Two long features out this week provide a serious, handy, collective guide to the yin and yang of observational climatology’s primary jobs these days – explaining and measuring global warming:

• NYTimes – Justin Gillis: A Scientist, His Work and a Climate Reckoning ; This is as good a story as you’ll find on Charles D. (Dave) Keeling and his son Ralph carrying on the monumentally successful and pathbreaking program to measure the jagged but relentless march of CO2 to levels in the atmosphere almost unprecedented in Earth history. It’s not just a profile, but a history of the century-old, steadily rising concern among specialists that mankind’s burning of fossil fuel would push temperatures higher. That general story has been told many times but this one is page 1, New York Times, with a full double-truck following the jump. Abundant, solid graphics and photos accompany it. Bit of poignancy – when Ralph Keeling travels with his kids, he reminds them to say goodbye to much of the world we now have. Dunno if such a masterful story as this will change many minds. But put it in your file.
• ClimateCentral – Tom Yulsman: How Will We Know if 2010 Was the Warmest Year on Record? ; This is a report, not a narrative story, but a good one by the co-director of the University of Colorado’s Center on Environmental Journalism. It explains how the world’s three primary data centers for global temperature trends are in remarkable agreement, why they differ in detail, and for fellow science writers, what background to know when each publishes its ranking of 2010 in the ledger of comparative warmth. Particularly welcome is the passage on the Goddard Institute for Space Sciences’s (James Hansen) interpolative estimate of warming in the scantly-instrumented Arctic. The story makes this educated guesswork look sensible, while also being clear on why it is wide open for attack by contrarions  – with and without scientific credential. This is another one for the file.

- Charlie Petit

..graphic by P. Preuss, Lawrence Berkeley Lab

The real neutrino news from the great white south will come when a bunch of data tells humankind something new about the cosmos. But word that the greatest neutrino observatory of all is finally finished after years of drilling holes and dropping strings of instruments down, its individual muon detectors spread through a cubic kilometer of crystalline ice deep under the U.S. Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, merits  attention. The IceCube Neutrino Observatory has to it a spookiness, always a good ingredient for story telling. It will give thrills to lay readers who hadn’t heard of it before. Its thousands of photomultiplier “digital optical modules” of DOMs will catch an occasional flash of blue light, emitted by a few unlucky neutrinos zipping UP through the ice, having pierced the entire Earth after twinkling their way through cosmic distances. A rare few happen to smack exactly into an atomic nucleus. They shower debris along their direction, emitting a distinctive glow of Cherenkov radiation from muons slowing down from light speed. From these twinkles will come maps of neutrino sources in the sky, including exploding stars and matter draining into black holes. The rest, the undetected neutrinos, zip through the sky to continue their intergalactic travels.

The emplacement of the last of the detectors is a ritual built on a technicality. Most of the detectors are already in place, already recording the cosmic flux of neutrinos. But it’s a good enough reason to write this thing up, prepare people a bit to hear any true news from its work. This is a good time of year to finish up IceCube too. Each DOM looks sort of like  a glass ornament, but big as a basketball. Y’know, miniatures would make nifty Christmas tree baubles, especially if they occasionally gave off a flash of Cherenkov blue.

Stories:

• Science News – Marissa Cevallos: South Pole neutrino detector complete ; Good well-paced job. But to say, as this and many stories do, that the signals occur when a neutrino happens to collide with a water molecule is pretty fuzzy. It’s ice. Molecules, including their electron orbitals, are packed tight. The neutrinos cannot miss traversing zillions of them.  So, what’s it mean to hit one? It has something to do with long-shot weak interaction within the nucleus. A news story needn’t go deeply into that. But it should at least hint why most of a molecule is neutrino-transparent.
• Fox News – Blake Snow : One of the World’s biggest Telescopes Is Buried Beneath the South Pole; Freelancer Snow is nothing if not enthusiastic. The style is lively. But he needs to slow down just a jot, grabbing a dictionary or geography tome once in awhile. He has some odd usages and nouns in here. He says this is paid for by a $272 million endowment from the NSF. Endowment? Besides, $242 million of the grant is from NSF, the rest from German and Swedish institutions. And, alas, he gets his arctic and antarctic mixed up, with a dash of Green Bay thrown in, when he says this thing is “buried across one cubic kilometer of Antarctica’s frozen tundra.” Even with global warming, ain’t no tundra on that ice sheet. One doubts that even the Ant. Peninsula’s stony outcrops have warmed enough to grow tundra.
• FastCompany – Nel Underleider: $271 Million Telescope Buried Under South POle Is Ready to Unearth Dark Matter ;
• Wisconsin State Journal – Ron Seely : UW – Wisconsin to unlock space secrets in Antarctica with IceCube. This is a hed of an unusual sort: it means nothing to the uninitiated. But it contains such an odd mix of elements that readers may be compelled to zero in  just to find out what the heck it’s about. The piece does reward – explaining things in clear lay language, and blessed with atmosphere thanks to a visit with the lead researcher while the final installation was underway. Plus, the paper assigned an artist for its own graphic rendition of the essentials.

Grist for the Mill:

U. Wisconsin-Madison Press Release ; U. Delaware Press Release ; IceCube Neutrino Observatory Website + Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; AIP 2010 Review Article: Ice Cube: An instrument for neutrino astronomy ;

And if you’re really interested, don’t miss this super duper hi-res photo of the IceCube above ground facility. It’s part of a gallery.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The Spanish tracker is in Barcelona and met today the first author of the PNAS article that describes the mitochondrial DNA analysis of a 12-members Neanderthal family found in the north of Spain 16 years ago. One of the world’s most important sites to study Neanderthals. The tracker asked the researcher if he liked how the Spanish press covered the news, and he said: “Some stories are a bit ‘yellow’ and too focused on the issue that groups used to exchange females. But in general; the articles are not bad. I really liked the story in the NYT”. Today, we’ve compared Zimmer’s story with the Spanish ones. Regarding to the style, it’s true that Spanish reporters are usually more straightforward, and there is less effort to “create a story” and to provide a context of the findings, like Zimmer does. Also, NYT quotes 4 scientists (3 are not related to the paper), and Spanish reporters only use the same 2 coauthors. Interestingly, the exchange of daughters to avoid endogamy is the main topic of all Spanish stories, but Zimmer mentions it only briefly, even though it’s in the title and abstract of the original paper.

Por absoluta casualidad, el tracker tenía hoy una cita con Carles Lalueza, el primer firmante del artículo de PNAS publicado ayer con los estudios genéticos de un grupo de 12 neandertales encontrados en la cueva del Sidrón (Asturias). A final de nuestra conversación pregunté qué le había parecido la cobertura del estudio en la prensa española. Se encogió de hombros y dijo: “Bien; no está mal. Un poco “amarilla”. Se han centrado demasiado en la parte de si las hembras cambiaban de grupo o no. El New York Times en cambio ha preparado un muy buen artículo”. Puede ser cuestión de gustos del investigador, pero comparemos hoy la nota en el NYT de Carl Zimmer con el resto de publicaciones españolas, para ver cuales son las diferencias.

Una diferencia “de estilo” respecto la mayoría, es que la nota de Zimmer encaja mejor en lo que entendemos por “historia” que fluye con un sutil hilo conductor. No parte directamente del resultado/conclusión del estudio, sino que invierte varios párrafos en desarrollar el proceso que ha llevado hasta él. Empieza con el descubrimiento en 1994 de los fragmentos de huesos masacrados que inicialmente se pensó eran humanos fallecidos durante la guerra civil porque la cueva era utilizada como escondite por el bando republicano. Luego los forenses vieron que eran neandertales, y según se explica en el segundo párrafo, enseguida se distinguió como uno de los mejores lugares del mundo para estudiar neandertales. Además, posteriormente se observó que conservaban ADN en buen estado de preservación. El artículo avanza con las conclusiones de algunos artículos anteriores al último paper, sobre la manera como murieron (canibalismo); cómo supieron los científicos que los 1800 fragmentos correspondían a 12 individuos; la cantidad de machos, hembras y jóvenes que había; estudios sobre su estructura social, e incluso que un par eran pelirrojos. Luego se entra en el análisis específico del ADN mitocondrial, se explica la tesis del artículo de que estaban emparentados (tenían similares fragmentos de una corta secuencia específica de genes -HVR1 y HVR2-, que suelen variar de generación en generación) y se busca la cita de una antropóloga del Max Plank Institute (del departamento del Dr. Paavo que secuenció el genoma del neandertal este año) diciendo que esta prueba no es tan concluyente. De hecho; en el texto Zimmer entrevista a 4 científicos diferentes. Y curiosamente; sólo cita de refilón que las hembras neandertales cambiaban de grupos para evitar la endogamia. A pesar que tanto en el título como en el abstract del artículo original lo citan como la conclusión del estudio.

Esto justo es el principal mensaje de textos como el de Público – Nuño Domínguez “Las familias neandertales se intercambiaban a las niñas”, El Períódico – Antonio Madridejos “Intercambio de hembras”, La Voz de Asturias – Javier G. Caso “Las neandertales cambiaban de pareja para evitar la endogamia” . O la propia nota del departamento de comunicación del CSIC “Las hembras neandertales migraban para evitar la endogamia”, elaborada con declaraciones de otro coautor, Antonio Rosas. Se podría intuir cierta discrepancia entre los autores acerca de la relevancia de la patrilocalidad, pero dejando de lado este detalle; ¿Qué diferencias vemos respecto al artículo del NYT? Básicamente, que Zimmer sí contrasta los datos con investigadores no relacionados con la investigación, y que se esfuerza mucho más en generar un contexto al lector. En El País, Alicia Rivera también lo hace en “Entrañas en una familia neandertal”, pero en El Mundo –por ejemplo- Rosa Tristán va mucho más directa al grano en “El patriarcado de los neandertales asturianos”. Debemos reconocer que este estilo de “narrar historias” es mucho más frecuente en los trabajos estadounidenses. Aquí solemos ser más asépticos, con la típica estructura de ir dando informaciones en párrafos separados, a veces no demasiado conectados entre sí ni siguiendo un hilo conductor. Respecto al “amarillismo”, sí vemos que quizá se ha abusado del gancho de intercambio de mujeres. Incluso en algún texto se empieza explicando que “grupos de neandertales se encontraban después de una jornada de caza y, al amparo de la lumbre y ambiente de camadarería se intercambiaban las mujeres…”. Quizás demasiado rebuscado.

Un punto interesante lo añade Nuño en Público yendo al debate sobre si los humanos modernos participaron o no en la extinción de los neandertales. Estas muestras poco aportan, pues son de unos 20.000 años antes de tal extinción, pero sí hay científicos que buscan interpretarlas.

Tema para calentar motores, ante la más poderosa noticia que Nature nos ofrecerá en un par de días.

- Pere Estupinyà

Stacked in tiers, evoking an overcrowded morgue, are hundreds of NASA spacesuits from the early days of space travel. The  Times‘s Henry Fountain got a tour of the place in advance of a Smithsonian Institution tour by the suits – or at least a few that are in good enough shape to travel, with the rest to make their appearance via photographs. It’s a nostalgic story – imagine, all those space suits, almost enough for an infantry brigade,and the storehouse doesn’t yet have any used for shuttle and space station missions. The images are terrific, at a gallery on line, and the story explains such things as the volumetric requirements of space suits not too stiff to move around in once they’re pressurized.

That’s an appropriate art lead for the section. But its star piece is top left on the front page, with much less arresting imagery. Donald G. McNeil Jr. checks in with the Grand Challenges in Global Health program that Bill and Melinda Gates set up five years ago with close to half a billion dollars in grants. How’s it going?, McNeil asked. Pretty good, was the answer, but not really good. This is fascinating reading, with brief synopses of a few projects that got money and the results so far. Some have been scuttled for lack of progress. Some “re-purposed” as more enticing discoveries changes their focus. A few lost the Gates’s support because other donors flocked in. And a few, a very few, seem to be working as planned.

Most interesting is the story’s sequence. The theme is that, to no surprise really, getting quick results from edgy science projects not already funded by the likes of NIH is very difficult. Hence the best way to tell that story is to start off with a few disappointing examples of work by researchers who seem to have done their best, but ran into serious snags. But what people would love to read about are some successes and compelling surprises. Thus one has to read deep to learn about the genetically engineered bananas with bright orange flesh, or the fast progress on a project originally aimed at making mosquitoes die of old age before they can pass dengue fever viruses and, instead, now seems to be yielding a way to vaccinate mosquitoes against the virus. There are aspects of the Gates project that could easily have yielded more arresting ledes than this has. But to go with the easy stuff would have blunted the more important primary message: Gates had no idea, but does now know, how tough it is buy a quick shift in public health science.

Other headlines to note:

• Carl Zimmer: Bones Give Peek Into the Lives of Neanderthals ; What happened to the El Sidrón victims? A tunnel of bones yields an answer. Other outlets did this news, too. Perhaps tomorrow we can pull a roundup together.
• Nicholas Wade – In Map of Brain Junction, Avenues to Answers ; Wade, in a story of modest-length, manages to tell readers convincingly that the anatomy of a synapse is bewilderingly complex with genes to match, and that a new map could begin making a difference to human mental health fairly soon. A question however – is there evidence that human synapses are particularly distinctive compared to those of lemmings?, of reptiles?, of octopuses?

PLus, on line, don’t miss this post, Following Maps, and Finding a ‘Lost World’, coming near the end of a long trek into the remaining forests of Madagascar by blogging scientist Brian Fisher. He’s been sharing a field log or diary. Sometimes he get bogged down into arcana, or overwrites the physical and equipment-failure obstacles of his sweaty work in a remote wilderness. But it’s also a thrilling adventure.His whole series of posts is here.  The print edition today carries a short excerpt from his most recent post, a meditation on why he does what he does, and the hope that taxpayers and philanthropists will continue to support such efforts:

There are nonscientist members of this expedition who have argued that collection-based research is unnecessary, a holdover from 19th-century taxonomy, a period of scientific effort that has done little to provide insight or a means to curb the continued onslaught of wild lands. Their arguments mirror what I perceive as a growing public questioning of the role of science in society. To combat this I think all scientists need to become better advocates. We need to get out of our offices and engage the public. We need to find ways to let the public experience what we do and see why it is important. We can do this through public speaking or cooperating with artists, painters or poets; but we’d better get busy if we hope to have the support for the task at hand.

How can I justify the expense of species exploration? We have only one world, and it is rapidly changing. There is little time left to figure out the components of this planet, from virus to vertebrate, from bacteria to bracken fungus. If I was off trying to discover life on another planet, sending blog posts from Mars, I bet few would question this great leap forward for science. But in our own backyard on planet Earth, why have we not taken up the challenge to fully understand diversity? The stars and planets will be there in 50 years, but how many species will have gone extinct?

- Charlie Petit

Last week I posted on the presentation at the AGU meeting of a science writing prize for coverage in 2008 of the teeny asteroid that astronomers saw coming, and that scattered its atmosphere-pummeled remnants across the desert in Sudan. That primed the brain for news that those shards of the early solar system are still revealing surprises. A stack of papers in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science lays the latest out at length from study of 2008 C3, aka the Almahatta Sitta asteroid meteorite.

Although not first out with a report, at Science News, space and astronomy writer Ron Cowen has it at more length than most. He focusses on a paper by a team of NASA and SETI Institute analysts.They discovered fragments of amino acids in that definitely are not contaminants by Earthly biology but also don’t fit the usual model for how these building blocks for peptides and for  protein can form spontaneously in space.

It has to do with water, which apparently could not have been present when these alien molecules formed. That violates the standard narrative. It’s a well-done story. That is so despite one source’s assertion that, by expanding ways that AAs can form, this means life probably had significant more chances to arise than previously appreciated. Because the rise of life is such a vast unknown, and because none that evolved off-Earth is evident yet, it would seem a stretch to believe this discovery moves the needle very far when it comes to the odds of life in the universe generally.

A quote like that, it seems to me, is nest-feathering by a scientist whose interest, consciously or not, is to improve the climate for grant approval. To reporter Cowen’s credit, he immediately follows this boosterish quote with a more temperate opinion from another authority on such things.

Other Meteorite 2008 C3 stories:

• Fast Company – Kit Eaton: NASA Finds Amino Acids on Impossible Meteorite, Improves Chances E.T. exists ;
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Life’s building blocks found in meteorite ;
• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal – Mark Johnson: Scientists study asteroid the size of a Buick that exploded over Sudan ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Goddard Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

...Near the Hague, AFP/Getty images

With Atlantic air traffic snarled like nothing since Iceland erupted, even the trains on slow-mode, and the siege of icy, snowy weather now approaching a month’s duration in western Europe and chilling both sides of the Atlantic, a few reporters have tried to explain why it’s happening. Could it really be just two words: “blocking pattern”?

It would seem so after reading, at the Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang site, Andrew Freedman‘s explainer. Posted yesterday, he has maps, experts, and insights. Among them is that it does not appear to be an overall chilling of the maritime and subarctic regions of the Northern Hemisphere, but a drastic rearrangement of really cold, and still-cold but relatively warm, air. Instead of swirling around the pole in parades of fronts, an almost fixed pattern has set in. A giant high pressure dome – a blocking high -  stuck roughly over southern Greenland is sending stormy polar air squirting south along its borders, one arm dipping well south along North America’s east side, the other funnelling down through the North Sea and across the British Isles and Europe. Freedman sums it up this way: The usual weather routes are “jammed up like the Beltway at rush hour” and commuting storms, unable to take their usual paths, “are doing weird loop-de-loops up into the Canadian Maritimes and even off the coast of the Pacific Northwest.”  It is among the most bizarre modes, meteorologists tell him, they’ve ever seen. While Edinburgh looks like an ice fairyland, across the sea in Newfoundland some areas have been warmer than usual for weeks. The image, from a NASA site, shows this months temperature departures from normal – reds for warmer, blues for colder.

He gets in the North Atlantic Oscillation, now in negative mode. He mentions global warming. Some say that the extra energy driving atmospheric temperatures higher is also increased the chance of atmospheric pressure anomalies such as is now squatting on Greenland (and perhaps, heaven help us and the polar bears and this is my thought, not Freedman’s, setting it up for more melting).

Nice job, Mr. Freedman. If anybody has seen other serious (or notably wacko) journalistic efforts to explain this freakish weather, let me know.

...Whipsnade zoo. AFP/Getty images

Here are a few others I’ve spotted that have covered this roughly as a science story:

• Western Mail (Wales) Aled Blake: Why have we had such a cold December? ;
• Wall Street Journal - C. S. Yuen: The Force Behind the Airport Delays ;
• Daily Mail – Niall Firth: Why it’s cold here by warm over Greenland:
• The Independent – Steve Connor ; The UK may be cold, but it’s still a warm world, says Met Office chief ;
• Guardian – George Monbiot: That snow outside is what global warming looks like ; More of an essay and lecture than news story, as one expects  from columnist Monbiot, a strong voice among those convinced we’re in big trouble due to climate change. For all that, good tag line: “The cold has reason in a deathly grip.” His story also provided that pic of a zebra at a zoo near London.
• CBC – Climate change blamed for warm Nunavut weather / Temperatures 10 to 12 degrees hight than normal in North;
• Christian Science Monitor – Patrik Jonsson: East’s early cold: “Greenland Block’ lets Arctic air slip to Deep South ;

Grist for the Mill: Met Office UK Press Release, Why is it so cold and snowy? ;

- Charlie Petit

For years (and especially during the recent swine or avian flu pandemic panic) Tamiflu (Roche) and Relenza (GSK) have been the drugs of choice to treat flu patients with severe complications like pneumonia. Governments all over the world bought and stored the drugs to be prepared. But, apparently, the data proving the efficacy of these drugs are weak! Nike Heinen (a freelance) quotes a report of the Cochrane Collaboration, a group of scientists “preparing, maintaining and promoting the accessibility of systematic reviews of the effects of health care”.

The article, published (in slightly different versions) by Süddeutsche Zeitung, Basler Zeitung (Tages-Anzeiger), and Badische Zeitung, explains in detail the astonishing career of these now Billion-Dollar-Blockbusters. However, in 2009, Heinen reports, the Cochrane scientists got hints that the important “Kaiser-review” might be flawed. A team lead by the virologist Laurent Kaiser from the University of Geneva had summarized 10 Tamiflu-studies (all done by Roche). In 2003, his conclusion was, that the drug has a beneficary effect compared to placebo. First, the Cochrane scientists trusted Kaisers conclusions. But after they were tipped off that five authors of the Kaiser-review were on Roche’s payroll and that not all the reviewed data came from peer reviewed journals, they asked Roche for the raw data. Roche denied the request, because the Cochrane scientists refused to sign a contract, that would bind them to maintain silence about any of their findings after review of the data. In December 2009, the scientists reported their objections at the British Medical Journal (BMJ) but  raw data from Roche is still not openly available.

The Cochrane collaboration is not only concerned about a possible lack of efficacy and billions of Dollars spent on drugs without a substantial effect compared to placebo pills. Some of the publicly available data about Tamiflu also report substantial side effects in at least ten cases, three of them connected with Tamiflu.

Regarding Relenza, the comparable flu drug from GlaxoSmithKline, the data do not seem to provide any better evidence. According to the Cochrane scientists, there are hints of data manipulation, too, and GSK’s major US study of Relenza did not show any efficacy – and never got published.

Sounds like a scoop, right? And it reads as such, first (“exclusive”, claims the Basler Zeitung). But unfortunately, the reader does not get a hint, that the article is not the first one picking up the criticism of the Cochrane scientists (have a look at Der Spiegel or the LA Times blog or Science’s news section etc.).

The New Scientist even included some criticism of the Cochrane allegations and some data to judge the re-evaluated efficacy estimations. Stuff, that I missed in the update article.

But don’t get me wrong, I liked the article, because it is still worth it to remind the public about the unsettled concerns with Tamiflu and Relenza. Especially, the nervous reaction of Roche hints that it would be worth it to dig even deeper…

Sascha Karberg

...in 2010 Godzilla, at least, didn't show up too

For months Seth Borenstein at the AP has been working, with the help of a researcher at the wire service, Julie Reed Bell, on a story just out that links  bad human judgment and actions to the ‘natural’ calamities of 2010.Ms. Bell prepared for him a 64 page compilation, day-by-day, of disasters. That’s plenty enough to get a share of a byline.

But the story has a thesis tough to swallow. Weather, as in climate change, perfectly plausibly is our fault. But earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, how’d we turn the dial on things like that?

Borenstein lays that link at the feet of collective carelessness. Earthquakes are worse because more of our cities are full of badly build shantytowns – exhibit A, Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Floods are worse because so many of us are putting houses on the broad flatlands near rivers and streams. Even snowstorms are worse because warmer air holds more moisture so that that when it does get cold enough to make snow, chances for blizzard are somewhat greater. Plus heat was heat – 18 countries, it says here, had their hottest temperatures ever.

It’s unclear whether volcanic disaster was worse last year than in most years in terms of evacuations and such. The air travel snarl during Iceland’s eruptions was extreme but I’m unconvinced that any amount of planning for such a thing would have altered the result very much. Still, the general theme holds up. The numbers are convincing too even if dollar losses set no record. One reason for the less-than-record damages bill, he writes, is that much of  the colossal natural violence in some areas, Haiti chiefly, tended to knock down things that weren’t worth much money in the first place.

*UPDATE:

• At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Anthony R. Wood has a heavily researched story this week on effects on weather worldwide this year by an unusually erratic jet stream. More important, he interviews climatologists who see long term changes unfolding in storm track patterns, with the additional solar forcing of greenhouse gases the most likely suspect.

- Charlie Petit

...U. Kentucky MacAdam Student Observatory

Religious discrimination, or common sense? Or just the way it goes when looking for a job. Whatever it is, several outlets are running stories on a lawsuit pending against the University of Kentucky asserting that religious beliefs knocked the plaintiff from consideration at the astronomy department.

• AP – Dylan Loan: Scientist alleges religious discrimination in Ky. Reporter Loan says the man, named Martin Gaskell, a PhD astronomer now a research fellow and lecturer at the University of Texas (and on his way to take a job in Chile), was turned away from a “prestigious job as the director of a new student observatory…” One has to ask: prestigious in what crowd?  Museum and small-observatory curators and managers, sure. An important job to be proud of, sure. But prestigious among astronomers, the kinds with PhDs at big universities? Not likely. The Hayden Planetarium’s directorship has some prestige. The UKy student observatory, not so much. It is unclear from this if it’s a tenured, faculty job. Loan seriously inflates the stakes raised in this suit.
• Louisville Courier-Journal – Peter Smith: Job candidate sues UK, claiming religion cost him the post ;
• NYTimes – Mark Oppenheimer: Astronomer Sues the University of Kentucky, Claiming His Faith Cost Him a Job ;
• Pharyngula (blog) PZ Meyers: Martin Gaskell was not expelled ; Not a news story, but this post, by a “godless liberal” and associate prof. at U. of Minnesota whose blog has wide readership, does a pretty good job of eviscerating the plaintiff’s case. Whether courts will see it that way we’ll learn soon enough.
• NYTimes – Mark Oppenheimer : Astronomer Sues the University of Kentucky, Claiming His Faith Cost Him a Job ;

Shades of Guillermo Gonzalez! You remember him, do you not?  – a fully credentialed astronomer, an author of well-received papers on the ostensible rarity of habitable planets other than Earth, outed by author David Darling in 2001 as a practicing creationist and advocate of intelligent design (to the surprise of clueless co-authors of scientific papers), eventually handed an academic career-killed denial of tenure at Iowa State University on grounds of low scientific productivity. Now affiliated with the Discovery Institute and on faculty at a small Christian college in Pennsylvania.

Well, his name was the first thing that popped into my mind upon reading accounts  of another astronomer in a somewhat similar fix. He is suing the University of Kentucky on grounds of religious discrimination. He was doing great during a job search there for a director of the campus’s small observatory, a key part of its astronomy training program. Then his religion became in issue. He travels in suspiciously evangelical circles. He says he is no young-Earther, no evolution-rejecter, etc. But all of a sudden he was dropped from the running, where some say he was out in front for this job.

A reporter or two might do worse than to call Dr. Gonzalez to see if he has any comment. For once, somebody associated with the Discovery Institute might really have something pertinent to offer on the practice of science. The NYTimes piece by Mark Oppenheimer, in the list above, does mention Gonzalez but only in passing.

It is not clear from reporting that the Kentucky job brought with it a tenured professorship or not, but if one looks at Gaskell’s website at UTA, he clearly has some chops even if he is not on faculty there.  His training is impressive. Look at his personal web page. This man is, based on what his page says, clearly a scientist and member of a scientific family. Something about this story begs for a deeper look.

- Charlie Petit

Bait and switch? An apt  metaphor for this story. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Peter Fimrite has it under a sunny-sounding hed: Wild coho salmon run in Marin Country renews hope. His lede follows that up: “One of the last runs of wild coho salmon in California has surged into the Lagunitas Creek watershed in western Marin County, bringing renewed hope to fisheries experts, watershed managers and those who have devoted their lives to salmon procreation.”

The next graf suggests that fears over a death spiral has been mounting recently but “Then, during rains this past week, the fish arrived and began laying eggs in the creek and tributaries…”  The story surely, one thinks, means to give a lift to readers glum over West Coast salmon fisheries that, south of Alaska, are practically shut down due to rapidly collapsing stocks..

The tone of this post already suggest that the story’s line turns a lot darker. But it sure takes awhile. This year’s run, as of the publishing of Fimrite’s story on Friday, is the largest one-week count in the last three years. The count still was only 55 adult fish and 30 redds, or nests of presumably fertilized eggs, laid.

Then the reader learns that while that was a good week, the run is still miserable, so far ( it’s kept raining and the rivers and creeks have kept coastal sandbars washed away and routes to the sea wide open, so maybe more have thronged inland.) Just five years ago more than 1000 spawning salmon made the run, and historically it was a blizzard of fish. And the plot of the last few decades of fish runs, linked to the story, makes it look like they’re on life support. While the run’s persistence certainly leaves hope alive, it’s unclear it revived it above its previous low ebb. Left it about the same, I’d say.

This is not the only unduly cheery example in the paper. The Chron over the weekend highlighted efforts to save another run that resides in the critical care unit. Carolyn Jones, under the hed Brentwood fish ladder to help Marsh Creek salmon, also sets readers up for encouraging news. It describes wildlife managers and advocates giddy to see the migrating fish given access to a watershed from which they’ve been blocked for half a century. But it also describes few signs that enough salmon – chinook and steelhead in this case – will use it to bring the run back to a sustainable level.

Some other outlets covered the same stories, but with considerable more realistic shades of gloom:

• Contra Costa Times – Hannah Dreier : Marsh Creek fish ladder completed as salmon population tumbles ;
• Marin Independent Journal – Mark Prado: Endangered coho salmon begin migration to Marin ;

Other salmon, fish ladder, and other such news from all over:

• Nor-West News (New Zealand) ; Fish get help to go up-stream ; Here’s a gem of a little story on individual initiative and persistence, not to mention volunteerism. Plus, you may never had heard before of fish called the whitebait and the common bully before.
• Eureka Times-Standard: John Driscoll: Fresh fish: Salmon take turn for the better on Freshwater Creek ; Yes, but again, the situation remains dismal.
• Eagle Valley News (Brit. Columbia) Habitat proves healthy for fish ; Fraser river, sockeye and coho.
• Tacoma News Tribune – Les Blumenthal: Hatchery vs. wild – It’s a fight for food ;  A decent, straight-shooting science report. Blumenthal finds some scientists worried b the genetic and resource competition that hatchery-raised fish pose for wild stocks. For thanks he gets some reader’s comments, including one that brings up socialism in regard to “green fundamentalists.” I recommend all tracker readers look however at the comment from pen_mightier_than_sword.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) It’s difficult for reporters in small Latin-American countries to have time to hunt down local scientists and to write stories almost from scratch. That’s why Lucy Calderon from Prensa Libre (Guatemala) deserves congratulations. She produces biweekly a series of interviews of Guatemalan scientists who have spent some time doing research abroad and then came home to put their knowledge to good use. Topics range from genetics, nutrition, biodiversity, pharmacology, or infectious diseases. Their research can’t often make it into Science, Nature or New England Journal of Medicine, but it’s being applied with great effect to  ease specific problems in Guatemalan society. The criteria about what’s scientifically newsworthy is different nation to nation. But in much of the world local applications of research can be far more important than any paper in a high impact international journal.

A menudo en el Tracker reflejamos las dificultades de sacar a relucir la ciencia realizada en ciertos países de Latinoamérica. Nos resulta relativamente fácil atender a las noticias embargadas de las principales revistas científicas, o seleccionar las notas que recibimos de las agencias. Pero estar pendiente desde la redacción de un periódico de qué ocurre en nuestro propio país en materia de ciencia, e intentar construir nuestras historias desde cero, es arduo complicado.  Sabemos que la ciencia local pocas veces puede competir con la de origen anglosajón, y que las propias instituciones y científicos no están tan versados en ofrecer facilidades para comunicar su trabajo. Por eso queremos recoger hoy la iniciativa que desde hace algunos meses está llevando Lucy Calderón en Prensa Libre (Guatemala) de preparar periódicamente una nota dedicada a los científicos guatemaltecos. Preparar notas de manera puntual está bien; pero hacerlo de manera regular es un esfuerzo que da sus frutos cuando se acumulan historias  …

La semana pasada Lucy Calderón nos presentó a un buscador de fármacos guatemalteco; un químico orgánico con varios premios en su currículo, cuyo objetivo científico es buscar moléculas en la naturaleza que puedan tener aplicaciones médicas. Lucy plantea la entrevista con un fuerte componente personal: le interesa la ciencia del investigador, pero también sus motivaciones, carrera, y saber porqué decidió regresar a Guatemala a pesar de tener ofertas de otros países. Como el propio entrevistado explica, “continúo con mi visión de impulsar la Ciencia y la Tecnología en el país, porque son las principales herramientas que pueden sacarnos del subdesarrollo”. A la pregunta de porqué la ciencia se valora poco, responde que es cuestión e cultura, y de esfuerzo de los investigadores por divulgar: “Solo llegando a todos los sectores de la sociedad se creará una cultura nacional en la que poco a poco la gente comprenda que la producción científica no es exclusiva de países industrializados, y para eso hay que informar y conocer lo que se hace a nivel local”.

En una línea parecida avanza la pieza de Lucy sobre un investigador/educador que también decidió regresar a Guatemala para devolver a su país todo lo que había invertido en él. Interesante comentario también: el impacto social que sus investigaciones podían tener en otros países más competitivos era mucho menor del que podría lograr en su país. Además, nos parecen tan interesantes sus pinceladas sobre biodiversidad en Guatemala y etnobotánica, que nos hubiera gustado un poquito más de meollo científico. La tiene versión pdf más contenido –y muy bien presentado- que la versión online.

Nos remontamos un par de semanas para conocer a una investigadora de gran prestigio internacional en el estudio de las vías de transmisión que utilizan los insectos para contagiar enfermedades como dengue, chagas o malaria. La doctora Monroy critica la estructura científica guatemalteca, y da unos interesantes consejos de cómo potenciarla. Muy interesante su reflexión sobre las publicaciones científicas de referencia: “Si uno no publica, a nivel internacional no vale. Pero a nivel local, lo que más importa es que el conocimiento producido sea trasladado a quien lo usará”. En el área de la salud, o industriales, resulta obvio; pero es cierto que los medios suelen preferir la ciencia académica que la aplicada.

Notas anteriores son una entrevista al director del recién inaugurado instituto de investigación en genética humana en Guatemala, una nota sobre el legado del experto en nutrición Dr. Torún fallecido el pasado agosto, o el artículo que dio inicio a esta serie de “medallistas”, dispuesta a dar a conocer a los científicos guatemaltecos que están trabajando en difíciles condiciones para mejorar la calidad de vida de sus compatriotas. Felicidades a Lucy por la sección, ánimo a continuar, y sugerencia a otros periodistas de la región a seguir iniciativas similares.

- Pere Estupinyà

Robert McClure, erstwhile Seattle Post-Intelligencer environment writer and now a mainstay of the non-profit InvestigateWest news agency in Seattle, has a disturbing barn-burner of a story out. Only it’s not about barns, but about barn owls disappearing, and much more. It’s getting picked up in many outlets including, at brief glance, the Seattle Times, Scientific American, and San Francisco Chronicle.

The story is about a new class of “super-toxic” rat poisons and the havoc they may be causing in nature, and among people as well. Part II of the story details that last angle.

This is hard-edge environmental, investigative reporting. Whether it’s entirely accurate I cannot tell, nor how much of this is really new – but it has a solid feel.

- Charlie Petit