We’ve read a great deal in recent years on tool-using animals, the blurring of the line between the self-proclaimed exceptional and unique species – us of the sapiens persuasion – and everything else, blah blah blah. So what and big deal, an ape sticking a stick in a termite mound or ant hill, who cares?  Then I read at the BBC site a well-composed report from Rebecca Morelle on some new research by people at the University of Auckland. It’s a good story, exceedingly lucid and convincing. But then, and this was the clincher, I looked at the video the researchers made and that BBC has linked to Morelle’s story. You gotta watch a brief ad first. It’s worth the wait.

Those Caledonian crows (and by implication other corvid birds such as ravens, jays,  nutcrackers..) are scary smart. Or, at least, they have a behavior which to our unavoidably anthropocentrically empathic minds looks scary smart.The research is published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

The news is no excloo for BBC, but is the first found in the daily stroll along the trap line.

Other smart Caledonian crow stories:

• ABC Science (Aus) Anna Salleh: Clever crows show innovative behaviour ;

Vaguely related news discovered while rounding this up:

• ABC Science - Ashley Hall: Research casts doubt on brain training ; We may be smart, but we easily dupe ourselves on how to get smarter.

Grist for the Mill:

PRS-B Abstract ; Univ. Auckland New Caledonian crow tool manufacture and use ;

- Charlie Petit

I know, I know – too much Eyjafjallajökull volcano news lately. And some of that already has mentioned that when that one erupts, say geologic sleuthing and historical records, a larger nearby shield volcano named Katla has typically followed along in short order and with larger capacity for mayhem.

The AP now has gotten  another reporter on the case in Iceland – Carlo Piovano yesterday filed a longer examination of a possible one-two punch now underway. He has fresh input from the nation’s volcanologists. It provides more detail than I’d seen all in one place so far. Yesterday we had a post contrasting two stories that offered different, primary reasons that the eruption, which started more than a month ago, went last week from a local affair to a towering ash cloud and costly international pain in the neck. Is it the chemistry of the magma, or the meltwater pouring into its cauldron that powered the ash five miles or more into the sky? Piovano’s piece leans toward the latter.

For further entertainment, ponder the hed that the service put on it: “Threat of new, larger Icelandic eruption looms.” That’s true. And it’s concise. Whether it is also misleading is harder to tell. If something looms at the door, or looms on the horizon like a thunderstorm, it means it might reach us or might not. If one dissects that hed, it’s redundant. Or not. That is, if something bad looms, is that in itself a clear threat? I think so. And if there is a threat, does that have built into it that it looms, making it wasteful of ink to say so explicitly? But the head spins:  if it’s the threat that looms, and therefore is not yet manifestly right here, does that mean it’s not really a threat yet? Maybe so. Is a potential thing the same as the thing? Hmmmm. One could fuss over this all day.

In any case this story says Katla “showed no sign of activity Tuesday, according to scientists who monitor it with seismic sensors, but they were still wary.” Ah, wary. Let’s hope those tiltmeters, gravitometers, seismometers and what-all stay on message.

Meanwhile, as Reuters’s Patrick Lannon reports and many others do too, the eruption for the moment has settled down considerably, planes are in the other, and this is fading rapidly as a science and geology story.

- Charlie Petit

We haven’t seen much lately in the Wall St. Journal from Robert Lee Hotz, who was engaged in some special back-scene projects for the paper. But Lee’s back in byline form today and filing from McMurdo Station, Antarctica. Presumably he’s there right now, maybe not. I’ll find out and amend this accordingly.

(NO sooner filed the email newsletter than THIS JUST IN: Lee is just back, getting the pieces in after his fourth time there since 1987. )

The yarn is a good one and is free of the grandiosity that is so tempting when one is filing from the ends of the Earth. It’s a one-topic news story on Emperor Penguins as examplars for a new step in satellite-empowered natural history. Last year a spate of news stories reported that penguin specialists were excited to discover that satellite pictures clearly show – once one knows what to look for – dark and somewhat pinkish stained regions of ice that betray their rookeries. If satellites had noses maybe they could even smell them from up there (a joke, folks, a joke).  Just counting rookeries was a big step forward in keeping population and distribution charts up to date. The news now is that, with the help of intelligence agencies, far sharper images reaching wildlife biologists show individual penguins (or bigger dots indicating huddled clusters of them).

He explains nicely the ambiguity, even at this new higher res, in telling whether a black pixel is one penguin or a dozen or more crammed together for warmth. One would think calibration of sat images with hand counts of a few selected colonies would narrow the error bar considerably. The Antarctic census is on.

Hotz is primarily a print guy. His multi-media skills are coming along too, as shown by the video that accompanies this story on line. What neither give us is an example of one of the satellite pictures that not only show the stained ice of rookeries but the individual birds. The story has due context. It presents the penguin census as but one example of the new mapping imagery  from the great white south.

- Charlie Petit

Freelancer Guy Gugliotta got the big story in this week’s Science Times, an ode to the Cassini spacecraft and its team of scientists and engineers. It limns the enterprise in a heroic and almost martial manner – especially in his vivid description how in 2017, and 13 years after its arrival at Saturn, the complex mission to Saturn is to end.  The probe, low on fuel, “will die a warrior’s death, diving inside the rings for 22 spectacular orbits on the fringes of Saturn’s atmosphere before plunging into the planet.” That’s bracing, if greatly anthropomorphic on the emotion and courage side – machine’s don’t care, and it’s easy for controllers in their swivel chairs to steer it to such spectacular oblivion. But it works for me.

The basic story is a tribute to the initial phase of the mission and its extensions, a masterpiece of celestial navigation and orbital billiards. Included is a sensational set of diagrams of the entire past and future trajectory, a nested set of zooming loops that look a bit like an  acrobat twirling scores of hula hoops around her waist at once. (Full Diagram hi def).

Also fronting the section is John Tierney‘s For Earth Day, 7 New Rules to Live By. It reflects the fact that Mr. Tierney is well-read and well-informed. And very opinionated. He’s contrarion, probably looks with contempt on anything frankly “liberal,” but on the whole it’s useful. He’s not a contrarion on climate science. But what jars here is a few gratuitious slaps at what, one imagines, he regards as the lefty and dumb tree-hugging sentimentality of many environmentalists of EarthDays past. Those are my words, not his, but why attribute the absence of worry over global warming by organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970 to a conviction that civilization would not last long enough for it to matter? He then lists a bunch of things he figures the enviros of 1970 believed, such as that cancer epidemics, starvation, and nuclear reactor meltdowns were about to knock the industrial world for a loop. Really? Some did believe a lot of that, sure. But the whole lot, all of it all at once? Don’t think so. On balance his list, with perhaps the exception of #5 on green energy, are acceptable for conversation in polite ( including in liberal) company.

Other headlines to note:

• Abigail Zuger, MD: Essay” With AIDS, Time to Get Beyond Blame ; Knowingly exposing people to HIV without telling them still gets exceptionally harsh treatment in many jurisdictions. It’s time, she writes, for an end to such AIDS exceptionalism – while at the same time to not pretend HIV is now a problem only in poor countries. Somewhat surprising is her depiction of modern HIV drugs, when used properly, as “almost infallible” at preventing a death from AIDS. Yet, as she writes, 16,000 Americans die of it every year.
• Gina Kolata: Cancer Fight: Unclear Tests for New Drug ; This one is on A1, not the section. It’s neither a prescriptive, new hope story on what will fix you, or a no hope story on all the things that won’t. It is. after its vignette lede, a more nuanced account of the growing power of some drugs to zero in on the specific variants of cancer that one might have, and the fuzziness of tests and of insurance guidelines and such in making sure the right people get such targeted medication. Bottom line: “no easy answers.”
• Claudia Dreifus: Q&A, A Conversation with Sean Carroll (the physicist) ; Nice mix of observation by the Caltech professor on the nature of time and other heady topics, and the personal (such as how he met that science writer to whom he’s now married) ; I don’t know whether she’s done a Q&Q with Sean Carroll (the biologist). If not, she might as well go for the full set.

As usual, much much more. NYT Science ;

- Charlie Petit

It was a felsic shift! It was a monster phreatic burst! Both? It’s hard to say. Two outlets, each with heft and in rather different quarters of the media, provide contrasting explanations for why Iceland’s middling-to-small volcanic eruption by Eyjafjallajökull volcano went from a plastic, gurgling lava flow to a clastic, plume-hurling ash cloud 30,000+ feet in the air.

Contrast these tales:

• AAAS ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: Iceland’s Volcano Proving Tough to Predict; On Saturday, Kerr reports, Iceland’s volcanologists revealed that the previous two days of violent, airplane-grounding activity followed a shift in the chemistry of the magma. It had become more rich in silica – or more felsic as geochemists put it. Such a shift generally produces more viscous lava that in turn tends to release its dissolved gases reluctantly – and explodes when they overcome the resistance.
• Wall Street Journal – Michio Kaku:  What Next From Iceland’s Volcano? ; Kaku, the well-known science popularizer and theoretical physicist at City Univ. of N.Y.; writes that  “last week the magma found a second pathway to the surface, this time beneath a glacier. When hot magma touched ice, it instantly created a burst of steam and produced glassified silicates… (a) colossal explosion that sent billowing clouds ..” etc. So in this telling, it was what geologists call a phreatic, or steam-powered flash explosion, that caused such headaches for the travel industry.

Kaku’s story goes on to say that the volcano will settle back down to a well-behaved local problem, with flowing lava but nothing rising near the stratosphere like a gigantic gray cauliflower, when it runs out of water (or the magma stops rising).

I’m going with Kerr’s version, but only on hunch. While Kaku is no geochemist, he presumably made some sort of inquiry so I wouldn’t count him out. Kerr didn’t name a specific person as his source, but did cite the Icelandic Meteorological Office. That tips the scale of authority toward a magma chemistry explanation and away from steam as primary driver in my mind. But we’ll see. I still have not seen anybody bore into the details – if any are available – of the general nature of Icelandic eruptions with their mix of hot spot and spreading centers origin to those of other regions. None of this means a fig to airlines that just want it to stop. But many readers in the usual, small share of the public possessed of so-called scientific literacy would eat up a deeper explanation of Eyjawhösidit’s plumbing and source.

One More, Weird Angle Dept:

• Guardian – David Adam: Iceland volcano causes fall in carbon emissions as eruptions grounds aircraft; Hey great – the ash and sulphur won’t cause planetary cooling or change climate much in other ways, but the drop in airplane traffic will cause a small drop in carbon emissions. This approaches the same category of news judgment as caterwauling about environmentalists who take airplanes to conferences and by implication thus, carbon footprint wise, stomp their green credentials into the swamp of hypocrisy. On the other hand, the piece has a welcome note for those scientific illiterates who shout that volcanoes emit more CO2 than does mankind’s industries. It says that the volcano’s CO2 output is far too small to compensate for the savings due to grounded airplanes. That would be a better, more informative lead angle for the piece.

- Charlie Petit

“Number of teeth is a predictor of cardiovascular mortality”, that’s the title of a research paper published in the Journal of Periodontology by Swedish periodontologists (University of Uppsala), adding to some older studies, which found a correlation of periodontitis and cardiovascular disease. (The theory explaining this correlation is, that harmful bacteria involved in periodontitis spread into the blood stream and cause problems there, too.)

Together with some scary pictures of toothless mouths, the study got a decent amount of press in Germany, Austria and Switzerland – despite the fact, that the study had a fundamental flaw: The scientists themselves acknowledged, that they didn’t account for socioeconomic or other risk factors (but smoking) for the development of cardiovascular disease in their cohort group of 7674 patients (629 died, 299 due to cardiovascular disease).

The news was spread via AFP (here), but it didn’t even contain the necessary data: How many of the 299 patients, who died due to cardiovascular defects, had teeth loss? The only information given, was, that people with less than 10 teeth have a seven time higher risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases. A typical correlation, not more.

Nevertheless, the AFP release was picked up without much editing from the online issue of the Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as Die Welt. Like AFP, both mentioned the flaw, but not before the very end of the article. After that the confused reader is left alone with this hint, which makes the whole news questionable: How sound are the statistics, really? Should I worry, because I already lack a few teeth? What about my caps, do they count as teeth or not? If I loose another tooth, how much do I raise my risk to die from a heart attack?

Others, like the Tagesanzeiger (Zurich), Standard (Austria) or , didn’t even mention the flaw.

I cover this here, because I’m too often fed up to the back teeth with texts covering such “news”, because they only raise more questions and make readers worry, unnecessarily. Shouldn’t we first do some (journalistic) research and try to get answers to these questions? Is it really enough to pick up a news release, without any research or editing? In other words: Shouldn’t we judge a little bit more the quality of science and decide (as a service to the reader), whether this news is really worth to be spread?

- Sascha Karberg

When I saw the cover of the May issue of The Atlantic, with the words “Fat Nation” written across a bulging, obese Statue of Liberty, I knew I had to track it. It comes on the heels of an article on Slate entitled “End the War on Fat: It could be making us sicker.” I’d had some objections to that story when I tracked it two weeks ago, and I was sure I’d find the story in The Atlantic wanting, too. As I pointed out in the Slate post, I haven’t been entirely happy with my own coverage of obesity either. It’s tough to get things right.

So I’m surprised and pleased to report that Marc Ambinder (photo), the author of the piece in The Atlantic, comes very close. It’s even more surprising, because I’ve also made the case in previous posts (you can find one recent example here) that reporters who aren’t science writers often come up short when they try to write about science. And Ambinder isn’t a science writer–he’s a political reporter.

Ambinder has written what is, fundamentally, a political piece. He addresses the question of what we can do–if anything–to halt and even reverse the alarming rise in obesity in the United States.

He makes compelling use of statistics to outline the extent of the problem. Ordinarily, I’d argue that the graf I’m about to quote has way too many numbers in it–too many for most readers to grasp. But Ambinder lays them out logical sequence, so even if readers don’t remember the numbers, they get the point. And the numbers add authority to the argument:

In 1960, when President-elect John F. Kennedy fretted about fitness in an essay for Sports Illustrated titled “The Soft American,” roughly 45 percent of adults were considered overweight, including 13 percent who were counted as obese; for younger Americans, ages 6 to 17, the rate was 4 percent. Obesity rates remained relatively stable for the next 20 years, but then, from 1980 to 2000, they doubled. In 2001, the U.S. surgeon general announced that obesity had reached “epidemic” proportions. Seven years later, as the obesity rate continued to rise, 68 percent of American adults were overweight, and 34 percent were obese; roughly one in three children and adolescents was overweight, and nearly one in five was obese. Americans now consume 2,700 calories a day, about 500 calories more than 40 years ago. In 2010, we still rank as the world’s fattest developed nation, with an obesity rate more than double that of many European nations.

In a few lines, Ambinder convinces us that we do indeed have an epidemic of obesity in this country, that it’s getting worse, and that there is no end in sight. And he notes that scientific understanding of obesity is central to ending the epidemic. “If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale ‘willpower versus the food-industrial complex’ debate. We need to understand what causes obesity, and what can really address it,” he writes. Excellent. Here is one political reporter who is not going to skip over the science.

He does a good job of recapping the role of evolution, which equipped us to conserve scarce calories in the form of body fat, and how contemporary abundance perverts that. He tells us about the “set-point” theory of obesity, and a newer riff on that, the “settling-point” theory. His breezy summary of the possible causes of obesity even includes a mention of the composition of the bacteria in our guts, a subtlety that cursory reporting might have missed.

And he includes nice, suggestive tidbits that he didn’t need, but which enliven the piece. Here are a couple:

When a group of Italian economists recently divided the number of calories consumed per day by the amount of time spent preparing food, they found that Americans consumed 42 percent more calories per minute of food-prep time than Europeans.

And:

Brian Wansink of Cornell University and Collin Payne of New Mexico State University reviewed all seven editions of The Joy of Cooking and found that, since 1936, the calorie counts for one serving of 17 out of the 18 recipes that have been continuously published—including macaroni and cheese, beef stroganoff, and apple pie—have increased by 63 percent.

And he frames the story with a personal touch: A year before writing the article, he’d had bariatric surgery, and now weighs 150 pounds, down from 235. (That’s him before and after, above.) He’s careful, however, not to suggest that such stomach reduction surgery can end the epidemic. To do it for the 1 million most obese Americans would cost some $30 billion. “I was very privileged, and very lucky,” he writes at the conclusion of his piece. “I had the resources to conquer obesity and all its attendant miseries with major surgery—a choice that we, collectively, should ensure that the adults of tomorrow don’t have to make.”

In only one place does he slightly mis-represent the debate over obesity. Early in the piece, he observes that the debate is currently a stalemate: “On one side are the proponents of individual responsibility, who believe that fat people suffer from a surplus of self-indulgence and a shortage of willpower. On the other are people who believe that Americans are getting fatter because of powerful environmental factors like cheap corn, fast food, and unscrupulous advertising.” He neglects to mention a third side, so to speak: those who believe that some people are more disposed to become obese than others. But he does acknowledge the importance of genetics elsewhere, so this is a minor complaint.

In sum, this is one of the clearest and most accurate pieces on obesity I’ve seen. Nice work.

- Paul Raeburn

Critics of science journalism have long decried our propensity to write “gee whiz” stories. As if people do science to discover the boring.

Comes now, via a news release (see Grist below), a team of researchers who say they have found a matted tangle of filamentous bacteria lying on the sea floor off Chile and Peru and covering an area as big as Greece, which is 151,000 square miles. (To the right is a micrograph of a thin slice of a mat sample.)

It’s cold, dark and devoid of oxygen down there, but when scientists from the International Census of Marine Microbes sent a camera down on a remotely controlled submersible, they were stunned. Resting on the bottom was “a big carpet of white grass with filaments sticking out and waving in the water,” The Independent‘s Steve Connor quoted a member of the expedition. Analysis of samples revealed the mat was made of bacteria that use hydrogen sulfide and nitrates to get energy, much like microbes on hydrothermal vents.

The Nature News Web site wraps the gee-whiz angle into a story about the marine census’s discovery of microbial species diversity orders of magnitude beyond what had been estimated. Jane Qiu writes that when the project began in 2003, some 6,000 marine microbes were known and microbiologists predicted the true figure could be as much as 600,000. The census is now likely to pass that number and the new estimate is that there could be 20 million kinds of microbial critters at sea. Maybe more.

The Australian ABC’s Anna Salleh takes the gee whiz angle and adds another that the Tracker could not confirm from any other news outlet–that the bacteria were gargantuan, ranging in size from 2 to 7 centimeters in length. She calls them Goliath bacteria.

Among the many claims emerging from the project that merit the GW reaction is that the biomass of all the microbes in the oceans is equivalent to that of 35 African elephants for every human being on Earth. That’s from Margaret Munro of the CanWest news service as published in the Vancouver Sun

Katherine Harmon in Scientific American‘s Observations blog notes that the census has upped the estimate of how many microbes drift in a liter of seawater from 100,000 to more than a billion.

AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid skips the gee-whiz potential and ledes with a comparison of the sea census to the U.S. Census. “Just try to get them [the bugs] to mail back a form,” he writes.

Grist:

The news release from the Census of Marine Life, affiliated with the microbial census project. It has links to more images and to video.

-Boyce Rensberger

After listening to President Obama’s lay out of space strategy in Florida last Thursday and filing on that, the AP‘s Seth Borenstein made a few additional calls and asked around the news room further, boring into its most intriguing aspect – missions well beyond the Moon, not nearly to Mars, but far enough away for human crews to rendezvous with an asteroid or two. Such voyages were among the alternatives suggested in the Augustine Panel’s report last year, the same report that presaged the White House’s abandonment of the Constellation Program to get astronauts back and forth to the space station, to the Moon, and on to Mars entirely aboard government-issue rockets. Now they are policy. Borenstein was smart to report and write what he could on this, immediately.

The story, a sidebar for the overall NASA strategy leader, didn’t hit the wire till late Friday.It is still popping up on the updated lists of fresh stories from AP. Its hed: Obama’s asteroid goal: tougher, riskier than moon. It quotes NASA administrator Charles Bolden saying “It’s really the hardest thing we can do.” Startling to me:  it says here that while Apollo 11 in 1969 took eight days to get to the moon and back,  a round trip asteroid mission might well take more than six months. And while the scarce gravity of an asteroid makes the rocket propellant problem easier – no big gravity well to fight on touchdown and takeoff – it also will deeply complicate the business of standing on the thing without floating away. But it would be good practice for visiting libration points and other mid-space locales.

This  story is just the thing to get the conversation started. The mission is the prime varnish to counter the Constellation mission’s demise with prospects for something more in keeping with the sheer cleverness and heroism seen in Apollo. It also is hardly gospel. Is an asteroid really a harder thing to do?  At the popular and respected Bad Astronomy blog, Phil Plait declares without too much elaboration, that the asteroid mission is both exciting and “is actually easier in many ways.” Plait in a followup post also has a pithy comment or two for those who commented on his post, and on a Congressman’s fixations on the new strategy.

We’ll soon enough learn more about this mission. It is at the heart of the new strategy’s effort to be pioneering and daring and not an abandonment of NASA’s heritage in human spaceflight. Also due is more media inspection of the administration’s apparent about face just before Obama’s speech last week. Going in, it appeared that he really did intend a pause, and perhaps halt, in the space agency’s devotion to people in space suits. Now we have a hurry-up mission to an asteroid aboard rockets neither NASA nor private industry has publicly sketched out. A few reporters, one hopes, are already digging.

Pic: The recently deceased Constellation-Ares-Orion program had a notion to visit an asteroid. Pic from a good blog at a site called Hyperbola on that.

- Charlie Petit

USA Today has out, under the byline of Jeff DeLong a lively account of the hard feelings and frustrations among some wildlife agencies, conservation organizations, and hunters’ groups as western US deer and elk populations fall. Is it the coyotes and lions taking them down, or loss of habitat and good grazing and browsing, drought, all of the above? And what to do in any case?

Two things to note. First, the reporting seems to have a sound basis in stats – with some surprising numbers here on the decrease in the sizes of herds, mostly of mule deer, in western states over recent years. The second is that USA Today notes that author DeLong writes this for them, but mostly he writes for the Reno Gazette Journal.

Naturally I went to the Reno paper’s website to get the news as it first appeared there. It turns out DeLong has been on the case for some time reporting various aspects in separate stories written over the last year or so. Here’s the link to the search routine that lists them, among others.

Then the snag. The Gazette Journal has a pay-to-play wall on the whole lot. One can see a short snip off the top of each one free, but must pay a more-than-trivial fee to read more. It’s too bad a micropayment system has not been developed. I’d look at them for 25 or maybe even 50 cents each, but not several bucks. I could expense it, but a habit of doing that and my overseers at the MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellowships would surely yelp.

One wishes the paper well in seeking to make money off news stories it spent of lot of money putting together. The industry needs somebody to lead the way to a decent way to stay in business. It cuts off the news aggregators who rip off their content (which, to be honest, they ARE giving away free), sell ads at their own sites, and help to run the US mainstream media into the ground. But if the Gazette Journal and other papers doing likewise succeed, I have a problem. Outfits like the Knight Tracker will need some sort of special deal if we are to continue providing a service to the industry itself, and to our colleagues among reporters and editors. I hope we get a concession of some sort – but would rather be unable to affordably link to news stories because their publishers are making money off them., than because there are no such stories due to their publishers having gone out of business.

Somehow in my mind the newspapering dilemma resonates with the hunters demands that coyotes, catamounts, and wolves get taken out so that they can shoot deer more easily. It’s all about wanting things easy. I’d like the news free for the critiquing. They’d like the fields and woodland edges full of relatively unskittish deer. Neither is very sporting or mindful of the real goal – to gain pleasure and pride while exploiting something healthy.

If I were a hunter, and I have nothing against hunting non-endangered species, I’d like it to think it is a nobler pastime if it is a real and difficult sport. The old time mountain men and robust pioneers feeding venison to their families weren’t the only predators out there. Surely it’s better and more prideful to bag a deer when the hunting requires stalking and fieldsmanship made tougher by rivals armed with tooth and claw – the deer would be scarcer and warier. Or else the trophy hunter could go to one of those exotic game ranches where, for a handsome fee, the creatures are practically lined up for blasting.

Other pertinent, crossways USA Today news:

• Janice Lloyd (Dec. 15, 2009) Gray wolf population declining in Yellowstone ; Ergo, it’s not as though the predators are having an easy time of it. Interesting tidbit in this – Yellowstone’s remaining elk, in some cases, are fighting back against the wolves like crazy. A few years ago, I gather, they were saps. Which head would you rather imagine over the mantle – a stealthy, fierce wolf fighter, or a meat wuss?

- Charlie Petit

I’d like to think for sure that I’d say “you bet” if two volcano scientists in Iceland told me to follow along or maybe just hop into their little SUV as they set off to see how far they could get into the fresh, hot, gray, darned-near pyroclastic cloud of gritty crud hanging like an airborne tsunami from above. Sounds great, wotta  story .. but just look at that thing.

NPR’s Joe Palca did not, or so it appears, hesitate a bit. He took the pictures to prove it.

• NPR – Joe Palca: Inside the Plume, A Volcano Tells Its Secrets ; This is his print story, filed after he took the jaunt into the plume. Click on it to see some more, dramatic photos.
• NPR – Joe Palca : On the Scene, At the Volcano; (Audio) Ran Saturday as an All Things Considered conversation between ATC host Guy Raz and Palca, while the latter sat under clear blue skies overhead and, on one horizon, a monstrous dark gray head of cauliflower, as he put it, writhed its way into the sky from the head of a melting glacier while crowned with wreaths of white condensed steam.

Palca gets a salute for an on-scene report of dramatic and rather daring science in action. What he does not get, mainly because there is little to get yet, is anything definitive from the many scientists watching ice-wrapped volcano Eyjafjalljokull volcano erupt. How long will it last? Might it get worse, stop soon, or what? What’s the situation in the magma chamber? What the scientists are saying to him and other reporters, Palca tells us in two words: “Not much.”

Most news on the volcano is, quite naturally, on the havoc its ash cloud is wreaking on aviation in the North Atlantic and across Europe. Palca is among reporters trying to find out how Iceland is doing. That place is gloomy for more reasons than the ash in the sky. First their banks go belly up and now, as one joke goes, they are scattering their ashes.

By jumping among various major media stories it is now possible to gather an idea what geologically is going on. This post may get some updates as the trawl continues. Tips welcome via the “suggest stories” function.

Other stories from Iceland:

• AP: Carlo Piovano: Iceland’s farmers try to save herds from toxic ash;
• Telegraph (UK) Philip Sherwell: Iceland volcano, an Eyeful of Eyjafjalljökull ; He gets a helicopter trip over a riverbed studded with ice chunks blasted from the glacier. No evidence yet that Volcano Eyja-etc. is pushing its larger neighbor volcano, Katla, toward activity. But Eyja-yadayadayada is doing plenty on its own.
• Reuters – Omar Valdimarsson: Volcanic Ash Relentless as Tremors Rock Iceland – Focus is on how things are on the island – and this (as do several sites) features a wide-ranging photo gallery, including this Reuters shot of lightning near the eruptive vent).

Other updates on the volcanic prospects for further airline disruption or clear skies over Europe as well as Iceland:

• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise, Dan Vergano, Doyle Rice: Icelandic volcano: The impact is broad, but could be worse ; Yet another way to pronounce Eyjafjallajökull (credited to AP) is here, along with a good dash of volcanology. It’s hardly news one can use as an air traveler but I’d like to know more about why this one is so explosive. It’s a spreading center – which I’d thought tends to mean runny, basaltic, or effusive flows as this piece puts it. And from the examples of Pinatubo and St. Helens, an impression was that subduction zone belchers high in sticky dacite and andesite are the typical exploders. This story hints the ice cover and phreatic or steam explosions are the reason for Eyja-whatever’s pop. Such explanation may be too far down into the technical arcana category for this story but eventually more such detail would be welcome.
• Reuters – Victoria Gill: Airlines condemn “European mess” ; Another broad roundup, including more on how ash fouls a jet engine, plus another suggestion it’s the meltwater and not the magma itself that’s blasting the ash tens of thousands of feet into the sky.
• Times (UK) Hannah Devlin - Ash plume shows first signs of dying down ; On line report, and resourceful. Devlin gets screen shots from an Icelandic communicaition utility’s webcam of the volcano – illustrating that what earlier was a vertical, Plinean column is now blowing esssentially sideways from the vents – thus and one hopes starving the high altitude ash clouds of fresh supply.
• Reuters : Iceland volcano sends new tremors, lower ash cloud ; Short report, in line with but different observations from the previous bullet from Devlin at the Times.

- Charlie Petit

Ambitions to build in north central Oregon the largest American wind farm yet are on hold. The US Air Force fears its whirling turbine blades will fill some of their radar’s with meaningless chaff.

The news broke earlier this week in Pacific Northwest press, where its promise of hundreds of construction jobs starting May 1 had stirred local excitement. However, as the Portland Oregonian‘s Scott Learn reported, the Federal Aviation Administration has, with backing from the USAF, triggered a halt. Local Senators are doing their best to get it going again. And, some say and Learn reports, radar spoofing fears could crimp wind energy plans in other regions too. In today’s edition, Learn further reports that the state’s senators might put holds on selected, Obama administration nominees for Pentagon jobs unless they get a green light for the long-planned wind power installation.

The Associated Press quickly picked the news up. It went further national this morning in the Washington Post where Juliet Eilperin calls it a clash between national defense and government plans to foster alternative energy, creat American jobs and combat climate change. The Air Force’s worries, we learn here, could scuttle the project in short order. It construction does not start soon, it says here, the developer could lose a chance at federal subsidies vital to its financing.

A small outlet may best, succinct success in putting the affair in context with wind energy and national security worries generally. At the Colorado Springs Independent, a paper presumably with good contacts in the Air Force, Pam Zubeck reports the basic issue plus info from Congressional testimony and academic literature. She does not mention the troubles for the Oregon plan at all – evidence that it is just one example with potentially many more to come.

- Charlie Petit