(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Extensive reporting in Spain recently  regarding the “Power Balance” bracelet containing a hologram that supposedly gives you strength, flexibility and equilibrium. Science reporters are writing against this fraud after a Consumer’s Association denounced the company. Probably, we should have done this before. Also, El Universal in Mexico equates organic molecules to life, and tells its readers that water and life have been found in an asteroid near Jupiter. A few days ago the Brazilian health minister said –as a kind of joke- that people should fight against hypertension by eating 5 pieces of fruit and doing exercise by having sex 5 times per day. Some reporters took this more seriously than others, and a Venezuelan newspaper even presented it as if it were a new scientific study proving that having sex 5 times per day extends life (it might be true, but that’s not what the minister said). In Argentina we find a solid story describing the life cycle of a parasite and the research by local scientists to block it. Early last week there came a great story in Chile about therapeutical vaccines against cancer and that anticipated the recently FDA-approved one.

En España una asociación de consumidores ha denunciado por publicidad engañosa a las pulseras mágicas que mejoran tu fuerza, equilibro y flexibilidad gracias a un holograma que interactúa magnéticamente con tu cuerpo. La comunidad científica las considera un fraude, y el ministerio de sanidad alerta de fraude. Si queréis enteraros bien de la historia, El País presenta un extenso reportaje de Carmen Pérez-Lanzac desmontando el bulo. ¿Cómo podemos estar seguros de que es un bulo? ¿Por qué no mantenemos cierta equidad y simplemente contrastamos opiniones como hace N.Ramírez de Castro en ABC? Aparte de por lógica, porque si la autora del reportaje pide a los creadores de pulseras estudios científicos que las avalen, y no encuentra respuesta, no hay punto intermedio: Las pulseras se anuncian como algo que no son. No hay más que mirar este video de Youtube enlazado por El País, en que una periodista da voz a unos testimonios aportados por la propia empresa Power Balance. El engaño es obvio. El programa Andalucía directo, además de considerar estúpidos a sus espectadores por pensar que pueden creer que una mujer con la pulsera se agache más que sin ella, o a un ciclista farsante le desaparezca el dolor de piernas, no informa sino que publicita. Denunciables ellos también.

Quien también se posiciona -y de manera todavía más contundente- contra las pulseras es Público en el reportaje de Jose María Mateos: “Pseudociencia, ahora en holograma”. En él, consulta a un experto en efectos biológicos de campos electromagnéticos que dice ”un holograma, de entrada, no radia, así que no puede interaccionar con nada”, acompañados de otras declaraciones negativas de médicos y científicos. Buenos trabajos críticos, que podrían haber aparecido incluso antes de la denuncia a la empresa.

Más notas interesantes:

En ABC, tras la salida de tono de Stephen Hawkins y su miedo a contactar extraterrestres, Jose Manuel Nieves hace algo muy bueno y recoge la opinión de otros científicos. La conclusión: no hay que temer a los extraterrestres. Obvio. Como conclusión desde la vertiente más periodística, esta réplica debería haber aparecido en todas las notas que reflejaban las palabras de Hawkins.

A principios de semana el ministro de salud brasileño dijo, en tono de semibroma, que para controlar la hipertensión, “además de comer cinco piezas de fruta al día, os propongo que también hagáis sexo cinco veces al día”. “Bromeó” es la palabra que utiliza Luis Tejero en su artículo en El Mundo. Evidentemente la actividad física –y ciertas formas de practicar sexo también la incluyen- es positiva para el sistema cardiovascular. Pero algunos medios han decidido tomarse demasiado al pie de la letra las palabras del ministro. El caso más extremo quizás es el de El Universal (Venezuela): Aseguran que el sexo contribuye a alargar el tiempo de vida, manipulando las cifras de hipertensión con la edad, e inventándose un estudio que la  relaciona con la hipertensión. Seguro que existe alguno, pero de esa relación no hablaba el estudio citado por el ministro brasileño.

En la sección de salud de El Mundo, María Valerio recoge las palabras expresadas en Science por dos científicos estadounidenses diciendo que EEUU debería aprender algunas lecciones de cómo Cuba ha sido capaz de ofrecer un buen servicio de salud a sus ciudadanos a pesar de los 50 años de embargo.

Ni entre comillas, ni nada. Esta semana se ha anunciado el hallazgo de agua y moléculas orgánicas a bordo de un asteroide en el sistema solar. Va alguien de El Universal (México) y titula “Hallan agua y ‘vida’ en el asteroide Themis”. Ni entrecomillado; el trecho existente entre moléculas orgánicas y vida es abismal. Y la relevancia de la noticia, lo mismos. Error gravísimo.

La Nación (Argentina) continúa en su buena línea de ir dedicando espacio a hablar sobre la ciencia hecha en su país, y Nora Bär se sirve de una estrategia a nivel de ciencia básica publicada por científicos argentinos, para explicar muy bien las sorprendentes fase de vida del parásito intestinal Giardia lamblia. Dicen que puede dar lugar a una vacuna, lo cual sería muy remarcable porque no existe ninguna vacuna contra parásitos (sólo virus y bacterias).

Pero para vacunas, el reportaje en La Tercera (Chile) sobre un tipo totalmente diferente, las terapéuticas, escrito de maravilla por Sebastián Urbina: “Vacunas anticáncer: la nueva forma de destruir tumores” , anticipándose el fin de semana pasado a la noticia de hoy de la aprobación por la FDA estadounidense de una vacuna contra el cáncer de próstata. No es un nuevo fármaco cualquiera. Es un nuevo concepto de vacuna que mucha gente desconoce, y es la labor del periodista científico destacar.

- Pere Estupinyà

Admittedly, it would be a better story if researchers had reported that we can prevent Alzheimer’s disease, rather than concluding we can’t.

Still, this is a major illness, and one that aging members of the mainstream media presumably have at least a passing personal interest in. And when a panel of experts convened by the National Institutes of Health concludes we don’t know how to prevent it, that’s news. Or it should be. Especially because many entrepreneurs (I use that word euphemistically) have claimed that they can help you prevent Alzheimer’s.

But it’s hard to find a reporter who covered this story, beyond recapping the panel’s conclusions.

An NPR blog post by Rose Raymond sounds like something out of the pages of a women’s magazine: Smoking: Don’t do it….Physical Activity: By all means, do it! That is to say, it sounds like health advice, not news.

Shari Roan, in a post on the Los Angeles Times Booster Shots blog, recaps the findings and adds that “consumers should discuss prevention strategies with their doctors.” Excuse me, but didn’t we just learn that there’s nothing we can to do prevent it? So why are we wasting our doctors’ time with questions about prevention strategies?I’ve claimed here in an earlier post that such reflexive “consult your doctor” admonitions are a cop out. Reporters shouldn’t simply write that and figure they’ve done their due diligence.

Kelly Brewington at The Baltimore Sun posted a quick recap. These short posts on blogs operated by newspapers should, it seems to me, make it harder and harder for the papers to dismiss blogs on the grounds that they simply feast on and regurgitate what the papers have reported. News execs who don’t like blogs could make a stronger argument against them if they didn’t use their own blogs for quick-and-dirty throwaway stories–in effect, doing exactly the sort of superficial job that they accuse bloggers of doing.

Sadly, the best source of information I could find on the panel’s report was the NIH press release, which, unlike these other posts, links to the panel’s consensus statement. The newspaper blogs could have at least linked to the panel’s report, if the reporters didn’t want to waste time reporting it themselves.

NIH’s press office did a better job on this story than most of the stories I saw. The lesson? Skip the media and go right to the source if you want to know what the panel said.

That can’t be good for the future of the news business.

- Paul Raeburn

Because stories sometimes seem to get different play online than they do in print, we inadvertently missed an important and moving story in Tuesday’s Science Times.

Katherine Russell Rich (disclosure: we’re friends) wrote about living 17 years after a diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer. Each year, on Jan. 15th, she goes to a website for people with the same diagnosis, and posts a short message: I’m still here.

Within days, a thunderous chorus comes back, 200 voices, 300. A few of them ask, “How can this be?” Sometimes they begin, “I’m crying.” Many answer in kind: “I’m here, too. It’s now three years.” “Five years.” “Three months.” “Seven.”

What we’re doing, in a way, is checking for lights in the darkness.

Rich writes that when she was classified as stage 4 (reserved for the most advanced cancers), she was given a year or two to live. Nothing was the same after that.

I enacted every New Year’s resolution, past and future, all at once. Quit work that had grown stale and became a writer. Wrote a book. Went to India on assignment, fell in love with the language that was swirling around me, went back to live for a year and learn Hindi.

What would you do?

Read this piece. As I said in a note to Kathy, it’s inspired–and inspiring.

- Paul Raeburn

It’s an interesting question. As a parent, I’m not particularly concerned, because my children have never had a Happy Meal or ever eaten at McDonald’s. (Sigh. If only I were that kind of parent…)

On Tuesday, Santa Clara, California county supervisors approved a measure banning promotional toys with high-calorie meals. Sharon Bernstein‘s story in the Los Angeles Times gives us a quote from one of the supervisors who supported it, and follows that with not just the routine rejoinder from the opposition, but a quote from Supervisor Donald Gage that raises an interesting question:

Gage, who is overweight, said he was a living example of how obese children can become obese adults.

But he questioned the role of fast-food toys. “When I was growing up in Gilroy 65 years ago, there were no fast-food restaurants,” Gage said.

Now that Bernstein has neatly raised that question for us, we expect an answer. Do fast-food toys contribute to obesity? And will the Santa Clara ordinance trim Santa Clara kids?

And she does give us a bit of an answer. I was delighted to see that she interviewed somebody with expertise on the issue, a doctor at a local clinic who directs a program on child obesity. He says the toys are a powerful lure for kids, which we don’t need an expert to tell us. Nevertheless, Bernstein made some attempt to address the question.

In a slightly longer and more comprehensive story, Justin Berton of the San Francisco Chronicle quotes five or six people, giving us a better idea of the reaction to the ordinance. But, again, he evidently feels under no compulsion to call an obesity researcher to see whether anyone knows whether this will help reduce obesity in kids.

Nor do others:

Jesse McKinley in The New York Times: Citing Obesity of Children, County Bans Fast-Food Toys. McKinley cites the Institute of Medicine and cites local and national obesity statistics, but doesn’t tell use whether removing toys will make any difference.

Brooke Donald on the AP wire: California county trims toys in meal to cut fat. What do we have here? Ah, a little background! A little context! Donald notes that a study by the Center for Science in the Public Interest found that many meals that come with toys exceed caloric guidelines. CSPI isn’t an impartial source, but Donald deserves credit for adding some background. The AP also called Burger King, easing some of the unfair, single-minded focus on McDonald’s in other stories.

San Jose Business Journal: Toy incentives barred from kids’ meals. It’s often interesting to look at the trades to get a different view. I didn’t find too much that was novel in this short story, except for this fact: “In 2006, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that restaurants sold 1.2 billion meals accompanied by toys to children under 12.” That doesn’t address the question of whether the toys are harmful, but it raises the urgency of the question.

Also, how much petroleum was consumed in the manufacture of 1.2 billion plastic toys?

- Paul Raeburn

How did all the rocket scientists and financial whiz kids (and whiz elders) on Wall Street miss the financial bubble?

Perhaps it had something to do with a red ten of spades.

This teaser comes from the most recent entry in Jonah Lehrer‘s blog, The Frontal Cortex. I often find myself disagreeing with Lehrer, and just as often agreeing. But there’s no question that he provides thoughtful, provocative commentary on neuroscience and its implications, which stretch from Wall Street, to the benefits of being middle-aged (if you’re a biologist or a historian), and the value of sunglasses to poker players. And all of that is in just the three most recent posts.

Lehrer has established himself as a force in coverage of neuroscience. In addition to producing frequent updates for the Cortex, he is a contributing editor at Wired and the author of Proust was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide. You might call him a young Malcolm Gladwell. Like Gladwell, he spins and filters new findings until he’s able to extract from them the surprising–and, once Lehrer has pointed them out, obvious–implications of those findings.

His most recent post, on Wall Street reform, suggests that the street missed the bubble because it saw only what it expected to see, not the unexpected thing that was actually happening. Like subjects in an experiment that Lehrer recounts, they were unable to spot the red ten of spades, because we all know such a thing cannot exist.

I take issue with Lehrer’s conclusion, that the success of Wall Street reform will depend not on the particulars of any legislation, but on whether the reform will change expectations and preconceptions, allowing the denizens of the street to see what’s happening, not what they expect to happen.

Or, as I read elsewhere yesterday, they should recognize that anything that happens must be possible.

I would suggest that the particulars of reform do matter; whether derivatives are traded in public or not is, I think, a big deal. But I allow that Lehrer is trying to make a point. And he gave me plenty to think about.

- Paul Raeburn

I was scanning my RSS feeds this morning, when I decided to look at Scienceblog.com, which had a potentially interesting story on the use of genetic tests to improve the outcome for people with asthma and for newborns at risk of returning to the hospital shortly after release.

By the second or third graf of the unbylined Scienceblog.com story, I suspected I was reading a press release. A quick search located the press release from Children’s Mercy Hospitals and Clinics in Kansas City. And indeed, the story and the release appear to be identical.

If you skip to the bottom of the home page at scienceblog.com, you’ll see that no subterfuge was involved. “Science Blog was started in August 2002. It lives, breathes and eats press releases from research organizations around the globe,” says the language under “About Us.” Unfortunately, on my Macbook I had to slip down six screens to find that. It should be prominentaly located, and it’s not. The top of the home page says “science news straight from the source,” which is, I suppose, what scienceblog.com would point to if it wanted to argue that it was providing full disclosure.

I suspect, nevertheless, that some readers will be confused, thinking they are reading stories, rather than press releases. This is the kind of thing that gives online news a bad rap. If we want to establish legitimate news sites online to replace disappearing newspapers and magazines, we need to be clear about what’s news and what’s public relations.

- Paul Raeburn

On Monday, 16 food companies said they would cut the amount of sodium in their food as part of a national campaign to reduce American’s intake of salt, eliminating thousands of deaths and saving billions of dollars.

Important, if true. Sadly, the announcement provoked a torrent of uncritical stories that could easily have been written by the companies themselves.

The AP story by Karen Matthews lets the PR chief of Mars Foods get away with this one:

Mark Broadhurst, director of corporate affairs for Mars Foods, said the company would cut the salt in its Uncle Ben’s flavored rice products by 25 percent over five years.

“When it comes to reducing sodium, if you can make it here you can make it anywhere,” Broadhurst said.

That doesn’t even track. If you can make “reducing salt” here, you can make “reducing salt” anywhere? What does that mean? Uncle Ben’s is so high in sodium and so recalcitrant about reducing it that if those guys can do it, anybody can?

Besides, we have no idea how much of a reduction that is. From a zillion milligrams to 75 percent of a zillion, perhaps. Nor do we get an explanation of why that will take five years. Somewhere in some factory, salt is pouring down a chute into a rice mix. One would think that Uncle Ben’s could reduce the amount of salt sliding down the chute by 25 percent or 50 percent this afternoon.

But what the heck; it’s nice PR for Mars Foods.

The AP helpfully reports that health organizations recommend a daily allowance of 1,500 to 2,400 milligrams of sodium per day for healthy adults. How much will the Uncle Ben’s five-year plan remove from a consumer’s intake?

The Reuters business story by Basil Katz and a cast of thousands (the 600-word story credits two other reporters and two editors; that’s a little more than 100 words per person, total) gives us the figures: Uncle Ben’s will reduce sodium content in its flavored rice from 800 milligrams per serving to 600. But, it added, “most companies would not discuss what particular products would change and by how much.”

Katz & Company report that “cutting salt intake by nearly 10 percent could prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks and strokes over several decades and save the United States $32 billion in healthcare costs.”

Which is interesting, because the AP quotes the New York City health commissioner as saying “If we reduced our sodium intake to recommended levels, we would prevent 44,000 to 92,000 deaths per year in the United States and save $10 billion to $24 billion in health care costs per year.”

Or, to summarize: Cutting salt by some amount could save 44,000 to hundreds of thousands of lives and $10 billion to $32 billion. That sounds like the kind of math that got Goldman Sachs into mortgage trouble. Does anybody have a real number?

This voluntary salt-reduction initiative is a project of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, so I thought it might be interesting to see how the new Bloomberg Businessweek covered the story.

It didn’t. Its website used a Health Day blurb, which in turn quoted the AP.

Also, nobody seemed to notice that just within the past few days, the FDA said it was considering regulating sodium, and the National Academy of Sciences released a report on the hazards of sodium in the diet. Might have been nice to include a graf mentioning those recent related developments. A Google search of “national academy,” FDA, and Bloomberg turned up nothing that mentioned the related developments.

And reporters didn’t even need Google; the two other developments were included in the press release. Sheesh.

Reporters might have turned to authorities who know more than Mayor Bloomberg about the effects of sodium on the body. Google directed me to a story on cardiobrief.org that mentioned a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine with links to sources. It also included a mention of a critic who thinks reducing sodium might not be warranted; there’s an interesting thought.

But I didn’t find any of this in the coverage. I write these posts in a couple of hours or so, and that’s often all the time I need to find a lot of relevant information that escapes the coverage, as in this case.

It’s not because I’m smarter. It’s because I Google a little background. The five reporters and editors on the Reuters piece didn’t have time for that?

Grist: The New York City press release.

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The biggest terrestrial telescope will be built in Chile instead of Spain, as everybody expected. Chilean press celebrates the decision to bring the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) to Atacama Desert. Spanish one says that its government didn’t fight enough for its candidacy. An outstanding story in Público revealing data obtained directly form the technical report says that the Chilean victory was solid in all fronts: better visibility, more observation days, less dew, and cheaper cost. In Chile the best reporting is from La Nación, in a story that already discusses the next steps and explains that Spain offered more funding but Chile better conditions for doing science. Chile won. Can you imagine how good it would be if all political decisions were taken following these criteria?

Se veía venir que el Observatorio Europeo Austral se decantaría por la opción Chilena frente a la Española para construir el que será el mayor telescopio del mundo. Los periódicos chilenos se congratulan, y los españoles reflejan las acusaciones de pasividad al gobierno. Poca diversidad en las notas, excepto una que sobresale en calidad a todas las demás: En Público (Esp), Nuño Domínguez: “España se queda sin supertelescopio”. Ha tenido acceso al informe técnico y no deja lugar a dudas en la “victoria por goleada” (como él mismo califica) de los cielos chilenos sobre los canarios. Más visibilidad (73% de noches despejadas en Armazones frente al 57% de La Palma). Mejor condiciones de observación (89% de noches descubiertas en Armazones vs al 72% de La Palma), 99% libre de rocío frente a 87%, y 25 millones de euros más barato sería construir en Chile. De hecho, según Nuño el estudio concluía que la opción española “no cumplía ni los mínimos para que el telescopio pudiese ubicarse allí”, y califica de “no recomendable” a la opción de La Palma.

Viendo estos datos, no sabemos qué podría haber hecho el gobierno español para conseguir ubicar el telescopio en Las Canarias, pero “pasividad” es de lo que se quejan notas como la de ABC: “España se queda sin telescopio gigante”, que además de las críticas vertidas por el PP también describe muy bien los detalles específicos del telescopio. Más sencillita es la nota de El País por Malén Ruíz de Elvira “El telescopio gigante europeo se construirá en Chile”, en que anuncia la intención del gobierno español de investigar porqué los datos de la ESO no coinciden con los del Instituto Astrofísico de Canarias. Explica también que fuentes del PP desconfían del ESO por considerarlo “un grupo de presión con intereses económicos en Chile”. Suena a mal perder… Muy parecida la nota de El Mundo: “Chile gana a España la batalla por albergar el mayor telescopio”.

Los periódicos Chilenos celebraron la decisión con unas primeras notas no firmadas de La Nación: “Telescopio E-ELT: Cancillería celebra “enorme salto” para Chile”, El Mercurio: “Chile finalmente albergará el telescopio más grande del mundo” y La Tercera: “Chile concentrará la mayor cantidad de grandes telescopios del mundo”. Pero horas después, en La Nación apareció un excelente texto de Cristina Espinoza: “Chile tendrá los ojos del mundo“, explicando ya cómo será el telescopio, su proceso de construcción, y el tiempo que podrá ser utilizado por astrofísicos chilenos. Respecto a la decisión del ESO, la nota dice que “no les sorprende, pues los informes previos ya eran muy favorables a Chile”, y que mientras la baza de España fue económica, la de Chile era calidad de los terrenos y buenas condiciones para la ciencia. Ganó Chile. ¿Os imagináis que todas las decisiones políticas se tomaran siguiendo estos criterios? quizás el mundo funcionaría un poquito mejor.

Tiene toda la pinta de ser una decisión tan contundente que el tema queda zanjado hasta 2018 que el E-ETL empiece a operar.

- Pere Estupinyà

A lot of us probably felt the way most physicists did when CBS announced it would have a sit com on extravagantly nerdy young male physicists and their neighbor, a good looking and physics-impaired young, female, blond um…babe.  Oh gosh, cliches, gobbledy gook masquerading as scientific conversation, and make-fun-of-the-dork idiocies, here we come. That, roughly, is how they felt in Dennis Overbye‘s telling. He catches us up, three years later, on how The Big Bang Theory is doing with the crowd that actually knows and includes and appreciates a lot of successful, full-on nerds. Answer – some still hate it, but scads of others have come around. They even compete to get guest spots on the program. It’s a hit. It turns out to be a clever appreciation of the nerd and the nerd’s important place among us. Even the background equations on the programs blackboards, it says here, tend to be sensible. And who’d a thought we’d get such a fine take on popular middle-brow entertainment by reading Science Times? Truly a brilliant choice, whether editors’ or Overbye’s or both, to do this.

Other headlines of note:

• Carl Zimmer – The Search for Genes Leads to Unexpected Places ; The guy is amazing. Time and again the prolific Zimmer makes a sweeping story look easy by making the topic go down smooth, yet while making it a BIG topic. This is about deep homology – the discovery not only that many genes date from the base of the bush of life, but whole suites of clearly-related genes continue soldiering on in formation billions of years after they first joined ranks, often doing entirely different things.
• Erik Olsen : Protected Reef Offers Model for Conservation ; Want to know one reason it’s good to keep lots of sharks in the sea? They eat barracudas, preventing those middle-weight carnivores from stripping reefs of the like of parrotfish – and without parrot fish algae could overwhelm the reef. I think that’s a trophic cascade. Olsen went to Belize to visit a huge, protected marine area, a model for what could happen in key spots all around the world.

Lots more in Whole Science Section ;

And a good one we missed last week, on the NYTimes’s Greenwire picked up from the Environment and Energy Daily’s service.

• Paul Voosen – Future of CO2 Storage May Be Etched in German Sandstone ; A close inspection of a research project that is putting a small amount of CO2 in a geologic formation a third of a mile under a hamlet named Ketzin – and then studying the bejabbers out of what happens. Does it stay put, migrate, form minerals that will be safe for aeons, or what. The models say it should work – but this project is trying to find out what really happens. So far, it appears, so good. Stakes are high – as he writes, “Politicians and the coal industry have placed their hopes – and their ‘clean coal’ rhetoric” on sequestration, a technology more respected in the abstract than in the practice.

- Charlie Petit

First the news, and then the problem.

Several outlets today carry word from researchers in Japan, Australia and elsewhere that they have charted in detail a previously suspected arm of, and take your pick among these terms, the  deep water overturning thermohaline global conveyor belt. It’s the primary driver of oceanic currents, with cold water sinking near the poles, rising again elsewhere, warming up, and generally pushing things like the Gulf Stream while distributing oxygen, salinity, and heat. There is real news here – such as that this is the fastest moving current yet found in the Southern Hemisphere, moving along at 700 meters+ per hour and carrying 3- million cubic meters of water per second. That, somebody calculates, is about 40 times the flow of the Amazon River.

Ahem. One does not get to the top tier of news outlets by rewriting other people’s version of things. The Tracker has looked askance before at the press release-rewriting factory that calls itself ANI, or Asian News International. It provides extensive copy to south Asian agencies including in this case, The Daily Hindu where its antarctic current rendition appears. Good story – but it’s hardly from ANI that the merits arise. Over at Nature News, one finds entire passages that ANI has lifted from an account of the research by Richard A. Lovett. This goes a step beyond merely pilfering a press release without more than mild rewrite. Nature News is the house news outlet for Nature, and the research ran in Nature Geosciences released yesterday. So it’s not a fully independent agency. But, like its counterpart ScienceNOW at AAAS, it is in science writing a well-regarded and quasi-autonomous outlet, somewhere in the limbo between freestanding wire services or newspapers and press agentry. Why cannot ANI, with its vast readership, a DC bureau, and more, stand up ethically straight and either report the news with a fresh chewing, or plainly tell readers where it found it pre-digested? Nature Publishing provides access to the text of  Lovett’s story “to Everyone,” but it also says “all rights reserved.” It occurs that it might do ANI and its tightly-leashed reporters good to get a letter from lawyers at Nature Publishing urging that ANI at least leave the Nature label on anything it slaps on its website and forwards to its clients. Maybe Nature Publishing doesn’t much care. A mystery, it is.

As I say, other outlets picked this up. The first place I noticed the news gets top billing on this list.

More Stories:

• Reuters -David Fogarty: Scientists uncover deep ocean current near Antarctica ; This one leads on the calibration of climate change as the discovery’s primary importance. That seems an overdone angle these days – attaching all things involved in global circulation first and foremost to the perils of greenhouse warming. It relates, but it gets tiresome to see it stressed for everything. Reuters is not alone is embracing the angle.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: Mighty ocean current plays vital climate role ;  Bridie Smith: Deep-sea discovery ; One is confident that Deborah and Bridie are different Smiths. Why each has the tale in the same paper is unclear.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: Huge ocean current found circling Antarctica ;

Grist for the Mill: CSIRO Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Enthusiastic parents normally report every single step in their babies’ life: “look! Johnny has grown a new tooth!” is fine for parents, but the same sort of thing comes from a reporter writing a story about the first antimatter particles created by LHC. “They prove Einstein’s relativity!” — as though nobody had ever created antimatter before… In Mexico, a scientist has found a compound from agave that can protect rats from diabetes and osteoporosis. She says that the compound is destroyed while the process of brewing tequila, but who cares… what’s the title of the story? Of course: “Tequila might cure”. If this stresses you, don’t worry: follow the advice of a story in Perú and eat carrots, fish, chard, chocolate, or pretzels, and they will help you to stay calmer. I don’t know why the Spanish lang. tracker is so sarcastic today… maybe he was exhausted after reading so many stories repeating Hawking’s fears of aliens repeating the colonization of the Americas. In the next post we will again highlight good examples of science journalism in LA, and we will discuss the reactions to the world’s biggest telescope going to Chilean Atacama desert instead of Spain. Ah! By the way… although astrophysics were so excited (and their happiness spread to the science writers) the images of the sun released last week were not so spectacular at all…

Quizás porque es lunes, quizás por leer tanto artículo sobre el miedo a los extraterrestres de Hawkins, o quizás por los problemas matutinos con la conexión a Internet, el tracker se sentía quisquilloso hoy durante su repaso a las noticias científicas. Hay notas buenas, como siempre, pero también encontramos algunas que merece la pena comentar constructivamente.

El Universal (México) titulaba “Mexicanos descubren tequila curativo” un artículo sobre los beneficios de los fructanos del agave que termina diciendo “en la elaboración del tequila esas sustancias son transformadas, por lo que no tienen efectos benéficos”. Entonces… ¿por qué inducir al lector que tomar tequila podría tener algún beneficio contra la obesidad, la diabetes y la osteoporosis? Aunque el cuerpo de la nota está muy bien, quizás el titular de Milenio en la sencillita pieza de Jorge Hernández: “Científicos descubren que el agave reduce obesidad, diabetes y osteoporosis”, es –todavía exagerado- pero más acertado. Intrigados nos tienen en explicar, aunque sea en dos líneas, cómo la reducción de apetito por el fructano previene la osteoporosis. Sin duda, algún mecanismo habrá propuesto la investigadora. No estaría mal incluirlo.

También cansino nos resultan los típicos artículos “los 10 alimentos que reducen el estrés” como el que aparece hoy en El Comercio (Perú) en portada de la edición electrónica. Esto es más propio de la sección de cotilleo o humor que de la de salud. Si estáis estresados, ya lo sabéis: podéis tratar vuestro malestar con zanahorias, pescado graso, yogurt chocolate, o pretzels… Pero que sean de trigo entero! Porque si no no te curarán el estrés.

En ABC (España) Neoteo dice que “La «máquina de Dios» logra otro éxito y crea su primera partícula de antimateria”. Parece el típico: “Mira! a Enriquito ya le ha salido un diente!”. Antimateria hace décadas que se está produciendo, y sólo falta que ahora esta nota nos diga que “esto confirma la teoría de relativiodad de Eintein”. Qué condescendientes somos con el LHC… y los millones que costó su reparación tras la chapuza. De eso informamos poco.

Sobre el consejo de Hawking de no buscar vida inteligente por el Universo porque podrían venir a  quedarse con nuestros recursos, haremos lo mismo que la mayoría de periodistas científicos que dejaron la noticia en manos de las agencias: ignorarlo.

Continuaremos destacando las buenas notas, y mañana analizaremos en detalle las reacciones a la concesión del telescopio E-ELT a Chile en lugar de España, pero para terminar con el post sarcástico… por mucho que los astrofísicos flipen con lo que serán capaces de hacer con el nuevo telescopio solar de la NASA, seamos sinceros: las imágenes que nos ofrecieron la semana pasada –aunque algunos no lo hayamos querido ver- tampoco eran tan espectaculares que digamos.

- Pere Estupinyà

In The Chronicle, environmental writer and former staffer Jane Kay takes readers into the migratory life of the gray whale – a species well known and popular in California. Its annual migrations hug the coast between from north of the Bering Strait to their Baja California breeding lagoons in Mexico. This gives Kay, who wrote the piece for DailyClimate.org, entry into the broader topic of the rapidly shifting ecosystem in the Arctic where the whales do virtually all their eating.

Kay, in her years at the Chron, elicited frequently from me some unhappy remarks. It appeared to me that she treated all oil spills, all pesticide contaminations, all drinking water pollutions, all carcinogens released into the wild or into people’s air, water, or food, as equal disasters. This whale story, however, does not raise those hackles. It is nuanced with maybes and other caveats. It’s a sensible look at a well-known creature as Exhibit A in an enormous and disturbing question. Can iconic arctic animals make it in anywhere near their current numbers through the century, and beyond?

It says here something I had not heard before: gray whales that usually eat crustaceans, octopi, and most anything else in the continental shelf’s sediments are now doing some standard, baleen-whale filter feeding for krill and such in the open sea. That’s interesting. I’d thought the only way they can eat is to flop on their sides, scoop muck from the bottom, and spit out the sand while trapping edible (and sometimes wriggling) goodies. She reports however that as sea ice retreats to deep water, the nutrients that used to sink from its edge (where life blooms) and nourish benthic animals are no longer keeping the shallows stuffed with their preferred prey.

Good story, if not filled entirely by NEW news. A search finds she is updating a similar story she wrote more than four years ago while still on staff at the Chron. That one notes that the whales were, up to then, migrating farther north into the Chukchi Sea near Barrow, at Alaska’s most poleward tip, to find additional bottom muck full of fat amphipods.

- Charlie Petit