Simulated solar system: European Southern Observatory

Astronomers are expecting a large number of new planets to be discovered in the next few years, as instruments and methods to detect them get revved up. Today’s announcement from the European Southern Observatory may presage things to come—the observatory said definitely five and maybe seven planets were found orbiting a sun-like star. And a video with animations and PR hype was popped up on the ESO web site quickly.

The Redorbit story starts with a quote from the AFP saying it’s “the biggest discovery of so-called exoplanets since the first was logged 15 years ago.” Christophe Lovis of Geneva University led the group of Swiss, French and German scientists working out of the ESO telescope in Chile. What they found was a solar system 127 light years away, in the constellation Hydrus. It contains at least five Neptune-sized planets, and probably two other planets–one Saturn-sized, and one only 1.4 times the size of earth. Before you start thinking another earth, however, this planet is very close to its sun, orbiting it every 1.2 days.

So this solar system has lots of planets, like ours does, with planets spaced in a fairly regular pattern, like ours. This discovery brings the total of planets outside our solar system to 472. The Associated Press story described the five planets as being covered with rock and ice, and measuring 13 to 25 times the mass of earth.

The image put out by ESO is an artist’s rendering showing a close-up of the sky around the star (HD10180), and it was made from photographs taken of that patch of sky through blue and red filters.

–Phil Hilts

On November 2002 the oil tanker Prestige sank off the coast of Galicia, Spain. It spilled 67,000 tons oil spill and polluted thousands of kilometers of Spanish and French coastline and beaches. It was the largest environmental disaster in Spain’s history. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers helped to clean the coastline in a massive campaign. Galician fishermen spent months cleaning the oil from the coast and sea. Yesterday a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine suggested that the most-exposed local fishermen have increased respiratory symptoms and more structural chromosomal abnormalities in their circulating lymphocytes compared to a group of fishermen that did not work on the spill cleanup. According to the authors, their findings indicate that even short-term exposure to oil sediments may have detrimental health effects. Spanish press is covering the results of the study. Some stories recognize the research limitations (lack of health information before the spill) and others not. And some say that Mexican Gulf workers should pay attention to this data, while others acknowledge that the characteristics and composition of the two spills are quite different.

Casi ocho años después de la tragedia medioambiental, económica, y humana del hundimiento del Prestige, un estudio de investigadores españoles publicado ayer por la revista Annals of Internal Medicine explica que 501 trabajadores y pescadores que pasaron más tiempo involucrados en la limpieza de las 67.000 toneladas de crudo que se vertieron frente a las costas Gallegas, sufrieron más problemas respiratorios y alteraciones cromosómicas que un grupo control de 177 pescadores que no estuvieron expuestos a los tóxicos del vertido. Público es quien más ampliamente cubre la información. Miguel Ángel Criado en “Los pescadores del prestige sufren alteraciones en su ADN” nos da los principales detalles de la metodología del estudio y sus conclusiones, y luego firma otra pieza donde profundiza en algunos aspectos del trabajo, dice que se podrían reavivar las críticas al PP, y cita alguno de los pocos estudios epidemiológicos que se han realizado tras vertidos de crudo. Manuel Asende explica que “Otro estudio confirma los daños genéticos en los trabajadores”, entrevistando a una científica de la Universidad de La Coruña que también se encuentra realizando análisis sobre muestras recogidas de pescadores y mariscadores expuestos al chapapote. Los resultados se darán a conocer en 2011, pero estudios previos de la misma investigadora sugieren que muchos voluntarios sufrieron alteraciones genéticas leves que desaparecían en el tiempo, pero algunos otras de irreversibles, similares a las de un fumador. La pieza modera la alarma sobre estos resultados, lanzando un mensaje de tranquilidad recordando que mayor riesgo de cáncer no significa un desarrollo seguro.

El Mundo por medio de María Valerio: “Los largos efectos respiratorios del Prestige” también desarrolla muy bien el estudio, empezando por una señal de atención hacia los trabajadores que actualmente están llevando a cabo las tareas de limpieza del vertido de crudo en la costa del Golfo de México. En su texto, María añade el matiz de que la composición y características de los vertidos son suficientes, y que los propios autores del estudio reconocen que no disponen de información sobre la salud pulmonar de los pescadores antes de su primer contacto con el crudo.

La Voz de Galicia también recoge el estudio por medio de Alfonso Andrade: “La revista del colegio médico de EE.UU. publica un estudio sobre el «Prestige”. Extraño titular, pero correcto texto que sólo habla de “indicios de anomalías cromosómicas”, y acompaña a otra breve nota diciendo que “La prevalencia de los síntomas respiratorios disminuye con el paso del tiempo”. En estos momentos (mañana del martes 24), otros de los grandes periódicos periódicos españoles todavía no han cubierto la noticia. Seguro que llegará con más detalle y análisis crítico.

- Pere Estupinyà

East Indian Flood, 2007 NASA image

A week a ago there was a spate of stories about the year in weather disasters, and many of the stories raised the question whether climate change could be said to be the cause of this year’s troubles in Pakistan, Russia, Iowa, etc. Some went too far and put “proof” in the mouths of scientists. Today, Andrew Revkin reports in his blog Dot Earth on a study that looked a similar, related question by reviewing a couple of dozen papers on losses in weather events.

It’s refreshing to have some data. The conclusion is that it is well-documented that there is more impact from natural disasters now than in the past, but making a statistically reliable connection can’t be done now. The paper, “Have disaster losses increased due to anthropogenic climate change,” was written by Laurens Bouwer, a scientist at Vrije University in Amsterdam. He concludes that it is too difficult to disentangle the weather events from the places they are happening, which are more populous, more economically developed, simply more vulnerable to loss than they have been historically. Prosperity complicates things.

I have no doubt that the various links between events and climate in general will get clearer, but unfortunately not fast enough for the policy makers in some slow-to-react nations. It will be necessary to make reasonable thinking-ahead policy before the data convinces everyone.

–Phil Hilts

International space station

Sounds impossible, but the interview clip at BBC seems real. The experiment by Karen Olsson-Francis, Charles Cockrell and colleagues at the Open University in England was intended to see which, if any, microbes could survive in space.

The team took a chip of limestone from a cliff in a town called Beer in Devon that had microbes growing in the rock. They busted it into bits, and put the little bits on disks that were flow up to the space station and attached to the outside of the capsule. They were left for 553 days. When the chips got back to the lab, they were put into a growth medium in a tube. After awhile, the liquid turned green. Dr. Cockrell said there was only one survivor–a blue-green algae that one researcher in Redorbit’s story said “resemble closely a group of cyanobacteria known as Gloeocapsa… They have a thick cell wall and this could be part of the reason they survived so long in space.”

These may be the most extreme conditions ever for bugs that have been studied—intense UV, no air, no water, and really chilly. The idea, the scientists said was not only curiosity about extreme conditions, but if these bugs can really do this, why not start thinking about bringing them to other planets to produce oxygen for colonists? Be difficult to do the environmental impact statement on that one.

–Phil Hilts

Lung nodules in TB, lower right

Victor McElheny spotted Tina Hesman Saey’s story on TB last week, and this story on Genomeweb News, by Andrea Anderson, writing up an article from Nature. Reuters jumped in, and a day later, the Guardian and Independent ran it. But so far, no takers among the big media in the U.S., though it looks quite important. Using a chip with gene arrays, researchers in London and Houston found a pattern in the way genes are transcribed by people with active TB versus those with inactive TB.

The initial sample of patients was small—13 people with active TB, 17 with latent TB, and a dozen controls without TB. The team found a 393-gene signature linked to active TB, and it was said to be independent of factors such as age, sex or ethnicity. The scientists followed up with two more sets of patients, one set in the UK and one set in South Africa, totaling more than one hundred patients.

The signature appeared in about 10 percent of people with latent TB, and seemed to be related to the severity of the illness. The signature also went away after successful TB treatment.

Based on the work, the researchers suggest that finding the signature might be used to identify people who are likely to go from passive to active TB, and also might be used as tool to monitor the response to treatment.

–Phil Hilts

Satellite measurements of plant productivity in 2003. Green shows increased productivity, red decreased. (NASA)

Global climate change, as many have observed, is a story that does not break; it oozes. Yet in today’s Science comes a climate change story that does, in a sense, break. To wit: the increased plant productivity caused by warming temperature, increased carbon dioxide and shifting rainfall pattterns has run out and the curve has reversed slope. Whereas plant productivity–the amount of atmospheric carbon taken up by plants–increased by about 6 percent during the 1980s and ’90s, it has since fallen by about 1 percent.

The implications for food production are obvious. If the small decline grows and population increases, malnutrition and outright starvation are likely to get worse.

And yet, as of mid-day on Friday, hardly any news organizations had picked up the story. The only major U.S. source to have it was AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid. International Business Times in the UK also has a story by Balasubramanyam Seshan.

Tracker trackers who spot other stories are invited to post comments with links to them. A more detailed account, with historical perspective, is on the SolveClimate Web site, by Matthew Berger. The Tracker is not familiar with SolveClimate, but it appears to be an environmentalist outfit doing something like real journalism, though with a clear agenda.

Grist for the mill:

A news release from NASA, whose satellites supplied much of the data.

-Boyce Rensberger

Adenines (As) being added to one end of messenger RNA (A still from a Flash animation at North Dakota State University. It's part of an excellent collection at NDSU's Virtual Cell Animation Collection. Click on this image to get the collection's URL.)

It was always a good bet that all the so-called junk DNA in our genomes wasn’t nonfunctional trash. Gradually functions are being found for some of it. Now comes word, via Science Online, that a form of muscular dystrophy is caused by a supposedly dead gene in the junk mutating into an active form.

It causes progressive weakening of muscles in the forearms, shoulders and face. It is a dominant trait with a 50-50 chance of being inherited by children of those with the disease. It afflicts about 1 in 20,000 people.

From the new finding, we now know that the gene that causes it is in all our genomes but normally disabled by the lack of something known as a poly (A) tail. This is a stretch of repeated adenine bases needed for any gene’s messenger RNA to get out of the nucleus and be translated into a protein. In this case, the defunct gene somehow has reacquired the ability to have the “tail” attached to its messenger RNA.

It’s a fascinating discovery, and the New York Times put Gina Kolata‘s very good story on A1. She backs into the news, much as this post does, writing of fossil genes that “rise from the dead like zombies.” The Boston Globe picked up her story but rewrote the top with a straight lede that gets right to naming the disease in question. Over at Vanity Fair‘s Web site, Alexandria Symonds needlessly whips up anxiety with a lede that says the finding is “something new and terrifying to worry about.” Symonds appears to have done no reporting herself, relying purely on Kolata’s story.

Another take: Rob Waters at Bloomberg.

-Boyce Rensberger

WHOI scientists who tracked the oil cloud with data from an autonomous underwater vehicle that criss-crossed the gulf. (WHOI image)

Things in the Gulf of Mexico may not be cleaning themselves up quite as fast as some had claimed and many had hoped. The New York Times‘s Justin Gillis, who broke the story of the vast plume of underwater oil droplets some weeks ago, reports now that it’s still there, not breaking down fast and flowing southwestward four miles a day. The cloud of thinly dispersed hydrocarbons is some 22 miles long, a mile wide and 600 feet thick. It lies about 3,600 feet below the surface. Earlier this month a team organized by NOAA claimed that nearly all the spilled oil was largely taken care of. Gillis, writing with John Collins Rudolf, says the latest assessment “sharply challenged” the government’s claims.

Janet Raloff, of Science News, ledes with new analyses finding that  huge oil plumes “continue to roam deep within the Gulf of Mexico and appear disturbingly stable.”

Dan Charles at NPR says scientists are still trying to figure out where half the spilled oil has gone. Click on Charles’s name for a text story and a link to the audio version.

Beth Daly at the Boston Globe has the story from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in her back yard, which did much of the research.

Seth Borenstein of the AP calls the new finding the first conclusive evidence of the plume’s existence.

-Boyce Rensberger

The distribution of floating plastic in the North Atlantic. Click on Jocelyn Kaiser's name below to see a larger version. (Science magazine)

The great “garbage patch” on the North Atlantic  surface–a place near the center where winds naturally sweep flotsam–does not appear to have collected any more plastic than it had 22 years ago. That’s unexpected because the use (and disposal) of plastic has grown hugely in that time. The finding, reported in Science this week, comes from research by the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole.

Similar flotsam patches are known in the middles of other oceans, most notably the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in the North Pacific, first recognized in the 1990s.

Curiously, although the North Atlantic junkyard has been under study since 1986, some news accounts led with the idea that the debris patch has only just been revealed. Dan Fletcher‘s brief in Time‘s online NewsFeed carries a hed that says, “Giant Floating Garbage Patch: Now In the Atlantic, Too!” An unbylined piece in UPI‘s online site heralds a claimed discovery and says that it has marine biologists worried.

Fortunately, most stories in the more careful media get it right. They point out that the main reaction to the findings is not that this is a new phenomenon but that there is now a mystery as to where the disposed plastic has gone. Science magazine’s Jocelyn Kaiser has a level-headed piece on ScienceNow with a snazzy map showing the distribution of floating plastic.

Jess McNally discusses the research methods in a piece on Wired.com, including several good maps and a photo of some of the plastic bits found.

-Boyce Rensberger

In a post yesterday, Phil Hilts mentioned that Matthew Nesbit of American University, yet another refugee from ScienceBlogs, was setting up shop on Big Think, which, as Phil noted, has been described as “YouTube for smart people.” (That delicately leaves unanswered the question of whom YouTube is for.)

I’ve been meaning to take a look at Big Think, after subscribing to its weekly newsletter for a month or two. Phil’s post now gives me the occasion to do so.

This week’s Big Think newsletter certainly makes the site sound as if it’s for smart people. The lead item is about the rise in the suicide rate among veterans. Big Think’s principal currency is video interviews, hence the YouTube quip. This item is an interview with Paul Rieckhoff, the founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. As is Big Think’s custom, the video is accompanied by a transcript, for those who want to scan the content without committing to the video. (Besides, this video wouldn’t load for me at Starbuck’s.)

If you define science stories narrowly, this isn’t one; it deals primarily with politics, not behavioral science. But I don’t define science stories narrowly, so I’d say the rise in suicide is an worthy subject for science writers.

Big Think is rich with science stories, even narrowly defined. It is not, however, always rich with important stories, such as the piece on the vets. Yesterday the lead item on the home page would have been perfect for the international edition of Cosmopolitan, if there were such a thing. It’s sex, sex, sex!

“Do you have sex like a Finn or a Bangladeshi?” the teaser asks. I like sexy stories as much as the next reader, but this isn’t the first one I’d turn to. Geez, if you’re going to use sex to promote the site, can’t you do better than that, Big Thinkers? This, incidentally, is a blog post, not a video. (Maybe, in this case, that’s a good thing.) And it’s a serious story by an economist who considers the link between sexual behavior and national wealth. Unfortunately, the item is more speculation than bigthink.

Today’s lead story is a serious piece entitled “Design Your Baby,” a look at the ethics of the reproductive choices that are increasingly available to us. It’s #19 in a series called Dangerous Ideas, in which one “dangerous” idea will be introduced each day in August. Others include “Let Kids Have Sex,” “Bring Back Eugenics,” “Legalize All Drugs,” and “Let Prisoners Vote.” It’s a great idea, and evidently Big Think’s attempt to stir us from our August torpor, especially here in South Florida, where I’ve recently been setting up shop. And it almost works.

Despite its reputation as a video site, Big Think features a lot of blogs and posts without video accompaniment. One minor frustration is that it’s a little difficult to know, when clicking on a link, whether it goes to a video or a post. (Please enlighten me, Big Think, if I’m missing a design element that is supposed to tell me.) If I’m eager to skim a post, I don’t want to confront a video. If I’m looking for a video to get a sense of a speaker, I don’t want a post. Some items are hybrids, such as a recent piece on whether gravity exists (!). It’s a blog post with a video interview, and no transcript that I can find.

The home page also featured a video interview with Sam Gosling of the University of Texas, an engaging speaker whom I put on the program for last year’s New Horizons in Science conference in Austin. It’s a piece on the virtues of stereotyping–it’s short and slight, but it’s fun, and it makes a legitimate point. It’s also nine months old–it was recorded last November. This is one way you can tell that Big Think is not a news site–it scrambles its offerings based on criteria other than the timeliness of the interviews.

But Big Think does link to a more recent interview with Gosling (in June). One of the things I like about the site is that it cross-references its speakers and topics in a way that allows visitors to easily track themes and individuals. The sitealso includes “people’s choice” and “editors’ choice” selections on the home page. Many websites try to organize their info in this sort of engaging and accessible way; Big Think suceeds better than most.

Big Think says it is “a global forum connecting people and ideas.” It goes on to say, “We believe that not all information is equal. We believe that expertise is valuable and should be shared.” But, it cautions, “We do not believe that experts have all the answers.” That seems to strike a pretty good balance; it’s YouTube for elitists, but not for those who put all of their trust in experts.

I suggest you spend some time at Big Think. The more comfortable I become finding my way around, the more I like it. And the good items far outweigh the items on Finnish sex.

- Paul Raeburn

It was George Soulié de Morant, a Frenchman (1878-1955), who is considered to be the “father” of western style acupuncture practice. His descriptions in his books, how and where to put the needles into the skin of patients, guided all his followers. Unfortunately he was a fabulist, according to an article published in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (a short version of a text published in Deutsches Ärzteblatt). The author (Hanjo Lehmann) is a physician and head of the German Institute for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), which aim it is to research the scientific basis of TCM. He seems to be the first ever, who really looked into the roots of the western style acupuncture and the ridiculous stories of Solié de Morant. The article explains Soulié de Morant’s fraud in detail, starting with his name – he himself added the aristocratic “de Morant”. Although he writes, that he spoke Chinese, when he arrived in China in 1901 (only 23 years old!), there is no hint, that he ever studied Chinese or lived with Chinese people. Also his rank as viceconsul and judge seems implausible, because he never visited any university or diplomatic school. Regarding acupuncture, Soulié de Morant describes, that he first saw and practiced the technique himself during a cholera outbreak in Bejing in 1901 – unfortunately, no records of such an outbreak at that time exist. These and dozens of more inconsistencies are interesting, but what consequences do they have for “modern” acupuncture therapies? Well, Soulié de Morant’s fiction and misconceptions not only found their way into but are the basis of current acupuncture protocols, the official course book of acupuncture of the German physician association “Bundesärztekammer”. Reading the article, it seems like the whole philosophy of western acupuncture, with energy streams and stuff like that, are based on sloppy translations, misconceptions or even blank fantasy. Only one example (because I won’t make the mistake to translate German acupuncture slang into English): The “Qi” in Chinese acupuncture tradition meant a fine substance – Soulié translated it into the disembodied, current-like “energy”. A whole different concept with consequences for the all-day therapy.

George Soulié de Morant

One might say, “Who cares? In most cases, acupuncture doesn’t work, anyway.” Well, to get an “official approve” to offer acupuncture, German physicians need to pay a substantial amount for a course, based on the course book of the Bundesärztekammer – which is in turn based on Soulié de Morant’s quackery. Not to speak of the patients, who get pinned with needles based on the fantasy of a fraud.

And: Until now, the positive effects of acupuncture, against migraine e.g., seem to be caused by a classical placebo effect. But have these studies been based on Soulié de Morant’s “misconceptions”? Isn’t it possible, that the wrong application of acupuncture misguided research, that tried to explain the effects of this type of TCM?

And, finally, since 2006 acupuncture is included in the catalogue of benefits of the German health insurance companies (at least for a few indications) – a therapy based on the doctrine of a fraud.

The article was published at Süddeutsche Zeitung a few days ago (together with a comment). I really thought, that this would spur some discussion and questioning of the Bundesärtzekammer, acupuncture societies etc., how they react to these new findings. But, apparently, I waited to no avail.

- Sascha Karberg

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Interesting article in El Pais about a scientific controversy: it seems than an astrophysicist announced in a public speech that Kepler mission had already discovered more than one hundred extrasolar earth-like planets, and a few days later all the members of the mission replied saying that it was not true, and that he is confusing the general public only to get some attention from the press. This, plus a story about a PLOS article saying that scientific fraud costs $110 million per year in the US, is a reminder that we are doing well if we are a bit distrustful to scientists… In Latin America, the reform of Colombian Constitution might lead to a much higher investment on Science, a nice story in Guatemala about the problems that a French geologist is facing to make research in certain areas where local people don’t want anybody to drill their land, and of course, the tremendously important news (irony) about the “terror bird” whose enormous beak scared its Southern American preys 6 million years ago.

En El Mundo (Esp) encontramos hoy un artículo de Ángel Díaz “el fraude científico se paga.. y no es barato”, recogiendo cifras publicadas por la revista PLOS de las pérdidas económicas que suponen las malas prácticas científicas. Dicen que 85 millones al año en EEUU, pero quien sabe; el fraude científico (exageración e incluso invención de resultados) es uno de los tabúes de la ciencia que más empieza a preocupar. Y aunque los casos más graves suelen destaparse, nadie sabe en realidad qué efecto tiene este fraude a bajo nivel, que el 2% de investigadores reconoce haber cometido alguna vez. Para nosotros; sirva como recordatorio de que no debemos fiarnos a ciegas de lo que nos cuentan los científicos. Para muestra, el artículo en El País que firma el investigador Francisco Anguita “De planetas habitables e inhabitables” sobre la controversia acarreada por un anuncio fraudulento de un astrofísico en busca de notoriedad sobre los centenares de planetas parecidos a la Tierra que ya había encontrado la misión Kepler. Según la nota los medios recogieron de inmediato sus palabras, sólo porque un científico de prestigio las había dicho, y posteriormente los propios miembros de la misión Kepler se encargaron de desmentirlas y criticar la actitud propagandística del astrofísico. Realmente, debemos ser recelosos con lo que nos cuenten los científicos. No somos sus portavoces, ni sus cheerleaders.

Fuera del tema del fraude, pero también adentrándose en la realidad diaria de la práctica científica escribe para Siglo XXI (Guatemala) Sebastián Escalón “La falla del Polochic: Cuando venga otra sacudida”. El reportaje es una buena manera de recorrer la orografía de Guatemala y su situación respecto posibles terremotos devastadores, acompañando a un geólogo francés quien se encuentra con una absurda oposición de la población local a sus investigaciones, por miedo a que se trate de un proyecto de minería encubierto. Sin salir de Guatemala, Lucy Calderón nos habla del procesador informático diseñado por unos estudiantes locales, persiguiendo su sana costumbre desde Prensa Libre de transmitir a la población la ciencia que se está haciendo en su país.

También en clave social, sobre política de la ciencia, SciDev explica por medio de Lisbeth Fog que Colombia está preparando una reforma de su constitución que dispararía la inversión en ciencia y tecnología. Además, apostaría por un modelo descentralizado de investigación, dedicando gran cantidad de fondos a las áreas menos desarrolladas del país. Ciencia como motor; buen plantemiento.

De todas maneras, la noticia del día es ese tremendamente importante hallazgo para la humanidad de unos paleontólogos argentinos y estadounidenses interpretando cómo atacaba un ave prehistórica a sus presas. Gran cantidad de periódicos hablan de esta “ave del terror” con pico descomunal. Si queréis saber más, una buena nota y gráfico los firma en Clarín Sibila Camps habiendo entrevistado a uno de los autores del estudio. (Lo de la tremenda importancia era un despiste irónico del tracker…)

- Pere Estupinyà