If anyone thinks I’m making an awfully long stretch just to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on the Tracker–I confess. You’re right. I am.

MIT's circuit-board cookies

Imagine my surprise, however, when I Googled “St. Patrick’s Day” and “science” and actually got some hits. One was an MIT blog about how to make science-y cookies with green frosting that teach a science lesson. Or something. Because the Tracker is an MIT blog, I’ll politely refrain from saying what I thought about the MIT cookies. I wouldn’t want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor would I be willing to bite into those cookies. (Aw, geez; that’s exactly what I wasn’t supposed to say…)

A Discover Magazine blog did a little better by examining beer. Why do the bubbles in Guinness, it asked, flow downward along the inside of the glass rather than up? Discover finds research that explains the curious phenomenon, although to my mind the explanation would seem to fit any beer–not just Guinness. This is one Irishman that isn’t convinced. Pull me a few pints, however, and I’m likely to agree with almost anything. (The single comment on the post includes a list of Irish pubs in New York City.)

An item by Jeannine Stein on the Booster Shots blog at the LA Times refers us to a history of alcohol, an explanation of alcohol-induced nausea, and something about the Breathalyzer. Party pooper.

I’m not sure any of this St. Patrick’s Day science would survive peer review, except perhaps down at the pub.

And if the pic of the circuit-board cookies was not enough to delight your senses, feast your eyes on this green beer photo from Booster Shots.

Me, I think I’ll forget this hapless attempt to create a St. Patrick’s Day post on the Tracker, and tend to the corned beef and cabbage now percolating on the stove.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, one and all.

- Paul Raeburn

On reading this burst of news from Scotland on “marine power” one wonders – where’s the perspective, the hey waitaminute, the… (pardon the expression).. the other side?

Wave energy is a lot like fusion. Fans of both look to the ocean, for one thing. Fusion advocates like to say all we need is the deuterium from seawater and we’ll power the planet. Wave and tidal energy boosters say, well, look how wavy the ocean is and how effortlessly it tosses boats about and lifts them with its tides. Let’s put it to work!  But there is, speaking of work, another way they are alike. Both get lots of positive press and public endorsement. Neither is a mainstay in powering any grids that I know of. Which is to say: does it work?

Thus the perplexion in this corner on reading BBC‘s no-nonsense dispatch today: ‘Milestone’ for wave energy plans. The Crown Estate, one supposes, by historic mandate manages the sovereign’s property for profit and conservation (ie for Queen Elizabeth). It in practice works more like the US Bureau of Land Management moshed with the Minerals Management Service and runs the property for the public purse. This week it revealed the successful bidders to lease ten near-shore sites off Scotland and the Orkneys for tidal and wave power. Along with the written BBC dispatch is this dockside video report  by David Shukman showing one of the devices, a monster floating snake thing, that is to be deployed in the suddenly more friendly-looking, angry sea. The report demonstrates how, without fossil fuels, the device will work. But not whether it has worked yet and made money at the same time.

The CE projects some 1.2 gigawatts of power from the overall initiative. That’s a bunch -  enough, it says here, for 750,000 homes.

In all likelihood the Brit press has been covering the technology and I just missed it. This lease sale has been in the works for a few years. The lease winners have some serious money and heavy hardware. But I am sitting here unable to recall any large scale demonstration of practical wave power, and precious little on tidal power as well. Yet the BBC’s account treats this lease sale with as little skepticism – or even an aside on the iffy character of the technology – as it would a lease sale for something as routinely established as offshore oil drilling.

Certainly a lot of work is going into this. Those big wave-harvesting flapper pumps up there on top are huge and real.  They are from one of the winners, Aquamarine Power Ltd. To gauge their size check the site where I found that one, and the pics of the real things in the fabrication bay. The snakelike one is from a company calledPelamis Wave Power.

Other Stories, mostly UK press:

• Bloomberg via Business Week – Rodney Jefferson, Alex Morales: Scottish Power, Pelamis Win Marine Energy Contracts ; Just a morsel of caution offered in this: “The technologies are still largely at a demonstration stage…”
• Telegraph – Simon Johnson : World first wave and tidal energy projects for Scotland ; A bit more caution here from the paper’s political editor; the power, engineers say, will be very expensive, and the machinery is still, in most cases, in development.
• The Scottish Sun – Andrew Nicoll: Scotland rules the waves ; Another by a political writer. In the lede – “..could be the first stage in Scotland becoming a green energy superpower…”   . No doubts evinced in this piece.
• Wall St. Journal – Selina Williams (filed from London): U.K. Tries to Catch a Wave ; She calls it wave and tidal power a key green technology. Interesting fact here, thrown out without elaboration however: UK now has 2.4 megawatts of installed wave and tidal power. That is a fifth of one percent of what this single lease sale supposedly will yield by 2020.
• Financial Times – Andrew Bolder: Salmond hails wave of energy deals ; The phrase “Saudi Arabia of marine power’ comes up here and in some other accounts. It is very difficult to know whether that means anything – how hard would it be to compare the annual energy, at best, this development will produce compared to the energy content of one year of oil from the Saudis? It cannot be much. Plus – should not the comparison be with coal, not oil?
• Herald Scotland – David Ross : Scotland is set to realize potential as ‘Saudi Arabia of marine power‘ ; All booster, neither eyebrow cocked.

A bit of background, written again without cynicism or skepticism:

• Renewable Energy World – Roger Bedard: Ocean/Tidal/Stream Power: The Road to Commercialization ;

Grist for the Mill:

Crown Estate Press Release ; Pelamis Wave Power Press Release ; Aquamarine Power Press Release ; Marine Current Turbines Press Release ; ScottishPower Renewables Press Release ; SSE Renewables/Open Hydro Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

If you’ve time to go link-jumping through a dialogue on the various modes of science journalism, as I just did and enjoyed, start with a post at Brit science writer Ed Yong‘s Not Exactly Rocket Science. It has tons of links. The one not to miss is at another blogsite, CMBR, by Canadian science writer Colin Schultz. Schultz, as Yong writes, has been interviewing science journalists to find out their varying approaches to and tastes in news (check Schultz’s archives page for most of them – and follow its ‘older samples’ link for the first interview, with Carl Zimmer).

I’m with Yong pretty much, by the way, in naturally gravitating to what I call “gee whiz” science stories and he and Schultz label “This is cool” stories. And as he is, I am grateful that some on the beat have the mindsets of cops and gadflies, digging around for missteps in research, policy implications, distortions, and similar that arise in or invade the research realm.

Schultz, in a surprise to me, asserts that investigative science journalism is “looked down upon.” By whom? Other science journalists? It has seemed to me just the opposite – us writers who tend toward the gee-whiz side looked down upon as mere cheerleaders for science while those turning over rocks to find corruption get lots of awards and the front page.

Plus, a nod to Yong for, in particular, mentioning in an aside one of those famous things that I missed, but have now read and gaped at. It is Zimmer’s post at The Loom late last year on duck sex. Or perhaps you’ve all seen that already?

- Charlie Petit

I’d thought the glop-awful vision of a warmer world’s oceans overrun with jellyfish unsettling enough. Now comes word of an even worse potential scenario that might follow efforts to clean the seas of excess CO2: millions of square miles of algae that exude a chemical toxic to marine mammals, birds, and other creatures (like people).

The notion that a way to help preserve a livable climate is to spread iron dust across large areas of the sea, spurring algal blooms that then die and sink and drain carbon from both the air and ocean,  has been having a tough time anyway. It just made a lot of people nervous. The fresh news, from a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, is that such measures might well give a special boost to algal species that secrete a dangerous neurotoxin called domoic acid. The authors, from Universities of  Western Ontario, San Francisco State, Maine, and from NOAA, say the findings “raise serious concern over the net benefit and sustainability of large-scale iron fertilization.”

I haven’t heard much lately about companies that have tried to raise capital so they could strew lots of iron around the ocean, and have already engaged in a few pilot studies. Looks like they wouldn’t easily pass an environmental impact review now. Not that there is an agency with teeth to rule on such a thing.

Stories:

• BBC – Richard Black: Climate ‘fix’ could poison sea life ; Hits the highlights and gets through to one company hoping to fertilize the ocean. Its official tells Black that it agrees further research is necessary – but holds out hope that marine ecosystems are already adapted to handle such toxins.
• AAAS ScienceNow – Lauren Schenkman: Carbon-Capture Method Could Poison Oceans ;
• Science News – Sid Perkins: IRON FERTILIZATION IN OCEAN NOURISHES TOXIC ALGAE ; Perkins’s well-tempered story does not, in hed or text, imply the case is made. He notes via a source’s quote that while the toxin is worrisome and its appearance in mid-ocean algal blooms runs against previous assumptions, the results “are less a prediction of ecological doom than it is a lesson about not knowing the consequences of our actions.”
• NY Times – Henry Fountain: A Risk of Poisoning the Deepest Wells ; A brief piece, for the ScienceTimes section’s The Observatory roundup.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: CO2 study: Plankton fertilization may backfire ; The idea’s history from new the Bay Area – at Moss Landing Marine Laboratory on Monterey Bay – gets a good airing here. One of the strategy’s early proponents and experimenters calls the new study “great,” but holds out hope that a role for iron fertilization may yet prove tolerable should a worse climate come to worst,
• London Free Press (Can) – John Miner: Fertilizing with iron lethal ; Uh, maybe lethal?  Potentially deadly? C’mon, why such a hed when nothing in the news is so slam-dunk sure of itself? The lede cuts right to the chase (for sensationalism): “…could trigger an ecological disaster.” But the story itself goes on to stress uncertainty, not sure doom.
• AFP - Adding iron to sea boosts deadly neurotoxin: Study.

Grist for the Mill: U. Western Ontario Press Release ; PNAS article ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post)For the last few weeks the tracker has noticed an increase in reports on sex issues in the health section of El Mundo. All the stories are based on scientific studies, and they are very carefully written. It seems to reflect a clear decision to take sexuality seriously as a health issue (as WHO classifies it), and to provide from the world of science info that fills gaps in understandings that so many people have about it. Today the paper’s most read story on the web compares the physical pleasures afforded by different sexual practices. The story is not smirking or sarcastic. It has the structure of any other science or health story. Spanish language media do not often write about sex from a health perspective, and the stories that have run tend to have a typical pop-science approach. El Mundo’s approach is therefore worth a look.

Ya sabemos que si en el titular de nuestra nota científica aparece la palabra “sexo”, las visitas se multiplicarán. Es por eso que tantas veces entre “las 10 más leídas” aparecen informaciones aparentemente irrelevantes sobre el comportamiento sexual del insecto palo (me lo invento) o un nuevo estudio demostrando algo que en realidad tiene más morbo que relevancia.

Algo diferente estamos observando últimamente en la sección de salud de El Mundo (España). El tracker lleva tiempo viendo que regularmente –y en mayor frecuencia que en otras secciones de salud- aparecen bastantes noticias relacionadas con la sexualidad humana. Puede que contenten a los editores porque generan más interés del lector, pero no parece éste ser el principal motivo de su presencia. Se percibe una apuesta del periódico por considerar la sexualidad algo que forma parte de nuestra salud, y reflejar la mucha investigación científica seria que existe alrededor de ella. Sabia decisión. Posiblemente, la sexualidad es uno de los campos en que la comunicación científica más puede informar a lectores y lectoras presas de tópicos, desinformación, tabúes, y ávidos en busca de informaciones fiables y serias sobre un campo que genera indudable interés. Hay campo para incluir la ciencia de la sexualidad en nuestros apartados de salud.

Ayer mismo, Patricia Matey escribía el artículo “Y tú qué entiendes por tener sexo”. Quizás no es la mejor elección para ilustrar justo lo que estábamos contando, pues es una pieza ligerita de un carácter más anecdótico que médico o psicológico, pero leyéndola percibimos que hay un esfuerzo en abordar una pregunta que todos nos podemos hacer, desde una perspectiva científica. Se empieza citando un estudio estadounidense dando porcentajes indicando que sólo el 70% de jóvenes y 50% de adultos mayores considera “sexo” el sexo oral, y los datos también difieren si además de penetración ha habido eyaculación. Luego se busca expertos que expliquen la trascendencia de estas diferentes visiones tanto en estudios como en consultas médicas. De acuerdo; no es el asunto más trascendente a tratar, pero percibimos el estilo.

Hoy, a estas horas la noticia más leída –de ámbito general- en la web de El Mundo es la del urólogo Juan I. Martínez Salamanca “Satisfacción Sexual: ¿masturbación o penetración?”. No lo tomes como un tema escabroso o en busca del morbo fácil. Todos hemos oído opiniones parciales sobre el tema, hay personas preocupadas por ello, y por fin alguien lo aborda desde una perspectiva científica y seria, sin retintín libidinoso, graciosillo, o vulgar. Habla de las investigaciones sobre placer sexual cuantificando en 58% y 57% el número de mujeres y hombres que se declaran insatisfechos, así como los estudios concluyendo que el orgasmo tras penetración vaginal otorga mayor satisfacción  que el conseguido por estimulación clitoroidea. La pieza podría ser más detallada, pero de nuevo, el tono es lo que nos interesa en este post.

Podríamos remontarnos a estudios de semanas anteriores en El Mundo, o buscar piezas en otras publicaciones, como esta de Isabel F. Lantigua sobre el comportamiento sexual de los españoles. Pero el mensaje es claro: La sexualidad es parte de la salud y preocupa a muchas personas. Como tal, tiene un espacio para ser tratada de manera seria en las secciones de ciencia. Y de hecho, a estas alturas posiblemente el lector prefiera leer algo científico que morboso sobre sexo.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Reuters News Agency today has a story that it can hardly cover with disinterest, as it is from its owner Thomson Reuters and, more specifically, from another business that Thomson Reuters owns:  ScienceWatch. Reuters says so plainly in its account, too, and omits a byline.

ScienceWatch uses such things as citation counts to determine who the “hottest” scientists are. They are tips to journalists who wonder whose phone numbers to put in a file so that should they need to call a Nobel Prize winner on short notice (such as on a predawn October morning) they won’t waste time.

Speaking of hardly writing things while being disinterested, upon reading that the hottest name of all right now is that of stem cell and genetic whiz Rudolf Jaenisch, it occurred immediately that he and I both get paychecks from the same place:  MIT. Reuters disclosed its “conflict” so I’d better do it too even though this website itself is a clue.

Jaenisch also, it must be noted, is among the more quoted scientists in media accounts. That means he returns phone calls, often providing sharp opinions of work done by others.

Close behind Jaenisch, with 14 “hot” papers, is a man from Harvard and MIT, Mark J. Daly of the Broad Institute, with 13 such bell-ringers. In fact, the town of Cambridge, Mass.,  appears to be crawling with scientific hotties (check Grist below to get to the press release with more detail).

I’m unsure of my gender meter’s accuracy for all 12 listed, but it appears they’re all men. Maybe it’s an old boy’s club doing the citing. Maybe it’s on merit. Both? Could be a conversation, even a story, in that for sure.

Grist for the Mill: Science Watch Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Let’s start below the fold on the section front page where, for a change, John Tierney in his column Findings does not write a column. He writes a news feature free of explanation of why he agrees of disagrees with this or that idea, or analyzes some proposition that defies conventional wisdom. But in doing so he may have missed a bet: I am left wondering why in the world, starting with the high stratosphere working down, does a man named Felix Baumgartner want to go supersonic toward the Earth’s core (while wearing a spacesuit)? Why does he jump off so many things – with his sights now on a double world record: highest balloon jump (120,000 feet is the plan) and fastest plummet (690 mph, supersonic at about the 100,000-foot mark)?Maybe there was just no room for such soft and non-technical matters. ’tis true that I have questions on those, too – such as, regarding worry of supersonic shock’s effect on a falling spacesuit with a man inside, does the low density of air so high ameliorate those concerns a bit? I’d also have liked to see what the man looked like while practicing his “delta formation” head down with arms straight and angled back, like those related thrill seekers who skim down cliffs and through mountain passes in wing suits, eventually open their ‘chutes, land, and do it again. Such people have such strange courage, such marvelous adventures. Me, I’ll be content to watch the video.

Tierney apparently was on hand during a vertically oriented wind-tunnel test. Mr. Baumgartner found he could manage skydiving maneuvers in a bulky pressure suit and heavy helmet. The details of how this former Austrian special forces soldier, and accomplished dare devil who jumps off anything really high if it draws an audience, it seems, plans with corporate backing to break the skydiving altitude and velocity records are quite vividly sketched out. But other than one robotic quote from the adrenaline loving jumper, and that special forces background and list of things he’s departed vertically downward, no hint to his motivations, the rewards, the fears. This time, I’d like a little more of Tierney’s penchant for unusual personalities and ways of thinking.   Grist for This Mill: Fearless Felix ;  Red Bull Stratos Project ; Project Media Center ;

The section’s lead is more information – but no more real explanation than the last time they were in the news – on the mysterious European-looking, desert-dried mummies found a few years ago in northwest China. They are buried under upturned boats at grave site now utterly arid. Nicholas Wade chooses the correct angle: the graves appear, from the tall poles and vaguely vulvic standards that mark them, plus the wooden phalluses in graves of women, to reflect a 4,000-year-gone culture more openly focused on fertility and sex than most. But who the people were and where they migrated in from, other than new DNA evidence indicating a genetic mix of East and West, remains baffling. Their dress was interesting,  heavy felt capes and such over delicate string skirts and minimal woolen loin cloths. What moves the ball forward are the wonderful photos.

Other Headlines to Note:

• Carl Zimmer: Answers Begin to Emerge on How Thalidomide Caused Defects ; Few people are better at pure explanation than Zimmer. It turns out that quite a bit of work recently has begun explaining the dreadful birth defects left by this sleeping pill decades ago, and also illuminating its new, legitimate clinical uses.
• Harriet Brown: For Obese People, Prejudice in Plain Sight ; A salutory essay on the open, unembarrassed bigotry that fat people face. I for one, however, do not understand why Michelle Obama’s statement quoted in the lede, or efforts to blunt childhood obesity, are unwise or unwarranted. The piece could have used more insight into legitimate motives that lie behind some of instances of  regrettable callousness by those who support programs to improve US nutrition.

Three Stories touching on Cancer must be grouped together:

• Jane Brody : When the Only Hope Is a Peaceful Ending; Brody’s husband recently died of lung cancer. She often writes in the first person. This one is extraordinarily skillfully done – explaining how her Richard, after 43 years of marriage, abruptly learned he was very sick and very terminal. She explains calmly and clearly the measures she and he took to make the departure as comfortable as it could be – and why it is good to have a plan beforehand.
• Roni Caryn Rabin: In Cancer Fight, Teenagers Don’t Fit In ;  Vignette lede grabs readers into thinking why, sick or well, teens are teens and need to be treated as such.
• Dan Jennings: With Cancer, Let’s Face It: Words Are Inadequate ; After a bout with prostate cancer, Jennings wonders why the verbs and nouns most often employed about the disease are such things as “fight” and “victim.” It is hard, he writes, to be both a fighter and the battlefield.

Plus, one from Saturday’s NYTimes, Northern California pages:

• Sabin Russell: Rays of Hope in Battling an Agonizing Disease ; An old pal of mine from days at the SF Chronicle, Russell has been among the freelancers on the Times list of potential contributors to this regional insert. It’s local but not so much a  Bay Area special as a heavily-reported medical story with appeal to readers anywhere. The topic is a dreadful inherited skin disease, we meet one teen age girl living rather pluckily with it and, most important, Russell describes several lines of research that may lead to an effective gene therapy.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

The struggle between those convinced mercury-tainted vaccines have significantly raised autism rates and those who say the science says otherwise will surely go on, and on, and on…

But several large outlets ran with the news over the weekend that a judge on the specialized US vaccine court, established to hear cases against vaccines in all sorts of circumstances, turned down on Friday a three-pronged effort by some parents and their advocates to gain compensation for childhood autism.

Stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II, Andrew Zajac: ‘Vaccines court’ rejects mercury-autism link in 3 test cases ; They report not that the vaccine probably does not cause autism, but a flatter and stronger, unshaded rejection. As with other stories, hints of paranoia and conspiracy-think arise in the selected quotes from the disappointed plaintiffs.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Court says thimerosal did not cause autism ; Nicely calibrated story – starting with the sympathy the judges feel for the plaintiffs even if their efforts to pin these tragedies on vaccines don’t hold water. Then comes a tidy glimpse of the run of reversals the argument has faced in such cases, the sense of vindication for one well known skeptic of the anti-vaccine camp, and an eyes-darting quote  from one plaintiffs’ rep: “The deck is stacked against families…government attorneys defend government programs, using government-funded science, before government judges.”
• NY Times – Donald G. McNeil Jr.: 3 Rulings Find No Link to Vaccines and Autism ; The hed doesn’t quite parse, but here’s another catchy quote: “It’s very hard to unscare people after you’ve scared them.”
• AFP: US court rejects vaccine-autism link ;
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: US court rules again against vaccine-autism claims ;

Related vaccine-autism news:

• CanWest via Vancouver Sun ; Meagan Fitzpatrick: Flu vaccine rekindles debate over connection to autism: It’s unclear to me that rekindling is a process pertinent to something that seemingly is inextinquishable, but the story’s peg has legitimacy – that eventual wide use of the H1N1 vaccine, which in some formulations include thimerosal, could be the perfect opportunity to test definitively whether vaccines can plausibly be blamed for some, or any, instances of autism.

Grist for the Mill: U.S. Court of Federal Claims Autism Decisions ;

- Charlie Petit

In news that seems to be stirring the hearts of astrobiologists who hope to get some day a peek under the thick alien ice crusts of places like Jupiter’s moon Europa, the AP‘s’ Seth Borenstein has an advance story of complex life hiding out in the water under a hefty Antarctic glacier. NASA scientists, and others, say they drilled a hole, dropped in some gear, saw a three inch (mmmm – almost prawn sized!) shrimp, and fished up a jellyfish tentacle. Borenstein reports the formal report is due at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. He doesn’t say more, but it must be one in Baltimore. One does not know how Borenstein tumbled to this presentation but it smells of enterprise reporting not propelled by press release. Perhaps there was a release. I’ll update this if I find out more. Neat picture, too – aside from the shrimp, what’s with the variegated ice? Something to do with the hot-water drilling system, one infers.

A  search finds the essence of the news is already on line but hidden deep in the meeting’s abstracts (see Grist, below).

Borenstein reports that the site is 12 miles from the sea. It surprised the researchers, it says here, to find such creatures living where they expected only microbes. What they are eating, they don’t know. One presumes that the bottom of this glacier is below sea level and that a passage to the the ocean may be open, or have been open recently. The story does not say whether that’s the case, or whether the water is fresh or partly marine. The abstract of the presentation strongly suggests it’s saline and that this section of ice sheet is floating.  Wonder what’s in Lake Vostok, way far from the ocean in East Antarctica?

Grist for the Mill: Page 11 of Program pdf: Chapman Conference on the Exploration and Study of Antarctic Aquatic Environments :  abstract of Surprises Seen in the Sub-Ice Shelf Environment.

- Charlie Petit

This morning The Tracker noticed, at the NSF Science 360 site – which is an aggregation of press releases – word from the University of Wisconsin in Madison that one of its research teams has news. It configured a piezoelectric crystal combo in a fashion that, when jiggled hard and thereby torqued a little bit, generates enough voltage to turn water into small streams of hydrogen and oxygen. It claims an efficiency of 18 percent. It says waste heat (and its microscopic thermal motion) in almost any process – from industrial manufacturing to the bounce in one’s step – could thereby provide reagents for electricity-making fuel cells.

It was in Physical Chemistry Letters earlier this month. Who picked this up?, I wondered.

It does seem fascinating and clever with essentially no moving parts if one excludes the bending moment put on the crystals. It involves nanotechnology, sort of. The researchers say it is such a fundamentally new way to convert mechanical to chemical energy that they coined a new adjective for it, piezoelectrochemical.  And then there is that 18 percent efficiency assertion. What’s it mean – 18 percent of what, and to what end?  Is that the portion of thermal energy harnessed to bend the crystals that winds up in the reaction potential of the H2 and O2 molecules? Big whoop. Or, more interesting, is it how much energy would be in the electricity gained after running those through fuel cells (which are less than 50 percent efficient) ? That might bring more venture capitalists nosing around.

But almost nobody covered this story. Two sites did. The larger is a write-up at Popular Science, credited to Jeremy Hsu. But Mr. Hsu in turn credits the press release as his source (via ScienceDaily) and does not even mention efficiency at all. This is, to be sure, a geeky story of a laboratory demonstration. But lots of news sites cater to geeks. That audience seems to deserve a closer and more critical report than they got.

Also running it is an outlet in India that has been popping up lately, Syfy – associated apparently with a large ISP in that country. This account seems to have originated with the ANI news service. It’s also derived, far as I can tell, entirely from the press release – therefore with no sign that a journalist intervened armed with enough curiosity or perhaps even the authority to pick up a telephone or send an email to the researchers, much less to some outside expert. Regurgitation is not reporting.

Grist for the Mill: U. Wisconsin Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Last Thursday, the Columbia Journalism Review’s Observatory ran a cheery, and disturbingly off-center, story on the new science section in the McClatchy papers in North Carolina, including the Raleigh News & Observer and the Charlotte Observer.

In a brilliant instance of being unable to see the forest for the trees, the article breezily noted the good news (we all love science sections, don’t we?), and recapped a few recent stories. Rick Thames, the editor of the Charlotte paper, went on about how happy he was to use all the freelance writing talent available to him (he didn’t say what he was paying). The science section’s  editor, Ann Allen, emphasized that she was featuring fresh and local coverage. The only hint that something more was going on came in the deck at the top of the post. Mysteriously, it referred to the science section as a “community journalism project.”

Editor Thames said it was a “head turn” that in these difficult times for print, he “was able to grow our newspaper.” (Important safety note: Never trust an editor who uses “grow” as a transitive verb.)

The piece was off-center because the news–and it was big news–came at the end. After all this making nice, Thomas K. Zellers, who wrote the CJR Observatory piece, finally got to the disturbing part: Thames, after deliberating over how he could fund a science section, came across a podcast of NPR’s Science Friday. “If NPR can find a way to support a weekly feature on science,” he remembered thinking, “why can’t a newspaper?”

Thames said he began a search for “someone in the local community” who would underwrite a science section. That helpful community resident turned out to be Duke Energy, one of the largest energy companies in the nation. What a nice story: An energy company helps support a local science section, enriching the community. Thames didn’t mention some of Duke Energy’s other contributions to science, such as doubling its spending to more than $10 million in 2008 and 2009 to fight legislation to cap emissions of carbon dioxide. That tidbit comes from the Charlotte Observer itself, Thames’s paper, in an article last October–before he started the Duke Energy science section.

Thames told CJR that when he presented the idea of science-section sponsorship to Duke, “Duke understood the concept immediately.” I’ll bet it did.

I’ll leave it to readers to scan back through the science section’s coverage of global warming since Duke took over the funding.

I’m deliberately being provocative here, because I think these kinds of arrangements deserve serious scrutiny. I don’t know whether this is right or wrong. Maybe this is a good thing. Politico.com and ProPublica.com are among new websites that have a single underwriter. So does the Tracker. That’s not necessarily bad.

But transparency is important. And so is the choice of underwriter.

CJR says that the McClatchy science sections run a disclaimer “informing readers that Duke plays no role in the editorial process.” That’s good. But I’m not in North Carolina, and when I looked at the science sections on the web, I didn’t see the disclaimer.

I’m not swearing it’s not there–I might have missed it. But if the idea is to be transparent, I shouldn’t be able to miss it. The Charlotte Observer has a sci-tech fan page on Facebook; I didn’t see the disclaimer there, either.

The Raleigh online version of the science section does include a little box entitled “Print Ads” which helpfully points to ads for Duke Energy. I didn’t see any disclaimer there, either.

I’m curious about the details of the relationship between Duke and McClatchy. If Duke has agreed to put down money to support the section for a year or two, we might argue that editors have some independence. If Duke is paying a monthly advertising bill, it could cancel at any time, such as when the section reports on global warming in a way that undermines Duke’s lobbying effort.

If Thames thought about any of this, he didn’t say so in a column he wrote announcing the section.

And where was CJR in all of this? Our leading press critic has a nice, meaty journalism story in its paws, and it delivers a fluffy bit of science cheerleading.

- Paul Raeburn

Sometimes a story with drama, poignancy, and policy pertinence demands that it be told – but may yet be such a steaming pile of dead ends and ambiguity the reporter has no choice but to just lay it all out and let the reader sort through it. Thus we have from the Inquirer‘s Jan Hefler this week what amounts to a sad story, but a shaggy dog story with no clear narrative point.

The news is that intense legal and regulatory maneuvers have been underway for six years over an unfledged young eagle found dreadfully ill and grounded, wandering along a road on an old industrial site upon an island in the Delaware River in New Jersey. It soon died. It is not legal to kill eagles. Some suspected it was deliberately frightened from its nest by the agent of a developer with big plans for the land.

The affair has been in the local news a good deal. This update seems to be a tale that one could organize around one consistent theme, or at least around a well-framed conflict. From the looks of it, however, the many threads in this story produced no tapestry – just a snarl. One thinks too that the reporter did about as much as one could expect with this. Thank goodness, one thinks, that the story doesn’t even try to get into the role of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

- Charlie Petit