Here’s a stunning story – of a dam in Texas that overflowed so tremendously that the flood waters gouged a “canyon” from bedrock in just three days, scouring out teardrop shaped landforms, plucking giant boulders and scattering them in heaps, erasing oak trees and mesquite. It provided science with a close, first look at how quickly a canyon can be dug. It’s like a mini-scablands, the ice-age scars in the state of Washington left by the collapse of an ice dam. One wonders. Had Charles Lyell seen something like what happened a few years ago along the Guadalupe River in South Texas downstream from the Canyon Lake dam, would the whole philosophy of gradualism in geology have been stillborn or sharply hedged?

The news arises from a report in Nature Geoscience; with a big boost from a Caltech press release featured prominently in the EurekAlert service’s daily notice.

A few outlets jumped on this and, in the next day or so, more could well join in.

Stories:

• Science News – Sid Perkins: Even a Newborn Canyon is big in Texas / Flood carved surprisingly large gorge that may help understand features on Earth and Mars ; Sid is smart – he calls an Imperial College London geologist who, a few years ago, discovered evidence in the English Channel of an ice age flood there that’d make this one look like a trickle. Perkins sticks tightly to the science and broad pertinence of this feature to geology.
• Christian Science Monitor – Brett Israel: Canyon formation: Recent gusher sugests that canyons can form very quickly;
• NatureNews – Richard Lovett: Modelling Mars in a Texan torrent / Huge canyon carved out in a week may aid understanding of prehistoric megafloods ;

A few observations here on the first round of media reaction.

First, reporting of the science lessons seems solid, particularly Rick Lovett’s piece. But my goodness – the few out so far treat this only as a science story, and as a fresh discovery too. As seen in Grist, and I’ll expand on this shortly, it’s old news in the town of New Braunfels not far from where this 2002 flood occurred.

Second, the same river just had ANOTHER giant flood this month, one that wrapped school buses around trees in a campground, sent people screaming for high water, and killed at least one person. Here’s a recent report on the cleanup in the San Antonio Express-News by Alia Conley. Stories on the 2002 flood, one thinks, would have benefited from mentioning the recent round.

Third, one notices that most reporters, in line with the Caltech press release, call this on first ref a canyon. Not a slot canyon, not a small canyon, or a short canyon, but just plain canyon. This evokes canyon country in Arizona, or the canyon of the Yellowstone.  The people in the area call it a gorge (they have to, though, as the word canyon is already taken by the lake and the region. Canyon canyon wouldn’t do). It appears to be about as large as the gorgeous gorges of Ithaca on the Cornell campus. I might call it an arroyo, or a wash, or a gully, or a barranca. To be sure, the paper’s title is “Rapid canyon formation during a catastrophic flood.” I don’t know for sure the formal geologic definition of canyon. But my Penguin Dictionary of Geology starts off its definition with “a deep valley with vertical sides…” This thing is no valley. So, on first reference, canyon seems too grand a term, you know? But it catches the eye – “Canyon carved in three hours” and one imagines something large on the landscape.

A headline and lede that said something like “huge gully carved in three days has lessons for geologists” would be a better way to evoke the scale of this feature.

Fourth, scientists and local tour leaders already knew about the three-day excavation, and have for some time. Look at the stories immediately below, and in grist to see the local tourist agency’s feature treatment it gives Canyon Gorge. A story is news no sooner than a reporter learns of it, but the gist of this could have been written some time ago. It is clearly news now. But maybe the local press did have it already?

Previous, local stories (full text behind pay wall):

• San Antonio Express-News – Roger Croteeu (Oct. 21,2005): Gorge-ous attraction is coming ; also (Oct. 17, 2007) More tours planned for Canyon Lake Gorge ;
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Oct. 7, 2007): no byline, but key words in summary of a news roundup are “Carved in just thee days, the Canyon Lake Gorge is being opened to the public on a limited basis…” ;

Grist for the Mill:

Caltech Press Release ; Canyon Gorge website ;

My anecdote: About ten years ago,  perhaps in 2002, I had dinner with my mother, now passed on, and brothers and sisters. I remarked about floods I’d just read of, in New Braunfels. Maybe it was this very gorge-maker. I said  the town name struck me with peculiar power. Maybe, I conjectured, it was because I’d just bought a big iron barbecue made there, with the town name pressed into its charcoal burner. Mom stared at me with amazement. “Charlie,” she said, “Don’t you know you were born in New Braunfels?” I thought I was born on Randolph Field army air base. That was true too but I didn’t know that I was taken home to a rental house in New Braunsfel. Then she started talking about the hail storm that ruined her and my father’s new convertible – not just shredding the top but it leaving dents in the hood and smashing the windshield. Stormy place, that New Braunsfel. They fixed the car and, I seem to have been told, drove me and older sister Kip back home to California in it.

- Charlie Petit

Now I know about blind shear rams and shuttle valves in a hydraulic T-joints and how they are supposed to work. And I know that drill pipe is connected with joints – like the buckles on a soft leather belt – and if a blind shear ram tries to slice through and pinch off a raging oil well’s center pipe and hits one of the joints, it won’t work. And that shuttle valves can leak. And that if one has TWO blind shear rams, the last line of defense, it cuts drastically odds for failure. And that repeated studies had concluded that all deepwater wells should have two blind shear rams but Deepwater Horizon’s managers elected to use just one. I know the Minerals Mgt. Service had those studies, and yet, and yet ….. nobody was sufficiently grown up and brave enough with the company’s check books or the government’s theoretical power of oversight to be sure that the last-ditch way to stop a blowout would actually work.

Could have guessed all that in fuzzy detail. And the above barely represents the size of the gusher of their own that a NYTimes team, David Barstow, Laura Dodd, James Glanz, Stephanie Saul, and Ian Urbina unload today (with tagline credit to Michael Moss and Henry Fountain). Their  account pummels the reader repeatedly with separate reports, instances, vignettes, historical incidents, and warnings in plain English from several independent groups of consultants and industry engineers all saying the same thing: blowout preventers or B.O.P.s are more like B.O.M.P.s, with the M for maybe.

It’s hard to say who looks worse here, B.P. and its contractors, or Minerals Management Service, but I’m guessing the latter. It turns out that Interior Secretary Salazar, or so it says here, specifically asked MMS for a report on the risks of expanded deepwater drilling on the US continental shelf and got a 200+ page report. It not once mentioned the agency’s long familiarity with fears that the gigantic piece of equipment that is supposed to stop catastrophic blowouts has long been seen as unreliable, untested, and unchanged. One is unsure it that lets the adminstration off the hook – it also seems evident that MMS was an industry lap dog and hence maybe not the best outfit to ask such a question.

This huge piece is an eye-opener. Too bad somebody in the Fourth Estate didn’t write something like this a few years ago. Maybe they did? But without catastrophe as exhibit A, warnings are easy to ignore.

While we’re on the topic of NYTImes and oil spills, its coverage over the last few days includes:

• Liz Robbins – Signs of Hope as BP Captures Record Oil Amounts;
• Justin Gillis: Where Gulf Sill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters ; … think Dust Bowl, the channelizing of the Mississippi, Johnstown Flood, cutting of most forest land, near-eradication of bison……  Nice article. In a few years, a decade or two at most, the gulf could look much as it did. Some of those others are still unfixed. (by the by, in the June 28 New Yorker, the sturdy observer Hendrik Hertzberg calls the spill,without a blink, “the single biggest environmental catastrophe in the history of the United States.” Was the Dust Bowl not a single event?

And, this just in from AP:

• Seth Borenstein: By the numbers: Oil leak wouldn’t fill Superdome ; Most interesting to me in this blizzard of comparisons is that all the oil filled so far, were it made into gasoline, would be enough to keep the vehicles on US highways going for less than four hours. Boy, that sure tells us how much oil we’re pumping and importing. Also from Borenstein, Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering ; Don’t look for any Dick Feynman among this bunch. And, while he doesn’t quite say it this baldly, it appears most of the panel has its mind made up already ( Not that it would be easy to find somebody who has not done so).

- Charlie Petit

That’s interesting (or funny, if you like): One study, but very different types of headlines: “‘Male Menopause’ discovered” and “Men have no Menopause”.

Both types of headlines are based on one study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which analyzed  3219 European males between 40 and 79. Blood samples provided testosterone levels and questionnaires (!)  asked about the “general, sexual, physical, and psychological health”. The result: “Symptoms of poor morning erection, low sexual desire, erectile dysfunction, inability to perform vigorous activity, depression, and fatigue were significantly related to the testosterone level.” Nevertheless, only 2.1% (63 of 2966 subjects) had these symptomatic low testosterone levels (mostly older men).

So, why do we mostly read headlines like “‘Male Menopause’ discovered” (Rheinische Post online), or “The Symptoms of Male Menopause” (Der Standard), as if the andropause is a given fact?

What the scientists found was nothing more and nothing less than a correlation between a low testosterone level and three clinical symptoms (“decreased frequency of morning erection, decreased frequency of sexual thoughts, and erectile dysfunction”). So, one could call it an age-related testosterone deficiency, affecting only a minority (about 2%) of elderly men. But one shouldn’t name it “andropause” or “male menopause” – and the scientists themselves did NOT use the term in the whole article – because this term immediately suggests a relation to menopause, which is a completely different and natural developmental phenomenon for every woman above the age of 50. Actually, the scientists themselves did this study to find criteria to be able to distinguish between occasional normal low testosterone levels and pathogenic testosterone deficiency – to prevent overtreatment: “The application of these new criteria can guard against the excessive diagnosis of hypogonadism and curb the injudicious use of testosterone therapy in older men.”

Furthermore, just one quick search for “andropause” at EurekAlert comes up with a very recent (and very sceptical) analysis of the evidence for an andropause and some interesting quotes about the pros and cons of a testosterone therapy. “It’s not clear whether such a syndrome exists, and that the evidence of the hormone’s effectiveness in these circumstances is inconclusive”, says the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin, a publication of the British Medical Association. And: ”Clinicians should not offer testosterone therapy without explicit discussion of the uncertainty about its risks and benefits.” In the NEJM-study, the scientists stress that their findings “underscores the paramount importance of using not only biochemical measures but also stringently defined, symptom-based criteria to prevent the overdiagnosis of late-onset hypogonadism.”

I couldn’t find many articles, where the study results were presented correctly, because most just copied the poor AFP piece. But here is one I liked, and it is not from a “leading” newspaper, but “just” online: The news-section of the Webprovider T-online: “Men have no Menopause“. It got the facts right, quoted the assessment of a gynecologist from Berlin, and included a hint, that a testosterone overtreatment increases the risks of heart attacks, prostate cancer and stroke.

Also, the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Werner Bartens) got the facts and the headline right:  ”The Male Menopause is a Myth“.

However, Focus-online, who headlines “The Nine Symptoms of Male Menopause“, did not even mention, that only 2 percent of the studied men have the symptoms (and only three symptoms, not nine). The (short) article reads as if andropause is a given fact and affects men like menopause affects women.

The Apotheken-Umschau (a pharmacy newspaper) did a well judged article, explaining the study results and the problems with the definition of the term “andropause”. But why do they headline “Symptoms of ‘Male Menopause’ identified”, if the last sentence of the article reads: “The study couldn’t rule out one possibility: That a male menopause doesn’t exist at all.” Same true for the “Ärzteblatt”, good article (detail rich, but lacks quotes for my taste), strange headline: “‘Male Menopause’ is rare“.

Also on the wrong track: Die Welt with “Scientists prove Male Menopause” (based on AFP).

Sascha Karberg

Three months ago  The Tracker posted on spending an hour or so clicking through the long-form science writing at Miller McCune Magazine. I just did it again, with the same result: pleasure and a boost in mood. Mainly, it’s fine to see such high quality material finding a paying customer. I don’t know what M2 pays, and its being on line and non-profit may be a clue, but it is apparenty providing work for serious journalists.

This pub, as explained previously, is a foundation and donation-supported outlet. Of immediate interest here at ksjtracker is its heavy dose of science, health,  and nature writing.

Four Sample Stories:

• Eric Wagner (June 15) The Value of Dead Bird Watching ; The is enough to make you want (almost) to go dig a dead pelican from the sand, suppress the gag reflex at the smell, brush the maggots aside, and measure it for a data base. Aside from sex, horror and disgust tend to attrack eyeballs and attention perhaps better than anything (though it may be only for a moment). This is engrossing, and I don’t mean because of the gross part. Dead birds are not just from oil spills and other pollution. The stories bonus is a link to a YouTube of THE classic  Monty Python skit, the one about the Norwegian Blue parrot rendered stiff from a swim in a fjord.
• Beryl Lieff Benderly (June 14) The Real Science Gap; Immigrants, we all know, have for a century or so provided an outsized share of the Nobelists and other brilliant researchers working in the US. But American youngsters for most of the last century went into science too at a good clip. Lately, veteran writer Benderly reports in this cover story, things are slowing down for the USA in the international brainiac competition. “Careers in science, engineering, and technology hold less attraction for the most talented young Americans.” Not only that, but nations in Europe and Asia with expanding high-tech industries and research universities are keeping more of their own at home – or luring them back after US training. Worst, the job market and environment in the US, she reports, has gotten dysfunctional. The problem is not, she writes, a shortage of scientists and engineers. We have lots, many of the stuck on a post-doc, grad-school treadmill. Good jobs are hard to find. There’s stuff in here about the fading science savvy of white men, too, while woman and minority men etc. aren’t yet making up the slack.  It’s not an entirely consistent list of woes (either not enough Americans are trying science, or there are three grads in good fields for every job, or both maybe but that must be subtle). Vannevar Bush comes up, too. So does the need for post-docs to form labor unions with muscle. This is a solid, sober report.
• Emily Badger (June 17)  The Price to You for Modest Climate Action ; A political and economic analysis of how much money the average US household would surrender if carbon gets a tax, cap, dividend- assessment, or whatever. It’s not much. For one bill  before Congress: $3 to $5 per person per month. This is useful reporting that, assuming its accuracy, needs wider circulation.
• Kristian Beadle (JUne 18) The Wealth and Decline of Mangroves ; a log of a blog by a reporter working his way down the west coast of Mexico right now. The writing is overblown. It meanders. It shows the advantage of disciplined, traditional journalism. But, one must add, well reported. Did you know that two thirds of seafood eaten globally spent part of its time in a mangrove, yet half have been eliminated already and the toll continues.

There is a good deal more. But it is evident that Miller-McCune is a refuge for long form journalism. Go to the General Site, or straight to the Science, Environment, or Health sections.

- Charlie Petit

Sometimes you just have to shake the dust from the brain with a long Sunday drive to nowhere. USA Today‘s Dan Vergano, a sober sort of fellow in general circumstances, has a go at a fast tour of mythology, paleontology, the bushy human ancestral tree, and the ambiguity of old DNA and older  bones. The intent is not necessarily, it appears, to get anywhere but right back into the garage for a retreat to the den and a muse on the wonders beheld out the car window.

Thus in a piece that moved under the hed Ancient legends walked among early humans? , and that question marks means probably not, he knits together news events that most of us who frequent this site probably remember but not likely in the same thought. They include the Siberian little finger bone that seems to fit no known pre-human, neolithic and iron-age legends of “wild men” who lived somewhere east of the Caucuses, and legends of winged  four-legged griffons with bodies of lions and the heads of eagles. He starts on this by a letter in March to the Times of London, but the itinerary is his. Read it to see if it holds together  (and to see also if you agree that one of Vergano’s sources, in dismissing the plausibility of a legendary wild-man link to recently-found fossils, is mistaken in thinking that the stories need date back a million years).

There are plenty of clues in the piece not to take it with much seriousness. Such subtleties, one fears, will elude many readers. Thus there are some out there today convinced that science has endorsed some specific, very strange mythology. No harm, really. Many others will enjoy this. I did.

Pic: Protoceratops ; with a griffin-worthy skull.

- Charlie Petit

Government-paid agents may be coming to a neighborhood near you, burying their sensitive snooping equipment in quiet niches to keep an ear to the ground. They may already have been there as their sensor matrix moves west to east. For USA Today Jeff Martin has the story. The hardware is for a program called USArray, and is part of a larger one called EarthScope, that the National Science Foundation is footing. Its aim  is to look deeply at the lithosphere underlying the nation.

Martin is a staffer at the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. His piece for USA Today focusses heavily on just one aspect of the array’s purpose – to measure local seismicity and earthquake hazards. This may mislead readers and suggest to them that this is done primarily for their immediate, practical  benefit. As far as I can tell, the main incentive is far more general and basic in nature. It is to get a snapshot of  the lithosphere’s hidden landscape of faults, rock types, stratigaphic zones, and other geotectonic details across and deeply under broad regions. Those may delight earth scientists. They might not be of much practical use for seismic safety.

I’ve known about this for awhile, mainly because friend Horst Rademacher and his wife Peggy Hellweg let the program put a detector on a property they own along the western rise of the Sierras. Their both geophysicists – and he’s a science writer as well. This USA Today story will catch millions of Americans up on the program’s existence, if not much of its justification. It started on the West Coast and is now moving through the Great Lakes on the North and oil-threatened Gulf Coast on the south. It is not mapping local seismicity, but its 400 sensors provide detailed maps of tectonic structures and such via finely-gridded measurement how waves from distant quakes move through. Hardware from the westernmost side of this traveling grid gets moved to the east side periodically, and on it rolls.

An archive search finds a few previous sample stories from regional outlets as the USArray reached their neighborhoods:

• Havasu Sun Herald (Arizona, Feb 16, 2006) Sarah Reynolds: Seismic sensor placed at Hualapai Mountain Park ;
• Uttomwa Courier (Iowa, June 18, 2009) - Matt Milner: EarthScope coming to southern Iowa ;

Grist for the Mill: EarthScope USArray ;

- Charlie Petit

Whaling these days is a dim echo of the past, back when Yankee whalers sailed into seas chocked horizon to horizon with spouts, or even a few decades ago when giant blue and fin whales got hauled up, big as freight cars, in steady parades into the rendering works and gargantuan abattoirs of Antarctic factory ships. But it’s hardly gone, not with Japan’s “scientific’ hunts for meat and data in the Southern Ocean, and coastal whaling continuing elsewhere (including off Alaska, in small non-commercial, subsistence hunts of bowheads by Eskimos in small boats).

A meeting this week and next in Morocco of the International Whaling Commission brings a flock of stories. The big issue is a proposed rule change to permit a limited resumption of commercial whaling. The given reason is, paradoxically, to reduce Japan’s open-ocean forays, harpoon guns loaded, to Antarctica to get mostly minke whales plus a few bigger ones. For science, wink wink. And meat to sell in the markets at home. Iceland also does some coastal whaling anyway – ignoring IWC dicta – as does Norway.

Most of these are fairly ordinary reporting. But first up, the Sunday Times bullet to see who went after a story with few harpoons of its own.

Story samples:

• Sunday Times (UK) – Sunday Times Insight Team: Flights, girls, and cash ‘bribes’ buy Japan some whaling votes ; Pretty ballsy bit of  reporting (entrapment alert) here – the Times’s undercover reporters, posing as lobbyists, offered  “development grant” bribes to representatives of small, poor nations in exchange for IWC votes. They got some hard nibbles, and apparently candid explanation how much Japan was already paying them for their votes. This team shows that Tea Party ambush in the US, the one that sent the community legal aid program ACORN out of business for not showing the door to people seeking loans for a streetwalking business, how the pros do it.
• AP – Jay Alabaster: Future of commercial whaling ban rests with Japan ; Without hiding behind any quotes, Alabaster declares that “The effectiveness of the IWC..is at stake.” He braces the story with adjectives and vivid verbs, referring to issues “boiling over” and “agonizingly close” prospects of a decision. One interesting assertion here: Japan’s coastal hunts provide more, fresher, and cheaper meat than the long trips to Antarctica. This, he writes, is a puzzle.
• Time Magazine (eggcentric blog) Krista Mahr: Support for Japan’s Whaling: On the Verge of Extinction? ; Japan’s allies, mostly small countries, are not all staying loyal (despite, reportedly, payoffs under the table).
• AFP – Giff Johnson : Pacific nations deny selling Japan whaling votes ;
• Sunday Times (UK) – Sunday Times Insight Team: Flights, girls, and cash ‘bribes’ buy Japan some whaling votes ; Pretty ballsy bit of  reporting (entrapment alert) here – the Times’s undercover reporters, posing as lobbyists, offered small nations “development grant” bribes in exchange for IWC votes. They got some hard nibbles, and apparently candid explanation how much Japan was already paying them for their votes.
• Reuters – Lamine Ghanmi: Whaling commission to seek way out of deadlock;
• Guardian (UK) John Vidal, David Adam: Return to commercial whaling could be determined by tiny Pacific island ;

Grist for the Mill: IWC 2010 Meeting agenda ;

Here’s a good story that includes easy to understand (and hence to report) research and a big dose of drama and clever coordination between PhD scientists and a few regular, if telescope-equipped, volunteer citizens. Plus it’s sort of good news, a tonic against the usual run of dreary news from all beats – scientists doing something interesting and intellectually useful – better too than the recent norm from this site’s beat list and scientists not knowing how to fix a broken oil pipe. I’d have expected more attention to it.

The collaboration took a look at the silhouette of a distant Kuiper Belt object, or asteroid-ice ball rock out beyond Pluto and Neptune, as it crossed the face of a far more distant star. They already knew how bright its unresolvable  dot looks from here, illuminated by our Sun. The transit of the star, and the latter’s pattern  of slight dimming, provided its diameter. It was not easy to predict the event and get the data. But they did – two stations in Hawaii did it – and figured out that it is smaller than expected. Implication: it’s bright white. Or, bright as things can be so far from the Sun, anyway, and may be the most reflective thing in the solar system. Must be ice – and clean ice at that. That’s a mystery – read a few stories or the press release in grist to see why and so forth. An MIT team led the effort, results are in Nature.

Signs of the times: The Boston Globe, right across the river from where the research was headquartered, as far as I can tell didn’t bother – not even a wire story. The latter part is easy to explain. Neither AP nor Reuters did it either. Few blogs did much with it for that matter, so the “new media” hardly filled the gap left by withering old-time journalism. I can with neither hesitation nor documentation or anything resembling data declare that, not so long ago, this would have gotten attention from many local, regional, and national news outlets. We have here a simple discovery from the outer solar system reported in a major journal that sends experts wandering the halls, muttering and scratching their heads in perplexity. That may not be a page 1 splash but is a tidy story that merits professional write-up and circulation.

Stories:

• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Scientists size up a bright mini-world; She gets in a def. of albedo. She also reports that this is the first use of a stellar occultation to study Kuiper Belt objects. Izzat true? What about this, reported in December by SpaceDaily ?
• BBC – Katia Moskvitch: Kuiper Belt world measured in star pass ; Features one speculation how this thing could be way out there but look shiny and new – could be a recently spalled chunk from collision by larger objects – one called Haumea, a dwarf planet, is a suspect.  Other reports, including the commentary in Nature, say even that’s a stretch. Moskvitch also throws in a ref. to the best known dwarf planet, good ol’ former planet Pluto.
• Telegraph (UK) Andy Bloxham: Astronomers in astonishing feat of photography / Amateur astronomers have helped…; Bloxham puts a lot of effort into stressing the collaboration of amateurs with the professionals when the observing network was put together. But he did not, apparently, get any of them on the phone or email. It’s not clear whether he used anything other than the press release and the paper as his source.
• AFP – Distant rock caught by Earthbound telescopes ;

Stray Question: I filched that illus up there from the paper, a screen grab. It’s from a station at Haleakala on Maui. Why the data scatter is less during occultation than it is before and after is not intuitively clear, or even fuzzy, to me. Maybe it has something to do with scaling and signal to noise?  The answer would never make the story – but it’s something I’d have asked of somebody among the dozens of authors of this report. Maybe it’s in the paper and I missed it on my fast riffle.

Grist for the Mill:

MIT Press Release ;  Univ. of Stuttgart Press Release (largely taken from MIT’s, U.Stuttgart role details added) ;

- Charlie Petit

This week the University of Arizona and its Seward Observatory released some amazing images from the new Large Binocular Telescope. They show how its new adaptive optics system – one that wiggles and dimples a mirror in opposition to the atmosphere’s wrigglings – gives the observatory a sharpness of vision well exceeding that of the Hubble Space Telescope. And this is for just one of its 8.4-meter main mirrors – when both of its eyeballs get these image-stabilizing spectacles it will be much mo’  better. The pic shows the same starfield as seen via the Hubble on the left, and the LBT with its eyeglasses on, right. Notice how many small stars stand out on the right compared to the fuzzy regions in the left image.

To be sure, this is pretty arcane stuff. Adaptive optical systems are not new, even if this system is by far the best yet. And relatively few general  news outlets provide astronomy buffs with extensive detail in any case when scientists come up with a better version of familiar hardware. But I am one such buff.

What coverage I can find goes hardly a whit beyond the press release. The latter, for instance, says nothing on one of the more intriguing ways that such systems take out a star’s twinkle. They do so by erasing it first with the aid of a bright star, or guide star, that has enough brilliance to reveal, moment by moment, the random refractions from the atmosphere. With that data as a guide, such systems also make dim objects near the line of sight to the guide star sharpen up. And if no natural star is in the region one wants to study, laser systems can make artificial star-like dots appear high in the atmosphere.

So, without a news release explaining the whole deal, no press account says anything about that gide star. And a call to the observatory confirms that the LBT will, as expected, rely on guide stars – natural ones initially and, in a year or so, artificial laser-made versions. Similarly, while the press release says the LBT’s system is much better than previous a.a. installations, it does not say why. (The reason is the “high order” density of novel magnetic actuators to push and pull the corrective mirror, and the large size of that mirror at the so-called “secondary” position in the optical train. That means it is built-in rather than an add-on.) Voila, neither do most press accounts.

Stories:

• Arizona Daily Star: Tom Beal: Twinkle no more, little star ; Beal does get some detail on the mirror that the press release lacks, made a call to the director, and wisely avoids a technical term in the press release, the Strehl ratio, providing the pertinent info in plain English. We learn that, so delicate is the corrective mirror, that the first two broke before they could be installed.
• Daily Mail (UK) Niall Firth: Incredible sharp images of galaxy 26,000 light years away taken by telescope that beats Hubble ; Details details, and feh. 26,000 miles light years away is the globular cluster M92, of which it took a picture, and that is a component of our own Milky Way. So Firth not only doted on the press release, but got some of it wrong.
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Telescope Takes Sharpest Pictures of Space Yet From Earth;
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: New Earth-Based Telescope System Snaps Sharpest-Ever Pics of Deep Space ;

Dept. of Jealousy: You’d think somebody would call another observatory with a great big telescope and older-fashioned adaptive optics – the Keck Observatory in Hawaii comes to mind – and ask how long it will take or whether it plans to update to something like the one in Arizona.

Grist for the Mill:

U of Arizona Press Release ; LBT supplementary info, with more images. Worth a look for the videos showing what happens to a fuzz ball when the a.a. gets turned on.

- Charlie Petit

Have a good time with this one:

Jay Price: When Silly Putty Meets Concrete ; It’s listed as an education story, and it’s about education rituals at North Carolina State University. But it’s got some pretty good viscoelasticity and thermodynamics in it. Also something on sound effects – splats, whacks, and thunks.

- Charlie Petit

See that flaming wildflower there? That’s the Schlumberger EverGreen Burner. What a great, unexpected name for an oversized stove top burner that, its maker says, uses such specialized high temperature technology – flame front-ignition, twin pilots,  pneumatic atomization and enhanced air induction in its single-head, 12-nozzle dealiebop, etc -  that it can take the excess oil overwhelming your rig and burn it up fallout-free and smokeless! “Ideal for cleanup operations,” it says. No need to store it or barge it back to shore!

We’ve all read that the oil industry’s technology for dealing with deep water blowouts is, as I heard on MSNBC the other night, mostly a photocopier at a consulting company – for aping other companies’ emergency plans. You know, the ones that spare the walruses of the Gulf of Mexico  (ooops, that was our immortal old Arctic plan but the Minerals Mgt. Service will never care) while not testing and not improving much of anything to be sure it will work. But it’s not as though they’ve got nothin’. That burner’s seriously slick. No credit to BP or the USA. One learns that this thing  is basically FRENCH! Courtesy of the Institut Francais du Pétrole. Gotta be a story just in that. See grist below for details. Also neat-o, I bet, is the Helix Q4000, a specialized rig one reads about that  joined the others out there and is capturing yet more oil from the leak.

I found that picture of the burner and the promotional specs at the manufacturer’s website. News agencies, far as I can tell, haven’t taken any pictures of it. I don’t see many images of any sort by video and photojournalists from on board the vessels that BP has hired, or of the crews working so desperately to turn off the company’s accidental tap. The story is one of tragedy and technological failure. We have plenty on the tragedy – reported mostly from the barrier islands and marshes. But few reporters are out there where the hard work of, eventually, undoing the hardware failings is underway. Too bad BP’s p.r. machine still seems to be in bunker mode. It ought to be hosting media visits to every ship out there, allowing interviews with anybody with a moment to talk. Reporters should be taken on the dispersant air drop flights too. It would make BP look as though, however much it screwed up,  it really cares for something other than revenue. Maybe BP is doing that, let me know if I’m wrong. Either way,  details and insiders’ tales will come out. Muckrakers don’t just clean beaches. There will be books. Battening hatches against reporters only makes things worse for BP.

Stories on the Spill Itself:

• Houston Chronicle – Jennifer Latson: Oil incineration gets under way aboard vessel / BP gains containment capacity in bid to curb spill ; A just-the-facts report.  It’s where I learned, in an unelaborated mention, of the EverGreen burner. BP, it says here, is now capturing about 25,000 barrels daily. Latest estimates, widely publicized, suggest this is only about half the spill’s volume. And a production vessel is being line up so that the company might be able to bring the oil ashore rather than burn it at sea.
• Politics Daily (blog) Dan Chivvis: BP Oil Spill Cap Plan B: Burn, Baby, Burn; Chivvis had the burner more than a week ago. And after looking it all up myself, I now see that he linked to the manufacturer’s website as well.
• Bloomberg – Jim Polson (June 10): BP Says 2nd Oil-Recovery System to Start Testing This Weekend,
• McClatchy Newspapers – Renee Schoof, Marisa Taylor : Plan to burn excess oil from BP well raises health questions ; At the very end of this story, mostly sourced from people far from the spill and worried about smoke and carcinogens, is a statement from the Schlumberger company. It says burning oil more or less like this is old hat – it’s been doing it for 40 years.

Grist for the Mill :

Schlumberger Evergreen Burner (w/hi def pic) ;  Helix Q4000;  BP Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A contradiction, if only superficial, is seen in recent accounts on wildlife deaths from regions of the Gulf Coast that are not beyond BP’s petroleum. There is talk of sure doom for many if not most animals caught in it. But if so there is a question: where are the bodies?

On the one hand we find NPR‘s report this week, by Nell Greenfieldboyce, on the fate of birds once they get significant oil on their feathers. The headline has the sort of question marks that suggest the answer: Should Oiled Birds Be Cleaned? Her story offers a variety of opinions. Some optimism comes from animal rescue workers who say many species are tough enough, given a rest and wash, to regain health. More convincing in the piece are the gloomy expectations of academic and other researchers. They fear that because the creatures are probably already poisoned by ingested oil, cleaning them may stop them from taking in more and restore some outward health. But they say it does little for their ability to survive long in the wild or breed again. Some do survive. One expects, and the story reflects, that few rescuers will let statistics stop them from giving the birds a chance.

On the other, AP‘s Jay Reeves, John Flesher, and Tamara Lush went out in the marshes, and sought opinions of animal experts who have spent a lot more time out there. They came up with little solid evidence of very many dead animals. By one count, only about 1000 birds, turtles, and marine mammals are dead.  The story provides little reason to think few have actually died. But if so, as it says of some birds, perhaps they are “crawling deep into marshes, never to be seen again.” And surely the toll on fish, molluscs and other marine life is staggering. Throngs of survivors, perhaps a tiny minority, provides the story’s hed: Sea creatures flee oil spill, gather near shore.

There will be long reports, books, and monographs on this spill’s environmental effects. For now, it’s mostly just reporters doing the best they can with what they got (without, it appears, much help from BP’s effort to keep the press away from the worst of it).

Other samplings of oiled wildlife coverage:

• Washington Post – Melissa Bell: Dawn dishwashing detergent saves wildlife ; A paean to one product and one bird rescue outfit that deems it the best one for getting spilled oil out of feathers. Procter & Gamble has donated 7,000 bottles to the effort. Bell links to a P&G ad that celebrates its bird-saving sideline. The story mentions that Dawn is largely a petrochemical, ironies and horrors. How successful are these rescues? Bell doesn’t tell us, perhaps she didn’t ask.
• NYTimes – Leslie Kaufman: Ad for a Dish Detergent Becomes Part of a Story ; Much better, with details on P&G uncertainty whether to expand promotion of itself and its product as a wildlife savior. Closing passage provides the story a proper ending to a full arc: nobody knows whether all the suds and fluffing makes much difference, long term.
• CNN – Amy Gahran: Reporting on the Gulf oil spill from your cell phone ; an app to let animal rescue know about any oiled wildlife you happen upon.
• Palm Beach Post – Dara Kam: Pensacola bird-rescue unit readies for rush of patients as oil begins hitting Florida Panhandle ;

And from across the world, a few enterprise stories (or: it could be worse…):

• NYTimes – Adam Nossiter : Far from Gulf, a Spill Scourge 5 Decades Old ; Niger delta, awash and afoul with oil, most of it Shell oil, some from Exxon Mobil. At one time, it says here, some delta residents lived off the harvesting of molluscs. The story should have found a dead scallop coated in oil. I found a pic of a black one, but it’s not from oil. The eco-disaster of the Niger delta has been covered often enough over the years. Right now is a smart time to do it again.
• Reuters – Randy Fabi: Nigerian village rues the day the oil men came ; Ditto, a report from the scene of a tragedy – greed, spilled oil, corruption, dead marshes, constant warfare, sabotage, and desperate people.
• Wall St. Journal – Benoit Faucon (blog): BP Is Not The Only Spill Master – Check Shell in Nigeria ;

- Charlie Petit