Back in October of 2008 The Tracker compiled some  news stories, including several under well-known bylines from the science and enviro reporting trades, on a pilot program on the shore of  Monterey Bay. Developed by a firm called Calera, the process combines the CO2-loaded flue gas from a natural gas powerplant with sea water to precipitate minerals that can be substituted (they say) for standard, Portland cement. These initial stories sketched prospects for a process that seems to do the impossible: combine two industries whose standard machinery belches vast amounts of carbon into the air in a way that nearly cancels each other’s carbon emissions.

The natural progression is that the process, if it is to vindicate the hopes of venture capitalists pouring money into it, shows up on business pages. And today, for at least one example, it has. The NYTimes‘s Claire Cain Miller not only gives it a writeup tailored for business readers but moves the ball ahead.

One might have hoped, when publicity on this process first burst out, that some enviro, science, or tech writer would have promptly burrowed as diligently as Miller did into the process. Why didn’t we read before this (maybe some of you did, but I didn’t) that it has ardent critics who see big flaws – perhaps entirely fixable but for now a problem? To name one: a big slug of highly acid waste that would have to be handled in huge quantities if the process is ever to tip the ledgers on carbon a bit lower. So it says here.

Ms. Miller did some standard, good reporting here.

Other recent Calera biz reporting, some of it acid as well:

• Miller-McCune – Frank Nelson (Dec. 11, 2009): Tempest in a Cement Mixer - Well ahead of NYTimes, this small outlet got hold of some of the same critics as the Times quotes – and brought to light the “flaming messages” in chat forums and other sites. However, by focusing on personal animus, this article may have  missed a chance to have sober, policy-pertinent impact.
• San Jose Mercury News – Scott Duke Harris: Silicon Valley tech leaders are reinventing themselves for a cleantech revolution ; Nothing here on explicit downsides.

Grist for the Mill: Calera ;

- Charlie Petit

Whatever the noted science writer Nicholas Wade‘s politics are (I simply don’t know), one strongly suspects he’s not delighted to see how,  in the conservative American Thinker blog,  columnist James Lewis employs a citation of Before the Dawn,  a well-received book of Wade’s published four years ago and that describes the scrambled ancestral tapestry that is modern humanity.

Wade’s book was an honest effort (I gather from reviews, having not read it myself)  to explain complexities of our diversity. They arise from prehistoric migrations and fine-grained mixings that have built up for 50,000 years and are accelerating. Such reviews of genetic data in general show how big-picture categories of  “races” such as black, white, yellow, etc. may be biologically next to meaningless. But they may be sociologically invaluable in understanding not only how humanity and spread this way and that,  but how racism can be real even if “race” fuzzes into an ill-defined, ever-shifting fog.

Lewis cites the book as his only piece of solid research while decrying the US census, with its questions about individual self-identity by group, as an evil left-wing effort to slice, dice, and divide the American people. He compares the motives to those of Nazis and old-time U.S. Jim Crow laws. That’s an odd way to characterize questions that respond to, and don’t cause, historic divisions in society along “racial” lines. Condolences to Nick Wade may be in order over such use of the book’s message.

- Charlie Petit

Forget majestic, serene Saturn. Those rings, says the latest study, are not garlands of peace but are, when looked at closely, arenas for constant violence. And that contrast between the once-standard, intuitive picture of the planet’s unblinking circular, orbiting prairies and the facts of the matter got a pretty good ride in the press today. One thinks that, in fact, scientists have long supposed the rings are quite dynamic with a great deal of bashing going on – and that the supposed standard view of calm is overdone by the press release and the coverage. But that’s a minor matter – the detail on the nature of change is new and a legitimate topic for reporters.

The study in Science magazine, led by a man at the NASA Ames Research Center, reports that under the still, pond-like surfaces of the rings giant icy boulders grind and smash, strange and mysterious objects race about. And even the shapes of the rings change fast, their flat countenances at times warped into wrinkles as high as the Rocky Mountains.

Stories:

• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : Scientists find turbulence in Saturn’s rings ; …”Gazillions of icy particles constantly colliding …. moving as waves under the influence of moonlets ..” and that’s a good quote. Perlman deftly plays up too a mystery – what’s the red stuff admixed in there? Rust?
• Nat’l Geographic – Brian Handwerk: Saturn Rings Surprisingly Unstable, Violent ; Lede snip: …beautiful but,well, a bit boring. Not anymore.” There are even cannonballs .. nobody knows what’s shooting them, either.
• Space.com – Andrea Thompson: Cassini Sees Saturn’s Rough and Tumble Rings ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Saturn: a ringside seat ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Ames Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) In Qatar’s capital Doha the EU’s proposed ban on trade in bluefin tuna met rejection by a UN panel. Spain has strong commercial interests in this fishery. It’s one of the biggest fishers in North Atlantic and the Mediterranean; thousands of jobs depend on this activity, and 80% of captures are exported directly to Japan at high prices. I’ve tracked the Spanish press to check how it balanced the conflict between conservation and economics. Some regional governments have applauded a decision that will allow them to continue fishing tuna (arguing that their traditional practices are not the ones that are causing the big decline of bluefin ). On a higher level, there is consensus on seeing this as a step back in the protection of this endangered fish. Some are already comparing Doha’s failure with Copenhagen’s.

En El Periódico de Cataluña, una nota de R. Vendrell y A. Madridejos empieza mostrando perfectamente las dos posiciones sobre la no prohibición del comercio internacional del atún rojo: “ «Los intereses económicos y políticos se han impuesto a las evidencias científicas», dijo desde Doha (Qatar) Sergi Tudela de la asociación ecologista WWF. «Se ha tumbado una propuesta injustificada que habría resultado muy lesiva para el sector pesquero», dijo Juan Serrano, director general adjunto de la empresa atunera Balfegó.” La situación es obvia: hay quien defiende la preservación de esta especie vital en el equilibrio de los ecosistemas marinos, y otros que priorizan los intereses económicos. Pero hay más: ambos quieren tener la ciencia de su lado. Porque la confederación española de pesca (Cepesca) asegura que “la propuesta de Mónaco no estaba basada en argumentos científicos”.

Y uno se pregunta: En polémicas así, ¿No sería ideal poder resumir los argumentos científicos en un par de frases? Sólo es una reflexión gratuita; posiblemente no. Rastreando la prensa hemos encontrado datos contundentes sobre el declive del atún rojo: sólo queda un 15% respecto a lo que había hace 50 años. Pero no hemos visto argumentos que expliquen porqué esto no es suficiente científicamente. Sólo una insinuación de que en 2006 se inició un plan de recuperación de la especie que ha reducido las capturas, las flotas y las temporadas de pesca, y “cuando se anuncien los primeros datos revelarán una clara mejora”. Nos reservamos el beneficio de la duda.

El Diario de Sevilla presenta una buena nota en la que B. Revilla y J.M Ruiz incluyen al perspectiva de los pescadores y junta local, quienes aseguran que sus prácticas más tradicionales no son las responsables de esta situación, y lo que la Comisión Internacional para la Conservación del Atún Atlántico (ICCAT) debería hacer es “eliminar la flota sobredimensionada -de cerco-que hay en el Mediterráneo”; “lo que no se puede permitir es pagar todos por igual, y que los artesanales desaparezcan al mismo tiempo que los industriales“. Según otras informaciones de Europa Press la junta andaluza está “muy satisfecha” por la no prohibición. Ciertamente, no todas las prácticas pesqueras son igual de dañinas.

Fuera de Cataluña y Andalucía -las dos comunidades con mayor actividad en la pesca del atún rojo- los periódicos a nivel nacional han cubierto la noticia explicando cómo transcurrió la votación, la “jugada” de Libia para precipitar el resultado, y las presiones de Japón a los países pobres, pero mostrando una clara posición contraria a la decisión. Quizás el más contundente ha sido Público, donde Manuel Ansede incluye también la no prohibición del comercio de derivados de ososos polares, y abre su artículo diciendo que la cumbre sobre especies amenazadas de Doha va camino de cosechar un fracaso como el del Cambio Climático en Copenhague.

En El País, Rafael Méndez titula: “Pescadores,1; Atún rojo, 0”. Relata muy bien cómo transcuyó la votación, e incluye que España recelaba de incluir el atún rojo en listas de especies en extinción porque “supondría abrir una puerta para que los ecologistas influyeran mucho más en la política pesquera.”

No entendemos muy bien este comentario. Los ecologistas pueden exagerar como de costumbre diciendo que esto conlleva la extinción definitiva de lo que sea. Pero la problemática del declive del atún rojo lleva años siendo denunciada por científicos y ecólogos marinos, y hay un gran número de datos que la avalan. No es una denuncia ecologista desmesurada, ni se trata de un capricho. El capricho es el afán de los japoneses de comer una especie que se encuentran en claro peligro. Es absurdo. Es como ir a la carnicería y pedir carne de león o de tigre. Nos parece diferente porque en conscienciación pública y protección de océanos estamos más atrasados que en sistemas terrestres -ya que hace menos tiempo que podemos saber qué animales hay escondidos debajo del agua- pero en realidad es lo mismo. No tiene ningún sentido comer grandes depredadores que se encuentran en lo alto de la cadena alimentaria, son más vulnerables, se reproducen menos que las especies pequeñas, y resultan básicos para el equilibrio del ecosistema. Pescar atún rojo es realmente como comer tigres o leones en lugar de pollos o vacas. Muy poco eficiente. El único sentido que tiene es hacerlo porque hay gente dispuesta a pagar una barbaridad por él. Pero esto, a medio plazo no es sostenible.

- Pere Estupinyà

One thing at BBC caught the eye this morning, leading promptly to another.

First, science correspondent Jonathan Amos set out, one guesses, to write an advancer on the upcoming launch of Europe’s Earth observing platform Cryostat, and became so engrossed in the Russian rocket that will do the job that he did a whole separate blog on it. Full discussion and news on Cryosat can, after all, wait for a better readership anyway, which will come if and when it reaches orbit.

For rocket and gadget aficionados, the Dnepr rocket is a gas.  It’s a recycled version of an old, silo-launched Soviet-era ICBM. Perhaps US Poseiden and Minuteman rocket, plomped upward out of silos to start their engines in mid-air, work exactly the same way. But I hadn’t thought about it. He has a video that, again for aerospace technology fans, is a treat.

One question that Amos does not answer. I am pretty sure that most US ballistic missiles resembling the Dnepr’s ancestors and their operation are solid fueled. But Dnepr’s clean exhaust is a giveaway to liquid fuel (a search of the web confirms that). That’s a good trick, one imagines, to get snap ignition and full thrust from a liquid system.

ELSEWHERE AT BBC:

The Beeb carries today a report by Matt Walker on the tiny, elusive flat-headed cat of Southeast Asia, an animal with a funny name and an unfunny predicament as logging, agriculture, and other land uses deprive it of the wet, forested habitat on which it depends. This is interesting news, if familiar and depressing as a type. It is inspired by a report on its shrinking distribution, and the paucity of information about its habits, in PLoS One.

Whenever I see a camera trap image like this I wish I could see the next frame, if such devices take them in quick succession, showing the unsuspecting animal’s reaction to the flash. Like jumping straight up.

An extra reason to bring it up is to salute the diligent and professional managers of the BBC’s website. Once at Walker’s piece, on line readers find an engaging and easy to use listing of other stories BBC has done, often with videos, on many sorts of wild cats.Fascinating and, to those interested in such things, a treasure.

Grist for the Mill: PLoS article: Modelling the Species Distribution of Flat-Headed Cats….

- Charlie Petit

As incremental scientific discovery goes, a report in the current Science, by a Danish researcher plus colleagues in Australia, on the evolutionary conflicts that arise from sexual reproduction is about as one-small-steppish as it gets. Fine, presumably diligently done, but no paradigm buster.

Here is the news. The genes of male wasps, bees, ants, and such among  species of social insects, have an evolutionary edge if they mate with as many females as possible and at the same time prevent any other males from doing so successfully. Females, who in many species from this clan often mate over just one brief period of time, similarly have an edge by accumulating as large and diverse a lifetime supply of sperm as possible. The report moves things forward with details on the ways that sperm left in one female by different males wage chemical warfare to neuter or kill off one another, and the ways that female reproductive tracts try to keep these competing sperm lines from doing so. Interesting, academic, excellent example for Evolution 101 but, as it happens, not many people wrote it up right away.

Exceptions include popular Not Exactly Rocket Science blogger and science writer Ed Yong, and at ABC-Australia Anna Salleh. Both handle it nicely and with enough detail to satisfy readers who never much thought about such things before.

ONE OTHER THING:

Now I tread carefully in bringing up one item to which these two articles pay no attention, and that was provided to them by the editors at Science. It is featured at the journalists’ advance press material on line site and shows, helpfully and to remind us that these insects include ones well know to the public, a photo from Australia of a honeybee hive protruding from a hollow in a tree. Other photos include that one up there of two bumblebees. The topic here relates to sex and sexual organs. It cannot just be me. Can using a beehive photo that looks so distinctly, um, mammalian, be an accident?  Honeycombs come in all shapes. I am a little bit priggish but welcome matter-of-fact discussion of sex when it’s sensible. But I am baffled – is this a wonderful metaphoric image to use, sort of vulvaic with little things buzzing around like sperm, or … what? Is it bold whimsy, dumb, a small harmless joke …. I cannot quite categorize it.

Grist for the Mill: Smithsonian Institution Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Chris Mooney and Matt Nisbet are easily linked in the mind, having for awhile joined forces in a touring two-man panel discussing public perception of science, scientific perception of the public, media sandwiched in between, and global warming politics. Both happen recently to have independently popped up with direct connection to the bloggy, angry public discussion over whether or not traditional academic climatology has somehow become so infected with arrogance, sloppiness, data distortion, or lefty hidden-agendaitis that therefore industrial society should happily burn all the coal it can without guilt, caps, taxes, or trade embargoes. Paying attention to their latest provides reporters on energy and climate beats a better idea how to report news in such an acid atmosphere.

First, Mooney recently interviewed Penn State climatologist and “hockey stick” graph assembler Michael Mann. A partial transcript of that, catching the gist, has been provided by the blogsite ClimateScienceWatch.  There one finds Mann not only, as one would expect, defending the integrity of the science of climate change, but characterizing scientists as like cub scouts suddenly in a battle with combat marines – which is to say, helplessly beat up by skeptics in the blogosphere, opinion columns, and conservative thinktanks. The comments, pro and con, provide a glimpse of what Mann is talking about.

Journalist Mooney, in his questions, seems pretty much on board with the idea that a partly spontaneous, partly orchestrated (by deep pocket fossil fuel trades) campaign for public opinion is not only on, but that academic science is plummeting fast in the eyes of the public and public officials alike. That is, it is losing. Things are dire. Call in reinforcements! Get bigger cannons!

Somewhat in contrast, Professor Nisbet has an essay in the current Slate: Chill Out / Climate scientists are getting a little too angry for their own good. There he argues that public opinion on climate change has not changed all that much recently, most people haven’t been paying attention to the varioius climategates and don’t read the blogs trumpeting the supposed disgrace of IPCC-type thinking, and that scientists are in one of the few professions that enjoys public respect across most demographic spectra. He seems to be saying this is too much ado about too little.

Famiarity with these battling perspectives – mine is firmly on the fence – is as important to science reporters as it is to the beleaguered, bewildered ranks of climate scientists that they cover.

- Charlie Petit

The ice skater Claudia Pechstein made international news year after year, winning world records and gold medals. But recently, just before the Olympic winter games in Vancouver, she was under investigation for blood doping. What was diagnosed was a higher amount of certain young red blood cells, called reticulocytes, and the international sports court CAS (Court of Arbitration for Sports) expelled her from national and international competitions immediately. But Pechstein insisted, that she was not involved in any doping practice, and tried a number of courts to be able to attend the winter games – her presumably last Olympic games, due to her age. She lost every single trial, and after so many cases of trusted sportsmen and -women, who were finally convicted of doping, not many people had the courage to trust her. But this week, a group of scientists revealed at a press conference (where Pechstein attended), that the unusual amount of reticulocytes in Pechstein’s blood may be due to a natural, well, pathological syndrome, called Hereditary Spherocytosis.

This is one of the (rare?) occasions, where science journalism (but not necessarily science journalists) makes the front pages. To understand the case, people need to understand the disease, learn about blood cell development, and that the use of forbidden proteins like erythropoetin (epo) raises the number of reticulocytes, the precursors of red blood cells, which transport the oxygen through the body. More reticulocytes make more red blood cells, which carry more oxygen, which leads to a better performance. Die Zeit (Dagny Lüdemann, Ulrich Bahnsen) provided such a summary of the facts. Hereditary spherocytosis forces the blood cells into a pathogenic ball-like shape and renders them for a quick replacement – raising reticulocyte levels. Patients with the full-blown syndrome won’t be able to do high performance sports, but the German scientists, the heads of the German society of hematology and oncology, diagnosed Pechstein and her father to have a light version of the hereditary disease. The article explains well, that the dominant genetic defect causes a relatively low level of hemoglobin (the oxygen transport protein) per red blood cell, which would be significantly higher after doping with epo. However, the scientists do not have a genetic test to be completely sure, that a mutation is the cause of the unusual high amount of reticulocytes. But they raised enough doubts, and it looks like “in dubio pro reo” might free Pechstein from her ban.

By now, one might ask: Why is the Pechstein case important for science journalists, why do I mention it here? Doping and the rules of CAS and WADA and other anti-doping associations should be watched much more closely by science journalists. Careers like Pechstein’s could be destroyed by weak, unscientific thresholds. On the other hand, who could really blame the scientists from CAS and WADA, who established this threshold, that they did not know about Pechstein’s syndrome. This is biology. Almost always there is an exception of the rule. And there are a couple of examples, that the likelihood of certain (positive) mutations is higher in sportsmen than in average people. But how to deal with this in sports? Or should we call it sports forensics? It’s hard for scientists, it’s hard for science journalists, but almost impossible for journalists with no background in biology.

Most articles are very cautious about claiming a victory for Pechstein, for good reason. In an interview (FAZ) a prominent doping expert makes clear, that even with the syndrome Pechstein might have taken illegal drugs to improve her performance. Ulrich Bahnsen (Zeit) expresses it as an “eternal doubt” in his commentary. Spiegel-Online (Peter Ahrens) addresses the problem not like Bahnsen with words like “doubt”, but headlines “The two truths of Claudia Pechstein“. The article (like many others) judges the facts as if they are independent and equally support the “two truths”, the guilty and the innocent Pechstein. Five or so arguments from supporters, five or so from the opponents. It’s a good way to read the story, but also the easy way, because it keeps the author from going into the details: What fact weakens another fact, making a certain conclusion more likely. The better part is, where the author explains the weaknesses of the doping control system, that led to the current situation.

Other stories: Welt, Focus, Frankfurter Rundschau, Tagesspiegel, NZZ, and lots more ink…

- Sascha Karberg

Who wrote this? Somebody dropped a byline. But at the Washington Post is a sublime piece of opportunistic reporting, from the science beat yet, on a social ritual – the annual frenzy for sports fans known as March Madness.

The games are already on and I find that on Tuesday somebody – name will be inserted here if I find out who – wrote  “In basketball, shooting angle has a big effect on the chances of scoring.” It’s full of numbers, which any US sports fan likes, but these have to do with dimensions, angles, velocities, heights of the players, and such.

The upshot is that there is physics behind the jump shot.

Go Bears.

- Charlie Petit

It’s an old story: A generic drug looks promising, but because anybody can make it, nobody wants to.

Drug companies, unlike many other businesses, often refuse to sell a product unless they have monopoly control. I guess we should be grateful they still sell us aspirin.

As I say, it’s an old story. But Marie McCullough of the Philadelphia Inquirer has made this story fresh again with a nice piece on a generic multiple sclerosis drug that looks promising but is still years and millions of dollars away from approval.

She begins with that old standby, the anecdotal lede–but it’s a good one. It’s about a woman who has mostly avoided the worst symptoms of MS apparently because she was pregnant–six times. The lede, as an anecdotal lede should, directs us right to the heart of the story: A UCLA neurobiologist who studied the protective effect of pregnancy in MS has come up with a potentially useful drug that could possibly trigger that protection in women who aren’t pregnant.

McCullough gives us the good news: The biologist, Rhonda Voskuhl, has raised $5.6 million to study the drug, a generic called estriol. But in the very next instant, she cuts us off at the knees:

If this sounds like a poignant success story, it isn’t.

Ouch.

I like that line so much that I plan to steal it for one of my own stories at the first opportunity.

It turns out that the multimillion dollar study is not the one that could win FDA approval for this drug. It’s the second-last study. The last one could cost $20 million. And it’s years away. The results from the current trial won’t be available until 2013, and then Voskuhl will have to start raising the really big bucks. And she has already been working on this for a decade.

Proving that the drug works–if it works–will have taken 20 years and cost more than $25 million. And how many people will have died or become disabled in the meantime?

McCullough also gives us an interesting sidebar reporting that some women with MS are able to get prescriptions for estriol, through one devious means or another. She also reports that the FDA is making this more difficult than it already is.

One complaint: In the main story, McCullough notes that Voskuhl has tried five times to get funding from the National Institutes of Health, and has been turned down each time. Then McCullough makes a slight misstep: she suggests that NIH might be reluctant to fund the research because the drug could undermine the $5 billion market for MS drugs.

Technically, she protects herself. She says “some patients” believe this, a claim that is probably correct, but isn’t backed up and doesn’t mean much. And readers are likely to read past the attribution, leaving them with the impression that the NIH is in bed with pharma. That might be true, but the story shouldn’t have said it without demonstrating it.

That aside, this is a nice piece of work.

- Paul Raeburn

Dog’s ancestry is Asian. No, it’s Mideastern! Maybe it’s both – like the superposed phonons in the next post down. People love their dogs, or most people do. News on them is an easy sell. In Nature’s bounty of news today is a genomic study, SNPs galore, of 912 dogs (85 breeds) and 225 grey wolves from around the Old World. The UCLA team reports that the domestic dog appear to have barked its first nighttime alarm to human masters in the Mideast well over 12,000 years ago. Continued occasions of back-breeding with wolves occurred, including in Asia, but the team says the Mideast had the first puppy commerce. And the paper’s chart is rather interesting – especially the clear delineation among breed types – show dogs, minatures, herders, retrievers, scent hounds, etc. Some breeds go way back, many others just to 19th century European breeders.

It’s pretty interesting stuff, and reporters fill in a lot of gaps.

Stories:

• NY Times – Nicholas Wade : New Finding Puts Origins of Dogs in Middle East ;  One suspects Wade worked on this for more than a few hours. Tightly organized, long, and narrative tempo as it ties the new info to archaeological and cultural sciences, limns the possible ways that people and wolves first interacted, and the likely first move by people was to first allow only the smaller wolves, runts perhaps, into their living sites – and thus drive the evolution of more manageable animals. Read it, if nothing else, for its aside on the Williams gene.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Gene researchers find Middle Eastern origins for dogs ;
• NPR – Joe Palca: Dogs Likely Descended from Middle Eastern Wolf’; The prose is solid, the story sound – but you gotta listen to the mp3 stream to hear a sly set up early on, and the ensuing joke at the end.
• Canadian Press – Sheryl Ubelacker: Toy poodle to bull mastiff, dogs genetically linked to Mideast wolf: study;
• Science News – Tina Hesman Saey: Who Reined the Dogs In ; Smart move – she first quotes an outside geneticist or two, who strongly praise the study – and then moves into further description of its meaning and a word from one of the authors. Also here is an image of the likely first, prolonged, domestication stage in which village dogs, probably still pretty wolfy, intermixed somewhat commonly with wild wolves nearby.
• Reuters – Steve Gorman: Dogs domesticated in Middle East, Not Asia ; Confusion here – reference to a 31,000 year skeleton in Belgium of a great dane-like breed, and then reference to the first known Mideast dogs 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.  The researchers, it appears, say the latter date refers to archeological evidence – while the genes say doggy origins started much earlier and from Mideast wolves, not European ones.

Grist for the Mill: UCLA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Some good writing accompanies news in Nature – on line today but destined for a later issue of the magazine -  that researchers have a dramatic demonstration of the fungibility of quantum effects. And the commendable wordsmithery to which The Tracker refers is not all by journalists.

First, the news. A UC Santa Barbara team of physics report that they got a (or some?) sub-microscopic resonating electron(s?)  – diffused as a harmonic probability wave in a qubit of the sort computer scientists are trying to harness – to couple with a silicon chip-sized mechanical tuning fork dealie-bop with an absurdly high frequency and so cold its own quantum behavior emerges above the thermal noise. Whew. That sentence is too long but I think a quantum of energy tunnels  back and forth between the two systems, alternately twanging one and then the other, but am not sure of that. The upshot: the biggest two-state quantum oscillator ever made. With an electron, or maybe Cooper-paired electrons, in a Josephson phase qubit calling the beat, a macroscopic yet quantized mechanical wave, or phonon, is doing the Schrödinger two-step in a system of trillions of atoms. It’s sort of like a drummer’s hi-hat cymbal making the bass thrum along, only with weird physics.

That’s my attempt at enthusiastic if not very good writing. NPR‘s Joe Palca called my attention (thank you very much) to this news yesterday as he was working on a story. He emailed me on a literary note:  his encounter in Nature’s News and Views section with “a brilliant example of good writing in the scientific domain.” He’s right. The technical parts are not easy to understand, but in between those it’s easy to appreciate. Linked down there in Grist, it is a perspective on the news by a physicist in Austria, Markus Aspelmeyer. He could have made a living as a journalist – but may be having as much fun in physics already.

Despite cognitive boosts from that good semi-layman’s account in Nature, the paper itself, and a press release, such news can be a tough challenge for reporters to understand much less translate to a thoroughly lay audience. It may be enough to offer a few standard metaphors for this spooky physics and then say it can be seen now in a fully macroscopic system – but a few reporters try to get beyond that. Were I still with a newspaper or news magazine, I’d probably stick with the usual bag of metaphors myself.

Stories (Palca’s piece is due out later today, or some time, for NPR’s All Things Considered. I’ll link it when I can)

• MSNBC – Alan Boyle: Tales from the quantum frontier ; Boyle really dives into this with history and broad perspective on why such arcane physics matter. He also mentions a second Nature paper on somewhat similar effects in Bose-Einstein condensates (from UK’s Cavendish lab) and links to additional, lay-language efforts to explain these things.
• Science News – Alexandra Witze : Physicists Observe Quantum Properties In The World of Objects ; Whatayaknow, Alex W. moves from Nature’s news side to contract writing at Science News, and first (or first I noticed) piece she does is out of her previous domain. She quotes Aspelmeyer, too. She explains  that the payoff might be ability to use such biggish (by quantum standards) devices to control action in atomic-scale quantum systems, and vice versa.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Team’s quantum object is biggest by factor of billions ; Here is a brave effort to describe simply the phenomenon of superposition – of being in two states or two places at once. With reasonable success. And he too calls up the man in Austria who pre-digested the news for reporters (and non-quantum-physicist subscribers to Nature) for an even simpler quote or two.
• Wired – Brandon Keim: Quantum Physics Used to Control Mechanical System ; Another deep dive. He gets a little murky describing the roles of qubit and resonator, to my mind (he usefully links to a Science News article by Laura Sanders on this team’s earlier work) – but the explanation of how the old Schrödinger cat conundrum now has a bigger stage is strong.
• PhysicsWorld – Belle Dumé : Quantum effects spotted in a visible object ;

Grist for the Mill:

Nature – Markus Aspelmeyer: The surf is up / Researchers have long wanted to be able to control macroscopic mechanical objects in their smallest possible state of motion. Success…heralds a new generation of quantum experiments ;

Nature article abstract ; UC Santa Barbara Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit