(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Uruguay doesn’t produce nuclear power – yet. It is considering starting a nuclear program in 2030, and wants to hear from its people first. A group of 15 citizens from across the nation has spent 3 months studying pros and cons of nuclear power stations. The members met last weekend in the University of La Republica to get data and opinions from a vast group of experts. The panel’s conclusions were announced yesterday: “With the information we currently have, none of the jury’s members is in favor to this initiative. But it could be accepted if technological advances minimize the risk associated with the venture, or if local studies provide information that’s currently unavailable”. Uruguayan press has followed the citizen trial, and gives some information about where the country now gets its electricity. But we are still looking for any detailed story about the issue.

Uruguay no tiene plantas de producción de energía nuclear, pero está analizando la conveniencia o no de construirlas. Para este análisis, además de datos técnicos y políticos ha querido contar –y mucho- con la opinión de la ciudadanía. Para ello ha organizado un juicio ciudadano a la energía nuclear: un comité de 15 ciudadanos de diferentes regiones y entorno social lleva 3 meses documentándose sobre el tema, y el pasado sábado 16 y domingo 17 tuvo la oportunidad de escuchar los pros y contras que un comité de especialistas expusieron en el paraninfo de la Universidad de la República. Ayer lunes se hicieron públicas las conclusiones de este encuentro: El jurado popular no mostró un no rotundo, pero sí importantes reticencias sobre la conveniencia de que Uruguay inicie un plan nucleoeléctrico. Según 180, el medio que mejor seguimiento dio a las jornadas, “ninguno de los miembros del tribunal ciudadano se mostró a favor, y la aceptarían si los avances tecnológicos minimizan el riesgo”.

Más allá de la noticia sobre la decisión, es un tema de gran interés informativo, y del que esperamos cierta continuidad. La voluntad del gobierno ha sido transmitir información a la sociedad por medio del jurado popular, y escuchar su opinión. Los medios pueden ensanchar este debate.

El País (Uruguay) preparó una nota inicial sencilla: “Debates sobre energía solar, nuclear y sobre uso del agua”, pero de momento no vemos que le haya dado continuidad al asunto. Lo mismo hizo El Observador con “Energía nuclear, a debate”, o El Espectador con “Se comenzará a debatir sobre energía nuclear”. Ninguno de estos medios –de momento- ha ido más allá de los datos básicos de la noticia. Nos extraña un poco.

180, en cambio, ha realizado un muy buen trabajo. El domingo Emiliano Zecca presentaba el texto “Uruguay nuclear como alternativa” en el que entrevistaba a diferentes de los participantes en el encuentro, cuya misión era “apartarse de posturas ideológicas y discutir si la nuclear es una alternativa viable o no con argumentos”. Algo interesante que se entrevé en la nota, es que falta información económica sobre el costo de construir una nueva central nuclear. Nos cuesta pensar que esa información no exista en ningún sitio, pero sí resulta cierto que es uno de los factores decisivos. Los aspectos de seguridad y residuos ya los había comentado Emiliano Zecca en “Primer día de discusión nuclear”; una nota cortita pero con información y datos clave para dar inicio al debate. 180 presentaba una tercera nota con información sobre los miembros del jurado popular, y la cuarta ya con las conclusiones: 180 - “Tribunal Ciudadano advierte por riesgos de energía nuclear”.

Seguro que escucharemos más reacciones. Hoy ya veíamos en La Diaria una muy buena nota-resumen de Amanda Muñoz: “Por ahora no”. Esperamos algún reportaje amplio que nos informe de todo el proceso en su conjunto. Durante estos 3 días se ha barajado información muy buena que seguro a la sociedad uruguaya le gustaría conocer.

- Pere Estupinyà

NPR‘s Richard Knox has on the air a model of careful, not-quite-debunking but cautious consumer health care reporting. The text is an adequate summary, but the broadcast a much richer thing in atmosphere.

I do have a question on how Knox, a veteran news man, got this. Ideally, as he lives in (or near) Boston, and that’s where this is set, somebody he knew told him of the odd sonic therapy he or she had gotten over at Mass Gen for a sore foot. Then I could say this shows how the alert reporter can, aside from systematic beat checks, find plenty to do just by keeping eyes and ears open. Or perhaps this is from more routine tips.

Either way, his opening vignette is engaging. It describes how a shock wave therapy similar to the lithotripsy that knocks kidney and gall stones to smithereens may also, at a milder power setting, stimulate the plantar fascia running lengthwise just above the sole to heal itself from the painful and mysterious condition called, natch, plantar fasciitis. He follows this with some doubting, but not dismissive, comments from a few authorities. More diligent, he shares word of the bewildering variety of explanation and treatments for this painful condition. None, he reports, is confirmed as particularly useful.

There are no accusations or even implications of quackery or other fraud here. It is however a reminder that when patients are hurting and docs don’t have a certain cure or palliative at hand, they may offer other treatments that are plausible but not quite scientific. Caveat emptor.

Knox, by the way, even took the picture.

- Charlie Petit

I just read on an Iranian service, Press TV, an interesting, tiny story on archeology in Iran. It relates to an ancient castle ruin and possible discovery of the location of a semi-mythical observatory built by a famous Persian scholar named Khajeh Nasireddin Tousi. Of him, I had never heard. He worked in the 13th century, even before Tycho Brahe and Copernicus built their observatories in Europe.   This agency picked up much of it from Iran’s Fars News Agency‘s account. The Tracker has not previously seen anything for this site from Iran’s news agencies. Most of the science news from the nation is about nuclear programs that may or may not be devoted to civilian power production. So this is a break from the routine. (And I don’t know exactly how the new archeology squares with other web material saying we already know where his observatory was. But this newly found one might have been the model for the one tourists see?)

I also just read in the Palm Springs Desert Sun a tidy, if routine, story by Kathy Strong on the great stargazing to be had in Borrego Springs.

I saw these things because a tracker reader, Nathan Grimm, sent us a note saying thank you very much and won’t you please add a link to my site? I can’t do that. But we’ll take praise where we can get it, plus the specific thing he’s promoting is a nifty little astronomy widget (at the bottom of the page to which the link connects). It keeps a running tab on all sorts of news and postings on astronomy. While I cannot add it to the tracker site without a major shift of linking policy and layout here, it could be something for physical science writers with a yen for astronomy to add to their personal electronic nerve endings.

- Charlie Petit

I noticed this morning, upon glancing through NSF’s science360 ‘News Service’ that aggregates stories including a lot of news releases, a link to an Idaho National Lab press release by Sandra Chung. It describes a method to blend wood with living bacteria. The bugs make a form of plastic called PHA. Not only does some of the plastic mix loose into the material’s recycled cellulosic woody matrix, but the bacteria grow cheaply on waste. Their sturdy plasticky cell walls go into the resulting faux-lumber too.

Interesting, I thought. Clever for sure. Then uh oh. It said one big advantage of the stuff is that if one puts this material in a compost heap it will break right on down. Ditto for landfills, if a little slower.  By contrast it says here and I believe it, conventional wood and petroleum-based plastic composite lumber will just sit there for centuries without rotting (That’s a hint why such boards make good decking).

Hmmm. This is just opinion, but it seems sensible enough to me to be worth raising in a real news story: Shouldn’t one WANT plastics to last near forever in a landfill? It’s a landfill, not a future farm plot where you don’t want the plow to hit a two-by-eight plank. Landfills are places that someday may make a suitable underpinning for other construction, a park, a forest, whatever. There are rocks and old bricks down there doing nothing much, why not plastic too? Especially if a plastic is made in part from petrochemicals, isn’t it better to sequester it for a long time rather than having it rot? That releases its carbon to the air, maybe as methane which is worse in the short run than CO2, accelerating global warming that some of us still believe in as a bad thing no matter what the US Chamber of Commerce says is the really sound science to embrace.

Even if all this product’s plastic is bacterial and its carbon is derived from non-fossil sources, why turn it loose so soon along with all the carbon-rich stuff in the wood portion of the mix? We have a carbon emergency in our air. It’s getting worse all the time. Burying carbon compounds centuries or forever makes sense to me – one might get some marketable carbon credits for it. Biodegradable plastic bags that otherwise would float in the oceans and foul the innards of sea turtles is one thing, but biodegradable plastics in landfills is quite another.

Propelled by hopes of seeing if any journalistic outlets picked this up and how they handled it, a search  for such stories ensued. It turned up essentially zip.

Except for Physorg.com, a tech and science-focussed international outlet based mainly in the UK. It’s “about us” suggests it generates its own copy – 100 or so stories daily -  but all I recall seeing from it while hunting down news stories are verbatim press releases. Here is its version of this story, complete with Ms. Chung’s byline. A tag line at the bottom recognizes the story’s provenance.

That’s good enough for me as an excuse to beef about the trope that biodegradable plastics are necessarily green, eco-friendly, good things.  Press releases are increasingly a form of public communication and news writing.  Physorg.com claims to have significant readership. It is thus a central example of press releases going straight to the public rather than through the mastications of the dwindling gatekeepers of mass media. It is a prime example of this fairly recent rise of public relations writers ability to deliver their versions unfiltered to larger society. Sort of like ad writers.

I’ve no quarrel with how Ms. Chung, a “research communications fellow” which means an intern handled it (she’s a grad of the fine UC Santa Cruz science communications program). Far as I can tell she wrote nothing untrue. She had a job to do and that was to describe this proposed product’s potential, not quarrel when the researchers beamed about its biodegradability.

Independence of thought, including the questioning of sources’ info,  is what journalists (and I include some bloggers in that category) are supposed to do – and does not so often happen when none are in the loop.

For all that, the Idaho Lab’s work on this material remains fascinating. (Now if the lab researchers could come up with a super long lasting wood-plastic composite that is as light and rigid as good construction lumber, that’d be really something. The stuff at the lumber yards now is quite heavy and is so floppy it’s only good as decking or siding screwed into frames made of the real thing – or of metal, concrete, something like that.)

- Charlie Petit

This site, my own blogging specifically, tends to dwell on breaking news and herd journalism. For one thing, both are important lenses on science journalism, and second, have another appeal to the demands of this job. Search engines find them easily, and the stories tend to be short enough to skim through fast without spending all day on just one or two bylines worth.

Today I got a note from an editor, Celeste Bernard, at the magazine Conservation, one of a scad of magazines I’d like to read regularly but don’t get around to (and right over there is my pile of New Yorkers that I’m behind on as it is). Her message in essence: Hey! Look over here!

It is, of course, an advocacy magazine, editorially on the side of those who want to see much more aggressive policies to preserve examples of as many expressions of the natural world as possible. I wrote that sketch, not the magazine’s “about” explainer, but I think it’s fair. But as you will see (or may disagree with), the magazine goes well beyond merely congratulating tree-huggers for being on the side of the angels. It dares to suggest that being green at heart is not the same as being free of error. Some of these articles confront common misconceptions among greenies head-on. Now, that’s progressive thinking.

There are some good ones, with bylines many of us know very well. In fact, a confession – this is a self-referential post, in a way, because rushing along this morning I gravitated to stories by writers I happen to know, or at least have met. If I missed a few pals, sorry, just missed, that’s all. Here’s a quick is somewhat biased sampling:

• Carl Zimmer : Black is the New Green ; Complete with footnotes, a history of “biochar” and on how this ancient method of essentially making charcoal and then burying it to enrich the soil could be a substantial weapon against global warming. It may also be a boon for agricultural and wildland productivity. I’ve read about this before. This is a more complete take, complete with some paleohistory of the Amazon.
• Madeleine Nash – Up Up And Away ; Two things to note. Nash, a Time Magazine veteran, does a great job explaining how a standard trope on climate change and mountain “islands” may have missed the mark in declaring mountain pikas a species at immediate risk.
  Also important is that the magazine ran it, even though it may deprive  the conservation and global warming-worried crowd (eg, the magazine’s readers) of one of its talking points.
• Chris Mooney: We Have Met the Enemy – and It Isn’t Ignorance ; Ah. I knew it. This is why my brother in law, a terrific and kind fellow in most regards, is incapable of thinking that little ol’ mankind is able to change the climate of a whole planet. And he’s no fundamentalist, either. Just conservative, distrustful of gov’t programs, and sure that scientists have somehow managed to mislead themselves.
• Charles Alexander: Beyond an Unreasonable Doubt ; A partner, and contrast, to Mooneys’ piece one bullet up. It’s a book review. I’m pretty well convinced that, overall, the science writing press has not done much false-balance reporting on climate change for years now. But there’s a lot more to mass media than us. This article, and the book, dissect the forces that keep the debate over global warming so hot.
• Erik Vance - Genetically Modified Conservation: GMO, it says here, may be just the ticket (but maybe not if Monsanto or other big-ag companies are calling the shots). Vance, by the way, is in my town, Berkeley, an outdoorsman, a kayak-toting kind of fellow.
• Douglas Fox – Power on Sail: Ships with kites for propulsion – we’ve heard about those – but that also divert some of the energy from pushing the vessel along to turbine-generated electricity to make methanol fuel via hydrolysis. Holy Rube Goldberg, if not perpetual motion, but who knows? Fox is a San Francisco writer (and like Vance and Nash, Northern Calif Science Writers Assoc. regular).

Gotta go -have a great weekend. The entirety of Conservation Magazine for your own exploration is here.

Pic- biochar, source.

- Charlie Petit

The last few two weeks have brought a series of media reports on coral bleaching in the Hawaiian Islands, the western Caribbean, the eastern Caribbean, and Thailand, and off Texas, and lots of tropical places.

Latest first, and raising a slight puzzle, is from the AAAS’s ScienceNOW service – by the journos working at Science – this one from Eli Kintisch on record temperatures in the eastern Caribbean, worse than those of the record coral deaths five years ago, bolstered by some sources in the region who say yes it’s bad this year. His thermograph of the heat doesn’t quite square with his report that some of this years worst-looking corals are in the western Caribbean, near Panama. Dunno why the disconnect – the map does show high temps on the Pacific side but not Panama’s Caribbean shore so much.   I sent Eli a note asking how he got tipped to this story, and his answer suggests he tipped himself. A short while ago he reported on the generally hot 2010 we’ve had and some of the results it’s had on wild places, including corals. So this is a follow to his previous. That’s diligent beat work.

*UPDATE:

Thanks to the comment below, we see that a full month ago, at Scientific American News, David Biello reported – via a source that Kintisch also cites – that the higher than average warming in this part of the Caribbean has been evident since January, and that it was reaching the danger point as summer ended. The hed:  Corals Face Catastrophic Bleaching.

Other coral bleaching stories:

• MSNBC – Bleaching in Caribbean / Panama,part of Costa Rica see temperatures 7 degrees above average ;
• Manila Bulletin/dpa (German press agency?): Corals show New Spate of Bleaching ;
• Honolulu Star-Advertiser – Gary T. Kubota: Scientists see coral bleaching in the Northwestern Islands ;
• AP – Audrey McAvoy (from Honolulu): Remote Hawaii atoll corals suffer some bleaching ;
• NYTimes – Justin Gillis :Extreme Heat Bleaches Coral, and Threat is Seen ; From Thailand to Texas, it says here. That’s a false spectrum. Gillis skips the 2005 events that Kintisch uses as a standard for the Caribbean, and cites 1998 as the global benchmark for comparison, so far, of coral bleaching.

- Charlie Petit

A  squad of journalists (and more bloggers) perked up to a new report from an unlikely combine – the Brookings Institute, the American Enterprise Institute ( sorta lefty and righty, in order)  along with the future-dazzled techno-boosting Breakthrough Institute that is hard to peg but that calls itself “paradigm-shifting” and aimed at modernizing “liberal-progressive-green” politics.” The report is  called Post-Partisan  Power. It appears crafted about as well as possible to cut through the murk of climate denialism, “progressive” suspicion of private enterprise, and other ideological blinders to find common ground in clean energy and efficiency.

It’s never clear where science journalism’s borders are. Its  environmental side is forever drifting into policy issues, and energy writing is one big gemish of money, technology, politics, and invention. But clearly any drive to vastly expand public investment in new technologies will sweep science, technology, and environmental writers up in its wake – if it makes a wake.

Plus, I personally find this report an unusual one.

The nation’s premier A-list daily the NY Times covers it doubly – first in a curtain raiser before the Wednesday announcement, by David Leonhardt on Monday. It’s a column with a clear stance and is in large part a profile of one energy policy guru who believes   that the failed cap-and-trade bill was too politically ensnared to have amounted to much. It is a thoughtful intro to the Times’s use – on line at any rate – of an E&E Greenwire analysis and news story filed yesterday by Jenny Mandel. For one thing, Mandel’s sources tell her, the new post-partisan report has no bill to push in Congress because such a thing is so unlikely right now, so chances of the $15 to $25 billion more in government pump-priming on innovative research materializing in the next year or more are small. And, it says here, a carbon tax would be cheaper anyway as an economic suggestion to private industry to ease away from business as usual.

(And maybe learn how to make a profit with US-made solar panels, wind turbnes, and stuff like that before China and other countries collectively clean our clock).

Other stories:

• Bloomberg – Jim Snyder: U.S. Urged to Lift Energy Spending Sixfold, to $25 Billion; Drop Subsidies ; Oh good. It says here that the report explicitly “faults lawmakers and critics who dismiss climate change as a ‘United Nations-inspired conspiracy’ and instead advocate ‘drill-baby-drill’ as an energy strategy.
• The Economist (blog) Plan B ; Odd story – it takes off on Leonhardt’s NYT column but makes no mention of the new report.
• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh: Energy: An Attempt to Breakthrough the Bipartisan Policy Logjam ; Dunno if using “breakthrough” as a verb i the hed  is a slip, or deliberate tribute to the Breakthrough Institute. This piece links to prominent blogs to provide a glimpse of what that sphere has to say on the report. Good adjective – he calls the Californians at the Breakthrough Institute politically “unclassifiable.” These bits are updates on a fine, long, bloggy dissection, and sampling of other opinion, by Walsh on the collapse of climate legislation for now in the US.
• The Atlantic (Wire blog) Heather Horn: Can the Government Do with Clean Energy What It Did With the Internet? ;
  
• Politico.com – Robin Bravender: Think tanks’ new energy plan ;
• Grist Magazine – David Roberts: There is no one correct climate policy ; The hed seems to be a non-sequiter. After all if one somehow knew how to blend the fruits of several ideologies into the ideal climate policy, that’d be one correct climate policy. This is a column, and a preachy one at that. It is mostly sensible but is, at bottom, a plea for one correct climate policy: the David Roberts policy. I think we got a truth in labeling nit to pick here.

There is more reporting to be done, but not necessarily on the report itself as by political writers on its stab at post-partisan action. One wonders if, in either or both AEI or Brookings, there is blowback from backers and fans for having anything at all to do with the other.

Related News:

• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: Analysis: Cleantech opportunities return after dismal year ; Says private capital is already stepping up.
• Popular Mechanics – Lisa Merolla: 10 Wind Turbines That Push the Limits of Design ; A mix of private and some gov’t moneys, and a dollop of native ingenuity, produce a bunch of strange looking wind turbines.

Grist for the Mill:

Breakthrough Institute Press Release and summary of the report; AEI Post-Partisan Power Paper

- Charlie Petit

Correction 12/3/10: Knight Kiplinger of the Kiplinger Foundation wrote to make clear that the foundation is rooted in journalism (the Kiplinger business publications), making it a journalism organization. I’ve corrected the text below.

I think it was Charles Darwin who said, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Which brings to mind the National Press Foundation. Yesterday, I criticized the foundation for taking funding from Pfizer for its “all-expenses-paid” annual cancer conference for reporters.

This morning, I looked at the press foundation’s donors. In its 2009 annual report, the foundation said “nearly 300 journalists benefitted from our training in Washington, around the world, online and through webinars. And it boasted that “in one of the tumultuous years in the U.S. media business, we did all this without charging journalists a dime, with programs that received some of our highest evaluations ever.”

How did the National Press Foundation do it?

According to disclosures on its website, it raised about $800,000 in 2009, and just over $1 million the year before. “We are funded by more than 80 journalism organizations and journalists: concerned foundations, corporations and individuals: as well as our program Fund, Endowment Fund, and Annual Awards Dinner.” That sounds legit–until you take a look at how much the donors contributed.

The largest donors–listed in the “Chairman’s Circle,” with contributions of $100,000 or more–are the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And Pfizer.

In the $50,000-$99,999 category, we find the Global HIV Vaccine Initiative, a consortium of NGOs and others. And Merck.

Next ($20,000-$49,999), we find Gilead Sciences, Honda, Prudential, Allstate, and The Kiplinger Foundation. We’ve moved away from the pharmaceutical industry, but we are still deep in corporate territory.

Note that The Kiplinger Foundation is the only journalism organization yet to appear.

Continuing down the list, we see, among others, AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, PhRMA (the drug makers’ trade group), and, finally, our first journalism organizations, in the $10,000-$19,999 category: C-Span, CBS News, and Gannett.

When we get down to the small change, we see a few more journalism organizations, including The Washington Post, USA Today, and my former employer, The Associated Press–but they are far outnumbered by corporations and industry trade groups.

With donations listed only in broad categories–possibly modeled on government financial disclosure forms–it’s impossible to tally the pharmaceutical contributions. So I’m going to fudge it: Let’s put Pfizer’s contribution at $100,000, even though it could have been far more. In the next few categories, we’ll put contributors in the middle of their categories. For example, we’ll peg Merck, which gave $50,000 to $99,999, at $75,000. If we continue to do the same thing with Gilead, AstraZeneca, Bristol, PhRMA, and add them up, we get a total pharmaceutical contribution of $225,000–a substantial share of the press foundation’s budget. The contribution of journalism organizations is far smaller.

When the National Press Foundation says in its annual report that it is funded, in part, by “concerned corporations,” it’s right on the money. You can bet that Pfizer, Merck, and the others are concerned about what appears in the press!

And here was a surprise: The National Press Foundation says that The Evert Clark/Seth Payne Award, which recognizes young science writers, “will be presented by the Evert Clark Fund and the National Association of Science Writers, in conjunction with the National Press Foundation.” Further, it notes that the award will be handed out “during the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing in New Haven, CT.”

I help to organize that annual meeting, and as a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, I have handed the Clark/Payne award to recipients at previous meetings. It’s a sign of how complicated and inbred these financial relationships have become: I find myself indirectly connected to NPF–and, I suppose, indirectly connected to Pfizer’s funding.

The National Press Foundation’s next medical reporting program will cover Alzheimer’s disease, Dec. 5-8 in Washington, D.C.–and it’s underwritten by Pfizer.

You might wonder whether funders, such as Pfizer, have any say over who’s on the program. “None,” the press foundation says. “We have a strict set of guidelines…”

Does that make it O.K., then, to accept travel, food, and lodging to cover one of these programs?

Not unless you believe that Pfizer is giving the National Press Foundation $100,000 or more out of sheer civic-minded generosity, with no agenda whatsoever. Pfizer expects a return on that money–as it does on any investment it makes. Indeed, the law requires that Pfizer act in the interests of its shareholders. It cannot give away money without expecting something in return. And it hasn’t done that here, either. (As Chief Tracker Petit pointed out in a comment on my post yesterday, the problem isn’t covering these conferences; we go to corporate press conferences all the time. The problem is taking the money.)

The foundation is proud to say that it never takes a penny of government money. “We wholeheartedly support the idea that news organizations need to be totally independent of government of any kind,” it says. By saying so, the foundation underscores my point: The source of the money matters.

The National Press Foundation apparently feels strongly that the press should be totally independent of government of any kind–but not of corporations.

- Paul Raeburn

The ambitious factory for long-form conservation and science writing that is the non-profit Yale environment360 has a good track record for turning out hard-headed, hard-hitting pieces that explore issues more deeply than do most media.

And right now it has a piece out that is most of that, with a big caveat. Freelance writer Alex Salkever visited the National Ignition Facility at the Livermore National Lab, and wrote a piece under the hed: The Promise of Fusion: Energy Miracle or Mirage?

Stick ‘Ignition Facility’ in ksjtracker’s search function and you will see there have been many stories on the general topic that we’ve read in recent years. You will also see a recurring complaint. Salkever makes the same error as do many previous writers, but perhaps worse. He implies that NIF is potentially a giant boondoggle, a multi-billion dollar lump thrown down the same frustrating hole as previous billions spent on harnessing the reactions that power our sun for peaceful, pretty clean, and really limitless electricity here on Earth.

Oh, don’t forget, we already do “use” those reactions for thermonuclear weapons. NIF may be a boondoggle, it may work fine, but it’s primary justification within the administration, the Department of Energy, and in Congress that votes the money is not, NOT, fusion energy. It is for stockpile stewardship. That is, its brief moments of fusion – that ought to occur when blistering gouts of laser radiation converge on tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel – are meant mainly for use by weapons studies. They provide ways to check the ability of aging US H-bombs to detonate should the horrible day arrive when our leaders want them to do so. One can create conditions that the components of such things will need to endure. One can simply learn the kind of physics, first-hand, needed to tend such weaponry.

It is also true that fusion energy is a big motivator for the physicists on the job. They are dead serious about using the machine for non-classified work that could dramatically change how humanity makes electricity. But to ignore the prime reason that this money is being spent, and saying outright that it’s all for fusion energy, is an error. Right in the lead, he calls the big place “a monument to science’s enduring obsession with fusion.” No. Not when he means fusion energy.  It’s a monument to the Defense Department’s and many politicians’ enduring interest in maintaining a reliable arsenal of fusion weapons.

It’s a good story otherwise. All it would have taken to give it deep luster was a light rewrite – one graf – to get the facility’s priorities straight. Further, it’d be a better read if it noted the contrast between the practical, defense-related purposes for which NIF was built with the intoxicating dreams that keep many of its employees working so hard toward a clean, green energy future.

- Charlie Petit

It’ll be interesting to see how much coverage is given announcement tomorrow in Palo Alto, California, of a new literary science writing award from the PEN American Center, and specifically announced by prize namesake E. O. Wilson and also by actor Harrison Ford (! Didn’t know Mr. Ford is a fan of science writing, but it appears his passion for conservation led him to write a check to help get the ball rolling). Regardless which media cover it, news of a $10k science writing prize will spread fast. This is most welcome.

Learn more at the press release.

A first reaction to this is a vow to learn how to write books or New Yorker-caliber long pieces with plenty of truth, plot, arc, protagonist, crisis, resolution, triumph, defeat, mystery, redemption, rivalry, vengeance, forgiveness, melancholy, joy, awe, horror, a dash perhaps of sex and a cracker-jack profile of scientists doing science relevant to the secrets of life itself or the hidden gears of the universe (or both) while mentioning Einstein or Darwin (or, again, both) and don’t forget the need for more research. Just like the sainted Ed Wilson.

Of course a prize for such fancy science writing is unlikely to go to the sort of daily journalism cranked out by the kinds of formerly ink-stained and now twitter-distracted guys and gals whose work is the main focus of ksjtracker. But you go for it, compadres. Few prizes are aimed at recognizing the meat and potatoes of the trade. This new prize presumably, as its not called a journalism prize, welcomes submissions not only from professional reporters and writers but scientists or anybody else who, on the side, has a knack for inspired and sustained thematic phrase-making .

Y’know, anybody with the chops to win this prize could also be a contender for the $20k National Academy of Sciences Communications Award. That could add up to enough to buy a pretty nice electric car, or put solar panels all over the house and in the yard. Or be front money for one’s next book that no publisher will touch.

- Charlie Petit

Two posts down, we salute a small scoop from Richard A. Kerr at AAAS’s ScienceNOW. Here’s a bigger one. He was first out of the gate this week with word from Swiss astronomers that they can’t find in their data any sign of Gliese 581g. That’s the Goldilocks Planet, suitable for water and just 20 light years away, that two weeks ago brought great glory to the US-based team that, since 1995, has been the Swiss teams’ rival in the extrasolar, Doppler-method planet hunting game.

The planet made an enormously wide splash when announced. This site linked to more than two dozen different accounts, and left out many others. So if it goes poof like the baby bear’s porridge, what a fast bombing news story this is. Not that the game is done. The US team says it was careful and looked at more data than did their collegial competitors.  However it goes in the meantime, this is a story now with drama, rivalry, potential embarassment and redemption, lots of good angles.

Other outlets have followed Dick’s lead. I’ll update this tomorrow, as time is short for today, but here are a few:

• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Exoplanet Wars: “First Habitable World” May Not Exist ; That’s a little bit of strawmanship. Few said it IS a habitable world, only that it’s in the habitable zone. It takes more than that. But Exoplanet War may catch the tenor.

*UPDATES:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Existence of habitable exoplanet questioned ; Nice job, and rewarding to read carefully. Cowen treats each teams version with equal respect. He has an engaging discussion about eccentricity of orbits. Also: a telling quote from a Swiss-team man. We all know about disregarding implications from data if they are only two standard deviations from random. Or, if you can’t be more than 95 percent or so sure, don’t publish it as a solid conclusion. This Swiss source says his group calculates the chances of this being noise are “a few percent.” That’s rigor. That’s fine. Them’s the rules. That also means there’s a more than even chance the tiny correlations ARE signs of this planet. The tension builds….
• Atlantic Magazine/Atlanticwire blog – Alex Eichler: ‘Earth-Like Planet’ May Not Exist ; This headline also does some straw man embellishment to make refutation more dramatic. Article itself is a satisfying blend of bloggy comment, aggregation and citation of other pubs, and some reporting.
• Astrobiology Magazine – Leslie Mullen: Doubt Cast on Existence of Habitable Alien World ; As one expects of such a magazine as this, the writer calls the principles and some expert authorities, reviews the history and data succinctly, and leaves the issue open.

- Charlie Petit

A Pfizer cancer drug

If you cover cancer, you might be eager to attend what looks like a great conference: Cancer Issues 2010, the National Press Foundation’s “fourth, all-expenses-paid, educational program on cancer issues.”

From the NPF announcement:

Confirmed speakers include: Dr. Minetta Liu of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center on the CTC chip; Dr. Carol Taylor from Georgetown University Medical Center on end-of-life issues; veteran reporter Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post on how the new health-care law affects cancer care;  Dr. Aziza Shad of Georgetown on palliative care for children with cancer; Jeremy Moore, one of the nation’s premier communicators about science, on reporting from scientific journals; and Dr. Claudine Isaacs, Director of the Lombardi Clinical Breast Cancer Program. The fellowship will include participation in a half-day HPV vaccine workshop at the National Cancer Institute.

That’s a great line-up, and note that includes a Washington Post reporter, Ceci Connolly, along with Jeremy Moore, described as “one of the premier communicators about science.” (Update: Malcolm Ritter alerts me that Connolly has left the Post.)

One could learn a lot at this conference. Last year’s fellows reported that they loved it. And isn’t it nice that it’s “all expenses paid”? On the other hand, only 15 fellowships are available, so if you didn’t compete for one of them earlier, you’re probably too late.

In any case, it’s nice that journalism benefactors found the money to support this thing. Let’s see, who’s funding this?

Woops. The program, NPF tells us with perfect transparency, “is underwritten by Pfizer Inc.”

I found out about this from Gary Schwitzer, who sent me a direct message on Twitter with a link to his post on his Health News Review blog. When I clicked on the link and his post came up, steam poured out of my iMac. Schwitzer, incensed about this arrangement, quotes an Australian journalist and pharma watcher, Ray Moynihan, who says this practice is “like an infectious disease–and maybe we need some sort of treatment.”

Journalists who value their integrity and independence should stay far, far away from this conference. Do you want to write something good about a Pfizer drug some day, and have somebody say, “Well, yeah, you got that cushy Pfizer fellowship! No wonder you love Pfizer!”

If you’re so inclined, send a protest note to the National Press Foundation. Do we have to explain that a Pfizer conference can’t be a balanced, independent conference? Is there a subtle bias toward studies and researchers using Pfizer drugs, and away from those who are studying other companies’ drugs? Can you be certain there isn’t?

And how did Ceci Connolly get involved in this, and why did the Post let her do it? Would they allow a political reporter to speak at a conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation? (Update noted above: Connolly has left the Post.)

- Paul Raeburn