I did this morning sneak a few peeks at the feed from Florida where SpaceX went through the countdown to its launch of the multiple-engined Falcon9 and its prototype Dragon space cargo capsule. Looks like the thing worked. The screenshot shows the first stage falling away, the bell of the second stage rocket in the foreground. Wrap up on coverage tomorrow.
- Charlie Petit
Directors of such TV programs as CSI and Bones are to be forgiven for pretending that table-top gizmos can provide the exact chemical formula of evidence in a flash, or that DNA data bases provide the name and address bingo after a human hair goes into the test chamber, and that forensic scientists work in labs that look like places from Architectural Digest. But USAToday‘s Liz Szabo has a story this week about a Southern California woman with a gadget that seems equally miraculous. She runs quickie safety tests (for such things as heavy metals) on her kids toys with a dealie that looks like an oversized bar code reader. She rents it out, too, and tests toys and such for others.
She gets kudos from consumer activists and government regulators, it says here. More technical detail and data is badly needed to explain why.
Tom Avril, the Phil. Inquirer science reporter, brought this piece to our attention. He asks, reasonably, why did not Szabo include some hint how the device works, how sensitive it is, and otherwise have addressed whether this is an appropriate use of such equipment.
I’d suggest further questions. Such as, if this pricey little thing is so good at doing what this story says it’s doing, should not inspectors of goods, especially imported toys and such, be using them extensivelyalready? If they are, let us know. Maybe buyers for major corporations – Target, Walmart, Costco, Toys-R-Us, and others, should use them routinely too. Maybe they already do? And if the devices aren’t particularly sensitive or accurate, then the story should say so.
Incidentally, as reported, the woman with the pollutant-detector seems to use her findings responsibly. That is, if she tests something that makes the readout window to display worrisome numbers, she notifies the manufacturer and authorities to do further tests. She’s not sending out a press release first.
Still..this story leaves a few important questions unaddressed.
Grist for the Mill: These XRF guns do sound impressive, according to their promoters. Check this from a company that rents them.
- Charlie Petit
At Slate Carl Zimmer presented yesterday some unwelcome news for NASA and its press agents, not to mention Science magazine’s peer reviewers and editors. He found almost nobody, in a sampling of several authorities but with enough statistical significance to raise eyebrows, who thinks last week’s report on arsenic self-laced microbes from Mono Lake will stand the test of time. His quote-headline sums up what he was told, ‘This Paper Should Not Have Been Published’ / Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life. Among the doubters the fast-moving Zimmer rounds up is Norman Pace of the U. of Colorado, a man of such standing among microbiologists that his nix on the paper should alone be enough to cast an odor upon it.
I concede that in the earlier comment string to go with posts on this matter, I said the paper looked as though it made its admittedly inferential case well enough (see earlier post) to deserve a trot in the bright sunshine of journal publication. What one is less sure about now, After reading Zimmer’s dispatch, is whether it was made well enough to merit a star turn at such an august forum as Science, complete with heavily-promoted press conference and NASA drum-beating. That is, maybe not only the fevered advance rumors of the paper’s contents were wrong but so is the paper itself in its conclusions, no matter how banal they are compared to imagined discovery of life on a moon of another planet.
One expects that, unlike many scientific papers that, after a news splash, fade from view with their conclusions eroded or discarded with no notice from media, the life history of this one will be covered all the way to resolution.
(And a thank you to Jonathan Beard, NY freelancer, for the tip to the Slate article).
Other recent coverage of the arsenic-philes:
See also
However this turns out, it’ll be news. And chances are that ultimate description of exactly what these arsenic-tolerating beasties are will turn out to be quite interesting.
- Charlie Petit
Kenetech wind turbine & eagle
The full-scale, in-the-round museum diorama of bygone industrial hardware that sprawls along Altamont Pass between Northern California’s Livermore and San Joaquin valleys is a fixture for millions of motorists who use the highway through its middle. It is like a working, 19th century farm that shows what horses were once good for – but in this case, the ancient ways are represented by rank upon rank of small and outmoded wind turbines – thousands of them. Once the world’s foremost non-hydro renewable energy complex, its tiny turbines flailing rapidly and bashing untoward numbers of raptors and other birds into feathereens, it has long been eclipsed by the monster wind harvesters recently familiar in Texas, the Great Plains, and along the Eastern Seaboard (not to mention Europe and China and….).
Yesterday my old newspaper and the one that hits the front steps each morning revealed plans by the Altamont’s largest operator, NexEra Energy Resources, to replace its older models with larger, slower-turning, less bird-lethal (but still bad news for some birds), more efficient and more widely-separated machines. The San Francisco Chronicle‘s Kelly Zito, who has been covering outdoors environmental matters lately, wrote it up for the front page. She leads on the bird safety angle.
The story is told well enough – which is that the state’s attorney general (and governor-elect) has helped to broker a deal between the turbines’ operator and local Audubon Society lawyers to put in less lethal equipment. The company pays $2.5 million for research into wind turbine bird kills and toward protection of raptor habitat, too.
What rankles is that in the newspaper, there is no illus. On line at the Chron, one finds just a couple of small photos of some of the old fangled machines. I think I am smelling one result of the unfortunate staff cuts at this once-expansive metro. Zito does mention that some of the old machines to be replaced have open-trusswork towers that tempted birds to build nests in them (just don’t try your wings in the wrong direction, dear fledglings). But readers might like to see something with a p. 1 story. Maybe in a follow Zito can get some diagrams or photos to compare the new and old equipment, its size, and spacing.
The story may have been launched entirely by the Audubon Society and Atty Gen’l press releases. Which is to say, without much warning or time to to work. Nonetheless, if the releases arrived even one day ahead of the writing, or in the morning, there ought to have been time to call the company – which operates across the US and Canada, presumably some of them fully modern and which presumably has a press officer - to, again, get a diagram or photo of the sorts of new turbines that are acceptable to compare with the old and render this story easy to grasp with something graphic.
Also, business readers and those worried about trade deficits might like to know where the new ones are likely to come from. Europe? China? Right here in the US, and if so by a foreign or American-owned outfit? Further, with tax breaks for renewable energy on shaky ground, what are the chances the company will maintain ability to follow through? Lots of room here for a substantial followup.
The story got some other coverage too:
Grist for the Mill:
Audubon California Press Release ; CA Atty Gen’l Office Press Release (with pdf of the agreement linked, and boy does it have a lot of signatures and pages of verbiage) ; For reasons unknown, big and corporate Next-Era Energy issued no release.
- Charlie Petit
(English intro to Spanish lang. post) If one reads NatureNews or ScienceNow stories explaining why H1N1 virus killed healthy adults while sparing kids and old people, it seems that all the research has been done solely in Vanderbilt University (Tennessee). But if you read the original paper published in Nature Medicine, you’ll see multiple authors from Argentina based and affiliated with a variety of Argentinean institutions. The Spanish Tracker sent an email to the principal investigator (Fernando Polack from Vanderbilt Univ. and Instituto Infant) and he said Argentine collaboration deserved more credit. The stories from NatureNews and ScienceNow quote scientists from Tennessee, Dallas, Massachusetts, Maryland, Toronto and Rotterdam, but none from Argentina. Maybe it’s not such a big deal, but since I started tracking, I’ve noticed that this insufficient recognition of local scientists in international media, and sometimes local as well, is not unusual at all. At least in this case, Argentinean press indeed paid attention to their institutions, and included them in their stories.
Leyendo estas nota en inglés de ScienceNow o NatureNews encontrarás una muy buena explicación del estudio hecho en la Vanderbilt University de Tennessee sobre porqué la gripe H1N1 fue más dañina en jóvenes y adultos sanos de mediana edad, que en niños y viejos teóricamente más frágiles. Si atiendes a la nota de Fabiola Czubaj “Resuelven un misterio científico” en La Nación (Argentina), descubrirás que también ha habido la participación argentina por medio de la fundación Infant. Y si lees en Clarín a Valeria Román “Descubren por qué la gripe A mató a tantos adultos sanos”, añadirás todavía más nombres de varias instituciones público y privadas argentinas. ¿por qué la prensa anglosajona mencionó sólo a científicos norteamericanos? (NatureNews tiene citas de investigadores de Tennessee, Dallas y Toronto) ¿despiste suyo, menosprecio, o desdeñable la participación argentina? Puedes apostar por alguna de las dos primeras opciones; Si lees la lista de autores y afiliaciones del paper original publicado en Nature Medecine, comprobarás que los primeros firmantes son todos nombres argentinos. Consultado por mail el investigador principal del estudio, Fernando Polack de la Vanderbilt University y la Fundación Infant reconoce que aunque la mayoría del trabajo se hizo en Nashville (Tennessee), muchas muestras se consiguieron de Argentina, la participación de los centros argentinos merecía mayor crédito, y así se lo había indicado a los periodistas durante las entrevistas que le hicieron. No es tan flagrante como en otras ocasiones, pero sí representa un nuevo caso en el que la prensa anglosajona elude la ciencia y científicos de fuera de Norteamérica o Europa. No es culpa sólo de ellos. Las instituciones deben hacer un esfuerzo en aprender a llegar a los periodistas y servicios de noticias internacionales. La visibilidad es importante.
En España, la corta pero concisa nota en Público de Ainhoa Iriberri “El exceso de celo de las defensas mata en las pandemias” no cita la participación argentina en la investigación, mientras que sí lo hace el más detallado texto de Nuria Ramírez de Castro “¿Por qué la gripe A mató a jóvenes sanos?” en ABC. tampoco citan a Argentina. También lo hace, por ejemplo, El Universal “¿Qué mató a enfermos de AH1N1?” en México.
Muchos interrogantes y frases vagas sobre el misterio en los titulares… como sugiere el título de Público, lo descubierto es que las muertes de individuos sanos se produjeron no por el virus en sí, sino por una sobrerreacción del sistema inmunológico que afectó de forma fatal a órganos internos, especialmente pulmones. Esto ya se intuía, pero no se entendía porqué los niños y los más adultos parecían más protegidos. El equipo del Dr. Polack hizo biopsias de afectados del 2009 y vio grandes cantidades de una proteína llamada C4d, cuya acumulación está relacionada con un proceso específico del sistema inmunológico que no es tan frecuente en niños, y que también ocurre menos en adultos que hayan estado expuestos antes a virus parecidos, como fue el caso de –confirmado por biopsias de muestras antiguas de la pandemia de 1957- personas mayores. La virulencia de un virus de la gripe continúa siendo más preocupante para niños y mayores, pero los efectos de sobrerreacción del sistema inmunológico pueden afectar peor a individuos sanos de mediana edad. Como comenta Valeria Román entrevistando al Dr. Polack “Esto lleva a considerar que las personas sin enfermedades previas que son afectadas gravemente por una pandemia podrían ser tratadas en el futuro con moduladores del sistema inmune para prevenir la mortalidad”. Ciencia interesante. Pero en este caso, lo que más nos interesa constatar en el tracker es la tendencia a infravalorar en los medios a la ciencia realizada fuera de EEUU y Europa.
- Pere Estupinyà
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung took a local path to deal with the conference on climate change in Cancun. Swiss and Austrian scientists found, that regular hares are infiltrating mountain hare (or arctic or snow hare) country. According to genetic studies, more mountain hares carry gene variants from regular grey-brownish hares under their snow white fur. Climate change (bringing few less snow covered landscapes and warmer winters) seems to allow regular hares to move higher into the hills until the ranges of the closely- related species overlap. Five out of 113 tested snow hares already carry genes from their more common cousins. And the hares are not the only ones affected by the rising temperatures. The regular ouzel (German: “Amsel”) is now able to populate the higher regions of the alps, the habitat of the close relative, the ring ouzel (“Ringdrossel”),writes NZZ. But neither ring ouzel or mountain hare can move much higher, so that the rising temperatures cause an advantage for low land species but a disadvantage for specialized mountain species. The scientists are not sure, whether hybrid species will emerge now. So far, the biologists say, the snow white fur of the mountain hare has no dark spots.
Zeit online took the Pacific path and interviewed Netatua Pelesikoti, manager of the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), about the consequences of climate change for the island states. The FAZ‘ correspondent from Cancun followed an expert from the insurance company Münchner Rück. And the FTD reports from Borneo and the destruction of rain forest there.
Sascha Karberg
As a space junkie since even before Sputnik make all Americans sit bolt upright and open the public checkbook, I naturally read past this lede this morning from the AP‘s man in Tokyo, Eric Talmadge:
A Japanese probe reached Venus on Tuesday and prepared to enter orbit on a two-year mission that would mark a major milestone for Japan’s space program and could she light on the climate of Earth’s mysterious neighbor.
And that, it appeared in short oder, is the sod covering a buried lede. Not till the fourth graf does one learn that, perhaps temporarily, mission engineers and scientists at the Japanese space had lost contact with their probe Akutsuki.
Here are headlines and key text nuggets, filed at about the same time, from a few other agencies, with a better eye to how to catch a news editor’s, and reader’s, attention:
Back to the AP story. The world’s leading breaking news agency, which usually doesn’t miss a trick, really should have re-topped Mr. Talmadge’s relaxed, boiler plate news story on the mission when this turned into a minor Perils of Pauline. Not to be too tough on him, but the piece, even with the insertion of some of the unfolding drama (which may be all over with by the time this post reaches Tracker readers, and perhaps the probe has checked in) could have used a little buffing up throughout.
For instance, it reports factually enough to put context around this first-ever Japanese mission to another planet, “Other space programs, including the Americans’ and the Europeans’, have successfully launched missions to orbit other planets.” Yes, but that’d be a lot more useful if it had a whiff of enriching detail, such as that the US Magellan spacecraft orbited Venus 21 years ago, and that the Soviet Union flew a spacecraft, Venera-3, past Venus in 1961 and landed on it several times. The European Space Agency’s Venus Expressed reached the planet in 2006 and is still at work. Context is important, and it doesn’t take a science writer to find such facts as those.
*UPDATE: The science writers at AP’s DC Bureau did (after the tracker’s notice) dive back into the story and give a proper rewrite:
Good luck to JAXA for hearing soon from its Akatsuki.
Grist for the Mill: JAXA Akutsuki site ;
- Charlie Petit
...Start is at the top...
After reading hints in this week’s science section, which is devoted entirely to puzzles, jumbles, encryptions, and other mind games and to why (some) people love them, that such diversions are not necessarily time wasters, I went ahead and did a few of them. The maze on the front page is a snap, and the ScienceTimes crossword was about a ten or 15 minute task (I did it on paper but checked its look on line. Firefox, for me, didn’t display its interactive features right but MSExplorer and Mrs. Tracker’s Mac Safari did). Crosswords editor Will Shortz says it’s about at the level that he and his stable put in the Arts section on Wednesdays. That’s about right. Steady progress mostly, brief snags, only a few first-guess instant gimmes, and none of the infuriating arcane stumpers (who says crosswords are all fun?) of a Friday or Saturday challenge.
And for a rarity, and while I have often enjoyed John Tierney’s civil but contrary curmudgeonliness, this may be the first time his was my favorite article in the weekly section. Most of the articles are to one extent or another deliberately playful and clever, like good puzzles. Tierney takes on a related and serious question: If puzzles are so entertaining to so many people to the point that they can keep at them for many hours without flagging, then can the environments of so-called real work be configured to harness similar quick, subtle, fully engaged, pleasurable, and persistent mental focus in which inferential and associative skills are fully revved? The answer seems to be maybe, but it’s not so simple.
Best look for yourself in the whole section.
A few other highlights:
Why exactly this topic is deemed a science theme I dunno, other than that anything you name, it’s likely that somewhere a scientist is studying it. The section, unless I missed it, does not bother with any pieces explicitly on game theory. Maybe games and puzzles do not, strictly, have much overlap? It does say in here that musicians and mathematicians tend to like puzzles more than average – and be good at them. And it does seem as though university science departments, aside from housing people apt at math, are full of quartets, rock bands, and various pluckers and strummers. One wonders about science writers and writers generally. We all “puzzle” over ledes and structure. But stories, whether fiction or intended to reflect reality, are nothing like game puzzles. There is an infinite number of ways to write a given story well. There is an even bigger infinity of do it badly. If you’d written that prize-winning story a day later than when you did, it might still have won but it would not have been the same story. Many puzzles, like proper mazes with just one direct route through, have one correct solution that everybody has to get. Yet, puzzles get what feel like creative juices flowing. Weird.
- Charlie Petit
Since excavation of its first known member in the German Neander valley the fate of Homo neanderthalensis has prodded people to think about the vulnerability of our own human species, Homo sapiens. And right in time for the discussions in Cancun about the threatening effects of recent climate change on current human populations, German scientists say it was climate that ended the time on Earth of perhaps the last and surely the best known surviving fellow member of our genus. At least, that’s the interpretation of old archaeological, anthropological and palaeogenetic data by a team of scientists from the Neandertal museum in Mettmann and the University of Cologne. Due to a period of extreme droughts (caused by a drop of temperature in the northern hemisphere) the hunter and gatherer communities of Homo neanderthalensis lost their livelihoods. The Neandertals has survived many previous climate fluctuations. About every 1000 years the temperature had also dropped, forcing the Neandertal people to move back and forth between the 53rd and 45th latitude in search of a suitable habitat. In the fourth (and especially dry) period of six such climate fluctuation events (so called Heinrich events), the area for refuge was too small to keep the species going and it died out.
The basis of this news, which was spread in Germany by the agency DPA, is a study published in the journal “Quaternary International”.
The piece from DPA (picked up, more or less intact, by the Tagesspiegel, Welt, Krone, RP-Online, e.g.) does not fully explain why Neandertals managed to survive three previous periods of colder climate. Perhaps the scientists couldn’t answer that either, but it looks like no one asked them or any other archaeologists outside of the Cologne group. How plausible is this theory? Did Homo sapiens populations suffer, too? What’s the evidence for this new theory? How new is it anyway?
I found only two individual pieces that tackle the question at all: one from the Austrian Standard, which starts with a quick introduction and provides a link to the original study article at Quarternary International; and another article from the Wiener Zeitung (Vienna), which actually included a second quote! Great? Well, not a live quote. From a US scientist, it is from an old Scientific American article which talks about retreat areas of Homo sapiens, NOT H. neanderthalensis. And, even better for those who like long shots, these retreat areas are located in South Africa – quite a walk from Europe.
Also: The sociology of lies
Wikileaks is top news right now. And not only for political journalists. There is a science journalism perspective, too, proves the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Jürgen Kaube). “Every social relationship depends on some, perhaps a lot, but definitely not thorough knowledge of each other”, Kaube starts his article about the sociology of lies and honesty, diplomacy and transparency. He takes Wikileaks as a “nice example” of what happens when the rules of secrecy and frankness are disturbed. He talks about the roles people play in social relationships. And about the “back rooms”, the guarded places where diplomats or regular people do not need to pretend or play act. And that’s where journalism comes in, according to Joshua Meyrowitz (University of New Hampshire): TV and other media destroy these back rooms. In the Sixties, wives learned about the work life of their husbands, kids heard about what parents did not want them to know, and the people got a better view of politicians, Kaube summarizes Meyrowitz thoughts. Now, Wikileaks opens the door to the back room of diplomacy. That’s the purpose of journalism, of course. But if anyone has to play roles in a society, asks Kaube, is then the existence of back rooms a social evil in itself? “Diplomacy will never be earnest in the sense of Wikileaks”, the article says in closing.
Sascha Karberg
It’s standard stuff: The story begins with a patient in the throes of weird, unexplained symptoms. All the reasonable treatments are tried–and fail. Then a maverick doc–a brash young kid, or a doddering old fool–suggests something radical, a suggestion greeted by laughter or derision. Cut to thrilling climax: After bucking the system to persuade doctors to try the radical approach, they try it–and it works. A life is saved, and the kid, or the geezer, is a hero.
As I say, it’s a journalism fixture. We’ve all written ‘em. But few of us have done as good a job as Sandra G. Boodman did yesterday in the Washington Post. (What’s more, she did it at a reasonable length–you don’t have to take the morning off work to read it.)
The story begins with a phone call–with the phone call–and then goes to this:
Doctors at three Upstate New York hospitals had been stymied by Donna Landrigan, whose case was unlike any they had seen. The previously healthy 35-year-old mother of three had initially become so psychotic she had to be tied to her hospital bed to keep her from hurting herself or attacking others. A few weeks later she had been placed in a medically induced coma to protect her from the continuous seizures wracking her brain, spasms that could have killed her.
Every promising lead had seemed to turn into a dead end, and the dangers of prolonged coma, including severe brain damage, were mounting…
It’s the latest in a series by Boodman. I mentioned another good piece of hers in February (about a 16-year-old with Alzheimer’s disease), and you can find others on the Post’s website.
Read, and enjoy.
- Paul Raeburn
Well well. Our friends over at the journal Nature have this week, on their press site of embargoed news alerts, word of a paper they’re putting up on Wednesday. It is about a young extrasolar planet that, the advance word says, is not only the fourth to be seen in its system but, if its reality is confirmed, makes trouble for standard models of planetary formation.
So much for embargoes, or this embargo at least. At Science News reporter Ron Cowen wrote it up anyway. Looks like it skirts the Nature embargo-break punishment algorithm for brazen reporters too. He found the article, including the authors’ declaration that it is in Nature, already out for public display at the arXiv site (see Grist below) for prepublication of just such articles as this. But not usually for journals with such stiff embargo policies as Nature has. The authors did, in the routine for Nature-pending articles, refuse to tell Cowen any more than he could read from the paper itself. He found at least three other prominent astronomers willing to talk about it.
A difficulty in reporting this as compelling narrative is that the argument the planet inspired, pitting processes called core accretion and gravitational instability, is on the arcane side. It’s a little hard to get emotionally involved in a debate over resonances and perturbations. On the other hand, it is about Jupiter-class planets with orbits on a scale similar to the real Jupiter. One grows weary of “hot Jupiters” zipping at roasting altitude around their stars. And they are detected directly, one gathers, by the Keck Observatory in Hawaii and not via some kind of doppler shift inference. I didn’t study the matter exhaustively, but apparently the system is so young at less than 100 million years that its offspring are still glowing perceptibly (if you have Keck eyeballs) in the near-infrared. And they are far enough away from that star to be distinguished from its glare. (News on the first three broke in 2008, see previous post).
At last look, Nature’s press site still holds to the embargo.
Grist for the Mill: arXiv astro-ph paper, “Images of fourth planet orbiting HR 8799.”
- Charlie Petit
Like many Americans I’ve been reading, with one eye-shut in dismay, the NYTimes’s category-by-category rendering of the vast volume of secret and sensitive (but not TOP secret) State Department, Wikileaked cables from the last few years. I haven’t however noticed the Times yet tackling our diplomatic efforts on climate change.
But another newspaper to which Wikileaks handed this steaming mass of embarrassing and at times brilliantly revelatory communication, the Guardian in the UK, did turn reporters loose on the climate angle. They included Damian Carrington, who over the weekend published an account of American negotiation with other nations over climate change agreements. The story’s hed and dek sum it up: Wikileaks cables reveal how US manipulated climate accord/ Embassy dispatches show American used spying, threats and promises of aid to get support for Copenhagen accord.
No deep surprises here, despite the story’s general umbrage. One wonders: If it weren’t for such tools as bribery, threat, and spying, would anything ever get done when governments collide? That is, don’t such things represent a big part of the skills we are paying the people in the State Department and CIA to exercise? But the Guardian does a service in covering the climate aspect of these conversations among high officials who didn’t expect that anybody would overhear them so quick. That is, as long as they’re out, we might as well have the benefit of a reporter pawing through them for us. What we also need is to have more than one reporter share the results.
Thanks go to Spanish language tracker Pere Estupinyá , who (scroll down to his post) noticed the Guardian’s report before I did and called attention to it.
- Charlie Petit
