This is just synchronicity of no meaning, but somehow nothing but space news rose to attention this morning before time ran out (actually, SF Chronicle has a nice story of rare species like red foxes returning to the Sierra, but it’s behind a pay wall for now). Below you’ll see news bursts on dark matter, on sending astronauts one-way to Mars, and on separate discovery that one-way robots already there may see fresh signs of recent, very salty water.

The finale: news off a paper in today’s Science by two UC Berkeley researchers who now, even more confidently than people like them have said before, say that Earth-sized planets must be exceedingly common. It’s an extrapolation deduction. They haven’t seen many, if any, like us in orbit and mass, but the trend lines all point to a populations peak ahead of them as they push their instruments to see such minuscule stellar companions. So they say. Time’s short so I’ll just list as many as possible. Have a great weekend everybody.

Just one comment. Not much heavy news here. One of the authors at least, Cal’s famed planet hunter Geoff Marcy, has been arguing for years that the extrapolation of known planet populations down to Earth-mass objects has consistently implied there are a lot of them, and most are small.

Stories:

• USA Today ScienceFair – Elizabeth Wise: 23% of stars may have Earth-sized planets ;
• Washington Post – Marc Kaufman: Galaxy may have gobs of Earth-size planets ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Alien Earthlike worlds ‘like grains of sand’ say ‘wobble’ boffins ; That’s a new use of boffin. Sort of clever allusion to doppler method of detection too.
• BBC – Pallab Ghosh: Earth-sized worlds much more common than giant planets ;
• San Jose Mercury News – Lisa Krieger: Nearly 1 in 4 stars like the sun may support Earth-size planets ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Many Earth-like planets orbit sun-like stars ;
• Space.com via MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: How many alien Earths? More than expected ;
• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: How Many Earths?
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: We are not alone: One in four stars ‘may have Earth-like planets in orbit around them” ;
• Cosmos (Australia) Heather Catchpole: Earth-like planets common in outer space ;
• AAAS ScienceNow – Richard A. Kerr: No Lack of Exo-Earths Out There ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Other Earths? A new estimate raises the odds of finding them ;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA-JPL Press Release, UC Berkeley Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

About a week ago at Symmetry Magazine, the in-house pub of FermiLab and Stanford’s SLAC laboratory, blogger Rhianna Wisniewski reported a preprint paper making the on line rounds via the arXiv early-publishing site. Other media have since perked up.

The news is cool, and utterly arcane. , triggering other media to perk up. The spectrum of the signal fits what some expect from collisions between dark matter and the ordinary kind. This, aside from indirect evidence such as excess mass in galaxies and the gravitational lensing effects of things we cannot see, would be the most immediate indication yet of dark matter’s effects.

Stories:

• New Scientist – Rachel Courtland: Hints of lightweight dark matter particle found in space ; Courtlands tells it with the background info I for one needed to make sense of this news, especially how the mass inference works.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Revealing the galaxy’s dark side . Excess of gamma rays at Milky Way’s center may indicate universe’s missing mass ;
• Wired News – Dave Mosher: Signs of Destroyed Dark Matter Found in Milky Way’s Core ;’
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Has Dark Matter Finally Been Seen? Time Will Tell ;

Grist for the Mill: arXiv paper “Dark Matter Annihilation in The Galactic Center...” ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A few  main newspapers in Latin America have  science sections. They used to include such subsections as called “life”, “Tendencies” or “Society”. That’s fair, but we’ve found that sometimes there is a mix of stories that may confuse the reader over what comes from solid science and what does not. To be  specific, El Mercurio in Chile has a section called “Life, Science and Society”, that  uses to have really good scientific stories. But today, we found one that defends a therapy with drops of flower essence to treat stress in cats and birds, the fear of ferrets, and the aggressiveness of turtles. We would like not to find a story like this in any section of the newspaper, but even less in one that shares pages with real scientific information.

Tener una sección específica de ciencia en un periódico es una decisión con ventajas, y algún que otro inconveniente. Por una parte, aunque sea pequeña, otorga mayor entidad a los contenidos científicos, fuerza que estén presentes a diario en el periódico, contribuye a que se vaya formando periodistas especializados… pero también puede generar distancia en el lector no interesado, y dar la imagen de que la ciencia está apartada de la sociedad o la vida cotidiana. Frente a eso, algunos periódicos prefieren incorporar los contenidos científicos en secciones más amplias como “Vivir” (El Espectador – Colombia), “Sociedad” (El Universal – México), “Tendencias” (La Tercera – Chile), o “Aldea Global” (La Nación - Costa Rica), entre muchos otros ejemplos. En realidad, uno puede pensar que si los contenidos son los mismos, al final no resulta tan trascendente. Seguramente; pero hoy hemos visto un ejemplo que nos ha llevado a reflexionar.

El Mercurio (Chile) tiene una sección llamada “Vida, Ciencia y Tecnología” donde muy a menudo presenta excelentes notas científicas, tanto de ámbito internacional como local, con buenas infografías, y bien trabajadas por periodistas especializados. Pero ocurre algo: en ocasiones el lector no puede distinguir si una nota procede de una fuente científica o no. ¿resulta importante? Quizás. Hoy por ejemplo leemos el interesantísimo reportaje de Lorena Guzmán “El poder de la mente hace la diferencia entre un runner de élite y uno aficionado”. Tanto por el título, como por el nombre de la sección donde el texto está incluido, nos imaginamos que abordará algún nuevo estudio científico sobre los efectos en el organismo de mantener un estado mental determinado, o estadísticas comparando grupos de corredores aficionados vs experimentados….  pero no. Las fuentes son una corredora de maratones relatando su experiencia, y un psicólogo deportivo aportando su visión experta. Rigurosamente, no sería  información científica. ¿importa? No. Sí sería información de “Vida”, muy interesante y bien trabajada, existe la figura del especialista que sí asumimos que transmite sus conocimientos a partir de literatura científica previa, y en realidad, si alguien percibe la nota como información científica, no ocurre absolutamente nada.

Sin embargo, a pie de página encontramos la nota de Amalia Torres “La terapia floral también actúa en perros, aves y hurones”. En ella se asegura, ni más ni menos, que unas gotitas a base de flores pueden reducir el estrés de gatos y pájaros, el miedo de los hurones, y la agresividad de las tortugas. Qué sandez, por favor. Aquí, periodista y editor han fallado estrepitosamente. No querríamos ver este tipo de información en ningún apartado del diario, pero lo que nos atañe: menos en una sección titulada “ciencia”. Un gran número de personas no saben distinguir que estas elucubraciones de una “terapeuta” no tienen ninguna base científica. Pero por la sección donde se encuentra, así lo puede parecer. Desde luego, no era la intención ensañarnos con El Mercurio, y volvemos a reconocer las buenas notas científicas que muy a menudo presenta su sección. Pero nos ha hecho reflexionar sobre lo adecuado de mezclar informaciones de la vida con la ciencia.

- Pere Estupinyà

Down today’s list of posts is some Mars news, about water. Right here is a perfect storm of Mars News that has little to do with science and has little chance of reality, but it manages to push old timey space romance and sci-fi fueled imagination. Hence it went, as they say and is already a tiresome word: viral.

Pete Worden, former Air Force General (fixed from earlier version saying ex-astronaut, of which I knew better but didn’t pay attention to myself)  is director of the NASA Ames Research Center. He recently participated in a meeting of the imaginative Long Now Foundation, devoted to deep time and other profundities and energized by visionaries such as Stewart Brand and Ray Kurzweil. I’ve never been to one of their meetings but I bet they are stimulating and fun, if not perhaps consequential.

While there Worden mentioned that NASA has looked into one-way expeditions to Mars. It seems to me I’ve heard about this idea before. An agency could save money, time, fuel, and headaches if people going to Mars did not insist on being able to come back to show everybody their slides.

It was a perfect storm. A week or so ago a blogger, Amara D. Angelica, at the Kurzweil web site noted Worden’s remarks. At about the same time an article in the Journal of Cosmology, by an author there and by well-known writer and astronomer Paul Davies at Arizona State, described exactly the same kind of mission. See Grist, below, for link to entire Mars-related issue with many papers.

Thus, this month, there has arisen with hardly any organized press campaigns a monster news splash over speculation on nothing new. Even DARPA, if you believe these stories, is in on the act. Fox News ran a picture of Star Trek’s USS Enterprise. That’s appropriate.

Take a look:

• Wired – Tim Carmody: NASA Developing Tech to Reach and Colonize Other Worlds ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Could a Human Mars Mission Be Funded Commercially? : This was posted Oct 7, and Atkinson treated the one-way idea as old news for a feature. But she does have the wit to refer to publication of info “in the somewhat dubious Journal of Cosmology,” a construction which literally means the opposite of the clear implication: this journal’s editors ought to be MORE dubious.
• Fox News – John Brandon: Is NASA Covering Up the 100-Year Starship ; Wotta story. File it under fiction.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Billionaires wanted for starship plan ; Boyle, being a veteran of this beat, rightly turns from this news to insert assurance that these ideas are old hat.
• Atlantic Wire – Max Fisher: Should We Colonize Mars … One-Way? ;
• Wired Science UK ; Duncan Geere: The case for a one-way manned mission to Mars ;

Grist for the Mill:

Journal of Cosmology article To Boldly Go: A One-Way Mission .. (by the way, the whole issue is devoted to Mars colonization papers).

Washington St. Univ Press Release (via EurekAlert!)

- Charlie Petit

Not that anybody much will notice now. But last week for Science magazine, not the journal which sits between the same covers but in its  journalism news story segment up front, Richard Kerr wrote up, after some sleuthing, an excloo. He discovered that operators of a semi-autonomous robot on Mars think they see evidence that a watery, if very cold, fluid recently seeped through the soil and leached minerals here and there, chromotography style.  Ergo just maybe it’s still wet enough shallow enough to sustain any life left over from even wetter times when evolution may have had a chance to populate the place with something alive. Big maybe, but it’s an angle. The pic is a screen grab from the piece.

That’s a nice little scoop. Scoop – is it called that because when one digs for a story and finds it, it’s a scoop? Well, scooping  is what the machine did too. His robot was the now-defunct Phoenix lander that sat in one place near the Martian south pole and scraped and tested and pondered all the soil its shoveled robot arm could grab.

But this week just about the time that Kerr’s piece came off embargo with the rest of the mag-journal NASA itself blared its trumpets and probably blew him so to speak out of the water for any scoop credit. The space agency announced that operators of a semi-autonomous robot on Mars have the first direct compelling evidence for contemporary slushy dampness in Martian soil.  Except their robot in not Phoenix, but the Spirit Rover near the equator. This one got stuck some time ago in a sandy drift, spun its wheels for-freaking-ever, and took a lot of pictures in the course of following Earth’s orders to try to dig itself out. It is still there, now somnambulant for the winter. But experts scrutinizing the exposed soil say it looks as though something wet has soaked through it recently (which could mean the last few  or few thousand or tens of thousand years, but likely not tens of millions of them) and rearranged the salts and other chemicals in it.

Interesting is that Ray Arvidson, a planetary geologist at Washington University/ St. Louis was a principle in both analyses.

One has no idea whether NASA rushed out its own version and own locale -  for this rather iterative, incremental discovery from Mars – after learning about the one cooking at Science. Could just be coincidence.

In either case, it’s pretty close to a tie. Here are samples of coverage for NASA’s announcement:

• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: Sleeping Mars Rover Finds Evidence of Liquid Water ; Spirit, she adds, is now hibernating through a cold winter and may never reboot.
• Wired Science UK – Mark Brown: Trapped Mars Rover finds signs of recent water ; Hmmm. Do the editors of this organization’s departments talk?
• Telegraph (UK) Andrew Hough: NASA uncovers new ‘life on Mars’ evidence after rover got stuck in the mud ; No mud, next to no even indirect evidence of life, but what the ‘oly ‘ell, eh? Criminy but this is silly on top – even though in common hyperbolics-are-us Brit newspaper fashion it settles down as one reads on.
• Space.com via MSNBC – Mike Wall: Rover finds signs of buried Martian water ;
• CNET – Jennifer Guevin: Rover finds evidence of subsurface water on Mars ; This is the second hed in a row to stress buried water – the news is that they think it started at the surface and soaked in. Ms. Guevin’s story is fine, if brief.
• ITWire – William Atkins: Spirit indicates past snowmelt on Mars ; Now that, in headline land, is the ticket ;
• Astronomy Now – Keith Cooper: Mars’ water went underground ;
• Gizmodo – Kyle VanHemert: Stranded, Stubborn Mars Rover Actually Makes A Big Discovery ;
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Mars Rover Spirit Finds Evidence of Water ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: New Water-Related Discovery from Hibernating Spirit Rover ;

Several readers have urged me in the last week to take a look in the November issue of Scientific American and an article there by Michael Lemonick. His topic is Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climatologist. She’s been picking up enemies among climate change worriers lately, and friends among climate change skeptics. She did so by stopping to listen in civil fashion to deniers and their enablers who took issue with her papers – and in the process says she learned things useful to her handling of her data. She also does not hesitate to lambaste the IPCC and its allies for what she regards as scientific oversimplifications, pandering, and misleading public explanations of what is happening to the planet.

Obviously, I have now read it. It is a superb, thoughtful, and needed exploration of who Curry is and why she is making it so hard to see exactly whose side she is on – and why she may appear to be giving undeserved comfort to the foe.

Lemonick does – although way too late for my tastes -  explain her underlying opinions of global warming this way:

“…it is important to emphasize that nothing led her to question the science; she still has no doubt that the planet is warming, that human-generated greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, are in large part to blame, or that the plausible worst-case scenario could be catastrophic. She does not believe that the Climategate e-mails are evidence of fraud or that the IPCC is some kind of grand international conspiracy. What she does believes is that the mainstream climate science community has moved beyond the ivory tower into a type of fortress mentality, in which insiders can do no wrong and outsiders are forbidden entry.”

Curry does exasperate me a bit because SHE should be repeating this in her own words often. Lemonick, in writing this level-headed and insightful account performs a service.

Also, just today, Sci Am’s fine editor, Mariette DiChristina, put on line a reply to her magazine’s readers and bloggers who have hollered about the sympathetic coverage Curry got from Lemonick. Further, Mike himself has been moved to explain further his thoughts in Why I Wrote About Judith Curry, at the blogsite Climate Central.

Lemonick, in the piece and his blog post on it, skirts a truth that the public and lawmakers often get exactly backwards. It is that if one wants someone to enter an arena of argument and declare a list of things that are as true as bricks in a well-built wall, don’t ask a scientist. You see Congressional committees regularly exasperated by professors, summoned to give a scientific view of things, get so many maybes, error bar concessions, and other slippery talk they think they called in an imposter. Nope, that’s how science works – it runs on doubt, not faith. While it is the most reliable way to see what is probably true  it seldom produces anything that reads like the ten commandments.

This also gives me opportunity to generally acknowledge the increased readability, timeliness, and savvy that DeChristina is insisting upon in Scientific American. The pub has become home to some of the sharper science writing to be found in US media, with a deft mix of articles by researchers themselves, and more typically now, by professional writers. Here’s the page to the whole November issue.

- Charlie Petit

The AP’s Dina Cappiello put on the wire yesterday what looks like a sturdy bit of enterprise reporting. She also has a usage in it worth noting.

First, she uses an angle I don’t find in other accounts in recent weeks – although some reporters may have used it. She freshens readers’ awareness of EPA plans to start a public accounting of private sector emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, facility by facility. Her hook is that many companies are lobbying against it. They argue, if I paraphrase the story right, that if details of quantities and of the ingredients reacted or burned to make them are made public their competitors might guess what proprietary processes they use. And that, on its face, means they may have a valid if not persuasive reason (or excuse) for their opposition.

It’s a solid piece of news writing. It merits circulation in media with readers who follow such things.

Also worth noting is a noun she employs. Her lede mentions greenhouse gases as the things at issue. It immediately translates company concerns this way: they don’t want the public knowing exactly how much they pollute. That’s forthright, lumping CO2 with such pollutants as sulfur or nitrogen oxides, heavy metals, and PCBs.

Some have argued that CO2 is not pollution because we all emit it with every exhalation of breath, plants require it,  it’s a natural part of the air, and it is  necessary for life.  Which is so. My opinion: so?

After all, streams, river, and oceans all contain pee and poop, and always have contained it since the Cambrian explosion or earlier. They are natural and are necessary parts of biogeochemical cycles. Turtles, fish, herons, beavers, livestock, and occasionally little boys and girls do their business in the waterways through our towns and farms and always have. But a community that runs its untreated sewage into one is rightly guilty of pollution. It’s all a matter of quantity and baseline levels. So don’t squat in the creek. It may be natural but it is illegal and it is pollution. Some day, equally illegal may be to burn a lot of coal or gasoline and letting the smoke go straight into the sky.

- Charlie Petit

Es bien sabido que el altísimo coste de la Estación Espacial Internacional (ISS) da dolores de cabeza a más de uno. Es una inversión que tiene sentido a larguísimo plazo, porque lo que es a corto, parece estar lejos de compensar. Estas dudas sobre su financiamiento son tratadas en El País por Alicia Rivera en “Europa busca socios para pagar el uso de la Estación Espacial”. Desde Bruselas, Alicia ofrece u muy buen ejemplo de buen reportaje sobre política científica. Se adentra incluso en las turbulentas aguas de la relación entre investigación civil y militar, con el dilema de porqué la ESA es la única agencia que no aprovecha sus instrumentos orbitales para uso militar. Interesante la frase “Las demás potencias espaciales suelen hacer primero desarrollos militares y luego se transfieren al uso civil; en Europa hacemos el camino inverso“.

También el El País vemos gracias a Sandro Pozzi que con la enorme granja de paneles solares  que está construyendo EEUU (tendrán la potencia energética de una nuclear), arrebatará el primer puesto en energía termosolar que lideraba España. Excelente reportaje también, que compara la producción de energía solar en España, y analiza el estado es esta fuente de energía.

En El Mundo, detectamos desde hace unos días un creciente interés por temas medioambientales. Hoy en la portada de la sección de ciencia, vemos notas sobre la negativa de España a reducir la pesca de atún rojo, información sobre donaciones para salvar especies, caudal preocupante en el Amazonas, tesoro de especies en el Amazonas, protestas de Greenpeace en Andalucía, venta de bosques del gobierno británico, el texto de Pedro Cáceres sobre el estudio de Science según el cual un quinto de las estpecies de vertebrados están en peligro, y hasta el anuncio de un documental de Jane Godall. Excepto la de Pedro, de momento todas las notas son de agencias, pero demuestran que El Mundo percibe que la protección del medioambiente es una temática de importancia e interés creciente.

Público aborda el tema de la diplomacia científica con extenso artículo de Javier Fresán “Matemáticos sin fronteras”, en el que relata la experiencia del francés Pierre Cartier y otros matemáticos que cual ONG se embarcaron en la cruzada de expandir las matemáticas por el mundo. En tono curioso, y poco más, vemos el original texto de Javier Yanes sobre los estudios genéticos para entender cómo Ozzy Osbourne ha podido sobrevivir a la ingesta de varias botellas de coñac al día durante 40 años. Una mutación en el gen de la encima Alcohol Deshidrogenasa-4 tiene la clave!

- Pere Estupinyà

Next post down says “you gotta read this” and here’s another one of entirely different mood. At her “Wonderland” site at PLoS Blogs, Brooklyn-based, mostly biology and health science writer Emily Anthes reports, by example, that dry research journals can “hide incredible stories.” That’s as true as another tyranny of journalism that is addressed next post down by another member of the tribe.

It’s about the morning after the night before.  Plus serpent.

- Charlie Petit

You gotta read this. At his Dot Earth blog NYTimes opinion man, ex-reporter he says but he’s still crackerjack in my book,  Andy Revkin reports learning of a new nub to the problem of communicating climate change and the policy choices with which it charges us all. It’s broad topic is “newsroom tyrannies.” Here we read of one so unspoken and accepted most people in the news biz don’t even stop to think about it.

- Charlie Petit

I am indulging in a personal matter here, but partly professional. Yesterday I discovered something awful. A distant server, through which my email is automatically forwarded to my own email utility with its own spam filters, went rogue. More than half my emails for the last month,  including many sending comments or tips to ksjtracker,  had stacked up in that machine (at yahoo mail) in its spam file. Seems to have started weeks ago. I was getting some, just enough to not be suspicious right off. But hundreds were waylaid. The Yahoo!  intermediary didn’t used to do that with such ferocity. It stopped many important ones, some from sources saying they’d love to talk to me about a story – and I thought I’d been snubbed. I missed a cabinet secretary’s visit in town who I need to interview! Old friends, new enemies, family notes, all junked.

It’s cleaned out, I rescued the waifs, and turned off that wayside inn’s spam filter for my account. Please know that if you sent me something recently and got nothing in return it does not (necessarily) mean I meant it to be so.

- Charlie Petit

On one level, a front page story today in my local paper about the state’s many parks pushes buttons that might get nods of agreement from almost anybody who pays serious and sober attention to climate change.  The Chronicle‘s Kelly Zito has news of a study that, given projections of warming in California, says redwood groves may fade, the iconic falls of the Yosemite Valley shrivel, Joshua trees could retreat from ever-hotter deserts, and seashores fall back as the water rises.

That’s likely to be true, or close enough to be useful. However, this is not a report from inside the science academy. It is from an advocacy group, the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, in conjunction from another, the Natural Resources Defense Council. The former’s list of officers, at its website, doesn’t reveal many if any well-qualified scientists although there are many with experience in public policy and lobbying. The report’s technical pages do suggest a serious effort to harness established academic climate models in making projections.  In its acknowledgments it lists a lot of people working in conservation and parks who looked over the report in advance, but few of them appear to be academic-level scientists.

How hard could it have been to give the document to some professors or similar experts at UC Berkeley’s Energy & Resources program, or Stanford’s  Center for Conservation Biology, and asked for (and quoted) their opinions of the quality of the report? Each of those fine universities has many academic departments with professors who could weigh in on these issues. When one doesn’t get an outside opinion or two or three from serious scholars on a big partisan report like this and gives it front page play, one is playing slow pitch softball in a hardball world.

The Chronicle account reads more or less true to me. As  for those who need to be reached – and who harbor doubts about all the enviro and global warming talk they hear – this story won’t get through their filters at all.

Further quibbles – Calling the cause of global warming “a cauldron of heat-trapping pollution” is rhetorical overkill. And to follow a list header that refers to “startling predictions,” and then ticks off things that could happen, misuses the word prediction. “We could win” is not a prediction of  the San Francisco Giants’ fate in the series, it’s a hedged hint at the odds. “We’ll kick their butts” is a prediction.

Grist for the Mill: Rocky Mountain Climate Org Report ;

- Charlie Petit