(English intro to Spanish lang. post) In El Pais, we read that the new director of the fusion reactor ITER is so optimistic about fusion energy, that says – half joking, I guess-: “I’m sure that an extraterrestrial intelligence is using this technology, and we could detect them by searching for a particular kind of neutrinos that are created during the process”. We’ve got a new extraterrestrial signal to search for intelligent life ;  Also: a well-researched, accurate story in El Mundo about the possible risks of paracetamol during pregnancy. Elsewhere, an extensive report on pharmacogenomics in Público. El Universal (México) criticizes its country’s insufficient actions on adaptation to climate change. A Colombian reporter from El Tiempo visits Jackson Lab and writes a good story about mice for experimentation. And La Nación (Chile) reports that penile enhancement surgery is growing in Chile.

Un excelente ejemplo de cómo presentar una información sobre salud, que puede ser importante, pero no hay motivos para alarmar: El Mundo – Maria Valerio “Alertan de los posibles riesgos del paracetamol en el embarazo”. Además del “posible”, el titular viene acompañado por “los especialistas piden cautela”, y “Los ginecólogos españoles piden más estudios antes de cambiar la pauta”. El estudio en cuestión ha encontrado una asociación entre el paracetamol y una enfermedad testicular. Es bueno reportar sobre ello, pero transmitiendo la misma cautela que los especialistas sugieren. Ejemplo contrario, el tratamiento de la noticia “Los suplementos de vitamina E aumentan los accidentes cerebrovasculares”-Europa Press que ha estado dando vueltas estos días. En muchos casos, se ha sobredimensionado.

Enorme trabajo en Público de Ainhoa Iriberri “Un medicamento para cada persona” sobre la adecuación de fármacos al perfil genético de cada individuo, tanto en tipo de medicamento, riesgos y dosis. Muy buenos los ejemplos concretos –despieces sobre oncología, cardiopatías, y dosis en psiquiatría. Incipiente, pero la farmacogenómica ya es una realidad. Y será cada vez más frecuente. Es sin duda una de las áreas para las que debemos estar preparados.

Gracioso comentario en El País del actual director del proyecto de reactor ITER de fusión nuclear. Está tan convencido de que la fusión será la solución energética, que si existiera una civilización extraterrestre más desarrollada que nosotros sin duda la utilizarían, y la podríamos detectar por un tipo de neutrinos que se producen durante el proceso de fusión. Interesante la visión optimista que transmite en el texto/entrevista de Alicia Rivera: “La fusión ha dejado de ser un sueño”.

Poderoso el análisis de Thelma Gómez Durán “Cambio climático: retórica sin acción”, en El Universal (México). A poco de empezar la cumbre de Cancún, una dura crítica a las insuficientes medidas de adaptación que se están tomando en México. Muchas fuentes consultadas, y buena documentación. Agradecemos un comienzo donde se reconoce la incertidumbre sobre la relación directa del cambio climático con eventos puntuales como el incremento de lluvias en una región, pero eso no quita que en general los fenómenos atmosféricos se están intensificando. El texto transmite que eso ya se lleva diciendo desde hace mucho tiempo, pero el gobierno mexicano hace poco para prepararse. Calentemos motores ante Cancún, que deberemos ser muy quisquillosos con lo que nos intenten presentar.

Buen reportaje en El Tiempo (Colombia) sobre JacksonLab, la mayor fábrica de ratones de laboratorio del mundo. No es una temática que suela aparecer en los medios. La visita de un reportero a este centro de Maine en el extremo nordeste de EEUU sirvió para sacar un original trabajo, lleno de datos y curiosidades.

Pero para trabajo detallado, el de Cecilia Yánez “A los chilenos sí les importa el tamaño” (La Nación – Chile), explicando que en su país los casos de alargamiento de pene están en aumento. Gráficos, entrevistas a urólogos, tipos de tratamientos, advertencia de fraudes, análisis de motivos… y frase morbosillas para un completo reportaje. En la ciencia, hay días para todo.

- Pere Estupinyà

Here we take an excursion away from mainstream and even bloggerific science journalism to briefly touch on the broader world of science writing, in this case for trade and in-house pubs. Or, as my friend Ben Patrusky told me during the just-concluded ScienceWriters2010 conf. at Yale co-sponsored by the N.A. and C.A. of Science Writers and Writing respectively, words have meaning and our world is not just science journalism. Many (not all of course) of the tools of science journalism are the same as for science writing in general. Such as, explanation and narrative. So, what is usually put at the bottom of my posts as Grist for the Mill is here the focus.

Oh, okay, it’s another case of airplane reading that kept my eyes open, this time during the long flight home from New Haven yesterday, and this time because I happen to have plucked from a table next to registration the Fall Issue of UCAR Magazine and stuck it in my bulging brief case. (UCAR stands for University Corporation for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado co-operator with NSF of the better-known National Center for Atmospheric Research alongside the Front Range’s Flatirons).

Among the goodies that kept me reading to the bottom:

• Rachel Hauser, Nicole Gordon: Getting serious about geoengineering ; Reporters, as in journalists looking for an edge, just about always put the conflict over climate engineering at the top of stories such as this. And that’s the better angle, and a sure fire lure to readers, for news writing. A deep and important divide exists over whether to talk too much out loud in any way that suggests there’s a techno fix for our predicament and that won’t rile the biggest industry that has ever existed in the history of mankind (as Michael Mann told ScienceWriters2010 the other day), fossil fuel extraction. One suspects a government pub, with its wariness over looking as though it’s overtly tilting for one policy over another, has to be  circumspect. This one is, although these writers do include among the side-bar boxes some muted, skeptical remarks. But if you just want a coherent, well-organized sampling of ideas, this is the ticket. It makes clear none of the cool ideas listed has yet been shown to be wise or feasible. It also has a tip to a conference coming up in February that might we worth watching.
• Carol Rasmussen: All hail ; Remember the spot of news earlier this year on a US-record hailstone? This site didn’t even track it, but word got around in short pieces (such as this nice one from the Minn. Star Tribune‘s Bob Von Sternberg, drawn in part from AP’s yarn). Rasmussen fills in all the blanks, including a vivid description of how these monsters form, word on the official body that certifies records like this, and the world-record hailstone from Bangladesh that was part of a horrific fall that killed scores of people.
• No Byline: Four Questions:  This is about heat bursts from thunderstorms. I’d never heard of them. A search shows some coverage over the last ten years, but not much. They sound amazing – usually at night, thunderstorms may catch a pocket of dry warm air and hurl it to the ground. It can last for hours. Temperature goes up to  95 to more than 100 F (is that an adiabatic thing? It doesn’t say), winds can surpass hurricane force, and humidity plummets to under 10 percent. Imagine, on a warm thundering humid Kansas night, all of a sudden whoosh a Saharan Sirocco rips your barn’s roof off and dries out the corn in the field. This article is first person by a scientist answering questions the magazine posed.
• Bob Henson – Hurricanes in the making: Henson is UCAR Magazine’s managing editor. Ergo, the piece gets good play at the front of the mag. While I don’t recall meeting him (apologies if I did; blame it on cocktails), he was there at ScienceWriters2010 and presumably plopped the magazine on that table. I’ve sent him an email asking if most of the articles are by freelancers, staff, or both. The topic here is the reasons some tropical waves roiling westward from Africa become depressions, then tropical storms, and sometimes hurricanes. The answer: marsupial pouches. I somehow doubt that term will enter the standard meteorological lexicon. The story is detailed in its explanation and etymology. Not many news stories have picked up on the term. One is at USA Today by Doyle Rice from two years ago. Henson’s story is in essence an ode to cooperative research among UCAR-affiliated researchers and other agencies to figure out why hurricane form or don’t form. It also says there is another less vivid but maybe professionally more palatable term for a hurricane’s marsupial pouch: Kelvin’s cat-eye circulation.
• Richard Anthes – Never in doubt ; Anthes is President of NCAR, and former professor of meteorology at Penn State. It’s always cause for a tiny pause and ego-check to find scientists who write popular science about as well as the average pro. Maybe m.e. Henson or somebody did some editing on this?, but in any case it’s not at all bad. It is about Hurricane Earl and presents persuasive argument that while the public may think hurricanes are unpredictable, the accuracy of track forecasts has improved to the point that (see this plot) even three days out, forecasters for the last five years have pretty much nailed where a hurricane is headed. Five days out, though, still forget it.

There’s more I could link. It even has an astronomy story, on astroseismology. So that’s one of the things I did on the airplane aside from trying to keep my butt from falling asleep. It was too cramped in coach to comfortably read the NYTimes ScienceTimes in detail, which had been my plan, and I don’t yet have an iPad or other app to take it with me digitally for easy reading while stuffed into a sardine tin in the back of an airliner. This was better, actually. I may have learned more.

p.s. I just heard from Henson. Most of the stories there, and the writers, are staff, so don’t go pitching ideas with much hope. He says “print lives” and explains that dead tree publication still works for him because UCAR includes like 100 colleges and universities, providing enough in-organization readers to make this glossy worthwhile. It has three issues per year. And, he says, we DID run briefly into one another in New Haven and chatted on Saturday night. Gad. It all comes back now….

- Charlie Petit

This is a lot stranger than whale strandings or occasional die offs of seals. It has the creepy novelty of the fungus-related disease killing bats in the eastern US. Apparently however mortality from the “avian keratin disorder” is not as high as from the bats’ white nose syndrome.

Wildlife researchers at the US Geological Survey report in an ornithology journal (and put out a press release) that several species of birds in Alaska and the North Pacific coast are suffering deformed beaks at a rate far above the norm. Visibly, the beaks may be crossed or elongated. Sometimes the birds plumage is off color or their claws may also be elongated.

Several outlets have it already, and one supposes more will be writing it.

Stories so far:

• AP – Dan Joling: Scientists see high incidence of deformed beaks; The releases says the cause is unknown, and Joling doesn’t find anybody else who can say different.
• Time Magazine (blog) Krista Mahr: Tweaked Beaks: How Bird Deformities Help Flag Undetected Toxins ; The researchers don’t have a cause, but this hed implies it’s a toxin. Could be virus or bacteria. Lots of things, the AGU release says, doing it. It must be said that Mahr’s story hang’s the toxin angle on a strong peg: so many species are involved, a chemical rather than a contagion does seem a good bet. She says the birds can’t even clean themselves properly, “poor little guys.”
• NYTimes DotEarth – Andrew C. Revkin: Scientists Probe Beak Trouble in Alaskan and Northwestern Birds ; Revkin includes separate links to fresh interviews following this prompt post, and to the papers (also in Grist below, thank you Andy).

Grist for the Mill:

USGS Press Release ; USGS website on ailment, Journal (The Auk) Paper 1 on Alaska birds and Paper 2 on crows ; .

It’s not clear why 32 years since its founding is a particularly singular moment to celebrate a section’s remarkable run so far, and predict what the beats it covers will yield soon. It calls the section What’s Next. Uh oh, one thinks. But this is a smart issue. There are no space elevators, cyborgs, immortal humans, electronic-aided mind readings, cures for cancer or even for baldness, reconstituted mammoths, high-IQ apes, or cities under the sea or on the moon here.

Right off, two stories state the obvious – one that is easy to overlook when deciding to be a seer. Gina Kolata recounts a personal failure to predict the future when challenged to do so, and gets a Nobelist to say it is ridiculous to try to predict breakthroughs because if one could they wouldn’t be such. Her story frames the sections left front, while Nicholas Wade on the right side explains why basic research is such a dead lock winner for government to fund yet is such low-yield ore that few industries see the merit in mining it themselves. As a Californian, I have to agree with his guess that the state’s $3 billion investment in basic stem cell research may produce lots of decent papers, but no game changers that pay off for the taxpayer. Speaking of basic research, for another day is left examination of funding cuts likely if a conservative new Congress gets its way.

The rest of it is a feast of near-term musings and hopes. Pretty much the whole staff, tackling everything from astrophysics to zoology, zooms in on things that are coming up but are so close and palpable that researchers are already getting grant money from the government to pursue them. Plus, non-staffers are in on the mix, chiefly Carl Zimmer with a set of brief conversations with individual scientists explaining what new channels are opening up in their fields. One also admires the little iconic logos some smart illustrator devises for the topics. That one top right goes with a piece on quantum computing by John Markoff. (The graphic thingie for Alzheimer’s disease is very scary). By the way, the link below to the whole section goes to a page that for unclear reason lists most everything, but not Markoff’s piece. It ought to be there. I had to use the paper’s search machine to find it.

Rather than review this broadsheet’s contents further, I’ll fold it up and read it at leisure on the plane ride home today from New Haven. ScienceWriters2010 is winding down after a crowded five days, to California. It looks like it will take some time.

- Charlie Petit

Read it : Whole Section.

No sooner had the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune published a story by Neela Banerjee, of their Washington Bureau, on a coordinated response from scientists to climate change doubters than they inserted a fast clarification.

It turns out there is indeed such an organized campaign, with a Minnesota researcher, John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas, running it. There also is a re-play of an American Geophysical Union public and press information services to provide climate experts to answer questions. But the Trib and Times story originally provided this AGU program as further evidence of a concerted and explicit campaign against the legions of political enemies of climate change science.

It you read that story linked in the first graf, you’ll notice the clarification inserted part way through. It’s a small clarification that may not change the story’s impact much, but it is something.

This is rather rapid reaction by the newspapers’ publisher to an AGU statement issued explicitly to quarrel with the papers’ version of events. At a guess, one might expect also to see a letter to the editor further clarifying the AGU’s reaction. But speaking of haste, the AGU statement is aimed only at the Times. As far as I can tell the Tribune is equally involved, if not primary, in the story’s origin.

One can quibble with whether the AGU’s effort is consciously, if not officially, intended to push the public conversation toward something based more or less on reality and data, with the rising political chorus against the scientific consensus in mind. But whatever the thoughts or hopes behind it – and the AGU has assembled panels of experts before to answer such queries so this is not such a new thing – one must concede it is not overtly a political effort aimed at anything but, um, ignorance of any political stripe.

More interesting is to compare the quick reaction at the Tribune and Times to the long struggle reported yesterday, in the next post down on on this site, on one British scientist’s long struggle to get a correction in the Sunday Times. It has to be recognized that the scale of the offense in the UK is larger.

The story is already, natch, circulating on the blogosphere,without the clarification, as seen here.

- Charlie Petit

During the roaring height of ‘Climategate,’ which is still pretty noisy, the triumphalist doubters made much of researchers they accused of cherry picking or just plain distorting data to scare people about climate change. Not just bloggers but columnists and occasional front page reporters in general media got in on the act.

But what’s a person to do when his or her quotes are cherry picked in a fashion counter to the intended message? One such episode unfolded in the British press. It gets an inside account at NatureNews from Simon L. Lewis.  He is a climate change science faculty member at the University of Leeds who elected to fight back following misuse of his views.

From the US perspective, I was most surprised that there is a Press Complaints Commission in the UK that can order retractions. It appears to be some sort of industrial volunteer policing agency, not a gov’t entity, but still seems foreign to how the press operates in the US. Lewis made a complaint, but this does not say what the commission decided.

What it does recount is a long struggle  to set the record straight – and ultimate success. Success, that is, if one ignores the tendency of corrections to have far less impact than errors.

(I went to the Press Commission site, and indeed it seems to have been instrumental in the case’s resolution. Here is its report. It includes the statement that the Sunday Time agreed to print in retraction ).

Lewis alludes to a NYTimes story on the front page, that ran in May, and that properly portrayed his role in the affair. Here it is, from May 25.

• Elisabeth Rosenthal: Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons;

Lewis’s message is that it’s best for climate scientists to square off with the press when reporters and editors screw things up, deliberately or not. That’s broadly true. This affair has two lessons. One, the obvious one if facts are as portrayed, the news biz can be nasty. Most of us try hard to be accurate and fair as we can, but there are few real restraints if one has a real free press. The second is that while things work a little differently in the UK than the US, getting a flamboyant press site even over here (I’m thinking of a certain broadcast news network) to retract can take a long time away from one’s day job.

- Charlie Petit

A patter of kudos and a pile of brickbats from HealthNewsReview blogger  Gary Schwitzer, health news critic and tracker, greeted release last week of a huge US trial look at the efficacy of CT scan screening of current and former smokers for lung cancer.

As both I and usual medical tracker Paul Raeburn are tied up at the ScienceWriters2010 meeting at Yale – Paul is program director for the CASW’s New Horizons in Science conference half of dual meeting with NASW – ksjtracker took a slide on closely following coverage of the trial.

Schwitzer did not give it a slide. He provides a careful dissection  of how some outlets handled, and others mishandled, the study’s results. Yes, it found significant payoff, in a superficial way, to such screening. It may be worth doing on a large scale, but the details and nuances are complex – too much so, it seems, for many outlets to grasp firmly and explain carefully to their audiences.

- Charlie Petit

About a month ago a post at this site (here) noted a slightly jarring sign of the times upon spotting a dandy story from the AAAS’s esteemed ScienceNOW news service, reporting on hints that geothermal energy might some day be piping energy from the West Virginia hills where coal now is king. The interesting and unespected aspect was to find it in the Washington Post, which is partnering with a few non-profit news services by using some of their copy free, or close to it.

At ScienceWriters2010 at Yale, during the Nat’l Association of Science Writers’s workshops portion of them  Saturday, two sessions described more details of such arrangements. The topic is overall a piece of good news – that as old outlets fails and shrink, new ones are filling at least part of the coverage gap and hiring people accordingly. At a session called “Partners and ethics in the new media’ Peggy Girshman, NASW veep and also exec editor of  Kaiser Health News (sponsored by the Kaiser Family Foundation, not the health insurance and hospital organization), described recent success getting its copy into mainline news organizations including the Washington Post. Some are true collaborations, with editors at both outlets working copy over – and sometimes working together on making initial assignments. Copy goes free to the Post, a pretty good deal for it.

Similarly, Michael Lemonick of the non-profit ClimateCentral told of his outlet’s perfusion of other media via copy swapping and general low-revenue arrangement. He recently, in this mode, roused a ruckus with a CC profile that ran in Scientific American. He gave fair treatment to gadfly climate researcher Judith Curry and her combination of orthodox general feelings about the reality of climate change, but a penchant for heavily criticizing her mainstream colleagues while reaching out to climate skeptics who appear to her to have something sensible (and civil) to say. She winds up embraced by the people most opposed to her bedrock science, and vice versa. A second session, on ‘New funding models for journalism’, brought similar reports. There Roger Cohn, editor of Yale’s Environment360 foundation-supported news outlet, shared word of success putting its copy on the sites of several outside outlets. (CORRECTED!:  I know Roger, yes that Roger Cohn, yet somehow managed to call him John on this post for several hours.)

Perplexing are all these cross-publisher arrangements, including many not dependent on advertising.

The jolly mood ebbed just a bit when a member of the audience asked Lemonick and Girshman if they are enabling main stream media’s layoffs of science writers, along with other staff, by providing free copy. Both Lemonick and Girshman nodded sympathetically at the possibility, but argued that it does not happen much. “They laid the people off first,” Lemonick said. “If they had the money they’d have kept staff and never used us.”

For what it’s worth, that issue seems unlikely to die. Later that evening, I ran into an established writer with an established outlet, furious that editors and their bosses are giving the writer’s copy away free to other, for-profit publishers who may or may not monkey with it. “It’s my name on that, I did it for my own place. This is like identity theft.” Plus, the stuff helps a business with no direct connection make money, and this writer’s not getting a thin dime. Others in the same shop feel the same way, so I heard. More telling, in this source’s telling, unemployed writers had complained, via email and phone, that job offers are drying up as struggling major media companies find they can get decent reporting free from the new generation of smaller, high quality, non-profits and similar outfits.

That’s how syndication and wire services usually work – you write, get a paycheck, and where it goes and how it’ll be edited there you can’t guess. But there is some unrest when the custom arrives in a workplace where that wasn’t the deal going in.

Elsewhere at ScienceWriters2010:

The NASW workshops wound up Saturday; today through Tuesday various scientists on the edge of forthcoming news are tipping the assembly to what’s new, all part of CASW’s New Horizons in Science conference now in its 48th rendition. One speaker today was climate researcher Michael Mann, he of hockey stick fame and opobrium from climate change deniers (and, by the way, Lemonick told his workshop audience that Mann is really really mad at him for being reasonably respectful in public with Dr. Curry. This meeting is full of little intrigues).

More on Mann at ScienceWriters2010:

• Science News – Alexandra Witze: Climate researcher speaks out / Michael Mann says scientists have lost control of the public message about climate change; I heard the same talk, this is pretty much how I heard it. Especially his best quote, which she puts in deftly: “It’s not just a hockey stick. There’s a hockey league.”

Twitters are, as reported last week, to be found at #sciwri10 , and a good collection of the blogs are at sciencewriters2010.blogspot.com ;

- Charlie Petit

We’re packing up in NYCity, lower Manhattan, where we’ve been visiting, heading for New Haven in a rental car and the ScienceWriters2010 sold-out joint gathering for NASW’s workshops and CASW’s New Horizons in Science conference featuring new and deep talks by scientists.

Don’t expect any tweets from this mossback, but the hashmark for those that are is at the meeting website opening page, or if you want it straight: #sciwri10.

I may have some reactions to the meeting Sunday or Monday – and certainly will be looking for blogs to share at this site and that are covering the meeting. Also at the meeting website is info for how to see some of the slideshows and other info from the meeting as it rolls through the schedule.

Good to see it’s so well-subscribed that it has bad news: signups are closed. Full. Not even SRO, but no room at all.

*!UPDATE: Many of the blogs from the meeting are aggregating at ScienceWriters2010.blogspot.com .

- Charlie Petit

Ocean acidification may not be the best term for what’s happening to pH in seawater, but under-alkalinization is even worse so there you go. It is trending toward acid, and for years has been the forgotten step child of rising CO2 what with solar forcing and temperature rise worries getting most media and policy fretting.

A few outlets recently have reported that its profile may be rising some. I got to the topic by happenstance, in doing the next post down on a marine biology trek to the Bering Sea with a freelancer on board for Nature, which in turn led me to a blog post on acidification:

• Nature / The Great Beyond – Amanda Mascarelli: Ocean pH dropping faster than expected ; Could be the pteropods, or marine snails, of the Arctic regions could start become unshelled molluscs pretty soon, not a pretty sight one imagines. She reports the sobering news from a Geological Soc’y of America mtg in Denver.

A search turns up a few other recent media stories in the same vein:

• SolveClimate via Reuters (Oct 29) Lisa Song: Concern Over Ocean Acidification Ramps Up Research Dollars ; Song, science writer based in Boston, reports the NSF is channeling more dollars into research on the souring of the seas. She explains, very succinctly, the log reason that a tiny change in pH means a lot to chemical reaction rates. This story also brings attention to a news and aggregating outfit, SolveClimate, I’d not encountered. Take a look if you can take a big dose of discouraging news. Also interesting is that Reuters, a syndicated news service, is relaying directly stories from other services such as this one.  Everywhere you look: news mashups.
• fishnewseu.com: Ocean acidification threatens marine life says new guide ; Dunno who wrote this exactly, but it’s interesting to see the penetration of worry on the topic in fishing trade journals and their equivalent.
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Better monitoring for ailing oceans by 2015 ;
• Softpedia.com -Tudor Vieru: Ocean Surveillance Network Long Overdue ; Same topic as Doyle’s one bullet up. Some day I’m going to find out what Softpedia is, othat than a Romania-based, sort of wiki, with this man Vieru and a few others providing a steady stream of serious environment and science reporting. Vieru is science editor. One is uncertain how much readership it gets, or whether he’s filing from Romania or the UK or where.
• Canadian Press – Alison Auld: System needed to monitor oceans’ vital stats, warn of disasters: scientists ;

Grist for the Mill: Partnership for Observation of the Global Oceans (POGO) ;

Pic: Found this at the POGO site in Grist. Nice visual allusion to its job. Looks like a jellyfish or other marine creature but is a water column sampling dealie thing.

- Charlie Petit

But why is the Bering Sea colder lately? That’s damned interesting. And if pollock, base of the region’s major commercial fishery falter as is feared they could, what species might flourish or migrate in to replace them? What do the people on the fishing boats think about scientific expeditions that could urge lower annual quotas for the catch?

When one reads a report on most anything on ksjtracker’s beat and radar screen, and it’s stuffed with anecdote backed by facts and references, and one is left bursting with questions and an appetite for more, one has to judge the story a success. Back in June we got wind (prev. post) of a freelancer, Wendee Holtcamp, who got herself a ride on an NSF-funded research vessel into the Bering Sea – south of the strait of the same name at the border of the Arctic Ocean, north of the Aleutians.

We caught her back then, before her month-long sojourn in that remote sea, due to her blogging on it at Nature’s Great Beyond. NatureNews, and the magazine itself, have her summary news report up this week. It is lively, detailed, and as I say, it left me eager for more (Some may be found – I didn’t check closely – in the archive of her blogs for the whole trip).  For instance, there’s the spectacle of recent chilling of those waters opening the way for a re-expansion of some plankton species that had retreated into the Arctic proper. What’s going on there? Did the waters cool in place or was there a big flow of chilled sea water out of the Arctic (that might imply a flood of warm water coming around Greenland)? One source says walruses are ugly, which is a joke because he pretends in this piece’s telling to disdain most anything with a backbone. Well, how those whiskered beasts doing with less sea ice around in the Bering?

Upshot: More sign of a changing biz. At one time, chances of a freelancer getting a reporter’s bunk like this were somewhat slim, given that newspapers and other major mass media outlets had enough staff with enough travel budget to elbow the bloggers and other venturesome entrepreneurs of the trade aside. Ms. Holtcamp reports she more than broke even on the trip and has another piece on it in the works for the mag-journal BioScience. Should you wonder more : her site.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A study published early this week says that although the use of heroine, cocaine or methamphetamines is more dangerous than alcohol to the direct consumer’s health; if you take into account the social impact of all the different drugs, and the huge extension of alcohol consumption, as a whole, the alcohol is the most dangerous drug. Too many reporters have been impacted by these last 6 powerful words, and told to their readers that “Alcohol is more dangerous/lethal/deadly than heroin or cocaine”. A few ones has included “to society” in their less attractive but more accurate titles.

Una de las noticias científicas más reproducidas esta semana es el estudio de Lancet comparando los daños que generan -tanto a sociedad como a individuos- el consumo de las diferentes drogas.

La mayoría de medios han optado por el titular fácil, impactante, e incompleto: “El alcohol es peor que la heroína” (El Espectador – Colombia, por poner un ejemplo). Los titulares, especialmente online, son cada vez más importantes. No debemos ser tan descuidados. Comparemos con El Periódico de Catalunya, donde Begoña Arce titula “El alcohol tiene un impacto social peor que la heroína y la cocaína”. La información que se transmite al lector es completamente diferente. Sí; reitero lo de “completamente”. Cuando leemos el primer titular, o “El alcohol es más letal que la heroína y la cocaína” (El Nacional –Venezuela), o “El alcohol, más dañino que la heroína y el crack” (El Tiempo – Colombia), inmediatamente pensamos en temas de salud. En cambio, el titular de Begoña o el de Emilio de Benito “El alcohol causa más estragos en la sociedad que las drogas ilegales” en El País (España), reducen el impacto pero ganan en precisión. Leyendo el contenido de sus textos, vemos que el estudio británico ha utilizado 16 indicadores que van desde la mortalidad al impacto económico, para evaluar el daño relativo de las diferentes drogas. La conclusión es que teniendo en cuenta los factores sociales que rodean a cada sustancia, en global el alcohol es la droga que más daño genera a la sociedad. De acuerdo; sí hay cierta veracidad en los titulares, pero no podemos obviar que teniendo en cuenta el daño para el usuario, según el mismo estudio crack, heroína y metanfetaminas continúan siendo mucho más peligrosas que el alcohol. Lo “novedoso” realmente del estudio es que el alcohol es la sustancia que tiene más impacto social. Y con este matiz deberían ser presentadas las noticias. Otro factor que debemos tener en cuenta, y podemos leer en el detallado texto de Emilio tras la sugerente frase “los investigadores no explican cómo asignaron los valores a cada sustancia”, es que estos riesgos no están ponderados por “dosis”: el alcohol resulta socialmente más dañino, porque su consumo está mucho más extendido. Begoña Arce abre su artículo con la clarificadora frase: “La heroína, el crack y la cocaína son las drogas que más daño pueden causar al individuo que las consume, pero es una sustancia popular y legal, el alcohol, la adicción más dañina para la sociedad.”, e incluye la cita del autor del estudio: «El alcohol hace más daño que la heroína porque su uso está más extendido». Veamos algunos titulares más:

- La voz de Galicia – Sara Carreira: “El alcohol es peor para el adicto y su entorno que la heroína o el crac”. Buen subtítulo: “Provoca la mitad de muertes, pero más lesiones y crímenes y un mayor coste para la sanidad”

- BBC Ciencia – “El alcohol, ¿más dañino que la heroína?”. Interesante uso de la interrogación. Añade un gráfico muy ilustrativo.

- La Nación (Argentina): ¿El alcohol es más nocivo que la cocaína?

- Clarín (con información de The Guardian): “Aseguran que el abuso de alcohol es peor que el de las drogas ilícitas”. Las palabras “aseguran” y el “abuso” también añaden un matiz.

- La Razón (España): “El alcohol, la droga más dura”. Buen texto, y gráfico (el primero de arriba en el post).

- El Universal (Venezuela): “Alcohol, heroína y crack son las drogas más dañinas”. Subtítulo: Consideraron daños físicos, psicológicos y sociales al adicto y a su entorno

- Qué.es: “El alcohol, peor para la salud que la heroína y el crack”. Sin comentarios. Bueno… uno sí… le excusamos por ser un agregador sin el filtro que tienen los periódicos con sus editores, verdad?

- El Universal (México): “Alcohol, más letal que la heroína: estudio”. El subtítulo va más lejos todavía, y generaliza a todas las drogas lícitas: “Un nuevo estudio asegura que drogas lícitas, como el alcohol, son más letales para quien las consume y para la sociedad”

- El Comercio (Perú): “Cuidado: el alcohol es más letal que la heroína y la cocaína”

- La Nación (Chile): “Alcohol causa más daño que el crack o la heroína”

Insistimos: los titulares en la época del twitter son cada vez más importantes, y en este caso, no era complicado hacerlos más ajustados a la realidad.

- Pere Estupinyà