(English intro to Spanish lang. post) We find a broad selection of science stories: Europe is being cheap with the fusion reactor ITER, a Mediterranean marine plant called Posidonia could be used as an environmental indicator due to its storage of metals, Chilean press explains that NASA tested its tsunamis detectors in its coasts, Bolivian researchers are making progress using bacteria and fungus for bioremediation, 59% of Uruguayans consider environment more important than economic development (28% the contrary), the saliva of a Guatemalan bug seems to improve potatoes crops, in Mexico the Jack Ealy conference on science journalism has just started, revival of unnecessary black hole’s fears at LHC, the Higgs particle is divided in five, headlines contrary to the body of their stories, and a news report on nanotechnology that has won a very succulent prize.

Como seguro que ya habréis oído hablar de las noticias del día sobre que la Luna tiene bastante más agua de lo pensado, que en dos semanas se recuperará el 90% del crudo vertido en el Golfo (a ver), y que las caquitas de las ballenas favorecen la absorción de CO2 en los océanos (cómo nos dejamos llevar…). Veamos qué más noticias encontramos destacadas en periódicos de lengua española.

Felicitemos primero a la periodista colombiana Ángela Posada-Swafford, que por su reportaje “El poder de lo diminuto” en la revista Muy Interesante ha ganado el premio Sacyr en la categoría de Periodismo de Innovación Tecnológica y Económica, y se llevará nada más y nada menos que… 18.000 euros! ¡Eso sí es estímulo para hacer periodismo de calidad! Enhorabuena a Ángela.

Empecemos. En España, Público presenta una nota de Nuño Domínguez alertando que Europa se está escaqueando de pagar los 1400 millones que le falta poner para el ITER (el reactor que va a experimentar en fusión nuclear), y como consecuencia, el proyecto peligra. Seguro que los terminarán poniendo, y sólo se quedará en un aviso, pero buena pieza para darnos cuenta que el ITER va retrasado, y su coste será casi el triple de lo previsto. ¿Qué pasó? Está bien que a veces saquemos los colores también a los científicos… y visto lo que ocurrió también con el LHC, quizás deberíamos ser todavía más watchdog con ellos. Muy didáctico el párrafo donde se explica el funcionamiento básico del ITER. Esto es lo que solicitamos algunas veces.

El Mundo es quien de momento recoge en su web con información y video de la plataforma SINC, un estudio que podría tener impacto: unas plantas marinas llamadas posidonias almacenan en sus tejidos los metales vertidos en el agua durante décadas, y podrían ser utilizadas como indicadores para registrar la historia de los cambios ambientales.  Podría quedarse en nada, o dar mucho juego. Es algo nuevo, que merece la pena ser difundido. En la sección se Salud, muy buen artículo de Isabel Lantigua sobre progresos en la aplicación de terapia génica a pacientes con HIV. La idea es introducir células modificadas genéticamente que produzcan un ARN que interfiera con el virus y evite su multiplicación.

En El País, Malén Ruís de Elvira firma un buen artículo explicando porqué los aparatos de fMRI no son buenos como detectores de mentiras por mucho que  las empresas interesadas lo aseguren, pero alguien en la web le hizo la mala pasada de ponerle un título que dice todo lo contrario del texto: “La resonancia magnética se perfila como detector de mentiras”.

La sección de ciencia de ABC anda cargadísima de astronomía. Casi hasta el desequilibrio. Pero encontramos buenas notas como la de José Manuel Nieves, explicando la hipótesis del acelerador de partículas Fermilab según el cual podría haber 5 partículas de Higgs en lugar de una. Curioso. También encontramos una nota de dudosa relevancia de Judith de Jorge dando voz a nuevos apocalípticos de agujeros negros en el LHC.

En La Tercera (Chile) Teresita Quezada y Francisco Rodríguez explican que la NASA probó en Chile con cierto éxito un prototipo para predecir y detectar la potencia de tsunamis. Buena infografía explicando su funcionamiento.

La Razón (Bolivia) lleva una muy buen artículo de Javier Badani sobre las investigaciones con bacterias y hongos para eliminar contaminantes del medioambiente. La bioremediación no es un tema tan nuevo, pero Javier lo borda dando un muy buen grado de detalle sobre las investigaciones hechas en su país.

El Observador (Uruguay) abordaba hace unos días “Los desafíos del Uruguay Natural” por medio de Yeli Barrios. El reto es continuar creciendo sin perjudicar el medioambiente. Curioso que si tocara escoger entre economía o entorno natural, el 59% de Uruguayos priorizaría la protección del ambiente por un 28% lo contrario.

En El Universal (México) Liliana Alcántara nos habla de los contenidos del taller de periodismo científico Jack Ealy, centrado esta vez en medioambiente. Quizá no es de interés general, pero aquí lo seguiremos. A ver si además de decir que el periodismo científico es vital –como se repite en todos los talleres y encuentros una y otra vez- sacamos iniciativas más tangibles.

En BBC Mundo, curiosa nota de Laura Plitt sobre una saliva de polilla guatemalteca cuyas propiedades pueden hacer duplicar la cosecha de papa. No se propone mecanismo, sólo se dice que las infectadas tenían más producción. Pse…

- Pere Estupinyà

This job would be a lot easier–and I’d be looking pretty darned good–if I just rewrote Gary Schwitzer‘s posts on his Health News Review Blog.

Schwitzer, a long-time medical writer, broadcaster and j-school prof, took a swipe the other day at CNN, where he was once head of medical news. I might disagree with Schwitzer on some of the particulars, but his general thrust was right on target.

The program in question was Sanjay Gupta, M.D., Gupta’s weekly medical show, also known as Paging Dr. Gupta. As Schwitzer points out, Gupta introduces the program by saying, in part, “I’m your doctor. I’m also your coach.” Heh-heh. It might come as a surprise to Dr. G (as I’m sure he’d want me to call him) that I don’t go to my doctor for news–and I don’t go to CNN for treatment, or coaching. Gupta is persuasive, however. Another part of his introduction, which Schwitzer didn’t highlight, was “Welcome to the place to live longer, and stronger.” Who could resist that? And who knew watching TV could make it happen?

One hopes that at least some viewers are sophisticated enough–and they don’t have to be terribly savvy–to recognize this as the usual television silliness. On the other hand, I could almost feel myself being drawn in, and I am, of course, extremely sophisticated, a point I’d be happy to elaborate on any time of day or night. Gupta is smooth, he comes across as very smart, and he knows stuff. At least what his producers tell him, if nothing else. I’m not quite as outraged as Schwitzer by this nonsense, but I do agree that it has no place in a news show.

Schwitzer doesn’t like the idea of Gupta offering any medical advice whatsoever, and, again, I mostly agree. A news program, he writes, “is supposed to be news. Not medical advice.” I’m not entirely opposed to the idea of offering medical advice, if it’s done responsibly. We often ask science writers to think before they write, to analyze, interpret, and evaluate before simply transcribing quotes. And we can allow medical writers, and doctors, to give readers help with their medical care, although we shouldn’t be telling them we can make the live longer and stronger. Even doctors shouldn’t say that on TV, because it’s not true. Exercise likely makes you live longer; Dr. G’s exhortations don’t.

Schwitzer also slams Gupta for his coverage of a story out of the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in which researchers reported that adding Avastin to standard chemotherapy significantly extended the “progression-free survival” of women with advanced ovarian cancer.

The operative word is “significantly,” which has a mathematical meaning that differs from its meaning in common usage. To wit: The women who got Avastin saw no worsening in their cancer for 14.1 months, compared to 10.3 months for women on standard chemotherapy.

Cynical medical writers have been here before. We know that spending tens of thousands of dollars to extend survival for less than 4 months is a bad deal for the health care system, even if it means a lot to those women. We can’t afford that sort of thing for every woman with ovarian cancer.

But here’s a point the cynical sophisticates rarely make: These drugs are generally tested in the sickest of the sick, so that there is less to lose if the drugs prove to be dangerous. But these drugs that extend lives for a paltry few months in advanced disease might extend lives for years if given early; so these results mean more than we might think. This is proof-of-concept stuff, not a regimen to be dispensed tomorrow.

Schwitzer criticizes Gupta for saying Avastin could slow the the spread of ovarian cancer “pretty dramatically.” That’s clearly over-reaching, at this stage of the research. And Gupta makes no claim to be an oncologist, so he doesn’t necessarily know any more about this than any reporter or any patient who’s done the research.

Thanks to Gary Schwitzer for alerting me to all of this. Thanks to Dr. G for making me feel so, I dunno, safe and cared for. And phooey to CNN for letting this guy get away with this stuff.

This is the same guy, remember, who started treating patients when he was in Haiti reporting on the earthquake. I don’t know whether he’s been back in recent weeks to follow up on his patients. But that’s surely something we would expect our doctor, and our coach, to do.

- Paul Raeburn

Anytime a headline has both “theories” and “science” in it, ksjtracker’s readership ought to know about it. It’s in today’s Anchorage Daily News, by fishing writer Mike Campbell: Are halibut smaller these days? Lots of theories, little science.

These theories aren’t real theories, but are hypotheses and SWAGs, if you really want to know (ie, scientific wild-ass guesses, an important category of thought).  Campbell’s piece reflects some sensible reporting, including the opinions of biologists and other experts on whether and why the giant halibut historically caught in and around the fishing town of Homer tend to include a lot more un-gigantic fish than they used to. Here also are snippets of the natural history of halibut, a mention of another flatfish that may be altering conditions in the fishing grounds, and some speculations on natural selection.

- Charlie Petit

A surprisingly muted response from the overall science press corps is greeting news that the Kepler satellite planet-finding project, as it hoped all along, is gathering a mind-bending sample of worlds around other stars. Not just any planets, but including Earth-sized planets. And not just a few new planets of many sizes, but hundreds so far – with thousands to follow.

Yesterday I posted on the first dribbles of reports on publication by the five-dozen or so astronomers on the team of results from just six weeks of observations, made a year ago. 700+ planet candidates seen. Seven hundred! The thing has been gathering data day in, day out (with a few pauses to fix glitches) ever since, and will keep at it several more years. So far the suspected planets are limited to ones that orbit their stars fast – still to come are, one hopes, some that take a year or so and thus will be at distances that make biology and terrestrial-type weather seem plausible. Most news has focussed on a worthy, but narrow, aspect – the team’s decision to sit on much of these data sets until it chews them over for itself, which could take months.

I hear from inside the project that another announcement is planned for October, featuring  what are already hinting to be “extraordinary planets.” A bigger publication of many more planets, their reality nailed down by additional observing with ground based telescopes and by deeper analysis of the measurements from Kepler, is due in February 2011. Critics say they ought to release raw data fast as they come in. That’d be fun. One wonders, by the way, how well this team of dozens of astronomers at dozens of institutions will be at keeping much of the number piles under wraps anyway. It’s already going to a fair-sized sampling of professional astronomers who are deeply absorbed in the exo-planet hunt. Some of them are sure to share files with outside colleagues, one guesses. I dunno if there’s any bag that can hold this many cats.

In the meantime, press coverage beyond what we listed yesterday:

• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle:  An avalanche of alien planets ; Almost lost in Kepler’s glare is another recent announcement of new planets from a somewhat similar project using the European CoRoT satellite. Boyle wraps them together nicely.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Kepler Craft Reports Apparent Planetary Bonanza ; He quotes one astronomer, not entirely disinterested as she’s on the team, saying that the discoveries rolling in already are “massively historic.”
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Orbiting telescope spots possible planets ; A source tells him “this is the single largest announcement of planets that’s ever happened,” and he’s not on the team. Maugh also gets in a practical reason why the team is holding some data close – to plump the results with ground based telescopes they need to be able to see them easily, which won’t happen till this summer as the target area moves into the night sky.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Kepler space telescope finds possible planets ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: NASA: Neptune-sized planets orbiting other stars ; Yes, we knew that. Vergano handles this with a small blog post. His lede repeats the underwhelming “Neptune-sized” metric. The bulk of the short story gets things in better perspective, but the top would have been better to declare excitement over discovery that the smaller the planets that can be measured, the more there seem to be – and well below the size of Neptune.
• Wired Science – Alexis Madrigal: Exoplanet Hunter’s First Data Withholds the Good Stuff ; Madrigal gives the grumpiness over data sharing a good airing – and also provides a small but clear dose of explanation how the mission works and why it has to take a long time to get to the really, really good stuff no matter who is doing it.
• Columbus Dispatch – Caitlin McGlade: Telescope sees possible planets near 706 stars / But data on 400 other stars kept for study by NASA ; Good effort at a regional paper but with a small, hasty trip-up: the 706 figure comprises the 400 or so targets withheld. They aren’t “other” stars. On the good side, many reports say the data include evidence for 706 candidate planets. Not quite so. The number applies to stars with evidence for planets, and several seem to host multiple-planet systems. Ergo, if they all pay off, that’d be more than 706 planets. McGlade gets that part correct.

*UPDATES:

• AAAS ScienceNOW – Richard Kerr: Kepler Unveils First, Partial List of Exoplanet Candidates ; A brief, without hinted criticism of the withholding of data.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Press Release ; preprint of paper. CoRoT Press Release (The French-led project reports six new planets).

Pic - Source. Not from Kepler, but from NASA’s TRACE satellite: an image of the sun with Venus crossing it in transit six years ago. This is about what Kepler is trying to see from thousands of light years away in the constellation Cygnus where 156,000 stars are being monitored, detecting such a transit only from the slight dimming of the star’s overall output. That’s some delicate work.

- Charlie Petit

For the second time this morning (1st time, one post down) a remarkable photo stopped the eyeballs, and led to a post as much as or more than did the text of the story. This one of a sperm whale just beneath the surface, trailing bubbles, goes with a story by Richard Black on a new study on these animals’ ability to move minerals around in the sea, with biological consequences. They eat one place, defecate in another. The headline, Sperm whale faeces ‘helps oceans absorb CO2 and the story do not seem entirely well thought out. For one thing, faeces or feces is plural (no singular version exists in English, something that apparently is explainable only in Latin as a plurale tantum). More important, the CO2 absorption angle is immaterial in practical terms. Black says as much, deeper, after using that as his lede, too. The story wanders through oceanic iron fertilization, uncertainties in how many sperm whales there are (one estimate, it says here: 10,000), and finally at the end the only meat I can find in this story. It has to do with how sperm whales, which eat squids etc at great depth and poop the remains near the surface, could have local, serious impact on the nutrient flows and bioproductivity of the sea.

The photo up there, by the way, has been used at BBC before – see this February piece on sperm whales and squid roundups from Victoria Gill. The SPL means it comes from the service Science Photo Library. There one can order a hi-res version.

Back to sperm whales, faeces, and global warming. At least Black got over the trivial global warming angle. This news is in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. It is by researchers in Australia, chiefly at Flinders University. Other outlets did their own renditions, some of them implying more emphatically that whales are our allies against a warmer planet. This regurgitation of the university’s press release angle shows peculiar news judgment. Much of the press seems to have checked their brains at the door. This is INTERESTING news, but just because a catchy angle has been suggested does not mean one ought to use it gleefully. This is tabloid-think, the chasing of a rendition because one can get away with it, point at somebody else for starting it by saying it first, grinning madly, not because it makes sense.

Other stories:

• first a somewhat more sensible one, AAAS ScienceNOW – Sarah Reed: Whale Poop is Ecofriendly ; Chatty hed that will get readers snared, without hanging the story on a too-narrow thread. This one has another remarkable sperm whale photo that, one suspects, is from the same series as the SPL frame popular with BBC. Again, alas and however, despite the general headline the text jumps on global warming as its angle. The vitalization of oceanic bioproductivity via nutrient redistribution seems to these eyes the far more fundamental one. It also declares that sperm whale exhalations “contribute to greenhouse gas emissions.” Hmmppphhhh. Look, animals breathing out are part of the quasi-equilibrium biological carbon cycle, a nearly zero-sum process that should not get mixed up in the public mind with debates about anthropogenic fossil fuel and rainforest-clearing emissions and things such as those that tilt the baseline badly.
• Headline of the day: AFP via the Independent (UK): Faecal attraction: Whale poop fights climate change ; Dumb in meaning, this head, with its embrace of the silly climate change angle -  but that’s a coinage to remember.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith:  Whales give carbon a bum steer ; Oh my, One source tells her the estimated 2 million tons of carbon delivered to the deep sea via algal growth spawned by sperm whale poop “makes a compelling case for an immediate ban on whaling.” Oh really? That’s a significant new reason for such a ban? Anthropogenic carbon emissions are measured in the billions of tons. And what do other whales contribute, such as the ones that are harpooned in significant numbers, like minkes? Does Ms. Smith agree with that sentiment? Really? Why not ignore such a statement?
• Brisbane Times – Chalpat Sonti: Whale poo, the
  Southern Ocean, and the battle against global warming ;
• Reuters – Michael Perry: Whale poo helps offset carbon footprint – study ;
• ABC (Austr) Sarah Clarke: Whale poo fights climate change: study ;
• Australian Geographic – Emma Young: Poo makes whales carbon neutral ; My head is starting to hurt. A cat is carbon neutral. So is a flea and so is a tree. They are like biofuel combustion – the carbon released was just recently already in the air. The freakin’ natural environment is roughly carbon neutral, whales included, and always has been. “Carbon neutral” is a term pertinent to release of vast stores of carbon into the air (and ocean, acidification etc.) and that wouldn’t go there, or only do so slowly, without human intervention.
• And in the less winning headline department: Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: Diarrhea-like Whale Waste Cleans The Environment ;
• One could waste time going on with this. One chooses to stop.

Grist for the Mill that nobody decided to re-grind for themselves:

Flinders University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

On Monday a few outlets ran with news that the Moon may have more water than scientists had expected, embedded in the minerals of its deep interior. It’s not much in ounces of H20 per ton of rock, but more than textbooks say. This post is not really about that news, which is interesting to those piecing together the Earth-Moon system’s history, but a bit arcane and not pertinent to much else. Rather, I just had to share the evocative photo that ran on line with  Reuters‘s brief account. The caption reads “A jet flies past the moon over the city of Aarau, Switzerland, April 24, 2010,” credited to Arnd Wiegmann. Contrails are, of course, condensations of water vapor. One wonders if an editor was sitting on this pic, waiting for an excuse to use it. The news arises from a report in Proceedings of the Nat’l Academy of Sciences by researchers at the Carnegie Institution who, among other things, cited analysis of moon rocks for their conclusion.

There was rather wide pick up of the news, made easy by the press release in grist below. Some of these show a variety of eye-catching ways, too, to illus this news.

Other stories:

• Space.com – Denise Chow: Moon may have more water than believed ; This one, at MSNBC’s site, has another interesting illus – a shot of a moon rock in the window of the space station, the blue water planet in the background.
• BBC – Katia Moskvitch: “Much more water’ found in lunar rocks ;

• National Geographic – Andrew Fazekas: Moon Has a Hundred Times More Water Than Thought. ; And Buzz Aldrin in his space suit, in this one’s pic, collecting moon rocks.
• Scotsman – Frank Urquhart: ‘Blue moon’ – with twice as much water as believed ; Yes. Perhaps twice, or 100 times. The “two orders of magnitude” report sowed confusion in the newsroom?

• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Evidence Shows the Moon May Hold 100 Times More Water Than Previously Thought ;

Dept. of nothing not much new under the moon:

• Science News (Oct 24, 2009) Ron Cowen : A damp moon: Water found inside and out ; In reporting a story on shallow water deposits, Cowen got word of and included, ahead of everybody else, the inferences on deep deposits.

Grist for the Mill: Carnegie Institution Press Release ;

This is the last post of the day – short haul today due to travel exigencies. I already got, a post or two down, to one item in Science Times: Dennis Overbye’s advance piece on the politics of a big extrasolar planet announcement today. That’ll get more tracking, as and if warranted, tomorrow.

The lead piece, under a giant photo of a Barbary macaque monkey toting a baby on his back – yes on HIS back – is from the effervescent mistress of style, Natalie Angier. It is a conversation piece, laced with references to studies and data, and mostly a provision of things to chew on. It’s a Father’s Day story. She coins a nifty phrase, number a zillion or so on her list of clever things one doesn’t remember anybody saying before: Males Behaving Dadly.

One must, to keep the gender strangeness string going, then skip inside the front page to John Tierney‘s second part to his essay on whether or not women in science are still suffering rampant discrimination – or are hitting ceilings manufactured by their own innate talents and behavioral choices. He’s a specialist at tweaking sensibilities. His themes are plausible, if not fully convincing. Last week he wrote that women may on average for all we know be better in math and science than men, but men being such unstable creatures fill out the extreme wings of their distributions of qualities a bit more – ergo more fools and idiots, and more super geniuses (and maybe fools in the bargain there) too. So top tiers at research universities may be loaded toward men. Could be. Today he writes that even when skills are equal, fewer women may want to shirt domestic duties, like children, than do men – and a first-rate scientist of mathematician usually has to work absurd hours to stay atop the game. And HE says studies show women gain promotion as easily as men, all things equal.  Could be, too. I’ve often thought that the reason the majority of extremely good science writers entering the field are women is that we’re benefiting from a self-winnowing of women from fulltime science jobs. Just a hypothesis.

Other headlines to note:

• Sean B. Carroll: Insects That Can’t Beat Them Scare Them : Xlnt essay on mimicry in insects, esp. by their pupae. Last week I said Prof. Carroll doesn’t do it like a journalist, no quotes etc. This week he does get in a quote  from a friend, a man who also has been friendly for years to reporter, ecologist Daniel Janzen.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Unfolding the Colorful Architecture of Butterflies ; After reading Carroll’s on pupae, one must turn next to this short, Observatory roundup,  explainer on how grown-up butterflies get their colors. I’ve read of the architecture of iridescence in butterflies before, but not sure I’ve heard of gyroids till now.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr: A Dirt-Poor Nation, With a Health Plan ; Rwanda. McNeil also has a report from an art gallery: Are Killer Viruses, Rendered in Glass, Also Things of Beauty? ; He does not like them.

As usual, much more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Reading sunspots may be about as accurate a way to gauge the future as reading palms – but smart and outwardly sensible people, including reporters, are doing it anyway.

The whole idea of an unfettered press is to provide diverse journalism without governmental or other filters to maintain adherence to authoritarian scripts. That’s good – especially in political news but not only there. So let’s ponder the practical yet arcane world of solar physics. Right now, media are all over the map on an essential unknowable – what the Sun will do next as a follow-up to its recent, historically low sunspot count.

Contrast these two stories in circulation:

• New Scientist – Stuart Clark: What’s wrong with the sun?” Clark gathers evidence and opinion that our star may well be headed for continued quiet on a scale not seen in living memory. Nothing hysterical in here, but what looks like solid reporting with many caveats. But the focus is on argument that solar output may well dip a bit, sunspots might go away soon and stay away for some time, the result slow global warming a bit, maybe cool off Europe particularly (as in the Maunder Minimum of centuries ago).
• Telegraph – Andrew Hough: NASA warns solar flares from ‘huge space storm’ will cause devastation ; In 2013, it says here, NASA scientists expect the sun to emerge from its deep slumber like a bolt of lightning and cause catastrophic damage for the world’s health, energy services, and national security unless precautions are taken. Even iPods might get blitzed into inapptitude, it seems. Not too much sourcing on this – it leans heavily on one researcher. The prediction is not a NASA agency declaration. The story somewhat irresponsibly throws around terms such as catastrophe without clearly and repeatedly saying the natural world won’t feel much – but a few aspects of modern society dependent on electronic devices, such as orbiting satellites and some communications systems, might get blacked out. That’s serious – but it’s not like it will end life as we know it.

Of the two, New Scientist clearly has a big edge in terms of broad reporting and use of caveats.While it speak ominously of strange events evident deep in the sun’s convecting layers and misbehaving streams of plasmatic currents,  it is not predicting anything that merits a bunch of exclamation marks. It lays out a hypothesis. The Guardian’s is, by contrast, an apparently overcooked rendition of presentations in DC last week at something called the Space Weather Enterprise Forum. .One finds there are other samplings, particularly in the Brit press, similarly wide-eyed over a potential approaching solar catastrophe. They are tedious.

There are stories to be found of more sensible disposition, among them:

• Space.com – Denise Chow: Sun’s strange behavior baffles astronomers ; Chow dwells on the mystery seen in recent data. Her sources’ best bet: The coming  cycle will be milder than usual. News delivered sans hyperventilation.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a case of the back story getting ahead of the story. At the NYTimes Dennis Overbye jumped the gun, without apparently breaking any embargoes on important science, late yesterday.  The Kepler Mission team, a year or so after its orbiting observatory began examining a swarm of stars in a piece of sky about as big as a hand at arm’s length, is reporting via embargo expiring today that it is finding lots and lots more extrasolar planets – hundreds of them. It can’t see all of them out there, just those that happen to cross their stars’ faces as seen from here. To see so many anyway, and down to roughly Earth sized, is very big news. Nobody is sure yet, but there presumably are tantalizing hints that genuine, other earths are being vaguely glimpsed, and not orbiting too close to their stars to be genuine terrestrial analogs. The paper, below in grist, makes it clear that the main story for now is that, as hoped, smaller planets are a lot more common than big Neptune to Jupiter-plus sizes. Kepler simply has a way to see the smaller varieties more easily, while previous techniques have largely been limited to detecting the big influences of massive alien worlds. These data are just the start – gathered over far too short a period, just 43 days, to capture the long repeats of planets in orbits measured on the scale of a year or more.

Also ahead of this news, and ahead of Overbye, at Nature News is Eric Hand – who also writes of the imminent announcement that in its first year of operation, and on a limited data processing basis, at least 400 “objects of interest” have been detected in the varying brightnesses of 156,000 stars that the Kepler satellite has in its sight. Overbye’s piece rightly recognizes Hand’s article with a direct link to it.

The angle of these two early risers is that while the data being released are dramatic, the team of nearly five dozen astronomers at 36 institutions, in a paper now on line and submitted to Astrophysical Journal, is keeping back a big wad of them for itself, for further study. Suspicion is these are the best candidates for earthiness. Critics of such withholding say that as taxpayers paid for the satellite, the data ought all be public ASAP. And, increasingly, publicly bought data are being shared around the science world more and more promptly.

Nobody waited at dockside when the Beagle returned from years at sea in 1836 and demanded field notes and a look at the specimens that Charles Darwin had collected. Maybe that would have gotten him off the stick in his publishing more promptly, rather than sitting on them for so many years. But such data privacy, until fairly recently, was a given in science. Now it’s an issue, and inevitably so. What is unclear is whether there is any legal or legislatively simply way to compel the Kepler team to release important but iffy data before that team, including its leader Bill Borucki of NASA Ames who struggled for decades to get this magnificent mission approved, can look first and hardest at them. A video of him, released yesterday as he explains the latest news, is in grist below.

As the storm of stories washes up on the abundant info the team IS releasing, and on the withholding kerfuffle, I’ll put’em in an additional post. Should be fun.

In the Meantime: Bloggers are starting to weigh in. An early example is at Centauri Dreams, a site devoted to imagining people might some day fly to another star. Really. Well, they are called dreams.

Grist for the Mill:

Advance publication of article in arXiv, Kepler mission home page ; NASA video via YouTube of Borucki explaining new data. If it doesn’t open, put Borucki in the YouTube site’s search box;

-  Charlie Petit

A little bump is riffling astrophysics. Just a tiny one that, one suspects, means little. But so interesting. Last week in New Scientist Eugenie Samuel Reich reported a University of Durham team’s startling conclusion that dark matter, even dark energy, may not after all that’s been said about them be needed to explain astronomical observations of the universe and the gravitational fields that fill it.

A hint to how far this may go is in her fourth graf, which identifies one of the lead authors of this thesis (in a paper to appear in Monthly Notices of the R.A.S.: Letters) as a “critic of the standard model.” That is, somebody looking to poke holes in other people’s balloons. A worthy task, but a hint to motivation and disinterest too. It has to do with calibration errors, real or not, in analysis of the cosmic background radiation measured by the old Wilson MicrowaveAnisotropy Probe, or WMAP, satellite. It says here the Durham team tried using something other than Jupiter to calibrate the satellite’s instrumental sensitivity. They got a different outcome. If the ripples seen in the Big Bang’s fingerprints are not as big as usually surmised, it says here, maybe we don’t need dark matter or dark energy to explain them.

It’s difficult to gauge the underlying merits of this news. Maybe this is the sort of thing that the Story Tracker (look down a few posts) at the UK’s Guardian newspaper could be good at doing.

Other stories:

• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Scientists allege that dark matter and dark energy might not exist.
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Bang goes theory as study sheds light on the dark side; New evidence, he writes, “if backed up could turn physics world upside down.” Big if. One has to like this quote, regarding the lead author of the paper, “He is a very respected guy and wouldn’t put his name to rubbish.” That’s a lot more convincing than explaining error bars.

Grist for the Mill:

The Royal Society apparently has a press release out. I cannot find it directly, but this in Astronomy Magazine is probably it.; Advance paper in arXiv.

- Charlie Petit

Last week at the UK’s Guardian newspaper its skilled science writer Alok Jha unveiled “Story Tracker,” which despite its name is certainly no clone of this tracker. It has some aggregator similarities, but quite separate strengths.

He explains that, as a good newspaperman, he has suffered pangs of “residual guilt whenever I cover a major story.” This, one gathers, results from the typical one- day dive into a story most daily reporters make, followed by some punchy copy and just as quickly the reporter’s departure from the scene to write up something entirely different. There may be dozens of ways to write it, but the reporter chooses one and  moves on – to revisit it only if events add something major to earlier results.

That’s about what I do here at The Tracker – spend a few moments pulling together accounts on the same piece of news, or perhaps focussing on a singular piece that via enterprise has the news to itself, and then take up something else. Read, react, move on, that’s my daily mantra. Occasionally I update posts, but those are a minority.

Jha’s and the Guardian’s idea: not “done-and-dusted” but a continuum that, as time goes by, entails “tracking reactions and analysis from scientists and bloggers over the days and weeks after a news story breaks.” Voila, richer, more informed, more comprehensive. This would appear to be exceedingly labor intensive, with no clear benefit to the newspaper’s revenue stream. One salutes it, yes, but with curiosity over how well or long it will work out.

The paper’s debut run with it’s Story Tracker is keeping tabs on the blogs and other ripples following news from Nature of a new study of the genetics of autism. Take a look, tell us what you think via comments. Is this a form of reporting in depth that might lead to something lasting? Is it merely a blog aggregation under a new title? What?

Things Found on the Way to Something Else dept:

• Guardian – Martin Wainwright (June 7): Scars from lion bite suggest headless Romans found in York were gladiators ; Fascinating. Hadrian’s Wall, an empire’s extravagance, and young men with exceedingly well developed musculature in one arm. The link was on the same page as the new Story Tracker’s at the Guardian, with a hed hard to ignore.

- Charlie Petit

Sunday’s Week in Review section of the NYTimes carried an unusual, wise, and exceedingly thoughtful report – or, one should say, reflective essay – by Randy Kennedy, The Ahab Parallax: ‘Moby Dick’ and the Spill. It opens, unavoidably, on hubris and ambition. It closes on a musing question whether the BP spill, like the drying of the whale oil industry, will help bring a new industrial revolution or just a blip on the longer road to exhaustion of both fossil fuels and civilization.

It is recommended reading. It (as does the book Fate of Nature, a few posts down) provides long perspective. It also is notable for its link to a blog by Nick Spicer, a correspondent for Al Jazeera who also launches his thoughts with an apt reference to Melville’s opus. I’d not have read this otherwise nor would, I suspect, many of ksjtracker’s readers. Spicer, on assignment in the gulf with a film crew, reports the frustration and anguish of getting this story. His blog is nearly a month old now, but still pertinent. The express BP-orchestrated stone wall of routine reporting comes up. For one thing, he writes, he has phone numbers of fishing boat captains and fisheries workers who might be able to fill him in on the disruptions of their lives and the world they know. Many hang up. He interprets this as reason to suspect BP’s money – hired by the oil giant to haul skimmers or lay boom, these skippers likely have made non-disclosure agreements. Good answer. That might be it. Maybe another one, just musing here, is this is what happens when one calls a small businessman (or woman) in the deep south and says, “Hello, I’m a reporter for Al Jazeera, and hope you might tell me… hello? Hello? Are you there?” Of course, in some parts of this country, saying “Hello, I’m a reporter for the (New York Times, whatever)” might get the same result.

Pic source,high def ;

Another set of thoughtful, gulf spill stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Boycott Big Oil? Prepare to give up your lifestyle ; If by lifestyle, one thinks oversized SUVs and airplane travel, that won’t cover it, Borenstein reports. Petroleum and its extracts include the plastics in your devices, the ingredients in processed food, the fibers in synthetic fabrics, etc etc. One is uncertain however that other petrochemical products compare at all with the volumes of oil and gas that are simply set on fire for energy. Some day, I read somewhere recently, our current epoch will elicit astonishment that, after finding so valuable a mineral trove as crude oil and natural gas, we just burned it. Second, I am sure that processing petrochemicals to make plastic emits a lot of volatilized or combusted carbon into the air – but if most of the carbon winds up in plastic, it’s not in the air. It can be recycled, or buried – a sort of sequestration. How environmentally foul is that? Anybody have some numbers for us? Borenstein rightly brings up the unknown health effects of petrochemicals – but the pertinent eco debate right now in the wake of the spill is over fossil fuels, not all petrochemicals.
• NYTimes – Thomas L. Friedman: This Time Is Different ; Friedman excerpts from a letter. It is from a guilt-ridden man who is exactly the sort at whom Borenstein aimed his story on oil company boycotts.
• Mother Jones – Kate Sheppard: Should You Boycott BP? ; MJ’s Washington-based energy and environmental politics reporter muses, zigs&zags, and plows through the conundra facing her and others who, with BP and oiled pelicans on their minds, just want to do the right thing. It’s not easy figuring out what that is. Speaking of Kate Sheppard, I learn via Andy Revkin at Dot Earth that she last week published a most insightful Q&A on carbon, global warming, and politics with S. Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham. Note also the sign of the times at the bottom of her piece, asking readers “If you appreciate our coverage of BP, how about chipping in to pay for it?”
• Charlotte Observer – Tyler Dukes: On the hunt for life in oil spill ; Welcome reading. Not a thumbsucker, but a newsy, narrow-view account from a local outlet on one set of researchers from the Univ. of N. Carolina on the water in the Gulf, sampling the spill and logging the microbes already working as hard as microbes can work to make food of it.

- Charlie Petit