Down there in Grist is a press release from an Israeli company, Rosetta Green. In it an exec says he is not only convinced algae can compete with regular petroleum, but says “most of the large oil companies” are heavily investing in it. Some analyst somewhere must have real numbers to put on that. It’d be worth reporting.

But not clear is whether oil companies hedging their bets by investing in green alternative fuels means much. A big example is on the front page of the NYTimes Biz Section today, where respected reporter Andrew Pollack dives into the murky world of algae-based fuel under a clever hed, Not Just Pond Scum. It is about genetic engineering, selective breeding, and hopes that vast acreages of green water can let the oil industry sell its stuff mostly for something worthwhile, such as feedstock for semi-permanent plastics and other goods, rather than for public burning. A nugget that may or may not be true, but I hope it is, comes up part way through. He quotes Craig Venter declaring that wild algae provide 40 percent of the oxygen delivered to the atmosphere annually. I’ll use that, even though it came with no footnotes, next time some loon calls the Amazon the lungs of the planet – a charming but not well-informed trope I’ve disliked for decades.

Pollack’s piece is solid. It leaves things out – such as the larger world of oil company investment (he mentions Exxon-Mobil, but leaves out hefty investments by BP andother companies) – but it is just one story. What it has, notable in a business section, is focus on worries from some quarters that super-algae could escape the gene-jiggered farm and wreak havoc in the wild. Some fear it could out-compete its ancestors, upsetting ecosystems, and make the public hate seeing so much green gunk everywhere. It’s balanced, with learned experts saying the wild algae has optimized itself for living in the wild – and would beat the chloroplast pants off the lab darlings.  Pollack reports that regulators will check things carefully.

Confusing to me is a passage on selection of algae that absorb less sunlight, but use it more efficiently, so that other algae deeper in the water can get more light. How does that square with selective breeding of algae, as the story describes, that favors the darkest green variants for succeeding rounds?

Other Algae and Biofuel News:

• Wall St. Journal – Aude Lagorce: Flying Algae-Powered Planes ; Look! Up in the Sky! The super algae have escaped and are covering that airplane! Actually, Lagorce reports on a demonstration by the European EADS airliner maker of a DA42 model running one turboprop on algae juice, at the Farnborough Air Show in England. This piece has a stat that (hoping it’s true) Pollack should’ve use on the oil productivity of algae per acre compared to other, dirt-rooted biocrops.
• San Diego Union-Tribune – Bruce V. Bigelow: Pond Scum, and Crude Oil: Our Mayor issues in Invitation to Sloganeers ;
• Eureka – Tom Shelley: Algae biofuel outperforms that derived from oil ; This site, for engineers and their fans, provides a short, dense dollop of data on the one-wing-clapping green airplane.
• LA Times – Tiffany Hsu: Big Oil and biofuels: BP pays $98.3 million for Verenium’s biofuels branch ; A well-focussed news story.
• Greentech Media – Eris Wesoff: The Return of Fed-Funded Algae Fuel Research ; A good roundup from this blogger with a touch of cynicism, and a link (see Grist below) to expert literature from nat’l lab analysts.
• And just a reminder that the regular kinds of algae are dangerous too: Bolton News (UK) Toxic algae on “Ironman’ water ; Straying completely off topic, The Tracker had also to pause at this site to read this startling report: Dead ponies found dumped in canal. It’s a model of heartfelt reporting on horrified, heart-broken members of the citizenry.

Grist for the Mill:

Rosetta (via NASDAQ wire) Press Release ; Exxon-Mobil Algae biofuels page; DOE National Algal Biofuels Technology Roadmap ; Oregon Dept. of Human Sources Press Release (on natural, toxic algae in a lake).

-Charlie Petit

At the AP Mike Stobbe, keeping his eye on the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, got a good one this week. It could be better – probably not in one day, but this looks like feature material. The news is that for hte last five years or so public health authorities have been watching a new fungal infection emerge in the US. It’s new here, but familiar enough in tropical regions. Oddly, its locus is the Pacific Northwest of the US and in Canada’s British Columbia.

Stobbe filed from Atlanta where he is based. He writes it responsibly, playing up that this is not a raging epidemic but a still-rare and treatable illness. I’d like to think a good and curious medical writer is already making calls to the field teams, chiefly in Oregon and Washington, who are scrutinizing the outbreak. They are talking to docs and the people infected, and putting together clues to how this fungus, Cryptococcus gattii, took root in a place so far from its usual tropical and subtropical range, how it affects people who get it, and how much farther or more intensely it may spread. They surely have stories to tell.

Stobbe’s right to file on this from MMWR, but it’s not exactly new. Substantial regional and previous reporting is to be found. These include a Time Magazine “killer fungus” report in April by Alice Park that asks “should we be scared?” An ABC News report by Courtney Hutchison at about the same time declared fears are overblown. I find, at the Seattle Times, pickup of another somewhat reassuring story by the LA Times‘s Thomas H. Maugh II in early May.

Even these longer looks are essentially phone call stories – get a variety of opinions and write’em. A deeper feature visit with the medical sleuths seems sure to turn up something fascinating.

Grist for the Mill: CDC MMWR report ;

Astronomy news reports that involve black holes, strange stars, awesome eruptions of energy, violent mergers, galaxy-wide effects, weird orbits, gravitational gymnastics, and the element of mystery are pretty much the norm. Ho hum – a million-mass black hole? Again? And so forth. But seldom do so many pop up all at once in one bundle and add up to an engaging narrative with a beginning, middle, and end.

Then along comes HE 0437-5439, a mysterious blue straggler, a giant star on the outskirts of the Milky Way already beyond the Large Magellanic Cloud, outbound at a fast pace for intergalactic loneliness. It made no sense when first seen five years ago. Now astronomers have a tale to tell in Astrophysical Journal Letters, one that began a long time ago in a galactic core 27,000 light years away. Read any of these pieces to get more detail. The pic here is sampled from a NASA/ESA/STScI one-page graphic novella based upon inferred events.

This news has so many whacked-out elements of cosmic hi jinks and yet could be true, and it traverses so much of modern astrophysics, that  it’s a shame more general outlets had neither time, nor space, nor staff, nor interest, or enough of none of the above to pay it attention.

• ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli: Speeding Star Was Born on the Run ; A shorty, highly compressed.
• Scientific American – Cynthia Graber : Super Star Is Remnant of Three-Star System Mangled by Black Hole ; She recognizes this as a just-so story from the top. In her lede: … There was this three-star system … strolling through the Milky Way…” ; Too bad she had to write this so short.
• Christian Science Monitor – Paul Sutherland: Star kicked out of Milky Way by giant black hole ; He crams his grafs with as many jaw-dropping nuggets as he can. One notes with regret that the dek on the hed declares the star to be “careening at 1.6 million miles per hour.” Please please. It is careering, not careening – common usage to the contrary that’s what a good language lover ought to apply while the old meaning still has life to it.
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Hyperfast Star Kicked Out of Milky Way ; Another shorty.
• New Scientist – David Shiga: Speeding star traced back to Milky Way’s heart ; Odd, Shiga misses one fascinating angle here – the star was once the stars. First two of them split the scene, then merged while their erstwhile triplet was consumed, presumably, by the big black hole in Sagittarius.
• Astronomy Now – Keith Cooper: Superfast star had deadly black hole encounter ; Solid account, told without hyperbole. The piece drifts a bit into dull jargon and bloated syntax. But its facts alone provide interest.
• ITWire – William Atkins : Speedy star gets expelled form Milky Way ; This is a pure blog post, a bit disjointed but filled by information – and apparently all derived from handout material and the journal paper without any original reporting.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA/Space Telescope Sci. Inst. Press Release ; U. Michigan Press Release ; arXiv astro-ph prepublication paper ;

- Charlie Petit

These are not really related, other than  stemming from the AAAS and its journal Science. That, plus a tenuous link related to blue and the blues. Bear with me here – it does have a point.

First, the Blues at Science:

• AP: Equipment defect leads to reanalysis of gene study ; Just a bulletin, and exactly why it is on the wire now is unclear. The essentials – that Science and authors of a paper that made a big splash are re-visiting the protocol – seem to have been reported more than two weeks ago. But it does suggest that worries have not faded that a possible systematic error in a Boston University study misled researchers into thinking they found a large suite of longevity genes. See earlier posts on accounts at Newsweek and NYTimes:  #1 and #2.

Next, Blue Tools and an Organic Haze.

• Science Insider – Ann Gibbons: New Molecule Turns Italian Artifacts – And International Scientists – Blue ; A delightful tale of a mystery in an old Veronese armory stuffed with far-older artifacts that changed their hue. Seems to have been a big item in Italian press already.

Okay, one more for a bluesy triplet having nothing in common except AAAS:

• AAAS ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli : ScienceShot: Speeding Star Was Born on the Run ; And the star is big and BLUE. This news is covered by many outlets, hence see separate post today on that piece of herd journalism.

There is a small point to this bundle. AAAS and Science‘s news staff – as do news operations at Nature Publishing, American Chemical Society, and other such academic and publishing-entangled outfits – has a special place within science journalism. These pieces on the fleeing star and the mystery in Verona display the talent level of the place. On the one hand these are plum jobs where reporters often dig into and explain things, even investigate people who don’t want to be investigated, with style and quality that is at or near the top of the heap in breaking news journalism. On the other, they are house organs with a stake in the news and in the the importance the press at large assigns to their own employer’s news worthiness. So they can be hobbled in reporting – as are newspapers about their internal affairs – what’s happening under their own roofs. Other than a useful Q & A by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel with the paper’s authors, they haven’t written much on the BU genes and aging affair.  There is no judgment of character or implication of ethical weakness, collective or individual, to be made here. Only an observation on the difficulties of covering the news when one’s own co-workers (and bosses) are caught up in it.

I’d bet that when the aging gene affair gets sorted out and the dust is cleared, one of the more definitive pieces will be from Science‘s in house journalists. But it will carry the inevitable taint of conflicted interest (which could make it all the more compelling reading). That’s just how it is.

Pic source ;

- Charlie Petit

The Tracker’s TV watching is pretty low brow – a lot of cable political shows that only occasionally strays right of center, sports,  and scripted cop and bad guy dramas. Plus Netflix. I admire the likes of Nova, loved the Planet Earth stuff, but with dismay must say I don’t see much of that genre. However, my local PBS and NPR duo-outfit, KQED,   has, as noted here before, a good science production unit called Quest. It recently added a blog/news line of on line, mostly-text science reporting too. And a staffer there sends me regular bulletins with links to highlights.

If you’d like to see the quality that a local non-profit broadcaster can muster, check Restoration of the San Joaquin River. It’s no behemoth – 12 minutes 28 seconds start to finish, with a good eye for history and fairness to all those fighting for their preferred use of the water that reaches the upper reaches of this main stem through the valley of the same name (southern half of California’s Great Central Valley). Producer Jon Fromer did a fine job. We see dried river, and river with flow returning, and dams and canals that until recently left the waterway a dusty gulch much of the year, and Chinook salmon that still venture up it for a little way but can no longer spawn in numbers that left early settlers agape (and awake at night, from all the fishes splashing). I’d like to have heard a little more from the region’s farmers, although it does have a sympathetic visit to the family that own’s one orchard. I also wonder what a UC extension or other ag. researcher might say on whether the percentage of flow now being restored to the river is easy to accommodate by more water-efficient farming methods.

I’d also like to see a more extensive, or if it’s there an easier-to- find, credit list for this and other shows. Who are the narrator, the researcher, the camera crew…??

But for anybody interested in wildlife conservation and restoration in heavily settled regions, this is one to see.

And being an astronomy enthusiast, I read through a Quest section “Community Science Blog” entry from Gabriela Quirós called Northern California Scientists Helping Lead Project to Build World’s Biggest Telescope. It is about the Thirty Meter Telescope project, led by California institutions. It would when built in a few years be the world’s largest optical telescope.. maybe. Other big ones are in the works and could beat it to first light.

This is not fresh news, but is well written and composed. Its theme and point are legit. It has delightful embedded videos and slide shows. But it is not flawlessly reported. The hed is okay, “telescope” to most people means a spyglass, or something under a dome on a mountain that one can, in principle anyway, look through. But in the story somewhere it should pause from saying it will be the world’s largest telescope and explain that this only counts optical telescopes. Radio telescopes are real telescopes. So are millimeter wave telescopes. Some of them are far larger than this one, and that’s not even counting the arrays of radio telescopes, many as big as or bigger  than the thirty meter optical one in the works ( billion-dollar, soon-to-open ALMA array in Chile  at right). Those arrays can be considered one telescope. Some span the globe.

Another nit pick: it says adaptive optics – a system that takes the blurring twinkle from stars by rapidly adjusting flexible mirrors – “was first used to correct distortions on the Keck telescopes.” The Kecks are great telescopes, inspired the TMT’s design, have done much for adaptic optics, and  are just a short walk from the TMT’s future home. But adaptive optics was first used for classified Air Force instruments, some of them on nearby Maui, taking pictures of Soviet spy satellites from the ground. It was employed for several astronomy instruments before the Kecks were fitted with it.

*UPDATE – Hardly had I posted this than writer Quirós e-mailed a friendly note and says she’s making fixes right away. She adds a remark that most any member of the press will understand: “I’m tearing my hair out because both bits of information are in my reporter’s pad!”

More important is that Quest has started a new initiative to add text-0nly, on line coverage of breaking science news to its lineup – such as one yesterday on new evidence for water-sopped minerals on the moon.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Science from different angles today.  Space: Chilean newspapers emphasize that the unexpectedly huge star R136a was found with one of their telescopes. Plus a speculative story in Spain saying that our Sun might have dark matter in its interior. On health: good reporting about the gel against HIV, and the optimism expressed about the vaccine’s search (compared to 2008 AIDS conference) due to the good results in 2009. Plus data showing than Latin America doesn’t receive enough antiretroviral medications, and also they are unfairly distributed. On Technology: Mexico has presented the first humanoid robot that can compete with the ones developed in Japan, US or Europe. This, more than the possible future applications, is newsworthy. On environment: Perú seems to take seriously investing in biofuels (including a still-experimental possibility using pine nuts). An independent story says today that Peruvian forest is decreasing fast due to deforestation. We wish both stories will never be connected. Also, another effect of climate change that you never heard before: in order to get more water, trees in Costa Rican’s forests are growing more lianas, and this is a “serious” problem for other plants and animals. On science policy: extensive story in El Pais about the exponential increase of human and economically resources for scientific research in China, and how this is affecting the attitude of US and EU institutions towards China. The search for collaboration instead of competition expressed in the article evokes the old saying: “if you can’t beat them, join them!”

Enseguida comentamos noticias importantes referentes al congreso internacional de SIDA. Pero un poco de astrofísica antes. Le Tercera (Chile) se ha encargado de dejar bien claro que la colosal estrella 320 veces superior a nuestro Sol, ha sido descubierta desde Chile con el telescopio VLT.– La Tercera. R136a (qué creativos son los científicos) no aparece en todos los medios sólo por ser la más grande nunca observada, sino porque hasta el momento los astrofísicos no pensaban que pudieran existir estrellas mayores de 150 veces nuestro astro. Hablando de nuestro Sol ¿sabíais que podía contener materia oscura en su interior, y eso contribuir a reducir la temperatura de su núcleo? Eso nos cuenta ABC por medio de Manuel Nieves en “El oscuro secreto del Sol”. Suena especulativo, como todo lo que escuchamos por primera vez. Pero se agradece leer notas originales, aunque te dejen entrever que se trata sólo de una hipótesis a comprobar con más experimentos. Pero para hipótesis relacionadas con el espacio a analizar en profundidad… ¿practican sexo los astronautas cuando van de misión? No, no estoy desvariando. En La Nación (Chile) Patricio Lazcano titula “Sexo en el espacio” un veraniego y muy bien redactado texto que mezcla el mito literario sobre los encuentros íntimos de astronautas en ingravidez, con rumores sobre el supuesto escarceo amoroso entre dos astronautas, e incluso los posibles estudios científicos de la NASA al respecto. Simpático texto, aunque quizá Patricio se excedió un poco comentando que en ingravidez el busto femenino se ve más grande y no necesita sostén.

Pero vayamos a temas más trascendentes. El Universal (Venezuela) destaca la nota “Latinoamérica no tiene suficiente acceso a medicamentos contra el sida”, a partir de los datos aportados por un ponente en el congreso internacional que se está celebrando en Austria: del 1.2 millón de infectados que hay en Latinoamérica, sólo 450.000 reciben tratamiento. Asegura también que la distribución de fármacos no es equitativa entre países, y que muchos países de la región no actúan con suficiente contundencia por perjuicios morales sobre la homosexualidad. Pero en lo que a investigación científica se refiere, tanto Isabel Lantigua “Unidos por la vacuna del VIH” en El Mundo, como Ainhoa Iriberri “Más cerca que nunca de la vacuna del sida” en Público, presentan dos buenas piezas explicando que gracias a los resultados positivos de ensayos clínicos (31% de protección) obtenidos en 2009 al combinar dos vacunas, los científicos son ahora mucho más optimistas que en la cumbre de 2008 celebrada en México. Otros avances de ciencia básica, como la localización de ciertos anticuerpos neutralizantes, les convencen de que avanzan en la dirección correcta. A ver si es verdad. Mientras (desarrollar una vacuna cuesta años) el otro anuncio estrella de la reunión: el gel microbicida vaginal que protege a las mujeres del sida, puede convertirse en breve en una nueva arma para tratar la enfermedad. Muy bueno el texto de Ainhoa explicando las dos estrategias de cura, a parir de la conferencia de Antony Fauci.

Espacio, salud… completemos la ronda con algo de tecnología, medio ambiente y política científica. Según BBC, el robot más avanzado de Latinoamérica es Mexicano. Se llama Mexone, y David Cuen destaca que tiene inteligencia artificial por el hecho de recordar lo aprendido antes de apagarse (¿?), tiene tres dedos que le permiten hacer lo mismo que con cinco, y que respecto las aplicaciones… ya se verá. Depende del contexto. Pero de momento ya ha roto la creencia de que los robots humanoides sólo se construyen en Japón, EEUU o Europa. Sólo por eso, ya merece la detallada nota de David. Todavía en México, en El Universal vemos una nota explicando que Perú un emprendedor pretende desarrollar biodiesel a partir de piñón. La noticia cita como fuente El Comercio (Perú). Buscamos en la web del periódico peruano para comprobar hasta qué grado está desarrollado este proyecto que suena ligeramente extraño, pero no lo encontramos. Sí en cambio un texto antiguo pero que merece la pena rescatar por bien documentado de Iana Málaga “Cada vez son más las empresas que apuestan por producir biocombustibles” sobre la creciente apuesta por los biocombustibles en Perú. Gran texto. Se habla más de aceites reciclados, pero también de cultivos destinados a la producción de biocombustibles. Esperemos que no contribuyan a las 150.000 hectáreas de bosque que cada año pierde Perú por la deforestación, según informaba ayer El Comercio, porque entonces los supuestos beneficios contra el cambio climático que cita el artículo de Iana y las empresas suelen airear, no sólo sería escaso sino incluso contraproducente. ¿cambio climático? Aquí viene lo último! En La Nación (Costa Rica), Pablo Fonseca nos cuenta que “Más lianas recubren bosques ticos por calentamiento global“, y esto es un problema para otros tipos de plantas…¡Cortémoslas para hacer biocombustible! (disculpad por la broma de buen rollete, no me pude contener).

Pero despidámonos serios, con un reportaje en El País firmado por Alicia Rivera “La China científica, antes socia que rival”, transmitiendo los temores que empiezan a albergar EEUU y Europa sobre el rapidísimo crecimiento de la ciencia en China. La frase “si no puedes con tu enemigo, únete a él”, refleja a la perfección (excepto por la palabra enemigo) la búsqueda de colaboración que están intentando establecer las instituciones occidentales. Lo explica el extenso artículo de Alicia, haciendo hincapié en la búsqueda de nuevas tecnologías para desarrollar fuentes de energía limpia, y en el gran potencial humano científico que está acumulando China. Qué Mundo… ya se lo pasan mejor algunos astronautas…

- Pere Estupinyà

A disturbing line on turtles and oil is in a dispatch today from the Voice of America’s Rosanne Skirble, who writes that are not only most of the turtles being found near shores in the region affected by the BP-TransOcean spill dead, but that “all the 150 turtles captured ( by wildlife managers) so far in deeper Gulf waters were covered with oil.”

Her general topic has been widely covered: the effort to save some of this year’s class of turtle hatchlings in heavily oiled reaches of the shore. Volunteers and others are digging up tens of thousands of the eggs just before they are due to hatch and transfering them to incubators at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s cleaner east side. The babies are entering the sea nearby amid hopes those that survive to nest will somehow know where to go to do it. Her story also comes out as the National Academies Press announces that a new report, Assessment of Sea-Turtle Status and Trends, is out with all the background info (one presumes) necessary for anybody writing on the topic.

The Tracker is moved to post on this in part by receipt of some disturbing photographs from Nicaragua, forwarded to us by freelance med. writer Laura Newman. They are on the internet, at a post by Harry Bolles, who happens to be brother of Nat’l Assoc. of Science Writers member and NY Academy of Sciences man Blair Bolles. That’s one of them here on the right. I don’t know the story behind this beach. Maybe the nearby town has a turtle egg festival? Maybe this is regulated – such as by marking only a limited sector of the nesting grounds to be harvested annually, with sectors changed year to year, enforcement against poaching,  and some sort of expert wildlife advice on sustainable harvests. And these are not endangered turtles, somehow? Maybe? More likely, alas, nope.  Harry B.  reports that these people “are invading a tortoise preserve .. and stealing ALL their eggs.” Well, they are not tortoises. But never mind that. Look at how full some of those sacks are. One suspects this is more than a few locals collecting eggs, but well-organized. Other photos at the site show there were LOTS of those sacks being carried off. The site has Feb. 28 written on it – so this could have been a while ago.

*UPDATE- Harry B. and I may have been had. Check the first comment. Could be a hoax email campaign going around. That’d be good to learn – the people in these photos all look so nice and happy! And not at all bothered by the camera.  Not my usual image of poachers.

UPDATE 2: We got word that Harry Bolles didn’t take the pictures, that he cannot vouch for their provenance, and simply put them on a facebook page for someone else who had discovered them and was concerned. The default assumption therefore is that the photos meaning is not apparent. I have no idea whether those people scooping up the eggs were doing so under a permit, or where. I will harbor in my heart my vision of a village turtle festival, a sustainable harvest that is part of a well-conceived conservation program. So much nicer that way.

UPDATE 3: This, from a site called Ocean Actions, seems to settle the matter. If only I’d thought to worship, and tap my keyboard, at the altar of the great god Google seeking guidance before posting….

-Charlie Petit

A  little storm is to be found brewed beneath a BBC Today blog this week. The post, Dinosaurs even the score,  is by the program’s science correspondent Tom Feilden. It describes evidence reported in the journal Geology that back in the Cretaceous a carnivorous dinosaur used its clawed feet to dig into a colony of burrowing mammals. It has a fanciful pic, of King Kong facing off with a T. rex (or were these allosaurs? I can’t remember) to capture the mood if not the plausible fact of dinos attacking mammals.

It’s a perfectly readable story.

Oh my. Look at the comments. The second one is from Brian Switek, aka Laelaps, writer of a popular paleontology blog. He says mildly “This post is quite similar – especially in the introduction – to a post I wrote last week for the Smithsonian blog Dinosaur Tracking.”  The post is A Mammal’s Worst Nightmare...

Similar, yes it is. Same, no. But very similar.

Here is Switek’s lede and 2d graf from last week:

Dinosaurs overshadowed mammals for most of the Mesozoic, but evidence of actual dinosaur-mammal interactions are very rare. On the mammalian score, a specimen of the relatively large Cretaceous mammal Repenomamus robustus described in 2005 was found with the bones of baby dinosaurs in its stomach—it had apparently fed on young Psittacosaurus shortly before it died. A new set of fossils from southern Utah, though, evens the score for the dinosaurs.

In Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, within the 80-million-year-old rock of the Wahweap Formation, paleontologists have discovered evidence that small predatory dinosaurs dug down into the soil to reach the burrows of small mammals. As reported in the journal Geology, the vestiges of these events are left behind as traces within the rocks—scratches made by dinosaurs and dens used by mammals—and by looking at them together scientists can replay what might have happened during those Late Cretaceous days at the end of the Mesozoic era.

Here, a week later, is the upper part of the BBC piece:

We know from the fossil record that dinosaurs and mammals must have co-existed for millions of years, and yet we know almost nothing about the nature of that relationship.

One clue, which appears to give mammals the upper hand, comes from the fossilised remains of a relatively large mammal, repenomamus robustus, discovered in 2005. It was found with the bones of a baby dinosaur in its stomach – apparently it had snacked on a young psittacosaurus shortly before it died.

Score it one-nil to the mammals. But as the old adage goes, one swallow doesn’t make a summer, and most palaeontologists suspect the true nature of the relationship – given their size and dominance – is that predatory dinosaurs regularly preyed on mammals.

New evidence supporting this, more conventional predator-prey relationship, is emerging from the 80-million-year-old rocks of the Wahweap Formation in Utah’s Grand Staircase National Monument. Reporting in the journal Geology a team lead by professor Edward Simpson from Kutztown University has discovered evidence that carnivorous dinosaurs may have dug down into the soil to reach small burrowing mammals.

There are significant differences. No lifting of fully identical text is apparent. But some passages are very nearly the same. The story angle’s construction is not different. Each starts by introducing the odd man out – a five year old report on mammals that ate dinosaurs (baby ones) – and then skips to the dramatic new reconstruction of what must have been the norm of  dinosaur carnivores gobbling up scurrying mammals. (Following two sentences added after initial post put up Wed. evening). Reading the full posts further along, one finds that a quote in the BBC article is nearly the same as a passage in the Smithsonian post that is not presented as a quotation. As far as I can tell, no press release was put out that might provide a common origin for the overlaps.

If one reads further down the BBC post by Feilden, several of his readers are seeing plagiarism, demanding apology or a clarifying explanation. I’m hoping for mere clarity. Other readers are exercised that Feilden would use a pic from King Kong, as it is so very unscientific. But the movie frame is amusing and clearly just a mood-setter. On that, he gets a pass. Probably on the whole thing. But this must be sorted out first.

*UPDATE: Switek tells me by email that he tumbled to the story July 14 after seeing a brief ref. at a dinosaur email alert list he reads as part of beat checks, that he thought up the mammals-that-ate-dinos reference and intro himself upon remembering that separate report, that there was no press release he ever saw, and that despite efforts by him and his editor, and a substantial twitter conversation, he has heard nothing from BBC.

UPDATE 2: The audio file of Feilden’s interview with the lead scientist. In addition, Feilden has today e-mailed Switek to say he did read the latter’s Smithsonian post, and the paper, before writing his own account, and that it was an oversight not to have linked to or otherwise acknowledged Switek’s work. The audio of the broadcast, one must note, contains no statement from the researcher that sounds at all like the quotation-marked line in Feilden’s blog post – the “quote” that is so nearly the same as what Switek originally composed on his own to share what he had learned. One must also observe that Feilden is capable of marked hyperbole – such as his remark on the audio recording that this interesting but hardly astonishing episode in paleontology “completely revolutionizes” understanding of dinosaur behavior.

(Thank you Dan Vergano for the tip on the two posts).

- Charlie Petit

A superb story is one that tells readers something they didn’t know and is not handed out by a press agent, is compelling and accurate, and makes a difference (for the better, preferably) to some aspect of society. Those are rare, the prize winners.  But even good stories, addressing a topic readers can be expected to know something about already, can do more than provide incremental addition to general knowledge. They can provide along with the latest some outside references that put the topic in a new light.

Chugging along here, a good example ran yesterday in the Washington Post by freelancer Brian Palmer. It’s about high speed rail in the US. The usual tack in such pieces is to compare the pitiful passenger train system in the US to the blindingly fast railroad systems in Europe, Japan, and increasingly, in China. Palmer does that too while examining the impact of federal stimulus dollars on US plans. But he starts off with an overall salute to US railroads for doing well what they make money at: hauling freight. The US is not entirely a wastrel on rail energy – we carry more goods than Europe does, by far, as a percentage of all commercial transport.From there he works into the historic context for rail as it is found in the US and elsewhere.

We’ve noticed before the explanatory work in the Post by Palmer, a regular at Slate. The last one was on solar energy. At Slate he works for the Explainer running feature. Some interesting ones there.

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- Charlie Petit

Upon glimpsing an AP story by Sten Lehman on hundreds of penguins on Brazil’s beaches, The Tracker thought again? A few times in the last four years I’ve noted stories on lost, perplexed Magellanic penguins being rescued, or adopted, or just looked at curiously, in Brazil. Most of those were alive, some dead (see 2008 post).

But Lehman’s story, and several others suddenly out this week, suggest this time it is different. Hundreds of the birds, native to the southern reaches of South America and islands toward the Antarctic Peninsula, are dead. Stomachs empty. Apparently starved. Previously, it says here, influxes of penguins to places like Rio were mostly live, if hungry,birds.

Lehman’s piece is short. One assumes the Brazilian press is covering this. A few other outlets pick it up as well, just enough to suggest an echo of a larger news event in Brazil :

• The Sun (UK) Rhodri Phillips: Mystery of the dead penguins ; Unsure if there is any reporting here – looks like a rewrite of other agencies’ work.
• Christian Science Monitor – Andrew Downie: Why are dead penguins washng up on Brazil’s beaches? ; Filed from São Paulo, with original reporting. Again, a shorty.
• BBC – Hundreds of dead penguins washed up in Brazil ;
• AFP: Hundreds of dead penguins wash up on Brazil shores ;

Just another natural world mystery, tucked into the back pages and short items in the daily press…..

- Charlie Petit

Pretty good week for news from one small corner of the small – in the larger scheme of things – science of astronomy. Supermassive stars that blaze fiercely for a mere moment of cosmic time and then blow up got two bursts of media attention.

The smaller, warm-up hit this time last week with reports on how stars form with masses dozens of times that of our own sun. Interesting stuff came out in Nature from a European Southern Observatory array in Chile, the Very Large Telescope Interferometer. It found within a star forming region in the Milky Way evidence for giant new stars wreathed in donuts of gas – absorbing matter while also ejecting it madly (Pic top right is an artist’s rendition, not a telescope photo. A real photo is here).

Then today comes a bunch on a star that makes those in Centaurus look like lightweights – a fierce young newborn in a our galaxy’s outlying Large Mageallanic Cloud. An astronomer in the UK estimates it, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Soc’y, to have been born with perhaps 320 times the mass of our sun (but to have lost some weight since, down maybe 20 percent as seen now). Somewhat interesting – the Brit-led team includes two from a university in Malaysia. Anyway, at one time, experts thought such things impossible – that their growth would shut itself off at a less hefty mark as pressure of radiation and outflowing stellar wind repel new material. This too is via observations in Chile, but with a different ESO instrument, the Very Large Telescope.

The news is comfy to me, once a would-be astronomer (no diligence, or fondness for actually doing rather than merely having a feel for mathematics, killed that idea). It is an opportunity for sheer gee-whiz science reporting and explanation able to evoke awe without an emotional price to be paid in worries over disease, wild habitat destruction, amok asteroids, climate craziness, or economic ruin here on Earth.

First, as this is a NEWS tracker, the latest round of stories:

• AP – Raphael G. Satter: Scientists find most massive star ever discovered ; Evocative lede: ..A huge ball of brightly burning gas drifting through a neighboring galaxy.., even though it’s plasma, not gas, strictly speaking. He also says ambiguously it’s tens of times “larger” than the Sun. Is this linear, or by volume? One suspects the former and that the volume is thousands of times greater.  Some quotes off the release but additional views from slightly skeptical astronomers reported here.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Most Massive Star Detected ; “Get big, die young..” and away she goes, reporting the story with phone calls well beyond what is in the press release.
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Biggest star ever found in neighbouring galaxy ; No sign easily visible of reporting beyond release.
• Telegraph (UK) Tom Chivers: Universe’s biggest known star discovered by British astronomers ; Yes, but aside from the hed’s absence of qualifiers, which is to be expected, “universe” is overkill.  “Biggest known” covers it. Chivers dives right into the Eddington limit and spoke with the lead author. Unsure though he defines it properly. It is not, as I recall, so much that it is the point where stars tear themselves apart but the one where radiation pressure alone is enough to repell in-falling material.
• Independent/ Press Association (UK) Alistair Keely: Astronomers discover ‘monster’ stars ; Right off the press release ;
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Telescope Images Most Massive Stars Ever Found ; A shorty, probably off the release, so wisely eschews picking up quotes the reporter did not hear herself (such use can be okay if labeled as second-hand).
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Astronomers detect ‘monster star’ ; Hurrah. Amos talked to the lead author, got additional info on how these big stars offer insights to the early universe, and more.

And some from last week’s glimpse of giant star’s aborning:

• Space.com – JR Minkel: Giant stars seem to form just like smaller ones / Scientists use infrared interferometry technique to scan star ; Minkel picks up a release quote – and says so.
• AFP – A mega-star is born – and here’s how ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Big or Small, All Stars Form the Same Way ;

Grist for the Mill:

Formation, July 14 – ESO Press Release ; NASA-JPL Press Release ;

Biggest yet, July 21 – ESO Press Release ; Sheffield U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

I’d known Steve Schneider from chance encounters but my most memorable long conversation with him was in the hot sun on the parking lot of the National Center for Atmospheric Research above Boulder. He was walking in, I was walking out. It was 1988, a scorching summer, and somewhat before NASA man Jim Hansen told Congress the signature of global warming was rising from the noise. Schneider told me the same thing, filled with caveats and his standard evasion of being made to look absolutely certain about things – but pretty darned sure. This cimate thing is important, he kept saying. The press has to take it more seriously. He gently poked his finger at my shoulder. Call me anytime.

And the last time I spoke with him in person, maybe two years ago, was at a small workshop on climate change in Berkeley. His prognosis this time came  during a moment of exasperation that the nation seems petrified of doing anything that requires any short term pain at all among Americans. The fact is, he said with no maybes, “We’re screwed.”

As a whirl of obituaries explain today, Stephen H. Schneider, Stanford University physicist and biologist, died aboard an airliner while flying to London following a scientific meeting in Stockholm. He had been ill for some time with a rare cancer, seemed to have beaten it, even wrote a book about it (an eerie parallel to Stephen Jay Gould’s arc), and then suddenly as he regained his stride, is gone. He was a warrior.

Some of the Obits and Stories:

• LA Times – Elaine Woo :
• Washington Post - T. Rees Shapiro ;
• The Guardian – Michael Mann, Ben Santer ; The authors are  climate scientists close to Schneider. They give him more credit than anybody on the planet – more than Al Gore or Jim Hansen – for shining a public light on human-caused climate change.
• NY Times – Douglas Martin ; NYTimes Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin ;
• Sydney Morning Herald/AAP: Thomas Conlin ;
• AP – Jason Dearen ;
• Discover Magazine – Chris Mooney ;
• San Jose Mercury News – Paul Rogers ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman ;
• Huffington Post -  Matt Petersen ;
• Time Magazine – Michael Lemonick ;
• AAAS ScienceNow – Richard A. Kerr ;

*More odes and updates:

• Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media – Bud Ward : Mourning the Huge Loss of a “Giant’;
• Columbia Journalism Review – Cristine Russell: Stephen Schneider: Climate Communicator / Remembering an esteemed scientist’s contributions to the media over three decades;
• Columbia Journalism Review / Observatory – Curtis Brainard: Obits for Schneider Roll In / Reporters pay respect to climate scientist and “mediarologist” ;

Stanford University – Louis Bergeron, Dan Stober ; Official obit from the university.

- Charlie Petit