Minutes after the Tracker wrote (above) about the Gene of the Week phenomenon, he noted reports in today’s news of two newly sequenced genomes. It’s all good news for sure, but as we should remember from the results of getting the human genome ten years ago, practical benefits take a while longer, sometimes a great while longer.

The new genomes that have been sequenced are those of two widespread species–wheat and ants.

Despite history, most stories on the wheat genome confidently told of expected improvements in wheat that would reduce world hunger. On a trivial note, many reporters couldn’t resist referring in one way or another to the cracked wheat genome–five times bigger than the human genome. The AP‘s Raphael G. Satter quoted one researcher saying the practical benefits of having the wheat genome could come in less than five years. Wish I could share that optimism.

Other wheat servings: Katia Moskvitch of BBC; The Financial Times’s Clive Cookson.

A Florida worker ant. (Jürgen Liebig)

Meanwhile, in ant genome news, an international team of researchers reports in today’s Science that they have sequenced the genomes of two different species of ants. One is a Florida carpenter ant, which lives in large colonies that depend on one queen for as many as ten years. The other is a the Indian jumping ant, which lives in smaller, less rigidly social structures in which a queen is easily replaced. Researchers hope to find genetic differences linked to the different behaviors.

Gwyneth Dickey has a good account of it in Science News. She reports that the project has already found differences in gene expression between two kinds of workers in the Florida species: The workers that go out to find food have more of a certain brain signaling molecule than workers that stay behind to defend the nest. Figures.

Katherine Harmon in Scientific American.

Grist: The Science paper’s abstract. The full article costs money. The University of Pennsylvania’s news release, which leads with the idea that this research establishes a new model species for epigenetics studies.

-Boyce Rensberger

It’s always best to be calm and cautious when approaching claims for a new drug, especially for cancer. A new cancer drug that cuts the death rate by just 2 or 3 percentage points is considered a winner. Treatments that extend survival by a few months can command top dollar.

So when the New England Journal of Medicine publishes a report on the Phase 1 trial of a new drug for advanced melanoma and, in an editorial, labels the drug “a major breakthrough,” attention must be paid.

Fortunately, there seems yet to be no excessive hoopla about the drug, which targets one particular mutation that makes people prone to melanoma and other cancers.

Elizabeth Cooney of the Boston Globe offers a sound report on the research, part of which was done in her back yard. Marie McCullogh at the Philadelphia Inquirer writes it from her local angle–the University of Pennsylvania researchers who were involved.

At Science News Nathan Seppa takes care to wrap in two earlier but recent studies on melanoma treatments.

Daniel J. DeNoon, at WebMD‘s news site, takes a careful approach, leading with this: “It’s no cure, and it works for only about half of melanoma patients…” He reports that for those who have the mutation, about 80 percent respond to the drug, gaining added survival times of two months to more than 18 months. The drug is a pill that patients take twice a day but, in time, the tumor cells evolve resistance and the disease kills them. DeNoon includes the observation that this finding comes “just” eight years after the mutation was discovered.

Liz Szabo, USA Today‘s crack medical writer, has a useful Q&A on the new claims.

Sandra Hughes at CBS News online quotes one researcher saying this is “the most optimistic time I’ve ever seen for patients with advanced melanoma.”

Advice to medical writers: Put a note in your calendar to remind you a year from now to check up on the status of this drug. And do a story whether it panned out or flopped.

-Boyce Rensberger

The 5,000-year-old Iceman, aka Ötzi, has long been thought to have been alone when he was caught high in the Alps by a snowstorm that killed him and buried him with his tools and weapons. Maybe not, says a team of archaeologists that has been studying the area immediately around the site where the mummified body was found in 1991.

With reasonable evidence, published today in Antiquity Journal, they conclude that Ötzi was a revered figure who died in the spring (based on stomach contents) and was preserved until fall (based on pollen found on the corpse) when he was laid to rest high in the mountains. They also argue that his wounds would have made it difficult for him to climb the mountain alone. The objects found with him, the new study argues, were grave goods, an explanation that disposes of the notion that a lone man would have taken an unfinished bow on an arduous climb.

The new analysis suggests that Ötzi and his things were laid to rest on a stone platform five meters from where the body was found. Thousands of years of freeze-thaw cycles and the glacierlike movement of compacted snow, the researchers argue, moved the body from its resting place.

No sign as of mid-day Thursday of a story in the English language general interest media, despite the wide interest in the lives of the long-dead.

Science magazine’s Andrew Lawler has a good account on Science Now.

Germany’s Die Zeitung has AFP’s take in Deutsch.

-Boyce Rensberger

A prototype of the oil-eating vehicle motoring on the Charles River. (MIT)

The Tracker usually ignores stories about scientific, technological or medical promises, unless the serious media go too ga-ga. But here’s a promise that looks sensible and certainly is timely.

MIT engineers announced the development of a solar-powered robot that is said to swim across the sea surface and gobble up floating oil. The inventors envision swarms of thousands of the devices (which coordinate their activities by GPS, wireless links and internal logic) criss-crossing oil spills, each with a mouth about two meters wide. They say the “SeaSwarm” should be ready for commercial production in about a year.

John D. Sutter has a good piece at CNN online. He says the machine can either burn the oil on the spot or seal it in plastic bags and leave them on the surface for boats to collect.

MSNBC online has an unblyined piece that picks up a quote from the MIT news release: “We envisioned something that would move as a ‘rolling carpet’ along the water and seamlessly absorb a surface spill.”

PopSci‘s Rebecca Boyle compares the machine to a tank rolling on water, citing its continuous “tread” that both picks up oil and propels the thing forward.

Gizmodo has a short by Rosa Golijan that compares the device’s oil-abosorbing nanomaterial to a “maxipad.”

Grist: MIT’s news release, which contains a slickly produced video on the SeaSwarm.

-Boyce Rensberger

The battle over kin selection theory will spark conflicts among larger, less social organisms than these.

One of the bedrock concepts of sociobiology–the theory of kin selection–has been thrown into serious doubt by none other than the man who put the field on the map–Edward O. Wilson. It is an astonishing development that Wilson has been moving toward for some years, although he has only now gone public.

Kin selection is the hypothesis once offered to explain the puzzling fact that individuals of many species will sacrifice their own well being, often their lives, to benefit others. Behavior like that would seem to weed one’s genes out of the pool. In short, the theory argued that since close relatives share many genes, the sacrifice of an individual can benefit that individual’s “selfish” genes if the sacrifice helps a close relative, also bearing the genes, to survive.

Writing in Nature this week, Wilson says, “After four decades ruling the roost, it is time to recognise this theory’s very limited prowess.” Instead, he writes, good old natural selection is enough to explain the evolution of so-called eusocial species such as ants.

Wilson and mathematician colleagues outline an alternative explanation that they say can account for the evolution of complex social structures.

Andrew Letten has an excellent piece on Wilson’s move in Cosmos online. There is, however, a semantic disconnect between the hed (“Kin selection is dead”) and Letten’s lede (“Wilson is trying to bring about the demise of the theory”).

Natasha Gilbert writes in Nature online of the two mostly mathematical papers that set forth the new arguments.

So far, there seems to be no sign that this was covered in the general interest media.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Thirty-three Chilean miners got trapped in a mine 700 meters beneath the surface last August, 5. This week we received the great news that all of them are alive and in relatively good physical conditions. But it may take up to four months to get them out. The first stories about how to keep them physically -but also mentally- healthy for all this time have already appeared. Apart from the basic information, this situation can generate great scientific reporting.

Spanish press has been following the unexpected decision to block US-federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, and the subsequent reactions. Reporters seem to be more straightforward than US media in saying that religion beliefs are behind this issue. A prestigious Spanish researcher says that this is a proof that public opinion in Europe is more mature than in the US. Also in Spain, one reporter takes on the extremely interesting scientific controversy about the remaining (or not) of oil plume in some areas of the gulf, that Boyce tracked yesterday.

New corneas developed by a Canadian/Swedish team appear in all science sections today, but we focus in 2 other biomaterials developed in Latin America: good reporting about synthetic skin in Uruguay, and about a cellulose/collagen alternative to some metallic prosthesis that is being tested in Brazil.

En El Mundo encontramos dos buenas piezas hoy. Tras la gran explosión de esperanza que supuso descubrir a principios de semana que los 33 mineros chilenos atrapados están vivos y en buen estado de salud, varias secciones de ciencia ya han empezado a escribir sobre el asesoramiento que se ha pedido a la NASA, y cómo mantenerles físicamente sanos durante los 4 meses que pueden durar las tareas de rescate. María Sánchez-Monge empieza a preocuparse también por su salud mental, diciendo que “La salud física de los 33 mineros chilenos atrapados en una galería a 700 metros de profundidad no corre excesivo peligro. En cambio, su bienestar mental pende de un hilo”. Realmente, además de las informaciones básicas, esta situación tiene todos los elementos para generar un gran tipo de historias de ciencia, psicología y salud. La nota incide en que para evitar agresiones, ataques de pánico o desesperación, el contacto con el exterior será trascendental. La falta de luz es un factor también importante por su relación con los ritmos circadianos. El artículo es muy esquemático, pero realmente muestra hasta qué punto podemos indagar a nivel científico en las dinámicas de grupo, y aspectos psicológicos aparte del obvio mantenimiento del buen estado físico. Revisaremos con mayor profundidad este tipo de notas.

El otro artículo de El Mundo lo firma Teresa Guerrero: “La lucha contra el vertido de petróleo da paso a una ‘guerra’ entre científicos” sobre las discrepancias entre ciertos estudios científicos acerca de la desaparición o no de crudo en ciertas capas del golfo de México debido a la acción microbiana. La nota simplemente explica –y lo hace muy bien- las discrepancias, pero nosotros queremos citar el análisis de imprescindible lectura que en el Knight Tracker hizo Boyce Rensberguer titulado: “la ciencia es turbia. ¿debemos decírselo a nuestros lectores?”, metiendo el dedo en la llaga con frases como “este es un nuevo ejemplo de porqué el periodismo diario –o a la hora- es una manera terrible de cubrir la ciencia”, o “el hecho es que la ciencia, como el periodismo, está realizada por seres humanos. Ambos con sus pasos adelante, errores, correcciones. Y ambos tienden a sobrevalorar sus resultados”. Interesante la autocrítica que hace un científico implicado. Merece la pena leer y reflexionar sobre la historia.

Otro tema que da juego: la inesperada decisión judicial de bloquear la investigación pública en células madre embrionarias. Gran revuelo en la prensa estadounidense, nos pareció que poco en Latinoamérica, y bastante en España. El corresponsal de El País, David Alandete transmitió primero la noticia acusando más directamente a la religión como causa última de lo que hicieron la mayoría de medios estadounidenses; continuó informando de que Obama hará todo lo posible por continuar con este tipo de investigación –D.A; y hoy insinúa que puede haber intereses económicos  tras los “enemigos” de las células embrionarias D.A, pues investigan en otras vías que están perdiendo financiación. Completa cobertura, que viene perfectamente ampliada por la entrevista de Javier Sampedro al investigador Carlos Izpisúa cuya opinión queda perfectamente manifiesta en la frase-titular: “Nadie puede estar en contra de curar“. Interesante la frase final: “la sociedad demanda apoyar estas investigaciones, y (en España y otros países europeos cuyos dilemas están superados) constituye un signo de madurez de la opinión pública que, por desgracia, no se da en Estados Unidos”.

Para no alejarnos de la biomedicina, terminamos con dos muy buenas notas encontradas en Uruguay y Brasil. El País (Uruguay), presenta un trabajado texto de Déborah Friedman: “Científicos uruguayos logran crear piel sintética”, reconociendo que no es que sea investigación punta, pero sí un gran avance para el país, pues permitirá el acceso a un recurso que antes era muy costoso. Realmente completos el texto con datos sobre su fabricación, y la incorporación de nanopartículas que actúen como vehículo de medicamentos. En Folha (Brasil), gran texto y gráfico de Ricardo Mioto sobre un biomaterial con base de celulosa y capas de colágeno que puede convertirse en alternativa a las placas metálicas utilizadas en lesiones óseas. Está en desarrollo todavía, pero parece prometedor. Buen reportaje sobre investigación local. Quien sabe si dentro de unos años también se publica en Science y aparece en todos los medios, como lo hacen hoy las córneas biosintéticas desarrolladas por investigadores suecos y canadienses para restaurar la visión.

- Pere Estupinyà

The source of the underwater plume of dispersed oil droplets. (BP Webcam frame grab)

The flurry of stories about that Gulf of Mexico oil plume–here today, gone tomorrow–is yet another example of why daily journalism (nay, hourly journalism) is a terrible way to cover science. [The Tracker is tempted to invoke Churchill's comment about democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others, but will resist.]

To wit:

A couple of days ago we had the news out of Woods Hole, retailed by the New York Times and others and blogged of in this space, that the huge oil plume deep in the gulf was still there and might persist for years.  Yesterday came a new report by a different research group saying that the plume was gone, utterly. The Times’s online version today picked up Greenwire‘s story, by Paul Voosen, saying the plume has been gone for nearly a month. (Wonder what the Times will print in tomorrow’s paper edition. ) This morning the Washington Post did the Times one better, staffing the new story with David Brown who wrote that the gulf’s “ecosystem was ready and waiting” for the spill, primed with microbes that gobbled it up. Brown’s story is full of fascinating and relevant microbiological facts and evolutionary biology.

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s David Perlman had the story as well, leading with the discovery of  “a voracious species of primitive oil-eating bacteria.” So did Margaret Munro of the Montreal Gazette. And Christopher Joyce at NPR.

Amina Khan of the Los Angeles Times quotes the lead scientist, Terry Hazen, on what the bacteria are doing now that they have run out of oil to eat, “They’re eating their [dead] brethren.”

The fact is that science, like journalism, is committed by human beings. Both proceed with small steps, incremental findings, discoveries of previous mistakes, misunderstandings, corrections or sometimes even retractions. Both tribes wish to make a big splash and sometimes over-interpret their findings or simply remain silent when others drop the question marks and substitute exclamation points.

In this episode, interestingly, one of the world’s greatest scientific journals is also implicated. Science published both sets of findings, in separate issues.

This may be a teachable moment. Christopher Reddy, one of the scientists involved at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, thinks so. In an excellent piece, available online at CNN‘s site (How did that happen?), Reddy explains the situation from his perspective, blaming not just journalists but scientists as well.

Reddy seems to understand the ways of both scientists and journalists. “We desperately want to please a reporter, who for the first time cares about what you do,” he writes. “And scientists, including me, have egos, so we want our thoughts and work recognized.” It’s a thoughtful, candid article, fit for both tribes.

What the Tracker has not seen in any news account [note inserted after posting: See Brandon Keim's comment below.] is the funding source for the research that says the plume is gone. Hazen and his team are at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Vacationing Head Tracker, Charlie Petit, read the LBL news release all the way to the bottom (some vacation) and learned that Hazen’s Energy Biosciences Institute at LBL is funded by a $500 million grant from… wait for it… BP.

-Boyce Rensberger

A colony of human embryonic stem cells (tinted blue) growing among feeder cells. (Clay Glennon, University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Gina Kolata has a well done update on the status of embryonic stem cell research and technology in the New York Times. It’s apropos  given the federal judge’s ruling earlier this week that has thrown a wet blanket on the field.

A sample of takes on the ruling’s impact:

Courtney Hutchison on ABC News‘s online service uses some strong language in her lede, writing that it has “sparked a firestorm of controversy” and that the ruling is a “devastating blow.”

AP‘s Lauran Neergaard opted for a more moderate tone in a brief, writing that stem cell researchers say the ruling leaves their work “in disarray.”

Rob Stein‘s lede in the Washington Post is strictly factual: “… all federally funded experiments already underway will be cut off when they come up for renewal if a new court order is not overturned.” But he does quote Francis Collins, NIH director, saying, “This decision has the potential to do serious harm to one of the most promising areas of biomedical research.” Collins also says the consequences are “dramatic and far reaching.”

-Boyce Rensberger

An artist's conception of the newfound solar system. (ESO: European Southern Observatory)

Our solar system is not alone. European astronomers have found at least five and probably seven planets orbiting a star similar to our sun and 127 light years away. Some of the planets are giants the size of Uranus or Neptune and at least one is a small, rocky world just 40 percent bigger than Earth. A dozen or so solar systems of more than three planets were already known. The new one appears to have the most, one planet less than ours has.

The discovery was based on six years of accumulated data collected at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, using a 3.6 meter reflecting telescope. It was announced at a colloquium on extrasolar planets in Provence, France.

The Christian Science Monitor has a story by Paul Sutherland of Skymania that waits until the eighth graf to dash hopes that the rocky planet might resemble Earth in more than size and rockiness. It circles its star at a distance 1/50th of that separating Earth from the sun, giving it a year of just over a day close to a searing heat source.

Tariq Malik of Space.com has a nice story noting that none of the newfound big planets seem to be gas giants. Also see Victoria Gill on BBC.com.

AP covered the story from Geneva. Raphael G. Satter and Frank Jordans included this quote from an astronomer not involved in the discovery: “The really nice thing about finding systems like this is that it shows that there are many more out there. Mother Nature really had fun making planets.”

The Economist approaches the story from a historical and mathematical angle with this lede:  “Somewhere, the spirit of Johann Elert Bode is smiling.” Bode was the guy who, in the 18th century, found a mathematical formula that he believed predicted the spacing of planets from their sun. But as the story, bylined only as T.S., notes, “Bode’s Law” has sometimes been broken by the one solar system we know better than any other. The spacing of planets in the newly discovered system appears to obey the law.

-Boyce Rensberger

(Scientific American)

One way to reduce the greenhouse effect would be to create a parasol effect–put something in the upper atmosphere to shade us from a small fraction of the sun’s rays. It’s an old idea that got some lift when Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, sending sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere and causing global cooling for a couple of years.

Now researchers at Beijing Normal University have developed a computer model intended to predict how well a deliberate injection of stuff (be it sulfates or clouds of tiny manmade reflectors) into the sky might slow warming. The modelers were most interested in slowing or stopping sea level rise, which could be the costliest threat to coastal cities. In their article in PNAS, they suggest that to stop the ocean’s rise, we would have to inject into the atmosphere the equivalent of one Pinatubo’s worth of material every 18 months. Forever.

There could be so many undesirable consequences of such action that the authors don’t encourage such a scheme. Doesn’t look like any major news outlets bit, but a few online sites did.

Mason Inman at ScienceNow quotes the study’s author saying the better way to stop the water’s rise would be “sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere.”

Reuters reports that the study concludes that even the most ambitious efforts that are realistic are unlikely to prevent a sea-level rise of about 70 cm by 2100. The agency’s story, as carried in Business Standard emphasizes the study’s conclusion that geoengineering is not a good option.

Other takes:

BBC‘s Katia Moskvitch; Richard Lovett at Nature.com; Discover’s blog by Andrew Moseman; David Biello at Scientific American online.

-Boyce Rensberger

Oil-eating bacteria: Science/AAAS

Early release of a Science paper on oil-eating bacteria produced lots of stories today, and the ball bounced one more time between nature-damaged and nature-cleans-itself tales.

This came just a few days after a quick study of the plume in the Gulf made it seem as if bacteria were not moving rapidly to eat the oil.

Today’s story reports on sampling of the plume that turned up an unknown microbe from the cold depths that had been stirred up by the accident. This one, unlike others, eats oil without significantly depleting oxygen. The Associated Press version by Randolph Schmid said the research team was led by Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, and Hazen said, “Our findings, which provide the first data ever on microbial activity from a deepwater oil plume” suggest a great potential for bacteria to help dispose of plumes in deep water.

The bacteria were found in a plume of microscopic oil droplets more than 3,000 feet below the surface. With this find, scientists may have to rethink measuring oxygen depletion as a way to check on bacteria eating the oil. In other spills, blooms of bacteria caused by the presence of oil quickly depleted oxygen in the water.

—Phil Hilts

Chronic fatigue virus?

The split across the different outlets was pretty sharp in the past two days—to write the story as the Wall Street Journal’s Amy Dockser Marcus did in the main story, saying as the headline does there is “New Hope in Fatigue Fight,” or as Discover did in its blog, saying “Chronic Fatigue Debate goes on.”

Headlines went both ways, and so did ledes–emphasize the finding first, or emphasize the debate? At the Wall Street Journal, the story runs into the tenth paragraph before the debate appears. But then, a little later in the day, the Journal ran a separate piece about the debate and the fact that the study’s publication had been held up by possible conflicting evidence. The Discover blog hit the hardest on the debate question, with a listing high up in the story of each negative and positive finding and it’s date.

That story also pointed up a problem with the “good news” version of the story. The good news was said to be that the latest report found a family of viruses associated with Chronic Fatigue also found by previous research. But is the family connection actually important? Previous work found XMRV (xenotropic murine leukemia virus) and this one found MRV (Murine-leukemia-virus-related virus). There were also questions of how different the patients were in this study and previous studies.

The scientists themselves were cautious. Dr. Harvey Alter, the lead author on the paper published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, said “It’s an association, but that’s all it is.” He said much more work is needed.

On the other hand, patients and some doctors are convinced enough already to be advocating trials using antiviral drugs to see if they help. Some patients have said they are already on the drugs.

–Phil Hilts