In PLoS ONE, since New Year’s Eve but somehow evading media interest until the last week or so, is a report from a neurology team at Philadelphia’s Thomas Jefferson University asserting significant progress, with the help of lab rats, in explaining why hangovers come with headaches (dunno if, without a headache, it’s a hangover, but moving along…). The report link is in Grist below.  What’s getting press is that the study found intriguing if indirect evidence that one of the remedies that bartenders have prescribed for years (aside from hair of the dog), coffee and maybe an aspirin or iburofen etc., does help.

At the Philadelphia Inquirer Tom Avril, who also tipped us off to this news burstito, writes it up at some length and well (but not at the longest length of all, as we’ll see). He, as do essentially all news outlets that covered this, gloms on to the caffeine angle. Avril also provides not only a Biblical injunction but a good explanation of the many ways that these rat headaches were induced by means that do not  much resemble a person spending too much time, all crammed into a short period, with elbow bent. But they did get an infusion of alcohol, and then got poked, not injuriously but still rudely poked, in the face to see how much they had of a reaction that the researcher believe means they felt pretty much hungover.

Aside from Tom’s tip, the other reason to do this post is to use that picture up right. I do not know what that attractive but whacked young lady is doing exactly, or why, but it seems a good bet alcohol was involved and it looks like a latte in her hand (could be beer, too). Alas, the pic goes with a decidedly weak article by “staff” at an obscure news outlet or aggregator or blogspot or something called eCanadaNOW. The article’s hed misspells aspirin, the story asserts that the rats were not given alcohol (even though they were), and aside from that it has too many exclamation marks. As for the woman in the picture, I hope she’s not embarrassed by the pic, and it wasn’t my idea to put it on the web first, but if she is and I somehow hear of that, down it comes.

I find no press release. The attentive folks at New Scientist, chiefly reporter Bob Holmes, seem to have gotten this press cascade started, on January 11. It’s just a short piece, but apparently  enough to turn on a rewriting and plump-it-up frenzy,  some of it by reporters who appear not to have read the study. The Telegraph and Richard Alleyne followed up (he did presumably read the study and called the lead author). Away it went.

The most amazing reaction to this news is at the UK’s Daily Mail. There columnist Craig Brown uses this study as a flimsy excuse to go off on hangovers and their ostensible cures.  His own passages are overwrought and a tad strained. But several of his selections of quotes from literature and other sources regarding hangovers are diverting. It’s a blog, and really ought to have had an encounter with a calm editor. Brown essays at length on the existential angst of rats and their feelings about their lives, assuming they have any self-awareness to speak of. He’s wrong about these lab rats being force-fed pure alcohol. That is, they were fed pure alcohol, but not in his implied huge or drunkenness-inducing dosages. It’s the other ways their brains were made irritable that might give the PETA gangsters qualms (they’re not ALL gangsters, I’m talking about the bomb-planters, lab-trashers and scientist-harassers among them).

If one scans through the study, it’s clear it covers a tremendous amount of ground in exploring the causes of such headaches, and hardly has caffeine as its only topic. The paper’s list of asserted ways, from formal literature, that varying kinds of alcoholic beverages cause hangover headaches is terrific. Reporters could have mined more from it. And while many accounts say or imply that the study endorses aspirin, as far as The Tracker can see from scanning the study, the only thing close to aspirin that it tested is an ibuprofen-class pain pill called Ketorolac.

Other Stories:

• Melbourne Herald Sun – Marianne Betts: Aspirin, coffee best fix for hangovers ;
• Toronto Star – Elizabeth Haggarty: The two most effective ingredients to treat a hangover ;
• TopNews – Rats Got Hangover to Get the Way Out ; Looks like rip and read aggregator rewrite.
• BreakingNews - Coffee-and-aspirin combo ‘beats hangovers’ ; ditto.
• Gather.com -Kate James:  Coffee and Aspirin is Best Hangover Cure – For Rats – Does It Work for Humans? ; The Tracker is really bottom-trawling to list this. This site purports to carry news. Where, in any definition of decent journalism, is there overlap with this content-free item? Anyway, Ms. James’s previous post,  just for context and to share all that glitters with ksjtracker readers, was Burglars Accidentally Snort Man’s Ashes.

Grist for the Mill: PLoS ONE article ;

- Charlie Petit

On the front page of today’s New York Times, long-time science writer Gina Kolata reports that an FDA advisory committee has recommended approval of “the first test — a brain scan — that can show the characteristic plaques ofAlzheimer’s disease in the brain of a living person.”

Kolata is careful not to call this the first test for Alzheimer’s disease, but she treats it, throughout the story, as if it were. The new scan, she writes, “would be especially valuable in a common and troubling situation — trying to make a diagnosis when it is not clear whether a patient’s memory problems are a result of Alzheimer’s disease or something else.”

And she goes on in a similar vein:  ”…having a diagnosis is important for planning and for understanding what lies ahead…” She quotes Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, an Alzheimer’s researcher at Duke University, who said, “This technique will allow family doctors to feel confident ruling out Alzheimer’s,” he said.

That all makes it sound as if this is the first test for Alzheimer’s. Another researcher says “this is a big deal.” “This is nothing but a positive for our families,” says a representative from the Alzheimer’s Association. If it were not the first test for Alzheimer’s disease, it might not be such a big deal. But I’m convinced–it’s a big deal!

It is not, however, the first test for Alzheimers–a fact I glean from Kolata’s own reporting.

On August 9, 2010, she reported on the front page of the Times that researchers had developed “a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in in identifying a signature level of abnormal proteins in patients with significant memory loss who went on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.”

Again, note the careful qualifications. But reading over the meaningless phrase “a signature level of abnormal proteins,” Kolata is reporting on the development of a predictive test for Alzheimer’s disease.

Kolata’s story today on the scan for plaques is strangely quiet on that previous reporting. She might have said–and should have said–that the scan follows the announcement last year of a spinal-fluid test that could also help identify Alzheimer’s disease. Today’s brain scan might be more accurately described as the second test for Alzheimer’s disease–with appropriate qualifications noted.

Why would she omit mention of that earlier test? Perhaps because it was widely criticized here on the Tracker and elsewhere, and even “corrected” in the Times itself, as I noted at the time.

Kolata wrote then that the new test “can be 100 percent accurate,” a phrase, as I wrote, that doesn’t mean anything–although it’s likely to be read by many as a test that “is” 100 percent accurate. (Every pitch a batter hits “can be” a home run; only a few of them are.)

Kolata has done her readers a disservice. And she’s done a disservice to her colleagues, who are stuck, as I often was, trying to explain to their editors why trying to match a big story on the front page of the New York Times isn’t going to be as easy as they think.

- Paul Raeburn

It crawled from under a rock,  Reuters‘s Maggie Fox reports, and right onto the list of new taxonomy. A giant crawdaddy, er, crayfish in non-faux-rubespeak, is giant by standards of its genus, if not by those of its better known crustacean examples of parallel evolution, lobsters. But five inches is a big crayfish. It’s twice as long (and about eight times the weight) of the creek’s standard, known varieties.

She writes it pretty short, but not too short to mention that for all the environmental degradation we read and worry about, science continues to discover species we haven’t even seen before. And in this case, it’s not in some remote and barely populated part of the globe but right here on a creek in Tennessee. The news is formally in the Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.

Grist for the Mill: U. of Illinois Press Release with a link to more, very cool pictures. Journal abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

After NOAA and NASA already said so, the World Meteorological Organization has said its numbers say the same thing. Last year was a tied with 2005 for hottest year in the modern instrumental record for the world as a whole. The fourth big player in this game, the UK’s Met Office, released its own figures declaring 2010 was second warmest ever, but that all the highs of recent years are basically tied.

There is some literal redundancy in WMO’s data – they are not independent, but are compiled in some fashion from material submitted by (you guessed it), the Met Office’s Climatic Research Center, NOAA, and NASA. Those three agencies’ data are compared in that hard-to-read plot up right, or in higher def here.

A few outlets pass along these unsurprising bits of news:

• Reuters – Stephanie Nebehay: New climate data shows warming world: WMO. She even gets a source saying these data should show (that’s a not-sly dig at the hed’s grammar) the contarians that their doubts are untenable. Good luck with that.
• NYTimes – Justin Gillis: New Figures Confirm That 2010 Was a Hot Year ;
• BBC – Richard Black: 2010 hits global temperature high ;
• AP – John Heilprin: UN: 2010 tied for warmest year on record; The service includes that while last summer’s Arctic sea ice did not break the record for lowest ebb ever, the current extent of ice pack is lowest ever measured for this time of year.
• Guardian (UK) Sylvia Rowley: Met Office: 2010 was second warmest year on record;
• AFP – Peter Capella: 2010 warmest ever year, says UN weather agency ;

Grist for the Mill: WMO Press Release ; Met Office Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Last week a rather clear error in data presentation was missed by many reporters (earlier post), and now we have another case. And again, while reporters who got it wrong have nothing to crow about, it is inevitable that for breaking news most journalists are going to take the plain verbiage of published papers and their press release accompaniments as solid indications of what the news source meant to say. The prime onus for inaccuracy in these cases is not on reporters working at deadline, but on supposedly reliable sources and the information they provide. And some – at least one anyway – reporters tried to head off this error before it went public, to no avail.

The news is that this week an NGO based in Argentina, the Universal Ecological Fund, released a report on the peril for world food production as global temperatures rise. Serious topic. The authoring org. appears to be earnest (if not diligent). It got wide pickup. However, the grave report, aside from its crop and food price worries,  also declared that at current rates of emissions, CO2 in the atmosphere will reach about 490 parts per million by the year 2020 (it’s now just shy of 400). That’s pretty much wrong. What’s totally wrong is its deduction that this translates to a temperature rise of 2.4 C by 2020.

A good explanation of the flub and the report writers’ misunderstanding that is behind it is at RealClimate by climatologist Gavin Schmidt. In sum, it is confusion between the eventual equilibrium temperature should the planet hold at 490 ppm, and the much smaller rise that would have occurred at the moment it reaches that point under current rates of growth. Earth’s surface and low-altitude atmosphere temperatures respond with considerable lag to a change in solar forcing, not instantaneously. If I push the car’s gas pedal down, I do not instantly reach a corresponding higher stead velocity. Nor do I stop immediately if I hit the brakes. Inertia demands respect. There are other errors in the food supply report too, having to do with translating non-CO2 climate forcings into CO2 equivalents. That 490 ppm by 2020 ought to have been more like 410 ppm, Schmidt at Real Climate tells us.

Another quick refutation of the report’s numerology came from climate reporter Stephen Leahy who blogs on it under the hed +2.4C by 2020 leaves Billions Hungry? Scary but Untrue. Inside Story of Good Intentions Gone Wrong (and how the media fell for it). Leahy even tried to save the report’s authors before they derailed themselves in public. Having seen the report’s advance material, he warned its author and the public relations company promoting it of the error. He tells us, “I used up (the) better part of 2 or 3 days of my time and still they went ahead with the release… they think it is better to have a conversation on this than to be right.”

Experienced climate reporters, if they covered this report and read that assertion about a 2.4 degree rise by 2020, should have immediately realized that such a jump is way out of line of standard projections. If they had called any other climate change authorities and mentioned the supposed temperature forecast, they’d probably have gotten an earful of incredulity. But most reporters who don’t intensely cover such issues would not have any internalized feel for the scale and rate of climate change. And many who do could easily have scanned right past the temperature change part as mere boiler plate while focussing on the fresh news: food forecasts. And if they treated this as single-source news? Trouble.

AAAS’s EurekAlert! service for reporters, which carried a link to the report, has taken it down. One wonders exactly what procedures there should have caught the error in advance – E!’s reputation depends largely on its efforts to look through press releases and other material it distributes in order to  minimize the nonsense.

Wotta mess.

Some of the stories that ran, oblivious of the error (ie, fell for it):

• CTV News – British Columbia: Climate change to spur crop shortages, study claims (and an added overline notes EurekAlerts about face on promoting this study).
• HeraldSun (Australia) : World food shortage in ten years;
• Economic Times (India):  ‘By 2020, world to be 2.4C warmer, India to be hardest hit’ ,
• Vancouver Sun/PostMedia News – Mike De Souza: Food prices sset to soar as world gets warmer ;

One suspects, from the scale of reaction, there were many other that have since disappeared. There are also a few mainline news stories out today calling attention to the error.

• Guardian (UK) Suzanne Goldenberg: Online news service promotes false climate change study / EurekAlert! carried a study with unfounded global warming claims that the planet would warm by 2.4C by 2020;
• AFP via Sydney Morning Herald - Kerry Sheridan: Climate change study had ‘significant error’: experts ;

- Charlie Petit

Two independent reports this week bring news on spider silk – one on how to harvest it from your friendly neighborhood black widow, another on how to get a trick nanny goat to put some spider silk feedstock into her udder,  and both with reassurance that spider silk is very special. Plus, we get word of the first-ever scientific journal devoted to video presentation of results – with its emphasis on showing technically minded readers how to do subtle or complex lab procedures.

• Scientific American – Charles Q. Choi: Sticky Business: Video Shows the Right Way to Extract Silk Glands from a Black Widow Spider ; Charles reports he’d spotted this journal, JoVE for Journal of Visualized Experiments, a while ago and was waiting for something sufficiently offbeat or diverting to generate an article. Harvesting silk glands from poisonous spider will do. It really shows one how to do this, and the complexity of the spiders’ silkworks is amazing.  A few PETA absolutists won’t like to see these eight-legged ladies getting their abdomens snipped off, one suspects.
• PBS NOVA “Making Stuff” – NYTimes’s David Pogue: Spinning of Steel-Strength Spider Silk; Inaugural episode of a new technology series, “Making Stuff”, visits with engineers of the biomimetic bent who deeply envy the casual routine among spiders of making silk whose properties are astounding. He starts with a very devoted fashion designer who made a whole piece of exquisitely patterned tapestry, with enormous labor and a million spiders’ worth of silk (the animals survived this procedure), to make. It’s strong as bejeezus. Next step: scientists are producing genetically modified goats that make the key proteins in bulk, especially the ones used to make the spiders supertough dragline silk. The link goes to a long excerpt preview – I’m looking for a link to the whole show. (Late addition, thank you Kate Beckett as per comment, whole show.)

- Charlie Petit

[This is one of those posts in which it's important to read to the kicker--PR.]

An anonymous tipster alerted me to an example of bad headlines that is so perfect that I don’t think I could have made up a better example.

The subject is a BMJ study on breastfeeding. The study raised questions about a World Health Organization recommendation that infants be exclusively breastfed for six months. The title of the study: “Six months of exclusive breast feeding: how good is the evidence?”

That’s reasonably neutral; one might expect to read that the evidence is good, or not so good. And the study’s conclusion is also tempered. Rather than concluding that breastfeeding is good or bad, it says, simply, that “complementary foods may be introduced safely between four and six months.” It doesn’t say that they must be. It doesn’t say that exclusive breastfeeding until six months is dangerous; it questions that recommendation, and says that introducing other foods is safe.

But is that the impression you would get from these headlines?

BBC News: Weaning before six months ‘may help breastfed babies.’

The Los Angeles Times Booster Shots blog: Breast may not be best for the first six months of life, some experts say.

msnbc.com: Study: Babies may need more than breast milk.

AOLNews: Breast-Feeding Exclusively Not the Best for Babies After All?

CBS News Healthwatch: Breast-Feeding Advice Wrong? What Should Moms Do?

Nature news: Is breast not best for babies?

You get the idea. These headlines all suggest that the current recommendations are wrong, that mothers now face a terrible dilemma, that if you follow the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics (“We recommend exclusively breastfeeding for a minimum of four months but preferably for six months…”), you might be doing your baby harm.

Some of these stories are much better than their headlines, but how many readers will simply see the headlines, or tweet or Facebook the links based on the headlines, inadvertently spreading misinformation?

Reporters working for old media always had a convenient excuse for bad headlines on their stories–”I don’t write the headlines!” (Copy editors, highly focused souls who wrote the headelines and rarely took their eyes off of their screens, had no opportunity to reply, making this reporters’ excuse even better.)

Now, however, that has changed. Many reporters do write their own headlines. But whatever the source of these headlines, they have created a false impression about the study.

And, the kicker: According to the study’s disclosure, three of its four authors “have performed consultancy work and/or received research funding from companies manufacturing infant formulas and baby foods within the past 3 years.”

Maybe that should have been in the headlines.

- Paul Raeburn

Would be much easier, if dioxin contaminated eggs tinted green

In just weeks a dioxin scandal has led to the closing of thousands of farms. Dioxin at levels that, while not quite toxic, are higher than allowed were found in eggs, chicken and pork, some already sold and consumed in Germany and some neighboring countries. The cause was contamination of animal feed. A German company delivered it, and had used cheap industrial grease as a fat supplement in fodder. Because the source of the dioxin in the grease wasn’t at first clear, officials closed thousands of farms and stopped the delivery of their animal products. It took weeks to find the source of the dioxin: The company derived the product from used french fry oil intended for industrial use only (for the production of biodiesel).

On one hand, this is in most part a topic for political journalists, and most of the published articles deal with responsibilities of governmental food control agencies and the inherently unhealthy production structure of “modern” agriculture. But on the other hand, it is also a topic for science journalists, because people needed to understand about toxic and non-toxic dioxin concentrations, how dioxin acts in the human body, etc.

Here are some links to articles, how German language newspapers dealt with the dioxin scandal – it seems, that more consumer, economic or political journalists then science journalists wrote the background articles:

Die Zeit has a commentary in the science section, relies on dpa sometimes, too (here), but wrote about the possible source of the dioxin source early.

Spiegel-Online: A dioxin Q&A, a whole special section

Die Welt wrote, how entwined the production chanels of food and fuel are – and that a mix-up is not a surprise.

Without mentioning the ongoing scandal in Germany at all, the Austrian Standard had a short piece about the rising environmental contamination with toxins like dioxin, according to a study from the German federal institute for risk assessment (BfR).

Though a little bit of a side track, the Süddeutsche Zeitung asks (and tests the evidence): Is organic farming the better choice? But Katrin Blawat had an in-depths article about dioxin and the toxic potential of the substance and how scientists define critical toxic values. And the science section published a statement from scientists against the industrialization of agriculture.

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Ulf von Rauchhaupt) provided a background on the toxicity of dioxin and gave an update of the research in the field.

Also: Fishy Breed

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung had an interesting article about the (environmental) consequences for the scientific achievement of artificial salmon breeding.

Also worth to be mentioned: The Rumor Virus

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (Volker Stollorz) had a piece – about what could be a newly found, dangerous retrovirus that has already infected millions of Americans, or merely an interesting laboratory artifact. According to the Whittemore-Peterson-Institut in Reno, Nevada, the “Xenotropic Murine Leukemia Virus related Virus“ (XMRV) cause Chronic Fatigue Syndrom (CFS). At least, in a study of 101 CFS patients, 68 carried the virus. But even more interesting, the virus was found in 8 out of 218 blood samples of healthy volunteers, too. The head of the institute, Judy Mikovits, estimates, that “20 million Americans“, might be infected. Blood banks got hysterical, fearing the spread of another potentially pathogenic retro virus (XMRV is a relative to HIV). On Facebook, people started a „Global Action against XMRV“ campaign. Desperate CFS patients started to self-medicate HIV-drugs, hoping to get rid of XMRV, ignoring the huge side effects of the drugs. And diagnostic companies start to sell XMRV tests ($549 each), based on patents already ensured by Mikovits.

BUT: Not a single laboratory in Europe could find XMRV in human tissue, so far!  The explanation might be, that XMRV, a harmless companion of mice, could indeed have crossed the species barrier from mice to human – but only in the lab. The article describes a scenario, where the murine XMRV developed in immune-deficient mice into a strain, capable of infecting human cell lines (it was found in a prostate cancer cell line 22RV1). A few years later, a scientist at the Cleveland clinic in Ohio found XMRV in prostate tissue samples from prostate cancer patients. This catched Mikovits’ attention, she wanted to test the blood of CFS patients ; and she ordered a sample of the XMRV infected cell line – a mistake, asks Stollorz? The problem is, that it frequently happens, that human tissue catches mice viruses if incubated in the same cell culture room. The Center for Disease Control in Atlanta couldn’t find XMRV in the blood of CFS patients.

The article is not an easy read. Who wants to hear about details from the lab? But if these scientific details make all the difference for the society to differentiate between a real threat from a new retrovirus or an unnecessary hype (in the best financial interest of certain private institutions), then people need to know these details – explained via good science journalism.

Also important: Corruption in the German Health Care System

An article (though, too short!) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (Wiebke Rögener) highlights corruption structures in the German health care system. The fact alone is not the most interesting about this article (it is well known, that about 56 billion Euro get lost in European Union health care due to corruption, according to the European Healthcare Fraud & Corruption Network), but Rögener gives a variety of examples, how different (and therefore hard to track) physicians, pharmacies, hospitals, or pharma companies try to flimflam the system. I should mention the so called “post marketing surveillance studies” here: It is a good idea, to pay physicians to collect data about new, recently approved drugs – but if pharma companies spend much more money than they publish studies, anti-corruption organizations like Transparency International get suspicious, that the fees for the physicians are more like a bribe to convince the doctors to prefer a certain product.

Sascha Karberg

Right now, I see on C-Span, Republicans in the US House of Representatives are rising to explain why in the name of a stronger economy and healthier people and getting government off our backs, it is vital to kill last year’s US health reform law. Democrats are rising to explain why for the very same reasons – except that it’s unrestrained insurance companies they want off our backs – they passed it in the first place.

Yesterday from AP a story by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, with the hed FACT CHECK: Shaky health care job loss estimate,  got a lot of circulation and provided some additional ammo for the Dems in the debate. It essentially torpedoes the anti-Obamacare assertion that last year’s bill would cause loss of 650,000 jobs. The AP’s story reads convincingly to me.

One also suspects that one could do a somewhat similar takedown of Dem assertions that health reform should reduce the budget deficit by $130 billion or so over ten years. But at least that number really is what the Congressional Budget Office said. It is still hard to believe.

- Charlie Petit

Reuters pic, but seat should'a been down

It’s in a quote and entirely germane and in fact uses a word that would spontaneously occur to anybody thinking about the topic of the dispatch, but nonetheless it’s remarkable to read “eat shit” in a report from the Reuters news agency. A salute is due the news editors who let this one go on through. After all, in this context, it is no metaphor.

Kate Kelland files it from London. I don’t know how many US outlets carried the story intact. The topic, which has been elsewhere in the news recently (which I know only because I realized on reading this that I’d hear of its topic, vaguely, already), is treatment of digestive disorders via stool or fecal transplant. The aim, a supercharged version of eating yogurt or other probiotics to restore balance in one’s gut flora, is to treat people who are so short on the good bugs  that they are desperately ill, often plagued by chronic diarrhea, and are typically suffering an overload or infection by one particularly nasty member of the gut community, Clostridium difficile. Such malady can easily be fatal. And fecal transplant therapy, apparently, has been applied for years but lingered at the fringes of medicine due to its profound yuck factor.

By the way, the doc who used the term ‘eat shit” does not literally have patients eat poop. It’s normally injected via gastric tube or enema. And microbial cultures with the same sort of population but not grown in somebody else’s colon are under study.

What’s missing in this story, or at least what question it plants in my mind, is how patients suffering maladies so severe they require this treatment got into their predicaments. Too much antibiotics, or what? If a simple transplant of well-balanced microbial ghoulash is enough to knock C. dificile down to normal levels or defeat it entirely, how’d the imbalance get started in the first placed, typically?

Other stool transplant stories:

• NYTimes – Carl Zimmer (July 12, 2010) : How Microbes Defend and Define Us ;
• AP – Laurean Neergaard (Dec. 13, 2010): “C-Diff” Superbug On The Rise: Last-ditch Method At Fighting Intestinal Bug ; This is the one I recalled reading not so long ago.
• MedPage Today – Kristina Fiore: ACG: Fighting C. Diff With Feces;

Grist for the Mill: American College of Gastroenterology Press Release (Oct. 10) ;

This reminds me, speaking of what is normally unspeakable in polite company. Mrs. Tracker is seldom vulgar and especially not in public. But she makes an exception when telling of her acute embarrassment one day when she was a young teenager out sailing on Balboa bay with a neighbor boy. They tacked the boat. While while coming about the jib got hung up. She suddenly realized it was a rigging problem and squealed, “I’m sitting on the sheet!” Rather, she meant to say that but came up with a spoonerism she and probably he could not forget.

- Charlie Petit

Those of us who missed the ScienceOnline2011 meeting of 300 tweeting Spartans last week in Research Triangle Park are not out of luck, as its examination of the exploding realm of all-online science news reporting, sci news commenting, sci news chewing upon, and general web-savvy  science popularizing scrivening is archived and much of it already accessible.

A good rundown is to be found at the Columbia Journalism Review, where Cristine Russell, pres of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing, writes it up. The meeting’s own twitter lineup, still rumbling along, is @sci11 . It turns out, reports Cris, that it took about 45 minutes of twitter frenzy to sell out its enrollment limit.

The ksjtracker got able representation by our mostly-medical Tracker, Paul Raeburn, who reports on it next post down.

The Tracker yours-truly here posts on this event with some chagrin at being so out of it. While I am not sure I’d have been fast enough to register in time anyway, I never even heard about it till a week before it occurred. Cris told me she was going, she was so excited. All I could say was what are you talking about? Paul’s going, and I don’t even know about it? Ed Yong and Carl Zimmer too? That makes me, while making most of my living on line writing about science writing, an official and forlorn fossil, species Extinctosaurus oldemediai (I am registered at Twitter but, oh this is tedious and so 20th century, Twitter messages and especially screens full of them still just look like hash to me).

I am vowing to spend a couple of days following somebody, or some event, that I care about and see if the bug bites.I mean, I have to try it and, until I do, stop asking who has time for that? All the cool kids have been doing it for years now.

- Charlie Petit

Last weekend in North Carolina, I saw the future of science writing.

Some 300 bright, enthusiastic and energetic science bloggers–scientists and journalists among them–gathered in Research Triangle Park for ScienceOnline 2011. The mood was vastly different from what you might encounter in a traditional newsroom. The black humor, cynicism and ironic detachment of newspaper newsrooms was replaced by an eagerness to learn and a willingness to share. These folks–and I count myself among them–love what they do. Unlike me, they don’t crow about discovering the future of science writing–they are creating it.

The conference, run by Bora Zivkovic, the editor of Scientific American‘s blog network, and Anton Zuiker, director of communications for the Duke Department of Medicine, is now in its fifth year. It differs from most other science and journalism conferences by welcoming scientists, journalists, and bloggers–who can be one or the other, or a little bit of both–as equal participants. Journalists were not there to cover science, and scientists were not there to report results. We were all there to share ideas.

The panels and hallway discussions ranged from the nuts-and-bolts of blogging to big thoughts.

A session entitled Web 2.0wned was an excellent tutorial on broadening one’s reach on the web. “Social media technologies are changing the way science information is passed between scientists, journalists, and readers–for better or worse,” the organizers wrote. “We think it’s for the better, and that resistance is futile.” It was organized by bloggers Arikia Millikan, Dave Mosher, and Taylor Dobbs, the latter the son of prominent science blogger David Dobbs. Taylor, from whom I learned a lot in an hour, is an undergraduate college student.

David Dobbs and several colleagues tackled one of many big issues in a panel on “open science”–”the need to not only make all science publications open-access, but to change current research, publication, and reputational structures to take full advantage of the internet, and to accelerate and enrich the flow and development of scientific data, idea, findings, and discussion.”

Bloggers Ed Yong, Virginia Hughes, John Rennie and Steve Silberman tackled the question of whether the web changes our perception of what is newsworthy. “What attributes are valuable in online science journalism – do we really care about things like scoops, or is context king?” It’s been a while since I’ve thought about what makes something newsworthy; that became second nature to me long ago. It was refreshing to be able to re-examine that.

That’s a sampling. I’m sorry I can’t mention all of the sessions, but you can take a look at the program wiki if you’d like the complete rundown.

Conference participants tracked many of the sessions and talks on Twitter, unleashing a blast of tweets that gave those of us who were there a chance to see a kind of instant replay of almost everything that happened (including a few things that happened in the wee hours, which I will delicately omit here). The tweets might not give you a complete picture of the conference if you weren’t there, but if you’d like to sample them, search for the hashtag #scio11. More information is also available at ScienceOnline2011.

As a journalist, I had one lingering question that wasn’t, as far as I know, directly addressed at the conference. The best science writers have always tried to separate whatever enthusiasm they have for science from their coverage, in which they aim for objectivity. For journalists, science is neither officially good nor bad; we try to tell readers what happens, without taking sides or cheering for success or failure. Many of the scientist-bloggers at the conference professed no such objectivity, nor should they. They have as much right to promote science as I do to promote good journalism. But it’s important, I think, that we remember who’s who.

Emily Anthes, whose Wonderland blog is part of the PLOS blogs network, raised a question this week about whom science bloggers are writing for. While acknowledging that the web provides broad new opportunities for science writers, she wondered whether science bloggers are just writing for each other. “Are the debates we’re having really reaching a wider audience?…Should that even be our goal?”

The goal of journalists should be to reach that wider audience, I’d suggest. But the goal for science bloggers, or scientist-bloggers, might be different.

Count on that question being addressed at next year’s conference, along with several others that haven’t yet occurred to anyone, but will likely be at the top of our agenda by then.

- Paul Raeburn