(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Plenty of interesting stories today in the Spanish press. Apart from writing novels, Nabokov also hunted, dissected and classified butterflies. And according to a paper whose first author is a Spanish scientist, he did it very well and his conclusions are totally valid. You can read the story in La Vanguardia (and also in the NYT). El Mundo tells us about a new strategy to treat cancer with capsules that bring carcinogenic cells to the tumor, and once there, they seem to release chemical factors that stop the growth. Público is the Spanish newspaper that fights hardest against pseudoscience. Today it has a set of three stories that give homeopathy a rough time: its basis, the creation of a lobby to defend it, and a regional government that funds an institute of homeopathy with public money. Finally, ABC presents two scaring stories. One about Italian scientists declaring that they have achieved cold fusion producing 31 times more energy than is consumed; and another story that gives some credit to the Nobelist Luc Montagnier when he says that DNA can make copies of itself with electromagnetic waves.

Realmente interesante rastrear y analizar hoy las secciones de ciencia en la prensa española. De verdad. Empecemos por Público, que se está posicionando como el medio que más y mejor ciencia aborda en sus páginas diarias. Y además, cada vez desde una perspectiva más social. Hoy es un claro ejemplo. Primero por el conjunto de tres artículos de Javier Salas atacando a la homeopatía y quienes la promueven. En el más punzante, Javier Salas denuncia que la comunidad de Madrid dedique 1,7 millones de euros de dinero público a recuperar el Instituto homeopático. Utiliza un tono burlesco –quizás excesivo- para señalar que la presidenta Esperanza Aguirre lo define como un centro científico de referencia, y explica sin complejos que “una dosis ínfima de la sustancia que genera una enfermedad, puede curarla”. Ya se; suena absurdo. Pues éste es el principio fundamental de la homeopatía. Por eso genera indignación en tantos colectivos, que se esfuerzan en repetir que homeopatía y otras terapias no convencionales no son medicamentos (J.S.), no se ha demostrado su eficacia y no pueden venderse como cura de enfermedades. Javier denuncia también que la industria homeopática ha creado un lobby para promover su uso por médicos y farmacéuticos, mostrando claro escepticismo ante los argumentos de los creadores de la asociación Semafarte. La sección de ciencia de Público lleva tiempo asumiendo su responsabilidad en denunciar las pseudociencias. Pero destaquemos otra pieza, la de Toni Polo “Acabar con la malaria costará 4.400 millones durante 50 años”, transmitiendo la visión de uno de los grandes de la ciencia en España; el investigador Pedro Alonso que lleva tiempo buscando la vacuna contra la malaria. El mensaje de la muy buena pieza de Toni es claro: el reto según Alonso no es reducir los efectos de la malaria sino erradicarla. Y esto va a costar un dineral y muchísimo tiempo. Bueno… teniendo esto en cuenta… muchos investigadores no están de acuerdo con la posición de Alonso, y consideran que todo este dinero invertido en una quizás imposible erradicación (sí posible en Latinoamérica y otras áreas) sería más eficiente dedicarlo a reducción y tratamiento. Esta era la conclusión de un especial de Lancet el pasado noviembre, y es la postura que también muy bien describe el artículo.

Sin dejar la salud, vamos a la sección que mejor la contempla. El Mundo nos presenta una nota cuyo título recuerda a la homeopatía, pero ni de cerca lo es. Cristina de Martos “Tratar el cáncer con cáncer”, explica un originalísimo nuevo tratamiento que está siendo investigado en NY: inyectar unas cápsulas con células madre cancerígenas del propio paciente, que cuando alcanzan el tumor detienen su crecimiento. Interesantísimo. Claramente falta mucho camino por recorrer, y la investigación puede quedar encallada por cualquier contratiempo de seguridad o eficiencia en humanos. En estos casos la importancia de comunicarlo al público es relativa. Pero debido a la originalidad, celebramos que El Mundo haya apostado por esta nota. Otra que nos llamó la atención fue la de Patricia Matey “Hasta el 15% de los españoles ya es adicto a Internet”. Sabemos que muchos psiquiatras consideran que se abusa de la palabra adicto, la diferencian de conducta compulsiva, y matizan que sólo debe utilizarse “adicto” cuando hay fuerte síndrome de abstinencia, y la “adicción” causa problemas serios en el propio individuo y su entorno. Pues bien; a este estadio parece que efectivamente han llegado este 15% de españoles, según varios expertos que entrevista Patricia. Si esto es así; la psicología y el uso de Internet puede ser una nueva fuente de historias en las secciones de salud.

Aparte de escribir, Navokob (foto arriba) cazaba mariposas, las diseccionaba, y clasificaba. Y según un artículo científico cuya primera firma es de un autor español, lo hizo muy bien pues sus estudios han sido confirmados. Conocimos a Roger Vila el pasado noviembre gracias a un magnífico reportaje de Joseba Ébola en El País. Allí anunció que pronto saldría el paper. Esta semana lo hizo. La historia es muy bonita, y Carl Zimmer lo supo aprovechar para preparar una extensa pieza en el New York Times. En España el único medio que ha retomado la noticia es La Vanguardia, por medio de Rosa M Bosch: “Nabokov, genio literario y científico”.

Y terminamos con dos notas “arriesgadas” en ABC. Arriesgadas porque tratan nada más y nada menos que de la fusión fría y de ADN copiándose por ondas electromagnéticas. ¿Cuál os suena más rocambolesca? A mi me cuesta decidir. Supongo que la segunda. Sobre todo porque a pesar de que la fusión fría haya sido repetidamente una gran estafa, Jose Manel Nieves asegura que esta vez científicos italianos han demostrado que su reactor de fusión genera 31 veces más energía de la que consume. Nosotros desconfiamos y creemos que hay truco seguro. Jose Manuel explica que también desconfía una gran parte de la comunidad científica, pero da crédito a los científicos y explica con esmero sus métodos (bueno; en parte, porque está bajo secreto de patente). Sospechoso, pero la verdad, aunque fuera un fraude, tampoco pasa nada por explicarlo. Con la segunda nota es diferente, porque alimenta pseudocreencias. Aquí discrepamos del criterio de publicar esta sandez sobre el ADN copiándose a si mismo con ondas electromagnéticas (J.M.N), por mucho que lo haya dicho un premio Nobel. Sobre todo, si el premio Nobel es Luc Montagnier, quien lo obtuvo por encontrarse en 1982 con el virus del SIDA, y desde hace un tiempo lleva diciendo cosas muy extrañas. Aquí merece más crítica.

- Pere Estupinyà

I just read the best, fairest, hardest-hitting, and deeply reported piece of magazine journalism I’ve seen on sustainable fish harvesting and whether the labels are correct at your fave chic and green cafe or fish market. Well, that’s a narrow field, but this thing is polished and good. It is even written with grace. It has at its core a mesmerizing profile of a near-obsessed fisherman and restaurant owner who worries how long ocean stocks can go before utter collapse. Plus, it’s adorned with a bunch of photos of good looking seafood.

It is, I must disclose, by a close local colleague in this business, Erik Vance, a tall outdoorsy guy from here in Berkeley. We don’t hang out but he’s high on the list of business pals. We met, I think, at a AAAS meeting a few years ago when he was just getting started. Or was it AGU? Hard to recall. San Francisco Magazine has the story in its Feb. issue.

I don’t believe that, whatever he got paid, it was an impressive per-hour rate. This story took months. Vance went to some of the best-known restaurants in the Bay Area where sustainability is tattooed in owner’s souls, and checked out their Dover sole and every other seafood on their menus to see if the supposed source really did catch it with a rod and reel or gentle (not bottom) trawl or a diver plucking molluscs from the seafloor and not a turtle-slaughtering long line or carpet-bombing bottom trawl.Vance manages to catch such places out in falsehood while infusing the piece with a deep sympathy for the work they put in to do as well as they do. He did the same with top-notch sea food marketers.

This is going to get the local and vast tribe of earth-friendly people in Northern California buzzing. The best science news in it is about development of a breed of vegetarian, algae-pellet gobbling trout that seem to thrive in fish ponds while still tasting great off the grill. The most discouraging is that even among people who say and seem to mean it that they are doing their best to sell only sustainable fish, to follow through is exceedingly difficult. And these are the good guys. To expect them to check every fish for its actual provenance without being tripped up by liars and gaps of info in the supply chain, or by limits on the energy needed to verify a fish or clam’s mode of harvest, may be a bar too high.

On another larger topic, the lessons of this piece, on deliberate or inadvertent gaming of well-meant systems, give one further pause when trying to imagine a world in which carbon offsets and cap and trade credits are backed by what traders say they are. Good intentions go only so far, and markets are powerful things.

SPEAKING OF BEAUTIFUL REPORTING AND FISH:

Ideas Show / CBC (Canada Radio) – Paul Kennedy: Saving Salmon ; Kennedy goes and sits on a rock with an Orca biologist on a remote beach off British Columbia, turns on the mike and shuts up. His source: a former recluse who decided she had to do something, with her life’s knowledge, for her neighbors and her whales. She delivers a monologue on science, politics, ecology, passion, wildlife management, and melancholy with a clarity and precision that is hard to overstate. (thank you to reader James Erlandson for the links).

- Charlie Petit

It is by far the most popular Egyptian artifact in German museums – the 3,400 year old bust of Nefertiti, the wife of Pharaoh Echnaton. The German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt discovered the bust in 1912, and brought it to Berlin in compliance with the Egyptian law at that time. Nevertheless, from time to time (in 2009, e.g.), Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA), demands the return of the bust – as once again on Monday. And again, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation rejected the request.

Hawass accuses archaeologist Borchardt of dishonesty to Egyptian officials about the importance of the bust, and believes it was taken illicitly.  The bust is not the only artifact Hawass wants back. Other famous discoveries bywestern archaeologists, like the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, have been pursued, too. But, according to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the latest letter is not an official state request because it lacks the sign of Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif. Nevertheless, it got much print in Germany – as always occurs when Zahi Hawass starts his media machine.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung had (with some, it appears, exclusive quotes) the most informative article, explaining the current debate, the history of the bust, the political moves of Egypt to repatriate its antique artifacts, and it provides background about Nefertiti, too.

The Financial Times Deutschland, though lacking a science section in the print edition, had a substantial Nefertiti story in the science part of the online edition. It adds some paragraphs about the past discussions, whether the bust might be a forgery – though, I don’t know, why, because the rumors had been settled via CT scans and isotope analysis.

The Hamburger Abendblatt bothered to ask a local expert (of the Egyptian museum in Hannover) about the news. The same did the local boulevard BZ (Berliner Zeitung) in one of its two articles on the topic. Of course, the experts opinion is, that Nefertiti belongs to Germany. (Did someone try to call an Egyptian other than Hawass or even an independent expert from, say, Australia, perhaps?)

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has only a couple of paragraphs about the years and years of research and restoration, the special encasement and technological knowledge that helped to ensure the preservation of the bust. And it asks what would happen to the bust, if it was placed in a less than optimal museum in Cairo and sent on tour like the remnants of Tutenchamun, the stepson of Nefertiti.

The Austrian Wiener Zeitung provides the facts on the Nefertiti case but also compares it to events surrounding the feathered headdress of the Aztec king Montezuma in the Ethnological Museum of Vienna, which had been requested as a historically and spiritually important value for the Mexican people.

The Handelsblatt (here), the Austrian Standard (here), Bild (here) did not have any more information than was spread via dpa.

The Frankfurter Rundschau had a diffuse political comment, partly Hawass profile, partly historical excourse into colonialism.

RP online (Rheinische Post) had a report about “our Nefretiti” in the cultural section.

Die Welt had a sappy comment, comparing Hawass with Cato, the Latin politician, who consitently repeated his wish to destroy Carthage in all his speeches.

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AND: Thanks for a candid comment!

Every year, the federal and local governments spent millions of Euros for “science years”, “science fairs”, “science cities” in the name of “communicating science to the public” – aka “create acceptance”. 2001 life sciences, 2005 physics and so on. In 2011 the theme is “Research for Our Health”. (At least in Germany. According to the UNESCO it’s the year of chemistry, but don’t be confused…)

Of course, folks need an opening ceremony with speeches of more or less important people, a public debate (though not too controversial), and some champagne and glamour, if you please. Journalists are invited and are supposed to quote lame speeches about how important …(*)  is for our society (*please fill in the science section of the corresponding year). Thanks to Kai Kupferschmidt, I wasn’t forced to read such inane reporting. He wrote an acid-tongued comment about the dead boring ceremony, announcing the year of health sciences, for the Tagesspiegel. Hope this helps people rethink, whether it really makes any sense to just repeat the same stuff every single year.

Sascha Karberg

One wonders – should not the paleontological societies of the world petition all the press officers for all the institutes for which they work and beg them, unless there is a prominent scientifically valid reason otherwise, to never cite T. rex in a story, and especially not in the headline, about dinosaurs that actually have almost nothing to do with our old pal the king tyrant lizard?

Of course, maybe editors and reporters would go with the T. rex reference anyway. It’s a free press. But one would like to see a little more free thinking.

The news is a theropod dinosaur not much bigger and not even as heavy as a good roasting chicken, that lived more than 75 million years ago. Researchers in China found its fossil a few years ago. The excitement is that its forelimbs are so reduced that its hands, or paws, or manuses, or whatever one calls them have only one visible finger apiece, and on each finger is a stout claw used, perhaps, for digging up ants and termites. While close relations are known and also have large, single claws, they also have additional if tiny and vestigial fingers. This one has none,  making it what the dinosaur experts call monodactyl and you can probably figure out the Latin etymology of that. It is, outside of birds, the only functionally monodactyl dinosaur ever discovered.

It also, apparently, illustrates how erratic evolution of species can be. For this one, Linhenykus monodactylus, is apparently a rather basal, or evolutionarily early, member of its closest known relatives, called collectively alvarezsauroids. And in that family, and among theropods or two-legged dinos (mostly carnivores) generally, a broad trend toward fewer digits has been seen. So it’s interesting and a bit confounding that among the most primitive members of the clan is the most extreme example of digit minimization.

The paper itself notes tyrranosaurs as well known examples of theropods with reduced forelimbs. This was enough for the press tip sheet for reporters to sport a headline “Early relative of Tyrannosaurus identified in China.” That in turn probably explains why a lot of reports ran with T. rex in their headlines. Even more stories, however, don’t give T. rex star billing. That means that plenty of reporters and editors saw that link to be tenuous, and gave T. rex a rest as default bait for readers’ eyeballs. Good for them.

T-rex-citing headlines :

• Bloomberg – Simeon Bennett: New One-Fingered Dinosaur Related to T. Rex Found in China ;
• BBC – Neil Bowdler: Two-clawed and parrot-sized: new T. rex cousin unveiled ;
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Scientists discover tiny one-fingered relative of T. rex ;
• AFP – One-clawed dino belonged to T. rex family ;
• Guardian (UK)- Tania Branigan: Scientists hail discovery of one-fingered T rex relative ;
• Metro(UK) : Mini Tyrannosaurus Rex discovered ;

Other Linhenykus stories:

• AAAS ScienceNOW – Michael Balter: A Dino with just one finger ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Digital reduction: Newly described dinosaur had onlhy one finger per stubby forelimb ; She does bring up T. rex but for contrast, not close kinship reasons.
• LiveScience via MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: Meet a one-fingered, tiny, bug-eating dinosaur ;
• Smithsonian Dinosaur Tracking (blog) – Brian Switek: A weird, one-fingered dinosaur ;
• Nat’l Geographic – John Roach: First One-Fingered Dinosaur Found – Dug for Bugs? ;
• Cosmos (Australia) Andrew Letten: T. rex’s tiny, one-fingered relative discovered ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. College London Press Release (sans T. rex till the 3rd graf where Velociraptor also comes up as a distant relative).

- Charlie Petit

Reading through today’s NYTimes science section two little oddities kept bugging me so I’ll start with those. They concern the illus selected to go with Carl Zimmer‘s lead art piece, More To a Smile Than Lips And Teeth, and with Kenneth Chang‘s story, below the fold, For NASA, Longest Countdown Awaits.

No complaints about the stories other than that they don’t move the ball forward much on either topic. Zimmer’s smile piece does introduce readers to an effort to put more rigor into classification of smiles, their relationship to expressions by other primates, and the mental states and communication uses associated with them. And Chang summarizes well the ennui at NASA wrought by a flat budget and impossible marching orders from Congress and the White House. He implicitly conflates far too much NASA’s space mission with the accompaniment of people along in the machines sent on errands across the solar system. It is as though absence of space suits is some kind of retreat from space (my words, not his at all) – but since politicians seem to do the same thing the focus of the piece is understandable. Ken does say at the top that it’s the human spaceflight program that is his topic. I’m partisan on NASA’s two-faced persona to the point of perhaps not being able to see straight. I’d very much like the story to have said obliquely via sourced quote or straight up that the only scientifically worthwhile space exploration NASA has done is the kind where people stay in control rooms and machines do the heroic traveling either by orbiting telescope or by robots sent far from Earth. Plus, US public web traffic overwhelmingly (at last check, not recently to be sure) favors robotic adventures over those by people with flags on their shoulders.

The illus for each is orthogonal to the topics. The big one on smiles seems to be an homage to century-ago parlor game, pasteboard boxes (or maybe it’s a real antique), called a smile analyzer, and nothing wrong with it other than it evokes a lot, illustrates nothing and that’s maybe like a smile itself. But inside is a picture of fake vs. real smiles. It doesn’t say which is which. And it appears to be lifted from a journal or other technical article complete with the original (tiny but decipherable) caption. This photocopied caption mentions Duchenne v. non-Duchenne smiles. Such smiles are icons of traditional smile classification. They refer to whether the eyes crinkle when the mouth curves into a smiley. But there’s nothing in the story about Duchenne smiles or the man behind the category. Why not? The omission leaves confusion.

And Chang’s story of space policy despair starts up front with a somewhat enigmatic pic of a proposed, privately-developed  Dragon transport vehicle from SpaceX and aimed at NASA as its customer. It’s okay as illus even though one must infer its connection to the topic. Even more striking for opacity of meaning is the illus at the jump inside. It depicts a similar proposed capsule from Boeing approaching what the caption calls “the space station.” Sure but which one? The illus features not the Int’l Space Station, but the notional inflated, entrepreneurial space station that the Bigelow Aerospace group of Las Vegas wants to operate as a rent-a-lab, or even a space hotel. Maybe the illus is cleverer than I first realized. With a story on our gov’t space program’s aimlessness, we get art celebrating hardware  proposed by market-driven people who think they can do space better and cheaper than NASA does.

Other notable headlines:

• Abigail Zuger MD - Books/ A Pound of Prevention is Worth a Closer Look ; A book  says so-called scientific medicine is part clap trap.
• Mark. S. Litwin, MD: Cases: A Young Life Passes, and a Ritual of Birth Begins ; No science here, but a wrenching, deep, rewarding dive into the emotion and pathos of the healing profession.
• Nicholas Wade: Lack of Sex Among Grapes Tangles a Family Vine ; Utterly fascinating, and inspiring a million questions Wade does not get to. Such as, does the all-grafting propagation of wine varietals mean they evolve almost like prokaryotic microbes, vertically inheriting mutations? And what happens to the cross-breeds that must spontaneously arise in growing regions? The focus is on something called marker-assisted breeding, which has to do with gene chips.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

During the blizzards over the holidays in Europe and the US a number of stories that qualified as science writing ran, and we posted on a few of them, seeking to explain how errant jet streams or unusual snow fields or other causes managed to leak so much frigid arctic air to the northern mid-latitudes while replacing it in the far north with oddly warm air.

Today at the NYTimes, I find as the morning runs out, Justin Gillisdoes a decent job tying it together. He uncovers no truly new info, but talks about a world that seems to have flipped upside down, and of an arctic fence or vortex that has become more of a sieve.

The piece stumbles, as stumble it must, on the question that nobody can quite yet answer convincingly. Which is  – how much is this tumultuous trading between the Arctic and sup-Arctic and Maritime realms just one of those things that has always happened with fair regularity, and how much can be taken as a sign that global warming is changing the fundamental nature of the world’s habitable surface?

Gillis consults well-known authorities who often receive calls from reporters, including James Overland of NOAA, Kevin Trenberth of NCAR, and Judah Cohen of the private Atmospheric and Environmental Research consultancy and whose Siberian snowfield hypothesis recently got such attention. Gillis steers quite clear of the contrarians of the blogosphere. He seems to give extra attention to the plausibility of a climate change basis for the change. Overall he leaves the cause for this strange weather up in the air.

- Charlie Petit

The AP‘s Eric Talmadge filed Saturday a well-filled dispatch on Japan’s launch of a resupply mission to the space station. He provides the basic info plus, in a worthy attempt to provide feature-scale context in a size able to to fit a tight space, he throws in a disconnected set of declarations on the Japanese program’s history, ambitions, and global context. It’s like a list of bullets without the little dots.

No complaint, but I sat up when reading this passage whizzing past: the Japanese space agency’s budget for last year was “180 billion yen ($2 billion) about one-fourteenth what the U.S. spends on space exploration…”

What? The US spends $28 billion on space exploration? A quick look reveals what I’d suspected: NASA’s budget is just short of $20 billion in current dollars. But in NASA lingo, space exploration and shuttle operations are  not the same things as space stuff generally. Exploration means people in space suits.  That’s less than half the NASA budget. Hmm. Maybe it means total US space budget? The military space budget for the US is bigger than all of NASA’s – spooky but true and with real spooks. But that’s not space exploration by any yardstick, it’s for close examination of Earth’s surface, plus secure comm links. There’re NOAA’s weather sats too. Anyway, with all the different programs it is not intuitively at all clear what it is that the US does that is 14 times greater than what JAXA does and is easily confined to the category of space exploration.

Thus I have a mystery that must have a simple answer. Whence arises that multiple?  To put a number on it is no egregious error, as the underlying point is that the US spends a lot more on space than does Japan. That’s manifestly true.  But the precision of it in this story is impressive, and opaque.

The H-II is a photogenic vehicle. When one sees gov’t-subsidized rockets like this rising on pillars of fire, it is all the more impressive that the entrepreneurial Elon Musk of SpaceX thinks he can win a price war for space biz with his new line of Falcon rockets. Such chutzpah makes the world a lot more interesting.

Other H-II, H-2B, etc. (the term varies) launch stories:

• Asahi Shimbun – Tamooki Yasuda, Masanobu Higashiyama: H-2B success doesn’t sell Japanese rockets ; Nice, and worried, rundown on the tough competition  these days for launch business.
• Xinhua: Japan’s rocket carrying cargo for space station blasts off ;
• Space.com: Japanese Robot Cargo Ship En Route to Space Station ;
• Daily Mail - We Have lift-off / Japanese rocket Stork 2 heads to space station with six tons of supplies ;  Usual spotty if enthused  rewrite reporting, and also usual collection of the best pictures available.
• Spaceflight Now: Japanese rocket launches cargo freighter ; Eye candy. No story (two sentences) but lots of sharp pictures for the world’s rocket fans.
• International Business Times – Carl Bagh: Japan launches rocket carrying International Space Station cargo ; Quick list here of other actors hoping for ISS cargo biz as the shuttle program fades.
• Universe Today – Ken Kremer: Japan blasts the White Stork Kounotori to Space Station ; Lots of tech. detail, Good photos, video, check the Japanese YouTube.

-  Charlie Petit

The New York Observer reports that a story by veteran Newsweek science writer Sharon Begley on cholesterol-lowering drugs was spiked because the magazine was running an ad for Lipitor.

“The piece had been edited, approved, fit to layout, and moved to the final stages of production before being abruptly spiked on the night of Dec. 9,” writes the Observer’s Nick Summers, who worked at Newsweek until last October.

Summers wrote about the situation last week. Begley’s story–or a version of it–was posted on Newsweek’s site today. When the story was held in December, Summers reports that “Dan Klaidman and Nisid Hajari, who were then acting as interim editors of Newsweek as its merger with The Daily Beast was being lawyered, told The Observer that Ms. Begley’s profile had been held, not killed.”

He says this has happened to Begley at Newsweek before. “In August, a piece by Ms. Begley on cell phones and cancer was killed from the magazine at the last minute, and ran online instead. Newsweek at the time carried iPhone advertisements on its back cover.”

Newsweek is in the final stages of a merger with The Daily Beast, where editor Tina Brown will become Newsweek’s editor.

Begley’s story is a profile of Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, the new head of Stanford’s Prevention Research Center, and a long-time critic of what he has identified as incomplete or misleading research studies. The story followed, and might have been prompted by, a story on Ioannidis that appeared in The Atlantic in November.

Here is the relevant section of Begley’s story in the version that appeared online today:

…A major study concluded there’s no good evidence that statins (drugs like Lipitor and Crestor) help people with no history of heart disease. The study, by the Cochrane Collaboration, a global consortium of biomedical experts, was based on an evaluation of 14 individual trials with 34,272 patients. Cost of statins: more than $20 billion per year, of which half may be unnecessary. (Pfizer, which makes Lipitor, responds in part that “managing cardiovascular disease risk factors is complicated”).

To further complicate things, it’s not clear that Begley’s summary of the Cochrane study is accurate. The abstract of the Cochrane study says, “All cause mortality. coronary heart disease and stroke events were reduced with the use of statins as was the need for revascularisations.” It also notes that there were “shortcomings in the published trials and we recommend that caution should be taken in prescribing statins for primary prevention among people at low cardiovascular risk.”

Not exactly Begley’s “no good evidence” that statins work.

Begley’s story should not have been held in deference to advertisers. If readers begin to suspect that Newsweek tells the stories its advertisers like, rather than the stories readers need to know, readers are likely to flee–and they’d be right to do so. Newsweek might think it needs Lipitor ads to survive, but it won’t do very well without readers.

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) From Chile is an interesting story relating immune system activation and mood changes. Plus, Mexican microbiologists are very concerned because an the aquifer, Cuatro Ciénagas, is drying up due to farming in the area. That puts in serious danger an ancient and diverse bacterial system that has been studied for decades. A story in Guatemala explains that the amount of money they will receive from climate adaptation funds depends on how well the current government deals with projects already underway. In Argentina we find a severe critic to Stephen Hawking’s book and public image.From Colombia an appealing story about our perception of time flow. And a Spanish newspaper dares to publish that a Russian doctor is working on a pill that will allow us to live 120 years but offers no second opinions.

El fin de semana es el mejor momento para captar futuros curiosos de la ciencia con historias amenas que tengan un trasfondo científico interesante, y vayan más allá de la simple anécdota anécdota. Un buen ejemplo lo encontramos en el magazine Tendencias de La Tercera (Chile), donde este sábado Marcelo Córdova nos ofrecía “Las bacterias tienen un nuevo blanco en la mira: nuestro estado de ánimo”. Todos percibimos que cuando nuestro sistema inmunológico se pone en marcha por alguna razón, suele ir acompañado de peor estado de ánimo; ¿pero a qué se debe? Con entrevistas en exclusiva a neurocientíficos, Marcelo desarrolla un interesante y original reportaje sobre las últimas investigaciones explicando la base fisiológica de la relación entre cambios de conducta, u alteraciones de la memoria, con infecciones y actividad del sistema inmunológico. Quizás el título despiste un poco al dirigir la atención a las bacterias, que por lo que cuenta después son sólo uno de los desencadenantes, pero muy buen trabajo. Destacar también la manera cómo está redactado, especialmente el inicio, que recuerda al estilo tan anglosajón de contar historias.

Una pieza que nos ha sorprendido, la firma en Página 12 (Argentina) Federico Kukso: “El hombre que mató a dios (otra vez)”. Se refiere a Stephen Hawking, y lo deja por los suelos. Muy valiente la pieza de Kukso, atreviéndose a espetar algunas verdades. Según él, Hawking es hoy un “artificio del marketing”, utiliza como “una herramienta publicitaria la esclerosis lateral amiotrófica que va paralizando su cuerpo como si fuera una estatua de un museo de cera”, reconoce pensar que los periodistas “necesitan llamar genio a alguien, que en este caso soy yo”, sus compañeros físicos ya hace tiempo que no prestan atención a sus trabajos, suelta puntualmente mensajes bomba a los medios para llamar la atención, y su último libro “el gran diseño” es una mala repetición de sus anteriores. Coincidimos. Posiblemente Hawking es todo eso. Podríamos discutir si es sólo eso, y la repercusión social de su personaje. De todas formas; bravo a que alguien exprese este contrapunto.

Si vamos a Colombia y retrocedemos unos días, en El Espectador Pablo Correa “El tiempo no es como un río“ entrevista al autor de otro nuevo libro, el reconocido neurocientífico especializado en percepción David Eagleman. De contenido más ligero, esta pieza vuelve a ser una de aquellas cercanas que abordan varios temas interesantes como nuestra percepción del paso del tiempo, la influencia de la neurociencia en los juzgados, gimnasia para el cerebro o la curiosa sinestesia, y contribuyen a la reacción positiva del lector hacia lo tremendamente interesante que es la ciencia.

Si pasamos de la mente al cuidado del planeta, gracias a El Universal (México) y Thelma Gómez Durán “Un “laboratorio vivo” que agoniza” descubrimos que el acuífero de Cuatro Ciénagas se está secando debido a la proliferación de cultivos en la zona, y con ello se pone en gravísimo riesgo el valioso ecosistema de microorganismos que está siendo estudiado durante décadas por un equipo de la UNAM. Su directora explica a Thelma que son colonias únicas por su antigüedad, condiciones parecidas a las primeras bacterias que habitaron en la Tierra, y una enorme herramienta para investigar el origen de la vida. En la pieza se explica muy bien la serie de motivos por los que Cuatro Ciénagas tiene tanto valor para la investigación científica, y los esfuerzos que los investigadores están dispuestos a realizar para preservar su contenido. Buena pieza, que en el momento de ser leída por el tracker, era la segunda más leída de El Universal.

También en área medioambiental, en El Periódico de Guatemala Carlos Rigalt “Parte del fondo de US$100 millardos para los países afectados podrían obtenerse hasta dentro de 5 años” presenta un buen trabajo sobre las conclusiones de la cumbre del clima de Cancún, y cómo se van a gestionar los fondos a adaptación. Es un tema vital para un país tan afectado por el cambio climático como Guatemala. Hay un mensaje clave: las ayudas tardarán un poco, y llegarán en más o menos cuantía en función de lo bien que el actual gobierne gestione los próximos fondos y es capaz de demostrar que se está invirtiendo de manera correcta.

Finalicemos haciendo hincapié en la necesidad cada vez mayor de no creer a ciegas en los científicos. La semana pasada vimos como todos los medios publicitaban sin rechistar las palabras de un investigador japonés asegurando que en menos de 5 años clonaría un mamut. Fue días después que Público por medio de Nuño Gómez buscó opiniones de otros genetistas explicando que no tenía sentido y era una búsqueda de financiación. Eso pone las cosas en su sitio. En La Razón (España) encontramos un interesante artículo de V.R “¿La fórmula definitiva para vivir 120 años?”, que se coloca como noticia más leída de su web. Resulta que un médico ruso dice –sin dar detalles- que está a punto de lanzar un nuevo medicamento que permitirá alcanzar los 120 años. La nota dice que en general “tomamos estos anuncios con precaución, pero esta vez es diferente”, porque viene abalado por una fuerte inversión farmacéutica, el presidente ruso y un multimillonario. Está bien, pero insuficiente. Como en el caso del mamut, el científico puede actuar en busca de notoriedad o financiación. Debemos buscar fuentes en antienvejecimiento para contrastar la noticia, quienes seguro nos la echarían por tierra diciendo que una pastilla no nos permitirá rejuvenecer nuestras células para que alcancen 120 años.

- Pere Estupinyà

As a native Californian The Tracker would never have said any plant species or genus other than our state tree, the coast redwood, or perhaps its cousins, the giant sequoia of the Sierra, is our iconic plant. Even the golden poppy, our state flower, doesn’t rise to quite that status. But I just watched a quiet, smooth and locally-made video news piece that makes me wonder how to shoehorn into top icon stature the vast family of manzanitas, almost all (95 out of 106 species of the genus Arctostaphylos) of which are only found west of Nevada and Arizona, north of Mexico, south of Oregon, and east of the Pacific Ocean. Other than those confines, they are all over the place, in great variety and profusion. Some hug the ground, others are big enough to be trees, and resemble with their red, flaky bark and dark green leaves their more widely distributed cousins, the arbutus or what are called madrone trees in California. Manzanitas are solid, resilient, and handsome.

The program, Science on the SPOT, Restoring San Francisco’s Lost Manzanita;   is just 9 minutes long. It  broadcast last week on KQED-TV, the local PBS affiliate. Its Quest science unit made it, with producer Gabriela Quirós in charge. She  also wrote a text version, 15 Months Later, Rediscovered San Francisco Planet Thrives.  The station, as it usually does, let ksjtracker know about it last week, but as I’ve always told broadcasters wondering why this here journalism tracker is almost exclusively about print media, it’s easier to read fast than watch or listen fast. Had I looked and seen it was less than ten minutes long I’d already have posted on it.

The hoary cure-all term for sources or reporters who are grasping to express the rare and wondrous, “holy grail,” pops up in the piece (holy grail is my pet peeve among cliches… oops, pet peeve is a cliche too. Yikes, can’t live with’em, can’t live withou…. oh no that’s another one). Just watch this program if you’ve the nine minutes to spare and don’t get an allergy spending time on what is, one must say, a feel-good piece with nobody sniping at anybody.

Its news has a deeper pedigree in local media too, as you might presume. Local papers and other outlets did give coverage over the last year and a half to the chance rediscovery of a lost wild species of manzanita, sp. name A. franciscana and native only to San Francisco, in the middle of a Golden Gate Bridge offramp median growing on serpentine (our state rock, maligned often for its natural asbestos content). The KQED program, for all its lovely flow, looks deeply only at a few aspects of the story. One has to read all the press on this affair to begin to grasp its scope.

Previous Stories, a sampling:

• Bay Nature – Sue Rosenthal (Apr-June 2010): The Presidio’s Miracle Manzanita ;
• ESA Blawg – Keith W. Rizzardi: (Aug 12, 2010) : Two Plants, Two Stories..
• SF Chronicle – Peter Fimrite (Dec 26, 2009): Manzanita bush’s discovery excites scientists ;
• SF Weekly – Erin Sherbert (Dec. 17, ’09): Finally, ‘Extinct’ Plant Brings Harmony Among Environmentalists, Scientists and Caltrans;

Grist for the Mill:

Nat’l Park Service/GGNRA Endangered Scrubland Plants ;

- Charlie Petit

The cable isp blinked off, on, and sideways this morning. All better now, but had a short haul. See you Monday / Charlie Petit

In Science this week is a report that just goes to show that theory can be quicker, but data are a slicker indicator of truth. Global warming is supposed to send biological niches uphill, the most convenient way for ecotones to stay in their most congenial temperature ranges. Maybe, and even almost surely, that happens. But the norm in California with plant species, according to a study by researchers at Univ of Montana, of Idaho, and UC-Davis, was to move downhill over the last century.

The reason seems to be that more rain confounds the tidy model off which theorists theorized. Whatever the explanation is, when a widely-circulated example of how climate change will alter the face of the planet gets a second look, it is news. It is also a lesson, one would like to imagine, in the natural rhythm of science as it wanders toward truth, bouncing off new data and new hypotheses. Further, the study does not refute the standard hypothesis, but does warn that it fits a narrow range of circumstance.

Stories:

• LA Times – Bettina Bozall: Mountain plant communities moving down despite climate change ; Some say, she reports, that models are unclear whether the wetter trend will continue in California. If it goes drier, sources tell her, then the uphill march may begin.
• NPR – Richard Harris : Calif. Plants Put A Wrinkle In Climate Change Plans ; Overall okay rendering of the news, but one must wonder about the lede of the print version of this broadcast’s assertion that the plants seem to be bucking the expected trend “in preference for wetter, lower areas.” In this state and probably most, the higher one goes the wetter and snowier it tends to get. That is, a move down may be wetter, but staying still also is wetter than it used to be, and uphill still ought to find things even more wetter (if that scans) as well as a bit cooler and hence more like it used to be too. My bet: soils down lower tend to be richer, and watering them gives more kick to vegetation then to water higher stretches. Just guessing. Hmm. Maybe it’s just that lower, flatter terrain doesn’t drain as fast, so soil moisture lower down is higher absolutely?  Evaporation is faster at higher altitude? Um, oh, …. never mind.
• Discovery News – John D. Cox: Downhill Mountain Migrations ;

*UPDATE: A reader – you will probably make the right guess who -  alerts us to a story that explores how confounding and patchy the impacts of climate change can be in rugged country:

• High Country News – J. Madeleine Nash (Oct 1, 2010): Dancing with Climate Change / Alpine species try to adapt to a warming world ; Mad Nash got to go to the otherworldly White Mountain Research Station, something all outdoors science writers ought to aspire to do and preferably on expense account. Also along taking pictures, we see, was her own personal gravity wave, physicist husband Tom. That’s a very cozy, sweet deal. Mad lets us know that when going downhill, one can bebop. Not her, but the sinewy scientist lady she follows around among the bristlecones. The passage, by the way, is skillfully crafted to tell us her source’s age without just plopping it in randomly and adorned only with commas. The story is a reader and is broad, on plants plus butterflies and more.

Grist for the Mill: UC Davis Press Release ;

Pic – Ansel Adams, Nevada Fall, Rainbow. source ;

- Charlie Petit