It may take a book to properly tell the tale of Sam Ting, Nobelist American professor, and the fancy spectrometer he has driven an army of physicists, engineers, and other to build and package up for a trip to the International Space Station. In the NYTimes, on the front page yet, Dennis Overbye gives it as epic a treatment as one can pack into a standard-sized newspaper feature.  In about three months, the shuttle Endeavour is to take it to the station. It could be the last shuttle flight, ever. Overbye does not mention that bit of looming history – not that I saw anyway while reading this – but he does throw in a lot on the driven personality of Dr. Ting, and on the shifting rationale for installing this piece of heavy equipment in space. Maybe, it says here, humankind will behold the shadow universe. We’ll be reading a lot more about this mission as the date gets closer. This piece gets the flow of proximate curtain raisers off to a classy start.

I didn’t filch it for this post, but take a look at the story if only for the wonderful, noirish picture of Ting and his thing that lensman Fred Merz took for the Times.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer ; NASA’s site also has a compilation of previous press coverage ;

- Charlie Petit

Perhaps it is just me. For years I have  jet-propelled myself happily through fat stories about how civilization gets and will continue to get fuel, electricity, and other energy for our machines and buildings. Lately the news of political paralysis, and projections with a lot of plotted lines leading to untenable futures, makes reading about energy prospects into more of a chore.

Today in the New York Times a big section on Energy has on its front page just two stories, each noting the dramatic continuing growth in American use of coal and exemplified by a monster, vertically-integrated power plant under construction atop a coal deposit in Illinois, written by Matthew Wald,  and of natural gas and Canadian gasoline, by Clifford Krauss. Little in the latter on frakking’s downsides, just a lot on how much gas the US has, and how much oil sands Canada has. Wald brings up global warming in the lede, but only to provide a contrasting frame for the story’s theme. A few years ago, even in in a business-oriented section like this one, the lead stories likely would have been on alternative energy sources ( brilliantly highlighted under the long-running banner of The Energy Challenge). The section was no ad magnet, either. It has just three – two full-pagers from oil companies, and a small ad from Columbia University for its sustainable management training program. The section seems so …. last mid-century.

New alternative energy, other than discouraging words from Wald in his coal piece about prospects for carbon sequestration, is tucked in the back in a little feature on solar in Davis, California by Todd Woody, and another by him on desert tortoises’ fates in the burgeoning solar farms of California’s deserts.

This section is not crusading journalism, with hardly a word one might regards as preachy or scolding to be found. It is descriptive journalism, period. It is about what is. Objectivism comes to mind. Nonetheless, technophiles and science fans might find, among stories on nukes and pipelines, diversion. Included is an update from Henry Fountain on worries that solar storms could cripple electricity delivery with damage that would take many months and scads of dollars to repair, and one from Tom Zeller on prospects for a lot more diesel cars as alternatives to hybrids and electrics.

It’d be nice to find a more optimistic section. This one seems merely realistic about what is most likely.

- Charlie Petit

This week the New York Times‘s Rony Caryn Rabin published a short piece on evidence presented at a meeting in San Diego that starting to smoke marijuana heavily in one’s early teens is far worse on the brain’s development than waiting till the ripe old age of 16. The story provides an interesting and entirely plausible hypothesis, and presumably relays accurately the researchers’ favored explanation.

It does not however note that (judging by the info the Times story provides) other explanations for the data are possible. While it may show bad judgment, bad parenting, or both, pot smoking  at age 13 may not warp the brain significantly more than at 16+. A few alternatives are provided in a post this week by Mark Abrahams, the editor of the seriously funny Annals of Improbable Research best known for its annual igNobel Prizes.

His post, by the way, is no joke, although it’s done with evident glee.

Grist for the Mill: Harvard/McLean Hospital Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

For all the excitement at NASA, you’d think astronomers have seen a black hole form. Which is impossible, literally, but the noise and general stirmash around it might be impressive. And that’s just what, news reports say, they have seen.

The news is that the Chandra X-ray orbiting observatory, along with the agency’s Swift satellite and two European orbiting instruments, have gathered evidence, 30 years after a supernova flash was seen in a fairly nearby galaxy, that a black hole formed. By theory, many supernovae occur during collapse of very massive stars, an implication that the part that doesn’t go exploding outwardmay wind up in a black hole. But now, for the first time, it appears not only that Earth scientists saw the explosion, but are picking up with the space telescope direct evidence that a newborn black hole is howling away in the leftovers.NASA heralded the news with a big press conference yesterday at its DC headquarters.

I do wish my understanding or relativity were better. For instance, the Washington Post‘s Marc Kaufman, in giving this news big treatment including graphics and video, wries that “eventually it (the star’s dead core) can collapse to the point of having no volume and infinite density – at which point it is a black hole.” Other accounts similarly describe what has happened some 50 million light years away.

Okay, that means that we are getting signals that, 50 million years ago, a spot of infinite density and zero volume formed out there. But, I am also confident that I have been assured by top notch astrophysicists and relativity specialists, in a time frame outside the black hole itself, it hasn’t happened. The event horizon or point of no return is there, wide as a planet’s orbit, but all the stuff is redshifted to infinity, frozen in place just inside that event horizon. If that’s right, the stuff may feel it’s fallen in a twinkling down the ultimate rat hole right to its non-dimensional bottom, but not yet on the calendars kept by anybody outside. Isn’t relativity, like, weird?

DID PRESS MISS STORY, THEN BITE HARD WHEN LURED?

So, there’s lots of ink, and I’ll look for anybody who tackles the time paradoxes. But first, a sort of spoiler. Daniel Fischer, a science reporter and blogger in both English and German, has assembled a timeline of news and missed opportunities by the science writing community to have spotted this story as big news long before NASA packaged it all up with a bow on top. Aside from the non-newness of this news (except that few reported it so it IS news), he reports, the researchers are not nearly as certain of the diagnosis as news releases, ergo news accounts, suggest.

Anyway, Other Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Baby photos form the ultimate edge – a black hole ; What is a baby black hole, or how is it outwardly different from older ones? All one detects is gravity, spin, and charge (if any). Does it consume matter, form an accretion disk, or do anything else differently from an old one?
• NPR – Richard Harris: Supernova Shines Light On Black Hole Formation ; Nice job of adding a few doubts to the report.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Has a Recent, Nearby Supernova Become a Baby Black Hole?
• National Geo – Andrew Fazekas: Baby Black Hole Found – Are You Older Than a Cosmic Monster? ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Telescopes spy ‘baby black hole’ ;
• .. there is more, I’ll update this later but time is short, the morning’s gone.

*UPDATES (Nov. 17)

• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Where once a star shone, scientists see evidence of a baby black hole ; A well-hedged piece. Readers who pay attention to such things won’t be able to tease Spotts about that black hole he said just formed should the consensus view change. It says here maybe, and spells out the alternative explanation.
• New York Daily News – Michael Sheridan: ‘Baby’ black hole captured in stunning space image by astronomers ; It is an error to say the image, however stunning, shows a black hole. There never has been a picture of a black hole because that’s the point of its being a black hole – it’s a no see’um. The supernova flash is the same whether a pulsar or anything else is left in the smoldering debris. Oh, sigh….. On the bright side, it does hint at something, which is that if it IS a neutron star, that in itself would be the youngest one ever found. If so maybe somebody’ll see it spinning up as it accretes stuff???? But this story is just too short to mean much, one must say. It’s not even a gee-whiz story – more of a whiz.
• Register – Lewis Page : 50m-year-old mystery space object doesn’t look a day over 30 ; Some day I will learn how much readership the Register and its science staff (Page and Lester Haines, so far as I can tell) get at this on line, cheeky tech news outlet. They both tend to the outrageous over-exuberance in launching their stories, but can be pretty clever. That hed is one to appreciate. It exploits a common turn of phrase to slyly note the difference between how long ago this event occurred, and the freshness of its image as it arrives in our neck of the woods. Plus, he explains and concedes that we are not seeing a black hole, but perhaps its glow: “Matter falling into them is commonly wracked so severely as to squirt out X-rays.” Well put. Also well put is his explainer of a neutron star as alternative diagnosis.
• ABC Australia – Timothy McDonald: NASA keeps close eye on baby black hole ; Note the difference in how unqualified is the writer’s own characterization – that scientists say it IS a black hole – with the quote with which he doesn’t quite back it up. Phrases such as ‘evidence for’ and “might be’ figure prominently. No mention of the more prosaic, if still weird, possibility they’re looking at a fresh neutron star.

SPEAKING OF BLACK HOLES (Get me rewrite!):

• WiredNews – Lisa Grossman: The Universe’s Most Extreme Black Holes; This is a gallery of examples, with supposedly nearest, farthest, biggest, oldest, etc. black holes, updated to reflect the so-called baby black hole in the news. The example of farthest makes little sense. Six million light years? That’s about the distance to its host galaxy so that’s no typo. It’s a deeper error. This needs a re-do. Perhaps it is referring to farthest stellar-mass black hole but is clearly out of date. Most perplexing.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; Paper preprint at arXiv.

- Charlie Petit

Maybe this time it’ll be different. For decades now various dazzling and dazzled entrepreneurs – remember the late missile man Robert Truax with his dumb-simple rocket, I think he called it the Conestoga? – have vowed to show how pluck, ingenuity, and a few good bankers or other angels can rescue the space age from the deadly grip of government?

A bit of such perspective, and jadedness, would have polished up a long piece this week at Florida Today by Todd Halvorson. He reports a dazzling (see first reference above to “dazzling”) pilgrimage he recently completed across the United States to visit various corporations and tycoons with entrepreneural space adventures on their minds. He’s been covering this stuff long enough to know that the odds are this is just one more set of misfires on the pad. But maybe, just maybe.

Even without a balancing dash of express cynicism this piece is worth reading by anybody interested in whether humanity has a future, in person, off Earth. Halvorson got himself tours of some amazing examples of up-front money being spent. Not just Bigelow and Musk, but Boeing and Bezos get a turn. It includes a poignant glimpse of old shuttle launch facilities being stripped and cleared by NASA to provide context. Nice job.

This Las Vegas hotelman and financier Robert Bigelow is most interesting, even while it is discomfiting to learn (again) of his fascination with UFOs and the paranormal. It’s a little like learning that a candidate to head the EPA is full of imagination and energy and an ability to get things done – while harboring determination to save habitat for Bigfoot. Yikes.

I’m almost ready to take the bait, again.

- Charlie Petit

For some time now I’ve been amazed at the legs that have grown under the idea, circulated among climate change skeptics, that the scientific mainstream worried about the greenhouse effect is just in it for the grant money. Say what?

I haven’t seen too many glaciologists or atmospheric chemists driving by in new Lexus seven-series sedans. Money, what money? I mean, it’s laughable. Right?

Today along comes The Scientist‘s Alison McCook, drawing attention to a report in a Greek news agency, on fraud on a massive scale by academic scientists. Oh. The headline, as rendered from the Greek by Google’s autotranslator: “Sir, where did you find the Porsche?” :

The affair gets further write-up at Nature’s Great Beyond blog, by Quirin Schiermeier.

- Charlie Petit

Let’s start small. In journalism, brevity is good. Editors love the short story – the shorter they are, the more can fit in the paper. Nobody wins prizes for briefs, at least none that I recall. That’s a shame. Imagine a contest : best story under, oh, 200 words. A problem is that one might get a zillion entries. But the finals, after some vetting, would be terrific. Judges, for one thing, wouldn’t have to try to read and keep simultaneously assembled coherently in their minds several blockbuster series and lengthy excloos, with sidebars, of the kind that prance off with standard J-prizes. And the prize would honor a form a lot more common and typical of journalism than are giant projects.

In the haiku science writing category, NYT Sci-Times league, here are two examples:

• Donald G. McNeil Jr.: Learning a worm-killer’s Modus Operandi: This is fascinating. I do want to know more – such as how in the world so many different  icky squirmy parasite species are all peculiarly vulnerable to one chemical – but I never knew ANY of this before, all in five brief grafs.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Researchers Dispute Report on Early Butchers ; We get a whole back and forth in a brief.

Interesting – both are inspired by reports in the Proceedings of the Nat’l Acad. of Sciences. Both probably got wider coverage, too. But this is a salute to the short form so I’ll not try to be comprehensive.

The section lead, from Erik Olsen, dives into the astounding improvement in understanding science – if not the doing of it – that skilled videographers are providing through vivid animation of the goopy, sloshing, rapid chemical reactions and machinery that keep living things living. This is well reported, about as comprehensive as the space permits. Don’t miss the video.  It should not be read without also reading, from the Times’s Sunday Magazine, a similar but more eccentric meditation by Virginia Heffernan on the  “hyperreality” of video in science and in general. Another thing: both articles mention Harvard Medical School’s Janet Iwasa, molecular biologist and visualizer. This jumped out to me. A few months ago I thought I’d sort of discovered her while writing on first-life experiments by Jack Szostak’s group at Harvard. She’d been in his team and made super nifty still graphics of how the first life on Earth could have self-organized itself. And following my suggestion her stuff ran with my article (in Science News). Turns out, she’s a star. Little did I know. This is sort of like the time, when shopping for a band to play at a daughter’s wedding, a coordinator at one venue said we should find out who the band was at a previous affair. She seemed pleased to suggest she spotted talent. Indeed.  We inquired. It was Santana.

Other headlines to note:

• John Tierney: When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays ; Tierney can’t get over discovery that, in a clever survey of mood and of wandering minds, people interrupted during sex reported that they were really happy, and their minds not wandering from the topic at hand, outdoing in those categories all others queried and not having sex at the moment. Think about that. You’re going at it when the phone rings and  you get asked what you’re doing and thinking about and how happy you are. What else are you going to say when there is a certain other person RIGHT THERE listening? That you’re really thinking abut a certain delectable somebody else? This, I venture, is a very confounding variable.
• John Moir: New Hurdle for California Condors May Be DDT From Years Ago ; Interesting as can be in itself – and also in its allusion to a monumental remediation project in the works.
• Claudia Dreyfus: A Conversation with Jane Goodall ; O dreary, another Goodall piece? I’ve done them, many  tracker readers have, and I for one found her a less than satisfactory, elusive subject. Dreyfus however gets a sparkling set of answers. Envious and admiring, am I.
• Gina Kolata, Natasha Singer: Good News and Bad From a Heart Study ; Very last piece in the section – and it’s a marvelous profile of a study that does nothing much – and is revealing for exactly that.

As usual lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

How’s this for a Copenhagen-anniversary sentence that demands some parsing and scrutiny, its truth not so important as its interpretation?:

The events of the past year have finally buried the notion that scientific predictions about future climate change can be certain or precise enough to force global policy-making.

It is about halfway through an essay from the UK, home of Climategate and its purloined emails, in the Guardian and by writer-professor Mike Hulm, a climate change specialists at the University of East Anglia.

It is a peculiar sentence. It is written as a thundering declaration, but what’s its distinctive message? Is there really a notion here that has been freshly buried.  Facts, opinions, data, wild confabulations, lots of things have never been sufficient to “force” global policy-making. The issue in general, when it comes to climate policy, is whether scientific consensus  ought to be a major factor, and how to combine it with persuasion, sticks, carrots, flattery, diplomacy, and emotion to get something useful to happen. Hardly anything forces immense policy shifts except maybe threat of weapons or beckoning pots of money or both.

So, that’s off my chest. Hulme does a good job overall stating what is clearly true and always has been. Which is, logic and error bars on a somewhat abstract threat to mankind won’t push humanity to collective action with any ease at all. Just because one says something with conviction and with solid argument for its truth doesn’t mean that the greater public or its representatives will buy it.

Thank you Keith Kloor, blogger and science writer (Collide-a-Scape) for sharing the article around.

Hulme doesn’t say it in so many words, but one (this one here) infers that it will take brilliant leadership, a rallying of courage, and perhaps a few scientifically insignificant-statistically visitations by meteorological disaster – not to mention that a miracle discovery of affordable and non-greenhouse energy on a huge scale would be helpful about now – to keep our new Anthropocene from resembling a global crime scene.

*UPDATE – As noted by Ed Yong in his comment below, NatureNews has a sympathetic profile by Adam Mann of one of those who took the heaviest blows as a result of the storm over stolen emails a year ago, Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit in the UK.

- Charlie Petit

One would think that a 3-degree barrier calculated to separate Bolivia’s city of La Paz and its Andean basin from desert would be a pretty safe cushion. But USA Today‘s Elizabeth Weise put up on the paper’s ScienceFair site an account that says this transformation to what once was called wasteland, at current warming rates, is possible by mid-century.

The news is from a reasonably obscure journal, Global Change Biology, and comes from scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology – presumably a fine research institute but not one of high national profile. The paleoclimatologic research, however, gets a big boost from the National Science Foundation that paid for it and put out a press release (in Grist below). At least one outlet ran with it.

Weise gives it solid treatment, even if she (if quotes are any indication) could not reach any of the principle investigators. She did talk to a program officer at NSF. She also explains succinctly how a local feedback loop could easily get broken, providing a means for a rapid mode shift that seems to have occurred at least twice in the last few hundred thousand years.

Quibble: The story just gives degrees of temperature. This being USA Today and not The-rest-of-the-world Today, it means Fahrenheit. It should be spelled out .

Grist for the Mill: NSF Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Over the years this site has noted a fair number of eagle stories in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Is it just a coincidence that the town’s football team is called the you-kn0w-whats? Over the weekend the paper’s Sandy Bauers did a fine job turning a story of wildlife rescuers and an apparently poisoned, national bird into a general yarn about the illegality of poisoning any wildlife, and the reasons why. The suspicion is that the sick bird, and a second dead one, suffered from second-hand poison.

The photo that ran with it – presumably taken by one of the officials who responded to a resident’s phone call about downed eagles – is a good one.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) “25.000 people graduated in medicine in Uganda, but 20.000 are living out of their country”. This is the sentence used to illustrate the problem of brain drain in a story about science and poverty, published in El Mundo. The paradox is that while international aid is generating experts and technology for developing countries, they are not able to retain some of their own brightest scientific minds. On other topics covered in Spain, the first catalog of invasive species says that some of the 168 listed are not harmful to ecosystems so authorities should not try to eradicate them. Varying opinions are expressed in Spanish press. Finally, we find an interesting story about Providencia, a small Caribbean Island that belongs to Colombia but is much closer to Nicaragua, and beneath its  extremely rich biodiversity and coral reefs are oil reservoirs. Apparently, Colombia and Nicaragua have different views about what to do with this oil, and which country has the right to it. An international court in La Haya will decide.

La semana pasada los medios españoles recogieron un estudio del CSIC explicando que el cangrejo de río americano, una especie invasora introducida en España en los años setenta, se ha convertido en el principal alimento de las aves de la cuenca del Guadalquivir, y de hecho han aumentado su número. Las primeras notas se hicieron eco de estos beneficios, pero según advierte Pedro Cáceres “El cangrejo americano, un invasor con alguna virtud” en El Mundo, “el efecto neto continúa siendo negativo”. Muy difícil de valorar, sobre todo a largo plazo, y por la ya imposibilidad de eliminarlo, parece que algunas especies invasoras van a perder su adjetivo. Éste es el buen análisis que en El País realiza Rafael Méndez “A la caza de (casi todas) las especies invasoras”, a partir del lanzamiento del primer catálogo español de especies invasoras. Algunas de las 168 que existen, en realidad no son tan dañinas, y las nuevas directivas establecen renunciar a intentar erradicarlas. Muy completa nota de Rafael, dando voz a opiniones a favor y en contra de este nuevo planteamiento.

“De los 25.000 licenciados en Medicina de Uganda, 20.000 están fuera”, es la frase de Pedro Alonso que Rosa Mª Tristan destaca para ilustrar la problemática de la fuga de cerebros en los países en desarrollo. Su nota de El Mundo es sencilla, pero refuerza el imperativo de que la ciencia contribuya a la lucha activa contra la pobreza. El investigador P. Alonso lo hace buscando una vacuna contra la malaria, pero insiste en que se debe trabajar de abajo a arriba desde una perspectiva local. Y en este sentido, la fuga de cerebros científicos es un gran impedimento. Destacamos esta nota, porque nos parece un gran tema para perseguir en muchos países de América Latina.

Público nos habla por medio de Antonio Albiñana “Providencia: ‘perla negra’ del Caribe”, del conflicto entre Colombia y Nicaragua por el control del mar alrededor de esta pequeña isla caribeña que además de una enorme biodiversidad, y grandes extensiones de arrecifes coralinos, esconde vastas reservas de hidrocarburos. Providencia es colombiana, pero está mucho más cerca de las costas nicaragüenses, país que según el artículo, pretende explotar estos recursos petrolíferos poniendo en riesgo la riqueza natural de la isla. Otro tema a perseguir.

- Pere Estupinyà

One post down is an item on an AP story, a small-stage example of how science writers often get to have fine outdoors adventures while on the beat. On Sunday the NYTimes’s Justin Gillis had an old-fashioned and lo-o-o-o-ong piece datelined Greenland that does the same on a far larger scale. The assignment included, among other things, his ride in a helicopter to get bottom water temperatures from a fjord full of bergie bits. And the pilot (afterward, over dinner) told him this of what he’d just done: “..it is so dangerous.” Well, anything for a story. Once. That’s my motto. Why some people seek out the same dangerous things over and over again just to keep the blood pumping defies this reporter’s comprehension.

The story is a contemporary example of a genre recently in short supply at major media – the big outtake on global climate change full of expansive graphics and reasons why some people with PhDs are worried, very worried. These days, compelling as the science is, weariness of things green has torpedoed most outlets’ appetites for these yarns. One is unsure how long in the US the conservative wing’s decision to elect climate skepticism to its own private Academy of Sciences can hold sway, and this country is not the only place where these big packages are out of style. But for now, they’re rare.

Gillis provides more info on the story and its meaning at a post on the paper’s Green blog. It explains nicely why Greenland is highly unlikely to melt enough to produce more than two or three feet of sea level rise by itself (but, always a but. Gillis does not say anything explicitly about what West Antarctica’s submarine, grounded ice could contribute).

The news is that most of the scientists Gillis spoke with are glaciologists and other cryospecialists worried that big things are happening in and under glaciers and icecaps, but that the scientific infrastucture to define and explain them is not only inadequate but sliding backwards. The biggest loss is due to aging and loss of satellite sensor platforms.

One notes particularly that Gillis does give explicit attention to the skeptics who say nothing worth disturbing the free market is happening to climate. Or, rather, he finds a bona fide scientist to dismiss the evidence for rapid sea level  rise due to melted ice and warmed oceans. There are not many such, but John Christy of the University of Alabama-Huntsville qualifies as a climate scientist (faculty profile here). He’s written for the IPCC after all. Christy is a friendly source for reporters, usually open to questions even if they may be less-than-sympathetic to climate change skeptics. But would Gillis, in looking for additional sources from the mainstream, have even bothered calling an atmospheric specialist such as Christy to ask about glaciers and ice caps?  The story should have said that while Christy may follow general literature, he is no expert on the mass wasting of ice sheets and (unless I’m very mistaken) has not done original research on the topic. Perhaps he did ask Christy for a reference to studies showing no major melting in, or in the cards for, Greenland. If so, one wonders if he got a good answer.

It is a good idea, especially these days, to include some voice from the strident wings of climate skepticism in a story this long. Otherwise the reporter may seem tone deaf, and will only infuriate readers of the skeptical persuasion. And Gillis’s story keeps its eye on the ball overall. Nonetheless an implied inability to find an authority on the specific topic – polar glaciers – who is not concerned about sea level change should get more explicit mention than it does here.

- Charlie Petit