Last week, Gary Schwitzer‘s excellent Health News Review gave a moderately favorable three-out-of-five stars to a story by HealthDay on a case report of a single patient whose blood pressure was lowered by deep brain stimulation.

Schwitzer’s panel of experts rated the story satisfactory on several grounds, while criticizing it for not being clear enough on the potential harms and benefits of the technique, in which a probe is inserted deep into the brain to deliver an electrical pulse.

While I have the utmost respect for Schwitzer’s work at Health News Review and at his own blog, I had an issue or two with this particular post.

The review notes that the HealthDay story quoted two experts not involved with the study, “so we can be sure it wasn’t based on a news release.” While I agree that quoting outsiders is critically important, this story was, in fact, largely based on a press release. Indeed there is no indication that Maureen Salamon, the reporter who wrote it, talked to the researcher who did the study.

Take a look at the HealthDay story and the press release from the American Academy of Neurology. They’re not identical, but they are similar. And the author of the study, Nikunj K. Patel, is referred to only by way of a paraphrase from the news release.

Despite its three stars, this is not an example of good, or even moderately good, reporting.

And while we’re on the subject of Health News Review, I’d like to raise a question I’ve been meaning to ask Schwitzer. One of the criteria on which stories are judged is whether the story discusses the costs of the treatment under discussion. For established clinical procedures, it is of course important to mention the cost. But for experimental procedures in very early stages of development, it’s often the case that no price has yet been set. Prices are set by business people based on such things as their assessments of demand and competition. And that usually doesn’t happen–and can’t happen–until a product or procedure is nearly ready to go on sale.

Health News Review says HealthDay’s failure to discuss costs was “not satisfactory,” and it refers to a 2008 Chicago Tribune blog post in which “the cost of DBS [deep brain stimulation] was estimated at $150,000 or more per patient.” That blog post offers no source for the $150,000 figure, and it is about the use of deep brain stimulation for other conditions. The truth is, nobody knows what deep brain stimulation for high blood pressure would cost–how many treatments would be needed, how often it would succeed, and whether it would be covered by insurance. All of those things will affect the price–if this treatment ever comes on the market.

A better recommendation, in my view, would be for stories on such highly experimental procedures (this one is actually pre-experimental) to note that costs cannot yet be determined, but that such procedures are often very expensive when they arrive on the market. And such stories might note the cost of a particular procedure using deep brain stimulation for something else. But let’s not take unattributed facts from old blog posts just so we can put a meaningless dollar figure in a story.

All of which is to say, I rate Health News Review as highly satisfactory, with five stars out of five. Schwitzer and his team are not perfect, but they’re awfully good. And I hope they will take this post in the spirit of constructive criticism.

Because I don’t want to get on Schwitzer’s wrong side. He’s got true grit. And, for all I know, a six-shooter on his hip.

- Paul Raeburn

Last September saw a burst of arcane physics news (earlier post) on the fine structure constant that physicists use to explain the precise frequencies at which the electron orbitals in atoms and molecules absorb and emit radiation. It’s a very basic basic constant, itself constructed from other fundaments such as Planck’s constant and the speed of light. It is dimensionless, and is ~1/137. Nobody knows why it is what it is. The news was that a very teeny change in it has been inferred (not proven) according to how far away (and long ago) one looks, and in what direction one looks, as divined from very difficult telescopic observations and precision spectrometry.

This news seems to have gotten deep under the skin of a producer, Jim Lebans, at Quirks & Quarks of Canada’s CBC radio network. He has kept digging away at it. In a somewhat self-referential production, show host Bob Mcdonald interviews producer Lebans, who in turn provides audio clips of conversations he has had with experts on the topic. It is well done, particularly Lebans’s explanation in lay language of why the fine structure constant is such an important pillar of physics and why cosmologists and quantum physicists are so skeptical about the data, but so excited about the possibility they may be no mistake.

That link goes to the entire program, which covers a lot of interesting stuff, including foxes that might be able to ‘see’ the Earth’s magnetic field and a plant with ballistic seeds. The fine structure constant one is toward the end, listenable separately or in sequence. We haven’t posted much on Quirks & Quarks lately, and must note again how unusual it is to find such a complete lineup of pertinent links so conveniently provided. Such a thing is like the “further reading” one might have found in Scientific American before the internet age – but now the gratification is instant.  After starting to write this post, I discovered it even has links that in turn refer to ksjtracker’s own post in September. Much obliged.

- Charlie Petit

As crowds surge through Egypt’s streets in defiance of the authoritarian government of Hosni Mubarack, a few reports have surfaced of looting and attempted looting of the National Museum in Cairo and several other museums and in some cases, historic sites.

The Tracker over recent years has sent a few barbs flying toward Egypt’s autocratic and egoistic minister of antiquities, Zahi Hawass, shown in an AP photo in the nearly-looted museum with one of the army soldiers who arrived to help. First reports suggest he worked reacted fast, and may have put himself in some danger too, in preventing things from going much worse for the nation’s archeological treasures. Moreover Hawass on his own blog (with posting of his missives faxed out of the country to friends who put them up for him while Egypt’s web service is down, overloaded, or both) seems to be acting as a solid source of information. “My heart is broken and my blood is boiling,” he writes of the looters. He also salutes the many Egyptians, demonstrators included, who flocked to defend the museum.

At Time Magazine, Cairo correspondent Rania Abouzeid got hold of Hawass and wrote up his account with some flourishes that is not in his own blog. For instance, while he reports directly  that one huge wave of looters mistook the new gift shop, full of jewelry for sale and copied from ancient relics, for the museum itself, Abouzeid’s account adds one line from Hawass he leaves out of his own writeup. “I’m glad those people were idiots.”

As both accounts report, however, a handful of mayhem-minded and probably gold-maddened looters did find their way into the museum itself. Al Jazeera‘s Will Jordan filed a video report showing shattered cases and scattered relics. However, the intruders reportedly were all caught, the Army showed up to protect the main museum, and the jewelry rooms left undefiled.

The Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag similarly, from the US, was able to stitch together a report on the army’s deployment to historic sites and museums, and gets through to Hawass for assurance that nothing was stolen from the National Museum. But, he also reports, it is not yet clear what is happening as the many other museums around the shaken nation. One site, Vastag tells us, is rumored to have been sacked but that cannot be confirmed.

Other stories:

• AP: Egypt: military detains 50 at museum ;
• CNN – Ashley Hayes: Egyptologists fear for relics amid unrest ;
• Telegraph – Harriet Alexander: Egypt crisis: Looters destroy mummies in Cairo museum ; “Destroy” is such an uncompromised word. Hawass, in other accounts, says all the damaged objects, including heads of mummies some looters attempted to take away, can be repaired.

*UPDATES:

• AAAS ScienceInsider – Andrew Lawler: Archaeologists Hold Their Breaths on Status of Egyptian Antiquities ; Some new, including that Hawass now has a new and better job title; good sense of inability to find out what’s going on at remoter sites and of the dire rumors filling the void.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Chilean seismologists disagree with a paper in Nature Geoscience by Italian researchers, saying that  February’s earthquake didn’t relieve all the seismic stress in the region and that the risk of a major quake remains high. In “El Mercurio”, they argue that their colleagues are wrong comparing 2010′s earthquake with one in 1835, and that “although they’ve done a terrific job describing last year’s quake, we don’t agree with the last sentence of the paper saying that the risk of another similar event is still high”. But apart from this interesting discussion, what we want to emphasize in this post is that Paula and Richard from El Mercurio are the only reporters from major Chilean outlets that bothered to talk to local seismologists. Others simply used wires and told their readers that they will probably suffer another devastating earthquake soon.

Un artículo de científicos italianos publicado en Nature Geoscience dice que el terremoto acontecido en Chile el pasado febrero no soltó toda la energía necesaria y podría repetirse en un futuro cercano. Ésta es la alarma que han transmitido todos los medios, menos El Mercurio; los únicos que por medio de Paula Leighton y Richard García “Polémico estudio predice riesgo de nuevo terremoto para el sur de Chile” se han tomado la molestia de consultar a sismólogos chilenos para corroborar la información. Extraemos dos de sus frases: “El estudio está bien hecho, es muy bueno, el problema es que termina con esta frase de que un nuevo terremoto, de la misma magnitud que del 27 de febrero, se va a producir en esta zona. Con eso no estoy de acuerdo” y “Ellos conocen muy mal la historia de Chile y este terremoto no se parece al de 1835 -que es sobre el cual basan toda su investigación- sino a uno anterior que ocurrió en 1751 y que es el que hizo que a Concepción lo trasladaran desde Penco a donde está ahora“. Desde luego, en el muy buen texto de Paula y Richard hay más argumentos de los expertos chilenos para apoyar estas frases. Pero más allá de si las conclusiones del estudio son más o menos acertadas, nos sorprende que una noticia de estas características sólo haya sido contrastada por los periodistas científicos de El Mercurio.

Podemos entender que estando avalado por Nature Geoscience algunos medios internacionales expliquen sólo el contenido del artículo, como El Universal “Estudio alerta de otro gran sismo en Chile”, Clarín “Chile podría sufrir de nuevo un gran sismo” o ABC “Científicos alertan del peligro de otro gran terremoto en Chile”. Quizás deberíamos responsabilizar más a los revisores de Nature y a esa última frase polémica. Pero nos sorprende que lo mismo haya hecho La Tercera “Experto italiano dice que Chile podría sufrir otro terremoto sobre 8 grados Richter” (interesante el matiz “italiano”), o La Nación “Estudio advierte riesgo de sismo violento en el centro de Chile”. Ninguna referencia a opiniones de expertos locales. ¿Serán las prisas por publicar? Podría ser, porque lo mismo le ocurrió en primera instancia a El Mercurio “Estudio: Zona central de Chile podría sufrir otro terremoto sobre magnitud 8 Richter”, antes de que Paula y Richard complementaron la información. Pero fijémonos en un detalle: la nota de El Mercurio en que se transmitía una alarma injustificada, posiblemente por ser la primera y estar en Nacional en lugar de Ciencia, se sitúa como cuarta más leída. Injusto. Qué bueno sería haber publicado la segunda nota, aunque un poco más tarde. Total; la actualidad en ciencia es una quimera. El artículo estaba escrito ya hace meses. Resulta difícil poder considerarlo –y tratarlo como- una noticia. Difundir titulares rápidamente y sin contexto ya lo hace twitter; al periodismo se le piede algo más (si no, pierde el sentido).

Realmente, hay algo absurdo en esto de los embargos y la premura por publicar, como expresaba este post en The Guardian “Time for change in Science journalism?” sugiriendo que los periodistas científicos tienen mucho que aprender de los bloggers. El análisis es un poco simplista, y no parece aplicar a periódicos anglosajones que tratan bien las noticias científicas, pero sí podría hacerlo en países con menos tradición. Si nos fijamos, El Mercurio mismo tiene una muy buena información científica en su sección de blogs. Y tenemos localizados otros ejemplos de bloggers en Latinoamérica que podrían convertirse en proveedores de contenido para los editores de periódicos de larga tirada. Es sin duda una idea a considerar.

- Pere Estupinyà

Much has been made of President Obama’s call for accelerated pursuit of clean energy in his State of the Union speech, which he managed without once assembling any syllables sounding remotely like “climate change” or “global warming” or any of that sort of red meat to inspire the elected right wing in Congress to do any more sneering than it already is.

If you can navigate past the pay wall, the New Yorker‘s Hendrik Hertzberg, stalwart liberal, Jimmy Carter speechwriter, and frequent anchor for ToftheT commentary,  does a nifty job sort-of-laying-into the President for his tap-dance around science and for his focus on the non-partisan ploy of urging energy independence. Barack Obama, once a reliable voice for cap and trade or something serious about the CO2 issue, has gone mute. Then Hertzberg nearly lets him off the hook by suggesting he’s merely,  foxily, playing for time, avoiding a distracting fight with the contrarians on the hill, and figuring science and the weather will eventually prevail on the people’s collective opinion.

What’s notable is the utter lack of qualification or, at heart, reasonable acknowledgment that recent weather craziness might not, item by item, be declarable as a signature of global warming. Nowhere does Hertzberg give the usual mumble along the lines of whilenospecificstormordroughtorheatwaveorarcticblastcanbeblamedonclimatechange etc.

For instance, how’s this passage  for non-pusillanimousness with no pussyfooting?

“Meanwhile, the ‘overwhelming scientific evidence” that Obama used to cite continues to mount, relentelessly and ominously. The decade just ended was the warmest since systematic recordkeeping began, in 1880; the year just ended was tied (with 2005) for the warmest on record, and it was the wettest. The vast energies released by moister air and warmer oceans are driving weather to extremes. Hence epic blizzards as well as murderous heat waves, unprecedented droughts alongside disastrous floods, coral reefs bleached white and lifeless while ice caps recede and glaciers melt.”

First, this is commentary and not science writing exactly, but the reference to “vast energies released by moister air” might be an impressively deep-minded allusion to latent energy. Second, that’s pretty bold stuff to slip past the New Yorker’s fact checkers. Statistically, it’s probably a good bet that the weather wouldn’t be anything like this had the industrial revolution not yet occurred. But such bald declaration of cause for such specific effect is unusual and a little nervous-making -  even though I for one am, as I’ve often said in one way or another, nearing panic for my grandchildren as CO2 keeps on keeping up and upper and upperer some more.

For another take on the same exact thing:

• Grist – David Roberts: For the last time: no, clean energy is not a substitute for climate change ;

While on the CO2 topic, a buzz through twitterland, a place where I feel alien, brings attention to a piece I wish I’d spotted last week when it was fresh:

• Miller-McCune – Tom Jacobs (Jan 27): Is It Hot in Here? Or Is the Climate Changing ? ; A light look at a human behavior study. It concluded that if you ask a person who is sweltering about it, they are more likely to see global warming as real than are those who are shivering. Works for lefties, rightwingers, everybody, it seems.

- Charlie Petit

Perhaps media appetite for the straight reporting of global warming is down a bit, what with the public’s recent ebb in interest in the dueling spittle-fest among partisans of various sorts, but it has hardly stopped. Today finds an arresting report in Science on flows of warming water into the Arctic, following a spate of report in the UK chiefly on a new expedition to check how the thermohaline conveyor belt that stops Europe from being so cold is doing.

1) Arctic warm water: The news is that a team from Germany’s Leibniz Inst. of Marine Sciences and from U. of Colorado’s Arctic and Alpine Research Institute say the flow of North Atlantic waters north through the Fram Strait into the Arctic is, say the foram’s in sediments, the warmest it’s been in 2,000 years. It is now 3.5 F warmer than a century ago. They tie that to a large system of amplifications, or positive feedback, that includes impacts of less sea ice.

STORIES:

• Reuters – Alistair Doyle :  Arctic current warmer than for 2,000 years: study ; The study, it says here, also reports that the flow is warmer than during Roman times, or the Medieval Warm Period (so beloved by contrarians, but Doyle doesn’t bother to say so). Main quote: things “are well outside the natural bounds.”
• PostMedia/Montreal Gazette – Margaret Munro: Water entering Arctic warmest in 2,000 years / Modern increase not a temperature swing: scientists ; Perhaps more stress ought have been put on what this account mentions: 2000 years is as far back as their proxy data go.
• Discovery News – John D. Cox: Warm North Atlantic Heating Arctic ;
• Nature.com – Nicola Jones: Arctic Ocean feels the heat / Inflow from the Atlantic is warmest in 2,000 years ; A good one, including a doubt from one expert who says the warm water it entering at depths well under the sea ice – so how it might contribute to its shrinking is not clear.
• IPS – Stephen Leahy: Arctic Defrost Dumping Snow on U.S. and Europe ; The hed and story are not a perfect match, as Leahy leads with the Science study and then gets into ways a warming Arctic could dump blizzards on lower latitudes. Also interesting is the report from Leahy, an experienced climate reporter, that the Arctic in some regions has been 21C warmer than usual for many weeks now. +21C! Is that a misprint? If not, it is astounding.
• Boulder Daily Camera – Laura Snider: CU: Warming water in the North Atlantic tied to heating Arctic ;
• BBC – Richard Black : Arctic canary looking sicker than ever ; A broader review, with a telling plot of Arctic sea ice now on course for the lowest winter peak ever measured. This story makes a good bridge for the next lot down below.

Grist for the Mill: CU Boulder Press Release ;

2) UK Expedition Sets Off to Arctic: The news is that a UK venture, the Catlin Arctic Survey, is about to send people on treks across several frozen landscapes (and seascapes) to study ice melt up close and personal, tracking where the melt water goes. They hope to learn whether accelerated melt will, as some suspect, change the salinity and hence  dynamics of the so-called global conveyor belt of interlinked surface and midwater currents that modulate much of global climate. IN the UK, many stories focussed on one scenario the study’s authors described – a possible slowing or shutdown of the Gulf Stream and subsequent chilling of Europe – rather than the data-gathering effort.

STORIES:

• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Climate change means we will be skiing in Yorkshire rather than sunbathing ; Would it kill Brit copy desks to put the occasional “may” or question mark or some other equivocation in headlines?
• Mirror – Mike Swain: Melting Arctic ice melt will bring freezing winters say scientists ; Aside from the excess of melt in the hed, this one IS nicely qualified ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Survey to probe Arctic ice melt ; Tersely done, good illus.
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: Chilly future for Britain with regular freezing winters if the Arctic continues to warm up, scientists warn;

Grist for the Mill: Catlin Arctic Survey Blog&News ;

- Charlie Petit

Hand axes reform human moving history

My first thought was: If this new discovery of stone tools at the Persian Gulf is right, and we are all Arabs, somehow, this will cause huge trouble on my next entry into the US. “Did you travel via an Arab country?” – well, not personally, but… you know, relatives…

The finding of British and German archaeologists, that humans might have left Africa much earlier (about 130000 years ago) got heavy attention in the German press. The Süddeutsche Zeitung explains, why the scientists can’t be completely sure – for one reason, no bones. So, the stone tools might not even belong to Homo sapiens but, perhaps, Homo erectus. I liked the article, especially because it describes briefly how green and fertile the Arab peninsula was at the time – though I could have used some further view. But the same goes for most other coverage I found:

Welt, Stern,Hamburger Abendblatt, the Austrian Standard, RP online, Handelsblatt, all covered it and the local Südwest-Presse, has a unique profile-like (though short) article (“Picnic spot kept a secret”) about the lead scientist of the study, from the University of Tübingen. The Basler Zeitung (Tagesanzeiger) included quotes of a scientist from the university of Zurich.

Spiegel.Online got some unique quotes of the German archaeologist – but, again, no further, independent quotes! But it is possible, to do so, proves Anke Brodmerkel for the Frankfurter Rundschau: She asked a scientist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, who was not involved in the study, for his view on the data. And this way, she was able to give her story a unique perspective – the findings might have consequences for the theory of sexual contact of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Now it looks like they coexisted much longer than previously thought. That raises a question. Do the the genetic data show a higher degree of sexual contact. Zeit.online (Sven Stockrahm) asked the same independent scientist, and, even more, his articles raises the question, how the humans, who once used these stone tools, were related to us and how they contributed to our genetic lineage – “It’s not [yet] enough flesh on the bones” to prove a new theory of human migration, the scientist is quoted.

Also: Dioxin’s not the most urgent problem of the food industry

In the midst of the Dioxin panic in Germany, the Tagesspiegel (Hartmut Wewetzer) had a (long!) comment, trying to give a rational view on the relative risks of being a consumer. He argues against such comfortable myths as that “organic” food is automatically more safe. He tries to raise awareness that it is impossible to guarantee food products free of Dioxin. The substance originates when people burn stuff and accumulates in the environment and in the food chain. And isn’t it right, that tons of sugar in every yoghurt might be more harmful than a picogramm of Dioxin? Wewetzer leads the reader, to think beyond the daily headlines, gets things into perspective and argues against empty-headed panic.

The German Gorch Fock in choppy seas

Also: Strange Rituals on Gorch Fock

After the recent death of a soldier at the German navy training sailing ship Gorch Fock the public in Germany takes a close look at the teaching practice and initiation rituals on board. The captain of the Gorch Fock had been put on leave and most of the press now deals with the question, whether this move by the minister of defense was appropriate or whether he should better await the results of an independent examination. Stern.online’s Frank Ochmann asked in a comment, why groups of people (especially in the military, boarding schools, scout camps or secret societies like the Free Masons) tend to invent strange and sometimes brutal rituals and what role the rituals have for the social group. He explains, how the “value” of being a member of the group rises with the severity of the sacrifice during the inititiation ritus. And he also explains, why the Bundeswehr – without any question – needs to prevent such rituals: The theme of the SS was “Loyalty is my honor”. One more remark: I very much liked, that at the end of the article, Ochmann gives hints to further (scientific!) litererature on the topic.

Sascha Karberg

We get today a hint of some of the dynamics behind the National Science Foundation’s press release and news aggregating Science360 News Service, plus a dollop of energetic but incomplete reporting by a media outlet.

This started this morning – after wrestling a router back into routing our internet connection to the PC – with the regular e-mail from NSF carrying the daily lineup at Science360. I always find something diverting there. The eye was drawn first to an NSF press release, from longtimer Cheryl Dybas, on a new computer-driven space weather forecasting tool. Quite edifying, even though I cannot discover what the ray-path through the iso-thingies is in the intriguing illus you’ll find there. But that’s not the why of this post. It is the next thing I noted,  a link to a piece of fine headline writing:

• Popular Mechanics - Sarah Fecht : Techno-Sponge “ShamWows” Oil Spills.

If you don’t watch enough low-budget TV shows to know what a ShamWow is, find out here: YouTube.

The story’s good so far as it goes. I don’t expect investigative reporting from Popular Mechanics. But all it tells me is that some how or other at NSF a researcher, Paul Edmiston, of the College of Wooster in Ohio, showed off a new silica-based material that absorbs six or seven times its volume in oils and other non-polar liquids. It can scavenge such things from polluted water, and can be re-used. Our chemical engineer and inventor mixes some kind of organic solvent glop into water, making it poison. He pours in his magic stuff and shakes it. It makes a floating layer at the top. He drinks the water just under it. Tastes fine. He could even heat and rinse out the loaded stuff on top and reuse it.  Great promise here, one gathers, for spill clean up and for remediation of plumes of such material in soil and so on. The Sham-Wow metaphor is perfect.

What one can also learn quickly enough, but not from this story, is that this Wooster assoc. professor is also founder and chief science officer of a company called ABS Materials. I’d wondered because the PopM story mentioned production of this stuff, but not by whom. One asks – even at this magazine with its tradition of lively reporting on all kinds of wowie zowie gadgets and materials but not of deep digging into the business side -  isn’t the professor’s connection to a specific company useful information to give to readers? The product may be good, and may well merit free advertising. In any case this is an essential fact.

Plus, one further learns from that company bio that the professor is on an NSF advisory body called the Committee of Visitors. And further easy nosing around discovered the reason for this Pop. M. story, a demonstration by him for media at NSF in DC of this technology.  Check the webcast video, it’s fine. The media advisory and webcast say clearly that he is more than an academic, but also an entrepreneur at the company manufacturing this absorbant – and by implication, has something to sell. The announcement even puts one of those trademark symbols,  ® , next to the product’s name, Osorb.

Thus one pieces together a sequence by which a man with a close connection to NSF is star, at NSF, of a press conference and webcast about this intriguing pollution-clearing product that he and his students (as Pop. Mechanics explains nicely) stumbled upon while doing something else. Then NSF’s Science360 service links to the media story, recycling it to reporters with no indication that NSF itself prompted the coverage.

There is nothing particularly surprising about such a sequence. However, Popular Mechanics editors or reporter Fecht, in covering the news, would have made my morning simpler, and given readers useful information, had they reported the commercial links as well as the researcher’s tie to NSF  in the first place.

And I do hope Osorb…oops Osorb® … does its job cheaply and well. If nothing else, the fully-told story illustrates how good ideas in university labs can make their way swiftly to market.

Plus, this I just thought of. A gov’t video showing a man calmly drinking from a container that a moment earlier was poison top to bottom may not be wise. If somebody tries that at home with something that this silica material ignores, it could be ugly.

- Charlie Petit

This ran more than a week ago but I just happened upon it. In the Charlotte Observer is a switch on the usual tobacco and health report. ‘Special correspondent,’ which presumably means freelancer, Whitney L. J. Howell reports experimental plantings of an easily gene-modified tobacco plant in Research Triangle Park. A Canada-based company, using an Australian tobacco strain with thin and delicate leaves, plans to inculcate the plant leaves with synthetic genes inscribed with the sequences for emerging influenza strains, harvest the vegetation about week later, and separate out particles slightly resembling viruses (but incapable of propagating the disease), and use them as a vaccine. the idea is that production could ramp up fast to high volume.

It appears that the plants’ germ lines, or seeds, don’t get the new genes. They are planted directly into the leaves and expressed only there.

This seems to me a tad bizarre, but the story says the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA is putting money into it. Seems new, and I haven’t seen other reports on it. Tobacco is a standard experimental plant, so it is not jarring to people in the business to learn that it is a platform for such work.

A quick search doesn’t find other reporting of this specific project. However, an example of tobacco as basis for making “personalized vaccine” against a lot of things is found, from mid 2008, in a Reuters story by Julie Steenhuysen.

Grist for the Mill: Medicago Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Richard Feynman lectures

Vic McElheny, old pal and former (first too) Knight Science Journalism program boss, passes on a good suggestion – science writers should take a look in the current Nature at the “world view column”  by Tim Radford, former science editor for The Guardian. He takes on and rubbishes the idea, often expressed by scientists themselves, that their clan is unusually inept at public explanation of what they do and why it tends to be interesting and occasionally very important and worth the public’s nickel.

My experience has been similar to what he reports. Scientists tend to be good and willing sources. They don’t flee reporters, and their quotes are often brilliant and clear. They often explain things quite well – probably better on average than the typical resident of my neighborhood or member of my own family, who tend toward the well-educated and accomplished. As essayists and lecturers, the share that is excellent seems high. True, some researchers, maybe more than is par, tend toward the reclusive side, but there also frequently is an enthusiasm and clarity of thought that compensates. Radford explains it well and with many a subtle articulation.

He loses me at the end in some details in his thrashing of scientists who, he suggests, hide behind scientific uncertainty as though to shirk societal responsibility. Few good examples of such a thing come to mind. In fact, I find it appealingly counter-intuitive that the best route toward truth are not the highways of faith and blustering confidence, but the meandering byways of doubt and dithering double-checking. So if a scientist disappoints a Congressional hearing by throwing in some caveats and talk of confidence levels, that’s just how it goes.

- Charlie Petit

Looks like NASA has found a relay torch. The refurbished Hubble Space Telescope won’t get any more furbishing. It will poop out in a few years. Taking over, budgets and a well-behaved rocket permitting, will be the James Webb Space Telescope. If there’s a baton to be metaphorically passed, a good one to choose is UDFj-39546284.

In Nature today, backed by a live internet news conference and press releases listed down there in Grist, a team led by California astronomers (one recently moved to Holland’s Leiden Observatory) reports that a teeny, faint, fuzzy, and barely resolved speckette of scruff by that name, lifted from the sky noise in the famed Hubble Deep Field sector of distant cosmos, is a galaxy seen as it was 13.2 billion years ago. It is bursting with big, hot, new stars, they believe, but the Hubble can’t get enough spectrum to be deeply sure. It existed near the close of the so-called Dark Ages, after the big bang had faded and during which, for most of that era, few or no stars existed. A murk of atomic particles suffused all, a sort of fog. Then, as galaxies and their first generation of giant stars revved up, the fog burned away (re-ionized that is) and from the void, blah blah blah and here we are. That’s the story anyway. So this thing marks about the time the lights came back on, and it seems to have been a bit earlier than theorists had supposed, when our 13.7 billion year old universe was merely about 480 million. This specific galaxy seems a good candidate as a high priority target for the late Mr. Webb’s eponymic legacy.

It’s also about as much as Hubble can do in this arena of cosmology. The Webb, somewhat cut down in size and alas bloating in cost, will have a bigger light bucket to capture that time’s emanations. It will be more sensitive at the longer wavelengths, IR and such, where they are most visible to us. It will be dandy for nearer things too, like planets forming around other stars right here in the Milky Way. But across the edge of the today’s visible noosphere  JWST will stride right past where Hubble is staggering and dropping to its knees.

That’s how I see it. Stories tend to stick to the facts of this discovery – but also tend to include nods to the nifty Webb Cam on the way (NASA and its contractors are bolting it together in the Building 29 cleanroom ,which has two web cams, at Goddard Spaceflight Center, Maryland.)

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: In Hubble’s Lens, Signs of a Galaxy Older and Farther Than Any Other; Overbye goes with a different metaphor for this event, with the Hubble leapfrogging into the past and the distance. True. But it’s running out of frogs.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox: Telescope spots oldest galaxy ever seen ; Hmm. Oldest galaxy ever seen is probably some nearby elliptical one. Headline writers have a chore on defining oldest in such a story. It’s seen as an infant. It probably never got particularly old before being merged into nonexistence, consumed by a larger one. The light is old, but if we find the very first email message ever sent is it from the oldest known email writer?
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Astronomers claim earliest galaxy yet from Hubble ; No quibbles with that hed.  Borenstein gets in a little bit of inside squabbling among astronomers over whose early-old-whatever galaxy is best documented.
• Time Mag – Jeffrey Kluger: Hubble Finds Granddaddy of Ancient Galaxies ; That hed’s a good stab at it. But this blog raises another conundrum of our expanding, relativity-shaped universe. He says somewhere in the void 13.2 billion light years away is a “magnificent red blob.” It looks red to us. But to itself, back when and back there with no cosmic expansion stretching out the light, anybody looking at it would see it throbbing with brilliant, hot, blue stars. As for magnificent, it was busy, but a small thing compared to today’s galaxies. Kluger does bring up some matters deeper in. Plus, he erodes my own theme up top, writing that Hubble should get a lot more work of this sort done obefore it punches out.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: A galaxy far, far, far away ; Oh boy, another case of common language confronting crazy relativity (I studied it, never really got it). Cowen is good at this stuff, but I wonder about his saying this thing is estimated to lie 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. Present tense. Maybe that’s how far away it was when the light came our way, but we and it were retreating fast from one another then, slowed down for a while, and noware speeding up again. Today it does not exist, but the place where it did exist is…. anybody know how far away it’d be now? The redshift is about 10. Is it, with the cosmological constant, now going faster or slower than then? Gad. Cowen also implies an important point that, statistically, this doesn’t come close to the two-sigma rule of significance. He reports there is about a 20 percent chance the blob isn’t nearly as red-shifted as the authors think most likely. His piece is a good lesson in how to write with the word “contingent” in mind.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Govert Schilling: Distant Galaxy is Record Breaker ;
• Nature News – Adam Mann: Oldest galaxy is lone ranger ; Sharp opening angle in this one – it supposes that this galaxy, hard as it was to find, means there were not many others back then and therefore that the “fledgling Universe was emptier than was previously imagined.” Some other accounts have sources saying they expect to find a lot more, with Webb or maybe some with the HST. Mann’s sources, authors of the paper, and several other media reports that point up that this galaxy seems to have been on the leading (and lonely) edge of star formation makes this angle credible.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Hubble telescope spots farthest galaxy yet ; Dave does a fine job describing just why this observation strained the ability of even this spiffed up latest iteration of the Hubble with its new hardware and programming, including 87 hours of difficult exposures during a two-year campaign to nearly nail this thing’s identity sort of down.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: A galaxy far, far, far away: Nice job of outlining main findings. One quibble. It says Hubble can’t resolve the objects individual stars. True. It also says that task will fall to the Webb telescope. I would be amazed if even it could see little dots in it, each one a star. Nebulae and morphology and maybe jets and stuff, but stars?
• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: Hubble Finds Galaxy Beyond Key Benchmark ; Other than a minor but distressing flub in misspelling her prime source’s name on first ref, a good and serious stab at presenting the findings’ significance the way astronomers see it. Also, a fine illus (hi def here) showing astronomy’s historic march farther, and longer ago.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire : Scientists discover oldest galaxy – that is so far away it takes its light 13.2 BILLION YEARS to reach Earth; It is good to see tabloids covering purely intellectual news such as this, and with such enthusiasm. Plus, in usual fashion for this pub with its aversion to ambiguity, there is not even a hint of the discovery’s penumbra of uncertainty – instead one reads a series of emphatic declarative sentences that tell the reader that what others say is probable is actually certain.
• BBC – Pallab Ghosh: Hubble telescope detects the oldest known galaxy ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: Hubble brings back baby photos of the universe ; Isn’t that a fine headline?
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Astronomers discover earliest galaxy yet found ; Hmm. Could’ve stopped after the hed’s ‘yet’.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Hubble spots most ancient galaxy to date ;
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Has Hubble found a galaxy far, far away? ; The question mark is a good touch for the hed, as Vastag writes this in a spirit of hopeful maybe, with an energetic description of the underlying spirit of this science.
• Deseret News – Joe Bauman : The Farthest Galaxy Yet – But Where Are Its Siblings? ; a blog by a former staffer.
• … there are more….

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Goddard Press Release ; Carnegie Institution Press Release ; UC Santa Cruz Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

One wonders how the state of US, gov’t-funded research into correlations of  murder and mayhem with numbers of guns compares with, say, smoking and tobacco studies at NIH back when The Tobacco Institute was urging surgeons general to shut up about smoking and lung cancer. Or how federal support for greenhouse gas and climate science may soon be faring as Congressional contrarians put their professor-scoffing footprints on the EPA, NSF, DOE, and other tax-money-dependent outfits.

The question comes to mind on reading this morning’s NYTimes and its one-two punch of stories connecting the National Rifle Association and its lobbyists to a dearth of federal research into the impact on public safety by gun control, or for that matter gun encouragement, laws. Writer Michael Luo, who reports often on economic matters, tackled the science of gun control with a mainbar on the general influence of the NRA behind Congressional resistance to funding such research, and a sidebar on the inherent difficulties such studies have in pinning rates at which people are shot to gun controls or their absence.

Luo ( see NYT profile) has been on the Times team covering the mass killing in Arizona that left its apparent prime target, Representative Gabrielle Giffords, gravely wounded. Attempting to read behind the lines, it is a tempting supposition that frustration over the sparse, solid information on public health and gun control led to today’s reports.

One may, by the way, expect to see a small item on the sidebar soon – in the Times’s corrections box. Today’s story identifies  one source, columnist and UCLA-trained economist John R. Lott, as a University of Chicago professor.  He is author of a book asserting that the more people carry legal  weapons, the less crime there tends to be. Lott has done a great deal of academic work but he’s not listed on the Chicago faculty (hat tip to ksjt reader and Phil. Inquirer reporter Tom Avril for expressing doubt on that score).

- Charlie Petit