The big climate meetings are underway in Cancun, Mexico. Not as big as Copenhagen – perhaps they’ll do better merely because expectations are lower? – but big enough. I’ve been meaning to do an opening roundup, but the morning’s seem to go by faster and faster. Soon.

In the meantime, here’s related news to discuss. It has seemed to me that US, and UK, climate change reporting has been a bit muted lately, stunned by the vociferous campaign by the contrarian wing of politically-loaded and generally conservative science to declare global warming’s imminent peril an overheated creation of liberal imagination. But that could be me, feeling blue over recent turns of events.

Some outlets are of course remaining on course, reporting signs of danger as they arise. One ran over the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend at the nation’s front-line newspaper:

• NYTimes – Leslie Kaufman: Front-Line City in Virginia Tackles Rise in Sea ;

I read it when it ran, and thought it might have been better. Yesterday, the National Assoc. of Science Writers email-borne discussion list, NASW-talk, reminded me of it. Kaufman’s story is in essence accurate, and vivid. A shoreline region is facing big and growing problems as tides run higher, ground water rises, and planning agencies wonder what to do about a geography changing under its feet.

In the fourth paragraph, it says tidal flooding as sea levels rise is a problem all along the East Coast and one that “many climate scientists link to global warming.” Uh huh, do say. But worsening things for the city of Norfolk is that it was built on marshy and that is compacting, and furthermore the whole edge of the continent there is subsiding, adding up to (including rising sea level worldwide as the seas warm and glaciers melt) to a sea level 14.5 inches higher compared to local landmarks than in 1930.

Talk about failure to isolate the important variable!  NASW-talk does not, far as I know, link directly for all to read without joining up (info on that here.) But a short discussion string there was not kind to Kaufman’s story. If it had been more explicit in explaining how much of that 14.5 inches is sea level rise, and how much is land level sink, it would be okay. But it doesn’t do so.

It includes a quote from one local resident, Jim Schultz, a science and technology writer, saying “No one who has a house here is a skeptic.”

As one contributor to NASW-talk, Massachusetts freelancer Richard Robinson posted, “I read that and thought the quote was a complete non-sequitur – their main problem is not sea level rising, but shore level sinking. Not a climate change issue at all.”  Another NASW-talk participant, Tennessee writer Elise LeQuire, opined “I also just noiticed in re-reading… the author used a science writer, rather than a climate scientist, as a source, further undermining the credibility of the article….. no wonder skeptics tune out.”

That last poke at her own trade seems unfair. Quotes from local residents are common ingredients in stories such as this. Why being a science writer makes one less credible than average is hard to fathom. But the broader point of criticism appears valid.

I would not condemn Kaufman’s story in its entirety at all. An editor should have stepped in (or maybe did and is the responsible party?) and asked for clearer demarcation of the multiple causes for Norfolk’s predicament, and better explanation why it serves as a model of what will be happening all over the place soon.

But the story and reaction to it do provide me with further motive, real soon, maybe tomorrow, to burrow through coverage of and in some cases from Cancun.

- Charlie Petit

The November Issue of Wired has what is surely among its most unforgettable covers. The topic itself is notable but not only itself but also the outlet giving it play. Writer Sharon Begley, known best for her wordsmithing at Newsweek and at the Wall Street Journal, gets a health sciences story to lead this tech-heavy, gadget-loving magazine. She also now has her byline on the left breast of what one can only assume will be forever known as Wired’s cleavage issue. For all that, the David Slijper photo manages to show a healthy young woman’s southernmost decolletage while being about as non-titillating as possible. Is Begley the only journalist to have written this particular topic up at length? It is good news and for now mostly about breast reconstruction. But, the report tells us that all sorts of re-purposed cells for other organ repairs should follow.

Fat – in the instances described here taken from the waistline – goes through a centrifuge-packing machine to terrifically increase its proportion of adipose stem cells. When reinjected into the same woman, they form within days or weeks a sort of  lipoma, a permanent new blob of living fat that triggers growth into itself by blood vessels. Just injecting fat as it comes out of the liposuction machine, it says here, doesn’t do the job. But with the stem cell trickery Begley describes, surgeons (if they have any sculptural knack) can fill in the divots of lumpectomies and other deformities in breasts with the woman’s own tissue and with a elasticity fully natural. It also, of course, provides a way to modestly enlarge healthy breasts – with applications already underway and mainly in Japan. Begley recounts the research thus far with a firm narrative and eye for arresting anecdote.

The story makes clear that breasts are just the start, and for a singular reason. Women, physiologically, don’t need breasts. That means the FDA has a lower efficacy bar for approving this technique to fix them up. A screw-up is unlikely to be fatal. But women care about breasts, a lot, and there is money to be made working on them – money that can fund further research. Next may come ways to inject fat cells and a potent load of their stem cells elsewhere to similarly trigger fast vascular growth and revive other kinds of tissue – like post-infarct hearts.  Begley puts in, near the end and it might have been better closer to the top, that fishy-looking outfits are also moving into the field. Some are making extreme claims, skirting close to scam territory. There also is worry that anything that promotes blood vessel growth into new tissue might not be a good idea for someone who has had cancer and may still have a few hungry, tiny tumors. But  it’s good reporting. It has Begley’s usual lively style. The technique, she writes, could provide tissue engineered assistance to “more organs than you find in a French butcher shop.” Elsewhere she noted that on the mammoplasty frontier, the method demands delicacy – “…you don’t take a big syringe full of the stuff from the Celution machine and cram it into the breast as if you were filling a cannoli.” Duly noted.

Meanwhile on the tissue engineering front, two other recent stories provide careful look at this center of rapid innovation by healthcare science. I’m sure there are more such stories out there. Send us some tips and I may be able to add to these.

Other stories:

• AP – Malcolm Ritter: Scientists trick cells into switching identities ; This story provides among the better news reports on recent ability to create new kinds of tissue by starting with a different cell type – but skipping any reversion of the starter to a stem cell stage. It’s called direct conversion. Ritter has some history – the method has been in the news for two years or so – and moves it ahead. It also has unknowns and hurdles. One has to think Ritter’s heart leaped when he heard a source say this: “When we make a duck look like a cat, it may look like a cat and meow, but whether it still has feathers is an issue.” Dunno what that means exactly, but it’s the kind of short laugh that gets readers’ brains relax, take a second, and digest what they’ve been absorbing.
• NYTimes – Gina Kolata : Glimpsing a Scientific Future as Fields Heat Up ; This is from a future-oriented Science Times, November 8, but merits re-mention here. Kolata, in making a  point about the hazards of prediction, especially in print, describes recent rapid progress of the sort Ritter is now reporting (in a story he was working on before Kolata’s appeared).

- Charlie Petit

A book review leads the section. It’s a picture book by a grad student in neuroscience, and the Times’s writerly doctor on-call, Abigail Zuger, M.D., writes it up in style that persuades readers – me, anyway – that the book is well worth consideration. It’s shopping season after all, and coffee tables have needs. It’s also a bit frustrating, this article is. The book takes advantage of the remarkable ways that microscopists and radiologists and such are able, thanks to selective flourescent tags, dyes, and presumably some digitizing artistry, to turn the brownish gray floop that is brain tissue into stunning riots of color and delicacy. But Zuger’s prose describes a different selection of arresting images than the ones that run with the story. The print edition’s captions don’t say what we’re looking at. What is that array of ivory-hued nerve axons and ganglia, what’s the brown membrane they’re splayed across, what’s the green moss poking through? No clue.  Go on line though,it is all explained. Turns out, that pic I mentioned is of neurons cultured in a lab dish. Spend all that money for a NYT subscription and the paper doesn’t explain what you’re looking at? Go on line for free, and there it all is in glorious detail?  We’ve all noticed it already. The newspaper business is nuts.

Other headlines to note:

• Andrew Pollack: Fuel Lines Of Tumors Are New Target ; Read this and remember it next time you wish there were more science stories on the research itself, rather than a heated announcement of a potential breakthrough thanks to research that has a big punctuation mark in it. Pollack talks to several teams, academic and drug industry affiliated, trying to gum up cancer cells’ normal voracious capacity to yank glucose from the blood stream and use it for rapid growth. All solid science, explained about as clearly as can be without losing  readers in metabolic pathways. Thus, salute! But so far, it’s all good-looking research protocols with no clear path to clinical application. As narratives go, this lacks the satisfaction of some sort of resolution. At least Pollack won’t have many or even any desperate patients contacting him, heart-breakingly pleading to know how to get the latest putative future and maybe miracle cure.
• John Tierney: Murder! Intrigue! Astronomers? ; We’ve probably all seen the news recently of an exhumation in Prague of Tycho Brahe, the great Danish astronomer with the metallic false nose. Tierney spins its elements of murder mystery into a scenario. Which is, how will or might movie makers work this up? That’s clever, well executed for the most part. But I cannot agree with his cynical presumption that astronomers like Tycho and Kepler would not make compelling protagonists when it comes to popular taste. Hmmph. Astronomers are thoroughly attractive heroes and villains for drama (says the one-time astronomy major who was no damned good at it, but now occasionally writes about it). Personally, I’d say a historic 18th century dramatic movie about the Royal Society, William Herschel, and their time’s condescending treatment of his devoted, comet-snaring sister Caroline – a rather accomplished natural scientist herself – would be gripping.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr. – Sierra Leone: Outbreak of Mysterious Blisters Is Case Study In Spread of Panic ; A brief, and an infuriating one. It’s not McNeil that gets the blood up, but the events he relates. Interesting is that the press, in two episodes of epidemiology and gullible or sensation-seeking reporters, committed considerable mischief with, in one episode, tragic result.

As usual, much more: Whole Science Section and not just in the section ;

- Charlie Petit

This post started with a pang of sympathy. Today’s NYTimes front page, which I scanned over on the way to the ScienceTimes section (for a separate post), has an arresting slice-of-city-life story by Susan Dominus, “In Mystery (and Culture Clash), Some Brooklyn Bees Turn Red” . It’s not a science story, but gently, compellingly done and is the sort of thing that science writers are drawn to read just because it’s about nature. It relates the consternation of  bee keepers and foodies upon discovery that their lovely bees are themselves turning reddish, and their honey is red, and tastes way too sweet and sort of metallic. All because the foragers found that a maraschino cherry packing plant nearby has the occasional puddle of leaked packing syrup, chock full of red dye #40, and they like that more than the nectar of blooms they now tend to bypass. The pang of sympathy is for the photographer, one Ozier Muhammed, who got a nifty closeup shot of the red honey-like product dripping from the comb. And it ran inside on a black and white page. Thud. I thought maybe on line I’d see it in gory-ish glory, but nope. All the editors put in was a long shot of a restaurant owner (and bee keeper) holding his hive’s wooden frame – but boy is the sorta-honey red. That’s one of the shames of modern newspapering. The pages in color only mean that the shooters often get frustrated to have their most vivid work run on gray scale sheets. (In the same vein, for  anybody who  read another NYT p. 1 print edition story today that jumped inside, on those wikileaked diplomatic cables and N. Korea: it’s a shame the surreal Reuters shot of ranks of Pyongyang’s soldiers marching in step – a precise leggy step as they are all women in short skirts – ran in black and white too. Busby Berkeley, but creepy too.  Here it is in color. North Korean chorines carry AK’s.)

This post is a three-parter and does have a theme: new style farming and food sense and its gradual incorporation into the broader society (ie, the 70s are really really over). The other two parts:

• LA Times – Megan Kimble: Suburban living, down on the farm / A growing number of housing development are being build arond organic farms….” ; A new town in Illinois, built around a farm, is the main focus. Best line: “Every effort is made to capture a bit of an old-country farming town. At Serenbe, even the landscaping is edible. Banks of blueberry and fig bushes line sidewalks, and pecan and peach trees sprout from street medians.” I hope the fruit all gets picked before it makes a mess of the curb strip and sidewalk. One wonders if all the cars run on biofuel.
• NYTimes – Jim Robbins: Farmers Find Organic Arsenal to Wage War on Pests ; This one is in the ScienceTimes, where it belongs and runs inside (on, praise be, a color page to support those strawberries, their hue the natural kind and not red dye #40). The details on how organic farmers deploy natural predators and general bio-balance to keep pests at a low ebb – while gathering data to get even better at it – is pretty impress. I like the part about luring pests to some yummy rows of non-crop in the fields, then vacuuming them up. Question: are the vacuumed bugs then mulched, composted, and recycled as organic fertilizer? Eat my crops will ya? Turn-about’s fair play!

- Charlie Petit

Cosmologist Roger Penrose, aka Sir Roger to the queen of England, is nearly 80 now, but remains hard at the game of hard mathematics. Now he thinks he sees, by direct data printed on the sky, evidence we live in one iteration of a repeating universe, Big Bang by Big Bang and banging on maybe forever. Hmm. If this is the case, thing are going to get even more complicated for dark energy theorists who don’t see any way our cosmos is ever going to re-collapse into ylem. Even standard inflation theory might be strained to accommodate such a thing. So some say.

He has a paper out, with Armenian colleague Vahe Gurzadyan , on the preprint site arXiv astro-ph. It’s in Grist below. Several alert reporters with specialty outlets spotted it in the raw, and other outlets are following their lead. The evidence for its mind-bending proposition: Distinct circular rings seen in the cosmic background radiation are visible to us in light that exited the Big Bang’s fading fog more than 13 billion years ago and light years away, shortly after the Big Bang. These, it says here in press account, could be the palimpsest-like markings of supermassive black holes that evaporated or did something sensational during the end times of a previous universe. Their ripples of gravity waves then, somehow or other, got projected through a near-singularity and the ensuing Big Bang to be heard, like the tolls  of monster gongs, even today. This seems a bit like getting a camel through the eye of a needle, literally, and expecting it to still look like a camel on the other side.

Something like that. The paper may add some technical repute to Penrose’s latest book, in review and dated for release in a few months:  “Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe.” Here’s a review that ran more than a month ago in the UK’s Guardian. Manjit Kumar says it may be a best seller but, chocked with equations and few concessions to lay ability, perhaps will have four readers – at least, among those without PhD-level expertise in mathematical cosmology.

First out with news of the new paper was, on Nov. 19, at the specialty site Physics World in Britain, by science writer Edwin Cartlidge. It is odd that Cartlidge does not mention that the paper’s arrival may be timed to promote the book. Possible also is that after the book went to the bindery, these new WMAP and BOOMERanG (those are instruments that measured microwave background signals) analyses came along to build the book’s case.

Next to grab it, far as I can tell, was Universe Today‘s Nancy Atkinson Nov. 22, who credited the Phys World story as among her sources. The site Further coverage followed from:

• io9 – Alasdair Wilkins: Have we found the universe that existed before the Big Bang?
• Science News - Ron Cowen : Cosmic Rebirth: Circular patterns in the universe’s background radiation suggest the Big Bang was only the latest of many ; Cowen got this out Friday, Nov. 26, while this tracker and others were on break for the US’s Thanksgiving holidays. He explains the basics about as well as a brief news piece could when tackling such an audacious concept. He reports that, in an email, Penrose explained that the image up top has enhanced dark circular bands artificially added to map of the microwave background’s irregularities, but they do cover regions of slightly suppressed temperature variation that the new theory seeks to explain. Some doubters, Cowen adds, aren’t sure the statistics are strong enough to show that the bands are real.
• BBC News – Jason Palmer: Cosmos may show echoes of events before Big Bang ;
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Was the Big Bang Preceded by Another Universe (Which Was Preceded by Another Universe)?
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill : Cosmic Rebirth Encoded in Background Radiation? ; An earnest effort at explanation, in conversational mode. That works, but disconcerting is interruption of the text by links to somewhat pertinent stories that look like sub-heds but  aren’t at all pertinent to the places where they are inserted.

Is it just me? Did nobody else notice there’s a book on the general topic coming out, or did everybody notice and see it as not important? And another question. Roughly how long does each cycle take? Penrose presumably would hazard a guess. If the theory has each cycle continuing through the deaths of stars and consumption of galaxies by black holes and then their entropy-punctuating evaporation…. Um…that’s a long, long time. Trillions of years for all I know.

Grist for the Mill:

arXiv paper “Concentric circles in WMAP data...” ; Random House “Cycles of Time, an Extraordinary New View of the Universe” ,

- Charlie Petit

A few weeks ago a remarkably detailed and intimate account of walrus research came to my attention, but I didn’t get to it right away and had suspected (as often happens) that it was getting too stale for a fresh post. It’s at Discover Magazine, where editor Eliza Strickland pieced together tidbits and interview items so vividly I felt as though I had laid myself out on the rock and mud Alaskan beach to watch walruses haul out with their big calves – an unusual sight until shrinking summer sea ice gave them little alternative except the beach.

She tells ksjtracker she did the piece in her “few spare moments,” which rules out any visit to the site herself. But this just shows that a good writer can stitch a scene together from the memories of those who were there. The story has considerable scope. It includes a far-sighted visit to the uncertainties of how walruses will cope with the oceans’ falling pH (acidification).

I’m posting on it now because along came a story of much bigger scope that also mentions walruses. What would happen, for instance, if their migratory paths along the Alaskan and Siberian coasts were interrupted by a gigantic dam? That’s just one question raised at the on line Alaska Dispatch. Its reporter Jill Burke takes with some seriousness a Dutch science writer’s brainstorm for how to keep the Arctic cold and fairly icy and passes it around among various authorities for comment. The idea involves geo-engineering of the serious old fashioned mega-project sort, but makes even Hoover dam look like a toy. The notion, backed as far as I can tell by scant serious science, is that if circulation through the Bering sea is stopped and the Pacific separated, the Arctic ought to get colder and thus keep its familiar nature longer as the globe warms.  It is a bit of a puzzle, other than that this project would hit Alaska hard for good or ill, why the Dispatch gives it such space. Burke finds so many sources that think it’s a bad idea that it’s hard to believe she herself is an enthusiast. Plus, as chance of it working seems slim, and as it would surely shut off the only clear benefit of an ice free summer Arctic (Northwest Passage, or Northern Route along Siberia’s coast for shipping), it’s just an awful long stretch.

Maybe the idea simply has such breathtaking gumption it is hard to resist as a story.

- Charlie Petit

If I read any more investigative medical stories by John Fauber, I’ll never see a doctor again.

In just the past year, Fauber, a reporter with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (and MedPage Today–more on that below) has taken on conflicts of interest related to spinal implants, the disclosure of conflicts of interest in medical journal articles, and spinal fusions–the latter in a story that included this gem:

One of the FDA advisers at the meeting raised a concern about nine of the doctors whose research on the product had been submitted to the FDA: The doctors all had a financial stake in the product, and their test results with it were nearly twice as good as the doctors who did not have a financial interest.

At this point, I’m running out of things to say about Fauber’s stories. These are, as I’ve said before, prime examples of newspaper investigative reporting and writing.

Yesterday, Fauber went after conflicts of interest in the use and misuse of artificial jaw implants. From the story:

The Journal Sentinel’s review of several thousand pages of testimony and other documents found that the FDA ignored warnings, patient testimony and its own staff recommendations to sidewith device companies whose research was conducted by doctors with a financial stake in the outcome.

“There were a million red flags,” said Mark Patters, who served as an FDA advisory panel member for all four of the device hearings and who voted to approve three of them between 1999 and 2002. “You don’t have to know the particulars to know the science wasn’t there.”

Fauber began working on this conflict-of-interest series in February, with the aim of producing 10 such stories in a year, and he’s on track. Many reporters would be pleased to produce a story like this in a year. Fauber does them in a month or two.

As professionals, we can admire Fauber’s work, and, maybe, bring some of this into our own reporting. But it’s important to remember that these stories are about real people with real pain and tragic losses. People who are being told they need jaw implants–and not just those who happen to live in the Journal Sentinel’s circulation area–should see Fauber’s story.

That’s where MedPage Today comes in. Since February, it has paid a fee to the Journal Sentinel–and a freelance fee to Fauber–for permission to publish his stories simultaneously on its website. (Its version of the jaw implant story is here.) MedPage Today is aimed at doctors, so its articles are re-edited slightly for that audience. Peggy Peck, executive editor of MedPage Today, declined to discuss the specifics of the arrangement but said that “our support of this venture is very significant.”

Fauber told me that he thinks the main advantage of the arrangement for the newspaper is to get broader exposure for his stories.

It’s yet another thing newspapers are experimenting with to adapt to a changing world.

But that’s not what’s important about Fauber’s stories. Thousands of people who read his stories might decide not to get painful or fatal jaw or spinal implants, thus avoiding the “long road to hell” that thousands have already traveled. That’s what’s important. And if newspapers are to survive in any form, that’s the kind of news they must give their readers.

- Paul Raeburn

NASA researchers who looked at satellite data say some of the worlds large, deep lakes are doing what the air and the ocean have been doing lately: getting warmer. Their analysis, in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Geophysical Research Letters, is boosted by press releases from both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the AGU.

Given that high profile, and that one of the world’s best known lakes, Tahoe on the California-Nevada border high in the Sierras, it’s a bit of a surprise there is not more coverage for this. Could be climate change burnout and weariness with dealing with contrarions. On the other hand, none of the media coverage I’ve seen wasted time calling up a few such contrarions to relay their insistence on (take your pick)  natural cycles, their conviction that a just Earth and its creator won’t let anything go wrong, their concern about miscalibration of instruments, their complaints that the Medieval Warm Period does not get enough attention and most scientists are just in it for the grant money and computer models are just make believe anyway. Woops. Slipped into rant mode there. So sorry.

In a sense, this news is not much news. If the ground-level air is warming, borehole temperatures are going up, the troposphere is warming, the glaciers are melting, and the oceans are warming, bigger news would be that lakes were not being carried along.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: World’s lakes getting hotter, more than the air ;
• Orange County Register – Pat Brennan: The world’s lakes are warming ;
• Science News – Janet Raloff: Lakes are warming across the globe;  Raloff describes not only the JPL study, but another one to come out soon with corresponding info on additional lakes, in China.
• CNN – Emanuella Grinberg: NASA study finds Earth’s lakes are warming ;

Other climate news:

• Science News – Alexandra Witze: The final climate frontiers / Scientists aim to improve and localize their predictions ; Cover story, and a serious look with only perfunctory reference to climategate or on the IPCC’s quality control flubs that in the end left no dent in the underlying scientific consensus.

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ; AGU Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Some wildlife biologists at UCLA tried to write up a serious study of the ability of polar bears to change habits and compete for food in an ice free summer arctic on dry land. But to look at some of the (scant) coverage of their paper in the journal PLoS One, it’ll be like that contest that fired my adolescent brain in the 1960s, portrayed in the Japanese blockbuster movie Mothra vs. Godzilla. As in that old schoolyard debate, “Who will win if….”

But in this case, it would be polar bears versus their slightly smaller cousins grizzly bears. In the end, the UCLA group concludes, grizzlies with their jaws and teeth better adapted to terrestrial life would likely win the niche. The stupendous mashup image is by Steven J. Kazlowski, discovered at a site called io9 under the  joky, dumb, and perfectly inevitable hed Grizzly Bear vs. Polar Bear – Who Will Win? The study, incidentally, does not see ursine combat as critical. Rather, it addresses comparative skull and jawbone suitability for a coarse, plant-rich diet and which species would thus out-produce the other.

Stories:

• Reuters: Steve Gorman: Study Sees Polar Bears Losing out to Grizzlies ;
• The Atlantic – Adam Werbach: Rumble in the Tundra: Polar Bear vs. Grizzlies ; A little bit of japing in the hed, but Werbach goes so far as to reproduce the paper’s digital imagery of stress patterns in the skulls of the two species, when biting down hard, to make the point in some seriousness.

Grist for the Mill: UCLA Press release ;

- Charlie Petit

Some amazing lines in press this morning from reporters not known for irrational exuberance. The AP‘s Marilynn Marchione probably took two or three deep breaths before settling on this lede: “In the nearly 30 years the AIDS epidemic has raged, there has never been a more hopeful day than this.” She had three reasons, including the pope’s decision to condone (some) use of condoms, and a global survey suggesting that the rate at which infection is spreading has dropped recently.

But the most surprising, out of the blue news – published in the New England Journal of Medicine – is that a daily, combination anti-retroviral pill called Truvada drastically reduced vulnerability to infection in gay men. Its mode of action suggests it ought to work for anybody, or any man at least. Another reporter doing a quick bit of hyberventilation has to be the NY Times‘s Donald G. McNeil Jr., who in a story running top right page one this morning declares, via paraphrase of Mr. Wait-a-Minute, Dr. Anthony Fauci, that given good compliance it reduces infection changes by more than 90 percent. That’s not UP to 90, but more than 90. That’s almost as effective, if not nearly as simple, as a terrific vaccine. McNeil, in his own voice, calls it the best news in the AIDS field in years.  The study by the way put its overall efficacy as a bit more than 40 percent, but its data suggest that a lot of the men who got infected anyway weren’t taking the pill every day, or much at all. Furthermore, other media tended to take 73 percent as the result with good (if not perfect) compliance. But it’s high in any case. And among those who did take the pills, there weren’t  drastic side effects. Plus, it says in here that while manufacturer Gilead rakes in $5,000 to 10,000+ retail for annual dosage in the US and other nations where patent laws get high respect, generic pills in poor countries run at around 40 cents each – or less than $100 yearly. This pill is already FDA approved to control active infection. Any doctor can write a prescription for it – but news coverage says doctors should not yet encourage immediate wide use of the pill as a preventive.

So far nearly all the stories are focussed on business and, but not in great detail, potentially tremendous disease-rate reduction. McNeil tells us the cocktail works by hobbling HIV’s ability to copy itself. How that works at the cellular and biochemicall level, whether the double-drug regimen reduces chances of drug resistance compared to a pill with a single mode, whether more and better such things are in the pipeline, whether long-acting treatments that don’t demand daily adherence are plausible, one does not learn. There are epidemiology and distribution and public education campaigns yet to report. Can women take it to good effect too? So many questions. (By the way, below under the subhed “other HIV news” is a Reuters story on a rather obscure HIV-Insulin resistance study that, compared to this huge story on infection prevention, is chock full of details on mechanism. I’d have appreciated some biochemistry along these lines for Truvada).

Further, while nearly 2,500 men in several nations took part, presumably with double blinding and good controls and all that, it’s difficult to judge how solid the stats are. Still, no matter how one cuts it,  “more than 90 percent” is hard to shrug off as a rounding error or other fluke.

Considering the triple-news Marchione leads on, busy times for the AIDS beat are back.

The only down side to all this that I can think of is that the pope, upon hearing that a pill is effective against HIV and does not (presumably) prevent pregnancy, may decide rubbers are sinful again.

Other HIV Pill Stories:

• Bloomberg – Simeon Bennet, Rob Waters: Gildead’s Truvada Pill Slashes HIV Infection Risk in ‘Breakthrough’ Study. More over the top quotes including “The end if AIDS is no longer a dream, it’s in sight.”
• Wall St. Journal – Betsy McKay, Dockser Marcus: Daily Pill Slashes Risk of HIV Infection in Study;
• AP – Marcus Wohlsen: Anti-AIDS groups hail drug but worry over cost ; Pretty good look at economics, and he finds a man who already plans to start taking a pill a day and hopes his insurance will pay for it.
• BBC – Neil Bowdler: Drug ‘can greatly reduce risk of HIV infection’ ; Unsure whether calling a pill containing two drugs is just “a drug,” but this story terms it that way several times.
• Reuters -Maggie Fox: Once-daily pill helps prevent HIV infection in men ;
• The Age (Australia) Kate Hagan: Experts hail new weapon for HIV ;
• SF Chronicle – Erin Allday: Truvada cuts HIV risk significantly in S.F. study ; Aside from overdoing the local angle (Gilead hq. are in Foster City on the SF Peninsula), Allday is commendably careful to temper enthusiasm. She writes, “How this study will translate into real-world prevention is the next big question for public health officials, some of whom hailed the study results as the most promising news in HIV/AIDS research in a decade or more.”
• Scientific American: Katherine Harmon: HIV Drugs Taken Preemptively Cut Rate of Infection Almost in Half ; The lead follows this hed’s construction, but one must offer correction. The study appears to conclude that HIV drugs distributed preemptively, in combination with regular checkups and reminders, cut the rate of infection almost in half. Among men who took them the rate is higher.
• Wash. Post – David Brown: Daily AIDS drug lowers risk of HIV, study finds ; Hmmm. Another small  usage cavil – the hed conflates AIDS and HIV too much. The drug is already  taken for HIV generally, not just in cases of clinical AIDS.
• Boston Globe – Elizabeth Cooney: HIV drugs found to aid prevention;  A lede that says it plainly and pretty much right on, although I put in parens how I’d have modified it: “Researchers reported yesterday that (two of) the same drugs that have transformed HIV infection from a death sentence into a chronic disease can also help protect gay man from being infected in the first place ….” ;
• USA Today – Steve Sternberg: HIV drug, drop in new cases give hope for prevention ;
• TIME Magazine – Alice Park : HIV Drugs May Prevent Infection in Healthy Individuals ;

*UPDATES .. stories I missed first time through, and still not comprehensive. Tips to yet other welcome.

• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: two stories, Pill shows a drop of up to 70 % in HIV infection risk; this quick news story got the essentials, and a followup provides considerably more history and context:  HIV-Prevention pill’s success rekindles AIDS researchers’ optimism;
• NPR /Talk of the Nation: Dr. Fauci Optimistic About HIV  Drug Truvada ;
• AFP – Jean-Louis Santini: Daily pill cuts HIV infections ;

Grist for the Mill:

Gilead statement ,  NIAID Press Release ;

Other HIV News Stories:

• NPR – Richard Knox: Global Health Leader Sees AIDS At Turning Point After 30 Years ; Interview apparently taped before the Gilead pill news broke.
• Times of India: Kounteye Sinha: ‘Only 3 lakh HIV+ patients have access to life saving drug’ , another story written before the Gilead pill news. (A lakh, more commonly used in reference to rupees, is 100,000). the story focusses on epidemiology stats worldwide and India’s recent, apparent, decline in HIV infection rate.
• HealthDay via Bloomberg/Businessweek – Amanda Gardner: Daily Pill Lowers Odds for Infection With HIV / Study found Truvada could cut risk by 73 percent in people who took it faithfully ;
• Reuters – Bruce Olsen: Researchers uncover HIV, insulin resistance link;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) For sure there are astronauts that would proudly wish to land and die in Mars. And engineers that would love to work on a mission to make it possible. And scientists that could learn a lot from research done in the red planet. And people who would accept that part of their taxes  be invested in this huge human adventure. The Journal of Cosmology  is free to reflect such optimistic views , as it does in a special report about the human exploration of Mars. But as a reporter, you can’t simply summarize these views. You need to contrast them with those of the many scientists, engineers, historians, and sociologists with very different opinions. If you don’t, as has happened in Spain, you might end up with a very cool story but one that only writes that one should send only old astronauts for a one-way trip, that infertility is a serious problem of radiation, that we might build nuclear power stations there, that we should be careful with the pathogenic microorganisms in Mars (big news), and that US congress and international community must promote ways to fund it. The authors of the report say that human beings could land in Mars in a bit more than 20 years if we abandon the culture of security and political correctness. Well; some might also say it is politically incorrect to put in doubt the justification of a human space exploration mission like this.

Hay astronautas que gustosamente arriesgarían sus vidas para ir a Marte. Hay científicos e ingenieros que se mostrarían encantados trabajando en una misión que lo hiciera posible. Y hay ciudadanos que aceptarían que parte de sus impuestos se invirtieran en este reto. Pero cuando informas sobre la posibilidad de un viaje tripulado a Marte, no puedes reflejar sólo sus opiniones; porque también hay científicos que lo consideran una sandez, sociólogos de la ciencia analizando sus aspectos más controvertidos, y muchas personas que de ninguna manera lo perciben como algo prioritario.

La revista Journal of Cosmology puede publicar un especial promoviendo tal aventura, utilizando como fuentes a los líderes de grupos encargados de diseñar futuras misiones humanas; pero los periodistas debemos mantener un espíritu más crítico, y contrarrestar con otras fuentes. Público hace una excelente revisión de los principales aspectos del especial aparecido unas semanas de Journal of Cosmology. Nuño Domínguez en “Marte: Así será la vida en el planeta rojo”, resume el mensaje de los autores: Marte podría ser pisado en poco más de 20 años si se abandona la cultura de seguridad y el pensamiento políticamente correcto, y luego prepara cinco muy buenos despieces sobre cinco puntos clave. 1) El Camino: Un viaje de ida sería más barato. En concreto, un 80% más barato. Enviemos a ese heroico suicidio voluntarios de unos 60 años. Y si los quisiéramos regresar, que se lleven un kit para construir pequeñas centrales nucleares y generar energía. 2) Las bases: Una vuelta a la vida en las cavernas. Para protegerlos de las radiaciones cósmicas, las cavidades en regiones volcánicas serían la opción menos mala. 3) La reproducción: Los colonos pueden quedarse estériles. Seguro que el peor efecto a su salud de la radiación 500 veces superior a la de la tierra, sería que quizás se quedan estériles. Si no, seguro que podrían llevarse un traje especial que les permita procrear, tener un embarazo plácido de 9 meses, y enviar una comadrona ya viejecita que tenga el honor de sacrificarse para ayudar a nacer al primer niño marciano. 4) Enfermedades: La lucha contra microbios mortales. Noticia bomba: habría vida en Marte. Pensábamos que el problema de la contaminación era no ser nosotros quienes llevemos nuestras bacterias allí, pero resulta que hay una posibilidad de encontrarnos con microorganismos patógenos capaces de infectar nuestras células. Lo mismito que cuando Colón cruzó el atlántico, sin duda. De todas formas… los autores creen que “los beneficios científicos, tecnológicos y económicos compensarán con creces el riesgo de toparse con un patógeno“. Los suyos seguro, pero si preguntas a otros científicos de la propia NASA o ESA, cuyos presupuestos para misiones científicas o de exploración robótica se verían mermados, no te darán la misma versión sobre el coste-eficiencia de tal inversión científico-tecnológica. 5) Marketing: Un plan de viaje subvencionado. Menos mal. Por lo menos se reconoce que muchos nos tiraríamos encima de los gobernantes si decidieran que en estos momentos no tienen nada más importante en que gastarse 110.000 millones de euros de dinero público que en enviar humanos a Marte. Claro está; si hay empresas que pueden verlo como un negocio, o publicidad, o individuos que sí lo perciban como algo importante y quieran hacer donaciones de su dinero privado, adelante. Un neuro-psicólogo cuya financiación está relacionada con este trabajo, dice: “El Congreso de EEUU y todas las naciones participantes deben también promulgar leyes para proteger estos esfuerzos de recaudación y a los patrocinadores que hacen de la misión humana a Marte una realidad”.

Alabamos sinceramente la tan clara estructura que ha elegido Nuño para presentar su historia, y lo bien que ha expuesto las ideas del especial de Journal of Cosmology. De verdad; plantea los puntos clave, está fantásticamente ordenado, y da una visión muy realista de la visión de los ingenieros trabajando en exploración espacial. Pero nos falta una voz crítica. Salvando las distancias, y exagerando un poco, es como si hiciéramos una historia sobre el atún rojo preguntando sólo a los pescadores o empresarios cuyos beneficios dependen de su pesca. De la misma manera que hay una discusión social sobre si es más políticamente incorrecto dejar a 2000 españoles al paro por limitar las pescas de atún rojo, o proteger una especie vital para la cadena trófica y equilibrio ecológico de los océanos, también hay una discusión muy profunda sobre si lo políticamente incorrecto es aceptar que los motivos de exploración espacial por los que fue creada la NASA hace 40 años son ya caducos. Hay historia jugosa para rato.

- Pere Estupinyà

After long failure to look at the latest from the non-profit agency to the developing world, SciDev.net, I took a look and found two stories that resonate nicely without express overlap. These are from a news service that is a genuine service, providing stories on science and closely related topics that, as the outlet’s name suggests, boost development of economies and general productivity.

• Naomi Antony : North African crops to be hit hardest by climate change ; There was a press conference in, one infers, Colombia, by the International Center for Tropical Agriculture.
• Hazem Badr: ‘Wonder food’ spreads to Middle East ; That’d be spirulina, or green goop (algae) from the looks of the photo of a smoothie.

- Charlie Petit