(UPDATE*) NYTimes Science Times: Old space delirium; new moon water, cleverness writ small…. and more
Maybe it’s just me, but I felt I hit a sweet spot reading the Science Times this morning and am feeling chipper. I think it was pages 1 and 3 that did it. For those whose digital reading habits deny them the occasional pleasures of good on-page layout (or lucky, which can be better then good) in an old fashioned medium, the newspaper, here is the order of initial reading that got the morning off to a fine start:
- Dennis Overbye : Madison Avenue’s Moon Shot ; The lead art piece, with emphasis on art and inspired graphic design. Overbye reviews a book that collects ads from big corporations that ran in the aviation trade press – such things as Aviation Week or Air Force magazine in the late 50s to early 60s. The book authors see the ads’ boosterism, Overbye suggests, as a variant of science fiction. I saw them as a kid. Dad subscribed to both magazines just mentioned. We learn here that many were cynical bait-and-switch loss-leaders for recruitment of new employees but, to me (and Overbye, it seems) they were intoxicating. The gallery of ads is here.
- *UPDATE: Also See: at Wired News, Alexis Madrigal has an interview with the curator of this ad collection.
- Kenneth Chang : Scientists see fresh evidence of more water on the moon ; Oberbye’s re-encounter with the semi-insane giddiness of the early space age jumps to page 3, where right under it is this sober, satisfying taste of the state of play in space today. Robots, not people, are making the discoveries. The moon is not dry, it is encrusted top and bottom in clear ice (so they say). And, underplayed in this tidy account, the data may be from a US instrument but it was aboard an orbiter conceived, designed, built, and operated by India and put up there by a made-in-India booster stack – hence supported by a society going through a rough equivalent to the early space race in the USA..
Henry Fountain and his Observatory, bottom of p. 3: Three stories, reported and written with extreme economy of explanation, free of angst, moral uncertainty, or peril. Pared down to the process by which people discover new things and surprise us all:- One Reason Lizards Have Ears: To Eavesdrop;
- Greens Get a Boost Under the Glow Of the Supermarket ;
- Scientists Propose A More Efficient Way To Make Ethanol ;
Elsewhere the section has stories without the innocence – or lost innocence of an earlier time – of those above. Back to the real world of ambiguity and pain:
- Gina Kolata: Infection Defense May Spur Alzheimer’s; Amyloid plaques are not just visible evidence of Alzheimer’s disease, but are made of a material that seems to have a useful function as an antibiotic. Good story on new discovery but the hed is overdone. Nowhere does Kolata suggest it as very likely that Alzheimer’s results from an over-response to infection. Possible yes, but the main hypothesis arising from this work?, apparently not.
- William J. Broad: For Iran, Enriching Uranium Only Gets Easier ; Pure explainer of some process-engineering facts that are not obvious – why is it centrifuges have such a tough time enriching uranium to a scant 3.7 percent, but go much faster taking that to weapons grade? Broad reduces it to simple terms by inverting the math that instinctively arises in the innocent cranium. It may give some people who are generally favorable toward nuclear power (my hand is raised) a moment’s pause at the prospect of hundreds or thousands of new reactors worldwide cranking out clean electricity.
- Nicholas Wade: Speed Reading DNA May Help Cancer Treatment: The news is important, but this story seems too brief and tight to make it clear. Famous researchers see mitochondrial DNA as big factors in cancer. That’s new, I suppose. But how could it do that? What are the 80 percent of mutated mtDNA strands newly found in some tumors doing to propel division? And how to square mtDNA’s possible central role with what the fourth paragraph says (a marvel of evoking a sense of things without providing any detailed info at all) about chromosomal DNA?
- Yudhijit Bhattacharjee : A Little Black Box to Jog Failing Memory ; The box is the Sensecam. One wears it. It automatically makes a digital photo log of one’s day. The news here is its ancillary usefulness for giving those with fading memory a brain-jogging reminder what they’ve seen lately. The disturbing thing is that this Microsft product’s main market is young people who may use the photos to fill their internet social networking pages. Information overload! Information overload!
As usual, lots more in this regularly amazing section: Whole Thing ;
