Not too often does a sport story, even in the NYTimes, merit inclusion on the paper’s on line listing of science news stories. This morning is one that made the list. Reporter Michael S. Schmidt tells readers that a new more refined test for human growth hormone, or HGH, is within months of a likely approval by the leading world agency that oversees anti-doping tests of athletes. It comes as the test already has had an impact – it led to suspension earlier this year of a professional rugby in Britain after his blood failed the new test.

For all that, the story is unnecessarily sparse on detail. It strikes a puzzling analogy between this new tool, which Schmidt describes simply and without elaboration as the biomarkers test, and other tests that screen for bone and breast cancer. These other tests are screening tests – with followup examinations usually performed to find out what a person really has before surgery or chemotherapy begin. This new hgh test,  one infers,  may be taken as incriminating in itself and could thus mean the end of careers for many athletes.

Quite aside from absence of any technical detail on what the test measures other than things called biomarkers, there is no mention here of rates of false positives or negatives or other potential confounding variables. Such aspects may not be easy to pin down, but they ought to at least be mentioned.

As it happens, the science side of this news has circulated already, if only within the considerably more rarefied confines of people who read the News of the Week section of the AAAS journal Science. There, in the March 5 issue, European News Editor John Travis wrote much the same basic story but in considerably greater detail (prev. link good for EurekAlert! embargoed news registrees. Direct link to pdf here). His piece, too and however, skirts the ticklish issue of false positives and what recourse athletes will have in arguing that maybe that’s why they flunked. But it does explain nicely how the test works, and why it must be administered within a few days of a blood doping incident (hence is best as a random, unannounced screen of athletes-in-training, not something to use when they show up for the event).

*CORRECTION – As seen in the comment below from John Travis, in the previous graf I (CP) got turned around on which test is now under review for wide use. The existing, older test is the one that must be used within a few days after use of extra HGH. The new one is able in many cases to detect such doping for a much longer period of time. Thus the question in the following graf pertains primarily to the existing test, which would continue in use, along with the new biomarker test, in the anticipated change in screening for HGH.

Plus, a question for Travis or other reporters who get into this. If the test, as Travis reports, relies on determining abundance ratios of the main form of hgh with a second form, or “isoform,” of the hormone that the body manufactures (but that injections of HGH do not include), than cannot the dopers’ suppliers make formulations that include both isoforms in natural proportion?

Samplings of related stories:

• NYDaily News – Christian Red, Nathaniel Vinton (Mar 18) : World Ante-Doping Agency calls on Major League Baseball to implement HGH testing ;
• NYTimes – Michael S. Schmidt, Richard Sandomir (Mar 18 ): Push to Test for HGH Intensifies ;
• Telegraph (UK) Jacquelin Magnay (Feb. 24) : Terry Newton drugs breakthrough prompts human growth hormone alert ;

- Charlie Petit

Last September, I criticized the journal Nature for charging what I thought were exorbitantly silly prices for its news articles. A single story–in a journal that cost $10–could cost $32!

The Nature folks, evidently recognizing the absurdity of that, decided not to lower their prices. Intead, they made the news stories free!

The news comes in a post on its news blog, The Great Beyond:

We’ve set the news free

All content hosted on the Nature News site is now freely available. This includes online news articles, and news and news features articles published in Nature. Previously, this content was free for the first four days from publication before becoming subscription-access only. The Nature News archive is now accessible to all.

I love the hed. Reminds me of Richie Havens singing “Freedom” at Woodstock.

I wish I could say that my scolding of Nature produced this change. I’d love to take all the credit. But I think the Nature folks were smart enough to figure this out without any help from me.

And I thank them for it. Nature’s news articles, which I’d decided not to cover because they were mostly inaccessible, will now become part of my posts again.

- Paul Raeburn

I have no problem with so many science writers – including me back in the day when I was in daily harness – who cover dinosaur news to a level of micro-incrementalism nearly in a league with, among other reporters, Tiger Woods’s personal foibles and major league baseball spring training. One reason is that editors at general news outlets, who might usually have a high threshold for science news as urgent enough to cover, seem to feel they get dinosaurs even if they are sci-phobic former English majors. So reporters know dinos are easy pickings with the assignment desk. Plus, in this case, the news is in Science, so the professionals regard it as important, too.

A small, distant, and in some ways ancestral relative of Tyrannosaurus rex has been identified among bones recovered in Australia. The evidence is a fossilized hip bone that has features supposedly found only in this extended clan. It would thus be, they say, the first tyrannosaur known from the Southern Hemisphere, hence is of some interest to paleontologists interested in the radiation of this one (but popular) class of theropods.

None of the home institutions of the researchers on the team even commissioned a fancy colorful dramatic and plumed artist’s impression of what this predator might have looked like while prancing across the ancient Outback. Yet the major wire services, BBC, major newspapers around the world, and the usual specialty outlets all wrote it up. Can’t blame them – for one, people will read it. For two, it’s not a tough piece to write.

One more point before listing some of the fish in this trawl: The standard line in reporting this, and in material from Science and the researchers, is that this is the first Southern Hemisphere tyrannosaur. Yet if you scroll down a bit to the post today from my colleagues Pere Estupinya on Spanish language press, he cites a report from Chile that just a short time ago, paleontologists there say they found a tyrannosaur there, too. Check it out, somebody.

Stories:

Pride of Place – Australian Media first:

• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Revealed: Australia’s very own little tyrannosaur ; The story emphasizes that, at the time 100+ million years ago, Australia was even farther south than it is now and was joined to Antarctica.
• The Age – Birdie Smith: Tyrannosaur dinosaurs called Australia home ; Gets one spoilsport expert noting that a key, diagnostic protrusion on the fossil is merely inferred – as it is broken off.
• ABC Radio Australia – Dani Cooper: Scientists unearth Australian Tyrannosaurus ;

And samples from all over:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Fossil of T. rex ancestor found in Australia, first such find in Southern Hemisphere ;
• Reuters – Michael Perry: T.Rex stalked Australia, albeit a mini-me version, And that is a headline, albeit a fact-distorting version. First, the correct abbrev of King Tyrant Lizard is T.rex, and of course a mini-me version, to be tedious, is not a T.Rex, rex, or anything else – it’s just a T for Tyrannosaur.
• AFP – Tyranosaurs roamed southern hemisphere: study ;
• LA Times – Amina Khan: Tyrannosaur bone found in Australia ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Tyrannosaurs spread worldwide early in Age of Dinosaurs ;
• Guardian (UK) David Adam: T-rex’s slightly less terrifying ancestor unearthed in Australia ;
• Bloomberg – Simeon Bennett: T. Rex Ancestors Live in Australia, Hip Bone Discovery Proves ; Now, if one grabbed the copy editor who wrote that hed by the lapel and asked, hey buddy, does this really prove it?, he or she’d probably shrug No, but who cares?
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: T-Rex’s long lost Australian cousin found for first time ; Alleyne’s story is fine, but the hed …. quite aside from the small Linnaean nomenclature flub, it’s one that seems to make sense but really does not. How can something have been lost if nobody previously knew of it? Who lost it? Did it lose itself? What…???
• Money Times (India) Priyanka : Evidence proves the existence of T. Rex in Australia.
• … could go on, time’s up, have a good weekend everybody.

Grist for the Mill: University of Cambridge Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Here’’s a really interesting story today in El País: kids studying in bilingual (Spanish-English) schools end up with better level of Spanish language than monolingual ones. You might ask: “Are the schools better?”. No, the analysis of 30.000 students from 120 public schools takes that into account. The key is brain plasticity. Studying two languages seems to improve overall language skills. The story is great, but with so much research in this field we regret that are so few scientific citations. Also: Everybody talks about the southern Tyrannosaurus found in Australia, but in Chile, a smart reporter recalls that 2 years ago local paleontologists found the bones of a T-relative, so they could have lived in Chile too! FAO has just lunched data saying that the rate of deforestation has decreased globally in the last decade, but it’s still very worrying in some areas of Africa and South America. The information is not yet “glocalized” (the news wires only point at Brasil), so there is a good opportunity for local environmental reporters. In Argentina a researcher finds evidences of increasing neurotoxicity in rats when certain pesticides are combined. Nature published the study of a Spanish researcher showing the chemical pathways how zebra fishes regenerate their cardiovascular tissue. And we emphasize a good story reviewing what has not happened in Doha.

Muy bueno el reportaje en El Pais de Elena Hidalgo: “El mejor español, el del bilingüe”. A priori quizás no lo hubieras pensado así, pero el seguimiento de escuelas que llevan 15 años alternando clases en castellano e inglés, demuestra que sus alumnos adquieren mejor nivel de español que otros estudiantes de escuelas monolingües. Ya se lo que tienes en mente: la calidad de esas escuelas puede ser mejor, o sus alumnos de clases más elitistas. No es el caso; el estudio del Ministerio de Educación y el British Council en 120 escuelas públicas tuvo en cuenta estos condicionantes y concluyó que, de por sí sólo, estudiar en dos idiomas refuerza las habilidades lectoestritoras; mejora la capacidad de aprender. Una de las claves: la plasticidad cerebral. De hecho, por pedir un poquito más a un excelente texto, aquí hubiéramos querido un poco más de investigación. El reportaje avanza con declaraciones de profesores y responsables del estudio, y hacia el final se busca a un neurólogo que no parece ser experto específico en esta materia. El reportaje está muy bien, pero con la enorme cantidad de neurocientíficos y lingüistas que están estudiando el bilingüismo y la adquisición de lenguas, quizás un poco más de ciencia “fronteriza” lo hubiera enriquecido.

Otras notas que merecen ser destacadas: En Público encontramos la mejor revisión de qué ha ocurrido en Doha con la cumbre internacional de Naciones Unidas para la protección de especies. Manuel Asende en “Los pescadores vencen a los ecologistas” explica que ninguna de las 40 especies marinas ha salido protegida, y con cierta sorna destaca que “La reunión ha servido para proteger un tritón y un escarabajo”. También resume en un “estamos muy contentos” la posición de los intereses pesqueros españoles sobre la no prohibición del comercio internacional de atún rojo. Manuel presenta con una valiente claridad el transcurso del proceso que ha impuesto los valores económicos a los ecologistas, y escribe: “Los pescadores han vapuleado a los ecologistas en una cumbre que la ONU vendió como ‘una ocasión clave para tomar medidas de protección de la biodiversidad’”.

Vamos a noticias más positivas: Esta semana Nature publicó un trabajo del español afincado en California Juan Carlos Izpisúa que explica cómo se regenera tejido cardíaco del corazón de peces cebra. Casi todos los periódicos hablaron de ellos, pero si queréis leer una nota, escoged la publicada en El Mundo por Ángeles López: “Los albañiles de los corazones rotos”. Muy bonito titular, y todavía mejor explicación de la investigación. Lo mejor, los dos párrafos de contexto antes de ir directo a la noticia, y la naturalidad y fluidez de un texto sobre un tema en principio difícil de digerir.

En La Nación (Argentina) también encontramos una buena nota de Susana Gallardo sobre una investigación local demostrando que la combinación de plaguicidas tiene efectos neurotóxicos mayores que las dosis por separado. Son estudios en ratas, pero que muestran claramente que las recomendaciones no deben guiarse sólo en productos aislados, sino contemplar este refuerzo de toxicidad. Susana califica al autor del estudio como un “repatriado” de EEUU con clara alusión al esfuerzo argentino de traer de vuelta investigadores que estén siendo exitosos fuera de sus fronteras.

La ONU también ha anunciado que si bien la tasa de pérdida de bosques ha disminuido en la última década, en zonas de África y Sudamérica continúan desapareciendo a ritmo alarmante. BBC Mundo es quien cubre la noticia de manera más amplia, pero sería una buena iniciativa que periodistas locales cogieran este informe para investigaran los casos concretos que se denuncian. A nivel global “son buenas noticias”, recoge la nota de BBC. “Pero la situación en algunos países sigue siendo alarmante”, continúa. Sólo cita Brasil, Indonesia y Australia. Hay oportunidad de “glocalizar” esta información.

Un excelente ejemplo de cómo hacerlo: el fabuloso trabajo que hemos encontrado en La Nación (Chile) por parte de Patricio Lazacano: “¿Tiranosaurios en Chile?”. La mayoría de secciones de ciencia hoy están hablando del primer resto de Tiranosaurio encontrado en el hemisferio sur. Concretamente, en una cueva de Australia. Pero Patricio hace algo más; aparte de explicar de manera detallada el hallazgo, contrasta la información con paleontólogos locales, y encuentra la perla de que hace dos años en Chile se descubrieron los fósiles en un terópodo pariente del Tiranosaurio. Por tanto, ahora que han aparecido en el hemisferio sur, no es descabellado pensar que podrían haber existido en Chile o Sudamérica. Ya se, un poco rebuscado, pero consigue hacer la información más cercana a sus lectores (total; estas historias paleontológicas sólo son para eso), y aprovecha muy bien para explicar qué motivos geológicos hacen que en Chile se encuentren pocos fósiles de dinosaurios.

- Pere Estupinyà

There’s big old/not-so-big new General Motors sitting in sufferin’ Detroit, with its still gigantic public affairs division cranking out press releases by the gigabyte saying the ex-bankrupt company is ready to resume prosperity via ace technology, super quality control, super duper new vehicles,  even-nimbler-than-Toyota-back-when-Toyota-was-nimblest management, and all the Buicks in China. And what could illustrate that world-class technology angle better than that a set of its in-house researchers just landed an article in the nation’s leading technical journal, Science? It describes a potentially momentous new, cheap, effective catalyst to replace the platinum-rich ones now used to clean up exhaust – and particularly the exhausts of high efficiency small diesel engines.

Maybe those Mad-men of Michigan Ave. put out a release but I could not find it at their main p.r. site. As a result, only a few keen-eyed reporters, all from specialty pubs, picked up this story. It is important, you know. Many US autophiles have eyed European drivers enviously for the variety of clean, fuel-sipping diesel cars they have over there (including some really fast BMWs, Mercedes, and similar-class wheels) while Ford, GM, and Chrysler put honking-huge diesels pretty much only in trucks. To find once-stodgy GM pulling this nifty-sounding diesel technology from its hat is rather encouraging. Not even business writers, nearly as I can tell, bit on it.

Hang your heads, GM’s media crew. Stand tall you few reporters who don’t need to be spoon-fed a press release to recognize a not-huge, but certainly notable, piece of news. It  not only is significant as a business story, but interesting technically as well. And if it turns out the p.r. people at GM DID promote this and nobody at the bigs bit on it, I will tug my forelock, shuffle my feet, and apologize for all the snarky verbiage I just had so much fun composing.

By the way, biz writers would have a nose for an important angle left out, far as I can see, by the first round of reporting. Does GM have a solid patent that will mean, maybe, most of the world’s automakers some day will be sending steady royalties to the once-maligned US automaker? Did Platinum futures wobble on the news, perovskite and palladium futures nudge up?

Stories:

• Science News – Alexandra Witze: Building a cheaper catalyst ; Not that Alex would not report this herself anyway, but with no press release anybody would have to call around for opinions from outsiders – including that there is still a good deal of work between the lab and confidence it will work on the road.
• NatureNews – Richard Van Noorden: Cheaper catalyst cleans diesel-car fumes ;
• Chemistry World (UK) – New catalyst for diesel exhaust ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Tim Wogan : Clean Diesel: Not So Precious After All ; True, the people at Science magazine itself can hardly have missed this development.

*UPDATE: one from a larger outlet came in later in the day – USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: New catalytic converter material could make for cleaner, cheaper cars ;

Grist for the Mill: Science journal abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker noticed this morning a press release from the University of Leicester in England. Linked below in Grist, it highlights a paper by one of its professors and two colleagues elsewhere. They support admission of the term Anthropocene into sanctioned scientific nomenclature and geological divisions specifically. Paul Crutzen, the Nobelist atmospheric chemist who shuttles between a Max Planck Institute arm in Mainz, Germany,  andUC San Diego in the US, is also an author. He has been pushing this idea for more than ten years. The point, which seems sensible enough, is that a new and clear course-shift in climate, geochemistry, and the fossil record will be easily seen in the stratigraphic record from here on out. It marks the time during which humanity has profoundly shifted what is normal on the Earth surface including sedimentary processes. When it started exactly is hard to say – first land-use alterations by agriculture? First prominent traces of fossil fuel-derived carbon in sediments? Or perhaps (my favorite) the signature of nuclear fallout? Maybe way back when mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths, and other Pleistocene beasts disappeared from N. America at about the time people migrated in from the Old World?

I wouldn’t post on this today except that, looking around to see if anybody already wrote it up, I found that a few days ago at Wired Science Brandon Keim composed a short introduction to the topic and to a series of photographs illustrating some of the visible changes to Earth that human kinds is now wreaking. The first is the near-erasure of the Aral Sea. Then comes a spooky one showing plumes of soot and blackcarbon. Another a vast expanse of farmland. Some bleached coral. Industrial and consumer trash on a beach. A plume from a smokestack.

Keim brings up Anthropocene explicity. His news peg is a meeting underway at Asilomar, and highlighted in another article at Wired Science by Alexis Madrigal, to consider the practicality and ethics of massive and deliberately Earth-altering geoengineering projects that could make climate change less harsh or easier to deal with. Such things would make a new geologic division even more unmistakable.

I’ll be looking for coverage of the Asilomar Meeting and posting on it separately. But this piece of Keim’s is enough to highlight the ongoing talk of declaring a new epoch. My own feeling is it’s a pretty good idea. But ‘Anthropocene” is a mouthful. Three syllables before one even gets to -cene. Many geologic division names of the deep past are equally verbose. But the more recent Pleistocene, Holocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, come off the tongue easily.

Maybe it could be Homocene, as in both “Homo sapiens” where the Homo is from Latin for human, or more broadly Earthling, and also from the Greek Homo as in homology or homosexuality, from the root for sameness, or agreement. The combined etymology of it reflects the instinct toward growth and importance of oneself and one’s kind by ever-competitive humanity. And if  Homocene doesn’t work for you maybe the even pithier Egocene might.  Or we could call it Sapiencene, from the Latin in Homo sapiens for “wise” or “thinking,” and from the street argot “sap,” as in what was that fool thinking?  Just saying….

Grist for the Mill: University of Leicester Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

My recent post criticizing the California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting for not including any health or science reporters on its team has drawn a thoughtful response from David Westphal, the center’s editor. I thought the issues raised in his comment, and addressed in my reply, were interesting enough that I should move them up here to the top of the stack, for those who might not go back to the original post.

Here’s Westphal’s comment:

David Westphal Says: 
March 26th, 2010 at 2:28 am

Paul,

I think the world of trained science and health reporters, and the contributions to public understanding they bring. So I have no interest in an us vs. them argument.

But it’s important to lay out the mission of the Center for Health Reporting. It’s not medical science journalism. Our focus is health care and health-care policy as experienced in communities throughout California. It’s doctor shortages in Santa Cruz, hospital governance in San Diego County, firefighting techniques that affect public health in northern California, diabetes in the Central Valley, the wisdom of starting a medical school in Merced — all projects the center has completed in its early months, all deeply rooted in a sense of place in California, all done in strong partnerships with local media. These and other works have already had results. The Forest Service has changed the way it fights forest fires, for example. Medicare reimbursement rates have gotten new national attention. And we’re only getting started.

Your slap at our staff is off-base. We have a terrific team to take on this mission — reporters and editors with extensive experience in public policy at state, national and local levels, with expertise in environmental issues, demographics, immigration, natural disasters and so on. Perhaps just as important, they’re proven critical thinkers, digging reporters and great storytellers, all of which are also vital parts of our work. They will pinpoint health problems to be sure, but they’ll also think about possible solutions.

In the months and years to come, we will partner with news organizations across the state to provide depth reporting that will add immeasurably to the public’s understanding of health issues in California. That to me is far and away the headline here. I have joined the Center for Health Reporting as editor because I believe it has great promise. We’re more than happy to live with a future assessment of our work that shows whether we’ve lived up to it.

–David Westphal, editor, Center for Health Reporting

And my response:

Paul Raeburn Says: 
March 26th, 2010 at 6:54 am

David,

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, which tells all of us much more about this new venture than what we could have learned from the press release that prompted my post.

I’d like to reiterate that, as I said in my post, I’m not taking “a slap” at the staff. We agree that you have a good team.

But your reply confirms what the press release said: That you and your staff have experience in public policy, environmental issues, immigration and natural disasters–but not health or science coverage. I continue to think that’s a mistake.

You say that you don’t need health reporters because your mission is “health care and health-care policy,” not “medical science journalism.”

How would you divorce the two? How could you report on public health without reporting on the legitimacy of the scientific studies that give rise to public health policies and practices? Stories on diabetes, doctor shortages, and Medicare reimbursements all turn on whether the care involved is scientifically sound, or not.

Health journalists and science writers specialize in those areas and would bring a wealth of experience to the kinds of stories you’re doing. And it’s selling them short to suggest that all they cover is medical science. Many of them cover many of the subjects that you’re tackling.

I wish you all the best, but I think you’re missing something by not including science and health writers in the mix. You can’t cover health care policy without covering the science that underlies it; you risk missing something important.

And if you think I’m wrong, wait until you tackle the policies coming out of the stem cell initiative in California. Try doing that story without including medical science journalism.

– Paul Raeburn

Sometimes it’s a good idea when writing about, say, cancer, to try to imagine how a person with cancer will react to the story. Or how an obese person will interpret a story about obesity.

It’s what you might call the core audience for a medical story: the people who actually have the thing you’re writing about.

Today, I became that reader. After carrying my 4-month-old son around in a sling for two hours yesterday while we chased his older brother around the park, I now read that some slings are being recalled because they’ve been linked to infant deaths.

I need a story that tells me exactly what the problem is, which slings are involved, and what to do. I’m the core audience. I’m the guy with his kid in the sling. I’m the guy whose kid–maybe–is at serious risk.

So, a look at a few stories from that perspective:

The Los Angeles Times online ran a brief from Bloomberg. (A brief? Are you kidding? This is my kid we’re talking about!) The baby products company Infantino, of San Diego, has recalled 1 million slings, I learn, “after three children suffocated.” When they were  in the slings, presumably? Is Bloomberg hedging? Why didn’t it say “after three children suffocated while in the slings?”

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the story reports, is investigating 14 deaths with the slings over the past 20 years. Let me see if I got that right: Three recent deaths prompted a recall, but 11 other deaths earlier did not? This has been going on for 20 years, and nobody told us? And with the earlier deaths, the CPSC did not name the brand of the slings, according to Bloomberg. That’s not terribly helpful. Do I have one of the suspect slings or not?

The CPSC says people with the slings linked to the recent deaths can contact Infantino for a replacement. That sounds like some kind of joke: First prize is a sling that suffocates kids; second prize is two of ‘em!

The Bloomberg brief serves the useful function of alerting people like me that we have a problem here. Beyond that, it doesn’t do anything to anticipate the questions and concerns of the core audience. The CPSC’s reticence might be the real problem here. But why didn’t Bloomberg ask why the agency kept its concerns confidential for 20 years? And if it did, why didn’t the Los Angeles Times include that in its online story? Not enough room on the web?

For U.S. News and World Report, even this brief Bloomberg report was too much. In a bylined one-paragraph item (part of a briefs package) that refers to the Bloomberg story, Megan Johnson at least includes the useful information that soft fabric inside the recalled slings can press against an infant’s nose and mouth, and that can be lethal to infants under four months old, because they might not have enough head control to turn to the side to get air.

Daniel J. DeNoon at WebMD shows up with a longer and much more helpful story. The three deaths occurred in 2009. He tells us how old the infants were and where the deaths occurred. He tells us exactly what sling models were involved, and explains that Infantino is offering to replace them with different slings. With that added information, the notion of replacement now makes sense.

DeNoon also explains exactly how the slings can kill–which tells parents what to look out for. That’s a potentially lifesaving safety tip that the other, shorter stories didn’t bother with.

The New York Times online ran an un-bylined AP story with similar information, including the two different ways children can suffocate in a sling.

The most comprehensive story I found was written by Onell R. Soto in the San Diego Union-Tribune, Infantino’s hometown paper. It included the critically important point–critically important to me–that “baby experts and breast-feeding advocates insisted not all slings are dangerous. They said carriers that keep a newborn baby solidly against the mother’s body, in an upright position, are safe.” Ahem, or the father’s body, one would guess.

And that’s the kind of sling I use–one with my guy upright. After an hour-and-a-half of combing the web, I found the story I needed.

We write for many more readers than the core readers. It’s probably the case that only a small number of the Union-Tribune’s readers have small children and carry them in slings. And as a news story, this thing doesn’t rate much attention. We’re talking about three deaths in 2009. Compare that to traffic deaths, cancer deaths, deaths among Americans in the military, or deaths among children in Somalia, and it’s insignificant.

The problem with these stories is that we’re writing for two audiences: our general audience, and the core audience. We shouldn’t waste the time of our larger audience with details it doesn’t need. But we shouldn’t withhold information that might be critical to those readers (or listeners or viewers) who form the core audience for any given medical story.

The lesson, I think, is to pause for a moment, in the heat of composition, and think about both groups. Imagine the concerns and possible reaction of the two kinds of readers, and try to craft a story that will speak to both of them.

- Paul Raeburn

I love this lede in The Economist: Myth and fantasy populate the world with “othermen” – the elves, goblins, dwarfs and giants that live in the wild wood, in the cave or on the high mountain peaks. Not animal, not quite human either…”

It captures well my own feelings about the widely reported news today that, in a Siberian mountain cave (pic shows view from just above it) in which fragmentary remains of humans have been found, one little pinkie finger bone appears quite different. Top-tier paleoanthropologists including the busy Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig amplified enough DNA from it for a comparison with that of modern humans and the extinct near-human species, the Neanderthal, that also once lived in the same region. It is neither, they report in Nature today. While only about 30,000 to 50,000 years old, the DNA is so different from H. sapiens and H. neandertalensis that it looks like the last common ancestor to all three may have lived as much as a million years ago.

It would thus make four hominins of (presumably) goodly brain that occupied Earth until the fairly recent past: Us, Neanderthals,  the “hobbit” Homo floresiensis species of Indonesia that appears to be gaining respectability as a distinct member of genus Homo, and now this new old one from Siberia.

Most peculiarly to me, Nature itself runs a News and Views article by a British professor that calls it “an unknown type of extinct human ancestor” in its headline and copy as well. Many reporters use the ancestry label too. Hmmm. Either we share a common ancestor a million years ago or so, or we don’t, and if we do, then this thing is a somewhat distant cousin and no more an ancestor than are hobbits or Neanderthals, right? Or does this recent instance of the species represent the last common ancestor to us and to its own self and maybe to H. neandertalensis too? And unchanged for a million years before exiting the planet for good? That’d be weird.

No matter how the cladogram works out, this is pretty neat and it all stems from a mitochondrial DNA result (the finger bone by itself, it appears, is too little for phylogenic parsing at such detail). Reporters had a good time with this, despite so many of them agreeing that this appears to be a human ancestor. I am definitely hung up on that assertion. How is this different from calling a gorilla, or a gibbon for that matter, a human ancestor? That makes no sense to me. Maybe “ancestor” has a technical meaning in phylogenic circles utterly unlike what makes grandfather Charlie Petit, former mayor of Ventura, my ancestor?

Addendum: As I went through stories, a possible further mixup in reporting emerged, it appears, in the name given by scientists to the last common ancestor or to the specimen that left its pinkie finger behind so recently. X Woman, or Woman X, or X, or what and who is it anyway?  Read down to see what I mean. There is much of the rush-job on an unfamiliar topic to be seen in many of these reports.

Other stories:

• Independent (UK) Chris Stringer : The tip of the iceberg in understanding of human history;  A fine commentary by a noted paleoanthropologist says nothing about this being maybe our ancestor, but a lot about its indication that, maybe, the human family tree remained an abundantly branched bush until much more recently than we had supposed.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Possible new human ancestor found in Siberia ; I am going nuts here. The story simply calls the creature “Woman X,” although how it is determined to be female I dunno, as it was mitochondrial DNA that was sequenced. (Skip down to the Christian Sci Monitor bullet a few down for a hint of explanation).
• AP – Malcolm Ritter: New ancestor? Scientists ponder DNA from Siberia ; Ritter is so reliable – so why does he go for the notion that the species living in that cave so recently, and with Neanderthals and modern people already as neighbors,  is simultaneously our ancestor?
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: A possible new link in human lineage — all from a little finger ; Hmmm, again. Is a side chain to the human lineage also a link within it? I am in terminal terminological overload. But this story at least does not have us descended from the mystery bone person thing.
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Scientists Discover Third Prehistoric Human Relative ; The hed gives me solace as does Berman’s description of this as, apparently,  “a previously unknown prehistoric human relative..: She labels it X-woman, not woman-X.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: X Woman may be unknown human species ;
• Times (UK) Mark Henderson: Fingerbone points to a new type of human who fell off the family tree 30,000 years ago ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: X Woman. Not human, not Neanderthal, what is she? ; Now this, I submit, is a hed with brains. But then he attaches the X Woman label to the last common ancestor to us and to Neanderthals. This is a clue that other reports, listed above, got the Woman-X or X-Woman monicker bollixed, and attached it to the finger bone, not the distant female creature who mitochondrial DNA has been passed along to all three lines, mutating for a million years. A fast scan of the paper itself sees no mention of X Woman or variation thereof – suggesting it came up during a teleconference on the paper.
• Science News – Bruce Bower: Ancient DNA suggests new hominid line ; The story, while unclear on what exactly X-woman means, is a serious effort to get the bigger picture right: The human family was once quite an extended one.
• NPR – Christopher Joyce: Fossilized Pinky May Point to New Human Relative ;
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Scientists reveal discovery of fourth human species ;
• Bloomberg – Michelle Fay Cortez: Siberian Fossil Yields Ancient DNA of Long-Lost Human Ancestor ; More usage and meaning problems, just in the hed. Which the reporter probably did not write. But if it was never known before, who lost it? And there is, again, that ancestor appelation for a creature that co-existed with fully modern people and apparently split from us a million years ago and dead-ended just a few tens of thousands of years ago.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Meet Digit, the new type of human ;
• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne : Stranger from Siberia is new ancestor of man, claim scientists ; Right. And I’m a monkey’s uncle.
• Time Magazine – Eben Harrell: Scientists Discover an Ancient Human Relative ; Hey. This one let my blood pressure drop a bit. No X woman (just an X), no assertions this is a human ancestor, the hed makes sense.
• BBC – Paul Rincon : DNA identifies new ancient human dubbed “X-woman” ;

And finally – to either clarify or add to the confusion and I’m voting for the former:

• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: Bone May Reveal a New Human Group ; He says the pinkie bone was from a child 5 to 7 years old, sex unknown, and hence no Woman X. He mentions bits of beadwork and jewelry at the site – as do a few other reporters but unlike them Wade is careful to report one cannot conclude that the mystery bone belonged to the species using such body decor.  This is a good one, second only to the Economist article cited at top.

*UPDATE (per comment below):

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Fossil DNA analysis may have revealed new human species ; Nice job, to the point, while sowing no confusion over why a small child of undetermined gender might also be called Woman-X, or whether this individual’s species might have been the exact same species unchanged for more than a million years and that is ancestral to both us and Neanderthals and maybe more as well.

- Charlie Petit

This week UC Berkeley circulated a press release on solution to a space puzzle : why did the 1995 probe that the Galileo probe dropped into Jupiter find so little neon in its upper atmosphere? Answer: a bit below the probe’s reach, pressure liquefies helium that settles deeper into the atmosphere and absorbing neon as it goes down. That news – formally reported in Physical Review Letters – explains the neon shortage up high, plus a less drastic shortage up there of helium itself (there is so much helium in the planet that it doesn’t take much of it to rain out and move neon with it).

Notable among the few outlets that picked this up is the Los Angeles Times, where Thomas H. Maugh II made a call or two, digested (and presumably verified) the release’s info, stirred in some more and turned it into a delightful little spring time tale. It has a clear narrative story and illustration of the process by which curiosity and scientific method get together, interspersed with basic facts about cosmic, elemental abundances, chemistry, phase transitions under high pressure, and asides on popular culture. Like a golfer or tennis player who manages to strike the ball right on the sweet spot, he nails it.

Other stories:

• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Jupiter Forecast: Cloudy, with helium rain;
• Space.com – Denise Chow : Jupiter Has Helium Rain, Study Suggests ;
• ANI News Service via New Kerala (India): Helium rain explains scarcity of neon in Jupiter’s atmosphere ; Yesterday The Tracker had a post on rip-and-read outlets that tend, barely, to rewrite and condense press releases and run them as their own reporting. ANI is among such, and in this case, makes a bit of a hash of it to boot.
• Softpedia (Romania) – Tudor Vieru: Helium Rains Cover Jupiter in Neon . Softpedia is a small and somewhat odd outlet – it does bring additional reporting or discussion to news it gets off press releases. The story is okay, and insightful in spots. But whoever wrote the hed didn’t read it closely. What’s the verb “cover” doing in there? The rain  does just the opposite.

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

Does the raising of livestock for meat and dairy put more CO2 etc. in the air than all the cars, trucks, airplanes, etc. in the world? Such was the assertion in 2006 of a UN panel’s report. Supposedly the livestock total accounts for 18 percent of all anthropogenic greenhouse emissions, expressed in terms of CO2 equivalency for non-CO2 gases. That is a bit more than the estimate from vehicle transportation for all purposes. Now, plenty of reporters are covering a paper, and its implications, presented at this week’s Amcrican Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco that sees in that earlier analysis a serious ooopsie – to have applied a very different yardstick to meat production than it did to the transport sector.

A UC-Davis ag. chemist – and a man who, as some reporters have uncovered with little effort, has been a longtime paid consultant to the meat industry (which he readily reveals) – seems to have made a good case for one flaw in the UN report. While the overall transportation sector’s contribution was summed only from the fuel that vehicles use, meat and dairy production got hit with everything involved in the process: land clearing, fertilizer for growing feed, methane belchings as a CO2 equivalent, and so on. (I dunno how double-counting transport of meat in both categories is handled or avoided.)

To be fair, then, the manufacture of vehicles, clearing of land for roads, paving and maintaining those roads, the production of raw steel, and all the rest should have been included for transport. That’s part of the news. Another is that one author of the earlier UN estimate says the UC Davis man has a point – but that most of the report’s other conclusions stand. Presumably that means the UN man stands behind the estimated 18 percent as legit.

Some reports, however, interpret the asserted flaw and the concession from one of the UN-affiliated authors that it holds water to mean that climate science and climate worry has been stripped further of legitimacy. Which is to say, by implication,  if it’s not climatically worse than using cars and other vehicles, then eating meat is as green as a bean sprout.

Few reporters, however, seem to have the wit to have homed in on the 18 percent figure. If that’s right, it’s a lot. If the figure is a serious overestimate, that’s a story. But to make the story only whether transport or meat are bigger boosts to the greenhouse is lazy.

The intellectual laziness starts with whoever wrote the ACS meeting’s press release on this matter – down there in Grist. Reporters seem to have taken that press release as the best possible interpretation of the paper. Read it yourself. It is a fine tip to a story. That’s what press releases provide to reporters: tips. But to swallow the release’s angle without thinking it through? For shame. To say it again, just because transport may yet be harder on climate than livestock does not mean livestock’s impact is therefore trivial.

The logical disconnect in media accounts, lifted straight off that press release, is seen most clearly in this unbylined Fox News Account: Eat Less Meat, Reduce Global Warming — Or Not. The report cites the many campaigns by vegetarians and others to stop eating animals for climate reasons, names the UC Davis man who criticizes the UN report, and quotes him to say “We certainly can reduce our greenhouse gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk.” Yet the story itself reports only that his research found the comparison to transport flawed, not the estimated size of livestock’s contribution. Did ANYBODY call up the professor or buttonhole him at the meeting and just ask him whether his criticism of the UN report goes deeper than to say it made an apples and oranges error in contrasting livestock to transport?”

A more interesting and nuanced blog report, by  The Guardian in the UK by Leo Hickman,  asks Do critics of UN meat report have a beef with transparency? His point is that the chemist gets considerable support from livestock industries for his research (while conceding that this in itself does not make him a hired gun, that he may well have done a fine job). He calls for an investigation into the original UN study. He does his own compilation of reporting on the matter, mostly from gleeful conservative-leaning news agencies. But again seems to overlook the real nub and potential vulnerability of the old UN report – the absolute size of animal production’s climate footprint – while fixating on its size compared to transport.

To be sure, The Tracker finds that 18 percent figure suspiciously high. The other 82 percent has thus to include the giant emissions from electricity production with coal and natural gas, transport of course, process heat for manufacturing, heating and cooling of buildings, concrete manufacture, deforestation. But somehow reporters are nearly all fluttering around the comparison with transport while ignoring the substance of the issue.

Other Stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Alastair Jamieson: UN admits flaw in report on meat and climate change ; Yikes, once again, hook line and sinker on the press release’s angle, unblinking referral to the impressive 18 percent figure, and no sign of further thought by this reporter that the UN report’s merit stands or falls on the 18 percent figure, not how it compares to transport. The tagline: a mention of the IPCC’s famous gaffe on Himalaya glaciers’ demise by 2035.
• BBC – Richard Black: UN body to look at meat and climate link ; Black does better than most – saying without specific citation of authority “…the 18 percent figure appears remarkably high to some observers.” He also goes beyond the press release’s figures to report a separate analysis, for the US, that transport accounts for 26 percent of US greenhouse emissions compared to 3 percent for pigs and cattle.
• CNN – Paul Armstrong: Scientist:Don’t blame cows for climate change ;

Perhaps so few news outlets covered this precisely because the conclusion and the argument to support it seemed, if judged by the press release, so out of whack.

Grist for the Mill: ACS Press Release ;

Pic:  meat-car, source ;

- Charlie Petit

The University of Southern California has announced the staff of its newly formed California HealthCare Foundation Center for Health Reporting. That includes the editor-in-chief, the managing editor, and three senior writers.

If you’re looking for the names of some of our distinguished colleagues among the new hires, look no further. They’re not there. Only one of the five new hires is said to have any background in health reporting, and she seems to be more of an environmental writer than a health reporter.

Michael Parks, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, who did the hiring, knows science writers. I don’t know how close he was to the science staff at the Times, but he was on the advisory committee for the Marine Biological Laboratory summer journalism fellowships (with me) for several years, where he worked with science writers.

This hiring seems misguided. It’s like staffing a new reporting initiative to cover cricket with American reporters who’d never seen a game. They’d file something, I’m sure, but it wouldn’t be pretty. Nor would their stories benefit from any experience or insight into what they were covering.

This amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?

*Update 3/25: I should have said that I mean no disrespect whatever to the reporters and editors who’ve been hired. They seem like capable people. I’m just arguing that they might not be the right people for the job, however capable they are.

- Paul Raeburn