...AAAS/Science/WashingtonPost

Reuters might better have blended two separate stories it has on the wire. They are too similar to expect many outlets to print both (to be sure, with on line reading, and the proliferation of systems to bring relevant material to a reader’s gaze, this is not the issue it once was):

• Science struggling to track destruction of nature ; Filed from London. I don’t see a byline, and below is a list of some other outlets covering a set of 16 reports on biodiversity, widening risk of mass extinction, and difficulty getting hard data. They are in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions.
• David Fogarty – Fifth of vertebrates face extinction: study ; Filed from Nagoya, Japan, and a meeting there of the Int’l Union for the Conservation of Nature. That first story listed mentions this meeting and the overlap is enormous – it would have been a good insert to this one. The news was released there, propelled by a US teleconference and multiple press releases,  reflecting two reports in this week’s Science.

The recent bad global economy, coupled with the dispiriting impact of so-called Climategate, emailgate, glaciergate, and so on have killed public and political appetite to do much about the overuse of Earth. But the science press, old line and new, has not given up on reporting what scientists are saying in major meetings, refereed journals, and all the rest. Reuters did good to handle them – separately or together – and these reports, esp. the one from Science and Nagoya, are getting plenty of attention elsewhere.

This is important. Important things are not always news, as in new. Haven’t we been hearing for  long time from experts that a great extinction event is unfolding, on our watch, of the scale of the KT and maybe even Permian? I’m sure I heard that theme 20 years ago in Rio at the Earth Summit. How is this news different?  In this case, what’s new is that conservation has measurable impact – but what’s remains most important is that extinction is moving fast anyway.

Other Stories on this week’s extinction and biodiversity news:

• Wall St Journal – Gautam Naik: A War Against Extinction ;
• AP -Malcolm Ritter: Study says conservation slowing animal extinctions ;
• Time Magazine (EcOcentric blog) Bryan Walsh: Wildife: Biodiversity Is Declining Fast – But It Would Be Even Worse Without Conservation Efforts ;
• Bloomberg – Rob Waters: Animals Face Extinction Threat as Conservation Efforts Lag, Scientists Say;
• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: One fifth of vertebrates in the grip of an ‘extinction crisis’ ;
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: Global extinction crisis looms, new study says ; That’s the Post’s rendition of the study’s map. One wonders why the US West Coast is an extinction hot spot. Don’t they know we have scads of tree huggers out here?
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Researchers assess extinction risks of vertebrates ; He starts with local focus, and works out to the larger mortality. A California Academy of Sciences press release
• BBC – Richard Black: More species slide to extinction ;
• PostMedia News (Canada) Margaret Munro: Conservation key to stopping global ‘extinction crisis’: Scientists ;
• LA Times – Eryn Brown: Grim news on animal extinction threat greeting Japan biodiversity summit ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Animals face extinction threat ; I mentioned higher that what’s important is not necessarily what’s new. Vergano handles that dichotomy directly and explicitly.
• Guardian (UK) Jonathan Watts: One-fifth of world’s back-boned animals face extinction, study warns ; Good for the Guardian – Watts filed from Nagoya.
• NatureNews – Joseph Milton: Conservation offers hope for biodiversity decline ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: Species slide to extinction: A fifth of world’s animals face oblivion ; Hmmppphhhht. The Mail’s headlines often have only loose connection to the news. The story makes clear that this study is about vertebrates, not all animals. Derbyshire handles the news quite well and at some length.
• … could go on for quite some length

Grist for the Mill:

IUCN Press Release (lots of links to resources), Cal. Acad. of Sciences Press Release ; Virginia Inst. of Marine Science Press Release ;  AAAS Science Paper Abstract (with scores of authors) ;

- Charlie Petit

In the biweekly Science News is a see-ya-later finale from its redoubtable Earth sciences reporter Sid Perkins. He tackles recent discoveries about the nature of some of nature’s most unusual storms. They are  convective towers of rain and lightning that work much like standard thunderstorms except that they have wildfires heating their bottoms rather than latent heat of condensing water vapor. They have the right name: Pyrocumulonimbus.

Perkins, as reported in the current issue of the Nat’l Assoc. of Science Writers newsletter, ScienceWriters, left DC and the magazine in late August. After ten years there he and his wife Deb moved to eastern Tennessee. He’s not native – he says he’s from western Tennessee.  He’s supervising construction of a new house on his wife’s family farm (hey, a little jot of private sector stimulus spending!) and freelancing. This feature story was, to employ an appropriate metaphor, hanging fire in the magazine’s queue till now.

It’s a fitting big-picture note on which to walk out of the door at SN. He reports that these storms have only recently been getting appreciation for their global meteorological impacts. Some of what weather people once blamed all on volcanoes is now recognized as often due to these things. They change the heat balance of things, cool the surface a bit while warming things up high, might have subtle pollution impacts, all sorts of things.That’s what it says here.

Sid’s still in the biz freelancing, including a regular gig writing bits for Nature Climate Change.

Pic source: (australiasevereweather.com)

- Charlie Petit

Many science reporters and  especially those with  general mass media are called on occasionally to write – or suggest themselves they do it – stories that are not so much science yarns as tales of how technical means get exotic, but workaday, things done. Henry Fountain has one today. He is among the better pure explainers of process, as seen in his reporting over the summer on the mechanics of stopping an out of control oil well. He gets the lead slot in the section, telling of an art conservator restoring some pieces for display, and that are made of things whose composition took heavy sleuthing with mass spectrometers and other fancy gear to figure out. It’s an engaging tale except …. call me a Philistine, but if it were up to me, the example piece on which he focusses (not the evocative one in the pic) would have been chucked in the trash.

Other notable headlines:

• Sean B. Carroll: How the King Cobra Maintains Its Reign ; The biologist science writer shows, again, how one can write a perfectly decent news story for the paper without a single direct quote from anybody. In this case, the topic is how a snake eats other poisonous snakes and gets bitten all the time without a tremor. And the mongoose still wins.
• David Tuller: Trying to Follow the Trail of Missing AIDS Patients ; Freelancer Tuller, in Kenya, hits the dusty road with a young man intent on getting HIV-positive patients back on their meds. (Personal aside:  years ago Tuller was a colleague at the SF Chronicle. It’s good to see his stuff. He is among the gentlest, most thoughtful, and most sincere people I’ve known).
• Nicholas Wade: Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher; That would be Marc Hauser at Harvard. He has his defenders. One should have seen this coming – much of the accusations of egregious error and fraud concerned  subjective interpretation of videotaped primate behavior, not data from instruments. Notable is one entirely subjective phrase in one somewhat off-topic quote – Harvard now has the “un-Larry administration,” and that’s not good in this source’s telling.
• Sandra Blakeslee :Serving Up Feathered Bait to Attract Ecosystem Data ; Now you’ll know how one manages to catch a hawk that, were you not there, would just fly on by, high in the sky. Many will envy her this assignment, a chance to meet some glamorous wild raptors up close and personal.

As usual, much more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Skimming through AP’s lineup today I almost skipped entirely a little item about NASA administrator Charles (Charlie more commonly)  Bolden Jr. visiting the center where China is planning to launch spaceships to take astronauts, or taikonauts if you prefer, to the Moon. One short graf stopped me:

Bolden left Thursday after a six-day visit. China has not commented on the visit and it wasn’t clear why Bolden’s statement was not released until Tuesday.

Naturally, to find out more, a visit ensued to the NASA Watch site that Keith Cowing has heroically manned for years now. As expected, Cowing posted on this, and doesn’t seem to know, either, exactly what’s happening but he’s pretty angry about it. (Speaking of Cowing and NASA Watch, one finds another yeasty post of his recently on Bill Nye the Science Guy, new exec. director of the Planetary Society, and his opinions of elderly astronauts who are sounding off on the Obama administration’s human exploration plans.)

Related Stories on Bolden’s Job Security:

• Houston Chronicle – Stewart M. Powell: Stormy skies for NASA’s chief / Signs of Bolden’s exile to the sidelines put his future in question ; Includes work of members of Congress looking squinty-eyed at Bolden’s China trip before he even left.
• Orlando Sentinel – Mark K. Matthews, Robert Block: Critics question Charlie Bolden’s focus on NASA’s new ‘vision’ ;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Administrator Statement on China Visit ;

- Charlie Petit

The AP‘s Matthew Daly filed yesterday a wide ranging story that somehow leaves out one central aspect of the news. But he put in another that – especially  if he thought on his own to find the fact – is brilliant.

The story is on decision by the Bureau of Land Management to okay the biggest solar energy installation ever on public land – the Blythe Solar Power Project that will get 10,000 acres of Mojave Desert and cover about 6,000 acres with its collectors.

We technically-minded readers do learn from this something about acreage, location, wildlife protection requirements, jobs, an enterprising passage on a recent spate of incompetence at BLM when it started leasing such land, the Interior Secretary’s happy remarks, the role of federal stimulus moneys, and other things that certainly belong in the account. But we get nothing about the installation itself. He reports that a German company’s enterprise  is behind it, but not whether it will have rings of mirrors around big solar power towers, a shiny sea of p.v. solar panels, maybe a glittering army of parabolic reflectors with stirling engines following the sun like mechanical daisies, or what. I looked it up. It’ll be a what: rank after rank of parabolic troughs heating some kind of working fluid to, in turn, flash water into steam and drive turbines hooked to dynamos. I love to use that old-fashioned word dynamo, by the way. Seems more hunky than generator.

The licensee’s press release, one notices, says this will be the WORLD’s largest single solar project so far. Take that, China! This seems to merit mention in the account.

Here’s the reason I wrote that one datum that the story has is brilliant: This and other projects getting a green light are the first ever significant permits for solar power on public land. Oh goody. But the same agency has, in the past 20 years, issued 74,000 oil and gas permits on its land. Bada-boom. Daly could have routinely cited the minor percentage of US electricity coming from solar. That may have been more rigorously informative. But it is not nearly as punchy and memorable as 74,000 leases for fossil fuel extraction. That’s a bunch of drill rigs and storage tanks.

Other stories (with asterisks* showing which report the parabolic troughs):

• *LA Times – Tiffany Hsu: Blythe Solar project in Riverside Country gets federal approval ;
• * (with caveat on the asterisk) SF Chronicle – Will Kane: Turtles last hurdle for huge Blythe Solar project ; Kane describes central solar power towers as the technology. I looked again at the company’s site. It’s not. It’s troughs. At least he tried to indicate how it’ll work. Kane does have useful info on how this fits the state’s renewable power portfolio, and mentions that oil company Chevron has a hand in things. But, ouch. You think the lede is on tortoises just to allow that neat turtle hurdles hed?
• *Reuters – Tom Doggett: U.S. approves world’s biggest solar power project ; This also reports the US loan guarantee deal. One wonders even though nobody seems to report on this: Is the announcement timed to let desperate Democrats who voted for stimulus money point out, just before elections, that stimulus money is about jobs, not for some kind of tea-party-fever imagined socialist agenda? (Late addition: check WSJournal piece two bullets down).
• Bloomberg – Todd White: Solar Millennium Jumps 17% After Approval to Build Largest Solar Plant ; Always a business angle. It’s the only angle in this teeny item.
• Wall St. Journal: Cassandra Sweet, Siobhan Hughes: Huge Solar-Plant Project Approved ; Ah ha. Two bullets up I wondered about this. Right in the lede it says the Obama team is using this to say renewable energy leads to jobs – and the piece prominently mentions federal grants and loan guarantees. Not sure to give this an asterisk for mentioning the technology or not. It has a video showing the troughs, but a still picture showing a bunch of mirrors aimed at a central power tower. I guess not. The story also explains that the permits may have been more deadline-driven – to qualify for tax credits – than election driven.
• * NPR (blog) Bill Chapell:U.S.  Approves Massive Solar Power Plant To Be Built On Public Land ; Hmmm. Anybody else bothered by use of “massive” to denote size? Is a dirigible massive? “Immense” has some of the same consonants and does the job more accurately. the story brings in notable commentary from an enviro group, the Natural Resources Defense Council. Such organizations have been made schizoid by projects that may combat climate change, but also may make things tougher on local wildlife.
• Energy Collective – Nathanael Baker: A New Solar Boom: U.S. Government Approves Largest Solar Project to Be Built on Public Land; I ignored a lot of bloggy and activist or industry newsletter type items. This is sharp and worth saluting even if it does say nothing about the hardware.

Final question: As these things heat an intermediate liquid, is there any prospect it will be able to store the stuff in giant insulated tanks and thus keep generating power after the sun goes down? Just wondering….

Grist for the Mill:

Solar Millennium AG Press Release ; Dept. of Interior Press Release ; NRDC Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) What a wonderful story in Ecuador, with so many angles to cover it. The National Park of Yasuní in the Ecuatorian Amazonian rainforest has more species of trees than US and Canada together. It has indigenous communities. It has scientists doing research. It has a huge diversity of birds, mammals and amphibians species. It has recognition as one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. But it has something else: a vast reservoir of oil under its surface. The avatar-like conflict is not new. A few oils wells have been already built in recent years. That caused deforestation in some areas or the reserve, brought more people to the rainforest, caused social instability in local communities, and endangered a number of important species. Now, the government of Ecuador is claiming for international help (money) to say no to the revenue from the oil, and to protectpart of the world’s cultural and biological diversity.

Second story: Cuban media announce that a local company has a homeopathic drug to treat cancer based on scorpion venom. The company assures that they have already treated 10.000 patients with cancer, and the improvements were clear. We haven’t found more details about these studies yet, but they surely deserve being investigated.

Interesantísimo el reportaje de Alexandra Ávila “Un futuro incierto para el área más diversa del país”, publicado en El Universo (Ecuador). En sólo 50 hectáreas de selva amazónica, la reserva natural de Yasuní tiene más especies de plantas que todo EEUU y Canadá juntos. Tiene una enorme diversidad de anfibios, pájaros, mamíferos y todo tipo de animales que la convierten en uno de los santuarios más biodiversos del mundo. Pero también tiene algo más: petróleo en su subsuelo. ¿habéis visto la película “Avatar”? la analogía con Yasuní es inevitable. Hace unos pocos años Yasuní sólo estaba habitada por científicos y comunidades locales como los Kichwa, Huaorani, Tagaeri y Taromenane, pero cuando se empezaron a explotar 10 pozos petrolíferos, la población aumentó drásticamente, se abrieron carreteras, tala indiscriminada, caza, y llegaron cambios culturales y sociales que desequilibraron a las comunidades locales. Queda más petróleo por extraer. En el dilema entre riqueza inmediata y protección de este paraíso natural, las autoridades piden ayuda internacional para dejar bajo tierra el petróleo, y que la balanza se decante hacia la conservación. La situación no es nueva, y el tracker no conoce bien la realidad de Yasuní. Por eso recomienda seguir leyendo el trabajo crítico de Alexandra, y otras notas que puedan aparecer.

Nos vamos a México, donde destacamos otro gran trabajo periodístico aparecido en Milenio (México). Lo firma Horacio Salazar “Genómica: la revolución que México no se debe perder”, y junto con “La medicina del futuro, predictiva y personal, ya está en Monterrey”, son dos documentadísimos textos sobre la situación de la medicina genómica en México, y un llamamiento a desarrollar esta ciencia (y tecnología) que tan presente en nuestras vidas será dentro de pocos años. La situación que el artículo sugiere revertir: “compañías como Genomi-k buscan problemas de salud en la población estudiada. Pero lo hacen con tecnología extranjera, con protocolos extranjeros, en laboratorios extranjeros”. Y no hablamos sólo de investigación, sino de unas pruebas genéticas que tarde o temprano se solicitaran en masa desde las consultas de los doctores. Esta medicina predictiva ya está en Monterrey, y potenciarla es una apuesta inteligente.

Promover desde los medios informativos la ciencia local es correcto, pero en ocasiones puede ser exagerado. En la agencia de noticias Prensa Latina leemos que Cuba sacará al mercado un medicamento homeopático contra el cáncer, basado en el veneno de escorpión. Lo más estridente: 10.000 pacientes oncológicos ya fueron tratados bajo su consentimiento, con “resultados positivos en la mejora de la calidad de vida”. ¿qué resultados? ¿dónde están publicados? ¿es el medicamento homeopático o no? ¿se trata de una gran noticia o una aberración? El cáncer no es un dolor de garganta, y un posible fármaco para su tratamiento no puede ser tratado con tanta ligereza. La noticia está siendo recogida por otras agencias de noticias como AFP, o medios como ABC “Cuba comercializará una terapia para tratar el cáncer con veneno de alacrán”, Terra, El Universal (Venezuela), o el Herald Tribune. En CubAhora (Cuba), Mayte María Jiménez firma la nota “Propiedades antitumorales en veneno de escorpión cubano” donde no habla de que sea un medicamento homeopático, y que vaya a comercializarse en breve. Reconoce que está en fase de estudio, y empieza su texto diciendo “El descubrimiento e investigación de cinco péptidos con propiedades antitumorales contenidos en el veneno del escorpión Rhopalurus junceus, una especie endémica de Cuba constituye una de las líneas de trabajo del grupo empresarial LABIOFAM, como parte del desarrollo de productos naturales en la terapia contra el cáncer”. Este enfoque es totalmente diferente. El texto de Mayte es más que correcto. Todavía querríamos tener más datos sobre el estudio clínico con 10.000 pacientes, pero comparar la nota de CubAhora con la de Prensa Latina es un buen ejercicio.

- Pere Estupinyà

Two papers in Nature Geoscience over the weekend, saying Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake early this year was not on the region’s largest fault as initially believed, got fairly wide coverage. The news is, quite naturally, that the nation thus cannot assume that for the time being risks of another major quake have fallen by very much. Most accounts are fairly brief.

(*UPDATE:

Do check the first comment. The Tracker failed to dig deep enough into recent coverage of this topic. I turns out one of the papers already received significant coverage a few months back after results were shared at an American Geophysical Union meeting in Brazil. So this news gets a double bounce. Science News’s Sid Perkins did it, as did BBC’s Victoria Gill. Wired picked up Sid’s story. So it got around some. But even if this week’s second wave of outlets saw that the story is in a sense stale, that’s no necessary reason to kill it. If it’s news to one’s audience, and is sufficiently instructive and interesting, it’ll do. And thank you Maria-Jose Vinas for letting us know. )

USA Today‘s Dan Vergano at the paper’s ScienceFair blog portrays the risk of another earthquake strike with a powerful, if only implied metaphor, saying that “..more seismic stress remains coiled in one of the island’s major faults.” That evokes both a tightly-wound spring, and a snake. Vergano also immediately dives into some seismology nomenclature, noting that the presumed actor was not the presumed one. Rather, according to the Purdue-led team, it was  “a north-dipping fault, called the Léogâne fault.” The upshot is that the elastic strain on other previously known and dangerous faults has not changed.

I do have a question. The Purdue release below does say its geologist said that because the original suspect fault is innocent, its danger has not changed. I’d have asked him, or the leader of the US Geological Survey team that wrote the other report,  exactly why, assuming that the built-up stress and strain of regional tectonic movement extends across broad areas, releasing one of the faults in the area might not remove stress from other nearby faults too? Just asking. The Purdue release simply says measurements around the original prime suspect show stress is roughly unchanged. I’d want to know more even if the answer would not fit into the relatively small space allotted to the story.

Other Stories:

• Miami Herald – Curtis Morgan: ‘Blind’ fault puts Haiti at new earthquake risk ; Story’s fine. The hed inverts things. The blind fault doesn’t provide new risk. As far as one can tell, it caused the quake and presumably itself therefore poses less risk now. But it failed to ease the OLD earthquake risk.
• Reuters – Julie Steenhuysen: Haiti May Be Primed for
  Another Quake ;
• AFP – Haiti fault capable of another big quake: study;

Grist for the Mill:

Purdue U. Press Release;

- Charlie Petit

On Friday AP’s Brian Skoloff filed an enterprising story gained by hitching a ride in a research submersible operated from a Greenpeace vessel. He went 1400 feet down and not far from the finally-totally-dead Macondo well that BP so famously ran until the rental rig exploded.

Included is a lively undersea video narrated by another AP employee. It is unclear  however why the voice-over says the corals can take millions of years to form. Not the individual coral heads, surely. No biggie, but what exactly takes millions of years? The story implies that it’s the reef “pinnacles” that take so long. So? If the living corals did get locally wiped out, does that mean it’s millions of years before they and their environmental services are back? That seems very implausible. Without explanation this particular iota of info is meaningless.

Aside from Skoloff’s resourcefulness in finding encouraging scenes of healthy corals and abundant phytoplankton to report with elan, and aside from this being just one reporter’s report from one small stretch of seabed, the story is notable for two additional if small reasons.

First, it cannot be permitted to pass without comment that this story comes via Greenpeace resources. To learn anything that comes even indirectly from such a crusading environmental organization and that does not paint a picture as bleak as plausibly possible of the impact of the oil industry on the environment is of interest. Skoloff, one can confidently assume, is a good journalist who wouldn’t let anybody outside AP’s editors tell him how to write his story. Ditto for the university scientists aboard the ship. At the same time, one guesses that this could easily have been a dive with no reporters on board. It’s not cheap to run those things and extra chairs are scarce. One can easily have expected only an activist’s point of view subsequently circulated via press release. So, good for Greenpeace.

Second, and a smaller issue, is to visit a phrase Skoloff employs in this story and that all science writers  have either used (including me), or had to work hard to avoid. He writes, “So far, it appears the area dodged a bullet, but more research is needed.” Oh. When is more not needed?  That particular phrase is so common it’s been used as a punch line to jokes about science news. It’s boilerplate. One might as well right yada yada yada. And it sounds so dry, like scientists are going to re-run their computers for another few hours. Why not write that researchers will have to remain vigilant for years, or something specific to the news such as people will need to check a lot more reefs and keep rechecking them?

- Charlie Petit

Finally an explanation why, if the world is warming up, bone-sapping winter cold snaps seem in an unscientific survey of my own memory to be getting more frequent.

The NYTimes‘s Andrew C. Revkin at his Dot Earth blog yesterday was among the first out of the gate on a new Arctic Report Card that NOAA posted on line.  It says – he says – that as the Arctic warms up the vortex of winds that tend to keep its wintry chill cooped up get weaker. And it’s still really cold up there, but now the refrigerator door is ajar and more of the gelid air can slosh down into Europe, Siberia, and North America.

*UPDATE 1:

Stephen Leahy, a freelancer and Inter Press Service correspondent, notes in his comment below he had the essence of this news back in June. He’s pretty much right about that, although when NOAA gives the report card its imprimatur that does mark a fresh turn in the story.

More notable is that he is among the relatively few enviro and climate change reporters who gets himself to many major meetings. This one he filed from Oslo.

It’s further worth reading his piece to note, at the website where he posted it in that link above, his recent one-man foray into Community Supported Journalism, to adopt his manner of capitalizing the term. When he doesn’t have an assignment paying his way, he asks his regular readers for donations to cover his costs, not to mention a part of his rent and general income. Contributions came from an international array of experts, not just a US crew. This is a sign of the times, although he concedes it has not yet meant big money. Some donors are sending him money – less than $5000 in all so far this year but that’s something. He also gets invitations from his readers, many of them international, to stay in their homes while on the road. He’s accepted several. What some people won’t do to keep their beat alive. It’s impressive, and chancy. Good luck, Mr. Leahy.

Original post continues:

This also might explain why Alaska was so relatively balmy last winter when the eastern US suffered periodic Arctic Clippers. Every time cold air broke out of the hyperboreal regions, warm air from the south surged up to replace it.  I guessed as much.

The NOAA report seems to be a regurgitation of info that’s been in wide circulation for a long time.  The gist – the old Arctic is gone, taken out by fading permafrost, thin ice, warm water, and an invasion of the Arctic Ocean by creatures of the south. Given however  the recent battering that scientific consensus on climate change has gotten in popular culture, it’s a good thing to see this report getting some attention. Also given that recent battering, one doubts the report will change the minds of many (see anon-science but pertinent story in NYTimes this week by John Broder: Climate Change Doubt Is Tea Party Article of Faith. )

More Arctic Report Card Stories:

• USA Today/ScienceFair blog – Dan Vergano: NOAA: Arctic Melting may point to future bad winters ;
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Warmer Arctic Probably Permanent, Scientists Say ;
• Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin: Arctic is warming, NOAA report says ;
• E&E ClimateWire via NYTimes – Lauren Morello: The Arctic Shifts to a New Climate Pattern in Which ‘Normal’ Becomes Obsolete ; Best hed of the bunch. Lucid description of ‘polar amplification.’

*UPDATE 2:

• See also World Policy Blog – Alun Anderson (Oct. 15) : The Great Melt: The Coming Transformation of the Arctic ; A long report on the same general topic. Anderson is former editor-in-chief of New Scientist. Vivid, dire turns of phrase here – such as warning that the Arctic is beginning a “long, slow, painful revenge” for the changes forced upon it, “a punishment that we humans are very bad at dealing with – spread over hundreds of years and almost completely unstoppable.” Gad. That doesn’t sound good. This is not a conventional, quick impressionistic blog-vent, but a well-polished essay with a clear, perhaps arguable and still disturbing, point of view.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release;  Arctic Report Card ;

- Charlie Petit

On October 9 last year a flood of news reports told of a great public disappointment in, or on, the Moon. The US LCROSS probe, as it pummeled a dark, exceedingly cold crater near the Moon’s south pole, failed to make a big and literally flashy explosion when its spent-booster-stage impacter rammed home, followed by the heavily-instrumented probe itself. Millions of people put binoculars on the spot, and nothin’. Put LCROSS on this site’s search space and see the initial progression of news last year, from giddy hopes to visible dud and on to first reports that it was a science success anyway as H2O and more lofted miles above the surface. Naked eyes saw nothing but LCROSS’s instruments got plenty.

Today’s cover story at Science comprises the main fruits of data analysis so far. Half a dozen technical reports by scores of authors say not only is there reasonably abundant ice in permanently-shadowed polar recesses where the sun never rises above surrounding heights, but other minerals as well. In Grist at the bottom of this post are press releases, including one from NASA proclaiming “NASA Missions Uncover the Moon’s Buried Treasures.” The ice, it says, appears to be there in near-pure grains, maybe whole shoals. There are other gases frozen to the regolith, including methane – a potential fuel.

It’s hard to quarrel with buried-treasure as news angle. It’s catchy, not too simplistically inaccurate, and its stirs conversation and longing. A NASA teleconference made things easier for reporters to scarf up quotes that they could hear for themselves.

At the Washington Post, to take one example, Marc Kaufman writes hyperbolically but permissibly enough for daily journalism, “Gazing at the moon will just never be the same.” Not only water to drink but fuel for lunar rockets and “a cache of familiar compounds” including methane, ammonia, mercury, and traces of sulfur and silver. Right off the bat, he has one mission scientist exulting over “a treasure chest of elements.”

Coverage is heavy.

More Stories:

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Moon Crater Contains Usable Water, NASA Says ; Wetter than the Sahara – a simile many reporters picked up.
• AP – Alicia Chang: Last year’s moonshot splashed up lots of water ;
• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik: Moon Not Only Has Water but Lots of It. Source says “It is really wet.” The Sahara comparo comes up again. Says it boosts the case for a manned lunar base. Remember when there was a rage to can “manned” from space travel lexicons, and use “crewed” or something else that doesn’t subtly deny equal footing to women? That seems to have faded.  The story’s actually pretty good – but it needn’t bother to say that the water is not an implication of lunar life. Good graphic.
• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: The Moon Hides Ice Where the Sun Don’t Shine ;
• Wired Science (UK) Mark Brown: Moon may hold enough water for human base ; Clearly, the US-arm of Wired did the better headline. Borwn’s story is shorter, with a more informal, easy-reading style than the Wired piece on bullet up.
• USA Today ScienceFair blog Dan Vergano : NASA: Lunar water in crater confirmed ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: LCROSS venture gave useful data, scientists say ; Chief scientists are at NASA Ames, so this is a local story for Perlman.
• TIME Mag – Michael Lemonick: Wetter That the Sahara! (On the Moon, That’s Good) ; Chatty blog, described historic context before getting to the news. It works.
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Enough Water on the Moon to Consider Space Station ; Yes indeed, more water by percent than in the Sahara. That’s a low bar for hydration.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Moon Crater Holds More than Just Water ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor : Silver found on Moon – and you thought it was made of cheese ; This seems pretty emphatic about silver, and the hed is backed by the story. The impression left by press material is that the data on silver are on the iffy side. I think there is a press law in the UK that frowns upon qualifiers.
• Register (UK) John Oates: Our Moon is west and welcoming, says excited NASA ; Appears to be entirely derived from NASA news release – to which Oates forthrightly provides a link.
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: How NASA’s Bold Moon Crash Almost Bombed ; This wins the prize for distinctive angle on a story most reporters all write roughly the same way. This is a gem that will be devoured by a few, devoted space wonks.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Water on the Moon and Much, Much More: Latest LCROSS Results ;
• LA Times – Amina Khan: Moon is wetter, chemically more complex than thought, NASA says ; Story’s fine, and this is the second recently-added name I’ve seen in two days on the roster of LATimes Science Writers. Yesterday’s post noted Eryn Brown’s story on a very distant galaxy.
• PBS Newshour – Jenny Marder: Moon Blast Reveals Lunar Surface Rich with Compounds ;
• Chemical & engineering News – Elizabeth K. Wilson: Moon Crater’s Icy Character;
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Lunar impact mission scooped up more than water ;
• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: Search for moon water yields surprises ;
• Providence Journal – Thomas J. Morgan: Silvery moon comes to light in a dark crater, and a Brown researcher sees it ; This says the evidence really is strong for silver. Perhaps I was too rough on Connor at the Independent, a few citations up.
• … could’ve done plenty more…

So much talk of lunar bases made easier,  implying that’s the same as easy (ie affordable). One cannot ignored, buts it is best reported with a voice of great reserve and qualification, if not skepticism. If we can’t yet develop a closed-system, self-reliant, solar-powered economy here on Earth where we have all the water we need plus air and temperate climates, how are we going to do that on the Moon? Living in Antarctica is hard, and costly enough. I don’t see many bases on the sea floor. On the moon – that’s a giant leap for sure. Not impossible, but not around the corner. If entrepreneurs can figure out a way to build hotels up there with a transport system too that’d be wonderful, as long as there are some kind of zoning and use regulations.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Press Release ; Brown U. Press Release ; U. Arizona Press Release ; UCLA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) SciDev reports (here in English) that a survey of El Tiempo subscribers (the biggest newspaper in Colombia), found them extremely satisfied with the science supplement that the Universidad Nacional of Colombia produces and regularly distribute as part of El Tiempo. The readers consider the information highly reliable, and say that their awareness of the scientific research done in the country has improved considerably. The tracker has checked the supplement,  UN Periódico. Although it only covers issues and sources related to the University that produces it, the stories are diverse and very well written. The tracker recalls posting on science reporters in El Espectador and El Colombiano, but never from El Tiempo yet. I’ve carefully reviewed El Tiempo. It seems to me that the scientific information its staff provides is quiet poor. I haven’t identified a single reporter that writes regularly about science. At a time when many countries in Latin America are preparing initiatives to improve the local science coverage, it is important to be clear: information produced by research centers can not substitute the work of science journalists. As a complement, UN Periódico is a good option. But if it reduces the quality of science stories from independent journalists, or gives a publisher an excuse not to employ science journalists directly at all, the net balance is for the worse.

En SciDev leemos un texto de Lisbeth Fog explicando que Universidades Colombianas incorporan suplementos de ciencia con sus investigaciones en periódicos de gran tirada. Analicemos con cuidado esta iniciativa, porque lo que en apariencia es una buena herramienta, puede tener consecuencias negativas.

Fijémonos en el caso más representativo: El suplemento UN Periódico de la Universidad Nacional, que se distribuye con el periódico de mayor tiraje del país: El Tiempo. Según informa la nota de Lisbeth, una encuesta reciente entre los suscriptores de El Tiempo revela altos índices de satisfacción entre los lectores y una considerable mejora en la imagen de la Universidad y la ciencia realizada en el país. Primera reacción: positiva. Leamos ahora el contenido de UN Periódico. En el número actual (pdf), entre piezas de diversas temáticas encontramos una muy elevada proporción de notas de ciencia, salud y medioambiente: Un muy buen reportaje de Jeinst Campo Rivera explicando que peces destinados a consumo humano de la bahía de buenaventura están contaminados con mercurio, una detallada explicación por David Calle de cómo se podría conseguir bioetanol a partir de residuos de banano, un algoritmo matemático desarrollado por la UN que reducirá el riesgo en la cirugía de Parkinson (Fanny Lucía Pedraza), una benevolente entrevista de Catalina Ávila Reyes al actual director de Conciencias sobre el estado de la ciencia y la tecnología en Colombia, reflexiones sobre el manejo del agua por empresas privadas, la importancia de la bioética ante un próximo congreso internacional… La verdad: muy diversa selección de temas, y francamente bien desarrollados. Sin obviar que es una revista cuya función es comunicar sin espíritu crítico las investigaciones de su universidad, segunda reacción: positiva.

Leamos ahora la sección de ciencia del periódico “El Tiempo”. Sorpresa: En el principal periódico de Colombia, encontramos información de agencias y después de mucho rastrear no identificamos un único periodista que regularmente firme notas de ciencia. En el tracker varias veces hemos citado –por ejemplo- a Pablo Correa de El Espectador , o a Ramiro Velásquez de El Colombiano. Pero es cierto que todavía no hemos conocido a un redactor científico en El Tiempo. ¿Qué significa esto? Si alguien puede llegar a pensar que la información elaborada por un gabinete de comunicación de una universidad puede suplir el trabajo informativo de un periodista independiente, que se olvide. Este no es de ninguna manera un modelo válido. Sería aberrante en información política, o deportiva, y también lo es en científica. El suplemento UN periódico está muy bien hecho, y como complemento, nos parece fantástico. Pero si su presencia implica cierta “sustitución” del trabajo periodístico, el balance final nos parece negativo.

Vemos algo tremendamente positivo en UN Periódico: la cantera de potenciales excelentes periodistas científicos que está construyendo. Pero en unos momentos en que varios países de la región están meditando estrategias para mejorar el periodismo científico y dar a conocer los resultados de sus investigaciones locales, nos parece muy importante señalar que éste no es el mejor modelo a seguir. Seamos todos concientes, que por muy objetivo que pretenda ser el trabajo de los redactores de UN periódico, la selección y el tratamiento de los temas continúa estando enmarcado dentro de la comunicación institucional. Podemos encontrar muchas otras maneras de motivar a El Tiempo a construir una sección o suplemento de ciencia elaborado por periodistas especializados; pero no dándole los contenidos sin ningún filtro.

- Pere Estupinyà

Farthest thing in space yet!  That’s a story many reporters can’t resist. It’s getting wide pickup.

The news: In Nature this week European and US astronomers report detecting, and measuring spectral line strength from, the farthest galaxy yet known to science. First spotted as a wisp of fuzz in the Hubble Space Telescope’s famous Ultra Deep Field photo that its Wide Field Camera 3 gathered, it got followup scrutiny in Chile with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. That machine’s spectrograph confirmed it’s being seen as it was just 600 million years after the Big Bang.

There is plenty of interesting science here. It includes the inference that this galaxy must have had a lot of neighbors at the time but dimmer and hence not visible. That era, by standard theory and data, was when a fog of gas was being cleared by the powerful radiations of the first generation of giant stars forming in the first galaxies. It’s called the epoch of reionization. For this galaxy’s light to still be coasting through space,  more fog-clearing must have occurred than can be blamed just on this one object’s light, X-rays, and other radiation. Ergo, merely seeing a galaxy such as this tells astronomers a lot about early cosmic evolution and the transparency of intergalactic space back then.

Much of that doesn’t get into news reports. Most distant galaxy is news enough for many outlets. But, many do tackle arcane details that take a long time to explain in full and that carry the risk of confusion if described in brief.  One example of the simpler approach is in the UK’s tabloid Sun, which is to be commended for covering such things as this at all, one supposes. The Mail’s illus is above right. Not bad – a lot flashier than what the ESO press release provides.

Other stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Astronomers say they’ve found oldest galaxy yet ; Has a hint of the inevitable doubts that a discovery like this will hold up. Skips (unless the AP client at the end of the link trimmed something out) the epoch of ionization aspect that has the astronomers themselves so excited.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Astronomer find oldest galaxy yet ; Always tricky, calling a distant cosmic thing the oldest anything when it may be a very early, youthful one. Would a picture of the first US President, at age 2,  be heralded as “Hisorians find oldest George Washington yet.” Or youngest? Fox does explain, explicitly, that this is old light revealing a then-young thing. She sort of bounces off the reionization angle, referring opaquely only to a haze of hydrogen gas and “a process called ionization that change the nature of the hydrogen.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Astronomers build on a Hubble find, report light from oldest galaxy ; Pete at least, after handling the superlative “farthest” which means the same as oldest except that we see it when it was among the youngest, dives right into the epoch of reionization (without using that term). He also lets a source introduce some caution – as in, it’s just a smudge, don’t treat as demonstrable fact the results of our efforts to interpret it.
• ABC OnLine (Australia) David Mark: Hubble reveals furthest galaxy yet ; Hmm. I think the word farthest is what’s in mind here. The story itself is fine.
• NPR – Astronomers May Have Found Oldest Galaxy ; A morning edition intro shorty, just enough to wake listeners up.
• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: Most Distant Galaxy Ever Confirmed ; Covers the bases very well, even names the spectrograph that got the vital data.
• Discover (Bad Astronomy) Phil Plait: Record-breaking galaxy found at the edge of the Universe; Ambiguous, but evocative, to call it the edge. Near the edge of time? Is a singularity an edge? Plait’s an astronomer, knows his stuff.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Scientists get glimpse of universe as it was 13 billion years ago ; It’s not clear whether Connor interviewed any of the scientists – I think he probably did. He surely was diligent in explaining the results and the theory of early universe into which they fit.
• Los Angeles Times – Eryn Brown: Far-off galaxy is found / Born just 500 million years after the Big Bang, the galaxy could help explain the ‘reionization’ of the universe ; Nice job. Looks like she called the Observatory of Paris man, another in Colorado, and got an outsider’s opinion too. Brown has been on the science beat for four months there – a rare newby in an old fashioned metro science writing slot. One presumes Karen Kaplan and Tom Maugh are still there along with various health writers. I get from Linked In that Brown was already a letters editor at LAT, was before that at Fortune, and is a Harvard history and lit. grad. Am guessing why she used a 500 million year point of universe age for this rather than everybody’s else’s 600m for the age of things as we’re seeing it now – presumably it was born some time before it emitted the light reaching us. Smart move.
• Space.com (via Fox) Charles Q. Choi: A Long Time Ago, and Far, Far Away: The Oldest Object Ever Seen in the Universe ; I guess Charles tumbled to a truth. The blobs on WMAP charts of cosmic background radiation are not quite objects in the sense of confined, distinct things. So maybe this is not just most distant galaxy but most distant anything. Solid story to back up the hed.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: New cosmic distance record-holder ; One of the few to tackle the hardcore  work that went into this discovery – some very difficult spectroscopy filled with potential ambiguity in which spectral line is which.
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Farthest-Away Galaxy Yet is Discovered By Team of European Astronomers ; Actually, Hubble astronomers discovered it. A European telescope provided the best data. the story is solid, with a dash of doppler effect, a tincture of reionization and hot, bright early stars.
• … I know I missed some. Good ones will be added – let us know via “suggest stories; of any such.

Grist for the Mill:

ESO Press Release ; U. of Bristol Press Release ; Observatory of Paris Press Release (more of a technical report, and thus pretty good grist) ;

- Charlie Petit

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