Just an idle question here. As sampled below, and as all you know already, a small army of reporters is hanging on in hope to be able to write in the next day or so that BP, after these long months, has managed to clamp a real big faucet on top of the failed BOP, or blowout preventer, that didn’t. They’ll just turn it off like a dripping tap that’s been fitted with a new washer. The suspense is focussed on pressure: will the well casing below this new hardware burst from the pressure  – or is it already cracked and set to start leaking badly – when the rising column of crude is stopped from exiting the top? Will insidious flows into shallow sediments eventually reach the surface, perhaps compounding the problem (although how-so evades me, as the ultimate, relief well spill-killer should intercept the stuff before it reaches shallower levels).

Here is the question: If there is worry that shutting off the flow will burst the pipe in this case, how is this case and casing different from what are beneath all the other deep-water, or any-depth, wellheads out there?  Don’t they all have BOPs? Aren’t they all equipped with less-drastic ways to cut off the flow of oil, such as when rigs have to be moved for storms or are being swapped from exploration to production facilities? Why aren’t those drill pipes equally prone to burst or leak?

Reporters as well as federal regulators and other industry watchdogs should be asking for a full accounting that compares the worry over this maneuver to routine modulations of flows from other wells. The explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon rig did not, as far as I’ve heard in press accounts, pose any particular hazard to the well casing beneath the B.O.P. But now we learn that merely turning off the flow might burst the pipe down there. There may be reason that this is not the case for other facilities. I don’t recall reading any reasons why that may be so. It could be all the unconstrained flow and failed mud-plugging did some damage, I suppose. (LATE ADDITION: See comments for more on that.) Any way one cuts it, we have here further argument for a complete re-think and re-design of undersea drilling equipment to enhance its ease of repair when it breaks down.

A few recent hope-the-cap-is-a-corker stories:

• Bloomberg: BP Plans to Start Test on Leaking Gulf Well Today ;
• Reuters – Kristen Hays, Matt Scuffham: BP says key test on blown Gulf well to start soon ;
• BBC – Vital BP oil well test back on course after setback ; Includes video of coast guard admiral with his sitrep.

Grist for the Mill: BP Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

.......................Source: Daily Mail

Check out this MSNBC report, along with its linked snippet from the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams. I can guaran-damn-tee you that ace science reporter MSNBC Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle did not sign off on this before it ran. It asserts on no grounds whatsoever that a solution has been found in the UK to the old riddle. Answer: chicken. It came first. Proof is in its proteins and enzymes. Uh, no. One is unsure whether, anywhere outside medicine and other than Mr. Boyle, a qualified science reporter exists in the greater NBC empire. This story offers no evidence that it that the answer is yes.

Thanks to tracker reader Don Monroe for the tip to this non-reporting – and also to a fine takedown of the story’s theme at the blog Pharyngula by its instigator, PZ Myers: Chicken, eggs, this is no way to report on science , and a second loud pshaw at Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne: Godawful science reporting: MSNBC says the chicken came before the egg..

The story made a particular dash through the press in the UK, where a few outlets appear to have as one of their news mottos:  anything for a joke, or for stories about jokes, even for old riddles. Actually that’s my motto too – but you gotta live by it while winking occasionally at the audience.

Behind all this, it appears, is one researcher’s own over-enthusiastic willingness to make accessible some interesting work in materials science and biomimetics. And in front of all this is reporters’ inability to think for themselves (if one concludes that the egg came first, which is more sensible, the  joke would still liven the story).

Other Stories:

• Daily Mail: They’ve cracked it at last! The chicken DID come before the egg ;
• The Sun: Chicken came before egg ; This doesn’t even make sense within itself. It points out that, yes, an egg doesn’t make itself, it needs ingredients, and chickens have’em. so the chicken makes the egg. But so did ancestors of chickens. Ergo, if a mutation somehow led to birth of the first chicken from a proto-chicken’s eff, that chicken appeared in the latter’s egg. Ergo the damned effing egg came first. And it means nothing new.
• Express – Emma Pryer: The Chicken Came Before The Egg, Researchers Discover ;
• Time Mag (blog) Kate Abbott: The Chicken and the Egg: Ancient Mystery Solved? ; hook, line, and sinker.

Grist for the Mill:

Sheffield University Press Release ; Warwick University (same one) Press Release ; The release sort of says chicken came first, but it took a few chortling news writers to take out the qualifications on such assertion.

- Charlie Petit

That’s house ad as in admiration. It is a science writing event of the purest sort too. Victor K. McElheny, creator and first director of the Vannevar Bush Fellowships in the Understanding of Technology and Science at MIT in 1983, which became the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships, has been telling friends for years now that he’s working on a book about the human genome project.

No reason to doubt it – he’s done books before. But he has the proof now. The book is out: Drawing the Map of Life. Published by Basic Books.  MIT has an announcement with details.

Congratulations Vic.

- Charlie Petit

..............................Serpentine hillside

The front page yesterday of the NYTimes carried, by Jennifer Steinhauer, a story of trivial importance but pregnant with insightful windows into our society: a bill has passed the California State Senate to, as she writes, defrock a rock. The Assembly is next. That would be serpentine, our official state rock. Other states have them but this was the first in the nation. Now they say, on flimsy argument, it causes cancer. Our golden poppy state flower seems safe so far. Maybe it will get tarred by association.  Did you know it’s among the wildflowers that favor serpentine soils?

Sheesh. Serpentine doesn’t cause cancer. It causes poppies.

Even my eight-year-old grandson Joe knows it’s the state rock. He’s developed a gem and mineral bug. He started a collection. I gave to him a bunch of mineral samples I got from exhibitors at the American Geophysical Union Meeting. I also gave him my own sample of serpentine off the top of a filing cabinet. It’s a nice rock, mottled and pale green mostly. Years ago a noted state butterfly man, Art Shapiro, was happy when I told him I could drive him into the Sierra foothills. There he showed me how he does his surveys. Charming, odd man. He doesn’t or at least didn’t drive. He’d hitchhike, net in hand, on the highways into the mountains and then follow his back-road routes by thumb. Locals knew him, so he got it done in fairly easy, friendly fashion.  He showed me how serpentine-rich hillsides support only a rather thin, scrappy veneer of vegetation, most of which in turn grow nowhere else and support their own distinct populations of butterflies. I picked up the sample that Joe now has in his collection box.

I like the stuff. I know it can contain chrysotile, but that as asbestos fibers go, this is pretty benign stuff. Yet a battle rages over whether groups active in gaining medical and legal support for victims of asbestos-related diseases such as mesothelioma should be granted their (grandstanding) wish to de-list serpentine from among California official icons. The anti-serpentine crowd is correct that asbestos promotion was part of the reason we got this rock its own special place in the capitol building’s displays. But this campaign is medic0-political correctness excess.

The bill seems likely to pass the assembly too. Most twitter offerings (geologists turned to twitter to mount a defense of serpentine) treat the whole thing as a joke, evincing no sympathy for this or any other state rock. The Times story didn’t say much about serpentine on the geologic or mineralogic line. Neither do many of the other stories. Seems to me it needs a little love.

Other stories:

• Sacramento Bee – Dan Walters (July 9): Let’s peer under the rock of this legislation ; The Bee was ahead of NYT, perhaps first overall, to report this bedrock issue. Walters sees the hand of trial lawyers at work here.
• AP – Trevor Hunnicutt: Calif may dump ‘state rock’ that contains asbestos ; the story too is largely about whether trial lawyers will rejoice at an official declaration serpentine is a health threat.
• Discover Mag (blog) Sheril Kirshenbaum, David Lowry: Unscientific California: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Serpentine and Biodiversity ; Hurrah, nice diatribe from a plant biologist. He mentions a few flowers that love serpentine, misses the poppy angle.
• Bay Citizen – Annette Fuentes: Outcry as State Rock Toppled. She gets a good angle here from a fellow writing a whole book on serpentine and its place in state history.

Grist for the Mill:

Facebook pro-serpentine page ; Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization serpentine statement ;

- Charlie Petit

A few posts down is one on engineering microbes, or using other trickery, to make biofuels from cellulose. Another effort of vaguely similar sort – to alter nature and agriculture so that our collective greenhouse enhancement goes down – is in the NYTimes. There Normitzu Onishi reports from Australia efforts to jigger cattle so that there ruminatious digestion belches little methane. The effort aims to convert cattle digestion to a bovine equivalent of kangaroo innards – which digest the same sort of food but don’t make so much methane.

It’s a somewhat funny and informative story. One thinks, to keep the barnyard and farm mood, however that conversion of cattle digestion is chicken feed compared to the task facing the world before our forcing of the atmosphere drops anywhere near pre-industrial levels. Some of such perspective is in the piece, but not much.

It is more than worth noting that this effort has been widely reported in Australia. For instance:

• AFP via The Age (Dec. 7, 2007) : Quest to make cattle fart like marsupials ; Only problem with that hed is that most emissions come from the front end.

Plus, as seen in this previous post, speculation reported in Australia is that if the Aussies just ranched roos for meat on the same land, they’d get the same yield in steaks and chops, but without the methane.

- Charlie Petit

In a recent post The Tracker tacked on the end a fleeting reference to Octopus Paul, the so-called pyschic mollusc that predicted every stage of the World Cup, including winner Spain. It dealt with a news blog column report thing that ran under the hed Science Journalism Officially Dead at CNN. That article complained, rightly, of the fatuous credulity regarding psychic powers with which this great news operations handled the topic.

Well! There is more. The Christian Science Monitor’s Casey Bayer has out this week a follow on this octo-psychic saga. Read it. It has just the smart-aleck tone the topic merits, and a bunch of pretty good reporting too. Without a big unambiguous passage declaring that psychic anything is almost surely pure hokum, the story will allow the daft among us to read it and take it as acceptance of paranormal abilities, even in cephalopods.  But most will get it as a guffaw over the whole affair.

- Charlie Petit

At Wired news Brandon Keim does a bang-up job explaining how an international research team headed by a Columbia University man figured out why so many feeble, stunted salmon with failing hearts have been turning up in fish farms in Norwegian waters and elsewhere off northern Europe’s shores. Most admirable is how much information he packs into what is little more than a news bulletin. He sketches the genomic detective work in tracing it to a previously unknown virus, linking it to the crowded conditions in salmon pens, noting the possible impact of the concentrated viruses there on nearby wild salmon, and providing context with viruses that affect other, land-based livestock operations.

The news arises from a report in PLoS One. A press release from Columbia’s Mailman School of Public Health (in Grist below) propels it along. Keim appears to have beavered up information not in the press release and from sources not named there. It also gets pick up from a few other outlets, not all with equal additional enterprise.  This news cries out for a deeper look – and, one suspects, marks the opening in a new level of concern over the long-term difficulties of fish farming in the context of collapse of so many over-fished wild stocks. Plus, one is curious exactly how this bioinformatics work was done.

Other Stories:

• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: A virus threatens Farmed Salmon: Walsh got this out even earlier than Keim, judging from datelines.
• FIS (industry newsletter) Natalia Real: Salmon virus potential threat to wild stocks ; It looks a bit like it advances the ball with enterprise reporting, but mainly it is lightly rewritten off the release.

See Also:

• Norway.com (Apr. 14, 2009) : Heart and Skeletal Muscle Inflammation: A “New’ Infectious Disease of Atlantic Salmon; A blog with history of the ailment’s discovery. It deals with earlier work by one of the co-authors of the new PLoS report.

Grist for the Mill: Col. Univ. Mailman Sch of Public Hlth Press Release ; PLoS Article ;

- Charlie Petit

There has been a lot of heady talk, and reporting, in recent years on the potential for easing use of petroleum fuels by switching in ethanol made from wood, straw, and other bio-sources of cellulose. In principle, if the right catalyst or, more likely, enzymatically talented microbe could be found, the twisted sugars of cellulose could be disentangled and fermented in a jiffy into ethanol or other liquid fuel.

A few specialty outlets are reporting that the EPA, seeing little if any commercial prospect for mass production this year or soon thereafter, is slashing its target for production of the stuff under the guidance of the Energy Independence & Security Act of 2007. National policy is to satisfy 30 percent of transportation needs with biofuels by 2030, with efficient conversion of cellulose to a gasoline or diesel substitute a big part of the presumption that it can be done. For now, most US ethanol is still being made from corn grain. It barely beats break-even in the efficiency equation and, if pushed to larger volumes, prompts worry it would take so much land and corn that food prices would soar for both people and livestock. But corn stalks, hay, scrap wood, and other vegetation is full of unexploited cellulose.

Looks like an opportunity for some enterprising science or energy writers to get hold of the entrepreneurs, professors, and nat’l lab scientists trying to hurry this switch-grass-to-gas-tank transition along. They never said it would be easy, but government went ahead and set up incentives and lures to industry in hope for a breakthrough. The idea was that genetic engineering, or the regular kind, would move apace.  What’s the hangup, exactly?

That there IS a hangup is clear enough from news reports written in the sometimes turgid manner of business reporting for business managers:

• Bloomberg – Kim chapman, Mario Parker: EPA Proposes Cellulosic Ethanol Short of U.S. Goals;
• Biomass Magazine – Kris Bevill : EPA slashes 2011 cellulosic estimates ;
• Domestic Fuel Cast – Cindy Zimmerman: Industry Concerned About Lowering Cellulosic Ethanol Goals ;

I learned first of this development from a thorough article by Dina Fine Maron on ClimateWire, one of several subscription on line  newsletters from Energy and “Environment Daily. I’m trying to get an open link to it and will update this post if successful.

Ironic Grist for the Mill:

Among the larger, focussed efforts on advanced microbial biofuel research is in the Energy Biosciences Institute in Emeryville, CA. Here is its May Press Release on calls for proposals. Its staff is largely researchers from UC Berkeley, some from the Berkeley Nat’l Lab that DOE head Steven Chu directed before heading for DC, and the Univ. of Illinois. The irony: its money is from BP. Surely there is a good story in the contrast between the company’s efforts to plug its well in the gulf, and the (big, but far smaller) money it’s putting into research that could reduce the need to drill in such deep water while countering the greenhouse effect too. Even if one cynically regards BP’s biofuels initiative as  a p.r. feint, the institute seems to take its mission seriously. BP is still in that game elsewhere, as seen in this Press Release.

Pic: Nat’l Renewable Energy Lab, via source ;

- Charlie Petit

It wasn’t drought, or stepped-up burning by settlers, that was the big reason for a spike in tree deaths in the Amazon basin in 2005. A new analysis of satellite and meteorological data pin the blame on ferocious winds from a mesoscale super-cell line of violent thunderstorms. It roared   across nearly the entire region in January, 2005. Down-burst winds reached 90 mph. The prime tool was satellite detection of the signature of bare wood – exposed when the jungles canopy is stripped and toppled trees and bare trunks exposed. Calibration from sites inspected on the ground led to an estimate that about half a billion trees went down in just two days.

The report clearly is important for ecologists and biodynamicists assessing the climatic and geochemical impacts of burning and other deforestation factors, including a warming climate, on the region’s health and contribution to global change. Notable is that the press release mentions that the momentary tree death rivaled and even exceeded direct human causes for Amazon deforestation and release of carbon to the atmosphere. It also declares that climate change just might increase the rates of such storms. I suspected news outlets might jump to conclusions that this means natural storms do more than mankind to affect the Amazon’s contribution to climate change, or that enviros again are blaming even the most natural things on global warming. The news renditions I find, however, keep their balance. All are from serious outlets and authors. After all, burning trees to create cattle land is a far cry in the CO2 balance ledgers from winds that knock down trees covered soon enough  in new, natural jungle growth drawing CO2 back out of the air.

Stories:

• DiscoveryNews – John D. Cox: When 500 Million Trees Fall In The Rainforest ;
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Phil Berardelli: Amazon Hit by its Own Katrina ;
• Time Magazine (blog) Jeffrey Kluger: How Half a Billion Trees Died in 48 Hours ;
• OurAmazingPlanet (LiveScience sister site): Amazon Storm Killed Half a Billion Trees ;

Grist for the Mill: Tulane University Press Release ; AGU (identical) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

At 83 miles across the asteroid Lutetia is big but no whopper – nothing like the monarch of the clan, Ceres, a dwarf planet that spans nearly 600 miles. Its name sounds as though it must be some exotic Roman goddess, but it’s not.  Lutetia was a town that preceded Paris (I just learned that).

A German-French astronomer discovered it as a dot in the sky over Paris  in 1852. Now we have detailed pictures of it. It is the biggest asteroid yet to have a close encounter with a machine from Earth. Frankly, it looks to me a lot like other asteroids: lumpy, gray, and beaten by eons of  impacts whose craters define its surface. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe got the images over the weekend. Lots of outlets ran the news and some of the pictures as it passed by, en route to a comet in a few more years. “Biggest asteroid seen yet” is a grabber for reporters and assignment editors. The object is of interest due to its ambiguous spectrum, making its composition and classification difficult to determine. But analysis of what the images imply of Lutetia’s history is still underway. Thus, these are stories with a dramatic headline but not much lasting news to flesh them out. Still, there are a bunch.

• Telegraph (UK) Richard Gray: Space probe has close encounter with giant asteroid ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Rosetta probe passes Asteroid Lutetia ;
• National Geographic Video: “New World” Asteroid Imaged Up Close ;
• Guardian (UK, blog) Stuart Clark: Rosetta flyby: Battered Lutetia comes into view ;
• AP: Verena Schmitt-Roschmann: European Space Agency looking closely at asteroid ;

Smartest piece is this blog, by Ben Sandilands at the site Plane Talking: Plain words about asteroid hype. It seems that some at ESA portrayed this opportunistic portrait as a tool to aid in protecting Earth from asteroid strike. Rot, says Sandlilands. Some outlets took the bait. For example: The Age (Australia): Asteroid fly-by to save us.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release

The Times’s Dennis Overbye has today an article that shows why, for many in the science writing trade, he has an enviable  but difficult beat – the insides of atoms and the structure of the universe.  He’s a one-man authority on how to render the cosmology-particle physics nexus into plain English.

It is, again, a difficult beat. Today, I read his piece twice and despite having written about entropy, gravity and thermodynamics and stuff like that, can’t quite wrap my head around it. It is a tale of a Dutch theorist, one of a set of identical twin physicists, who says gravity is an illusion. Ergo, the drawing to go with the story makes a silly joke of that, with people floating off the planet. But the story invites such japing. Isn’t this a new theory of gravity? And if there’s no gravity what would the new name be? Most of the maverick theorist’s colleagues tell Overbye they don’t understand his papers on this, and some who say they do also say the idea is trivial. Others declare it a revolution. I found it entertaining graf by graf, but got nowhere on the big picture.

Maybe the problem is its assertion that gravity does not exist because this supposedly “imagined”  fundamental force is just an expression of entropy. Hmmppphhhtt. We didn’t say atoms fail to exist upon discovery that things called quarks give rise to the protons and neutrons of their nuclei, or that quarks may not exist because vanishingly tiny vibrating strings may give rise to them. Neither did “gravity” go away when Einstein embellished Newton’s equations. Plus, even if gravity may not be a distinct fundamental force but an expression of other fundaments of physical behavior, how about the strong and electroweak forces? What’s up with them? (oops, up assumes gravity is real enough to make an up). By the way, I could be wrong about this story’s satisfactions: it is #2 this morning on the Times’s most e-mailed list. (Science stories tend to dominate this on Tuesdays, today getting about half the top ten, depending on how one defines science).

Skipping inside the section for a moment, New Yorkers with an appreciation for geographic and natural splendors need to read about the huge gorge next door. Or rather, off shore. William J. Broad describes the Hudson Canyon, a gash on the continental shelf carved by cataracts of ice ages past. Methane seeps may fuel part of its teeming life. Sounds like the East Coast version of the Monterey Canyon.

Page 1 story: Gardiner Harris today gets what looks like the real, damning goods on SmithKline Beecham and its handling of Avandia. No summary of mine can do it justice – just read it. Looks like some lawyers slipped to NYT some of the material they’ve uncovered during deposition and discovery.

Other notable headlines:

• Carl Zimmer: How Microbes Defend and Define Us – We’ve all heard that each of us, cellwise, is outnumbered by the microbes that inhabit us. Zimmer breaks that down into sub-populations and puffs it up with eye-popping numbers on their diversity. Amazing is the diarrhea transplant vignette that opens and closes the piece.
• Donald G. McNeil – Desperate Addicts Inject Others’ Blood ; Hed captures it perfectly;
• Jane E. Brody – Blame’s Net Catches Lung Cancer Patients ; I thought the American Cancer Society highlights lung cancer all the time. Brody argues that in fact this most-common cancer gets short changed by philanthropies.
• Cornelia Dean (Book Review): Seashells by the Thousands and the Stories They Tell ; You could make a poster for the wall from this illus.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

This morning a few stories surfaced with what looks like  good – but is actually deeply disturbing – news for a quick end to the Macondo well’s gusher, aka the BP Deep Horizon gulf oil spill disaster. At Bloomberg, Jim Polson and Jessica Resnick-Ault report it in too-understated a fashion. The gist is that the new cap that has gotten so much ink lately, a 12-meter stack of valves, is in essence a new blowout preventer bolted to the top of the old one. And that once there, like a faucet, it may be able simply to turn off the flow – provided the well casing beneath the first one is undamaged and can take the pressure when the rising oil is forced to stop rising. It may also provide a way to turn the well into a production unit, sending all its crude to tankers at the surface, but the main lesson here is that it may be able to turn it off, period.

That’s right, just turn it off. That’s what the original B.O.P. was supposed to do – just slam shut on the leak from the deep. An intact well casing farther down, it naturally follows, should not burst. Polson and Resnick-Ault report the fundamentals well. It’s a must-report story. Others, as we’ll see, have it too.

What’s lacking is the obvious. Which is that if BP and the oil industry and the Minerals Management Service has been acting like grownups for the last 20 years or so, there would have been developed a blow out preventer with a fitting for a backup on top, without customized on-the-fly engineering, that could be added to finish the job. Think about it. All a B.O.P. does is to act like a faucet. That means there is no reason to think good engineering would not have found more than one way to replace the tap should it go bad. Or entirely different strings of valves, some at depth, to turn off a runaway well. The deep kill drill mud method may be the one that shuts it off forever and forget it.

This good news is, in reality, the scandal. It underscores the laxity of imagination and penny pinching that got BP and the gulf coast into this mess in the first place. That’s the story: it is not fundamentally difficult to turn off an oil well. One has only to invest time and money up front in the way to do it.

....nytimes graphic

There is much talk about failure of the press to get the ultimate reason for the disaster right, our “addiction” to oil and other energy that is cheap to produce. That’s a fine, philosophical position. But just as important is to report why the technology failed and whether it had to be that way. I’d say the press and gov’t regulators alike must demand immediate development of smart, 21st century hardware that gives oil drillers a whole set of proven, robust hardware for rebuilding the top of an oil well, complete with shut-off systems and backup shut-off systems, to start deploying the day a major leak begins. These guys practically started from scratch. If they came up with this in a few months of near-panic conditions, think what could have been done over the last few decades had there been proper leadership and oversight.

Other stories:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Tests to Determine if New Well Cap Will Halt Oil Flow ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: BP to install new containment cap, test shutting down flow ;

*UPDATES – More stories:

• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: Critical Test Near for BP’s New Cap ; Superior description of the reasons for a pressure test ;
• BBC: How BP is trying to stop the Deepwater Horizon Oil Leak ; Watch this for animation – apparently provided by BP.
• AP – Colleen Long, Harry R. Weber: BP prepares to test new cap installed on oil leak ;

Grist for the Mill: BP Press Release with the intended self-exculpatory phrase “..never have been deployed at these depths or under these conditions…” to which reporters should long ago have responded with dropped jaws.

- Charlie Petit