The statistics of flu epidemics and pandemics are notoriously difficult to sort out. And despite the often-repeated boilerplate that seasonal flu kills 36,000 Americans each year, nobody really knows how many deaths should be attributed to the bug. It is known that the actual death toll fluctuates widely from year to year.

But that didn’t stop Don Sapatkin, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, from wading in with a 1,300-word story to the effect that the H1N1 virus actually saved lives during the last flu season. His second graf says that last winter “fewer Americans appear to have died of influenza-related causes than in any recent flu season.”

Sapatkin goes further, writing that we had “a winter flu season with virtually no seasonal flu, no pandemic flu, no flu of any kind, at least not yet.” He quotes an infectious disease specialist as saying, “It is very eerie.”

The story goes on to suggest that H1N1 kept seasonal flu strains at bay through a kind of ecological competition for niches in people’s respiratory tracts and that H1N1′s symptoms were mild in most people, not fatal.

It’s a fascinating hypothesis, approached gamely. Sapatkin isn’t the first mainstream journalist to write about this, but he produced the longest analysis the Tracker could find, though it still wasn’t a comprehensive report.

CDC is still saying that although the curve bottomed out months ago, we are not out of the woods, that cases are still being reported in the U.S.  The bar charts above, from the CDC, show reported cases above and deaths below by week, August at the left and April at the right. During winter, the death toll approached 200 a week. The original graph and many others are here.

Moreover a team of researchers at NIH and other institutions insists that H1N1 had a bigger-than-perceived impact because so many of those it killed were young and had more years to lose.

AFP, in an unbylined story, reports that WHO denies its H1N1 alarms were influenced by vaccine makers eyeing profits.

-Boyce Rensberger

The first backwards-orbiting planet–a body that moves around its star in a direction opposite to the star’s rotation–was reported last August. One exception to the rule–no big deal. There could be one oddball way a wandering planet (astute etymologists will spot the redundancy there, but never mind) got captured by a star after that star’s regular solar system formed in the expected way. But now that a sample of 27 exoplanets has been checked, six of them go the wrong way around. That’s one of them passing in front of its star in the picture above, provided by the European Southern Observatory.

The findings were obtained by a team of European researchers working at the Geneva Observatory and reported at a conference in Glasgow.

“The new results really challenge the conventional wisdom that planets should always orbit in the same direction as their star’s spin,” Space.com quotes one scientist in a generically bylined article. That expectation grew out of the belief that planets condense from the same disk of rotating gas and dust that gave rise to the star. Now it looks like fully a quarter of exoplanets formed in some other way.

All the so-called retrograde planets are hot Jupiters, balls of gas at least as big as our Jupiter but orbiting very close to their star.

Thomas H. Maugh II, writing in the Los Angeles Times, quotes an astronomer suggesting that retrograde planets began life far beyond their current starry tether but were flung about from place to place in a kind of “gravitational billiards” that eventually sent them close enough to a star to be captured.

Dan Vergano‘s  post yesterday on USAToday.com notes that if our solar system had captured a hot Jupiter, it could have swept up most of the dust that would have formed an Earth.

Paul Sutherland, writing on Scientific American‘s site, says the astronomers bought some of the lenses for their equipment on eBay.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) All about genes in Latin America today: Just by silencing one gene, Mexican Scientists have induced the first step of asexual reproduction in a plant species that normally reproduces sexually. In Costa Rica, a medical doctor publishes a study that relates the genetic variety of the stomach bacteria Helicobacter with specific polymorphisms of their human hosts, and the high prevalence of gastric cancer of Costa Ricans. An Argentinean reporter has written a great story about the mitochondrial DNA tests that showed that the 40.000 y.o. fossil found in Siberia was not the initially expected Neanderthal. In Chile we follow the crusade of a lady who discovered thanks to a genetic analysis that her father was not the biological one, and is looking genetically for “her origins”. And in Colombia, the curious story of a lizard which females seem to naturally select genes, by having male or female offspring according to the body size of her sperm donor.

En la ronda para destacar notas científicas de carácter local en periódicos en lengua española hoy encontramos una curiosa diversidad de informaciones alrededor del ADN. Emepezamos por El Universal (México) con un muy buen trabajo de Guillermo Cárdenas Guzmán: “Un paso vital hacia la clonación de semillas”. La “noticia” es que un grupo de científicos –entre los que hay mexicanos- han silenciado el gen que expresa una proteína clave en la reproducción de las plantas –la Argonauta 9-, y conseguido que una especie que se reproduce por vía sexual –la Arabidopsis thaliana- haga un primer paso hacia la replicación por clonación (asexual): producir gametos anómalos que contienen todo el conjunto de cromosomas y no sólo la mitad. Explicado de esta manera, pocos lectores pasarían del primer párrafo. Por eso Guillermo no explica la “noticia” hasta mitad del texto, y empieza creando un contexto para que el lector enmarque dicha investigación y asimile lo trascendental que puede llegar a ser. La idea básica es clara: la mayoría de plantas se reproducen sexualmente, pero si en las de cultivos habituales como el maíz pudiéramos imitar a las que se reproducen por clonación generando copias exactas, los agricultores evitarían la pérdida de rasgos deseables como resistencia a pestes o mejor rendimiento. Lo primero en que pensarás será pérdida de biodiversidad; pero los expertos explican que son formas de reproducción compatibles, y sólo se aplicaría en casos concretos para mejorar cultivos. Más información en la nota original. Un aspecto curioso es que esta inducción de asexualidad parece implicar un pasado evolutivo asexual, reprimido posteriormente por la aparición de la reproducción sexual, y que ahora los científicos estás intentando despertar. Seguro que hay más opiniones sobre esto último, y sobre la posible aplicación futura de esta técnica. Para ser completo el artículo los debería haber incluido. Como “revolución” de la agricultura suena un poco exagerado, la verdad; pero ya ha plantado la semilla de la curiosidad sobre la posible modificación de la sexualidad de las plantas.

Más genes: gran historia en La Nación (Costa Rica) de Irene Rodríguez: “Genes juegan rol en incidencia alta de cáncer gástrico en el país”. El cáncer gástrico es muy prevalerte en Costa Rica, y un cirujano local está dispuesto a averiguar porqué. Para ello mira los genes de los costarricenses, pero sobre todo, los de las variantes de la bacteria Helicobacter que habita en sus estómagos. Hay de diferentes tipos, y algunas son más peligrosas que otras. El extenso artículo de Irene explica cómo influye tanto la bacteria como la predisposición genética del propio individuo a la aparición del cáncer gástrico.

ADN mitocondrial en esta historia, y utilizado para analizar los restos de un supuesto neandertal y descubrir que podría tratarse de una especie desconocida. Lo que hicieron científicos alemanes en Siberia, y está explicado magníficamente en el suplemento futuro de Página 12 por Martín Cagliani: “El misterio del homínido X”. Los restos encontrados podrían terminar siendo de un heidelbergensis y convertirse en un descubrimiento menor, pero Martín hace un amplio contexto del hallazgo, y regala un dinámico relato al lector.

Seguimos con la línea genética en el suplemento Tendencias de La Tercera (Chile), donde encontramos una historia que puede ser muy común en los próximos años con el auge de la información genética. La firma S. L y explica la utilización del ADN por parte de una mujer chilena para esclarecer quienes eran sus progenitores. Sin entrar a valorar el dramatismo de la redacción, ni la reacción particular de la protagonista al descubrir -ya a una edad avanzada- que no era hija biológica de su padre, el artículo muestra cómo aquellas personas que sospechan no ser hijos biológicos de sus progenitores pueden recurrir al ADN para comprobarlo, y buscar otros candidatos en caso negativo. Si les hace falta.

Terminamos con una de las originales notas que en El Colombiano acostumbra a ofrecer Ramiro Velásquez, esta vez sobre unas lagartijas que dirigen el sexo de sus hijas en función de las características del macho que las fecunde. La clave está en el tamaño: en esa especie, para los machos es bueno ser grande y para las hembras ser pequeñas. Por tanto, cuando una futura madre es inseminada por un macho de tamaño grande suele tener hijos masculinos, y cuando el padre es pequeño, elige tener descendencia femenina. Suena extraño, y por desgracia, el artículo no incluye el posible mecanismo de cómo se produciría dicha casi mágica selección de genes. Lo guardamos entonces en el apartado “curiosidades”.

- Pere Estupinyà

There is something friendly and cozy about brown dwarfs. They don’t collapse into degenerate white dwarfs, neutron stars, black holes, or blow up into red giants, or go obstreperously nova or, even more unsocial, supernova. They just sit there, glowing warmly for awhile and then cooling off into a cold, dark, peaceful old age as long as no black hole or something like that gobbles them up. Too big to be classed as planets with masses many times that of Jupiter, but too small to light the internal fusion furnaces that would make them stars, they just float along in a limbo of uncertain classification.

So The Tracker thinks it a good idea for the reading public generally to know there has recently been discovered, about ten light years away and thus the closest new “star” found in more than six decades, a brown dwarf newly dubbed UGPS 0722-05.It’s probably pretty old as it is quite cool – apparently the most tepid one ever seen (but still about as hot as a baked potato fresh from the oven). It took a sensitive infrared telescope in Hawaii to get a bead on it.

But only a few specialty outlets have the news. Their readers are mostly hardcore science aficionados, and thus the fraction of the public that will learn of our newly recognized neighbor appears particularly small. More’s the pity. This is the kind of gee-whiz curio that ought to be picked up, short and sweet, by outlets large and small – and that (cue the nostalgic melancholy old-fogey song Those Were the Days) was once a staple back when such publications had room for lots of little, interesting fillers.

Stories:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Newfound neighbor to solar system is a cool slacker ;
• New Scientist – Ken Croswell: ‘Dark sun’ is one of our nearest neighbours ;
• Scientific American (blog) John Matson:Cool brown dwarf may be a newfound neighbor of the sun ; The doubts, he explains, arise from parallax uncertainties. The piece adds another reason to withhold firm judgment – the article is still under review at a journal and so far has only been at the first-look site for unpublished physics-related papers, arXiv.
• Discover via CBS News – Andrew Moseman: Earth’s Newest Neighbor: 10 Light Years Away ‘;

UTTER CONFUSION Dept (or, the kind of news that’s fit to mix up):

At All Headline News, Windsor Genova writes that this brown dwarf has a planet. No other news outlet has the planet. It seems not likely that the brown dwarf has it in truth either. This looks like a case of over-rapid research and fuzzy attention to detail – for it appears to mash up news of the new, nearby brown dwarf with another one, including planet, considerably farther away. The planet that actually is the one that this story this story is just ten light years is,  one feels confident, the same one that at USA Today Dan Vergano described from a different patch of news last week. It, as Vergano writes, is about 450 light years off and around an entirely different brown dwarf.

Grist for the Brown Dwarf Mill:

On UGPS Jo722-05, ArXiv paper ; On the more distant brown dwarf with planet: Penn State U. Press Release ;

Two posts down we mention the week’s Pulitzer Prize haul, including note that at the Milwaukee Sentinel its reporter Dan Egan was a finalist for one of them for his coverage of Asian Carp and other invasive species into the Great Lakes. He’s been covering the topic since 2006 at least, as seen in this series and has kept it up – here’s a more recent one.

Pulitzer week and its sideswipe of the carp issue is excuse enough to shine a light on another story on the Great Lakes and two species of these big fish – bigheads and silvers – that aren’t much fun for anglers and, worse, make life tough for the natives in an American river or lake.

The Chicago Reader, a free weekly newspaper and representative of what one was called the alternative press, last month ran a large package on the incipient, perhaps in-Lake-Michigan already, invasion. Three writers, Ryan Chew, Kari Lyderson, and Mike Sula, did the reporting. While other states are suing Illinois to erect a permanent barrier between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi drainage – perhaps by closing a man-made shipping canal entirely – the package asks pointedly: Is there a chance in hell we can? Reported here, as in Egan’s piece linked above, is the use of DNA to conclude that a fish species has arrived in places where nobody has yet seen it.

And in the lemons and lemonade category, the effort includes writer Sula’s discovery that the fish can, with effort, be made into good eating and already are the basis of a growing fishery and fishmeal export industry. This despite  its dreadfully messy skeleton of pin bones and even some bones that split into a Y-shape – making easy fillets a fantasy – and other practical aspects that add up to a chore for anybody planning to put it on the family table. This culinary angle is more comedy of errors than it presages appearance in very many if any fancy cookbooks. That’s why it’s worth reading.

- Charlie Petit

Leaving aside the ScienceTimes section for the moment, one has to admire the hard edge found on the front page under Elizabeth Rosenthal‘s byline – a piece filed from Denmark on Europe’s happiness with clean, high-temperature and heavily filtered trash and garbage-burning urban powerplants. This contrasts things there with widespread public opposition to such things in the U.S. The subtext that perhaps only I see, but it seems clear enough: Americans are kind of chicken-little stupid. This is, one must add, the flip side of European horror at – and the contrasting shrug among Yanks at – genetically modified organisms or “frankenfoods” on farms. In the latter case, from one perspective, the Euros are the stupidos. Strange, but true.

On to ScienceTimes.

• Henry Fountain : Studying Sea Life for a Glue That Mends People ; What’s the idea, Henry, writing a story on biomimetics without once using the term, on my list of all time prettiest and most evocative in science? Wonderful art, well-reported, interesting detail on how a worm mixes ingredients to make an underwater sandcastle glue. But, one must add, on a topic that has been covered many times and has no particular reason for being reported now. Sure enough, mussels come up. They’re a standard ingredient in underwater glue newswriting, as it the observation that chemists have yet to make something like nature’s adhesives that surgeons can use to fix broken bones – but they’re working on it.
• John Markoff : New Force Behind Agency of Wonder ; On DARPA. Perfect example of how a profile can carry readers into a world that they would not ordinarily visit if the vehicle were a standard news story.
• Denise Grady : In Reporting Symptoms, Don’t Patients Know Best? ; And good luck getting a clear answer from this piece. But it does describe evidence that patients’ complaints and observations about their meds and how they feel don’t get put on medical charts very much. The value of the article may be more subtle – underscoring how non-rigorous is much of the so-called science of clinical medicine (i.e.,  bring on those outcome-based metrics for guiding docs to the best treatment options).

See Also:

• Celia W. Dugger: A Campaign Shows Signs of Progress Against Polio; filed from South Africa, largely about eradication efforts in Nigeria and India. (Dugger also contributed heavily last week to coverage of the newly-found, 2-million year old hominid fossils founds near Johannesburg).

AS always, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Congratulations to all the winners of this year’s Pulitzers, and particularly from our corner of the business salutations to those whose entries pertained to medical, environmental, scientific, or other fact-driven and often conceptually difficult, rigorous aspects of modern society.

Aside from the usual superb performance by individual reporters, the list of winners and finalists is notable for the frequent connection to ProPublica, a nonprofit set up primarily to subsidize and bolster investigative reporting as old line media outlets cut back.

Prizes include:

• PUBLIC SERVICE – Bristol (VA) Herald Courier – Daniel Gilbert: Underfoot, Our of Reach – A series on the conflicts over Southwest Virginia’s natural gas wealth ; Primarily on the financial labyrinth into which royalty money goes, or should go – and an illumination too of the big money and heavy politics behind the energy industry. Interesting is to see that the series links to a ProPublica graphic on hydraulic fracturing and a related series on natural gas drilling generally (interesting in light of the next prize in this list). Furthermore, finalists included the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica for a series on the oversight of nursing in California.
• INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: NYTimes Magazine/Pro-Publica – Sheri Fink: The Deadly Choices at Memorial; In New Orleans, a hurricane and the fate of a hospital in a flood zone. Notable also that a philanthropic foundation’s underwriting of a reporter’s work, for ProPublica, is as much or more responsible for the story than the initiative from the NYTimes to publish it. Pro-Publica’s ME was formerly the NYTimes’s investigative editor.
• Explanatory Reporting: NYTimes -  Michael Moss:  Tainted Meat ; For relentless coverage and sleuthing into food, E. coli, salmonella, and other public perils from food, a trail that took him from peanuts to hamburgers. Moss was also a finalist in the Investigative Reporting category. This category’s other finalists include Dan Egan of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for coverage of invasive species such as carp in the Great Lakes region, and the NYTimes‘s Gina Kolata and staff for cancer coverage.
• National Reporting -NYTimes – Matt Richtel: Driven to Distraction ; Essentially a human behavior on public safety series – on cell phones and other things not to use while driving down the road. A finalist, an entry somewhat on the technical and engineering side of news, was the Los Angeles Times and its staffers Ken Bensinger and Ralph Vartabadian for reporting on Toyota vehicles and their brake and accelerator control problems.
• Editorial Cartooning – SFGate – Mark Fiore: ScienceGate (and more) ; Mostly dealing with politics, this on line artist is an entrepreneur whose animated comments appear at the San Francisco Chronicle’s website. His entry included a delicious take on climate skeptics and their kin through history.

Just a note – The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has in recent years, continuing with these prizes, been a powerhouse of investigative reporting and a beacon for regional newspapers. Its pathbreaking and relentless coverage of BPA and Phthalates in plastics of recent years, Mr. Egan’s coverage of invasive species, and in the non-science-related beats, its receipt this year of a Pulitzer for Local Reporting for an expose on child-care fraud, and more such high caliber work is impressive.

Grist for the Mill: The Pulitzer Prize 2010 Winners and Finalists ;

- Charlie Petit

The deadline is April 20 to apply for this summer’s Kavli Science Journalism Workshop on The Universe. Hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships at MIT, this three-day intensive workshop will cover everything from new discoveries about dark matter and energy, to the most promising planets on which life may be found. The 15 journalists selected to participate will be awarded up to $750 towards travel expenses.

Find a list of faculty and other details at http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/bootcamps/current.html

Now, we return to our regularly scheduled tracking of science news…

Here’s interesting news on its face -  and perhaps much more interesting in its details than suggested by most news accounts. The science party aboard a British research vessel, the RSS James Cook, has just discovered the world’s deepest field of black smokers and other hydrothermal vents. They are belching away along a rift in the sea floor south of Cuba. It’s about three miles or five kilometers down and runs in a line that crosses from one side of an immense, larger gorge called the Cayman Trough to the other. The depth is about half again farther down than other mid-ocean hydrothermal vents, it says here.

You won’t find much in media accounts however beyond that this is a record depth for such things, the Trough was the setting for the movie The Abyss, some giddy yelps from the scientists over how dramatic the vents look, and a bit of boilerplate about hydrothermal fields in general. I’ll get to the hole in coverage momentarily but first:

Stories:

• BBC – Alasdair Cross: World’s deepest undersea vents discovered in Caribbean ; Interesting stuff here on the issue of seabed mining, but not so much, beyond what’s in press release, on these particular vents.
• National Geographic – Brian Handwerk: Deepest Volcanic Sea Vents Found, “Like Another World.” (Good video link).
• LiveScience: World’s Deepest Undersea Vents Discovered ;
• AP – Raphael G. Satter: World’s deepest known undersea volcanic vent found ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Claire Bates: Into the abyss: British expedition finds world’s deepest undersea volcanic vents ;

The sketchy coverage may be due in part to timing – the story broke on a weekend. The hole is this – These vents are deeper than others, but why? From what little The Tracker knows about deep sea hydrothermal vents the locale does seem strange. They are in a trough, a deep canyon. To me, a trough is like the Mariana Trench and the Challenger Deep – a cleft in the ocean’s crust where an aging, cooling tectonic plate is foundering, dying, sinking toward the mantle and forming a convergent boundary with another plate. But most hydrothermal vents are in the opposite sort of context: a rambunctious spreading center like the East Pacific Rise or the Mid-Atlantic Ridge where new crust is formed and is moving slowly away from the scene. They’re often deep down, but not compared to much of the abyssal plain. So what gives?

All I can learn without, you know, doing some reporting, is that (thank you Wikipedia) the Cayman Trough WAS a subduction zone 30 million + years ago during the Miocene. More lately it’s being split cross wise by a newer rift. So it seems to be a tectonic tangle, a plutonic palimpsest, a dog’s breakfast of geological leftovers from several different aeons ago with a brand new rent in its middle – it’s a candy mint AND a breath mint!  What with an Earthquake in Haiti and now these deep vents as exhibits it seems therefore to offer reporters a chance to tell readers the Caribbean is the kind of place that gives structural geologists a long list of things for argument and serious sleuthing. This would give readers an inkling why these Brits and international colleagues spent so much money to go there with their submersible for a close inspection.

Aside from the geological curiosity of it, the researchers plan to look for differences in the vent ecosystem that might be due to its unusual depth. But they are sitting on what they already see until they get more data, the release says.

Grist for the Mill:

University Southampton Press Release ; RRS James Cook Voyage 44 expedition website.

- Charlie Petit

It’s really a terrific story that finally, after a false start, broke yesterday as Science Magazine’s embargo expired on a new woman and her (apparent) son, their remains tentatively identified as a new species of the hominid persuasion. This comes a year and a half after a son and his father of the H. sapiens persuasion found them in a South African  region known for its fossils and designated a heritage park:  the Cradle of Mankind. (And in Updates below, you can get a good sense of the atmosphere, if not all the science, in the find via CBS’s 60 Minutes. Its team got a preview tour that broadcast Sunday April 11).

The Tracker made a big stink earlier in the week over excess love by many media for screeching “missing link” upon report of any relative that walked on two legs. The rant, and mine was not the only one, was triggered by some embargo-straining advance stories from a few UK outlets. So it is necessary to note that the main wave of coverage overwhelmingly eschewed this old and outdated term, reader magnet though it may be. Most call it a relative, even a possible link, and more than one runs the term “missing link” by readers only to explain that this is not a missing link and why the labels means little anyway.

Best example of that – AP – Randolph E. Schmid: African fossils may fit gap between apes, humans ; Schmid found a credible source to explain why missing link is not only passé and cliché, but also explains why the fossil’s relationship to us is unclear – could be a member of one of our ancestral species, might have been on a bifurcating branch that has since died out, might even be an already-described species. One must also half-salute the forthright hed at the Minneapolis Post, where the Inside Science news service’s  Devin Powell has it under the hed:  New hominid species not a missing link, scientists say.

The NYTimes in a story by Celia W. Dugger and John Noble Wilford evades the term and headlines it, New Hominid Species Discovered in South Africa. This one is an easy, polished read, using that timeworn (timeworn because it works) tactic of starting off with a narrative vignette. It’s of a boy and his paleoanthropologist father, scouring the hills outside Johannesburg when the boy’s dog wandered off, he went to find it, and presto “Dad, I found a fossil!” You gotta be hooked by this kind of story telling. Dugger reported from the site, Wilford from NY, so it must be Dugger who got the first-hand look at the richness of further fossils lying all about the place – one splayed out on the road.

All in all, perhaps by evading the missing link straightjacket news stories show immense variety as they wander among competing hypotheses whether these creatures are or are not a new species, are in the transition between Australopithecus and Homo genuses, which of those two clades they best fit, and  whether they represent a dead end or a direct ancestor to us. Such diversity of slant may confuse, but it sure beats everybody rewriting while adopting angles from one or a few press releases.

Other non-missing-link stories:

• Press Association via Independent (UK) Hugh Macknight: Experts reject new human species theory ; This one is an outlier. It is confusing. What exactly is rejected? It goes to the opposite extreme from hailing a missing link. Putting aside the bad idea ot use the expansive word “theory” for a single taxonomic designation, it seems to muddle several uncertainties by stirring them all into one loud NO. These include whether these creatures represent a new species at all, whether they probably do but are too scantily described to give it a name yet, whether they represent the root transitional line between australopithecines and our own genus Homo or a dead-end, and how they might be such a transition to our own line yet be more recent than the oldest accepted Homo fossils. On that latter point, its possible of course that an ancestral species can keep going while its progeny spread – having branched off while the main clan stayed put – but it is a little awkward.
• LiveScience – Charles Q. Choi: Fossil Skeletons May Be Human Ancestor ; Condolences, Quixote. Surely you’ve noticed that Fox ran your account and slapped on the hed: Missing Link Between Man and Apes? Maybe, as the vast majority of Fox News’s followers may not believe in evolution, the network is helpfully replaying the entire history of evolution science and is still stuck in the era when, 100+ years ago, Missing Link was a sort of sensible term? His story is extensive, and even includes a source declaring emphatically “It’s not a missing link.” A link, of course yes, but leading where or anywhere is not known, and it wasn’t particularly missed any more than is any transitional species before it is found.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: New pre-human species offers evolutionary clues ;
• Johannesburg Times – Judy Lelliott, Sapa: New hominid species found in Cradle of Humankind ; Rather brief. One would have thought the local paper would give this more attention.
• Bloomberg – Meg Tirrell: Nine-Year-Old Fossil Hunter Finds New Species of Human Ancestor ; The story is more circumspect, saying the researchers merely suspect it is a new species of hominid, and are not sure either whether it is a direct human ancestor.
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Anne McIlroy: New hominid discovery announced; creature may be part of human line ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter N. Spotts: Fossils found in South Africa point to early human ancestors ;
• MSNBC CosmicLog  – Alan Boyle: Fossils Shake Up Our Family Tree ;
• Science News – Bruce Bower: Partial skeletons may represent new hominid ;
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: Fossil finds give clues to ancestors ;
• Wired – Brandon Keim: Possible New Human Ancestor Discovered ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Fossil skeletons may belong to an unknown human ancestor ; Detailed, with a pretty stiff rejection by one esteemed paleontologist of the idea that this is an Australopithecus at all – might be another of the Homo genus running around at the time.
• Times – Hannah Devlin: Ancient skeletons hailed as “human Rosetta stone; ;
• Independent – Steve Connor: African fossils hailed as the Rosetta Stone of humanity ;
• Telegraph (UK) Kate Devlin: Two million year old fossils ‘could help understanding of how man evolved from apes’ ; A number of stories seem to conflate the transition from apes to hominids with that from Austrolopithecus to Homo. Do the experts do it too? Seems more likely they evoke the more apelike body forms of Aus., sending reporters off inferring a direct ape-human leap.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Found: Our two-million old ancestor who bridges the gap between apes and Man ; Hmmm. Seems to be trying to evoke the missing link term without using it. And the hed is far, far too emphatically confident of the way to interpret the news. The story’s a bit better, has a maybe here and there.
• Newsweek – Sharon Begley: Welcome to the Family, Missing Link: Begley has it both ways here. Maybe she wrote the hed, maybe she didn’t. In the story she says expressly that the lead scientist recoiled at the term missing link but she adds her own “to laypeople, that is what it is.” It seems that those stories that don’t use the term, and thus are forced to explain how this find fits into the mosaic of discovery in the last century, serve those lay people much better.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman : New human species claim fuels ancestry debate ;
• Could go on ….

*UPDATES:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Fossils offer “window’ into human evolution ; Ran same day as the rest, a solid job that ought to have been tracked that day.
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: 2-million-year-old fossils offer look at human evolution ; He makes a good clarification – the fossils are not from the transition from a clearly, classic “ape” ancestor to hominids, as some accounts imply, but from the more ape-like Australophithecus hominid to the more human genus Homo.
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Found in South Africa: Key Link in Human Evolution ; Particularly competent back-and-forth on the Homo v. Australopithecus discussion on what kind of branch of the extended-family bush held these two tree-climbing bipeds.
• CBS 60 Minutes : Michael Gavshon, Sarah Carter producers, Bob Simon correspondent (Sunday April 11): DISCOVERY – Fossil Discovery New Link in Family Tree? ; Terrific look at the fossils, the site, the people, and the excitement. The limitations of science on TV, when it must compete with the production value of expertly shot videos, are also clear. Good reporting led them to get comment from Don Johansen, for example, but editing for time seems to have only let him make wry remarks on ego and objectivity, but left out his distinct view of the fossils as Homo something-or-other, not Australopithecus. Richard Leakey does a star turn too. And CBS really ought to police the viewer comments feature to keep out the kooks and opportunists who veer wildly off topic.

Grist for the Mill:

University of Witwatersrand Press Release ; U. Melbourne Press Release (really confusing too. Hed says its Homo. Text says Australopithecus.) ; U. Indiana Press Release ; Texas A&M Press Release ; University New South Wales Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Australopithecus sediba has also arrived to Spanish language media. In its first hours yesterday, all newspapers from Spain covered online the finding with their familiar ranks of science reporters. But in Latin America, nobody signed a story; all that we found was from agencies. The situation has improved today, with some very good print stories in Spain, and a few Latin American reporters covering the new hominid arrival. We review some of them. But the fact that in some countries the principal newspapers haven’t used a reporter to write about such a story suggests once again a scarcity of well trained science journalists in Latin America.

El fósil del Australopithecus sediba es importante porque con sus 1.95 – 1.78 millones de años de antigüedad rellena un hueco clave de la evolución humana (entre 2.1 y 1.6 millones de años) en que el registro fósil era prácticamente nulo. Además, fue justo entonces donde se dio la transición entre homínidos y homos. Antes habían Australopitecus, y después llegaron los homo habilis. Sediva es importante porque justo muestra características mixtas de ambos, y puede ayudar a comprender dicha transición, incluso quizás catalogarse como un antecesor directo nuestro. Más investigaciones lo dirán. Pero de momento, la extraña combinación de cerebro pequeño, pies primitivos y largos brazos arborícolas propios de los Australopithecus, con una pelvis moderna, dientes pequeños y largas piernas con las que incluso correr… es suficiente para que los investigadores lo hayan considerado una nueva especie. Tanto Science como Lee Berguer (el científicos que lo descubrió) han sido muy cuidadosos con evitar la palabra “eslabón perdido” y en decir que todavía faltan estudios para esclarecer el lugar y relevancia que ocupa este nuevo hallazgo.

Repasemos las notas aparecidas, pero saquemos también conclusiones: Empezamos a rastrear las noticias ayer durante las tres horas posteriors al embargo, y vimos cómo todas las versiones online de los principales periódicos españoles reaccionaron rápido y ofrecieron de inmediato la noticia a sus lectores bajo la firma de sus periodistas especializados. Hoy, las versiones impresas presentaban notas mucho mejor trabajadas, aunque sólo en una encontramos –como ante un hallazgo así suele ser habitual en la prensa anglosajona-  opiniones de expertos no involucrados en la investigación. En Lationamérica ayer sólo encontramos unas pocas webs que ofrecían noticias con información de agencias. Y hoy, son todavía pocos -comparado con lo que sería deseable- periodistas los que firman notas propias en versiones online o impresas. Sin duda nos habremos perdido más de una y de dos, pero que una noticia como la llegada de un nuevo homínido tan importante no sea cubierta por periodistas en plantilla, nos indica de uevo la falta de periodistas científicos especializados que hay en algunos países de la región.

ABC – Jose Manuel Nieves: “Hallan un nuevo candidato a ser el primer antepasado del hombre”. Sin duda uno de los texto más trabajados y completos que llegó tras el embargo. Quizás tarda demasiado a explicarle al lector qué hace este descubrimiento importante. Primero relata la curiosa anécdota de que el fósil fue descubierto por el hijo de Lee Berguer, y es después cuando pasa a analizar la mezcla de rasgos primitivos y modernos (de Australopithecus y de los primeros Homo habilis) que le ponen en situación privilegiada como candidato a explicar la transición hacia nuestro género.

El Mundo – Rosa M. Tristán: “Un nuevo homínido bípedo con el cerebro pequeño”. Cierto que bipedismo y tamaño del cerebro son dos de los rasgos destacados por los investigadores, pero el titular nos deja un poco fríos. El texto en seguida cita los detalles clave, pero también encontramos una frase que nos descoloca “La teoría que toma fuerza a la luz de estos hallazgos argumenta que la evolución fue un camino lento en que la hubo muchas especies de homínidos, ensayos de uno de los cuales salió nuestro antepasado”. ¿No lo sabíamos de antes?

El País – Alicia Rivera: “Descubierto un homínido de hace casi dos millones de años”. Buena nota sacada online después del embargo, en que incide en la discusión sobre si se trata de  un ancestro de la humanidad o una rama lateral extinguida. Pero mucho mejor artículo en versión impresa: “Un nuevo homínido da pistas sobre el origen del hombre”. destacando más el carácter transicional.

Público – Nuño Domínguez: “Un fósil desvela el origen del género humano”. Algo parecido ocurre en este periódico. Nuño arriesga quizás demasiado con un titular tan contundente en la versión online, pues justo allí se encuentra la polémica (Berguer lo clasifica todavía como un Australopithecus, y no concluye que sin lugar a dudas “esta especie surgió el género humano”). Pero en la versión impresa la nota es amplísima e intachable, incluyendo un muy buen gráfico (el de este post) y las opiniones de un reconocido paleontólogo español.

La Razón – M Póveda: “Descubren el «eslabón perdido» entre Australopithecus y Homo erectus”. Nota cortita que recurre al nefasto recurso “eslabón perdido”, y que subtitula que con 1.9 millones de años de antigüedad ya caminaba erguido. Bueno… “ya” lo hacía Lucy 1 millón de años antes… El hecho en sí de caminar erguido no es lo relevante del A. sediba.

La Nación (Costa Rica) – Alejandra Vargas: “Nueva especie de homínido aparece en cueva de Sudáfrica”. Nota muy clara y concisa, que incide desde un principio en la mezcla de rasgos: “brazos largos similares a los que tienen los simios, pero manos cortas y fuertes. Un cerebro muy inferior al de los humanos modernos, pero piernas largas con las que podía dar pasos largos y hasta correr”.

El Universal (México)- Arturo Barba: “Identificado, un nuevo ancestro del humano”. Da importancia a que “replantea la línea evolutiva”, pero no vemos muy bien en qué sentido la replantea.

Página 12 (Argentina)-  Pedro Lipcovich: “Dos eslabones perdidos, encontrados”. Titular un poco confuso, pero buena nota que nos desvela que “sediba” en idioma sesotho significa “fuente” / “origen”, y que en el artículo original enviado a la revista los autores incluyeron al niño que descubrió los fósiles como coautor, pero los editores no lo aceptaron.

En Colombia, tanto El Espectador: “Hallan nueva especie homínido que vivió hace 2 millones de años en Sudáfrica”, como El Colombiano: “Científicos hallaron especie homínido que vivió hace 2 millones de años” recogieron de inmediato la noticia, pero no firmada por ningún periodista de plantilla. De momento ocurre lo mismo en algunos periódicos latinoamericanos como La Tercera en Chile, El Comercio en Perú, Milenio en México, Clarín en Argentina o La Prensa en Honduras. En otros países todavía no han reaccionado. Esto nos sugiere una reflexión. ¿no se considera este hallazgo de importancia suficiente para dedicarle mayor esmero? ¿no hay periodistas científicos que quieran ser ellos quienes cubran la noticia, y ofrecerla a sus lectores tan pronto se libera el embargo?

- Pere Estupinyà

...Oil & Wind in Texas / NYT Photo

The other evening, driving on Rte 580 where it leaves the Central Valley of California through the Altamont Pass inland of the Bay Area, I saw the forest of turbines that once made California the nation’s leading harvester of wind energy. First, seeing that from the downwind side that those that were spinning were all going counterclockwise, I idly wondered if that’s the industry standard or if perhaps some go the other way around. Second, there are many kinds up there with varying heights, blade configurations, and towers. But nearly all are tiny things. They are toys compared to the monsters going up elsewhere in the US and in the world. It looks like a renewable energy museum.

The Chronicle used an old file photo of a few of those turbines, non-representative as they are of the new norm, on a report from Hearst’s Washington bureau by Jennifer A. Dlouhy on the industry’s continuing  national expansion. The American Wind Energy Association reports that last year wind harvesters installed 5,700 turbines with more than 10,000 megawatts of generating capacity. That’s a record.

It goes on to mention that the top state is not California any more, it is Texas. And midwestern wind fields are coming on fast. It does not – maybe the Chron’s editors cut this out, but one wonders – explain how that 10,000 megawatts is measured. Not that one expects a utility industry white paper in a few column inches, but is that the average power of the nation’s wind production, or the theoretical peak power were the wind to be blowing everywhere real hard? The association compares it to three big nuclear power stations. One would like to know if capacity and availability factors are applied to make it a legit comparison.   And how does the U.S. stack up against other nations? It’s #1 but China and other nations are closing fast. The story nonethelss bestows on Texas bragging rights as the “Saudi Arabia of wind power. “  Incidentally, the Houston Chron used a version of Dlouhy’s piece, but without the reference to being the Saudi Arabia of wind – maybe because it’s a strained metaphor, or maybe Texans don’t like being reminded that early in the last century they lived in the Saudi Arabia of oil before there even was a Saudi Arabia of oil, and then lost the mantle.

The press release behind this news is in Grist below. And unlike the unvarnished bullish tone of this (and other) coverage, while the total installation was a record, the report’s press release says right up top that it represented a slowing in percentage growth rate compared to that in 2008.

Personally, I’d suggest the Chronicle look into whether the iconic windfarms in the Altamont remain competitive and are likely to modernize with giant newfangled turbines, or are so outclassed in wind resource that investment is drying up and the whole enterprise east of Livermore will fade into a historic footnote. After all, the US oil industry got started in Pennsylvania. I just saw a reference claiming it produced half the world’s entire petroleum supply in the 19th century. But you don’t see too many oil fields there today. And if the Chron has done a story like this, it has no excuse using a picture of Altamont to illustrate modern wind energy gear.

Other stories on the wind energy report:

• Reuters – Matt Daily: US adds record amount of wind power in 2009 – AWEA / More than 10,000 MW of wind turbines installed in U.S.
• Market Watch/Medill News Service – JeniecePettitt: Wind industry grew at record pace in 2009 ; The record pace was, actually, it appears, less than the rate in2008 if I understand that press release down in Grist.
• Guardian/SolveClimate (Guardian news agency, UK) Dave Levitan: U.S Wind Industry Bullish on Offshore Potential, but Breakthrough Needed: This is the story that U.S. readers could have used – context and detail from, it appears, a reporter familiar with the topic. Its point: If the US is to remain a player in wind energy, it has to build on the continental shelf.
• San Jose Mercury News – Dana Hull: United States sees surge in wind power ;
• CNET/GreenTech – Candace Lombardi: Iowa, Texas tops in wind power efforts ;

Grist for the Mill:

American Wind Energy Association Press Release; (Full report apparently not available free, but the page with the release links to lots of the association’s data. It includes a listing of its releases meant to “debunk” things said by wind power skeptics or reporters it regards as misguided. Feisty outfit, is this).

- Charlie Petit