In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors have encountered over the millenia, tried to understand, and sometimes learned to treat. In psychiatry, illnesses are decided by committees. No matter how bad you feel, you can’t have one unless you meet the requirements the committees have established.

I’m talking, of course, about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You might think you’re depressed, but if you don’t meet the criteria in the manual, nobody else will think so–including, notably, your physician and your insurance company.

I could go on–I’ve written about this cookbook-recipe approach to medicine before, and I always enjoy it. But I learned something today that I didn’t know about the DSM-IV, as fans and detractors refer to it. (The fourth edition is the most recent, hence the IV. I’m not sure whether the Roman numerals are an attempt to add an imposing classical flourish, or meant to subliminally suggest the Superbowl.)

Here’s what I learned:

Roughly 35,000 Americans commit suicide each year–more than die from prostate cancer or Parkinson’s disease. Another 1.1 million people make attempts, while 8 million have suicidal thoughts. Among those aged 15 to 25, it is the third leading cause of death. Yet researchers know astonishingly little about how to treat people who contemplate killing themselves. The subject has been so roundly ignored that the 900-page bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV, offers no advice for doctors on how to assess suicide risk.

That, to me, was a stunning revelation. I’ve spent a fair amount of time with the DSM, and I’ve read plenty of articles about what’s in it, what isn’t in it, what should be in it, and so forth. But I hadn’t known that it largely overlooked suicide.

The revelation comes not from one of the old reliable medical news sources, but from what I’m coming to believe is one of the new reliable medical news sources. Or maybe new to me, if all the rest of you have been avidly reading it and making sure I never found out about it.

The source? Forbes. Yup; the business magazine. Check out “The Forgotten Patients,” a story by Robert Langreth and Rebecca Ruiz on why the mental health industry ignores the 35,000 people a year who commit suicide, and how a few researchers are trying to change that.

The prevailing view, according to the Forbes reporters, is that suicide is a symptom of a mental illness. Cure the illness, and you prevent the suicide. But some are challenging that, saying, based on a few new studies, that it’s better to target the suicide directly–and that it can often be prevented.

The push for this new treatment is coming not from well-intentioned mental health advocates, as you might suspect, but from the military. In 2009, a record 244 active and reserve soldiers killed themselves, according to Langreth and Ruiz. They report that the military is spending $50 million on a study to try to predict and prevent suicides among its troops.

It’s a comprehensive story, rich in detail–but not bogged down by detail. Langreth is also dispensing it in bits on his Forbes blog, which is where I first saw the piece.

You might argue that this single article is not enough to conclude that Forbes is a useful medical news site, but a separate post by Langreth called my attention to a Forbes story on the nation’s 25 most-profitable hospitals. They are not necessarily who you think they are. The story, by David Whelan, is a nice example of what can happen when medical reporting is combined with business reporting. A medical reporter who didn’t concern himself or herself with the business side of things would never find this story. And it’s a good one.

So I say we should keep watching Forbes. Agreed?

- Paul Raeburn

A few years ago  researchers, with intriguing if not uniformly solid evidence, told a big AGU meeting that maybe the great die-off in North American megafauna 13,000 years ago or so was because a comet (maybe asteroid) slammed into Canada’s Laurentide ice sheet. They cited indirect evidence including shocked minerals, signs of second-splash elongated crater-like things elsewhere in N. America, and even – this was far fetched – mammoth tusks that appeared riddled with tiny blemishes as though shotgunned with debris from an exploded bolide.

I have to admit rooting for the hypothesis, even while thinking it was too fine a yarn to be anything more than a yearn. Put “comet mammoth” in this site’s search box and see how often we’ve tracked the story’s peregrination. It’s been chipped away over the years. Adherents have gamely gathered more evidence to counter doubts. In this last weekend’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences came a heavy blow against the killer comet. It concluded that one of the pro-comet arguments, that nanodiamonds scattered in sediments from the time could only mean something had mightily pummeled the crust, had one flaw. They’re not nanodiamonds, just some carbon sheet bits mistaken for them.

Proponents say it’s not over yet. Several news reporters spell out the state of play:

Stories:

• AAAS ScienceNow – Richard Kerr: Mammoth-Killer Impact Rejected ;
• NatureNews – Rex Dalton: Comet theory carbonized ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Mammoth-killing space blast ‘off the hook’
  
• CBS News – Charles Cooper: Comet Impact Refuted as Cause for Mammoths’ Extinction;

Grist for the Mill: Washington Univ.- St. Louis Press Release ;

Sometimes one goes out on assignment, figuratively on the phone or maybe with shoe leather involved, comes back and tells the editor, “I’ve got butkus. Nothin’ but a notebook full of nothin.’” Either at that point it’s time for lunch – or  the editor says, “Okay, that’s the story.” One imagines, on the basis of zero evidence, something like that happened with Donald G. McNeil Jr. after getting the green light to get to the bottom of the bed bug frenzy in the U.S. He declares it the international arthropod of mystery, which ain’t a bad start  on a story without much discovery.

It’s not a bad read at all. It even echoes and addresses one of my late-day fearful fantasies, spawned by reading in somebody else’s story that bed bugs, for all their feasting upon human blood, are very clean and are not known to transmit any diseases. My dark impulse imagining was of some fiend introducing HIV to bed bugs, horrors. Well, McNeil tells us that some fiend has done exactly that, in South Africa, just to see what would happen. HIV did not survive the encounter. One also reads plenty on the little that’s known of this creature’s history, speculation on why it is proliferating lately, and the hard work it takes to get rid of them (ie, good luck with that). One thinks there must be a narrower angle to focus the news. Perhaps he tried other tacks that didn’t work. Here’s what I’d have tried: a mysterious failure of evolution. How in the world, with all the fast-evolving microbes out there, did they all fail to exploit this seemingly easy route to a host? Thousands of years dining on us, and butkus. Bed bugs would seem to have vector-available for work embroidered on their carapaces, but they have no vile fellow travelers. That’s a stumper.Maybe it has a super immune system of its own?

By contrast is the next story down on the section’s front page. It is by staff writer Katie Hafner, whose usual beat is in consumer electronics, social media, etc. But today she has a marvelous scientist-at-work profile,  of a doctor who is both a practicing internist and an epidemiologist with a knack for finding patterns few would think to look for, much less be able to see. She has so many examples of his work the piece in places is like a stand-up comedy routine of one-liners, bang bang and here’s another.

Other notable ScienceTimes headlines:

• Carl Zimmer: Scientists Square Off on Evolutionary Value of Helping Relatives ; About last week’s Nature article, by E.O. Wilson among others, discounting kinship selection. That’s big news in the academy, esp. among those who chatter about the foundations of altruism. Other coverage includes by Brandon Keim at Wired, and by Andrew Letten in Australia’s Cosmos.
• Abigail Zuger, MD: Essay: Isolation, an Ancient and Lonely Practice, Endures ; Hmm. She says nobody has really studied whether isolating patients with virulent, infectious diseases is good for much, and patients may hate it. Sounds like a job for the protagonist in Katie Hafner’s report referenced above.
• On the main front page Tom Zeller Jr.: New Fault Lines in Mountaintop Coal Debate ; Fine cross disciplinary story – the geology of Appalachian coal seams, mountain top mining, enviro loathing, and bottom-line investment capitalism simmered together into a tasty stew.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Rob Irion is director of UC Santa Cruz’s Science Communications program that, in one short year turns well-trained, usually-young scientists into science writers. It has a success rate such that, in the last 30 years, banana slugs (school mascot) have become mainstays of the business. He sent us this year’s edition of the annual end-of-term magazine Science Notes that his flocks turn out. Illus is solid and imaginative, the product of students at the science illustration program at nearby Cal State University-Monterey, a new home for what was once, too, at UC Santa Cruz.

I got an ah-moment right off, reading through the very first piece. It is by Jane Palmer, called Cultivating Autism.  She profiles a scientist and  explains his difficult research. He is cultivating induced pluripotent stem cells, or ips, derived from the skin cells of people with autism. One goal,  largely in hand, is to  coax them into becoming neurons. Ahead, it is hoped, will come discovery of misbehavior in these ersatz snippets of brain that might provide clues to whether, and which, genes are the reason for the malady. This story, like others in the collection, is at bottom an exercise  in craft, not news coverage. Inevitably they tend to concern work that has not yet had any great impact nor any assurance it will have much. So it goes when hunting up feature topics for a student magazine and to satisfy a class requirement – a good story of uncertain meaning outside its own arc is surely the norm.

The ah ha moment came, part way through. I recalled just reading in The New Yorker a piece by Peter Boyer on Francis Collins at NIH. That one addresses the reason for and aftermath of that recent federal judge decision to rescind the Obama administration’s loosened rules on federal money and research with human embryonic stem cells. Boyer’s story is conventional, if slight cross-grained, journalism with its topic things that matter and are in the news. Suddenly Palmer’s story became highly illuminating. In Science Notes is the backdrop story – an example of the legions of other researchers, pursuing elusive payoffs in basic research, who depend for research dollars on the sorts of decisions Boyer looks at from aside the seats of authority. Of course, ips cells are not human embryonic cells. But it all in a flash cohered for me as a single enterprise.

I skimmed through the whole lot in Science Notes, watching videos of a strange flying turbo-wing thing machine, learning from a remarkably even-handed, sober review of brown apple moth science and politics, marveling at the connection between twinkles in stars and images of the insides of living cells, and wondering about the fighting zeal of Weddell Seals that can also schlump happily around the lab without biting anybody, and more. There are many ah ha moments in there.

Don’t miss:  the self-bios of the authors and illustrators at the bottoms of the pieces. Good luck to them all.

- Charlie Petit

Coming easy off a vacation at the beach. I’m still there, but half time, the morning’s all tracking. Oddities and fragments are catching the eye first. Maybe it’s the grit between my toes talking but I have to comment on the AP‘s placement of, on its science feed, a piece from its correspondent in Mongolia, Ganbat Namjilsangarav. The reporter describes the 12-member cabinet of that nation’s ministries sitting down in formal ranks of desks set upon the stark gravel of the Gobi. They all wore hats that say “save our planet.” There is, for all that, not much science here. It’s purely a political show. But, one easily infers, Namjilsangarav bounced along in a jeep for 15 hours with the government reps to get to the site. One must salute that. Anything for a story, and to back up a fine picture – redistributed by the AP from the Xinhua news agency. One expects Namjilsangarav did not attend the recent meeting at (if not atop) Mount Everest by officials in Nepal, are on the bottom of a lagoon in the Maldives by that country’s officials, but he mentions them. Good – one should always look in the archives to put today’s news in context. Photos of those three confabs would make a good tryptych.

Speaking of threes, and weather and drought and the lurking anxiety over changes in their patterns, fire tornadoes hit the news the last few days. The two biggies, with videos:

• Hawaii: CNN : Amazing Fire Tornado Hawaii! (via KITV) ; This is spectacular – the fire whirl is no mere dustdevil that glows, but has the form of a genuine tornado.
• Brazil: Sky News: Fire Devil Twister Blazes A Trail in Brazil ;

These things crop up in the news regularly. Each time, it appears from this evidence, they are treated as something rare, and special. One thinks they are not particularly so. Just check the archives.

My third news example is from a few years back, re a fire in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. Here’s a video sampling at a site called Metacafe with a tune I, being an old fart, do not recognize. But it’s got the apocalypsos drumming and bass line to match the swirling fire’s nervous frenzy.

Messing around with search engines I discover fire tornadoes already have attracted the attention of science museum curators. The clip’s site doesn’t tell me where the demonstration occurred (Germany is my guess), but if you’d like to see one under controlled conditions, it’s here. Artists harness them too: lookie here.

There is no logical, only a visceral, way to connect fire tornadoes and the Mongolian cabinet’s semi-desperate stunt. If you’d prefer a logical, calm discussion of fire tornadoes and their history and some notable, destructive examples, read it at the usually oddball, catch-all Examiner news site. It is by Johnny Kelly:  Rare fire tornadoes captured on video in Brazil and Hawaii over the past week. This is good, useful reporting on what most news outlets took as mere diversion and eye-candy.

- Charlie Petit

A study by a formerly obscure but, on paper, quite august group, the InterAcademy Council, issued this morning its findings on the performance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that has managed to stub its toes again and again in the last year or so. The council represents national academies of science. Thus, it has ability to sample the opinions of the senior hot shots in the world’s research effort. It gave the IPCC a scolding.

Here are some sample headlines racing through the world wide web from prominent news agencies:

• Daily Hindu – Narayan Lakshman: Sharp criticism for IPCC leadership ;
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Call for overhaul at UN climate panel ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Report: Climate Science Panel Needs Change at Top;
• Fox News – Jeremy A. Kaplan : Independent Audit Panel Slams U.N.’s Climate Group ;
• NYTimes – Neil MacFarquahar : Review Finds Flaws in U.N. Climate Panel Structure ;
• Bloomberg – Jeremy van Loon: UN Climate Panel Should Change Management, Study Says ;
• Reuters – Louis Charbonneau : U.N. climate panel urged to reform, stick to science ;

Collectively, one must forgive readers,  many of whom already doubt the whole global warming worry and may nod yes to suspicions it is a plot by grant-crazy scientists or world-domination-bent collectivist cabals or loonie tree-huggers, if they read those and think the IPCC just got shown to be useless. Never mind that, as Cookson notes in a fashion found in most if not all accounts, the report “did not challenge the fundamental conclusion of IPCC reports that the world needs to tackle man-made climate change by reducing emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.”

Rather, as the report says and many have been saying for months, IPCC leaders forgot to make sure that the embroidery of examples its authors marshalled to make said conclusion compelling and readable was based on solid, peer-reviewed science rather than blah blah blah. They did, in other words, overshoot miserably on Himalaya’s upcoming ice loss, but worldwide glaciers are retreating anyway.

Notably, among the accounts that do not do much to note that the underlying science is fine is the one at Fox news. Reporter Kaplan asserts that the IAC “did not spend its time analyzing the accuracy of climate models and climate science.” He seem to imply it did not address the reliability of those aspects of IPCC’s work at all. A reading of the report’s conclusions, however, makes clear that as a vehicle for forwarding legitimate scientific conclusions to the public and to governments the reviewers feel that IPCC overall has done a good job. That’s the same as saying the conventional view of global warming as a big problem is already shared by this InterAcademy team. And they in turn represent organized science. They do seem to think way too much flim-flam slipped into the reports to the public – a bad move when there are plenty of stout research findings that would have done the job just fine.

In an arena as contentious as this, with so many heels already dug in, it would be difficult to concoct a news account verifying IPCC’s shortcomings and not  feed the confirmation bias of readers who think global warming is bogus. One doubts any of these stories alter the landscape of public debate. On that score, one must note the poor judgment by Bloomberg’s reporter van Loon in deciding to give Greenpeace the mike for defending the reality of greenhouse-driven, we-done-it global warming. Really, all these scientists available from academic institutions, and somebody decided Greenpeace is just the bunch for an authoritative, outside opinion?

Grist for the Mill:

IAC Press Release ; IAC full report on processes and procedures of IPCC ;

- Charlie Petit

The last week has seen a welter of reports on New Orleans and the surrounding region’s recovery five years after Katrina. They include many sober accounts of new sea walls, drainage restoration, subsidence, fixed houses, still-ruined neighborhoods, and erosion. To its credit National Geographic smuggled in a small, sort-of good news, natural history and exotic alien species yarn that takes full advantage of the anniversary.

John Roach checks out the nutria situation. They’re back, he reports. No surprise there, but I found this story a welcome vehicle for getting deep into the bayous and learning more about this South American immigrant and the cajuns and other locals who make money trapping them, killing them, and whacking off their tails for government bounties: $5 a pop.

The story’s structural problem is apparent. Reality has a way of messing with the clean narrative arc that fiction writer’s can craft at will. Roach has two tales to tell. One is that nutria can’t be sent to oblivion by any mere hurricane and are reclaiming their old range fast. The second is that hunters are keeping them at bay so well that their damage to the wetlands (grazing, and burrowing) is going down. Those are contradictory themes. Nutria are either bouncing back, or getting whacked. But he found a fine, file picture to go with them both.

- Charlie Petit

CBS News apparently got tarred and feathered by a few critics on Sunday because, in its broadcast reporting of the Tea Party and Glenn Beck rally in DC the day before, it told its audience that about 87,000 people were there.

That’s enough to fill a very large stadium for an NFL game. That’s a big crowd that had itself a good time under the gaze of Lincoln’s statue. But after organizers of the rally declared they’d gotten 300,000 or even twice that, CBS got itself hammered for, in the minds of some, underestimating the crowd. Liberal bias, etc etc.

This isn’t science, and it shouldn’t take much other than careful analysis but no differential equations, quantum mechanics, or supercomputing to estimate a crowd. Quantitative thinking and objectivity are, however, parts of the soul of science – and science writers in news organizations ought to ask their colleagues on other beats where they get their crowd estimates.

In Portugal, Steve Doig, of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University – where he teaches computer-assisted reporting – is on a sabbatical paid for by Fulbright Grant. But he’s also, it seems, an experienced head-counter. You know, aerial photos, grids, careful extrapolation, and other due diligence. And he had a long-distance hand in counting that crowd.

His eviscerating blog post on the experience is eye-opening reading, with more links, for any reporter who might find him or herself looking around and thinking, man, there must be a million people here. There is a way to know for pretty sure. Why did CBS get the number from an outfit trained in counting crowds, while the usually reliable and careful NYTimes relied heavily on what organizers told it?

Maybe there really were 300,000 people there. I have no way to know. But consider. The Pasadena Rose Bowl holds about 90,000. It is 880 feet long and 695 feet wide, rim to rim. Most of that area is, when filled, packed with people a good deal more densely than, one suspects, most of the rally crowd was. I’m unsure what area is peopled in that DC photo top right. But for perspective the reflecting pool is 167 feet wide and 2029 feet long. So a Rose Bowl plopped into that photo would cover maybe half that crowd’s foot print. It’s plausible that they all could squeeze into such a stadium. Thus a crowd in the 100,000-range is hardly outlandish. It’s harder to accept that three or four Rose Bowls worth of people are there.

At the Washington Post, Greg Sargent also sifts through the audience-size question and comes down more or less in favor of CBS’s numbers.

Thanks to Ed Sylvester, journalism professor at ASU (Note – earlier erroneously said he worked in public affairs), for alerting me to Doig’s post.

- Charlie Petit

The notion that drug-company sponsorship of a clinical trial might affect the outcome will come as no surprise to most Tracker readers. Numerous studies have shown that drug-company studies are more likely to show favorable results than are studies sponsored by the government.

Many of us, as a result, might have lapsed into a sort of reflexive view that drug-company-sponsored trials are always problematic. Dr. Daniel Carlat (left), a psychiatrist in private practice in Newburyport, Massachusetts, takes a more nuanced view in The Carlat Psychiatry Blog. He’s a sharp critic of many drug-industry practices, but one who’s willing to probe the details and correct himself when he’s wrong–meaning he’s the kind of guy you can trust.

“My opinion,” Carlat writes at the top of the the blog’s right-hand column, “formed as a result of participating in many CME [continuing medical education] activities, is that allowing pharmaceutical companies to sponsor accredited medical education leads to many bad things, including biased education, corrupt physicians, and, ultimately, harm to our patients.”

So, naturally, when Mother Jones published an article in its current issue suggesting that an AstraZeneca study of anti-psychotics might have been rigged and even led to a subject’s suicide–Carlat was all over it. (It’s called the CAFE study, for those of you who follow psychiatry news. And to see the Mother Jones article, you’ll need to register.) “The study was well have been manipulated [sic] in order to make Seroquel look good,” he wrote. “In my next post I will delve into the specifics, so stay tuned.”

I’m afraid to think about how many times I’ve ended a post in similar fashion, and never remembered to go back and follow up. But Carlat does, and his follow up turns out to be a surprise.

He begins by noting that the trial–which compared AstraZeneca’s Seroquel with two other antipsychotics in subjects with their first episode of psychosis–used a higher dose of Seroquel than of either of the other medications. Was this a guarantee that Seroquel would look better? Or could it have been, as Carlat asks, “simply a research decision made with pure motives by the scientists who ran the trial?”

He might have rested his case there, but, instead, he put the question to the trial’s researchers. And one of the study’s authors, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, chair of the psychiatry department at Columbia University, responded:

Although your inferences re dosing are understandable, they are entirely incorrect. The CAFE study was wholly investigator initiated and we determined the doses for each drug. There was a clear rationale for the higher quetiapine dose relative to the other drugs which I am happy to explain to you. This study design in no way was influenced adversely by industry influence.”

Carlat takes Lieberman at his word, and that seems reasonable to me. Carlat also notes that Lieberman has been quoted to the effect that new drugs, such as Seroquel, might not have advantages over older drugs.

So, as Carlat writes, “there you have it.” It’s a considered examination of a complicated question which we all think we know the answer to–but probably don’t.

I could end there, but I stumbled across another critique of the CAFE study by the Alliance for Human Research Protection. The alliance describes itself as a group of professionals and others “dedicated to advancing responsible and ethical medical research practices, to minimizing the risks associated with such endeavors and to ensuring that the human rights, dignity and welfare of human subjects are protected.” We’re on the side of the angels here. Who could be against any of that?

The alliance’s post, however, summarizes the Mother Jones article and embraces its harsh conclusions. Which might be right–maybe Carlat isn’t being tough enough. I haven’t reported the story, so I can’t say. But Carlat, unlike the alliance, added something to the discussion. I think that’s important. (Carlat is apparently tough on his own profession, as well as drug makers. He’s the author of Unhinged: The trouble with psychiatry–A doctor’s revelations about a profession in crisis, which came out in May.)

Now you might wonder why, on this journalism blog, I’m writing about posts by a psychiatrist and an advocacy group. Aren’t we supposed to be critiquing science journalism?

The authors of these posts probably wouldn’t call themselves journalists. But the posts called my attention to an article I might have missed, and they contributed to an important news story. I learned something I hadn’t learned from the papers. And that’s good enough for me–I call it journalism.

- Paul Raeburn

(Philippe Cousteau)

Columbia Journalism Review’s Curtis Brainard has an excellent analysis of the problem, highlighted here yesterday by a Tracker post and at least 17 cogent comments, that faced reporters when Science published, in separate editions, two seemingly contradictory papers about the undersea oil plume.

If you want to know how science journalism works (or doesn’t), add Brainard’s “Observatory” piece to your reading list. In fact, read all of Brainard’s blogs.

And by the way, the NY Times has yet to tell the readers of its paper edition that the plume may be gone. Paul Voosen‘s good piece from Greenwire is, however, on the NYT Web edition. If you’d like a nervous laugh, click here and read the first three heds listed.

Have we achieved some kind of milestone when the green writers are giving us happier environmental news than the ostensibly straight writers?

-Boyce Rensberger

A British study, published online today in the Journal of Medical Ethics, has found that doctors who are atheist or agnostic were twice as likely to make decisions that could shorten a terminally ill patient’s life than were doctors who are deeply religious. In other words, the nonbelievers were more likely to withhold heroic measures to extend the lives of the fatally diseased.

As a result, Sarah Boseley the UK Guardian‘s health editor, wrote a story that carried this hed: “Atheist doctors ‘more likely to hasten death’”. Her story seems okay but the hed, published yesterday, prompted the Guardian to publish a commentary from Evan Harris, a former Liberal MP, criticizing the hed as misleading. He emphasizes the study’s finding that religious doctors were less likely to consult with patients about what kind of care they wanted. Valuing “sanctity of life” over “quality of life,” they barged ahead to prolong life at all costs. The nonbelievers were more likely to discuss the options with patients and found that many did not want to prolong their dying process. They also offered more pain control.

CBS News online has a hed as misleading as that in the Guardian: “Study: Atheist Doctors Twice as Likely to Pull Plug.”

A sample of other stories: Elizabeth Landau in CNN‘s health blog. Bloomberg Businessweek picked up the story by Health Day News‘s Alan Mozes. Kaiser Health News covered this story with a collection of ledes from four online outlets.

-Boyce Rensberger

A NASA artist's conception of the newly found exoplanets, picked up by nearly every news outlet.

Hard on the heels of the discovery of a multi-planet solar system with resemblances to our own–including giant planets and an Earthlike globe–comes a report in Science of another system with two Saturn-sized planets plus one just 1.5 times the diameter of Earth. The newly found system was discovered by the Kepler space telescope. The previous discovery was by a European telescope in Chile.

The New York Times, which skipped the European discovery, caught up today by wrapping that find in with the American one. Kenneth Chang has their story.

Time‘s Michael D. Lemonick notes the flurry of exoplanet discoveries in recent years in a story with both of this week’s announcements.

The recurring exoplanet stories remind the Tracker of the Gene of the Week days a generation ago. After a while, journalists got bored (especially the editors) and, of course, the practical benefit of the finds proved elusive. Likely the same thing will happen with exoplanet discoveries, the total now pushing 500. Until, that is, astronomers find a good way to determine their atmospheric composition and find one with, oh, say, a lot of nitrogen, a good amount of oxygen and a little carbon dioxide.

Rachel Courtland at New Scientist backs into the story with this seemingly curious lede:  “NASA’s Kepler space telescope normally cannot ‘weigh’ the extrasolar planets it finds, instead measuring their physical size.” She goes on for three more grafs before getting to her news peg: the fact that the solar system found by Kepler can weigh itself. It’s an interesting point, largely missed by other reporters but probably beyond the interest of most readers.

A sampling of other accounts:

Marc Kaufman in the Washington Post. David Perlman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Dan Charles on NPR’s Morning Edition.

-Boyce Rensberger