Mammoth, deep-frozen. Not yet freshly available.

Since Dolly, the cloned sheep, several scientists around the world announced the cloning of a whole zoo of mammals. Some had nothing more than a plan, some seemed to have proof (but had faked it), and some, actually, did make clones. In those peak days of the clone hype, even the plan to clone was good enough for a report. Does anyone remember the announcement of the cloning of the Giant Panda? Well, though the silly idea made headlines all over the world, the hidden fact was, that the “clone” (just a few clumsy cells, if ever in existence) died early – in the womb of a cat (Yes, a cat! Lacking pseudopregnant Pandas, the Chinese scientists tried cats as surrogate mothers for the “Panda-clone”, which was made by sticking a Panda cell nucleus into a rabbit’s oocyte. And this is not a joke!).

I really thought the days are over, where just the attempt to clone something was worth an article. However, it seems, that a Mammoth cloning project is just too tantalizing not to be put into headlines. “Japanese scientists attempt to resurrect Mammoth” shouted the news agency AFP (source: The online version of the Japanese newspaper “Yomiuri Shimbun”: Daily Yomiuri Online). The article lacks any hints about the major hurdles of such an experiment: that DNA degrades after death; that even minor breaks in the DNA would lead to non-functional genomes; that the scientists would need not only the usual 300 oocytes but hundreds or thousands more; that the harvesting of elephant oocytes is, well, difficult; that even artificial fertilization does not work for elephants etc. The report seems to ignore all the recent in-depth discussions about cloning techniques. And, by the way, not even the idea is new: Right after Dolly, the first loudmouth scientists raised the interest of credulous reporters with the mammoth clone ghost.

But the problem is, that people will take it for granted, if newspapers from Süddeutsche Zeitung (here) to RP online (here), stern (here) and Bild write, that Jurassic Park “could become a reality” and “they could have success”, “because” the scientists will use a technique from scientist Teruhiko Wakayama, who was at least able to clone mice frozen for 16 years. Well, 16 years and minimum 4000 years are quite a difference! Not to speak of the minor disparities of mice and elephants. The Standard adds a tiny bit of further information: The 2001 cloning of the nearly extinct “Gaur” bovine (Bos gaurus) was successful, though the clone died two days after birth. So, does this mean, that the chances for a mammoth clone are high? No, the article avoids to tell, that the gaur clone was created out of perfectly fresh cells! The last paragraph of the Handelsblatt‘s article, finally, raised some doubts, mentioning the (failed) mammoth clone attempt of a French team in 1999 and a critical comment of “Nature” regarding such experiments on the occasion of the announcement of the sequencing of the mammoth genome, recently.

What one could make out of a lousy agency news demonstrates the Ostthüringer Zeitung. This article includes the comments of a local scientist from Weimar, who questions the use of a cloned mammoth and insists to use the financial resources to protect the habitats of living elephant species.

In summary: Please leave me alone with cloned mammoth news. Wake me up, if someone actually cloned a mammoth, not a minute earlier.

Sascha Karberg

In the Daily News today reporter Elizabeth Blue Mink has a story rich with implied and only lightly limned (well, it’s too short a story to do more) cultural, political, and economic intrigue. When I first saw the hed, saying that Interior Dept. plans to protect polar bear critical habitat don’t sit right with the North Slope’s native residents, I figured Inupiat hunters were worried that they might have to stop stalking and shooting the white bears.

No, that’s not it. In fact, it says here, subsistence hunting of bears (just as with walruses, whales, seals, caribou….) can go on. More important, this is a  borough not only dominated by Inupiat politicians but is also where North Slope oil revenue pays for a lot of the schools, health clinics, and infrastucture such as power grids. Many of its residents fear loss of revenue should oil company exploration be hobbled in the name of bear protection.

What a dilemma for the people who live up there. What a tapestry of cross-cutting assumptions and reality checks — for sure it is a ripe tableau for smart reporters to examine.

Photo source

- Charlie Petit

Last week a post here noted the falling appetite in mass media for fundamental, and disturbing, news on the science of climate change and global warming. It referred to the low pickup of  news of the kind that ten or five years ago would, my gut tells me, have gotten a lot more attention. One reason for less coverage is that recurring news becomes old news, and that’s no news. Another may be the media are discouraged and cowed by vociferous ridicule and contempt from usually conservative, contrarian politicians, bloggers, and columnists. It’s hard to sort out which is dominant, but my guess is the latter.

Another example is on the wires, barely, today. Yesterday in Nature Geosciences arrived a report, from a five-person team led by a University of Michigan man, that the positive reinforcement of rising temperature in the Arctic appears to be dramatically larger than is assumed in most of the big global circulation models. Those are the things that climatologists use to estimate the future course of things, and are often derided as just guesses (by people out for the grant money, some say). Maybe so, but these guesses’ error bars go both ways – low as well as high. The reason for the paper’s conclusion appears to be underestimation of the impact of shrinking snow and ice cover above the Arctic circle.

The story is not easy to report in a deeply explanatory way. The paper is full of references to the change in solar forcing in terms of watts per square meter with big uncertainties, and plots of various models and ways of measuring the world’s actual performance. It also breaks on a Sunday so, even with an advance press release, it would easily have evaded notice of many journalists and their editors. Again, why it has so little coverage could arise from a melange of factors aside from global warming attention saturation and bludgeoning from special interest groups. But coverage sure is scant.

Stories:

• Los Angeles Times (blog) Margot Roosevelt: The melting Artic: a bigger-than-estimated impact on climate ;
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Thaw of Earth’s ice sunshade may stoke warming ;
• Ann Arbor.com – Heather Lockwood: University of Michigan study indicates Earth’s shrinking snow and ice cover exacerbate global warming more than models predict ; Looks like a light rewrite of the press release.

The plot up right is from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. The big freeze-up of the Arctic Ocean is underway, but note that for this time of year it is the lowest it’s ever been measured to be. (That plot goes to Jan. 2. An updated plot of this year, through yesterday, shows we’re still at a record low for the date). When the sun comes up again up there, it may have a record head start on clearing the ice for next summers’ tanker traffic.

By the way, this paper on an albedo slump in the far Arctic offers a dramatic contrast to a hypothesis, mentioned in this earlier post, that recent frigid weather in Europe and the US Atlantic Seaboard is due to MORE snow in high latitudes but distinctly sub-Arctic parts of Siberia and places like that. One would love to hear the authors of these two analyses explain how they contradict or complement one another.

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill: U. Michigan Press Release ;

Aw, gee whiz, where’s the gee whiz? Science news reporters are of course obligated to investigate and parse and relay the downsides, caveats, policy implications,  and scary but depressing parts of events on the beat. But a big part of the readership for science news is people who love the second-hand thrill of discoveries or invention of mind-bending things that make one feel rather good about the achievements of the scientists who are our society’s scouts into the unknown. Exotic planets! Giant Squid! Weird Microbes in Rocks! Limitless Cheap Energy! (OK, we don’t have that last one yet except for maybe boring dirty coal). Speaking for myself, I’m still happiest writing stories while channeling the 15-year-old me who could not get enough stories that made the mind giddy with surprise and  amazement, and with envy of those who learned that stuff first for a living.

There is this week not much jolly surprise among the big articles in Science Times, other than in perhaps the lead piece in the section by Nicholas Wade on a border collie. The dog learned more than a thousand different words – nouns in human-think but who knows what a collie thinks? – and could fetch accurately when given a huge pile of stuff and pluck out the right one when told. That’s a record. But that many dogs understand a ton of commands is no gob-smacker. The piece discusses, sensibly, acquisition of language and what if anything this skill has to do with human language.

Aside from a relative absence this week in holy-moly-can-you-believe-that?, in both quantity and quality, one must say, the Times remains tops in the business. It also of course does, most weeks,  provide things to make one gasp, “awesome!”  I’ll get to sampling the large bolus of other stuff in it in the last few days and particularly in the Sunday Week in Review section. But first…

Other Science Times headlines of note:

• Roni Caryn Rabin: A Pink-Ribbon Race, Years Long ; Wonderful story about the women in between – those with metastatic, stage 4 breast cancer, sometimes already there upon first diagnosis. They have next to no prospect of cure but may also have many years, often very productive years, to go. Constant treatment, frequent discomfort, anxiety attacks yes, but a real life even it has no easy fit in the pink-ribbon dichotomy.
• Dennis Overbye – Essay/ Recalling a Fallen Star’s Legacy in U.S. Particle Physics Quest ; On Fermilab, the big collider outside Chicago about to go defunct. One more opportunity for Euro-envy and to think could’a would’a should’a built that Superconducting Super Collider in Texas.
• John Tierney : Heavy Doses of DNA Data, With Few Side Effects ; Nice piece on genetic testing and with a pointed politic0-philosophic sub-text essay about the tendency of some people to think they know what’s best for other people and make big (but unnecessary and arrogantly controlling) plans to put walls in environments and limit freedom to learn stuff. Or maybe … that’s just my own politico-philosophic bent that is reading a message into this that ain’t there?
• Kenneth Chang: Bending and Stretching Classroom Lessons to Make Math Inspire ;  On a young woman artist with a love for math and her distinctive star status in some circles.
• Gina Kolata – Close Look at Orthotics Raises a Welter of Doubts ; Good on her main point that many podiatrists and the OTC  ilk of Dr. Scholl may be overselling their products and may prey on the worried well. It has however no acknowledgment that for many but not the majority of cases in which they are prescribed orthotics can be life-changers for people with distinct, real malformations. One worked for me, anyway. In my small-number personal anecdotal world of my right foot, that is what is clinically important.
• Gina Kolata - Trial in a Vacuum: Study of Studies Shows Few Citations ; Inside where it belongs, as few outside the academy (or among science writers) care about citation analysis. But this is, in its narrow audience, instructive. It is also, one adds, limited to health and behavior sciences, notoriously (remember the ‘decline effect’?) known as the soft sciences but really the most difficult and hence hardest. One wonders if the pattern holds in physics, acoustics, chemistry, etc…

Elsewhere lately in the NYTimes:

• Week in Review (Sunday):  Matthew Wald: Recession Special: Cleaner Air ;
• Week in Review – Kenneth Chang: Quakes, Tectonic and Theoretical ;
• Week in Review – James Gorman: Mass Animal Deaths: an Environmental Whodunit ; and while I didn’t list it above, this reminds that today’s Science Times has (yet) another followup to the Arkansas bird deaths, Leslie Kaufman – Conspiracies Don’t Kill Birds. People, However, Do.
• Felicity Barringer (Jan 15): If Quakes Weren’t Enough, Enter the ‘Superstorm’ ; Those of us who live in California and read up on history a bit have heard of the storms of 1861-62, when so much rain fell that the whole SF Bay filled with fresh water from engorged rivers, and some say even at flood tide all the water in the Golden Gate was outbound. It could happen again, Barringer was told. They call’em ARk storms, for reasons better than Biblical.
• DotEarth blog – Andrew C. Revkin : On Responding to Imprecise Climate Risks, This post today is terrific, if pretty wonky. A reader demanded an absurd degree of detail and precision from Andy to back up his assertion that climate change looks serious enough for drastic policy reaction. He sent this fellow’s demands to a panel of AGU experts. Their replies, in part, are that such detail is in many cases impossible.  But the details they do provide are, um, terrifying.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The new example of exaggeration on genetic determinism is the PNAS study saying that genes influence friendship. Reporters have more reasons to criticize its conclusions than to praise them. But at least in Spain, they bought it. Something similar happens with the Japanese scientists announcing that they might be able to clone a mammoth in 5 years: a few journalists gave it for granted without looking for second opinions (*Update: great reporting in Público). We have very good stories too: Spanish researchers suggest that maintained and intense physical exercise damages some areas of the heart, and a well documented story explores the abundance of dioxins in the food we consume.

Qué absurdo el estudio estadounidense relacionando genes y amistad. Las suposiciones y metodología son tan débiles; y apoyan las conclusiones de una manera tan indirecta, que uno debería criticarlo en lugar de ensalzarlo. No lo hizo por ejemplo El Mundo en la nota de Miguel G Corral: “Los genes también nos unen a nuestros amigos”. Allí leemos de manera contundente: “Estamos vinculados por los genes tanto a la familia como a los amigos.” O “aquellos predispuestos genéticamente para ser líderes” (como si el liderazgo tuviera una carga más genética que cultural…). Aceptamos que es un tema tentador para sacar en una sección de ciencia. Pero percibiendo que roza la frivolidad, debemos como mínimo buscar opiniones de otros genetistas no implicados en el estudio.

Algo parecido ocurre con el anuncio de científicos japoneses de que serán capaces de clonar un mamut en los próximos 5 años. Sabemos que las dificultades son enormes, y si nos forzaran a apostar, seguro que lo haríamos al no. Sin embargo, por ejemplo en ABC -una de las notas más detalladas- José Manuel Nieves “Científicos creen que podrán «resucitar» a un mamut dentro de cinco años”, tampoco busca una segunda opinión científica no relacionada con el grupo japonés, para contrastar si se trata de un anuncio fehaciente o propagandístico. La clonación de especies extinguidas es un tema recurrente, sólo promesas, del que ya conocemos las críticas, y no deberíamos hacerles oídos sordos.

Centrémonos en lo bueno, que la sección de salud de El Mundo nos da varios ejemplos a destacar. La primera de Cristina Lucio y María Valerio “El exceso de ejercicio perjudica al corazón”, describe estudios españoles sugiriendo que el ejercicio intenso como triatlón o maratones, si mantenido por largos períodos de tiempo, a largo plazo puede generar arritmias y enfermedad. Muy buena nota, ponderando los resultados. También muy original la de Patricia Matey “Ideas suicidas en el quirófano”, explicando que debido al estrés y presiones, los cirujanos piensan considerablemente más en el suicidio que otros profesionales. Los datos vienen de un estudio estadounidense, pero Patricia complementa la información con opiniones de médicos españoles. Y un tercer  reportaje, muy completo, el de Pedro Cáceres “Las sustancias tóxicas forman parte del menú cotidiano”, advirtiendo que la contaminación por dioxinas de las granjas alemanas no son un caso aislado, y que su tóxica presencia puede ser más habitual de lo que nos pensamos. Hasta 7 profesionales cita Pedro para avalar esta delicada afirmación. Gran trabajo, que sin duda tendrá influencia.

(*) Update: Público publica un gran trabajo de Nuño Domínguez sobre la posible clonación del mamut, añadiendo el enfoque crítico de otros investigadores. “Es la típica mierda que sale a la luz cada dos años para atraer atención“, dice uno. “Sus declaraciones no tienen ninguna base científica, son sólo una campaña publicitaria para obtener dinero y popularidad“, dice otro. Contraponer las piezas de Público y ABC es un buen ejercicio.

- Pere Estupinyà

The Tracker’s taking Monday off for the national holiday.

The photograph of a bald, grinning, seemingly defiant Jared Loughner is the face that launched a thousand diagnoses.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, news anchors, and others have shown little reluctance to diagnose Loughner, whether or not they know anything about psychiatry, and in the face of what might seem to be a rather large impediment: None of them have examined the patient.

From the Arizona Daily Star, we learn that Loughner “appears to fit the criteria” for court-ordered care for someone “persistently and acutely disabled.” That evaluation comes from Charles “Chick” Arnold, “a leading Arizona expert on mental health and the law.” As reporters Carol Ann Alaimo, Tim Steller and M. Scot Skinner point out, Arnold is a lawyer, not a psychiatrist.

John Cloud at Time opens his story with this: “It seems clear that Jared Loughner was developing a mental illness in the two years or so before the Tucson killings…” Clear to whom? Did Cloud go to school with this guy? Cloud does note that it’s difficult to tell exactly what mental illness Loughner has. But then he goes on to talk about Loughner’s reported fascination with lucid dreaming. How does Cloud know this? He read it in Mother Jones, which heard it from Bryce Tierney, who says Loughner told him about a dream journal he (Loughner) was keeping. This it a little bit too much like one of those exercises in which a story is passed around the campfire from one person to another until it becomes unrecognizable. I’ll look forward to reading a story about the dream journal if someone in the press gets access to it, but, in the meantime, maybe we shouldn’t repeat this tale.

From Diane Mapes at msnbc.com, we get these evaluations, also borrowed from other people’s reporting: “Jared Loughner’s former friend, Zane Gutierrez, says he has the look of a “monster.”U.S. Marshal for Arizona David Gonzales told the Daily Beast that Loughner has as a “paranoid headlights” stare.”

From Benedict Carey at The New York Times, we get this: ““I’d say the chances are 99 percent that he has schizophrenia,” said Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, the founder of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va…”

I’m being a little unfair, because these stories included more discussion than I’m showing here, but I’m trying to make a point: Diagnosing illness by way of news reports is a questionable practice.

Some stories took what I thought was a careful and intelligent look at the issue of diagnosis. Peter McKnight of the Vancouver Sun wrote, “Indeed, the most popular ‘explanation’ for shooter Jared Lee Loughner’s behaviour is that he is mentally ill. That no psychiatrist has made such a diagnosis hasn’t stopped media commentators, who are certain that Loughner is mentally ill and that his putative illness offers a full and final explanation for the events in Arizona.” The last part of that is worth repeating. A diagnosis of mental illness is not enough to explain violent behavior. Some people with mental illness become violent; most do not.

Daniel Carlat, a psychiatrist and the author of the Carlat Psychiatry Blog, wrote a short piece on AOL Health in which he discussed the possibility that Loughner might suffer from schizophrenia, while resisting the temptation to make the diagnosis. “We do not know if Loughner has schizophrenia, but if he does, I would guess that there is a complex and elaborate web of delusions festering in his mind — with Gabrielle Giffords at the center of them,” Carlat wrote.

Douglas Fox at Wired Science wrote an interesting piece on a Secret Service study of U.S. assassinations. Most assassins, the study’s authors concluded, were not delusional:

Contrary to popular assumptions about public killings, the attackers didn’t conform to any particular demographic profile. But when Fein [one of the authors] reconstructed their patterns of thinking, he was able to distill them into a handful of recurring motives for killing a public person — motives that seemed consistent regardless of whether a given individual was delusional or not (and three quarters of those who pulled the trigger were not).

It’s always tempting to reach for the easy explanation. We’d like to think that those who commit acts like the Tucson shooting are different from us–aberrant, ill, deranged–anything that will help to reassure us that we are not capable of such a thing.

Mental illness isn’t enough to explain assassination or mass murder. And in many cases, it appears, it isn’t part of the explanation at all.

We should remind ourselves that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the others killed or wounded in the Tucson attack were shot by a person–not by a diagnosis.

- Paul Raeburn

I was not going to post on this as the day is late. In Science is a study whose conclusions are sobering, but on a topic that has for now worn out its welcome with most pubs, much of the public,  and with US politicians who are the ones who can do anything about it: global warming. There is not much pickup even though the conclusions suggest that, if evidence from rocks 30 million years old is correct, our planet is much more sensitive to rising CO2 (and its feedback side effects on Earth’s reflectance etc) than standard models say.

Then I saw this illus, with a blogpost at a site called Planetsave, by Zachary Shahan. Being a total scaredy-cat on climate change, this mashed-up illus and its utter hyperbole is one that just has to be shared. I don’t know where the pic originated, at this blog or elsewhere, but it’s an essay in itself. (Late addition: On second glance, sigh, one must quietly mumble that the artist put the planet’s terminator in the wrong place with unlikely shading … and that’s just me being tediously didactic, like I get when movie explosions in outer space’s near-vacuum emit billowing, slowing poofs rather than the ballistic trajectories that blasted stuff would take).

Other stories:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Ancient climate hints at much hotter times ahead ;
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Climate change could happen much faster than previously thought;
• ANI – Earth’s hot past points to drastic global warming ;

Grist for the Mill: NCAR-UCAR Press Release ; NSF Press release ;

- Charlie Petit

Artist's conception (by Lynette Cook)

Hmmpph. Giant black hole in the news. What else is new? Not this, so much. A  year and a half ago a US-German pair of astronomers published, and told colleagues at an American Astronomical Society (egad, apologies, as noted in comment I tried to call it AAA)  meeting in Pasadena, that they had re-measured the most super and most massive supermassive black hole known, in the well-known galaxy M87, and concluded it has a mass of 6.4 billion suns, give or take half a billion. Here’s the paper they published back then, at the watering hole for physicists and astronomers,  arXiv astro-ph. That was about twice earlier estimates.

In Seattle this week they got a lot of coverage for revealing to the same American Astronomical Association their latest refinement, giving it a best-estimated 6.6 billion solar masses. Cosmically speaking, that’s about the same as the earlier number.

Most people, reporters or especially readers, cannot be expected to know all that I put in my first paragraph. It is a legitimate story. I concede to be showing off – having written a story not long ago in which supermassive black holes came up and which had led me to the earlier work. The challenge for reporters is to present the new data without overdoing the newness of the number, and to focus on the higher confidence in it as an example of science’s usual course – data, model, results, more data, better explanation and higher confidence, and around and around. I’m writing all this, reacting to my initial thought (hey, I already know that! Why is THIS news??) and before reading the accounts. Now to read them….

Stories:

• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Scientists Size Up Monster Black Hole ; Kudos. Boyle gets the history just right.
• Science News -Ron Cowen: Neighboring black hole puts on weight ;  Hmm. I’m getting unruffled. This too has a sense of history (and even puts in a hyperlink to my story of a few months ago, thank you Ron).
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Obese Black Hole Lurks In Our Backyard ; A little sketchy on history, but fine on the way the data was obtained and the relative proximity of M87 to the Milky Way.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Astronomers weigh heavy black hole neighbour; This is a specialty site for people with focussed interest in astronomy, but is nonetheless an odd story. It has quite a bit on the hardware, and some on the dynamics of galaxies, but no indication how the 6.6 billion solar mass compares with earlier estimates, or even how humongous this is – and even the previous numbers down to 3 billion or so are – compared to routine supermassive black holes (the Milky Way’s core has a black hole estimated at about 4 million solar masses).

Grist for the Mill: U. Texas/Austin Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Enough of coverage of global warming and all the rantings and ravings it inspires. The Boston Globe‘s Carolyn Y. Johnson today takes readers for a visit with the corps of weather forecasters, some of them trained meteorologists (especially the ones at the National Weather Service) including some pretty sharp tacks with local TV who try to tell New Englanders whether those clouds mean snow or what.

This isn’t a science research story, of course, more of a story of scientific applications in daily life, but it’s full of computers and modeling and radar and satellite observations and stuff like that. Close enough to science, and a timely story that’s reflects a little bit of enterprise and shoe leather.

She does not get into the question many people ask with a smirk about weather forecasting – if science can’t even tell if it’s going to be windy in two weeks, how can it tell us what the weather is going to be like in two decades? Smart move, that. The answer would just cause a loons to clutter the paper’s comment server.

- Charlie Petit

OK, yes, that’s my homage up there to Jan & Dean’s surf music anthem, and I’ve done this trick before – on a little old lady hominid from Tanzania many many years ago. Oldie but goodie.

Anyway, from the wilds of Argentina, by way of, among others, the famous dinosaur hunter Paul Sereno of the U. of Chicago and “explorer in residence” at the National Geographic Soc’y, is word of a turkey-sized meat-eater from early in the Mesozoic. It already had features that its or its kins’ descendant tyrannosaurs and allosaurs and other-meateatingsaurs did too. Like the holes in its skull, a long tail for balance, and teeth that don’t chew, they slash and gore.

To experts the big news is not this is an ancestor of theropods -  the general group of two-legged predatory dinos – but that the same paper concludes that another, long-known, sharp-toothed predator, famous Eoraptor from the same fossil bed, was actually on the lineage that eventually produced all the big plodding plant eating sauropods such as diplodocus and apatosaurus.

The report gets lots of attention, natch, as the report is in Science with prominent press release promotion.

Stories:

• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel – Mark Johnson:  Meet “dawn runner,” a new dinosaur discovered in South America ; He mentions Sereno first, but quickly notes the lead author is an Argentine. The piece is a short blog, just a lead-in to a handout video of Sereno.
• Chicago Sun-Times – Kim Jannsen: U of C dinosaur prof helps dig up early meat-eater ; She gets a fine quote, in her kicker vignette, from Sereno.
• Chicago Tribune – William Mullen: Tiny early dinosaurs quickly branched out ; Mullen visited Sereno earlier in the week in his lab, got a pretty good inside glimpse at the research.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid : Early T. Rex ancestor found in South America ;
• NY times – Sindya N. Bhanoo: Pet-Sized Dinosaur Was Early Ancestor to T. Rex, Researchers Say ;
• Science News – Alexandra Witze: Early meat-eating dinosaur unearthed ; She has a description a lot better’n'my turkey-sized: “tall as a seven-year old but as light as a house cat.”
• LiveScience via MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: Earliest known T. rex relative may have been found ; Nice job tying in the asserted demise of distant kin Eoraptor’s status as a theropod founding father.
• USA today – Elizabeth Weise : New dog-sized dinosaur discovered ; Hey somebody with appreciation for the lineage of  language wrote that hed -  dog-sized and thank you whoever you are, rather than the coarser common recent construction, dog-size.
• NatureNews – Matt Kaplan: Move over Eoraptor ;
• ScienceNOW – Michael Balter: Pint-sized Predator Rattles the Dinosaur Family Tree, nice, mostly behind a pay wall. See comment on USA story above for ditto on the hed’s composition.
• BBC – Neil Bowdler: “Dawn runner’ casts light on birth of the dinosaurs ;
• Medill Reports – Ani Vrabel :  Meet Eodromaeus, world’s oldest dinosaru found so far ; J-school writer does a darned good job, and good photo too.
• … could do more

Grist for the Mill: Univ.of Chicago Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Found in Argentina and published in Science this week, a new dinosaur fossil suggest that earliest dinosaurs didn’t compete with non-dinosaurians herbivores, and that one of the oldest dinosaurs species found –the Eoraptor- is not the ancestor of carnivores like T.rex but gigantic plant-eaters. By far, the best coverage we’ve found is a detailed story in a local Argentinean newspaper that we had not before encountered. The reporter –Diego Castillo- makes a great job with original pictures, a list of fossils previously found in the area, and a very clear explanation of the findings relevance. This story should be a goad to other reporters, who usually say it is too hard for local newspapers in Latin America to cover science well.

Difícil resistirse a las noticias sobre huesecillos fósiles de dinosaurios… Tenemos serias dudas de que el antepasado de los Tiranosaurus encontrado en Argentina merezca ser una de las noticias científicas más repetidas esta semana. Pero el hecho de que aparezca en la revista Science, y la creencia –posiblemente falsa- de que al público le hechiza la palabra “dinosaurio”, hacen que esté destacada en muchas secciones de ciencia.

Nos parece perfecto que así sea en Argentina. ¿por qué? Los motivos los explica claramente Página 12 en la breve nota: “Un dinosaurio en Science”, cuyo resumen sería: “oye! Que unos compatriotas han publicado en Science. Hagámosles caso, que esto no ocurre cada día. Además, puede servir para muchas cosas”. Cierto; pero qué lástima que no se haga el esfuerzo de indagar en cuáles son estas cosas, y explicar de qué va el hallazgo.

Esperamos no ser injustos, pero nos parece que el único (*en el último párrafo comentaremos otra genial historia en el Diario de Cuyo*) que se ha tomado la molestia de entrevistar a los científicos argentinos, y escribir una nota con información más allá de la suministrada por agencias, ha sido Sebastián A. Ríos en “Un nuevo dinosaurio reformula teorías”, publicado en La Nación. Atención al título. Otras notas tipo La Tercera “Descubren nueva especie de dinosaurio”, BBC ” Descubren al tatarabuelo del Tiranosaurio Rex en Argentina”, El Comercio “Una nueva especie de dinosaurio fue descubierta en Argentina”… y muchas otras; se quedan en la superficialidad de anunciar una nueva especie de dinosaurio. Eso por sí sólo no merecería un Science. Tenemos que ser capaces de extraer el verdadero meollo de la investigación. Y eso es lo que hace y anuncia Sebastián con su título, que da a entender una relevancia más allá del propio descubrimiento. Si en 3 minutos leemos el abstract del artículo o el resumen de la revista (quien no sepa inglés, que aprenda rápido o se olvide de dedicarse al periodismo científico), uno ve enseguida que lo que el primitivo Eodromaeus sugiere es que –a diferencia de lo que se pensaba- los primeros dinosaurios no compitieron con otros reptiles provocando su extinción, sino que simplemente coexistieron y los segundos se fueron extinguiendo poco a poco por otras causas. Otra conclusión importante (quizás más todavía) es que el nuevo fósil recoloca a otro dinosaurio (el Eoraptor) como antecesor de los gigantescos herbívoros en lugar de carnívoros como T. rex. Todo esto lo explica Sebastián en su detallada nota. El título es un pelín arriesgado, pero el contenido merece ser destacado.

De verdad; nos cuesta ver la relevancia social de este hallazgo, pero bueno; ya sabemos que hay ciencia que sólo sirve para ser contada. Y sobre todo debemos hacerlo cuando ocurre en nuestro país, y avalada por un Science. Nos sorprende que Clarín no lo haya tratado. Vemos informaciones en ClarínVeracruzano “Descubren en Argentina una nueva especie de un dinosaurio de hace 230 millones años”, en El Comercial “publican hallazgo de científicos Argentinos en Science” (parece utilizar información de agencias, pero descubrimos unas declaraciones muy contundentes del investigador principal anunciando el hallazgo casi como revolucionario), La Voz “Científicos hallan en San Juan al diminuto abuelo de Tiranosaurio” y…

Felicidades al Diario de Cuyo y a Diego Castillo por su excelente pieza “Cada vez más cerca del origen de los dinosaurios”. La encontramos en el último minuto de esta revisión, y le ha supuesto al tracker 30 minutos más de trabajo. Pero mereció la pena. La mejor nota con diferencia. Tiene fotos originales de la presentación. Tiene un resumen de los fósiles previos hallados. Y tiene un texto muy bien trabajado, que da contexto al lector, y está redactado de manera genial. El primer párrafo es clarísimo: “Siendo tan pequeño en relación a otros animales prehistóricos, el Eodromaeus murphi tiene una importancia científica de primer nivel: desplazó al Eoraptor del lugar que ocupaba en los manuales de dinosaurios, se instauró como el primer ancestro conocido de las aves, y su hallazgo trae luz para avanzar en la búsqueda del primer dinosaurio sobre el planeta, el origen mismo de este mundo de gigantes desaparecidos”. No conocíamos el diario de Cuyo. Es un diario regional fuera de Buenos Aires. Esta nota debería ser un estímulo para todos los periodistas científicos que se sienten comprometidos con el tratamiento de la información local con calidad. Reiteramos las felicitaciones a Diego, y despedimos este post con mayor motivación de la que lo empezamos.

- Pere Estupinyà