.................nyt photo

On Monday the Financial Times‘s Andrew Jack reported from an International AIDS Conference in Vienna that a study – its results supposedly embargoed until today by Science magazine – has found that a vaginal gel tested in Africa appears to reduce HIV infection rates significantly. Jack cites as his sources two people who have been briefed on the results, and did not overtly use anything provided by the journal in advance. He also got philanthropist and Microsoft founder Bill Gates to go on record about making the gel, should tests confirm early results, affordable and available.

So whether or not the reporter technically broke the the embargo’s self-assigned rules, the result is the same. AAAS lifted it. Thus a day early, news is spreading and is getting fairly wide pick up including a tremendous NYTimes splash. Clearly Jack at the FT was not the only reporter gathering  additional info ahead of the embargo’s scheduled lift. Further info on the break is at, natch, Ivan Oransky‘s site Embargo Watch.

Does this question make enough sense to ask of the researchers: Is there any chance that already-infected women who use the gel also thereby reduce odds they will pass the virus on to others? Might such a two-way protection be apparent under further testing protocols? Another: epidemiologically, what increment of reduction in transmission rates might be enough to drop the epidemic below what is required to sustain itself? That is, is a one-third to one-half drop enough to put out the fire?

Stories:

• NYTimes – Celia W. Dugger: African Studies Give Women Hope in H.I.V. Fight ; On page 1, top right with a large photo, she ties the Science study on the gel to other evidence that microloans and small grants to girls and their families led to delayed and more careful sex, reducing odd of contracting HIV.
• AP – Marilynn Marchione: AIDS breakthrough: Gel helps prevent infection ; Interesting detail here on what efficacy it would need to get FDA approval vs. the lower threshold that might be enough for use elsewhere. As context, Marchione reports that in South Africa one in three girls is infected with HIV by age 20.
• Agence France-Presse: Anti=HIV gel ‘milestone’ for prevention ;
• CBC (Canada, + AP)): Anti-HIV gel protects women: study ;
• BBC – David Campanale (video link) Vaginal gel ‘slashes HIV risks’ in South African tests ;
• Washington Post – David Brown: Gel found to reduce AIDS risk in women;
• Times (S. Africa) Claire Keeton: Great results for HIV prevention, to be presented at Vienna today ;
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: S. Africa eager to see speedy roll-out of AIDS gel ; reported from Vienna.
• AlJazeera: Gel ‘helps prevent’ HIV infection ; service credits “agencies” in part, but also seems to have gotten direct quotes itself.

- Charlie Petit

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I thought this morning I was looking at a cover for one of those narrow-focus magazines like Cinefex that worship the latest special effect and digitally-enhanced shoot-em-up apocalyptic movies. It is a frame from  Transformer Armageddon: Reckoning from the Abyss, properly pronounced in a deep gravelly voice to a bass drum’s slow beat. I made that up. It’s the Deepwater Horizon drill rig in extremis.  Maybe this pic has made the rounds already. It’s new on me. The time stamp implies this was no professional shooter’s shot – more likely from  documentary footage by emergency crews.

The NYTimes layout editor filled the entire space above the fold for this invitation into William J. Broad‘s useful, if not notably inspired, reminder of a verity. His lede: Disasters teach more than successes. That’s a tidier variant of another old observation – The way to reduce mistakes is to be wise; wisdom comes from mistakes. The only mistake Broad makes is to call such thought paradoxical when it is already common. The story is a solid provider of context. It is not explicitly about the gulf spill so much as a list of other episodes where major technological improvements came only after standard manners came to disaster. It made me back off, just a smidge, from morally blaming the Minerals Mgt. Service for this by its lax demands on industry to do some testing of emergency responses before drilling under new conditions. MMS hardly invented the pattern of reforming only after something blows up.

Nicholas Wade has two pieces, one large and the other really big and below the fold, from his core genomics beat. The large one on some of the different ways nature has found to encode male-female distinctions in genomes, I found hard to follow, or to care.  But the really big one on the many illustrations that the human race continues to evolve and diversify is deeply informative and clear, even if does not break specific news. Most of the examples will have been glimpsed before by ksjtracker’s smart readership, but not all in one place in small, digestible bites. Here’s a question. It comes up late in the story. What aspect of paleolithic life in the Upper Nile selected genes for extreme stature? Was it a tall-grass prairie where stumpy hunters couldn’t see diddly? Do crocodiles there prefer to dine on short people? So hot that being long and skinny is useful to maximize dermal thermal radiation per unit of body mass? A hint, please.

Other headlines to note:

• Lawrence K. Altman M.D. : A New Pumping Device Bring Hope for Cheney ; No longer just an experiment, ventricular assist devices are covered by Medicare and, Altman tells us, use a continuous rotor to move blood now that docs believe a pulse is not necessary. Inspired by the former vice president’s recent installation of one of these – with some detail on the seriousness of his heart disease.
• Gina Kolata: With This Rinse, Performance Improves ; Is this really true? Kolata reports that merely swishing one’s mouth with a carb-loaded solution and spitting it out tricks the body into thinking it has plenty of fuel and improves extreme-end athletic performance.
• Kenneth Chang: NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft Discovers Surprises on Mercury ; Strange doings in its thin air, a rapid-response magnetic field, youthful-looking lava on this supposedly dead little planet.

As usual lots more: Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Bee reporter Hudson Sangree has out today a well-crafted and crafty story that explores a classic local enviro conflict. It pits environmental sensibilities and sentiment against a town’s development plans including a sewage plant and their financing. An organized handful of people are defending a gigantic butternut tree that stands in the project’s way. It is possibly a hybrid with walnut and has been growing unprotected and largely unappreciated aside a bridge on the West side of town near the Sacramento River. The trunk is 22 feet around. An arborist tells him that’s the biggest in the county – no big deal, as the tree is native to Eastern N. America. More important, some say it may be the biggest in the nation (I just looked up the listed record holder. It is in Virginia with a reported circumference of about 18 feet. Whether both boles are being measured at the same prescribed, roughly chest height is not clear) .

One surmises that Sangree is rooting for the tree. But he does a fine, balanced job laying out the stakes. The things that the city has put on offer to compensate for the tree’s demise are fascinating – including one to mill it and decorate City Hall with its fine wood, a sort of homage.

Sangree has been covering this issue for a little while now – this one is an update on earlier dispatches. Sangree’s publishers, as reflected by the Bee’s editorial, are not for keeping the tree: The best way to honor tree may not be to save it ; Sure. Politicians and their publicists are not only people who can spin the news.

Earliercoverage:

• (July 14)  West Sacramento woman sues to save huge butternut tree ;
• (July 9) Planned removal of massive West Sacramento tree protested ;

- Charlie Petit

One may still hope that, pretty soon, BP can disperse its fleet of skimmers and other crude oil picker-uppers sitting around the empty spot in the ocean where the Deep Horizon rig once sat. They can thus be dispatched closer to shore where the accumulated glob remains spreading its toxic self around. Oil is no longer rising from the wellhead, thanks to a new blowout cap atop the old blowout preventer-that-couldn’t. But now, a new uh-oh.

The AP in a late dispatch, reports something ominous is leaking from the seabed nearby. Colleen Long and Harry R. Weber report that the feds told BP it could leave the cap’s valves and ports shut tight for another day “despite something seeping near the sea floor.” How exciting, and not in the good way. Near means two miles. That’s quite a distance – a little news explainer about now on both chemical sampling of the substance and on whether seismic sensing might allow any leak plume to be traced back to the Macondo well would be welcome.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Dow Jones service has a notable summary by Stephen Wisnefski and Angel Gonzales filed, apparently, before this fresh ooze made the news. The piece, in good biz news style, moves rapidly from continuing worries that the cap may only force oil out the sides of a possibly-damaged seabed well casing, to the all-important (to its readers) update on BP’s share price and prospects. One can, it appears, buy a derivitive-packaged insurance against BP default on its debts for $368,500 annual premium.

Underway is a suddenly-changing news story, and accounts carry tracks of reporters adjusting their stride and injecting the latest news. First came the shared theme of a locked-tight seal. Then came word that something fishy is occurring on the seabed nearby. That disturbs what was a clean angle – a hazard of the last hour’s news writing colliding with this hour’s news.

Other well cap and related news:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: U.S. Allows BP to Keep Well Closed for Another Day; Updated from this morning’s paper edition (West Coast, perhaps it made the local home edition?) with news of “undetermined anomalies” on the seafloor. Fountain reports it includes methane with uncertainty whether it’s the well’s fault, or a natural seep.
• Washington Post – David A. Fahrenthold: Allen’s letter to BP notes seep, ‘undetermined anomalies’ at wellhead ;
• Washington Post – John Hofmeister (Q&A): BP oil spill: Leaking, seepage. Will the cap hold? ;  Hofmeister, an oil man and CEO of Citizens for Affordable Energy (does that mean cheap always trumps safe for the environment?), provides an expert summary of where things stand.
• Miami Herald – Jaweed Kaleem, Daniel Chang: Gulf oil spill cap to remain in place – for now. This one suggests that if the buried well casing is damaged and leaking “that means oil would likely gush once again into the ocean after three days of no new oil.”  Hmmm. Seem more likely that if BP does have to re-hook hoses to the new cap and lets the oil rise unimpeded into these new, multiple conduits to ships above, the stuff will take that route of least resistance rather than batter its way up through the sediment. Maybe not all of the seep would stop. But “gush” seems overkill. ‘Hope so.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter Grier: BP oil seep could spell trouble for containment cap ;
• Los Angeles Times – Richard Faussett: Seep near capped well worries US / Concerns prompt a stern warning to BP from Washington’s point man on the gulf oil spill ; Filed late Sunday.

Grist for the Mill: BP Response Press Release ;

A reminder of better days (actually, one day ago):

• USA Today – Rick Jervis: Focus shifts to Gulf oil cleanup ; One suspects this is the theme that will outlive today’s re-focus on the primary leak. Jervis didn’t miss anything – he filed this yesterday before the worrisome seep and the demanding letter on it from the fed’s response boss surfaced.

Pertinent News Analysis:

• Media Matters for America (a partisan, anti-conservative outfit) : NY Post op-ed completely inverts OBama’s remarks about oil spill crisis ; Not a reliable source of unbiased news one can use without explanation. But this item appears to set a record straight.

Other related news:

• NYTimes: Justin Gillis, Leslie Kaufman: After Oil Spills, Hidden Damage Can Last for Years ; a broad-shouldered summary of follow-up research into other spills. It has, one can argue, a gloomier tone than its own reporting supports. Impacts do last for years, but it IS encouraging that they decline and do, presumably, eventually fade away (other than reversal of accelerated erosion while marsh vegetation is scant).

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) On the first day of the 28th International AIDS conference hold in Vienna this week, Bill Clinton said that “In too many countries too much money goes to pay for too many people to go to too many meetings, get on too many airplanes”, and that “every dollar we waste today puts a life at risk.” Bill Gates also argued that: “We have to be honest with ourselves:  We can’t keep spending AIDS resources in exactly the same way we do today“. And Julio Montaner (chair of the conference) asked governments to lead a war on drugs and against new HIV infections with scientific evidence instead of ideology. Well! It sounds like we journalists have an important role exploring the issue and denouncing institutions failing this so-important job. The coverage of the conference has just started, but El Mundo in Spain and El Espectador in Colombia have already prepared some good stories.

La XVIII Conferencia Internacional del Sida que se está celebrando esta semana en Austria acaba de empezar. Veremos qué da de sí a nivel científico durante la semana, pero ha empezado fuerte denunciando la falta de eficiencia de algunos gobiernos e instituciones en la lucha contra el SIDA. “Se malgasta mucho dinero” han opinado tanto Bill Clinton como Bill Gates. Perseguir y denunciar aquello que no funciones también es nuestro papel como periodistas especializados en salud. La ineficiencia no es un problema nuevo de la gestión política y la ayuda al desarrollo, pero podría ser una buena iniciativa el explorar cómo se están gastando los recursos propios e internacionales en ciertos países.

En España, El Mundo ha enviado a Viena a Isabel Lantigua para realizar notas como “Los científicos declaran la guerra a las políticas sobre drogas”, donde refleja el contenido de la Declaración de Viena y la petición de los científicos de que las políticas de prevención se adecuen a las evidencias científicas. Una de estas evidencias es que el adicto es un enfermo con un trastorno físico, no un criminal, y si fuera tratado como tal, se podrían evitar muchas de la enorme proporción de nuevas infecciones que se contraen por compartir agujas. Isabel explica también las críticas de Bill Clinton a la ineficiencia en la gestión de recursos. Destacamos este párrafo: “En lugar de lanzar esta crítica de forma vaga, Clinton ha dado ejemplos concretos de lo que él considera ‘tirar el dinero’. Así, se ha mostrado en desacuerdo con el interés que tienen muchas organizaciones en enviar expertos a los países pobres para realizar luego informes y elaborar teorías, cuando lo que necesitan los ciudadanos de estos lugares son acciones concretas e inmediatas que eviten las nuevas infecciones. “Seguir por esta línea no es buena idea, no es suficiente lo que estamos haciendo”, ha reconocido el ex presidente.” Aquí hay jugo periodístico donde rascar. Buenas notas también de la prolífica I. Lantigua: ‘Por primera vez es evidente que los antiVIH salvan vidas”, el resumen de carácter más social: “Por los derechos de los seropositivos, aquí y ahora”, y el optimismo de Bill Gates abrazando la oportunidad, pero reconociendo que no podemos seguir gastando el dinero como ahora y pedir más recursos constantemente.

En El Espectador (Colombia), Pablo Correa y Mariana Suárez firmaron con anticipación a la conferencia “Sida, un ajuste de cuentas”; un muy buen reportaje que empieza exponiendo la enorme diversidad en formas de contagio que existe en el mundo dependiendo de las costumbres y políticas que se establezcan (entre ellas, la educación sexual) y que avanza cubriendo datos, percepción social, la ansiada vacuna, cómo mejorar todavía más el tratamiento, y hacer que llegue a los países más necesitados. Atención a la muy detallada infografía, con datos de todos los países de América Latina. También dentro de la amplia cobertura de El Espectador, Lisbeth Fog en “Nuevas pistas para combatir el Sida” resume los dos avances recientes más notables en investigación científica hacia nuevos tratamientos: convertir ratones en inmunes al HIV gracias a la inserción de células madre sin el gen CCR5, y la caracterización por científicos del NIH de tres anticuerpos que impiden que el virus infecte las células.

Seguro que la conferencia ofrecerá más reacciones y perspectivas científicas. Las seguiremos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Two stories landed Friday that The Tracker didn’t get to before noon out here on the West Coast. First, NOAA (among others) says 2010 so far is the hottest ever measured by thermometer – an ephemeral event. Second, on a longer and more impactful time scale, the US National Academy of Sciences’ National Research Council says that climate change is already so dramatic as to force Earth off its Holocene tracks. The move by some toward official geological academy declaration of a new epoch, the Anthropocene, gets  thereby a boost.

I’ll get to some of the coverage of those two in a moment. But first, just to set the horizon properly for these different time scales of change, I must mention an article I came upon over the weekend while browsing honor society Phi Beta Kappa’s  The American Scholar magazine (no, I weren’t no Phi Beta danged Kappa). In it, to go with that rusting Hybrid car on the cover, is an explainer by Robert B. Laughlin called What the Earth Knows / Understanding the concept of geological time and some basic science can give a new perspective on climate change and the energy future. He’s a Nobelist physicist, writes clearly too. Personally I think he overstates his point, but it does offer a robust angle on whether it makes sense to frame environmentalism with terms like “saving the planet.” It is about deep time. The planet is fine, he says, or not, and in the long run we don’t matter. Definitely worth reading by any science writer or anybody else wanting full perspective. On the other hand, one could just as easily say what’s the point of anything? – in the end the universe will be vast, dark, cold, damned near empty, with even its protons including the ones now in our very own atoms decaying into scattered photonic embers. And even if the Earth will recover and go its own far more tumultuous way, so? One might as well tell your bullying kid to go ahead and sock the school ninny – he’ll heal and have far worse experiences and triumphs too before he’s dead. Still, the piece is correct that deep time is important on general intellectual principle.

Hottest Year So Far Stories: Pretty simple story, easily reported even with the uncertainties from La Niña.

• Reuters – Alina Selyukh: World simmers in hottest year so far ; A small missed chance here, as with a lot of coverage by other outlets noting that during June Arctic sea ice reached a record low for the date. In early July, in a nip and tuck race, this year fell behind 2007 in the melt-off stakes as seen here. That would have made a clarifying addition and is easy to look up at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
• AP – Natasha T. Metzler: Warmest June on record, climate scientists say ; Just a shorty.
• Guardian – John Vidal: Last month was hottest June reocrded worldwide, figures show / US government climate data suggests (sic) 2010 on course to be warmest year since records began ; He writes, without hedging, “the trend to a warmer world is now incontrovertible.”
• USA Today – Oren Dorell: World sizzles to record for the year ; Dorell gets in some skeptics remarks, as one from non-scientist Marc Morano, a conservative political operative and now at the Climate Depot website,  who accuses NOAA of cherry picking the data, and from former TV weatherman Joe D’Aleo. Dorell consulted no outside climatologists for opinion.
• Time Magazine – Megan Friedman: Heat Up: Last Month the Warmest June on Record ; Another shorty – does not mention that whole year for the world has thus far been hottest ever measured directly and perhaps for quite a long time before that.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release ;

National Academy on global warming impacts, plus Anthropocene:    The report goes far beyond nomenclature, offering  global warming’s calculated incremental effects in decades to come.

• Discovery News – John D. Cox: New Study Charts Effects of Each Degree of Warming ; Same report from the National Academy of Sciences. Ignores anthropocene angle.
• E&E Climate Wire via NYTimes – Lauren Morello: Without Carbon Emissions Cuts, the “Anthropocene’ Looms as an Ugly Epoch – Study; Quibble here – the report doesn’t “dub” the new epoch the Anthropocene. “Dub” evokes initial anointment – this term has been around and on offer for official stature for a decade or so. Otherwise, a careful job.
• NYTimes (Dot Earth Blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Science Academy Charts CO2 Impacts Degree by Degree ; Revkin opines that reports like this, just like scores that have gone before, don’t make much policy dent – and says that psychological and sociological factors ought to be what the academy look into.
• Denver Post – Bruce Finley: Study quantifies potential impoacts of climate change ; He closes on an interesting angle – the makeup and vetting of the review panel’s members.

Grist for the Mill: NAS report ; NAS Press Release ;  Texas Tech Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Let’s start the weekend and end the track with coverage of a sentimental cute critter story.  This one takes a tiny bit of bitterness off the gulf oil spill’s toxic residue. Some of the turtle eggs – loggerheads and a few Keimp’s ridleys – taken from the oily shores of the gulf and incubated at Cape Canveral, have hatched. The first babies have been set free into the clean waters off Florida’s eastern side – imprinted, handlers hope, somehow with the directions to the nesting areas where their mothers left them.

Some of the stories:

• AP – Brian Skoloff: Sea turtles rescued from Gulf spill released ;
• LA Times -Alana Semuels: Saving sea turtles one egg at a time;
• Audubon Magazine – Justin Nobel: Oil spill update from the field: Saving 8,000 sea turtles from an oily apocalypse.
• New Scientist – Sujata Gupta: Gulf turtle evacuees could get lost at sea ; The tag line on this tale of peril says “some success is better than zero.” In the rest of the post comment below is explanation why that much success may be just perfect.

And just to keep us balanced on whether regular people are necessarily any better at protecting the environment than the execs at BP are:

• Hometown News (Brevard County, Fla) – Tammy Roberts: Sea turtle harassmanet, beheadings reported on Brevard beaches ;

I hate to be a sourpuss dept:

Tens of thousands more eggs are in the pipeline, say news accounts. The official point is to prevent failure of an entire year-class of these endangered species from nesting areas in the oil spill’s heartland. One suspects an equal reason is to forestall some of the impact of videos showing baby turtles floundering into glop at the beach’s edges and promptly dying, struggling pathetically.

None of the stories, and one can’t be surprised, put this in context of what always happens to nearly every baby sea turtle. It dies fast and ugly. That’s why those that survive to adulthood lay so many eggs. Gulls and crabs and near-shore predators gobble them up, tearing them limb from carapace while alive, or they starve, or something else. Every mother turtle leaves maybe 100 eggs in a sandy nest each season. To maintain the turtle population only two or three hatchlings over her life must make it to reproductive age to replace her (and the fathers in some statistically weighted way). All the rest die.

In these stories we read of wildlife managers hoping a few survive. Well that could be all it’ll take. One percent or less might do. In fact, by entering the sea on beaches where local predators are not atavistically primed for an annual tender turtle feast, they might do better than average. This could be a spike in the species’s recruitment. Or not. But one should not think  failure of most and even nearly all newborns to survive would be anything new in the world of turtles – or other wildlife for that matter. It’s the norm.

- Charlie Petit

AP‘s Alicia Chang appears to have taken a breath before doing anything with a press release from the Jet Propulsion Lab this week. The release, down there in Grist, beats the drum for the early results of a new orbiting observator, WISE, for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. It does so in sweeping terms, summing up its quarry over its first sweep of the entire sky. That includes nebulae, star clusters, and galaxies.

PLus asteroids. Chang narrows it down to the asteroids it has added to the ledger – 25,000 newly discovered ones among the 100,000 it has seen. And nearly 100 of them are near-Earth asteroids, meaning they have paths through the inner solar system that put them within astronomical shouting distance of Earth. This is solid reporting in which the writer finds one topic among those offered and zooms in on it.

See also earlier post on first WISE results;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA JPL Press Release ; UCLA/UC Berkeley  Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer site ; NASA Mission News ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Impressive data and pictures about the destruction of Spain’s natural coastline are in an extensive Greenpeace report today. The study concludes that 50,000 hectares of such open land turned to  urban or commercial use between 1987 and 2005. It says that the process continues at  7.7 hectares a day (the equivalent of 8 soccer fields). Some environmental reporters are more belligerent than others but all criticize the shortsighted regional and central institutions that allowed this unsustainable conversion of natural areas. Right now, half million houses are for sale just along the Mediterranean coast.

We review also some stories from Tierramérica, a communication platform about environment and sustainable development in Latin America, covering issues like biodiversity loss in Honduras’ rainforest, giant turtles preservation in Ecuador, the progressive melting of the Andean glaciers, a Peruvian river contaminated due to mining industry, a UN report worrying that governments in the region still don’t see the economical benefits of preserving their natural richness, or the little presence of scientific stories from local researchers in Latin America newspapers.

Todos los periódicos en España están cubriendo la presentación del informe de Greenpeace, según el cual el ritmo al que avanza la destrucción del litoral español debido a la construcción de viviendas es de 7.7 hectáreas al día.  El estudio recoge datos de entre 1987 y 2005 -justo antes del freno del boom urbanístico-. Pero según los autores, el fenómeno es imparable y se está extendiendo por los últimos rincones de la costa que todavía están bien conservados. El País ofrece un bien trabajado texto de Rebeca Carranco que incluye videos, galería de imágenes excelentemente comentadas a pie de foto, y enlace al informe original de Greenpeace. Los datos y fotografías (ej. Benidorm) son escalofriantes, y toda una denuncia a las administraciones centrales y autonómicas que lo han permitido. Es más; la única excusa para no frenar este crecimiento urbanístico descontrolado era la mejora económica que podía conllevar; pero la burbuja que supuso y la crisis actual ponen de manifiesto que ese desequilibrio al final ha sido contraproducente, y de ninguna manera era la mejor apuesta donde invertir. Que ninguna región repita el error si está a tiempo. El texto de rebeca termina con una frase que muestra lo absurdo de haber estado tanto tiempo mirando sólo a corto plazo: “El año pasado (en España) había un millón de viviendas sin vender, casi la mitad en la costa mediterránea”. Muy amplio también el artículo de Público, mostrando los mismos datos pero utilizando un tono más crítico y de denuncia con expresiones como “urbanismo salvaje”, o “grandes aberraciones”. Un tono ligeramente más neutro se percibe de manera sutil en El Mundo: “España destruye cada día una superficie de costa equivalente a ocho campos de futbol”.

La preservación del medio ambiente es uno de los temas emergentes en el periodismo. Desde luego que no es nuevo, pero cada vez cobrará más importancia, especialmente en regiones como América Latina que todavía están a tiempo de preservar su valiosísima riqueza. Desde Tierramérica y el servicio de noticias IPS, Humberto Márquez califica de asignatura pendiente la gestión ambiental en Latinoamérica, reportando a partir de los datos de un informe presentado esta semana por las Naciones Unidas. La pieza refuerza esta idea fundamental de que explotar los recursos de manera sostenible y proteger el medioambiente es clave para fomentar el desarrollo económico y disminuir la pobreza. Quizá no de manera inmediata, pero seguro a medio plazo.

Aprovechamos para no abandonar esta plataforma multimedia apoyada por el Banco Mundial y las Naciones Unidas para destacar otra nota de Emilio Godoy “La ciencia en la ciberautopista”, incidiendo en que las redes de revistas científicas están difundiendo mucho conocimiento científico entre las instituciones de Latinoamérica, pero éste no llega al público debido a la falta de espacios de divulgación y periodismo científico de calidad. Esta es la limitación que más nos concierte. Debemos reivindicar nuestro importante papel, y las historias que sugieren un cambio de mentalidad frente a la conservación del medio ambiente son una buena forma de hacerlo. Por ejemoplo, también en Tierramérica, el reportaje de Sonia Edith Parra “Patrimonio natural del Caribe hondureño en la cuerda floja” sobre la amenaza que supone a la biodiversidad una mala gestión turística, de expansión agrícola, y el narcotráfico. Buena pieza, pero a la que falta la contundencia de los datos, fotografías y titular del mensaje elaborado a partir del informe de Greenpeace sobre la costa española. En España llevamos años alertando que el litoral se está degradando peligrosamente, pero aparece en todos los periódicos cuando un informe ofrece un dato concreto: 8 campos de fútbol al día. Lo primero, es captar la atención.

- Pere Estupinyà

Just in case the oil in the gulf, the acid water washing into Puget Sound, the collapse of tuna and swordfish stocks, and other cheer are signs of the apocalypse for the oceans, portending an age of jellies sloshing quietly under the slickened, impoverished seas, here’s a counter hope. Maybe a goby cavalry is ready to ride.

Well, not that biblical. But Science today has a report by researchers from Norway, the US, South Africa and elsewhere with just a hint that rapture is to be glimpsed in it. Or, as Wired‘s Brandon Keim writes under the hed A Mud-Loving, Iron-Lunged, Jelly-Eating Ecosystem Savior, “meet the bearded goby,  a six-inch-long fish that lives in toxic mud, eats jellyfish, lasts for hours without oxygen, and has saved a coastal African ecosystem from a nightmare fate.”

One of the paper’s authors tells him (or a release does, not sure) that, off Namibia, gobies are gobbling jellies and, with no table manners plus the usual end-result of poop not to mention being prey themselves to barracuda etc. , are recycling the jellyfish into general nourishment in the waters for the rest of its inhabitants. That helps keep the rest of the ecosystem there going rather than succumbing entirely to the glistening, slowly throbbing, tentacled newcomers.

The piece is lyrical in its descriptions. Keim does come back to Earth, or to Ocean, late in the going – saying (via sources) that the region’s biology is still a mess. But it is not nearly as bleak as it would be without these little gobies.

Other specialty outlets pick it up, with varying degrees of rhetorical flourish:

• National Geographic – Christine Dell’Amore: “Miraculous” Fish Thrive Amid Jellyfish Swarm, Toxic Mud ;
• Scientific American – David Biello: Scourge of the Jellies: Small Fish Shows How Ecosystems Adjust to Potentially Catastrophic Changes ; Includes a good video from the University of the Western Cape.
• AAAS Science News Article – Elizabeth Pennisi: How a Little Fish Keeps Overfished Ecosystem Productive ; Check out the pic of a goby in a gloppy stew of jammed jellies.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: Super goby helps salvage ocean dead zone ; Story’s fine.  New Scientist embeds the video from Norway – and slaps its own watermarked logo on the images. It does leave the University of Bergen in the credit scroll at the end. It ought to give credit at the top, one thinks.

Grist for the Mill:

University of Bergen (Norway) Press Release with videos ; Penn State Press Release ;

The other day I pulled a comment from one of this site’s gulf spill posts – but only because the commenter didn’t provide his real name. That’s our policy.  It seems to keep down the rants and insults from craven people shouting from dark corners. I haven’t heard back from my email thanking the writer, explaining why I had to pull it aside, and asking for his name so I could put it back up. The comment itself was thoughtful.

A lot of people would likely find one of its remarks quite sensible regarding the fancy faucet that BP’s response team finally bolted securely in the past week to the top of the overwhelmed old blowout preventer: “I assumed that there must be something more complicated – giving the BP engineers the benefit of the doubt – but now I realize that they actually must indeed be really incompetent …. Have we really sunk to this level of incompetence in America?”

And if that comment had stayed up, I’d have had to reply there’s incompetence involved, sure, but no, the engineers at BP and its contractors who do the drawings and order the gear are not on the hook. To design, fabricate, and install this set of valves in three months under such conditions and see them work is pretty quick. The flotilla of remotely controlled submersibles down there is impressive. So is the squadron of ships at the surface sucking the stuff up, and that has been shooting off that amazing Schlumberger EverGreen Burner thing.

The shame and incompetence is to be found  in why the engineers had to do this from scratch. If they’d been permitted years ago to add redundancy and flanges and more robust top ends to such deep water operations, and to test their plans B, C, and D under realistic conditions before some drone filled out the safety  documents and shuffled them to the sheep pen at Minerals Management Service, the engineers would very likely have quietly gone about paving the way to what happened yesterday. But they could have done it within days or a few weeks of the catastrophic, fatal explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon. That they could not do so is an executive failure abetted by lax or corrupt government regulation. It is not a display of essential technical inability. I bet there were engineers urging exactly such contingency gear be designed, tested, and ready – just in case.

Oh yes. The news. Oil is no longer visible leaking from the failed well head or – so far – from the nearby seabed. The press cannot condone thought that if the pressure test goes as hoped the environmental problem will now rapidly evaporate. But  for now anyway it’s not getting worse. That is fine news.

Stories:

• NPR – Richard Harris, Kathy Lohr (+ wires): Hope and Disbelief As Gulf Gusher Cap Holds Steady ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: BP well remains sealed as pressure tests continue ; Much-appreciated set of numbers here, giving a feel for what the engineers are looking for.

Speaking of Achenbach, don’t miss his geology primer earlier this week on why the gulf has so many rigs: Rare mix of geological factors created rich but dangerous reserves ; And speaking of plugs and oil, watch for the Peak Oil plug in this nicely done yarn.

• Guardian – John Vidal: The oil spill is under control – now it’s time to count the ecological cost ; This opinion piece takes an unexpected tack – bad as it is, the US was LUCKY that the leak was so deep, and in the Gulf of Mexico. And it was, in a literal if not really pertinent point, just a drop in the ocean just like Tony Hayward said. Seems an apology for BP, or a pooh-pooh at environmentalism? It’s not.
• AFP – Allen Johnson: Optimism as BP oil cap holds up ; OK, but odd phrasing : it says the cap increases pressure in the deep well casing because it is “forcing (the oil) back down into the wellbore.” No, it’s just plugging it in place. Maybe he’s confused by what heavy drill mud does? Perhaps it’s a hastily thought-out reference to back pressure.
• AP – Harry R. Weber: Gulf geyser stops gushing, but will it hold? ; A shorty.
• LA Times – Richard Faussett, Nicole Santa Cruz: BP stops flood of oil into Gulf of Mexico ; This dispatch is more pessimistic than most on what happens if the pressure test doesn’t work out, and the oil permitted to flow again. “Some of the oild could be captured…but much could once again belch into the ocean..”  Other outlets report that the four ships at the surface attached to extra conduits from the new cap might well capture essentially all of it. That opinion, from a source, is in this story too – but after the bald assertion it’s not so.
• BBC – Gulf of Mexico oil stoppage going well, BP says ; More interesting is the accompanying sidebar-analysis from Matt McGrath. He reports, of  the ultimate savior relief well just a few feet away now, that “any leak into this well would be disastrous for the efforts to permanently stem the flow?” What?!  What’d he Say?! Any leak? Ack. I mean, it has to get some oil in it when it punches into the mother that spawned this monster, one thinks. Surely it’s primed and loaded with oogledy-thousands of barrels of heavy drill mud to dump in and kill it. A disaster with any leak the other waqy, it says. More info, please.
• …. Lots more reporting going on in this saga of money, oil, engineers, execs, dead wildlife, a flattened gulf economy, and national politics.

- Charlie Petit

Just a week ago The Tracker posted on a Foreign Policy article about the peril in China to muck-raking science journalists -  including those who uncover phony resumes among scientists there. Today one finds more on that seamy underside of the nation’s dramatic charge into the ranks of front line research and technology powers. The Wall Street Journal‘s Loretta Chao relays from Beijing the aggressive reporting by some Chinese journalists who had the gumption to wonder in public whether degrees on the walls are really from Caltech, Berkeley, Oxford, or so on. Her lead example is an executive with China’s Microsoft operation who, it says here, is quite the tech star in his native land. Now he’s in hot water.

At one point Exhibit A’s published work said he is a Caltech man. He’s taken that back. The story sort of dangles the reader along with its recitation of the accused’s defense – he hadn’t claimed it personally, it got into a book he helped write because of an error corrected later, he only did research at the famed Pasadena powerhouse, and truly does have an American PhD.  Just when the story starts going all he-said she-said, blam! It turns out the doctorate the man says he really has is from a place US investigators regard as a diploma mill that has since changed its name and re-emerged as a perhaps credentialed place but still one few in academia have heard of.

The WSJ piece appears, to be sure, mostly derived from what has already been in local press and in an internet storm. That’s fine – it’s routine in a foreign bureau and could lead to better things including leaks directly to the journal’s reporters.

A thing to keep in mind, lest one be tempted to think that academically China is the academic paper tiger, is that at the real UCLA and OSU and Harvard and MIT and UTA and Stanford and so on, graduate schools are well-populated by industrious, bright young people from China. Plenty of those doctorates are bona fide, plenty of their owners are going home with them – and a trickle of US academics are finding work in increasingly competitive Chinese technical universities. A balancing story, or a paragraph or two in this one, could have put some numbers on that to provide broader context.

- Charlie Petit