A remotely operated submersible 28-feet long, and made with a cleverly hinged frame so it can squeeze down a deep hole and check things out in waters never before explored, made its bow at the American Geophysical Union meeting this week. If tests in Lake Tahoe and elsewhere go well, in a few years a  research project led by a Northern Illinois U. man will make a 30-inch wide hole through the thick, floating tongue of glacial ice called the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The team will insert into it the custom-made, slim-packed robot trailing a communication and power cable. Operators will, when it reaches water thousands of feet down, order it to open and fold in a different way, and then steer it around  in the dark depths with cameras and sensors at the ready. The aim is a better understanding why such shelves protruding from the Antarctic mainland appear to be melting from beneath. They’re pretty sure it’s because the water is getting warmer but they need details.

A few outlets picked up the news, and lots more reporters went down to the exhibition hall in Moscone Convention Center to take a look.

Stories:

• LiveScience/Our Amazing Planet – Jeremy Hsu : Robot sub to see what lies beneath Antarctica ;
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Robotic Sub to Probe Antarctic Ice Melt ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman (save this space!. Dave tells me his story was scheduled for yesterday, got bumped. Then for today, bumped again. Now due out Saturday).

Speaking of Perlman, he is the only newspaper reporter among the scores of freelancers and writers for smaller outlets in the press room. Seems so recently there’d be a dozen at the AGU (Perlman’s been going for at least 40 years). No major wires are there either. The news conferences are on line, so many outlets are covering the formal news events remotely. But there is so much to be said for being at a meeting, not just listening-in over a phone link or watching streaming video.

I happened to be there a bit later and went down to look at this machine myself. Its manufacturer, DOER Marine, built it across the bay at its facility in the port town of Alameda. DOER is for Deep Ocean Exploration and Research. It manufacturers a line of standard-issue remotely operated vehicles, and has an embryonic program to build a sub that can take scientists to the deepest parts of the ocean, 30,000 feet down, while seated in a sphere of “massive glass” so they can see all around, not just get cramps trying to peak out little portholes.

This bespoke, one-off machine for the Antarctic  is called the Sub-Ice ROVer. Thus its name has a formal ring: the DOER SIR.  The  President of the company that built it, Liz Taylor – daughter of oceanographer and company founder Sylvia Earle – explained how it works. It took me a long time staring at it to realize how it folds. Its aluminum chassis is a rhombus, a parallelogram with sides of equal length, and hinged bits at the corners. It can get real skinny and tubular by flattening out in one direction to go down the hole, and then stretch itself flat in the other direction while exposing its working bits as it pokes along the ice shelf’s bottom. See Grist for an explainer at the WISSAR website. The glossy smooth outer shell in the renderings has been supplanted by an open latticework skin to save weight.

Notably, it’s taxpayer stimulus money at work, largely. Looks okay by me, and I’m sure some skilled workers got hired to make it. (CORRECTION: Ross Powell of NIU, leader of the project, let us know that while some stimulus money reached the overall project, the SIR machine is paid for by NOAA and the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation.)  This is one fancy piece of fabricated fiberglass, aluminum, and lots of motors, instruments, gears, and gadgetry whose names I don’t know. I forgot to President Taylor how much the company is charging for this one-off, under-ice robot. Another reporter who did ask told me it’s $2 million. It is a key to a $10 million project to explore the bottoms of ice streams, glaciers, and floating ice tongues managed by NIU and Montana State. The stimulus money arrived via the NSF. The company’s motto seems honest and catchy: “Make a dollar, make a difference.”

Boy, the stuff you learn by being around in person, and after the press conference is over. Besides that, going to a meeting is collegial. Yesterday evening the press room hosted the two winners of AGU’s science writing awards. The previous evening they got the hardware formally from the poobahs in tuxedos, all very nice. But this was the more pleasant follow-up with some wine, beer, and nibbles but no black ties. One learns a lot about the trade listening to award winners reminisce how they did it. Roberta Kwok got the Walter Sullivan Prize for features, and with accompaniment of a researcher, Peter Dennisken, described how she got the story of the only (and tiny) asteroid that’s ever been spotted by telescope on its way to collide with Earth, and its air-bursted fragments picked up on the ground.

And the winner of the David Perlman Award for breaking news, Pallava Bagla of New Delhi and Science magazine’s man in India, told reporters what a tough but rewarding time he had finding out that the IPCC had really screwed up when it formally declared that Himalaya’s glaciers all would be gone by 2035. Fascinating. And eponym Perlman introduced them both.

Grist for the Mill:

WISSAR (ice sheet drilling program) DOER SIR info sheet ;  NIU Press Release ; DOER Marine ; AGU Journalism Awards Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Not just in the US, but all over the world health care rationing is the norm, even if it doesn’t go by that name. Whether one gets care  mainly via private health insurance, payment out of pocket, employer’s clinic, or a national system, if there’s not enough money to give everybody A-one care something has to give.

Take a look at or listen to Public Radio International’s The World Rationing Health / Who Lives, Who Dies? . It is a collection of four articles/broadcasts (both text and audio are on line)  from four nations put together explicitly to put discussion of the topic in the US into broader context. David Baron organized the project. He reports from Zambia where a de-facto rationing in public HIV clinics comes via the near-endless sit in waiting rooms until it’s your turn, Patrick Cox reports from the UK where Nat’l Hlth System rationing is explicit (and under fire), Sheri Fink of Pro-Publica hopped on board from South Africa where local agencies devise their own systems to choose who gets care , and she also provides from India a counter-example of sorts. An ingenious doctor there, faced with a rationing imposed by shortages of supplies, put together cheap, hand-made medical equipment to save children’s lives.

The main deficiency in this is that there is no example of another front rank industrialized, highly developed, democratic nation that controls its health costs but without quite the explicit, open rationing that the UK has. How’s it work in Germany, Sweden, Japan….?

Nonetheless these few glimpses of specifics probably leave on most listeners and readers a far deeper lesson in global public health than a big, comprehensive, statistic-filled opus in which talking heads with fancy job titles wring their hands. Notable: The World, a PRI program co-produced with BBC and WGBH-Boston,  got some of the money for this from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

- Charlie Petit

This is what happens when reporters make up their minds about a controversial story before beginning to write. In a Dec. 8 Chicago Tribune piece on Lyme disease, reporters Patricia Callahan and Trine Tsouderos write that while Lyme disease is real, so-called “chronic” Lyme disease, said to last for years, “is an illness that might not even exist.”

That’s an arguable point, and a fair conclusion to come to–if the writers came to it fairly. But they follow that by saying, without attribution, that we live “in a golden age of dubious medicine,” and that “advocates can raise big money to ‘Unmask A Cure’ for a disease that already has a cure, and doctors disciplined by medical boards are held up as heroes.”

Then this:

Fueled by suspicion of doctors and drug companies, Americans are flocking to alternative healers promoting risky treatments and unproven cures. The Internet connects pseudoscientists with the desperately ill, trumpets I’ve-been-cured testimonials and often dismisses the results of clinical trials as the work of unsympathetic doctors corrupted by Big Pharma money.

Google “ALS” and “treatment” and results include a site touting deer antler therapy for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Google “cancer” and “alternative treatments” and you’ll find a “grape cure,” among others. Message boards are packed with patients trading treatments, often including detailed prescription information.

It goes on. Note that none of this is attributed. The reporters are saying, in their own voice, that chronic Lyme disease belongs squarely with all kinds of risky and unproven cures for cancer and other ailments. With that kind of opening, most readers don’t have to wade any further through the reporting to know what conclusions the story is going to come to. The writers have conveyed their sneering skepticism without, so far, more than a few shreds of reporting. And none from anybody we might consider an expert on the disease.

Indeed, experts are scarce in this 3,000-word story (the count is for the web version). Callahan and Tsouderos are likely going to send me an irritated note enumerating the experts they quoted in the story, but there aren’t many of them, and none of them is quoted at length addressing the legitimacy of chronic Lyme disease.

The reporters might point out that they quoted Allen Steere, the doctor who discovered Lyme disease. But does Steere say chronic Lyme disease is a phony diagnosis being treated by pseudoscientists with unproven cures? Here’s his quote:

“I don’t think of it as a mysterious disease that causes a lot of vague symptoms,” said Steere, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has spent decades studying Lyme disease and sat on two of the expert panels. “It doesn’t.”

It’s clear that Steere doesn’t buy Lyme disease as a cause of all kinds of seemingly unrelated symptoms. But his statement is far more measured than those of the reporters. Further, this is the entire quote. I was eager for a more extended report of Steere’s views of chronic Lyme, but this is all we get. Further still, the quote does not appear until 1,000 words into the story, after we’ve already heard about a doctor repeatedly disciplined for treating chronic Lyme, and from a woman who thinks Lyme disease was manufactured in a government lab. The reporters also quote a Robert Bradford, identified only–and unhelpfully–as the founder of the Robert Bradford Research Institute, who says chronic Lyme is the plague of the 21st Century and might be responsible for half of all cases of chronic illness.

Steere’s quote is set up with a paraphrase of the findings of two doctors’ organizations who concluded that “the diagnosis is suspect.” Again, this is far more measured than what the reporters are writing in their own voice.

They then quote chronic Lyme advocates at length before introducing another expert, Dr. Paul Lantos of Duke University, whose quote, in its entirety, is: “Why take needless risks with people’s lives?”

Again and again, Callahan and Tsouderos give far more space to advocates making questionable claims than they do to experts who refute those claims, allowing the serious case for chronic Lyme disease, whatever that might be, to be buried under the dubious claims of advocates.

The reporters go on and on impuguning patients and advocates without ever telling us whether there is a debate among legitimate experts about whether Lyme disease might assume a chronic form.

The reporters bolster their case that chronic Lyme disease doesn’t exist by noting further down that Bradford was convicted more than 30 years ago for conspiring “to smuggle a banned cancer treatment.” If Bradford is a crook, why do the reporters spend so much time reporting what he has to say? Why is he even in the story?

The writers give the last word to an activist whose rebuttal to one of the doctors’ groups that was skeptical of chronic Lyme disease is this: ‘”Infecting the committee members with Lyme sounds great because we are pissed off.”

Not exactly reasoned debate, eh?

In short, what Callahan and Tsouderos have done is to argue that chronic Lyme disease can’t exist because the people who say it does are nuts.

A far better approach would have been to report the evidence, pro and con, and to quote the most persuasive advocates for and against chronic Lyme disease–not the least persuasive. And to give both sides equal time to speak.

(Thanks for the heads-up to Pam Weintraub, features editor of Discover Magazine and author of Cure Unknown: Inside the Lyme Epidemic.)

- Paul Raeburn

In Nature this week a one-two punch of Arctic science and commentary led a lot of reporters to bring news that polar bears and several other inhabitants of their customary ecoystems are in trouble but not doomed by inevitable climate change – but that intermixing of species as their ranges overlap may erode a few genetic distinctions away. Grizzly bears and polar bears in particular, and has been reported in the scientific literature and general media for several years, are the lead examples of the latter, possible scenario. The first set of forecasts are in a multi-author research paper, the second in a commentary by two scientists in Alaska and a third in Massachusetts.

One has to ask whether the good chance that polar bears could persist in the wild, if greenhouse gas mitigation occurs on a large scale, is news. After all the assumption behind the unofficial rise of polar bears as global warming’s iconic endangered species is already that, if humanity manages to stop putting so much extra CO2 and methane and other such things in the air, enough of the bears’ icy habitat will remain to prevent extinction. So we need to act fast. So why is it news that a team of US scientists argue in Nature that very thing: tame the greenhouse = (probably) save the polar bear?

The news is, I’d offer, not that the supposition is new, but that the detailed calculations showing considerable ability of suitable pack ice to persist in some regions of the arctic, maintaining such prey species as ring seals, makes the existing hypothesis more robust. That, and the authors don’t see any pending “tipping points” in seasonal sea ice coverage that would doom the entire habitability zone for polar bears to disappear. Thus the story would seem not so much to be that they could squeak through the next century’s transitions if things go well, but where and in about what numbers. Plus, if it all depends on emissions cuts, and given the recent slump in international diplomatic work toward that end, where’s the reason for hope?

Such subtlety eludes the headline writers on some writeups. More stories ought to come along on the topic – at the American Geophysical Union meeting today in San Francisco another press conference (beyond a teleconference two days ago) will fill the ears of scores of reporters.

Plus, one would think more outlets would have tried to find out exactly where the last redoubts of the polar bear might be. Top of Greenland, out in the Canadian archipelago, both, where? Are the white bears of the Bering Strait region and Hudson Bay doomed no matter what…?

Stories:

• Edmonton Journal – Ed Struzik: ‘Message of hope’ for polar bears’ survival / Greenhouse gas reductions still needed ; One plainly put piece of news here: one of the authors says flatly to forget hopes that polar bears can adapt to life on land should sea ice, with lots of fat seals on it and in range of swimming bears, go away.
• Post Media News / Vancouver Sun: Margaret Munro: Still time to save polar bears ; Powerful vignette lede on two skinny polar bear cubs that one of the study’s authors found recently, starved to death on the fringes of the animals’ present range. The researcher says, however, optimism depends on one’s optimism that the requisite changes in emissions will occur.
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Arctic’s vanishing sea ice presents polar bear with a new danger – grizzlies ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Polar bear ‘doomed’? Only if greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t cut ;
• Science News via Wired – Alexandra Witze: It May Not Be Too Late for Polar Bears ;
• E&E Greenwire via NYTimes – Paul Voosen: No ‘Tipping Point’ for Sea Ice in Polar Bears’ Future ; This hed gets closer to the fresh conclusions in the paper on sea ice, polar bears, and the creatures they eat.
• NatureNews – Nicola Jones: Polar bears could survive on persisting ice ; .
• .. could do more, but gotta run over to SF for the AGU meeting and a panel I’m on.

*UPDATE: I didn’t know it, but the AGU meeting included a press conference on this polar bear story. Among those listening was the world’s foremost journalist climate blogger:

• NYTimes / DotEarth – Andrew C. Revkin: Pondering a Polar Predator in Retreat ; Not for the faint of heart is the video of two starving young polar bears to which Andy links. This is not a normal news and commentary blog post, but a meditation on life, death, and responsibility on Earth, 2010.

Grist for the Mill: U. Washington Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

.....15.9994?! Where ARE you?

For a good time pondering the slow, reformative pace of scientific fine tuning, click over to the Los Angeles Times where Thomas H. Maugh II wrote up in good style some  small, obscure, amusing, astounding news. The atomic weights of ten elements including some that everybody knows about have been wrong. (No dysprosium or its ilk on this list, even though the NYTimes‘s Keith Bradsher, in story one must call a must-read even though it’s not strictly science, just wrote balefully of a feared dysprosium shortage).

Sorry for the digression in parentheses there. Anyway, the Periodic Table had it either wrong or sort of wrong, depending where one is, and that has nothing to do with relativity theory.  This is big news of the most arcane sort. If Jonah Lehrer, who wrote that big New Yorker story (previous post) on the dodginess of nearly all published scientific results, had known about this he’d probably blame it on the Decline Effect. But it is not that – it’s just that the hard and fast atomic weights of some elements are not, out there in nature, constant. That’s because the periodic table doesn’t list all isotopes separately, but gives each element an aggregate atomic weight representing the average of its naturally occurring isotopes adjusted for their relative abundance.

Maugh calls it, in his lede, the Extreme Makeover, Chemistry Edition. The elements affected in a revision, proposed by researchers from the US Geological Survey and University of Calgary, are hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, chlorine, and thallium. Rather than having single atomic weights, each will now get a small range to reflect that in various geologic settings the relative abundances of the isotopes may be different, changing the average an oonch.

It’s not often a science writer has to, or gets to depending on one’s point of view, explain what an atomic weight is and what an isotope is. Or where the big news is in the change of a number attached to oxygen from its now-canonical 15.9994 to the range 15.999 03 to 15.999 77.

A few other outlets ran with it – not many considering two press releases gave the news a boost.

Other stories:

• Canadian Press – Scott Edmonds: Atomic weight of 11 elements on what was a constant periodic table are changing. Hmmm. The LATimes said ten elements. The difference is that an additional element, germanium, has also been revised slightly, but apparently not because of isotope abundance fuzziness. He tells what he calls a really bad chemistry joke, and that’s about right for this riddle. What element of the periodic table obeys all laws? A: Copper. As in cop, get it. Copper’s At.Wt. stays the same. This story also carries the news that an additional set of multi-isotope elements are under scrutiny and may eventually be in for a change recommendation as well.
• Ottawa Citizen/Postmedia News – Sarah McGinnis: It ain’t heavy, it’s hydrogen: Scientists updating periodic table ;
• CNET – Jennifer Guevin: Periodic table gets weighty update ; The story, plus a sarcastic aside. He refers to the “snappily named” International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry’s Commission on Isotopic Abundances and Atomic Weights. I’m pretty good at acronyms, but never would I nor anybody else be able to tell you, unless they belong to the thing, the meaning of IUPACCIAAW.

*UPDATE: More stories:

• Scientific American – David Harris: Mass Migration: Chemists Revise Atomic Weights of 10 elements ; Good basic chemistry explainer except ….. Edmonds’s story from CP, a few bullets up, says these ten are merely the first ones for which the group has calculated a range, and an additional series is in the works. Harris says these ten are it – everything else has just one stable isotope. Hmm. Iron, for one, has four stable isotopes and it’s not on the list. Tin has ten.
• *UPDATE to UPDATE – Harris, not long after this post went up, did amend his piece with a simple re-wording, evading the error on the diversity of elements with multiple stable isotopes. He and I had just sat on the same panel at the AGU meeting in SF – he moderated splendidly a rehash of the arsenic microbe story – and he’d told me in the press room later he too had done this periodic table story. Gad – felt bad chiding him even slightly on it.

Grist for the Mill:

University Calgary Press Release with links to the two journal articles; USGS Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Washington, D.C.-based science writer Brian Vastag wrote a nice, and nicely depressing , feature in The Washington Post on Tuesday, about the emerald ash borer, the Asian long-horned beetle, the Asian gypsy moth, and the other 450 or so species of insects that have invaded American trees since 1860.

The story was pegged to a report in the December issue of BioScience, but Vastag used that report to range more widely among experts in invasive species to give us this status report.

His reporting also turned up an interesting puzzler. The USDA, according to Vastag, has had regulations since 2005 that require wooden shipping materials to be heat-treated or fumigated so that invasive species can’t hitch a ride on them to the United States. And 98 percent of such materials are properly treated, according to a government spokesman. So, clearly, something isn’t working.

It turns out that the USDA drafted a tougher rule in 2004, but that the rule hasn’t moved forward. Despite the crisis–clearly demonstrated in Vastag’s article, and not refuted by the USDA–the USDA has apparently done nothing about it for six years. Nevertheless, a spokesman told Vastag that preventing the introduction of forest pests is a “high priority.”

If that’s what happens when something is a high priority, I’d hate to think what happens to proposals the USDA has simmering on the back burner.

This is the best nugget of news in the piece, and I’d venture the friendly suggestion that Vastag should have put this higher in the story, rather then where he did–in the concluding grafs.

Maybe we’ll read more about that in a follow-up. Let’s hope Vastag stays on the story.

- Paul Raeburn

On the track today, the tracker remarked that it was hard to find bylines with some recent AP stories. There is a reason for that. One of the suddenly anonymous tipped me off to this:

Press release – News Media Guild

Dec. 14

NEW YORK – Hundreds of journalists at The Associated Press are taking part in a national “byline boycott” and are signing a petition protesting proposed cuts at the news cooperative.

Guild members and supporters are removing their bylines from news stories and photo credits. They’re also demonstrating unity by wearing red shirts and signing a petition asking AP management to reconsider a pension plan freeze and increases in medical payments by more than 40 percent.

“Guild members have increased productivity, embraced new skills, and have made many financial sacrifices,” said NMG President Tony Winton. “Members are saying AP has to do better if it wants to preserve and protect quality journalism.”

After failing to make payments into the pension plan for years, AP wants to freeze the benefit, which was paid by salary deferrals. The Guild says the proposal would undermine retirement security for almost all workers. AP also wants workers to absorb $1 million in medical plan costs even though workers adopted cost-savings measures two years ago. AP told the union that it can afford to absorb the increase – it “just doesn’t want to.”

About 1,200 AP employees in the U.S. are represented by the News Media Guild, a local of The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America. The union represents reporters, writers, editors, broadcast staff, technology employees and business office employees.

The current two-year contract expired Nov. 30.

- Charlie Petit

Don’t you just love some good news that takes the edge off the bad – even if it, on reflection, only accentuates the bad by reminding one that the good is only news because the contrast with the norm is so sharp?

Well, Japan’s Kunimasu trout, or some say salmon, is a dark-hued or “black kokanee” that was supposed to have gone a-glimmering 60 years ago.

Stories:

• Yomiuri Shimbun – “Extinct” trout species rediscovered ;
• AP – Scientist says he found Japan fish thought extinct ; It did go extinct in its main lake, it says here. The fresh, live one was in another lake.
• Mainichi Daily News – Salmon thought extinct found living near Mt. Fuji ;

One thinks there is more to this story. It is to be hoped that a reporter, somewhere, will follow it up in a few months to see how it holds up in light of  genetic studies or other additional research. For one thing, is it salmon or trout? All Pacific salmon are closely related to trout, but one thinks there is a difference. Some say all Pacific salmon are trout – which is to say, they are anadromous, or ocean-migrating, trout that spawn in rivers and streams. Steelhead salmon are clearly anadromous rainbow trout. If that’s right, one might well regard this Japanese not-really-extinct fish as either trout, or salmon, equally well.

- Charlie Petit

At Politico, the web-based news outlet with the name that make its beat clear, reporter Keach Hagey dives headfirst into political coverage of climate change – including a leaked e-mail from Fox News’s DC managing editor Bill Sammon, during ClimateGate’s height, to the outlet’s reporters. Read the whole story but here, thank  you Politico, is the email’s key (maybe only) verbiage:

Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

Oh, really? First off, it has what many may take as a reasonable tone. It is an order, at first approximation, that journalists be objective, not to mention be fair and balanced so you, the public, may decide. Right. Reporters should  report what people are saying, but should not regard points in contention as established facts. Sounds pretty much okay.

But look closely and it falls apart. No reasonable news editor should put these manacles on reporters. First off, it extends far beyond the scientific debate over what is essentially a scientific matter, climate change. To the degree to which legitimate scientists disagree, which isn’t much in essence, argument is over the relative weights to give causes of climate change – anthropogenic, or cycles not heavily influenced by humankind.There is almost nothing in the literature that says climate has not warmed recently, for whatever reason. I mean, it’s accepted as fact pretty much across the scientific spectrum, including among contrarians. Otherwise, it would make no sense for that crowd to say global warming stopped ten years ago. That alone, while ignorant, implicity acknowledges that it was happening before it stopped.

Mr. Sammon says that ANY assertion of planetwide warming or cooling needs this boilerplate rejoinder. Wow. If one is writing about the extinction of mammoths, one would need to say the the cooling that produced continental ice sheets during the last glacial maximum, and nice habitat for woolly elephants, is just a rumor? Or that the Eemian warming that put hippos in the Thames 125,000 years ago is just another contentious hypothesis that some say is wrong?

Further, his justification for the memo is that unnamed “critics” have called into question the truth of global warming, regardless of its cause. The skepticism, by his memo’s implication, does not even have to be from scientists, but from critics of any stripe or denomination.  Has Sammon issued an evolution-creationism memo? (Or telling reporters not to declare as fact that tax cuts for the super-wealthy are an effective economic stimulus without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that some critics see it differently?)

It says here that the leaked email went first to Media Matters, an openly liberal organization that has been going after Fox for some time now. That such a memo circulated within Fox News is no surprise. It also is no surprise that somebody in Fox leaked it. The memo is stupid and unnecessarily stupid at that. Had it declared only that counter-assertions should accompany  declarations that people are behind the recent warmth, or accompany any statement that computer models are pretty accurate in saying things are going to get a lot hotter, it would be merely an example of a policy to slant reporting.  But this one is so broadly ill-informed as to be laughable.

Here is Media Matters‘s own rendition of this affair, including clips of Fox news coverage that triggered the memo, adn examples of reporters apparently trying to comply with its directive.

- Charlie Petit

For one of the few (if any) times in the last 30+ years I haven’t been to the opening days of the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. Tomorrow I’ll make it, for a late-morning panel discussion with other reporters. Among us will be one of the authors of the paper that led to the panel’s topic: the suddenly famous Mono Lake microbe with its tolerance for arsenic and the enticing if indirect evidence that it can swap arsenate for phosphate in its DNA. That should be interesting.

In the meantime, the press room run by AGU news chief Peter Weiss and his gang is busy. Take a look at the list of registrants, which includes working press as well as working press agents plus students. Well over 200 names. Not all show up, but Weiss said this morning about 160 have so far – maybe 75 of them freelancers, staff writers, and other journalists.   The related releases and press conferences (which includes the panel on arsenic microbes) are generating news accounts from reporters not only there but covering it via teleconference, web hookup, news release, and whatever else they can scrounge from afar. A few reporters on the scene, one supposes, are stirring themselves to venture into the enormous program, scratch their chins, draw up plans, lace up their walkin’ shoes and taking in talks and posters for yarns and excloos.

We listed a few of the stories from the meeting yesterday. Here are more, aggregated by topic. Also, a few press releases or other grist for the press mill that I happen to have come across.

Radar data, mapping program, color coding et voila

CRYOVOLCANO ON TITAN: The question – is the H2O equivalent to magma and lava perhaps actual  ice, some sort of high speed glacier, or a watery slurry that stays warm enough to flow for awhile? Is it pulverized by volatilization and deposited like pumice, maybe?  I’d like to know, will see if any of these tell us.

• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: First Volcano Sighting on Saturn’s Most Earthlike Moon ; Hey, nice. At first one thinks she misses the point, but she has a better one to make. It’s not merely that it’s a cryovolcano, but that it’s any kind of volcano that makes the news for Grossman. She immediately tells readers why that’s exciting to planetary scientists : the frigid place already has lakes, rivers, clouds, and a cycle of evaporation and mist of rainfall that do NOT rely on water, but on organic fluids. Now it has volcanoes, and they may use water. So Earthlike, but the roles have different actors.
• AP – Possible ice volcano spied on giant Saturn moon ; No byline. One expected to see Alicia Chang’s signer, but can’t find who wrote it.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: String of Peaks Found on Titan Could be Cryovolcanoes ; Long story, heavy on a methane angle (CH4 would be erupted along with ice), and a hint at the possible general character of the erupting stuff. Pumice gets a mention.
• Inside Science News Service – Eric Betz (via MSNBC): Possible ice volcano spied on giant Saturn moon ; It spewed “molten ice,” says here. If not water, which one supposes is possible – one imagines some kind of Aa lava, with blocky stuff tumbling along – then what? What to the cryvolcanologists have in their minds’ eyes? It goes on here to say one possibility is a “slushy liquid and gases.” That helps. But it also compares it to a glacier. That’s confusing.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: First ‘cryovolcano’ discovered on Titan, ice moon of Saturn ; He says boffins (sigh) believe they have discovered the first cryovolcano known to the human race. One recalls similar claims some years ago for features on Neptune’s moon Triton. And he calls the eruptate “freezing slush,” which is evocative.

• Grist for the Mill: JPL Press Release, cool video ;

A RING AROUND THE EARTH? Or, out among the posters….

• APS Physics Central / Buzz Blog – Alaina G. Devine :Putting the G in AGU Part I ; No press release involved.  Devine is a former math major and frequent motivational speaker who writes regularly for the website of the American Physical Society. This blog isn’t news, but it illustrates the richness to be found by wandering among the ranks upon ranks of posters at meetings like this. She, apparently, is not convinced there is a ring around Earth. But she witnessed a heated exchange about the hypothesis it has one that changes climate. A fight? Could be news.

URBAN LIGHT POLLUTION: Not just astronomers dislike it.

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: City lighting ‘boosts pollution’ ; The lede says it makes air pollution worse. A key natural catalyst for busting up smog precursors is easily sundered by light – even the dim lights of a city at night.

NEW SATELLITE SNAPS GIANT STORMS ON SUN: On August 1 the Solar Dynamics Observatory or SDO provided the best look yet at a solar eruption that was almost like half the sun’s surface blew up. Now we have the movies and the data. The orbiting machine teamed with another craft called STEREO.  Thus came new understanding how distant regions of the sun may coordinate their fireworks – generating “sympathetic flares,” so-called. The pertinence is to understanding more about solar storms that make mischief with Earth’s power and communications systems. A related video went straight to YouTube.

• Daily Mail (UK) Niall Firth: Stunning ‘solar tsunami’ gives scientists new clues about what makes the sun explode; This may be mostly off press release, but it’s pretty well put together and certainly shows that this  much-derided tabloid can hunker down and tell it straight.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: NASA satellite helps predict weather on the sun ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Huge Solar Explosions Can Rock the Entire Sun ;
• Huffington Post – Catharine Smith : ‘The Great Eruption’ ; Massive Solar Explosion Rocks The Sun ;  A rewrite off releases and the Daily Mail story, but it’s nice to see this mostly-political news site paying attention to news like this.
• UniverseToday – Nancy Atkinson: Near-Synchronous Explosions Connect Across the Vast Distances on the Sun ; Atkinson does this story to the max, including links to lots of videos including one nifty one from ScienceFriday.
• New Scientist TV – Catherine de Lange: Going global: Watch how solar eruptions are connected ; Another one richly bedecked in video eye candy.
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• Grist for the Mill: NASA press release ; Lockheed-Martin Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Two small news splashes here with nothing in common except boundaries, spacecraft, and the geography of the solar system. Those, and each is launched by press releases, each is making a ripple at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that I’ve not yet attended even though it’s right across the bay, and each attracts a small crowd.

1) Voyager Gets Nearer to Interstellar Space:

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Voyager near Solar System’s edge ; Filed from the AGU meeting in San Francisco. I guess 33 years on the job does make one a “veteran probe,” a usage I don’t recall seeing before. And here’s to plutonium radioisotope generators.
• AP – Alicia Chang: NASA: Voyager 1 nearing edge of solar system;
• New Scientist: Maggie McKee: Voyager 1 probes reaches new solar system frontier ;
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Voyager reaches edge of solar system
• And just wondering – has somebody finally invented a robotic program that writes the news without human intervention?  Maybe you’ll ask yourself the same thing after MJB News Online – Natalie Brown: Voyager 1 To Leave Solar System ; I’ve no idea what MJB News is  or whence if comes. The site provides few clues.

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

2) Iapetus’s Strange Ridge

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Iapetus oddball shape explained ; Or, the ring that fell down. He ties this to the news (see yesterday’s post) on how a dying satellite left the icy rings of Saturn behind.  One does wonder why obliquely impacting ring particles might not just as easily have excavated  a trench -  a linear, composite crater – rather than build a wall.
• Register – Lewis Page: Boffins crack walnut-shaped Iapetus moon mystery ; Yes, Boffins. The story provides some implications how it might work, but Page leaves out a lot – such as where these boffins work, what’s the meeting….

Grist for the Mill: Wash. Univ. St. Louis Press Release ;I read it. I still don’t get how little impacters with the velocities of rifle bullets would build up a ridge. Doing this with rifle bullets fired obliquely along the ground does not lead to expectation of a little column of piled up spent bullets – but a blasted out groove in the middle of two lanes of debris.

Others from AGU meeting:

• Space.com – Mike Wall: Ice volcano Found on Saturn Moon Titan ;
• New Scientist – Eric Betz: Giant ice volcano may have been found on Titan ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: City lighting ‘boosts pollution’ ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Scientist warns of quake risk from ‘carbon capture’ ;

- Charlie Petit

Last first – the question of the yawn. All I know is my own yawns. In reading well-inside today’s NYT science section where Nicholas Bakalar describes the many ideas about why so many creatures yawn, none of them very well tested by experiment, I don’t recognize my yawn nor that of our cat Emma. So this is a sample size of one. But I digress. I’ll buy that nobody knows the physiological utility of a yawn. Harder to take is the complete focus in this article on the yawn’s main mien – the gape. I’ve been yawning all morning even before reading this article. Sure there’s the mouth preamble, but when it’s really going my head tenses back, arms go out with elbows locked firmly straight, back arches, knees lock, toes point, fists clench with hands cocked up, my butt’s about as hard as it gets. And I groan through a rictus grimace. It’s a full-body stretch. So all the attention to whether or how a good yawn improves brain circulation seems to me, the case of one, to ignore that it’s often a generalized muscle stretch. Tonsil exposure is just one aspect. The jaw’s significance may be mainly that it’s the easiest joint to push without forcing one to put down what one’s holding or stop walking or stand up or whatever. Maybe it kicks the heart rate up, provides sensory signals generally, or something. I dunno. That cartoon guy looks relaxed everywhere but the head. A good yawn is a workout.

The section’s lead is Gina Kolata‘s report on beta amyloid and other protein tangles in Alzheimic brains. It is the latest in an intermittent series she and Pam Belluck have been writing, The Vanishing Mind. One might have thought amyloid buildup to be the usual suspect as cause and a possible door to treatment, but this does move the ball forward in detail. The problem may not be too much production, but not enough trash-hauling in neural tissues.

But here’s a question. What’s wrong with this passage in Kolata’s story:

When Dr. Randall Bateman first tried to get funds for an effort to answer a sort of chicken-and-egg question about Alzheimer’s, some grant reviewers turned him down, saying they doubted it would work. But they were wrong. He got his answer, although it took much longer than he expected, and his paper describing his results was just published online Thursday by Science.The question came to him in 2003, when he was a neurology resident. One day he was sitting in the hospital cafeteria at Washington University in St. Louis, taking advantage of free soup and rolls. Dr. David M. Holtzman, a neurology professor, joined him, and the two began to talk about the puzzle of Alzheimer’s. Why, Dr. Bateman wondered, did beta amyloid build up in patients’ brains? Were people making too much? Or were they unable to dispose of what they made?

Great question, Dr. Holtzman replied, but what kind of test could you do to answer it?

That’s a trick question. Maybe you see something, but I find nothing wrong with it. There also are no direct quotes. It reads smoothly and with authority. It is about a conversation, and captures its participants. The point is that this is a long story, my mind wandered, and I started looking for empty quote marks. Those are quotes around lines that carry an important bit of information but do not express anything in a way that is particularly clever or revealing of the speaker’s character or personality. I remember once an old pal, Horst Rademacher who lives nearby and writes for a German newspaper, told me American reporters are quote-happy. He told me I am the writer, so write. Anyway, I found a bunch of quotes – and I am not picking on Gina Kolata at all – that are direct quotes that provide no added value by being verbatim. Why not write, in one’s own rendering, such bits as these (I’ve left out the quote marks to reduce clutter) :

We are much closer and quite optimistic that we will be able to do it ; the default network has a unique metabolic profile; What we think may be happening is that a clearance mechanism is broken first ; That’s a very interesting question; We don’t know the answer.

Sometimes one just has to have a quote to break things up. Or the editor demands quotes. But a writer, after finishing a long stretch, can clean things up by going back and rewriting parts where the source’s own voice adds nothing important to the reader’s understanding of ideas, or of people, and is not even colorful. I don’t know how to categorize one quote in this story. It is “Too much of a good thing is bad.” The man who said it comes up, near as I can tell, nowhere else in the story except to source that remark. Maybe he provided such a long and helpful interview Kolata simply needed a way to get his name in as a thank you?   That happens sometimes.

Other headlines to note:

• Sean B. Carroll: In a Single-Call Predator, Clues to the Animal Kingdom’s Birth ; Carroll is of course a noted professor and parttime freelance science writer. He uses no quotes, as I’ve remarked before. That’s not a practice that journalists need embrace. But it works  fine.
• Natalie Angier: Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivors’ Tale ; Beautiful, almost entirely. Yet even Natalie A. with her brilliant phrase making  could use some editing. To call musk ox “co-prancers with mastodons”? Musk Oxen maybe, but Mastodons pranced? And to force a reference to “biting the dust” into discussion of one herd’s bad teeth? And to list reindeer and caribou, technically the same species Rengifer tarandus, as distinct for the sake of some word play in the lead? Maybe a slide on that last one. But, uh … whoa, girl.
• Dennis Overbye has two, laid out one atop the other in the section and each about the same modest size, each a tidying look-back on stories that turned messy recently: Poisoned Debate Encircles a Microbe Study’s Result on the arsenic bacteria; Rings in Sky Leave Alternate Visions of Universes on the backlash to the idea that the cosmic microwave background includes circular ripples projected by black holes in a previous universe that spawned our own.
• Nicholas Wade: Decoding the Human Brain, With Help From a Fly ; Here’s a quote with punch : “I think this is the beginning of a new world.” That’s quite a role for a fruit fly brain’s anatomy.

- Charlie Petit