NYTimes Science Times: The inexplicable bug of the bed ; A pluripotent doctor-scholar of the unnoticed ; and on p.A1, the bankers shun decapitation of mountains
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
