Forget fight or flight. In a special issue on the brain, Discover magazine explains that’s it’s all about the four F’s: fight, freeze, flight, or fright.

And writer Jeff Wise elaborates on that with a story of an encounter between Sue Yellowtail, a 25-year-old water-quality specialist for the Ute Indian tribe, and a mountain lion.

Wise tracks Yellowtail with the deadly acuity of a mountain lion as she passes through the four stages. It’s an illuminating and dramatic story.

But it could have been much more. (In fairness, this is an excerpt from Wise’s 2009 book, Extreme Fear, so my comments about how the story could have been better should be directed, I suppose, both to Wise and to the editors at Discover.)

The Discover excerpt begins like this:

In the throes of intense fear, we suddenly find ourselves operating in a different and unexpected way. The psychological tools that we normally use to navigate the world—reasoning and planning before we act—get progressively shut down. In the grip of the brain’s subconscious fear centers, we behave in ways that to our rational mind seem nonsensical or worse…

And he goes on to for a couple of grafs explaining the four F’s, until he gets to this:

On a winter morning a few years back, a young woman named Sue Yellowtail went through them all in about 10 minutes.

Ah, now we’re getting to the drama. But before getting to the mountain lion, Wise gives us a little natural history (“The Mancos river rises in southwestern Colorado…”), and background on Yellowtail (“Sue Yellowtail was just a few years out of college…”).

It’s all useful stuff, establishing the scene and introducing us to the character. But before pulling the camera back to give us the scene, and before the biographical info on Yellowtail, how about starting with this, which is graf #7 in Wise’s (Discover’s) telling:

On a clear, cold morning in late December, [Sue] Yellowtail pulled her pickup over to the side of a little-used dirt double-track, a few yards from a simple truss bridge that spanned a creek. As she collected her gear, she heard a high-pitched scream. Probably a coyote killing a rabbit, she thought. She clambered down two steep embankments to the water’s edge. Wading to the far side of the creek, she stooped to stretch her tape measure the width of the flow. Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank, not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion. Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

Maybe it could be compressed even more, to give it more punch:

On a clear, cold morning in late December, Yellowtail pulled her pickup over to the side of a little-used dirt double-track, a few yards from near a truss bridge that spanned a creek. As she collected her gear, she heard a high-pitched scream. Probably a coyote killing a rabbit, she thought. She clambered down two steep embankments to the water’s edge. Wading to the far side of the creek, she stooped to stretch her tape measure the width of the flow. Just then she heard a rustling and looked up. At the top of the bank, not 30 feet away, stood a mountain lion, . Tawny against the brown leaves of the riverbank brush, the animal was almost perfectly camouflaged. It stared down at her, motionless.

This is just a quick-and-dirty edit, but you get the idea. As short and punchy as possible, getting to the mountain lion as quickly as possible.

Then Wise could follow either with a bit more of the story, or he could step away from the narrative for an explanation of the four F’s.

For my money, less telling–and more showing–might have made this a better piece. On the other hand, it’s pretty darn good the way it is, and I won’t tell you what happened. No spoilers here. Read it yourself.

I’d like to lay out for you the other stories in Discover’s special brain issue, but the website does not make it easy to determine what’s in the magazine and what isn’t. There is probably a “this month’s issue” page with a table of contents here somewhere, but I can’t seem to find it. Clicking on “brain special issue” gives me the Wise piece and two other stories. But it’s not clear whether that is the entire brain package in the magazine. (I know, I could go out and buy the magazine, but I’d be likely to come back with a handful of magazines and never finish this post. Besides, my nightstand is about to collapse under the weight of all the print that’s already there.)

One of the brain-issue stories is by Kathleen McGowan who writes about fenestration. Can’t guess? It’s the art of cutting around a skull to open a window on the brain and remove it. (Not to be confused with defenestration, which is defined, I think, as something writers often want to do to editors.)

McGowan walks us through the fenestration and dissection of the brian of H.M., whose epilepsy surgery destroyed his memory. It was one of the most studied brains in history, and when H.M. died, researchers were eager to examine his brain. Nice science story, even without a mountain lion.

The third piece is an excerpt from Stuff, a fascinating new book on hoarding by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. A taste:

I could feel the cockroaches surrounding me as I stepped in. The walls were coated with their brown dung, and occasionally one dropped from the ceiling onto the piles of debris below…

(Check out the book, too. You’ll learn things about the fascinating Collyer brothers that you haven’t heard before, I’m pretty sure.)

If these three articles are the whole of Discover’s special brain issue, then Discover deserves a demerit. McGowan’s piece is the only original article in the bunch. The two others are book excerpts. And Wise’s book was published in 2009. A year-old book excerpt?

What is is that the print people always say to dismiss web news sites? Oh, yeah: “They’re just aggregators. They wouldn’t survive a week without print to borrow from.”

Discover may be forging a new path–an aggregator in print. Or maybe not so new. Anyone remember Reader’s Digest?

- Paul Raeburn

The decision this week by NASA to abandon all hope of hearing another peep, tweet, or other telemetry burst from the Mars Phoenix lander stirred a lot of entertaining, sort of respectful, headlines from journalists. The mission’s forecast inability to survive a Martian winter was not the only reason it was news – so were the orbital photos showing a change in the shape of its shadow, barely discernible at the camera’s resolution. The inference is that a thick layer of dry ice hoarfrost, or maybe a solid slab, collapsed one of its flimsy solar panels. It probably didn’t feel a thing, dead already.

There is news here, and also a chance for writers to show some whimsy and to harmlessly go into full anthropomorphic mode, playing a dirge for the plucky spacecraft. What with the Mars Rovers in their final stages of infirmity, the red planet is providing multiple opportunities for sentimental copy.

The important wake was a year and a half ago, when winter set in and Phoenix went into an electronic coma with little prospect of coming out of it. Earlier Post. To be sure a few had hopes, however slim – another post in Jan. this year.

Dead-for-sure Phoenix Story Samples:

• The best hed, over a small account at a small Aussie outlet: Gizmodo – Mark Wilson: The Mars Phoenix Lander is But a Dead, Black Dot ;
• Space.com (via Chr. Sci. Mon): NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander officially kaput / ..officially broken ; “down for the count … no peeps … hundreds of pounds of ice.” Tidy summary of its achievements.
• AP via NYTimes: Goodbye to a Silent Phoenix ; This is an item with an engaging hed. The full story, with a nifty lede,  from AP’s Alicia Chang: NASA ends effort to contact Phoenix Mars Lander ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Phoenix Mars Lander won’t rise again ; Maugh opts against (phony, actually) sentimentality. Right at the top: “..virtually no one had expected the craft to survive the long Martian winter..”.
• Nat’l Geographic – Richard Lovett: NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander Officially Dead; “The lights have officially gone out…” after the Lazarus mode can’t thwart the cold and the rime.
• Pasadena Star News: Mission over for JPL’s Phoenix Mars Lander ;
• Arizona Republic – Anne Ryman : NASA ends Phoenix Mars Lander program ;
• Cleveland Plain Dealer (editorial) The red planet finally claims Phoenix Mars Lander, after science is served.

All the stories say the mission was a success. NASA’s press releases say so. The Tracker felt a fondness for it, too. It came with a gripping narrative:  a spacecraft resurrected by a team of resourceful mavericks from the bits and pieces of other missions, some failed or mothballed, winner of a stiff mission-selection competition within NASA, and headed for the north pole of Mars. But, one thinks a bit reluctantly, did it really move the ball forward by much? Its dirt scooper had a devil of a time getting samples into the analysis chambers. It saw and scraped up some ice; ice was gratifying to see, but a revelation? It revealed minerals and highly reactive chemicals in the soil that might make the place amenable to life, but did they open any new scenarios of old Mars? How much more do we now know about the Martian hydrological cycle? Its weather? Maybe not much. Some reporters should have done some plain-talk questioning. One need suspect no error, scandal, or misuse of tax dollars to do that. Good science inevitably turns up null results or, if not null, grand experiments may have ambiguous outcome. Was this one of those – or a big success? I don’t know but also have not read much on its results that amazes.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Phoenix Twitter Feed ; NASA Press Release ; Univ. Arizona Lunar & Planetary Lab Phoenix Mission ; NASA JPL tribute video ;

- Charlie Petit

First, before getting to Science Times, let’s look some more at the paper’s front page. Already tracked, a slide down the list of posts, is its gloomy, angry story on the gulf oil spill. Also there is a (depressing) account from Elizabeth Rosenthal entitled Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons. This is no surprise, so that is lands on the front page is one. The story is solid, moving along through the facts of the public opinion shift in the UK before getting to parts having to do with what remains true. She winds up with a visit to believable sources who say persuasively that this all occurs despite no significant change in scientific conviction that the planet is, though not in her words, getting screwed over by political and industrial malfeasance. (One must note Rosenthal’s other piece this week: In standoff with Environmental Officials, BP Stays With an Oil Spill Dispersant; ) At this point, if you’re not already heading for a hole with a blanket to wrap around yourself in despair, in a third above-the-fold piece of drear, Barry Bearak has Tottering Rule in Madagascar Can’t Save Falling Rosewoods. Timber barons will be timber barons and a nearly stripped land seems trying to vie with Haiti for most badly managed real estate on an island nation.

All of which makes it a relative, somewhat guilty pleasure to open the Science Times. Right on top the amazing Carl Zimmer springs another of the features he seems to hatch as fast as most of us write emails. It’s not as though Zimmer has written a puff piece of nature-is-wonderful writing – it is about small birds that that have only natural oils on them and that fly incredible distances without stopping. It has an engaging, anecotal lede that foreshadows the yarn perfectly. It closes with worries that land development and other human activities are a mortal hazard to some of their migrations and perhaps their survival. But mainly it shares scientists’ awe on discovery, via superlight telemetry dealies, that some small birds whir along for thousands of miles without stopping. He does have stats on the incredible metabolic trickery required to do it . He leaves only implied another indication how tough (or oblivious) some birds are: they do it after major, invasive abdominal surgery. Gotta stick those transmitters somewhere near their center of gravity. Right in the belly. It’s like, hang on buddy, gotta shove a GPS transmitter in next to your liver. Don’t roll over on account of that antenna sticking out through your backside, and remember the marathon in the morning.

Other notable headlines:

• Sean B. Carroll: Tracking the Ancestry of Corn Back 9,000 Years ; How I love fresh corn on the cob. It’s like candy. After having watched (finally) the documentary Food Inc., which pretty much villainizes the American nation’s corn growers with combines marching to an ominous drumbeat and left me fretful about corn, I needed the moonlighting professor’s paean to this fabulous grain. He traces nicely, without one must say the conventions of journalism (no quotes, just citations of authority), the trail of research that revealed how a Mexican weed became a world staple.
• Alan Schwarz – From Big Leagues, Hints at Sibling Behavior ; Of base stealing, baseball statistical treasuries, and sociology.
• Q&A with C. Claiborne Ray: Vulcanism and Cataclysm ; Or what would happen if a volcano came up through a big oil field? Nice answer but hmmm and hey dad, who would win, The Alien or Freddy Kruger..??
• Laurie Tarkan: Labels Urged for Food that Can Choke ;

As always much more: Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Not many major general interest outlets perked up on news from astronomers that the “solar” systems of other stars are fairly likely to have orbits of significantly different inclinations to the system’s – and star’s -  mean plane of rotation. The news is from a team led by a Univ. of Texas – McDonald Observatory astronomer, and from a separate team at the U. of Washington. It is getting better pickup in smaller outlets – the kind whose readerships include a high proportion interested in cosmic oddities and other tidbits.

It all came out of an American Astronomical Society meeting in Miami and had help from at least one press release. At least one set of planets has angles formed by the orbital planes of individual worlds as great as 30 degrees. Many others are in highly elliptical orbits even if nearly in the same plane. One wonders if such instability means that a fair percentage of planets are also being sent careering totally out of orbit from their stars, ejected by gravitational bullies among their nest mates, flung to freeze in the loneliness of interstellar space.

*UPDATE – I even posted on this last week, but neglected to mention in this post that the scoop-machine at Science News, Ron Cowen, already wrote the gist of it up. Also see earlier post.

I started this post assuming the planetary orbit news from the meeting all covers the same announcements. As I sample, however, it becomes clear that not every reporter decided to include both “angles,” on inclination and on ellipticity – and some may not have known of them both.

Stories:

• Space.com via Chr. Sci. Monitor – Denise Chow: Wild planetary orbits could affect habitability ;
• Wired – Lisa Grossman: Planetary Bullies Make Astronomers Rethink the Habitable Zone ; Not sure this writer knew of the Texas paper, one out-of-plane orbits. Story focusses on U.W. report on high ellipticity of orbits.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Out of Flatland: Orbits Are Askew in a Nearby Planetary System ; and this one pays no attention to the U. W. paper – it’s all Texas. Byline is Miami, so Matson was surely there.
• Telegraph (UK) Inhabitable planets likely to have extreme climates, say scientists ; Nothing but a U.W. press release with light rewrite. Sigh.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log- Alan Boyle: Planets Gone Wild ; Boyle, who has a nifty little book out on Pluto, find resonances with Pluto in these extrasolar systems too.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin : Unusual exoplanet orbits suggest violent past ;

Grist for the Mill:

UTA – McDonald Obs. Press Release ; U. Washington Press Release ;

Other Exoplanet and similar news:

• Science News – Ron Cowen : Herschel telescope unveils icy debris ringing sunlike stars ; Not planets, but smaller stuff – super Kuiper belts. Cowen has a scoop on this – and links to the on line paper.
• AFP: Hubble catches planet being devoured by its star ;

- Charlie Petit

One doesn’t just write a phrase like “the enduring laxity of federal regulation” without a certain furious grimace. That comes up with a rather late, but nonetheless two-fisted article – not papered over as a “news analysis” – top of the fold page A1 of the NY Times today by Campbell Robertson, Clifford Krauss, and John M. Broder. It starts with a theatrical lede on “a disaster in abstraction, a threat floating somewhere out there…” and then smacks readers with (as they may already have seen on 24-hour news channels, the internet, the smartphone…) the penetration in the last two or three days by horrid, ugly glop deep into bayou country. The oilamageddon appears, after looming out there on the horizon, to have arrived.

This piece has the measured, steady pace of stifled rage, enunciated through clenched teeth, written as an indictment. It waffles into a few backs and forths among sources midway through. It gets its chops back toward the end. It declares that industry has made a handmaiden of the government and that nobody foresaw such an accident as this or was remotely ready for it.

Let’s hope BP kills the thing this week. It should have been killed the day the rig blew, a month ago. Weird thing is this: If its source finally dies this week, the size of the spill will still be on the order of the Exxon Valdez’s oiling of Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Times tells us this as a way of saying how MUCH oil has been spilled. More telling would be how little it is. All that oil – and it’s just one tanker’s worth. Just one ship. Imagine how much oil must be still down in this one field – surely many ship’s worth. So yeh, stop the leak. But unaddressed are questions such as: What if there’s a big regional war one day again and combatants start sinking one another’s oil tankers, like in WWII in both the Pacific and Atlantic. What if…? There are a lot of tankers out there.

And another thing. The Navy just decommissioned the NR-1, its smallest nuclear submarine, a vessel built 40+ years ago and equipped for deep oceanographic research.  All the Navy ever said was it could do down 2300 feet, only half way down to this spill’s source. I don’t know if it had arms or other grappling tools mounted on it. Most of its jobs may have been for spook agencies. But a topic worth chasing is whether it would be useful, or possible, for the US government to have a powerful, perhaps manned, adaptable utility knife of a vessel for deep underwater work. Dunno about nuclear power though – can one imagine not only a spill, but losing a nuke in it? Its fuel would probably stay intact  but a lot of people would go berserk.

Lots of other ink, and we’ll not try to be comprehensive.

(But First, a late morning Bulletin from AP‘s Seth Borenstein: Gulf oil plume darker; not good news, expert says ; and isn’t this just terrific. Others likely will cover this new development. Which raises a question – why, if it’s coming out black, is the stuff on TV the color of bricks? )

Other stories:

• NY Times – Henry Fountain: Expert is Confident About Sealing Oil Well ; Fountain discovers a man who worked with Red Adair and now is among those ready to turn the spill off. He’s a good ol’ boy, no doubt with the skills and the stories to match his confidence. He never went to college. Hmmm – just wondering where the top university-educated engineering grads are in the pecking order of the oil-industry’s problem solvers? Is this fellow representative? Why is the basic design of this blowout preventer thing apparently unchanged for decades? Is the fossil fuel industry itself fossilized? Where have the feds been?
• ABC News – Kate McCarthy, Bradley Blackburn: White House: Undoubtedly Worst Oil Spill in US History ; Don’t miss the accompanying video of an ABC newsman, Sam Champion, who put on scuba gear and went diving with Phillippe Cousteau right into the crud 25 miles offshore. One of the most horrible thing he’s ever seen underwater, says the frog man. ABC should call experts in bi0-remediation or microbial appetites. Those awful little droplets, the granular oil – how fast, or do, microbes eat them up? Oil is organic and, ultimately for something, food. And what about the line that if one doesn’t spray all of it off and it gets on your skin – it burns? Truth here is bad enough – one is worried that it might get sidetracked by exaggeration and uninformed hyperbole.
• Fox News – Bill O’Reilly: Sarah Palin vs. President Obama Over Oil Spill ;  There’s anger even at Fox. I kid you not – the no-spin spinmeister is irritating as ever with his asides, and he’s pure politics without a technical insight to offer but he gets one thing right. Obama didn’t do it, he couldn’t be doing more, and he doesn’t know what to do now because nobody does.
• Houston Chronicle/Hearst (via SF Chronicle) – Jennifer A. Dlouhy: Frustration mounts over cleanup efforts ;
• AP: Tom Raum (analysis): As slick spreads, so does frustration ;
• Wall St. Journal – James Herron: BP Outlines Backup Plan to Cap Oil Leak ; Literally, it says here, put a new cap on it. This will take weeks more to happen, we learn.
• Washington Post (blog) – Kate Sheppard: The big offshore lie ; Sheppard’s day job is at Mother Jones. This one opines, reasonably, that even if this well had worked and all that oil went to a refinery and a bunch more oil rigs are built in US waters, it’d make hardly a whit of difference to our dependence on imported oil. In the meantime at Mother Jones she flogs along further: Obama’s Sluggish Oil Spill Response / Why has the administration been so slow…? ; Gotta agree with that. It has been slow. The White House should have sent DOE SEc’y Steven Chu down there, told him to set up a desk in BP’s oil spill war room, and put his Nobelist PhD brain to work barking orders and eagle-eyeing the whole operation. Just because BP has the equipment and workers to do the work – and knows whom to call for more help – doesn’t mean its managers couldn’t benefit from a scary untouchable and brainy visitor looming around being pissed.

- Charlie Petit

The last few weeks have seen a few small articles on the tight lid the US Air Force put on its recent launch of a formerly NASA winged satellite the military adopted, the X-37B, that has been many years in the works. Space buffs find it intriguing – a sort of mini-shuttle that presumably could be launched by rocket here and be landing half way across the world in half an hour (or bombing something). Or it might skittle around in space for weeks or months before showing up at an air strip near anybody. Way cool. Also, a way expensive method for getting a package to its destination.

That news flow got much larger with, at the New York Times, William J. Broad‘s story on what is known about the unpiloted robot spaceship – and chiefly on how a band of determined amateurs sleuthed out its orbit and inferred that it is in an orbit known to be favored by US spy sat agencies.

Broad’s story is serious. If you want a more playful take, extracted almost entirely from the NYTimes account, check the techie site Gizmodo. Its correspondent Jack Loftus explains cheekily how well the amateurs blew the cover on X-37B’s path in the sky: Now we “totally know where it is right now,” Loftus writes. “…roughly anywhere between 40 degrees N and 40 degrees south latitude at an altitude of about 255 miles…”

That Gizmodo thing got me to thinking. With Broad’s story highlighting the ease with which these civilian sky watchers teased out its orbital parameters it seem likely that, in operation, this bird could be more elusive. Couldn’t they just paint it black to make it less visible? And maneuver it here and there with little squirts from small rockets?

The cloak and dagger atmosphere undeniably makes the story legitimate. It missed an angle seen in this photo – showing it being ferried to a test drop by the White Knight airplane that Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites of Mojave, CA, built for its X-Prize winning, Spaceship One  suborbital tourism prototype. The one in space now got there atop an Atlas booster.

UPDATE: As learned from comments, USA Today‘s Dan Vergano had a good background explainer and graphics before the launch.

Other stories:

• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Secret US spaceplane spotted in orbit by hobbyists ; Page also covered this project more broadly a few days earlier with US X-37B robot minishuttle: ‘Secret space warplane’? ; The latter story is well-done.
• Space.com (via MSNBC) Leonard David: Amateur skywatchers spot secret space plane ; Includes links to previous coverage ;

- Charlie Petit

Not many people most of us meet at parties or have over for dinner want to see whales and dolphins hunted for food and profit. Not me. But it is hard to see why an international news agency such as Reuters decided that a meeting in Finland merits coverage because its participants resolved that these relatively brainy marine mammals should be acccorded personhood because they are self-aware and organize complex societies. Thus they merit “human rights.” The services upstanding reporter Alister Doyle filed it along with a picture of orcas, or killer whales, from Alaska. Obviously giving them whale rights protects little – orcas kill other species without conscience, after all.

It also is hard to put this story in a clear category. It does not fit the surprise bin, as enviro and whale-admiring groups have long argued that they and porpoises are too smart to simply be butchered. Is it consequential? Maybe, as a meeting of the International Whaling Commission next month will debate new rules for whaling. But again, delegates to such meetings have heard arguments like this for years. Is it to make fun of the resolution as a diversion into daffy animal-loving illogic and sentimentality? Apparently not, as the story is reported absolutely straight.

Given that so much news is devoted to arcane doings involving people like, oh, Sarah Jessica Parker (her name just popped out at a random look at the People site), who really don’t do much at all that is new or surprising yet land in celebrity gossip sites’s feature slots, this Reuters story hardly exceeds the known outer boundaries of unimportant and not very entertaining news. There are no errors I can spot in Doyle’s piece either.

Maybe I’m just in a sour mood. Certainly no wider criticism of Mr. Doyle’s output is to be inferred. Why this one hit a nerve I dunno. But …. why bother doing it????

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker has posted frequently on environmental stories in the NYTimes by Elisabeth Rosenthal, an MD-turned-reporter but not a medical writer. She’s sharp and insightful, but not so often one to be glimpsed behind the second-person voice. She’s written a few pieces first-person for environment360, the Yale University Sch. of Forestry and Environmental Studies news and journalism on line site  including a new one just up.

She is, she tells us, rather a determined illustration of the active environmental conscience. She details the accommodations and adjustments she has made in how she lives. But when she has to get to Europe you don’t find her on the Queen Mary, or riding a bio-diesel blimp to Texas because there aren’t any of those. It’s a few big Pratt & Whitney or Rolls Royce turbofan engines sucking kerosene as she streaks along near the edge of the stratosphere and blowing to greenhouse smithereens her intention to have a low carbon footprint.

Thus we get into a easy to read exposition on the challenge for the world to put a cap on air travel. It only accounts for  2 percent of global carbon emissions but the percentage is going up. There is no dumb hooting in here about the so-called hypocrisy of greenies for flying to conferences where they inveigh against burning fossil fuels. There is much more info of the useful kind. For instance, why would you think that people still take airplanes across Spain when the high speed trains over the same routes are more convenient and comfortable, plus far more efficient? There is a good reason for that. Read it to see what. The story is flanked by a long line of other stories by her and others, with links, that illustrate why this non-profit service is worth a regular look.

ON that latter note, I should mention another A-list enviro writer with a piece on e360 in the last week. A staffer at the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert, reviews the ongoing ferment in earth science circles stirred by one prominent Nobelist and endorsed by lots of other scientists to declare the Holocene epoch – which is “barely out of its diapers” she writes, kaput. The proposed new one is our very own Anthropocene.  Her piece is inspired in large part by a paper out now in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s the cute critter – if an apex predator is to be considered cute – story for the day. In the Observer (and also in its partner pub, the Raleigh News and Observer) T. Delene Beeland relates getting a dose of fresh pee upon herself from a very young red wolf in eastern North Carolina. Her story relates progress in reintroducing this species to a tiny part of its former range. Beeland, by the way, freelanced this and is also with an independent, subsidized science news outlet Science in the Triangle on which we’ve posted before.

It’s straight news reporting, shifting into first person well into it. One suspects she wanted to be sure to mention she’s writing a book on red wolves. More pertinent there was the “whiz” event that’d be hard to write second person (one suspects that is Ms. Breeland’s ungloved hands holding the pup in the photo).

For most of the last century red wolves were almost extirpated from the wild.  The recovery project is centered on the Alligator River Nat’l Wildlife Refuge near Pamlico Sound, with smaller efforts on other lands.

There is much to be written about red wolves that is not in this piece. It is of only moderate length and surely had to be written economically merely to get in the basics – red wolves are different (sized between coyotes and gray wolves), they are rare, are shy, the US Fish and Wildlife Center organized a recovery program more than 20 years ago, and here’s a glimpse of how things are done. There is much more to write. One example might be to explore prospects for their genetic purity – the strain apparently goes back millions of years, if Wikipedia is to be trusted. The latter source also says that red wolves, regular wolves, and coyotes all interbreed with fertile offspring. A question is this. Can, in the long haul, their genomic integrity survive extended contact with coyotes already in their region, and with coyote-wolf hybrids migrating into New England from Canada and probably heading south along side the Appalachian Trail? Plus, does it really matter in larger schemes of things when red wolves presumably occupy a much larger range than now?

Grist for the Mill: FWS Red Wolf Recovery Project ;

- Charlie Petit

Every story idea has to come from somewhere. Freelance feature writers – staffers too for that matter – spend a lot of time gathering string, looking to leads that might lead to something rewarding to write and to sell. Michelle Nijhuis, one of our more accomplished long-form magazine nature and science writers, reports that a few years ago she read on the tracker this squib about an AP yarn on the return of large puffin colonies to Maine a century after their near disappearance.

She followed up.  The result is in the current issue of Smithsonian. It is a good one, worth a quiet moment to read through. One can hear the whir of seabird wings while doing so, and meet some remarkable people and creatures. It’s satisfying to us here at the tracker too that these posts sometimes get people to dig for more.

- Charlie Petit

One can only go so long without a story on the huge alien snakes from Burma that are eating turtles, alligators, Key Largo wood rats and much else in the Florida Everglades. Not only Burmese pythons but other foreign constrictors are loose in the bogs. The pic shows one case where the gator got the best of it. The Washington Post‘s Paul Scicchitano this week updated the story with word that, cold as was last winter’s snap, many of the pythons survived it. Other than that it is another, familiar dip into the subconscious horror many feel regarding snakes, especially ones big enough to swallow a pig whole.

- Charlie Petit

(Part way through this I realized Paul Raeburn posted on it too, next slot down. Well, it IS a story after all about duplication…)

Such a lather over life today. J. Craig Venter has succeeded in his long and extensively publicized quest to sequence – put together in the workshop – a whole bacterial genome and get it to take over the gears, levers, wheels, and riobosomes of a microbe whose own natural genome had been removed. The mash-up promptly reproduced itself a few billion times. Not only that, each copy is an exercise in immortality for the team. Venter and the gang signed it (inserted a few extra sequences spelling out their names, like watermarks), put a bunch of other stuff in there including for all I know a patent registration number, and definitely including something by another j-man,  J. Robert Oppenheimer. Maybe it includes the line about becoming death, the destroyer of worlds, an appropriately hubristic yet intellectually sublime and introspective declaration if ever there was one. I wonder if anybody has dropped a little vial of this new microbe in some local and hospitable place, figuring fragments of its genome with their names on it might survive till the Sun goes red giant.

Some outlets are entertaining the question, “Is it alive?”  What in creation does that mean? It’s an autonomous, self-replicating chemical system with genetic controls that make it capable of evolution. It has a synthetic variant of the genome of one microbial species, Mycoplasma mycoides‘s genome, plugged into a cousin, M. capricolum, that divided looking and acting just like an M. mycoides. The synthesis wasn’t entirely synthetic: yeast cells and their DNA-repair systems knit the synthesized genome chunks together. Sure it’s alive. The lab may have smelt like a brewery. What next, a debate about vitalism? The question does address the nerve that such work as this strikes in many people who usually chose other things to do than to think seriously about science. If one Googles Venter, or a few other people traveling the road to synthetic life, one can find a number of atheist-oriented sites celebrating his project as a refutation of the need for god, and some religious ones saying no it doesn’t.

Anyway, the Craig Venter Institute and another arm of his empire, Synthetic Genomics, has its success in Science magazine today where it can’t be missed (the embargo did not quite hold – details at Ivan Oransky‘s  Embargo Watch blog), and doubled down with interviews, press releases, lots of pictures. See grist for the press release.

One must, for all the sniping, congratulate the team that did this. It was difficult, industrial-scale synthesis. The effort plans to move on to much more purely invented genomes, stripped down and assignable to no specific natural species but equipped for novel jobs. One wonders whether a Congressional committee aide already has contacted the team to come to a hearing and explain where this is going and to share  thoughts on government oversight of such things. “Playing god” may come up.

*UPDATE: This is a synthetic genome, but its reception nonetheless echoes what the same group reporter three years ago when they transplanted a natural genome from one to another microbe:  Earlier Post.  Something that came up then, but not this time around that I notice, is that the researchers apparently already have a name for their new “species”: Mycoplasma laboratorium ;

Stories:

• Ottawa Citizen – Tom Spears: The definition of life just changed ; Again, what the hell is that headline about? Did Spears explain at all to the headline writer that the whole deal is that this thing satisfies the definition of life? I mean, is a rewritten newspaper article published somewhere else still a newspaper article? Criminy. The story is breathless but doesn’t have the idiocy of the headline – in fact Spears’s third graf says the “synthetic cell actually lives, according to all definitions, even though all of its genes were made in a lab with ingredients from a fancy chemistry set” and that last bit is fine news writing.
• BBC: Scientists create ‘artificial life’ , with video and audio files, Q&A, and a profile of Venter. Lots of people are saying he created “artificial” life. If one copies the neighbor’s house, is it an artificial house? Evolution created life – Venter made an extra copy, but I’m getting entirely too worked up about semantics and usage here. “Synthetic life” is a better term. That refers to how it was made. “Artificial life” is too close to “not real” as in artificial Christmas tree.
• NPR All Things Considered – Joe Palca : Scientists Reach Milestone on Way to Artificial Life ; Venter tells Joe how hard it was – and other sources tell him that hard doesn’t mean creative. That is, he didn’t create life, but he did some pretty remarkable copying. (Hmmm – if a writer just copies somebody else’s words faithfully from one book into another book, it’s plagiarism isn’t it? )
• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: Researchers Say They Created a “Synthetic Cell” ; As Wade writes, this is just a step toward the eventual goal – not to copy an existing microbe’s genome, but to write more or less from first principles, as learned from real genomes, a new genome stripped down to essential functions and including traits that the genetic engineer might like to see, such as little, living biofuel factories. This is a solid article, with caveats and qualifications and little hyperventilation over the meaning of life. It plays deep inside, why I don’t know.  He called some of the right people, too, such as Gerald Joyce, the RNA evolution man, at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla.
• *UPDATE – Wall St. Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Scientists Create Synthetic Organism ; Missed this important outlet first time through. Well played on front page. One quibbles with calling it a synthetic cell. If one sends a construction crew a changed set of drawings for a building and they rebuild it, does that make it a synthetic building? The instructions may have been re-typed by hand, but a regular biological ribosome and other organelle things made the proteins that are in the rebuilt cell, yes?  But Lee smartly plays up sources who say it is a new and deeper era of genetic engineering we’re now entering.
• Belfast Telegraph – no byline: First ‘synthetic cell’ created ; This toss-off yarn is the one that Embargo Watch suspects broke it.
• AAAS Science News of the Week – Elizabeth Pennisi: Synthetic Genome Brings New Life to Bacterium ; Well-calibrated headline.
• Telegraph (UK) : American scientist who created artificial life denies ‘playing God… ; No byline, which is curious. Search machines show another story at the Telegraph, under the byline Tom Chivers with the hed “..is it really ‘playing God’?, but the link is dead.  Don’t know what’s going on there.
• Times of India – Subodh Varma: It’s science at work, not god or Frankenstein or magic ; Varma lays it all out in sober prose. One is unsure whether this is a “typical case of selling a scientific advance through hype,” as the story does not say who is doing the hype. Venter’s team is eager for publicity, may be varnishing over potential down sides to widespread synthesis of genomes, but is not hyping the fundamentals. Maybe it’s the media itself that is hyping it? Sure. There may be tripe there, but not hype in its usual meaning by which media fall for somebody else’s hype.
• Washington Post – David Brown: Scientists create cell based on man-made genetic instructions ; An upbeat story. Brown declares, without hiding behind a quote or source, “the experiment’s success if more symbolic than practical…it is unlikely to have any immediate effect on the biotech world…”
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Scientists create 1st bacteria strain from man-made DNA ; You’ll have to read this to see how he deftly, unexpectedly, works the gulf oil spill into his account ;
• Time Magazine – Alice Park: Scientist Creates Life. That’s a Good Thing, Right? ;  Cheeky hed, but very good explainer with some details I don’t see elsewhere.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Creation of genes in lab raises hopes, concerns ; Good reflection on the lessons of Asilomar from a man who was there, and on this achievement’s peril and promise.
• Philadelphia Inquirer – Faye Flam: First lab-created organism raises ethical questions ; Art Caplan tells her this’ll spawn a “metaphysical earthquake.” And she points out the for all the Frankenstein talk, but victim of Dr. Frakenstein’s monster was the monster, not the public.
• AP – Lauren Neeregaard:  The Quest to Create Artificial Life ; Again, that “artificial” grates a bit. The story’s solid. It includes a true, creepy, but not misleading quote from Venter about this microbe’s parent being a computer.
• Live Science – Stuart Fox: First Live Organism with Synthetic Genome Created ; Includes the contents of the “watermarks” slipped into the genome, including the paper’s authors’ names and some quotations.
• Science News – Laura Sanders: Genome from a bottle ; No foolin’ around with murky ethical or philosophical ramifications here – just what they did, whether it will pay off or not, and explanation why this falls well short of creation (rather than duplication and modification) of life.
• San Diego Union-Tribune – Gary Robbins: First synthetic cell created by scientists ; It’s a local story for the veteran and competent Robbins. It’s a decent job. Robbins’s byline there is news, too. He’s been science editor up the coast at the Orange County Register for years. Now at the ‘Trib. Things change – but he got another job in the newspaper business! He even says his new employer is hiring. It wants a web-centric biotech writer. More on his change here.
• … could go on all morning.

Grist for the Mill:

J. Craig Venter Institute Press Release ; AAAS Press Release ;

Vulgarity Alert, but wanna laugh?:

Don’t read this if you object to coarse language.

• The Daily Mash: I’d Play God, Says Everyone ;

- Charlie Petit