to say for sure if it belonged to a tiger or a lion.

That may be untrue. But as a result I’ve had fixed in my mind that these two greatest of great cats are very similar under the skin and are probably very closely related. Ask anybody – what’s the tiger’s closest living relative (other than another tiger)? Most’ll guess the lion. So it comes as a surprise that, according to the BBC‘s Matt Walker, a new study concludes that the closest living relatives of the tiger clan are snow leopards. It appears that lions are closer to the jaguars of the New World than they are to tigers. So say the  Texas A & M researchers in the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution.

It’s rather a modest story. It gets to the point efficiently. However, one suggests, Walker ought to fire up the on line editing routine. He left out what most of us and probably he too learned early on the science beat. Be sure to give the institutional affiliations of the people you’re quoting, citing, or otherwise mentioning. Maybe it’s there but I keep looking and not seeing it. The story’s attraction at BBC, it further appears, is the opportunity it affords to bring attention to the outlet’s new package of info to help celebrate what the WWF organization calls 2010  – the Year of the Tiger.

Grist for the Mill: Journal abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker is posting this while holding it at arm’s length. I’ve noted with some dismay the tepid response by most US media to the problems, and hints of welcome tightening and perhaps wide reform, facing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But here’s a piece of somewhat the same mind but that hits me as ludicrous. It also is hard to dismiss in its entirety. It ran in Britain’s right-of-centre Spectator, where science writer and book author Matt Ridley lionizes the dedicated bloggers, mostly of the skeptical sort,  who busted up the public’s perception of scientific consensus on climate change.  The result, Ridley writes, is to reveal most mainstream journalists as poodles on the leashes of their establishment sources.

It’s just an opinion, but it’s mine and here it is: this piece reflects only preening, self-congratulation in the on line world of the mad. Ridley, a prize winning journalist and chronicler of evolutionary biology, in this instance and on the climate front mistakes a bloggy victory in the political and public opinion battlefield for a strike for truth, justice, and the advancement of humanity.

Here’s the catch. For all of his indiscriminate admiration for the chattering snorters who share his distrust of government and seem to think “Al Gore” is an expletive, Ridley puts his finger on some real problems in standard journalism. They go beyond the failure of publishers to make the 20%-plus profit margins to which they had been accustomed. That is that the sheer energy and tenacity that once was the glory of big-time journalism does seem to have migrated to the internet – a place woefully free of the sort of editing restraints and codes of conduct (such as fact-checking) one hopes to find in the news room. But it definitely is lively.

I don’t have further comment about this article but wonder if any of you out there do.

Pic – source Wired.co.uk

- Charlie Petit