Last week’s burst of news on Boeing’s planned space transport and tourism service garnered significant coverage, including at the Washington Post a story by Mark Kauffman (and more, at previous post). Yesterday Kauffman and Dan Eggan ran a natural follow-up, making for a good one-two punch. This one barely mentions the Boeing announcement, and may have been in the works before that news. It is a deeper look at the inversion of human spaceflight, formerly NASA’s primary bulwark of both public and Congressional favor,  into what they call its biggest headache.

The result, the story reports, is that NASA’s budget is at war with itself, and resolution of its inconsistancy is hard up against a deadline in Congress. If not handled quickly, they report, the space agency could be stuck with a harsh, incomplete budget that forces delay of many important programs. They don’t spell it all out but it includes, presumably, scientific study of Earth, solar system, and the universe beyond.

The story deftly outlines the irony of the fracas. Chiefly it is that the manned program’s greatest boosters tend to be Republicans, but to make their argument for the traditional NASA m.o. they must lambaste an alternative that would usually warm their private enterprise-loving hearts:  to leave space taxi service to private industry. Elon Musk, the SpaceX (and Tesla Motors) boss, is in the middle with NASA. The images, incidentally, show one vision of NASA’s directly-ordered rockets, and a parallel vision of ones that Musk’s company has or hopes to have (not that his ideas are the only ones from industry).

The Post finds sources pinning the blame back on the Obama administration for handling the conflict poorly while continuing to pay the companies of another nation – Russia – to provide seats to US astronauts. Wotta mess. One must read this story twice to get it once, but it lays out a confusing story about as well as possible in the available news hole.

- Charlie Petit

The AP‘s Nataliya Vasilyeva, reporting from Moscow, is bringing renewed public attention to the hot argument among several major nations over who if anybody has sovereignty over the arctic sea bed. It’s a natural for her, as Moscow is the site this week of an international conference among arctic nation with sea bed sovereignty a major topic. She’s not the only one filing on the topic recently, either. Most stories pivot on a long chain of ancient, drowned mountains called the Lomonosov Ridge. It runs  from off Siberia’s continental shelf, right across the north pole, and shades out just off North America’s continental shelf near the border between Canadian and Greenland (ie Denmark).

Science writers ought to go after this story. Russia, Canada, and Denmark have all argued that the ridge is a national extension of their own sovereign stretches of continental shelf, per the Law of the Sea almost-treaty. Each nation says the issue must be decided by UN arbiters strictly on scientific grounds. This seems much simpler than sifting the good science from the bad in the complex geopolitical swirl over global warming – can’t geologists tell the history of those mountains, and determine if they still are or ever were part of somebody’s continental mass?

The naive eye looks at that map, one seen a lot on web searches, and seems to see a break between shelf and ridge at both ends. But “seems to” is not an argument. This needs some deep reporting to give context to whatever the UN eventually decides. The simplest might be that however those mountains formed tens to 100s of million years ago or so, they’re now an exotic terrane out in international waters and nobody’s flag-planting stunts add up to a seamount of beans. In the meantime, there’s some geology news writing to do. The ridge’s high points are closer to North America than to the Asian land mass. However, the fact it has a Russian name because a Russian scientist found it may give Moscow a leg up in any public and not particularly technical argument.

Other recent stories:

• Times of London (via The Australian) Tony Halpin: Russia jostles for pole position as Arctic melts ; While tAP’s story inevitably has wider circulation, this piece is much more detailed and perceptive of the news’s context and history.
• RT (Russia television news) via YouTube (Sept 16): Russia vs. Canada: Race for Oil-Rich Arctic Seabed ; Doesn’t get much into the technicalities of the argument, but is a notably well-balanced piece. It leads on its own nation’s claims, but give a Canadian minister a decent spot of time for another view. Also: on line text report by Sergey Borisov. RT provided text summary and video of remarks from both nation’s ministers. RT, one must add, covers this topic aggressively: see log of previous stories.
• for background: NatureNews – Daniel Cressey (Jan 2, 2008): Geology: The next land rush ; Cressey says, via unanimity of sources, that the ridge was born on the rim of  Eurasia. An oceanic rift rafted it to sea where it subsided and sank not long after the dinosaurs’ demise. Who can claim it now is the issue.

With all the focus on this ridge, and on potential gas and oil deposits, reporters and particularly science writers might also explain whether the ridge itself is economically important. One suspects not. Few oil or gas fields sit under big mountains. They are in sedimentary basins, usually pretty flat land. One assumes it’s the 200 mile exclusive economic zone around the ridge, and that would accompany any territorial award, that is prompting this ruckus.

- Charlie Petit

The Associated Press is not only increasingly essential as a news service for its direct coverage of events – what with client papers whose stories it once rewrote as part of its  contracts having cut  their staffs to the bone -  it is also among the more traditional. Its verbiage may tend to the colorful or dramatic on occasion to be sure, and it engages in vital investigative get-the-bums reporting regularly enough, but above all it is  neutral in tone and anonymous. After all its clients represent a huge spectrum of audience. Overt personal or advocacy reporting could be risky.

Thus to find a first-person story under an AP byline is notable. Maybe there are lots of them, but I don’t recall many – make that any. Over the weekend many outlets picked up a yarn by reporter Sean O’Driscoll describing how he responded to a call for volunteers to help put bright white paint on roofs in New York City. The “I” word is right in the lede.

The story doesn’t cover any new ground, strictly speaking. The Department of Energy’s Secretary Steve Chu – as O’Driscoll reports – has been promoting white roofs as a great way to conserve energy and save money. One of the tactic’s biggest promoters, former California energy commissioner Art Rosenfeld (a physicist who worked for Chu when the latter was boss of the Lawrence Berkeley Nat’l Lab), has gotten a fair bit of coverage, too.

But…. precisely because of its vignette lede and engaging tone this piece may be among the more persuasive and effective at explaining the program and how it works. A small flaw is the impression at the top, only mildly corrected deeper, that a cool roof must be glaring white. Black or deep gray are out, but while white is best, many colors and compositions that reflect the near infrared work pretty well for cool roofs.

Maybe Mr. O’Driscoll can have a part II to this story, and do some really heavy work paving a parking lot. The cool roofs research gang also has plenty of studies out showing the amazing payoff to replacing dark asphalt with cooler, paler pavements ( see Grist for example).

Grist for the Mill:

DOE Press Release (July 19); Art Rosenfeld From Local Cooling to Global Cooling: Cool Roofs and Cool Pavements, pdf of fairly large powerpoint (presented in Shanghai, English and Chinese captions).

PERSONAL ASIDE:

As long as we’re on personal angles, I seriously doubt we will ever paint our house’s n0w dark gray roof white or some other cool color, or reshingle with anything particularly bright. I recall visiting a neighbor not so long ago, but before the white roof campaign showed how sensible such things are. They were near-blinded on sunny afternoons by the fresh, bright white paint on a close-by flat roof – and later persuaded the offender to put on a darker coat. But that’s not why I won’t do it. We have no air conditioning. Nobody I know within many miles of here has air conditioning. This town is downwind from the Golden Gate entry to SF Bay, so sea breezes mean hardly any heat waves – maybe a week to ten day’s worth in a year. Our energy bills are immune to roof color.

But if I lived over the hills to the east where everybody fries for weeks and even months on end each summer and fall, we’d have a cool pale roof for sure (cool roofs don’t have to be bright white, as it happens). Yes, I know cool roofs would be good here in Berkeley on general principle anyway – the infrared radiating from our hot roofs probably pre-warms by a tad the air heading east to those roasting regions. But we don’t need a cool roof. Self-interest does make a difference. And thanks to son-in-law Tom for bringing this story to my attention. He and his family live over those hills where it’s hot. Come to think of it, their house is among so many trees a white roof makes little sense for them too.

- Charlie Petit

...... Solar nebulae, source http://tinyurl.com/2dmyaug

Ever since writing a post here that mentioned “up stream” reporting as something we on the science beat need more, inspired by a panel discussion in the UK and a related blog post, I’ve been looking for examples to see how they stack up.

The pure meaning of upstream is, I gathered, the reporting of science news before it reaches the peer reviewed paper stage. Ergo – reporting the process, including the politics and academic wranglings of research.

At Science News the scoop machine named Ron Cowen has  out this week a story on discovery, maybe, of water-spawned minerals in the planet-forming disk of dust and such around a young star, EF Chameolontis. It says here that in a paper presented at a conference in Baltimore, which is somewhat upstream as it’s not in a journal but is merely starting to circulate among colleagues, NASA scientists say they see the signature of phyllosilicates. They form only around water, and here they are in presumed fodder for growing planets.

It’s interesting, responsible reporting, and a good read. Cowen puts in effort – and compares these minerals to phyllo dough in their layered structures. The discovery’s implications are neatly sketched, including insights into the solar nebula back when Earth was agglomerating.

But one can also see why most reporters – not working at a specialty pub like Cowen’s where deep reporting on somewhat arcane topics is encouraged and with readers who enjoy it – might not jump on this as news. Better, most might think, to keep focussing on journal reports where lots of editors and peer reviewers have chewed it over. Cowen, being a pro, submits the paper’s contents to several outside experts. Several of those say it’s interesting research, but for this or that reason has to be regarded as tentative and intriguing but not much more. Hence, the story is about speculation and the maybe’s and slippery conclusions that saturate science.

Contrast this to the news, from Science, in the next post down all about festoons of craters on the moon and the complex geology and mineralogy inside and around them. That’s a good story too and a more natural piece of news. Much as I and many of us enjoy so-called upstream journalism, it’s hard to see it displacing from the front burner the peer-reviewed, buttoned-down and bow-tied reports that are most easily sold to editors and distributed to the general public.

- Charlie Petit

It’s not easy to figure out, via search engine and not much time, who in NASA’s extended community of staffers, contractors, and academic scientists and engineers decided to call a chunky little instrument with a swivel head the Diviner Lunar Radiometer Experiment. No sign of its etymology at its UCLA website, but isn’t Diviner a sublime name for something that senses the nature of things from a distance? Words with religious or superstitious overtones tend to have such stirring punch – no wonder even non-believers borrow them often and to great effect (other examples include transcendence, exaltation, ecstasy, and awe, all useful to science journalists among others). But somebody at UCLA or elsewhere likes words – elsewhere on the instrument team’s site (see link in Grist below) one sees reference not to the prosaic field of view of the instrument, but to its field of regard. Lovely.

Onward. The field of regard of the Diviner LRE has, from its perch on NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, been swept up, down, and sideways across the moon for a year now. The gadget is mainly a radiometer for measuring surface temperatures on the moon that range from hot enough to boil water down to and probably well below that of liquid oxygen. Its multiple channels also give good evidence of mineralogy.

The news is that, in Science today, are two reports on Diviner data revealing  a far more bewildering mosaic of rock types on its surface than the textbooks anticipate, including splotches of granitic-looking rock among all the basalts. A third report, from the probe’s laser altimeter team, describes new details seen in its craters, plains, and mountains and, indirectly, its bombardment history. Most press releases, alas (to me), focus on the laser altimetry topography map, rendered in pretty colors. Nearly all news reports follow that line of least resistance. We knew already the moon is beat up, a Rosetta stone to planetary accretion, and like that. Almost no attention is paid in media to reports from the different LRO teams using the Diviner instrument confirming and in some cases discovering mineral formations of great complexity. Maybe it’s just me but the mineralogy seems to be the newest news here. Or perhaps the Diviner label on a piece of hardware has me entranced.

Stories:

• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Map of moon’s craters reveals our satellite’s cataclysmic past ; Sample attends only to the altimetry and new crater counts, not at all to the minerals divined.
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: NASA reveals Moon’s ‘turbulent youth’ ; Paige also does craters almost entirely. The Register also does its usual thorough on line  job with illus, providing links directly to NASA and other sites for explanation of what the pictures show.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: The moon as solar system’s Rosetta stone? ;
• Wired Science – Jess McNally: Moon Crater Map REveals Early Solar System History ; Good story, and superb gallery of IRO images.
• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: The Moon Through LRO’s Eyes ; No surprise that this specialty pub and this veteran writer have the most knowing write up. He leads on the cratering and altimetry, but gets into the mineralogy. Beatty also salutes the word “silicic,” saying it seems to be all consonants.

Dept. of Old Hardware: LRO, among other things, took photos that revealed where the old Soviet Lunokhod 2 rover stalled and died 37 years ago after driving across the moon’s soil for 20 miles. That story is told well by this blogpost in March. Among the spritelier news accounts was this NPR All Things Considered report on the man who bought the derelict machine, sight unseen to a remarkable degree, at auction.

Grist for the Mill:

UCLA Diviner Lunar Rad. Experiment site ; NASA-Goddard Press Release mostly on lunar altimetry ; UCLA Press Release on diverse minerals; NASA LRO site ;

- Charlie Petit

Who’d a thunk climategate, with its blizzards of news stories (and mega-blogstorms) mostly about e-mail churlishness, Copenhagen, and badly-vettted IPCC summary reports but not much about fresh science, would have also been the setting for journalism so solid and true that it’d win one of the most distinguished prizes in science writing? Two weeks ago the American Geophysical Union announced that Indian journalist Pallava Bagla will receive its annual David Perlman Award for Excellence in Science Journalism. This is one of AGU’s two media prizes. The honor is a rarity for recognizing the sinew of the trade – breaking news rather than heavily crafted features that take weeks or months to put together and garner most of the plaques and dais time.

In the Columbia Journalism Review is Curtis Brainard‘s smart Q&A with Bagla, in two parts. Some dates from February when Climategate was hot and the IPCC was retracting its infamous assertion that Himalaya was losing its glaciers so fast they’d be gone in 20 years. Augmenting that is further conversation subsequent to the AGU’s anointment. Kudos to Brainard for this deep look at Bagla’s reporting.

It is also notable that this is no flash in the pan lightning strike. It reflects the skills that have given Bagla a distinguished career. He’s not only been a correspondent for Science magazine’s journalism side for years, but is an accomplished photojournalist, TV, and print reporter. In India has has long been recognized as a man at the top of his field – with plenty of other prizes.

I found two biographies on him on line:

• LeadIndia (2006): India’s highest science journalism award conferred on Pallava Bagla… ;
• LeadIndia (2010) : Pallava Bagla, photojournalist / Science magazine and New Delhi Television ; Slightly squirrely html in this one, but it includes an updated bio from the previous one.

Significant is that his prize-winning piece, which ran in November , predates discovery by other reporters that the IPCC’s proclamation of imminent Himalaya’glacier collapse was based on unrefereed, unsubstantiated, and non-scientific reports. This notably included a New Scientist article many years old and that included an assertion based upon a reporter’s telephone conversation – with its gist portrayed without footnotes by the UN body as robust science (see Jan. 19  ksjtracker post). But Bagla’s reporting was a more direct assault on that assertion. He was first to report on Indian TV, and later in the Science piece, that most of India’s glaciologists knew from their own observations that the glaciers may be retreating but nowhere near as rapidly as the IPCC said. Rather than tracking down an error’s cause he looked for evidence of what is true.

Grist for the Mill: AGU Press Release (Aug 31), including word on its other prize, the Walter Sullivan, for longer form writing.  Roberta Kwok won that one for a piece in Nature about a small asteroid that astronomers tracked through space by astronomers, and that meteoriticists and others then picked up partially and in pieces from the desert in Sudan.

I don’t know what to make of one aspect of these prizes that most readers of this site will have surely noticed. Nothing untoward, but startling. Their winners wrote for the journalism pages in the front portions of the world’s two leading cross-disciplinary, formal science journals. To work at either has always been, in the trade, a plum achievement and clear evidence that one is  a diligent pro. But Science and Nature, for all their influence in science writing as well as science and on decision makers, are hardly read by general audiences.

- Charlie Petit

Ordinarily news stories that herald a promising new treatment based on the recovery of one patient would raise eyebrows and elicit heavy grumbling from experienced medical reporters. That’s not statistics, it’s not science, it’s just something for researchers to follow up but not bother reporters about until they have something solid. But this case may deserve forbearance. It got past the reviewers at Nature, for one thing. The news is that a 21-year old man who had required monthly transfusions since he was a toddler to keep the common blood disorder beta-thalassemia from killing him is now merely mildly anemic. This is, it seems, entirely thanks to in vitro alteration of his blood marrow and successful takeover by the modified cells of his own machinery for making red blood cells.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Gautam Naik stresses the right angle – gene therapy has had a rough ride in the last ten years or so as other trials went awry. Some patients died as several different efforts to add healthy genes to the tissues of patients born without those genes not only didn’t work, but triggered severe side effects. Thus this case offers reason to expect the general method will, eventually, pay off.

Other stories:

• Boston Globe – Carolyn Y. Johnson: Cambridge firm hopeful, cautious on gene therapy ;
• HealthDay (via Bloomberg/Business Week – Steven Reinberg: Gene Rx May fight Severe Blood Disorder ; Good enough story. More interesting may be the three-way combo of news agencies. Not only have Bloomberg and Business Week partnered to combine reporting resources, it appears that they are farming the job out to yet other outlets.
• Nature.com – Joseph Milton: Gene-therapy hope for β-thalassaemia .
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Gene Therapy Appears to Help Patient With Anemia ;
• New Scientist – Andy Coghlan: Blood disorder cured – a first for gene therapy ; Hmm. Seems bold to call this a cure, flat out. The previous Reuters hed is better on this score. And, is it true that gene therapy has never cured anybody before? The story itself says it’s the first time a person has been cured of this genetic disease by any means. This appears to be a clear disconnect between story and headline.
• Not Exactly Rocket Science (Discover mag blog) Ed Yong: Gene therapy saves patient from lifetime of blood transfusions ;
• Mail (UK) Claire Bates: HIV virus used to cure teenager of blood disorder using gene therapy ; It’s sharp of Ms. Bates to notice that the highly modified viral delivery system of the good gene is at heart a lentivirus with some relationship to HIV, but it is unwise to use HIV unvarnished it in the headline where it is distracting, uninformative, and alarming. Even calling it “de-fanged HIV” in the lede is empty and unnecessarily sensational.

Grist for the Mill: Bluebird Bio (via Business Wire) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

For now rocket ships seem firmly on the science writer’s beat. Several familiar bylines in the fold are among those reporting announcement from Boeing that it is partnering up with a space tourism booking agency to use an orbiting space capsule not only to rotate crews to and from the international space station, but to put plain folks with deep pockets in extra seats. One hopes a few reporters start angling to be, finally, the first journalist in space.

This may also herald the inevitable migration of rocket ship news to other beats just as aviation news did many years ago. After all, science writers flock to nifty archaelogy and paleontology news, but don’t pay much attention to the Land Cruisers, Land Rovers, and clapped-out Peugeot taxis that got them to their sites in remote corners of the developing world. Want to do research on the moon? Book a room at Bigelow Lunar Towers.

This is more than diverting space-tourism news. Most coverage sees the announcement as partial vindication for the current US administration’s decision to rely a lot more on private enterprise for getting humans and their cargo to space, and less on government-owned and operated transportation. NASA could then get back to its core mission of space exploration, science, and development of daring new technologies.

The news also gives a boost to cynics who said, every time some little startup rocket company advertised it can vastly undercut the costs of standard rocketry, that in the end the big boys (like Boeing) would take the ball away. But at least, in this case, the imagined Boeing capsule might go up there on a rocket from one recent spaceship startup, Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. One supposes that these tix to orbit would cost a lot more than whatever Virgin Galactic plans to charge for suborbital trajectories to the edge of space and back down all in an afternoon.Perhaps the market can bear them both.

Stories:

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Boeing Plans to Fly Tourists to Space ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Boeing unveils plans to launch private citizens into orbit ; Matson smartly tells his readers that the Boeing capsule is far from ready – much farther than its much more mundane Dreamliner next-generation commercial passenger plane.
• USA Today – Ben Mutzabaugh: Boeing: Space tourism flights possible by 2015 ;
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Boeing says it’s entering space tourism business ;
• Wash. Post – Mark Kauffman: Boeing, partner plan to carry travelers to space station with new spaceship ; Includes link to a video of the launch sequence, plus an image gallery.
• Los Angeles Times – W. J. Hennigan: Boeing enters space tourism partnership ;
• Mail (UK) Sarah Gordon: Boeing plans to send tourists to International Space Station by 2015;
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Boeing Aims to Fly Passengers to Space on New Capsule ;
• CBS – William Harwood: Boeing Plans Capsule to Fly Space Tourists ;
• … plenty more out there. Let us know if there are some outstanding ones to add to the list.

Department of Déjà vu:

An important nod is due to outlets that were more than a month ahead of today’s news gusher. The specific deal with a booking agency is apparently fresh, but the general business plan is not. The Orange County Register‘s Pat Brennan on August 5 reported “Boeing ‘cutting metal’ on new spaceship.” That Boeing is building a capsule was not news, but Brennan included the new space tourism angle with a reference to efforts by Las Vegas’s  Bigelow Aerospace to build inflatable, private-market space stations.

And before that, on July 23, BBC‘s Jonathan Amos reported from the famed Farnborough Air Show in England that Boeing execs and engineers at their exhibit were openly talking of using its NASA-ordered Orion capsule or a derivitive to carry private citizens. Furthermore, standing and conferring with the Boeing suits at the show, he reports, was Bob Bigelow, the ‘Vegas hotel man (and UFO fan) whose plans to make money off space visitors are long standing and well-known. Ditto, at Space.com Denise Chow wrote the outlines Aug. 27.

I expect others were ahead of the game. For other, the announcement today is front page news.

Grist for the Mill:

Boeing Press Release ; Space Adventures Ltd Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

On August 10th–more than a month ago–Gina Kolata gushed on the front page of The New York Times about a new test for Alzheimer’s disease which, she reported, “can be 100 percent accurate.” I criticized the report here, as did Chief Tracker Charlie Petit, in a separate post. It has taken the Times more than five weeks to issue its own correction, which appears today:

An article on Aug. 10 about spinal fluid tests in Alzheimer’s research left the incorrect impression that the test can predict the disease with 100 percent accuracy in all patients. (That impression was reinforced by the headline.) In fact, the test was found to be as much as 100 percent accurate in identifying a signature level of abnormal proteins in patients with memory loss who went on to develop Alzheimer’s — not in identifying patients who “are on their way” to developing the disease.

The article also misinterpreted an element of the researchers’ findings. Among a group of patients who had memory loss and developed Alzheimer’s within five years, every one had protein levels associated with the disease five years before; it was not the case that “every one of those patients with the proteins developed Alzheimer’s within five years.”

And the article misstated the source from which the finding of 100 percent accuracy was drawn. It came from a separate set of patients that the researchers examined to validate the protein signature they had identified in an initial group. (In the initial group, as the article noted, nearly every person with Alzheimer’s had the signature protein levels.)

Note the use of such phraseology as “left the incorrect impression,” and “misinterpreted,” and even “misstated,” which sounds like an accident.

This is the phrasing I don’t see: “The article was wrong when it said….”

Such clarity was also missing from the Aug. 24 blog post by the public editor at the Times, Arthur S. Brisbane, who, addressing the 100% claim, wrote, “the study said something much narrower than that.”

His prescription for fixing the story did not indict the reporter or the reporting, but said, instead:

A better approach in this case would have been to offer either a narrower claim for the 100% connection among factors or a broader description, less the absolute, of a promising new study of Alzheimer’s.

So I’ll say what he didn’t: An even better approach would have been to report and write the story accurately. The reporting was in error, the story was in error, and the Times should say so. Enough of this talk of “narrower claims” and “incorrect impressions.” The headline on Brisbane’s post was “The Trouble With Absolutes.” It should have been, “Times Errs on Alzheimer’s Story.”

The Times is the best paper in the country, maybe the world, although I don’t read enough languages to know. Why, then, does this correction read as if it were written by a student hiding under his desk, afraid of a rap on the knuckles?

Or am I getting an incorrect impression?

- Paul Raeburn

Isn’t it impressive what one can learn by making call or two, rather than looking at stuff on the net and jumping to a conclusion? I’m lately a specialist on the latter practice, much to my chagrin when you sharp readers let ksjtracker in on an error or two or…, but this morning I managed to disabuse myself.

It started as what appeared to be  a clear case of a press release coming out AFTER the warning it made had already been answered, problem solved, power of the press revealed, etc etc. The news is about a historic and invaluable botanical collection and arboretum in Russia, the  Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry’s Pavlovsk Experimental Station,  near Saint Petersburg. Started a century ago, it has thousands of plants including many berry shrubs and fruit trees of species and strains that are rare or even extinct elsewhere. Many don’t have seeds that can be stored or are viable, so must be maintained via annual plantings. Now, Government agencies have scheduled an auction of the land for housing development. Horrors.

This I learned for the first time from a press release (in Grist, below) from the Ecological Society of America, urging international pressure on appropriate agencies all the way to the top in Moscow to cancel this pending travesty. So, thought I, let’s see if any news agencies have already responded.

Indeed, reporters were way ahead of me. And way ahead of the release, too, it seemed:

Stories:

• AAAS ScienceNow – Erik Stokstad (Sept 10): Good News for Imperiled Russian Seed Bank; A shorty, but with dates, numbers, and what looks like plans that would, at worse, give time to move the operation.
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Russia’s Pavlovsk seed and plant bank saved – for now (Sept 9); Weise listed many notables who already have put pressure on the Medvedev gov’t.
• AP – Irina Titova: Celebrated Russian seed bank fights for its land (Aug 20) ; She leads on one of the most famous episodes in the facility’s history – the decision by its staffers in WWII, when Hitler’s army threatened, to stay and try to safeguard it. Many at the station in the end starved to death there during the German siege – while refusing to eat the invaluable seeds in its holdings.
• NPR – David Greene : Researchers Fight to Save Fruits Of Their Labor (Aug. 30); Greene reported from the site, just before the government announced it is reviewing the decision to sell the place off.

That is why it seemed for awhile that the Ecological Society of America was late for this parade, that pressure is on, some results are in, somehow the Russian government is seeing the light and will realize that perhaps an upscale housing development can go elsewhere, or time can be found to relocate the station’s work to an even better spot, or something.

But just in case I phoned the top name in that press release below and asked why ESA’s plea is just is out now when all this has been reported, if not widely but by some important int’l news outlets. The answer: Of course we know that things have gotten a little better. But the reprieve is only temporary, for a review  which a closer read of the news accounts affirms as the case. And the The gavel could still ring down, turning the Pavlovsk into money for some oligarch housing developer (my words, not hers). Dire things may still ensue.

And word is that the decision is due for announcement any day now.  I’ll look for further coverage.

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release ; ESA Open Letter to Russian gov’t.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Water scarcity is a huge problem and reported often in Africa. It also threatens some parts of Latin America, as shown in one of the series of articles in SciDev about the regional impact of climate change on water supplies (English here). Also related to water: Perú is the world’s largest exporter of asparagus thanks to the large crops in the Valle de Ica, but a local reporter explains to BBC World the crop is consuming underground water resources. A Paraguayan reporter analyzes the causes and consequences of a severe drought in his country. A Colombian reports sounds the alert in El Mundo that the  flow of the Amazonian river in Leticia’s rainforest is extremely low.

Finally, a very detailed story about a Uruguay-Spanish collaboration that yielded a patent and a possible Chagas treatment.

La escasez de agua es uno de los temas medioambientales cuya presencia en los medios será cada vez más frecuente (como veremos más adelante en el post, esto representa una oportunidad para ofrecer notas locales a grandes medios internacionales). No obviamos que los problemas más graves se encuentran en el continente africano y partes de Asia, pero como indica este mapa extraído del muy recomendable artículo en SciDev de Lucinda Mileham “Seguridad hídrica y cambio climático: hechos y cifras”, hay regiones de América Latina que se enfrentan a serios problemas de abastecimiento. El artículo forma parte de un especial de SciDev sobre el impacto del cambio climático en la seguridad hídrica. En el editorial de David Dickson se explica que aumento de la demanda, deshielo de glaciares, cambios en los patrones de lluvias, intensificación de inundaciones y sequías podrían tener efectos devastadores en la agricultura y subsistencia de zonas rurales. Plantea que es tarea de los científicos informar a los políticos, y que los medios tenemos un papel importante en esta transición. Asumimos la tarea. En el especial de SciDev encontramos un muy buen número de piezas relatando casos concretos, pero ninguna sobre países de América Latina. Aquí los periodistas científicos locales pueden ofrecer sus trabajos. De hecho, es lo que han hecho los autores de las siguientes notas a comentar.

En BBC Mundo, interesantísimo texto desde Perú de Javier Lizarzaburu: “Peru: el dilema del agua y los espárragos”. Aquí no hablamos de algo tan difícil de manejar como el cambio climático, sino de las consecuencias medioambientalmente negativas de una actividad económicamente muy positiva para el país. Dilema es la palabra más acertada. La producción de espárragos en el valle de Ica ha convertido a Perú en el mayor exportador del mundo, pero según un informe reciente está acabando con las reservas de agua subterránea que mantienen a la población. Los cultivos de espárragos han generado puestos de trabajo y riqueza. Reducir esta actividad no parece una opción viable. Optimizar recursos sin duda es necesario, pero ¿suficiente? El texto termina planteando hasta qué punto en el actual escenario ambiental la transformación de desiertos para agricultura puede seguir considerándose una opción con futuro.

También en BBC Mundo, desde Paraguay Eduardo Arce nos explica que “Paraguay se enfrenta a ‘larga y costosa’ sequía” que lleva 5 meses afectando a 30.000 famílias indígenas. Tampoco aquí se le achaca la culpa al cambio climático, sino a “la deforestación, al mal uso del territorio y a que ‘algunos ríos y arroyos fueron represados por ganaderos de la zona para dar de beber a sus animales’” (que agravan el periódico fenómeno climatológico de “la niña”). Desalinización es una de las estrategias a seguir, pero según el buen artículo los meteorólogos pronostican dos veranos con escasez de lluvias.

“El río Amazonas, en riesgo de secarse” es un texto desde Bogotá de Francisco Argüello para la versión de América de El Mundo (España). Tras un título ligeramente exagerado, encontramos una buena nota explicando las consecuencias del espectacular descenso de caudal del Amazonas a su paso por la ciudad colombiana de Leticia. Según el texto se ha producido en un corto espacio de tiempo. Además de los efectos en la población, nos hubiera gustado encontrar algunos datos históricos para poder valorar estos cambios, y científicos explicando a que se debe esta sequía. Según una fuente del artículo la situación del río Amazonas es todavía peor en Perú y Ecuador. De Perú ya hablamos, pero a título de ejemplo, en El Universo (Ecuador) vemos que la sequía ha estado a punto de generar racionamientos de electricidad. Realmente, los rcursos hídricos son un tema a perseguir.

Dos piezas para terminar: En El País (Uruguay), fijaos qué destaca Déborah Friedmann al inicio de su nota sobre la patente española con colaboración uruguaya de un compuesto contra el Chagas: “Antes éramos más académicos, de una investigación más básica. Ahora estamos realmente preocupados en generar algo que pueda ingresar al mercado, más allá de todos los problemas que pueden existir”. Son declaraciones de un científico uruguayo implicado en la investigación, y que Déborah haya decidido abrir su pieza con este mensaje, refleja la importancia que da a que un país apueste por ciencia aplicada, especialmente si –como dice el extenso artículo- viene de una tradición demasiado académica en la que ni siquiera había esfuerzo en publicar los resultados científicos. Además de generar conocimiento, a veces algunos científicos olvidan que la ciencia también tiene la misión de generar desarrollo social y económico. Queremos repercusión e impacto.

En El Mundo también encontramos un interesante texto de Isabel Lantigua: “Un conflicto de un millón de dólares” explorando los conflictos de intereses –y pagos directos- que existen entre indústria farmacéutica y profesionales de la medicina. Lo hace a partir de un artículo aparecido en una revista científica, pero no se hace referencia a la situación en España. También éste es un tema para glocalizar en nuestros respectivos países.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Post bought a sizeable story from freelancer Brian Palmer about hopes for clean, green energy from clever, small nuclear reactors that might run for 60 years without refueling. It ran Tuesday. It is a fine example of how to get readers’ hope up, only to let them fizzle a bit toward the end. That fizzle is mostly economic – nobody seems to have good evidence that this scheme can compete economically with standard nukes, much less nice cheap coal plants that get to dump waste into the atmosphere at little cost.

The news is about a hoped-for, commercial revival by a company called TerraPower (link in Grist, below)  for an idea that’s been around in nascent form for half a century. It is the traveling wave nuclear power plant. It’s a way to put into one fuel bundle all the expensive separate steps involved in standard advanced fuel cycle ideas – ones that would vastly expand the lifetime and energy output of uranium fuel by transmuting nuclear waste products into yet more, fissionable elements. It’s like a uranium enrichment plant, regular reactor, a breeder reactor, and an advanced fast power reactor in one. And yes, it makes plutonium, but it suggests here that it’s never in a form easily filched and diverted to some fiend’s rogue nuclear weapon program. The plutonium would be used for fuel, and thus destroyed, about as fast as the reactor makes it.

You’ll have to read it for some more detail, which Palmer provides in small doses in rather exuberant, almost salesman-like fashion. He provides little  resembling a serious effort to explain nuclear physics,  fast or slow neutrons, or like that. But, you could read a more expansive explanation of this technology’s recent history and involvement by the likes of Bill Gates elsewhere. One such ran last year in MIT’s Technology Review, by Matthew Wald, the NYTimes staffer. Another is a well-informed blogpost at a site called GigaOm, by Katie Fehrenbacher. The latter includes a link to a semi-technical slide show presented at a symposium at the College of Nuclear Engineering at UC Berkeley boosting the technology, at least for large plants if not the small versions Palmer highlights, and listing a lot of its deep-pockets backers such as Bill Gates. Cognoscenti regarding cold war technologists will sit up on seeing Lowell Wood listed on the technical team.

Thus the Post is reporting on something not new – save perhaps for the pocket-reactor version – but not overly publicized either. Too bad it leaves to the end perhaps the most important aspect – whether this nifty sounding idea is affordable enough for wide application soon enough to forestall construction of thousands of new fossil fuel-burning stations.

One thing puzzles. Palmer’s piece in the Post refers to the bulls eyes offered to terrorists by standard nuke cooling towers, and says little nukes would have smaller cooling towers. That passage makes no sense to me. Cooling towers of any size are not hard to find – and why would a smart terrorist think smacking a cooling tower, not the reactor, is the better idea?

Grist for the Mill: TerraPower.

- Charlie Petit