Today finds two reports on the rising tide of drug resistant bacteria.

At the AP, Marilynn Marchione reports what she calls “an infectious-disease nightmare.” It’s a breaking news update to earlier reports from several outlets of a spike in drug-resistant bacteria in the US and elsewhere. She attributes her new info to buzz at the American Society for Microbiology conference in Boston. The twist on the general story is that while several species of microbe are involved, they all seem to get their anti-antibiotic armor from the same gene, called NDM-1, as in New Delhi. The gene, somewhat easily spread horizontally from one kind of bacterium to another, is believed to have begun its spread in India. Marchione writes, indirectly attributing it to a source but in her own words, “India is an overpopulated country that overuses antibiotics and has widespread diarrheal disease and many people without clean water.” Which is to say, India has conditions perfectly suited for breeding new strains of common microbe that proliferate even when hit by some of  modern medicine’s best and newest drugs.

And at the NYTimes Erik Eckholm reports on US efforts to clamp down on a different breeding ground for superbugs – American farms where livestock are routinely fed heavy doses of antibiotics to spur growth and keep them healthy. He pulls readers in by getting out of the office and visiting a pig farm. Its owner happily shows him around to see how lively his well-medicated piglets are. After long, subsequent passages on the danger to public health posed by such routine use of antibiotics, he pulls the narrative into a circle with another vignette from the same farm. The farmer says if the science it there, he’ll change his practice. One is unsure that the world is so simple, but it neatly ties a bow on this news account.

Well done in both cases.

- Charlie Petit

For more than two years a dramatic conclusion from two researchers at the National Solar Observatory on Kitt Peak, with offices in Tucson, has bounced around smaller news outlets and, notably, among bloggers. After analyzing 20 years of data on the magnetic field strength in sunspots – revealed by a warping of OH spectra known as Zeeman splitting – astronomers Matthew Penn and William Livingston see a trend that could have dramatic impact on Earth. This includes a possible replay of the great cooling in the 1600s and early 1700s known as the Little Ice Age – blamed on a prolonged sunspot drought and slight overall dimming of the sun, the Maunder Minimum.

A new version of the paper gets a big boost from a small but influential science journalism publisher today – the AAAS‘s ScienceNow. Reporter Phil Berardelli doesn’t write it long, but long enough to get outside astronomers saying that the paper is legit. At issue, as he writes, is whether the extrapolation showing magnetic fields dropping in about 2015 below the minimum needed for sunspots reflects a very likely scenario. His hook is an update of the thesis, for an international virtual symposium, on line at the preprint site arXiv astro-ph.

This is a legitimate news topic. A decent chance that the Sun will moderate its overall output (which overall has positive correlation with sunspot number despite intuition that proliferation of big cool dark spots ought to dim a star), and thus counteract to some small or large extent the current warming driven by fossil carbon burning, merits full public airing. It sure would complicate efforts to get the world’s nations to drastically change their energy policies. A Maunder Minimum II could chill any chance for a carbon tax even if, when the minimum wanes, the climate-forcing rebound would cook us for sure. And anyway, ocean acidification would proceed apace.

However, a look at it must let readers know that Penn and Livingston’s work has been making the rounds for awhile. Examples include:

• NASA Science News – Tony Phillips (Sept. 2, 2009): Are Sunspots Disappearing? ; A blogsite within NASA gave it a measured look, and includes the opinion of one of the researchers involved, Penn, that he himself is betting that Sunspots return to their pattern of recent history. But this was a year ago. Maybe he’s shifted his bet?
• AGU EOS Journal – W. Livingston, M. Penn (July 28, 2009): Are Sunspots Different During This Solar Minimum?; The two scientists laid out their data, conclusions, and caveats in the AGU’s official newsletter and journal sent to all its members.
• Watts Up With That? – Anthony Watts (June 2, 2008): Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015″ ; One of the foremost bloggers in the global warming skeptics camp picked up on this thesis early. If scientists plausibly argue that a natural solar fluctuation could soon cool the Earth, one observes, it fosters (if not logically supports) belief among some skeptics that recently rising temps are also the doing of the sun, not the likes of the coal industry and its customers.
• Arizona Daily Star – Dan Sorenson (May 19, 2008): Sunspot cycle more dud than radiation flood ; Cited by Watts (previous bullet), and notable for reporting that AAAS’s Science rejected an early paper by Penn and Livingston. Also interesting here is that from the start the two scientists were stressing that their analysis is not a prediction, but a remark on where the trend would take us if it holds.

The new paper, from a quick read, sees the anemic rise in sunspot number during the first phases of the 11-year solar cycle’s current iteration as evidence that whatever the trend’s fate, it’s not showing signs of stopping now. As it says, “It is important to note that it is always risky to extrapolate linear trends; but the importance of the implications from making such an assumption justify its mention.” That’s a heavily nuanced, if perhaps true, sentence. A reporter who sits down with, or just spends some time on the phone with these two to ask how they regard their paper’s role in political and ideological debates over global warming might get a terrific story.

One prediction seems safe: this series of ever-updated papers will get more press.

Pic Source NASA (image taken today)

- Charlie Petit

Note: A balky broadband this morning got worse, slowing things badly, so today’s haul is pretty short. Back to normal tomorrow, one expects.

For years those of us with a morbid interest in nuclear explosions have noticed the occasional picture of what looks like an infant universe bursting from its ylem egg – but is actually an incandescent nuclear-test fireball caught a tiny fraction of a second after detonation. Today’s NYT Science Times lead story by William J. Broad, on the photographers who under top-security clearance documented US atmospheric tests from the 40s to the early 60s, has several of these spooky things and a lot more. The whole gallery is worth a look if you don’t object to being stupefied and distressed.

There is not much science here. But it is  a reminder of decades past when almost every big metro science writer had the nuclear arms race on his or her beat. Broad still does. This is a fascinating story of cold war ethos and a reminder how the nation, almost unanimously in the early years, regarded atomic weaponry.

Another reminder of the old days comes below the fold. Gardiner Harris writes a tribute to Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, a public servant of sublime order. She was almost solely responsible for keeping thalidomide from wide use in the US. His story forthrightly describes the caution and scientific scrupulousness she represents with what he describes as industry-friendly haste that today more typically characterizes the FDA. The piece is about trade-offs, in effect. Its tone makes it ammunition for those who would like to see the agency go slower and raise its standards of efficacy evidence,  even at the price of having few drugs that are really useful not start helping people  as quickly as they might.

The first page’s third article is about now, not then. Leslie Kaufman and Shaila Dewan provide an overdue long assessment from the Times of the Gulf oil spill’s short and long term environmental impact. Its hed is exactly right: Gulf May Avoid Direst Predictions After Oil Spill. In light of the Oilamageddon talk a few weeks after the gusher’s magnitude came clear and while BP and its contractors were striking out repeatedly in efforts to stop it, it is clear that the direst predictions are for sure out of the running. It could have been written “…is avoiding…” rather than “…May Avoid….”. But reality is also avoiding the rosiest predictions, with no certainty where in the middle it will wind up. The piece will be seen by some as premature comfort for BP. It implies with persuasive examples that the harm is nowhere near the best-guess predictions from many responsible observers. It has only perfunctory acknowledgment of recent evidence for thick layers of semi-emulsified, toxic petroleum resting upon sediments miles from the well. The resulting piece is a bit risky. My guess is that it will stand up over time.

Other headlines to note:

• Sean B. Carroll: Hybrids May Thrive Where Parents Fear to Tread ; The Wisconsin professor shows, again, how to write a newspaper story with no quotation marks. He IS an expert, after all. Illus is amazing – that zorse just looks to the intuition like a chimera, not a homogeneous blend via sexual sorting and combination. Weird (and it’s not fertile either). Some kind of incomplete imprinting?
• speaking of imprinting… Nicholas Wade: Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus ; Fascinating update on familiar discovery that genetic imprinting gives unequal weight, in some genes, to contributions from mother and father. That’s not news. Wade however provides a glimpse of the flood of new discovery to illustrate it.
• Nicholas Bakalar: Deadliest Catch, Found in Unlikely Waters. EXPOZAY! That Discovery Channel TV show mesmerizer does not even take viewers to the most dangerous fishing grounds in US waters. Bakalar digs out some stats, gets them displayed in a tidy graphic, to show that Bering Sea crab boats are dangerous, but not as much as Dungeness Crab fishing off Northern Californa, Groundfish off New England, or scallops off the eastern seaboard generally.

As usual, lots more - Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Robots may not have feelings, but at least they may soon have feeling, singular.  A combo of two papers in Nature Materials, press releases, and perhaps the slow day in other news over the weekend meant a lot of media attention to rubbery robot skin that has a sense of touch. Research teams at Northern California’s football rivals, Cal Berkeley and Stanford, reported two ways to make a flexible membrane that can feel things. One uses semiconductor nanowires (Oski wow wow and Go Bears!) and the other a polymer capacitor void grid thing (Is that a marching band or a doofus contest?).

One problem I have starts with the UC Berkeley press release and ends in the stories I read. The release provides as examples of the goodness of a sense of touch the ability to gently hold a wine glass, or egg, and when it sees a have stock pot, grip it like a stevedor. The release just means that, if the robot’s imaging system and processor tell it “egg” or “wineglass” its sense of touch permits fine adjustment of its grip toward gentle. But some stories make two errors: Taking a press releases examples as the best ones and, worse, scrambling them.

For instance, at the Wall Street Journal Jennifer Valentino-Devries writes it this way: “To tell the difference between how a wine glass feels and how a cast-iron skillet feels you need skin.” No, the point of the release’s explanation is that to handle such things properly, and to adjust the force of grip, it helps to have a sense of touch. But to know what kind of handling is appropriate takes eyes and a brain. If all the robot has is touch, the only way to tell the difference between a fragile wine glass and a steel goblet is to squeeze it till it either bends, or breaks, which means ooops. Ditto for a real egg versus one of those plastic eggs some people use at Easter to hide the bunnie’s chocolate gifts.

Valentino-Devries’s story is on the whole sound, including tidy explanation that the new technologies are still embryonic and, and that application to real robots, much less prosthetic limbs, is well off. Further, she reports both proposed technologies and contrasts them clearly.

A second problem is that some outlets report on just one of these twinned papers. It’s as though reporters got just one of the releases and didn’t check the journal itself. Who would do that?

A third weakness in many stories is to write this with no reference to a long history of research on precisely this field of touch-sensitive artificial skin.

Other stories: (with those reporting on just one of the papers noted).

• BBC – Jason Palmer: Sensitive touch for ‘robot skin’ ; Both papers, good technical data, an opinion from an outside source.
• HealthDay – Alan Mozes: Researchers Develop Touch-Sensitive ‘e-Skin” ; Only on the Berkeley paper.
• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen: Artificial “skin” materials can sense pressure ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Sensors and Sensibility: Flexible Pressure Detectors Could Innervate Artificial Skin ; Nice job,  Matson recognizes (unlike the press release) that the Stanford skin’s technology is best compared to a capacitor, not a battery.
• Wired News (via Reuters) – Tim Carmody : Pyramids, Nanowires Show Two Futures for Artificial Skin;
• Postmedia News (via Montreal Gazette) Carmen Chai: Engineers craft artificial skin for patients, robots ; Only on the Berkeley paper.
• MIT Technology Review – Katherine Bourzac: Electric Skin that Rivals the Real Thing ;
• *CORRECTION – Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: New Electric Skin Could Bring the Human Touch to Robots, Artificial Limbs ; An earlier and erroneous note in this space said PopSci did not give credit to one source it should have, the Stanford Press Release. It is linked in the body of its story. My apologies for not seeing it there and, on noting other sources acknowledged at the bottom, assuming the story was rewritten entirely from other press accounts. – Charlie Petit.
• Wired (UK) Mark Brown: Robotic e-skin can sense touch and pressure ; Only Berkeley paper, spells it Berkley.
• … plenty more.

As for that mash-up ref in the head: By the grace of Google, one learns a lot of irrelevant – sometimes irritating, sometimes delightful – stuff far from the meat of a query. And speaking of meat, my search turned up this:

• GATHER – Bruce Baker: Is the Lady Gaga ‘Meat Dress’ At the 2010 MTV VMAs the New Artificial Skin Fashion Touch? ; I’m unsure what this site Gather is, but it seems to include a community of bloggers. And this hit is no random misassociation for the news search term given to both Bing and Google, “robot skin.” Mr. Baker really does write, in alternating paragraphs like a sculpture made from found objects stacked together, on Lady Gaga’s proteinaceous but entirely non-epidermaceous attire of recent sensation, and the latest word on robot skin (Berkeley-only version, and he misspells Berkeley). This is like writing in back and forth fashion about marsh ecology and the woodwind section in the city orchestra because both involve reeds. A new journalism form? Or just nuts? You be the judge (No fair piling on the guy for saying the new robot skin is made from geranium. Unless his next topic is solid state electronics and potted plants).

Grist for the Mill:

Stanford U. Press Release ; UC Berkeley Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Today we compare three stories published in Chile and Argentina; about acupuncture, shamanic healing, and the limits of stem cells clinical applications. The acupuncture one uses only favorable sources explaining a vast list of benefits for women health. The stem cells one alerts about the increasing number of clinical centers that are offering treatments whose efficacy has not been scientifically proved and that might be unsafe. We argue that –at least in some Latin American press- these different levels of caution are very common when one reports about conventional or alternative medicine. It’s true that the critical attitude we usually get from the sources is very different. But being aware of that, we can’t report on acupuncture without a single reference to a scientific study, or at least the view of a counterpart from conventional medicine. In this sense, the story of shamanism explains the possible psychological benefits of this practice, but includes a quote from a WHO document, and explains also that a commercial neoshamanism sought by disenchanted people it’s growing, which distorts the real ancestral rituals.

Vamos a comparar tres artículos aparecidos el pasado fin de semana en secciones de ciencia; uno sobre beneficios de la acupuntura, otro sobre chamanismo curativo, y otro acerca de los límites de las células madre. Anticipo la conclusión del post: mientras que cuando reportamos sobre medicina convencional solemos advertir claramente de sus límites, en terapias alternativas tenemos tendencia a transmitir que sirven para todo. Y esto resulta por la actitud de las fuentes respectivas, y porque resulta difícil encontrar buenas referencias que –desde dentro del sector- mantengan una actitud crítica con la medicina alternativa y nos sirvan para contrastar la información. Si queremos hacer buen periodismo de ciencia, nuestro trabajo es buscarlas, junto con literatura científica siempre que sea posible.

En la sección de ciencia y tecnología de El Mercurio (Chile), en encontramos un texto de Lorena Guzmán y Paula Leighton en defensa de la acupuntura: “Acupuntura, la nueva aliada de las mujeres”. Decimos en defensa, porque sólo se utilizan fuentes favorables a esta terapia alternativa, que se propugna sirve para aliviar trastornos premenstruales, sequedad vaginal, reglas abundantes, ciclos irregulares…, e incluso infecciones, ayudar a que se produzcan contracciones en el parto, o tratamientos de infertilidad “tan efectivos como la fecundación in vitro” al “tonificar la esencia de los óvulos ayudando a que crezcan y salgan”. Aquí no vamos a juzgar la acupuntura ni la precisión de tales afirmaciones, pero conocedores de la controversia que la rodea, en una sección de ciencia no podemos reflejar sólo esta visión favorable sin contrastar con la una única fuente que refleja la posición de la medicina convencional. Incluso lo ideal si queremos hacer buen periodismo científico es -como ya hemos insistido algunas veces- ir más allá de las opiniones a favor o en contra y recurrir a la literatura científica para que confirme o desmienta lo que alguien nos pueda vender. Cierto que en algunos casos puede haber pocos estudios publicados, pero entonces como mínimo nos toca ser más cautelosos.

Esta cautela sí la encontramos en La Nación (Argentina) en un texto de Tesy de Blase sobre rituales chamánicos. Por lo pronto, empieza planteando que a estas ceremonias sanadoras acuden personas desencantadas con la psicología y medicina convencionales, y que comparten poco con la mirada racionalista occidental. El artículo también refleja las opiniones de los defensores de utilizar el chamanismo como terapia, pero se centra sólo en temas de bienestar psicológico, evita mencionar curas de enfermedades concretas, y cita un documento de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS). Lo hace para reforzar la idea de que la búsqueda de armonía, el cuidado integral del paciente y una visión holística de la salud tienen efectivamente consecuencias muy beneficiosas par alos individuos y pueden ser carencias en la manera como se practica la medicina occidental. Innegable. Pero al mismo tiempo advierte de la llegada de un neochamanismo comercial poco serio que desvirtúa las prácticas ancestrales.

Pero leamos ahora, también en La Nación, el extenso artículo de Fabiola Czubaj explicando qué se puede curar y qué no a día de hoy con las células madre. En realidad, con las células madre también se han creado expectativas desmesuradas y por Internet se pueden encontrar clínicas ofreciendo tratamientos a gran cantidad de patologías. Pero aquí la actitud de los propios investigadores –y del periodismo- es muy diferente: hay un constante filtro de los científicos implicados en advertir al público que queda mucha investigación por realizar y no deben dejarse llevar por promesas infundadas. El artículo deja muy claro que de momento las aplicaciones clínicas sin riesgo de estas células capaces de regenerar tejidos están limitadas a algunas enfermedades de la sangre, pero que “para las enfermedades del cerebro, el corazón, el riñón, el páncreas, el hígado, los músculos, el pulmón y otros órganos todavía no tenemos prueba alguna de que funcionarán”. El contraste es obvio. En general, cuando reportamos sobre medicina convencional marcamos unos límites muy estrictos, pero al hacerlo sobre terapias alternativas solemos transmitir que sirven para todo. No estaría mal encontrar un experto que reconociera los límites o abusos de sus compañeros. Pero no es sólo culpa nuestra; el artículo de Fabiola habla sobre un sitio online creado por la Sociedad Internacional de Investigación con Células Madre para –“dado el aumento de clínicas y médicos que están ofreciendo vía Internet tratamientos universales para curar enfermedades graves y que no cuentan con respaldo científico”-, informar a la comunidad y los profesionales sobre el consenso científico internacional. En el campo de las terapias alternativas es más difícil encontrar esta autocrítica. Pero sin duda existe, y es nuestra labor buscarla.

- Pere Estupinyà

For the past several years researchers from the US Geological Survey have reported throngs of walruses hauling up on Alaskan beaches – once an uncommon sight. But without much of the once-usual sea ice anywhere near shore, it appears, when it’s time to have a baby a mama walrus gotta do what she’s gotta do. See this post from this time last year. *Correction 1, thank you Seth B. They bore young in the spring. Now the animals must be near water shallow enough to reach bottom-dwelling  shellfish and other food. Sea ice has retreated too far off the continental shelf. Same thing now. This year’s news of walrus’s ability to improvise appeared first, it seems, in the Alaska Dispatch in Anchorage from Jill Burke Saturday. Her piece is a general one but with vivid reports from a community near one of the barrier islands where walruses set up an encampment. Villagers, she reports, have no complaints that it is easier to hunt walruses than usual. On the down side for them, some worry that any carcasses not cleaned up will attract polar bears, not particularly welcome near town. Burke also reports sensibly that whether this is the new normal for walruses, and what it means for the species’s ability to persist in a less icy Alaska, is not yet known. The plot of sea ice extent immediately above is from the Snow and Ice Data Ctr. site linked below in Grist. (*Correction 2: Early post had Burke’s byline wrong. Brain read “Jim Burke” not the correct Jill Burke) Other stories

:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Melting sea ice forces walruses ashore in Alaska.  Tens of thousands of them, he reports.
• Guardian (UK) Suzanne Goldenberg: Scientists investigate massive walruses haul-out in Alaska ; Godenberg provided the link, thank you very much, to the Alaska Dispatch report and to the USGS site below in Grist. *Corrected (three errors in one post! ’tis a new record, sigh. First version erroneously credited The Telegraph for this story).

Grist for the Mill:

USGS Walrus Research page.  Links to a terrific time lapse movie of satellite maps to local sea ice coverage over recent weeks, Nat’l Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis.

- Charlie Petit

Today’s AP wire carries a brief, with no byline: “Researchers: Thick coat of oil on Gulf sea floor.” Word is that AP is hustling out a long story on the lingering oil, one that has been in the works awhile. This bulletin was zipped together just to keep up with breaking news.  What is notable is that this shorty, while it hardly does the news justice, also provides the url to a University of Georgia researcher’s fascinating and detailed blog post on how the oil was discovered. Provision of that direct link to a scientist’s weblog is an excellent cross-platform, new media meets old media service to the public.

*UPDATE: AP‘s large story lands later in the day:

• Cain Burdeau, Seth Borenstein: Oil no longer on surface, but scientists dig into the dirt of Gulf floor and strike black gold ; Joye (see next graf) provides a good quote on her confidence, if not proof, this is from BP’s well: “It has to be a recent event. There’s still pieces of warm bodies there.” Another source tells AP’s men the oil “did not disappear. It sank.” That’s immediately followed by two other authorities’ surmise that this probably is not part of the big spill, and why they have doubts. This is a timely news top on an expansive feature.

The blog is from a professor of marine sciences, Samantha “Mandy” Joye. She has been a central figure in debate and discussion on the fate of the oil the that leaked from the Macondo Well before BP and its contractors finally bolted a decent set of valves on the wellhead and simply turned it off. It’s well written and dramatic.

She posted her blog a week ago. The essential news, one quickly discovers, broke Friday. At NPR its enterprising reporter Richard Harris described the discovery of flocculant petroleum muck on All Things Considered. Harris, one should remembers, is the man who first reported how drastically the oil company and federal officials initially under-estimated the size of the spill (in public – in private they seem to know perfectly well they were low-balling). He fleshes the news out well – there is no proof yet, he reports, that the stuff the Georgia professor reports is from the spill, but it does “suggest that a lot of (it) didn’t simply evaporate or dissipate into the water – it has settled to the seafloor.”

And yesterday, at ABC TV Matt Mutman and Kevin Dolak reported it similarly.

Gee. Maybe, as a news story, the big plume is not dead after all, not all polished off by microbes or weathered into ugly but fairly non-ecocidal tar balls.

In the meantime, reports AP and the New Orleans Times Picayune,  the failed blowout preventer has reached a Louisiana NASA facility aboard a barge. No word when it will be taken apart and engineers can say why it did not work.

- Charlie Petit

.... source http://tinyurl.com/2wbs7m8

The Charlotte Observer works pretty hard at covering science, and not just medicine. It gets a two-fer today, medicine and natural history, from “correspondent” which means free lance science writer Tyler Dukes (A bit of checking uncovers a Q&A with Dukes by blogger Bora Zivtovic, which in turn reveals his day job is at the web site for News 14 Carolina) . It is a worthy outtake on research with lowly, squishy sea squirts at a local university. They repair their own hearts. The story has its strengths, chiefly as an example of what a post last week mentioned as “up stream”  science journalism. It’s not heavy-duty analysis. But it is entirely about process. A federal, tax-money grant from NIH went to a woman at a local university for studying these squirts’ heart tissue and genetics. The question is whether ability to rebuild damaged heart muscle can be applied somehow in people. The story offers no hint of an answer. But a good scientist is working on it.

Furthermore, science grants with funny names are regular dart boards for well-meaning ignoramuses running for public office and eager to show they are alert to government waste. As hundreds of thousands of dollars to look at the innards of icky marine invertebrates  called sea squirts might elicit cheap laughs, it’s good to read an explanation for why such investment is sensible.

I might have skimmed through this piece without posting. But a declaration near its top raised my blood pressure. It’s not central to the story and is just plain wrong. He probably did not mean it literally and was just typing along thinking to make a point about interconnections among orders of life, but what Dukes says is that the sea squirt is “actually one of our most primitive ancestors.” What? Maybe something tunicate-like and sea squirtish back in the Cambrian, but surely not THESE sea squirts. I was still fussing over that hyperbolic misapprehension of phylogeny when up pops a holy grail. Grrrrr. Welcome as are routine references to evolution in Bible Belt-based publications, an editor should have said whoa. It would take just a few gentle adjustments to make better what it is already a very nice story.

Grist for the Mill: Winthrop University Press Release ; This says the grant application got the highest score of any received in its category at NIH. Congrats to the young assistant professor.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Reporters in Chile say psychologists have two focuses as they work with the trapped Chilean miners: they base advice on similar situations experienced on space and Antarctic, and they are observing and trying to learn as much as possible from this new situation. A bit speculatively, one reporter suggests that the genetic heterogeneity of Chilean population has prepared them to confront difficult situations, which may help the miners. Elsewhere: In Ecuador, two great environmental stories: the first describes scientific studies in the tropical rain forest and the vast plant biodiversity that has been cataloged. The second alerts that some protected areas are endangered due to lack of funding to take care of them. We see something similar in Bolivia, where a reporter summarizes the achievements of the nation’s science on the 50^th anniversary of its National Academy, while also complaining about the lack of government support for research.

Comentábamos hace unos días la oportunidad que supone el aislamiento de los 33 mineros chilenos para preparar notas de ciencia. Tanto sobre cómo los conocimientos ya existentes de sicólogos, fisiólogos o expertos de la NASA pueden ayudar en la difícil situación, como qué nuevas lecciones podrán extraer al analizar en detalle un evento tan único. La Tercera (Chile) publica un extenso reportaje de Marcelo Córdova “Las lecciones que dejará para la ciencia la convivencia de los 33 mineros a 700 metros de profundidad”, en el que encontramos información muy curiosa. Por ejemplo, en estadías extensas en la Antártica se ha definido el “síndrome del tercer cuarto”, según el cual los problemas mentales y de ánimo suelen empezar a intensificarse seriamente a partir de la mitad del período de permanencia. También nos resulta interesante la necesidad de moderar el contacto con familiares: si bien en cierta cantidad resulta tremendamente útil, los psicólogos ven que un exceso de comunicación con familiares puede ser contraproducente, porque evita una aceptación de la situación y genera más ansiedad. También se conoce que en las dinámicas de grupo las personalidades más extrovertidas son las que primero suelen sufrir cambios de ánimo problemáticos, y que no se debe bajar la guardia tras el rescate porque después del éxtasi inicial suelen aparecer depresiones y roces en el entorno familiar. Eso es aplicación de lo ya “conocido”, pero los expertos no esconden que su papel es también de observadores para sacar toda la información que puedan de tan inusual situación. No hay grandes conclusiones todavía, paro ya les empieza a sorprender el papel de líder y la organización de tareas que se está fraguando. Llegarán más datos sin duda.

Una información relacionada nos deja un podo dubitativos. En Mercurio (Chile), Pamela Elgueda Tapia asegura que la heterogeneidad genética de los mineros hará que  afronten y superen mejor la situación. La tesis -defendida por genetistas locales- es que la diversidad genética aportada por la rica mezcla de antepasados indígenas, europeos, africanos o asiáticos, genera mayor capacidad de adaptación a entornos cambiantes. Puede ser, aunque nos suene un poco especulativo y arriesgado trasladarlo a una situación tan concreta como esta. Esperemos también que la expresión “el gen minero” que aparece en el final del artículo no cuaje. De todas maneras, excelente manera de transmitir los estudios genéticos que científicos locales están realizando sobre la población chilena, donde –por ejemplo- se ve que las clases más altas tienen un 20% de genes indígenas y las más bajas un 56%. O que el 84% de los genes mitocondriales (se transmiten sólo por la madre) sean de origen indígena. Esto reflejan que eran mayoritariamente hombres los que llegaban a tierras chilenas y dejaban descendencia con mujeres nativas. Toda esta diversidad, según el artículo ofrece mayor capacidad de sobrevivir en condiciones extremas a los mineros. Esperemos que así sea.

Sin salir de Chile, en SciDev descubrimos por medio de María Elena Hurtado que… sorpresa! El gobierno chileno acaba de descubrir que su inversión en I+D es menor de lo que pensaba. Se ve que han utilizado un nuevo método para calcular el gasto, y ahora en lugar del 0.7 del PIB es el 0.4. Lo bueno es que esto generará un aumento de los presupuestos.

En El Universo (Ecuador), encontramos dos muy buenos textos sobre temas medioambientales. Alexandra Ávila explica de maravilla cómo los científicos trabajan en las parcelas de monitoreo del Parque Nacional Yasuní para entender la diversidad, dinámica y funcionamiento del bosque tropical. Según el artículo, en las 50 hectareas de la parcela ya se han identificado 1.200 clases de árboles y plantas; más especies -de árboles- que en Estados Unidos y Canadá juntos. Muy completo trabajo relatando la metodología seguida por los experimentadores sobre este tesoro de biodiversidad que, según la nota “áreas protegidas, debilitadas por recursos insuficientes”, están en peligro por financiación insuficiente. Buen trabajo de reivindicación, con abundantes datos.

Destacamos hoy también en el periódico boliviano La Razón, el texto de Miguel Vargas “Investigación made in Bolivia” que aprovecha el 50 aniversario de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias para repasar con orgullo qué ha aportado durante estas décadas la ciencia boliviana, pero mostrando disconformidad con la pobre apuesta del gobierno hacia la i+D “ante una sociedad que no es consciente de que la investigación es la punta de lanza del verdadero desarrollo”. Es decir; se requieren más recursos públicos y privados para la CyT. Pero atención; también para la difusión del conocimiento científico. Ni científicos ni comunicadores trabajan por voluntarismo. El tracker ha estado últimamente participando en diversas jornadas para discutir cómo mejorar el periodismo científico en la región. Y quedó harto de escuchar muchas buenas intenciones pero pocos proyectos concretos que tengan recursos ambiciosos asignados. Si las instituciones consideran tan importante el término de moda del public engagement with science (compromiso público con la ciencia), deben mostrar un apoyo más decidido. Y nosotros ser proactivos en solicitar lo que necesitamos. Continuaremos con estas reflexiones.

- Pere Estupinyà

In a story that has all the earmarks of diligent beat checking – including getting away from the desk – the AP‘s Marilynn Marchione appears to have an excloo on the wire this morning. She reports from Boston. There, at a meeting of the American Society for Microbiology that generally feeds her specialty of human medical news reporting, New York State Department of Health workers told colleagues about a potential treatment for sick bats. Common medical fungicides appear to put a big hurt on the fungus that causes white-nose syndrome. Scientists blame it for a precipitate decline in the last few years in brown bats, and some other species, across much of the nation’s East. Local extinction – extirpation – is feared.

A press release is not evident using the usual searches. If there is one, let us know. If not, this is a good example of enterprise reporting – not big time investigative spade work, but an example of nimbleness upon encountering information un-packaged but newsworthy. The story mentions no journal destined to carry the same report, or having already done so. Hence one is unsure if the work is peer reviewed. This could be the first that professional colleagues have heard of it. (Late addition: see comments for word that some of this has been reported before). At the same time, it is my experience that for stories that don’t come to one due to some press agent’s hustling, and is an exclusive, journalists’ doubts stemming from peer review issues tend to fade.

Marchione does report this as tentative, if hopeful, news. We learn that it’s welcome but doesn’t mean much without further research including some efforts at spraying caves, disinfecting people who go into them and head for another one, perhaps dousing bats directly which cannot be easy or cheap, or even somehow getting them to swallow their medicine (drug-toting moths and mosquitoes?), and so on. It may be hard to treat the bats and not wreak other environmental harm. As she writes, “now comes the difficult part.”

By the way, in today’s rip-off and post world that makes the old rip-and-read news operations at radio stations look like pikers, one finds what appears to be a rewritten version of the news with quotes and other elements identical to Marchione’s story. It is  making the rounds at an India-oriented service called MedGuru. No credit given to AP, wire services, or any other indication of source.

Other bat die-off news:

Two years ago we had a good deal of reporting on this ( previous post). A general check finds that the general issue is getting steady attention:

• McClatchy via Kansas City Star (sept 8 ) Pat Pape: Winged victories: Bat rescuers battle myths ; Feature vignette lede; A natural history primer on bats, and their white nose predicament. Fine overall but states as fact that the fungus drastically eats away wing tissue – a phenomenon some other stories treat as scarring but not utterly destructive. One is also unsure the further implication – that they lose the ability to fly because of gaps in their wings – is solid.
• Las Vegas Review-Journal – Keith Rogers (Sept 1): Dry Climate might save bats / Scientists watching for signs killer fungus moving into Nevada ;
• Charlotte Observer- T. Delene Beeland (Sept. 5) :  A plague stalks sleeping bats / White-nose syndrome has killed more than 1 million in North America with no end in sight ; Well-reported with local color, plus citation of a Science report last month on potential extinctions in much of eastern US.
• Pueblo Chieftain – Anthony A. Mestas (Aug 30): Caves closed to shield bats from fungal disease ;
• Charleston Gazette – Rick Steelhammer (Sept 1): Bat disease could prompt more scrutiny for mining permits ; A good report from a local workshop by West Va, US agencies.
• The Scientist – Jef Akst (Aug 5): Bats at risk of extinction ;
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas (Aug 5): ‘Scary Stuff’: Most Common U.S. Bat Headed to Extinction ;
• Bloomberg – Airelle Fridson (Jul24): Many West and Midwest caves, mines to close to fight bat disease ;

Grist for the Mill: USGS Nat’l Wildlife Health Center White-Nose Syndrome info page. Really interesting – including a report from Europe where bats appear to have natural resistance to the same fungus. Maybe someday we’ll import the European equivalents of little brown bats to take over mosquito duties in a malarial, encephalitis-ravaged US?

- Charlie Petit

Ecopolitology is an environmentally-oriented new media outlet in Fort Collins, Colorado (see its ‘about’ ). From the looks of one example it is providing old-fashioned journalism – nimble and multiply sourced and with a timely hook. The story is by Timothy B. Hurst, its editor and founder. It is about a big fire burning through a pine beetle-blasted lodgepole forest and a new report that addresses what seems a dumb question: Are forests full of dead, red-needled and crackly dry conifers any more likely to go up in flames than nice green ones?

Answer: looks like no.

I went looking for coverage of this news deliberately. A few days ago NASA’s Goddard Space Center put out a press release – linked in Grist below – with an eye-opening spot of news. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin teamed up with NASA LandSat imagery analysts to figure out whether western forests hit hard by beetles are any more likely to host wildfires than are green and presumably healthy tracts? Teams from the National Park Service and elsewhere helped get ground truth, calibrating the LandSat data. Result: hold that beetle-killed “tinderbox” talk. Dead forests, the researchers surmise now that the data make them think about it harder, drop needles fast and their flammable oils degrade.

Such effects seem to mean that dead stands of trees don’t support crown fires any better than live ones. Not worse, either, maybe, but the data say don’t blame the dead trees for the recent upsurges in wildfires (blaming them both, however, on warming climate is a good bet, the scientists say).

It is surprising that few outlets – I can’t find any others in mainstream media – covered this example of a scientific question that seems obvious until one does a study and gets an unexpected answer. Not only did NASA send it about directly, but it circulated on EurekAlert!. It is so counter-intuitive it merits wider attention.

Hurst took the NASA report, knitted it into news on the Fourmile Fire near Boulder, and got himself a story.

By the way, I mentioned this story and study to Mrs. Tracker this morning. She exclaimed of course there aren’t so many fires in those dead trees – who would want to go camping there? Hmmm. So, having not read the formal report, one does wonder if they considered the percentage of wildfires set by careless or pyromaniacal people and, if it’s significant, corrected for the different number of visitors to dead versus live forests.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release (text and well-done, embedded video) ;

- Charlie Petit

In Science today two Carnegie scientists at Stanford University report a thought experiment and what they calculated when they ran it. Which is, how much would CO2 rise if we let all the coal plants and cars and fossil-fueled whatnot live out their useful lives, but as they expire replace them with low or no-carbon machinery? They conclude the rise would be significant but well this side of certain catastrophe. It seems that people have not yet built the plants and other gear to double or triple or even more expand our air’s CO2. Ergo, there is still time to reconfigure the world’s economy into a low-carbon system without immediately abandoning  its current stuff.

It’s a little bit wonky, as such academic exercises will go right over the heads of most of the public not to mention many key lawmakers. And at heart it’s not so much different from standard IPCC projections that build in “business as usual” and other scenarios that lump both existing and projected emitters into the mixing bowl. Still, to isolate those factors seems instructive, with implications that the Stanford researchers say are a surprise. Several outlets tackle it as news.

At Time Magazine Bryan Walsh dives in sharply, calling it in his blog a “little good news/bad news on the climate and energy front.” The good news is described above. The bad news, he adds, is that the thought experiment won’t happen in the real world – there are few signs that any major nation is going to stop building new versions of the old, fossil-fuel-gobbling things. Thud. And good reporting.

The Christian Science Monitor‘s Pete Spotts reports it with much the same elements, but front loads with more of the report’s implied optimism, which in this context means not as pessimistic as are most analysts these days about chances of avoiding a dreadful rise in atmospheric carbon content. In the end, he assures readers that difficult times are ahead, still.

Other stories:

• Wired (via Reuters, and is this a new partnership?) – Lisa Grossman : Carbon Emissions Not at Doomsday Level … Yet ;
• National Geographic – Mason Inman: Warming Solution: Just Stop Cold? ; Nat’l Geo makes this breaking news part of its ongoing occasional series The Great Energy Challenge.
• Brisbane Times – Adam Morton: Limit on climate, and the catch.
• Scientific American – David Biello: How Much Global Warming Is Guaranteed Even If We Stopped Building Coal-Fired Power Plants Today? ; He too uses a good news / bad news form.

Grist for the Mill: Carnegie Institution Press Release ;

Other Climate Science, Bullpucky Division: The CEO of Ryanair, the no-frill airline based in Britain, has delivered a vulgar denunciation of global warming as a bunch of crap only he doesn’t say crap. This gets a ride in UK media:

• Independent – Martin Hickman: Global warming? It doesn’t exist, says Ryanair boss O’Leary ; Complete without any @#%!*&s interrupting the verbiage.
• Independent – Michael McCarthy: Why let the facts get in the way when your profits are at stake ; McCarthy may be picking on a mental midget here, but he  does a fine job on the excoriation.
• Daily Mail – Niall Firth: Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary says global warming doesn’t exist ; Firth makes no effort to find somebody to counter this fellow’s splutters. Actually – what would be the point? But this might have said his arguments are exceedingly familiar to a weary scientific establishment that has rebutted them each and every one many times, to no discernible effect on how often they get splattered about.
• Telegraph – James Dellingpole : Why from now on I’m flying Ryanair ; I can’t help it. It’s a dirty habit. I keep reading Dellingpole. It’s like watching some guy self-immolate but turn up the next day unscorched and ready to do it again, and again, and again. One thing he gets right here – the Independent newspaper went apoplectic over a non-event.
• Guardian (blog) Leo Hickman: Michael O’Leary: Global warming is ‘horseshit’ and other insights ; I couldn’t quite bring myself to sharing directly the dek with tracker readers (ie, f-bomb alert).

- Charlie Petit