Seth Borenstein at the AP has done a sly compilation of how well his colleagues (ie competitors)  think through simple math that’s staring them right in the face. It’s sly because Borenstein wanted to see how many spotted an error that he himself thought he’d noticed in a paper – on penguins and the biologists who band them for study – and that the paper’s authors conceded to him was, yes, if not abject error quite distinctly misleading.

Well surprise! Most reporters do not question even very basic math that they are handed by researchers who probably did a lot better in arithmetic than did the average journalist or the average follower of most professions. Here’s the score he shared with ksjtracker: “Getting the math wrong: 14. Getting it right: 2. Our batting average as science writers, a tepid .125.” That is well under the Mendoza line and if you’re a baseball fan you know what that means and especially if it’s the team average: back to the minor leagues for you.

The news is significant, and not dependent for its impact on the exact translation of the raw stats. It is that, in a Nature cover story, a team of biologists from France and Norway reported that the longterm survival of king penguins that had been tagged with metal bands on their wings was dramatically lower, and their chances of leaving progeny also lower, than non-banded ones.

However…ahem. The paper and Nature‘s summary for reporters both say that flipper-banded penguins had a 16 percent lower ten-year survival rate. By contrast, the accompanying data results table says that chances of surviving for ten years fell from 0.36 to 0.20. Well, subtract those two and one does get 0.16 or 16 points difference, but as our alert AP man saw, what’s important is not that the rate fell 16 points but that 0.20 is about a 44 percent drop from 0.36.

A similar error occurred with breeding success. Borenstein reports that one of the authors told him, on being contacted, those are mistakes (and he tells us that some other authors said they’re sticking with the paper as is because they think it makes sense in French. I’m not sure, even with a dollop of Gallic ancestry, how that works).

Gadzooks. I’d like to think I’d have seen the error in going from numbers to plain English. Why reviewers did not is a mystery. And I fear I might well have been one of the science writers slapping his head about now were I to have covered this story myself. Plus, for all I know Borenstein and Petit are both thinking alike but wrong, and somehow that data box DOES translate to a 16 percent reduction in survival over ten years. But I doubt it.

None of this alters the underlying message: researchers need to rethink banding of king penguins, maybe all penguins, maybe all birds (although a banded leg must be different than a banded flipper).

Now, to name names;

Stories that got the figures right or darned close to it:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Study: Penguin tracking bands hurt seabirds ;
• BBC – Richard Black: ‘Unethical’ flipper tags are damaging to penguins ; He uses 40 percent reduction in survival, close enough if he just rounded things off, and also runs the absolute numbers: 18 out of 50 of the non flipper-tagged (but they did have subdermal transponders)  survived, vs. 10 of the banded birds).

Stories that did not catch the flub:

• NatureNews – Daniel Cressey: Researchers’ flipper bands can seriously dent penguin survival, and also skew the results of research; Does have a good summary of earlier concerns along the same lines.
• AAAS ScienceNow – Cassandra Willyard: Flipper Bands Harm Penguins ; Boy, did Science miss a chance to tweak Nature on this one!
• Guardian (UK) Nidhi Prakash: Tagging penguins limits survival chances, study shows / survival rates for  king penguins with flipper bands dropped by 16%.. ;
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Banded study penguins die sooner ;
• USA Today – Elisabeth Weise: Study: Banded penguins die sooner, skewing climate data ; Two shots at it at USA Today, this one longer. More important than the data math oversight, it does a good job explaining this as ongoing controversy with other penguin researchers saying their bands aren’t nearly this bad.
• ArsTechnica – Yun Xie: Data from banded penguins suffer from fatal flaw ; Another one with good history of the debate. But it too takes .20 to be 16 percent smaller than .36.
• LiveScience – Janelle Weaver: Tracking bands can harm penguins ;
• NPR – Christopher Joyce: Flipper Bands Can Harm King Penguin Population ; Nice job explaining why these bands might be worse than they look: coefficient of drag.
• AFP : Tagged penguins could skew climate studies – scientists ;
• Toronto Sun – QMI : Tagging bad for penguins: Study ;
• Globe and Mail – John Allemang: Tracking bands put penguins’ live at risk, study finds ;
• ABC (Australia) Carl Holm: Penguins harmed by banding ;
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Problems for Penguins ;
• Telegraph (UK) Tags created to help penguins could be killing them ;

Plus a few more just to show I can still do some of my own tracking:

• The Australian – Hannah Devlin: Penguins with tracking tags have lot survival rate ; Yep, she goes with 16%. But the hed is off: these wing bands are not the tracking tags used on controls (which are under the skin and send radio signals). The story is solid on the study’s importance and intended ethical judgment.
• Science News via Discovery News – Susan Millius : Penguins Harmed by Research Bands ;  One more in the 16% column. Batting average falling again.
• Hey Wow get this : Carrentals.co.uk – Lisa Davidson: Tagging penguins’ flippers shorten their lives ; 40 percent she says! I usually ignore this outlet in searches because, well, it’s called Carrentals.com. I opened it thinking what’re the odds this outfit got it right? Son of a gun. Maybe Lisa D. happened to rewrite the Beeb or something, but it’s got the right math. Maybe I’ll pay more attention Carrentals.com.

By the way, wing banding of king penguins has been reported before:

• Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas (June 8, 2004, via ABC Australia): Banding kills birds it’s supposed to tag ;

- Charlie Petit

NASA-GISS annual temps thru 2010

Last year in the USA was the 23rd warmest as far back as direct data go, says the annual report on such things from the Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Even with all that snow, 23rd! Big whoop, warmer than the historic norm, and that’s not the real news you already know.

2010 also was statistically tied with 2005, world wide, as hottest ever. It also was warmer than the El Niño-boosted 1998 that some contrarians say probably marked the high point for global warming and so they conclude it has stopped. Ergo, one presumes, atmospheric physicists can collectively take further credit for explaining, starting a century ago or so, that the CO2 stunt that humankind is pulling ought to warm things up. Things did sort of stall for a few years – but stop? Look at the plot. That looks pretty normal for this jerky line with a upward trend.

A separately-calculated report from NASA, via the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan has slightly different numbers as in the uppermore right plot, but the same message: 2010 and 2005 are for now the record holders Yet to weigh in are the Hadley Center/Met Office in the UK, and  the World Meteorological Organization.

Last year was also tops in recorded history for rain and snow. NOAA does not have an official explanation for that. This all is big news, but not terribly complex or challenging to report in its essence. The trick is to put the news in some political context without getting bogged down.

Stories:

• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin : 2010 ties ’05 as warmest year on record ; The illus is smart, at least with the on line story (dunno what went in the street edition), showing a Pakistani man struggling in that nation’s monster floods last year. It’s a reminder one ought not reduce climate change to one variable. She packs her story with data summaries. Nine of 10 hottest in history have been since 2000.  Arctic sea ice still trending down. It’s been 34 years since a year’s global temperature average was below that of the 20th century as a whole. And it was the wettest ever. Her politics come up at the end with a source talking about the wisdom of lighting up a cigarette when the X-ray shows danger in the lungs. Not the best analogy really – by the time one has lung cancer, fatalism can be  understandable, even defensible.
• USA Today – Doyle Rice : 2010 tied for Earth’s warmest year on record ; He provides balance, the kind that some people attach to the f-word (not the usual one, but false). He contacts CATO Institute’s resident meteorologist Pat Michaels, who says he’s not impressed. Interesting, he also cites data from another fave of the doubtists, John Christy at University of Alabama-Huntsville, that in essence agree with NOAA’s and NASA-GISS’s figures.
• Bloomberg/Bus. Wk- Tony C. Dreibus, Mathew Carr: Global Temperatures Matched Record High Last Year, NOAA Says ; Two reporters for five grafs with info all, looks like, right off the release.
• Telegraph (UK) Louise Gray: Flood warnings: hottest year confirms global warming say experts ; NOAA may not have ascribed a reason for the floods and snow, but Gray says simply that it’s because “warm air tends to hold more water.” The Met Office, she reports, will have its figures out later this month. And she quotes (with citation) Eilperin’s kicker at the WaPost on smoking, cancer, and climate change. Also, despite the hed’s implied surprise, the NOAA man at the press conference didn’t say this confirms global warming – at least not for the first time. He said it reinforced it.
• NYTimes – Justin Gillis: Figures on Global Climate Show 2010 Tied 2005 as the Hottest Year on Record ; He ties it up nicely, saying that regardless of trends “2010 will go down as one of the more remarkable years in the annals of climatology” with blistering heat waves, prodigious snowstorms, and coral reef die-offs. He missed the shrinking, thinning arctic sea ice.
• NPR – Richard Harris: Last Year: The Warmest on Record (Again) ; Sharp hed, the sort one sees in the likes of the Economist. NPR’s leded illus is, as in the Post, of Pakistan’s floods. There is, one detects, a certain tone of exasperation in both the printed story and the broadcast.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: 2010 ties 2005 as warmest year on record worldwide ;
• Reuters – Timothy Gardner: 2010 ties for warmest years, emissions to blame – US ; While most reporters seem content to report what the scientists say has happened so far, Gardner gathers up what they thinks is coming in years and decades. It’s not pretty. He also reports that the NOAA news came out a day late due to the East Coast snow storm.
• Christian Sci. Monitor – Pete Spotts: Global warming waning? Hardly. 2010 was tied as warmest year on record ;
• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik: Last Year Tied 2005 for Hottest on Record ;
• Guardian (UK) Suzanne Goldenberg: Last year was joint warmest on record, say climatologists ; Earth’s temperatures above average for 34th consecutive year and joint warmest since 1880 ;

*UPDATES:

• Science News – Alexandra Witze: 2010 ties record for warmest year yet ;
• Huffington Post – Peter Gleick: 2010 Hottest Year on Record: The Graph That Should Be on the Front Page of Every Newspaper; This is a (well informed but partisan, and on the side of data) op-ed-type piece with a particularly feisty and evenly-divided set of comments. Warmists and contrarians get in their licks about equally. Plus, presumably knowing his way around plot smoothing routines, Gleick dresses up this temp graph (looks like NOAA’s data)  with a “standard polynomial trendline” to punctuate his piece’s message that global warming didn’t stop – it’s more likely accelerating. Peter Gleick, incidentally, is a hydrologist and director of an institute devoted to water issues. Also of interest to many of this site’s readers, he has a brother in the science writing clan, James Gleick.
• Mashup special! Philippine Daily Inquirer: Global climate hotter, wettest ; With no byline or hint of source on top, and a lot of familiar passages, this was getting my blood up as a rewrite ripoff. But no, it’s fine, just a normal rewrite. At its end is credit to four major news outlets – NYTimes, AP, AFP, and Reuters.

Grist for the Mill: NOAA Press Release, NASA/GISS Press Release;

- Charlie Petit

The major news of the day in the US and big around the world – the murders and near-murders in Arizona during Representative Gabrielle Giffords’s public meeting with constituents – has generated intense coverage of her grave brain injury and her prospects. With a tip of the hat, one points to this wrap-up on how the media are doing.:

• Columbia Journalism Review – Curtis Brainard: Giffords’ Medical Care; A long post, with extensive pull quotes to illustrate its points.

- Charlie Petit

Maps of the universe are big news today. One came out at the American Astronomical Association meeting in Seattle yesterday, the other at another meeting in Paris. Many outlets are raving about them. Number one, with more public appeal, is a stupendous  zoomable mosaic photo and database of about one third of the sky, impossible to look at all at once or on any frame at full resolution. It is from the famed (and sublime) Sloan Digital Sky Survey. That made its bow in Seattle. The other, presented at a European Space Agency press conference in Paris, is a far more arcane but scientifically scintillating map of microwave background and other microwave signals gathered by Europe’s Planck satellite revealing both the patterns in the Big Bang’s detonated ylem as well as the frigid clouds that betray cloaked galaxies in the early distance.

It is, however, impossible (for me anyway) to, despite stories’ assertions it can be done, to take a look on line. Readers will be left without a clue, except by some diligent searching around the web themselves, how to sample them. Maybe, in particular, the Sloan maps server is overloaded with all the interest that this publicity has spawned.

Much of the imagery released to press is useless, for instance that one up right that shows northern and southern celestial hemisphere with all the terabytes of data smoothed out into a soup, and stripes indicating where the Arizona telescope is just starting to finish the job as the Earth’s rotation aims it here and there.

And below is the YouTube video, also embedded in many news dispatches, that gives a taste of what the Sloan map lets one do (It  is ksjtracker’s first embedded YouTube video, done in part just to be sure it is as easy as they say). It’s rendered in the style of the famous of powers-of-ten video in which one zooms out from a picnic on Earth and then to the whole universe. But this one STARTS with a galaxy and proceeds to ever less magnification, making rather manifest that we live in a honking big cosmos impossible to truly grasp except by dropping one’s jaw.

In Grist below are links related to the Sloan as well as the Planck map, which may eventually reward the persistent with an idea what they’re about. One must spend time at the Sloan site to master the basic navigation tools, and from previous experience with earlier versions, I know it’s worth it (some of my desktop wallpaper has been random galaxies that I tell myself nobody else except the robot telescope had even looked at before). But so far all I get is a swirling gizmo telling me the site is really busy.

Reporters have some followup work to do, after helping to pique public interest in the Sloan as well, to a lesser extent, the Planck map. Such, giving a sense that using these things takes some practice, and today the servers may not be able to keep up. That, at least, is how it looks to me after a frustrating time this morning not doing any of the zooming through space I’m supposed to be able to enjoy.

Major wires (AP, Reuters) don’t pay much attention to these, but specialty outlets are all over them.

SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY STORIES:

• BBC – Jason Palmer: Sloan data yields biggest colous night-sky image ever ;
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Biggest colour image of the night sky ;
• Nature/ Great Beyond – Adam Mann:  Universe says ‘Cheese” for biggest ever astro-photo ;
• Columbus Dispatch – Spencer Hunt: “Big picture’ provides a close-up of the universe ;
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Biggest picture of the sky unveiled ;
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Biggest-Ever Night Sky Image Relased to Public ;
• Guardian (UK) Alok Jha: Universe captured in mind-bogging detail by Sloan Digital Sky Survey;
• Telegraph (UK) : Digital image of night sky ;
• New Scientist – David Shiga: Most detailed image of night sky unveiled ;

Planck Survey stories: First, you simply HAVE to check the hi-res version of this press handout image. Once the Planck people scrub the foreground Milky Way off the background radiation, they should sit down with the Sloan people – so that if one zooms past the most distant galaxy all of a sudden this blown-up quantum foam fingerprint of the almighty whatever it was that made us rises into view, maybe with a big badada-BUMMMM audio -  like in the opening movement of Beethoven’s Fifth.

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: :Planck telescope observed cosmic giants ;
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Hot (and cold) spots of the cosmos ;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Planck telescope finds cold, weird wonders ;
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Planck unveils first science results ;
• NatureNews – Geoff Brumfiel: Planck telescope sees Universe’s cool stuff ; While I’m not making many comments on coverage, this is about the plainest, fullest, most confidently-done report I’ve seen.
• New Scientist – David Shiga: Spinning cosmic dust motes set speed record ; Shiga mentions the big map, mostly reports a new facet of the cosmic microwave background – modulated by whirling bitty bits.
• Universe Today – Mark Thompson: Planck Unveils the Wonders of the Universe ;
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark :Scientists release first taste of data from Planck mission ;
• AAAS ScienceNow – Govert Schilling: Satellite Spies Stellar Hatcheries ; Covers one aspect of the larger Planck data dump today.

Grist for the Mill:

SDSS Press Release, SDSS III SkyServer ; SDSS-III Intro ;  ESA-Planck Press Release ; Planck Notes for Editors ; Planck Science Team explainer site, NASA-JPL-Planck Press Release ; Max Planck Inst. Press Release ; Univ. British Columbia Planck Press Release ;

The top story in today’s NYTimes, Ken Chang’s piece on the latest Pluto/planet-or-dwarf? news, is handled elsewhere (scroll down) today.

Moving along, the section has another grace note – a set of stories that move the ball forward on several topics that have been in the news:

1. Nicholas Wade: Depth of the Kindness Hormone Appears to Know Some Bounds : Oxytocin the hormone of love. As Wade remarks, “you knew there had to be a catch.”
2. Nicholas Wade: Doubt on Anti-Aging Molecule as Drug Trial Stops ; That’d be the resveratrol that was going to make us all younger, skinnier, and free to eat all we want.
3. Benedict Carey: You Might Already Know This… ; Update with practical examples, tying the recent kerfuffle over a journal article on ESP that Carey himself reported, with the theme of a New Yorker piece by Jonah Lehrer of a few weeks ago on the “decline effect.” Carey neatly provides clarifying examples of flaws in calculations designed to reveal whether a result is sufficiently statistically significant to be scientifically interesting. One wonders whether the work that Nick Wade reports in 1) and 2) above got the finer kind of statistical analysis.

Other notable headlines:

• Henry Fountain: California’s Heavy Rains Counter La Niña’s Ways ; Or, the wet year that was supposed to be dry is explained by statistics one does not need Benedict Carey to explain.
• Amanda Schaffer: Down the Hatch and Straight Into Medical History ; the odd ways of a pioneering laryngologist, his X-ray machine, and the endoscope he invented.

As usual lots more. Whole Section;

Step One: put brain in gear

Just a shortie here, with a lesson. I trolled briefly today to see if GISS or the Met Office or NOAA or anybody like that has weighed in on 2010′s place on the global temperature rankings.  I came across this at a smaller outlet with a lesson for editors and reporters, or maybe news robots, that go into autopilot mode too easily:

• AHN (All Headline News) Vittorio Hernandez: Environment Canada confirms 2010 was hottest year on record ; The nation may have gotten its southern tier frozen stiff lately, but the year was way warm, especially the arctic and subarctic realms.

One reads this story and comes across an understandable but not excusable declaration: “National temperatures across Canada exceeded the average by 3 degrees Celsius (37.4 Fahrenheit), which made 2010 the hottest year in the country, according to Environment Canada’s 2010 report”. That’s stilted and not quite up to snuff in the syntax department, hinting at rewrite mill. Worse is the unit conversion handily provided to readers and totally fouled up in a confusion between absolute and relative temps (which I don’t need to explain to all our smart ksjtracker readers).

Perhaps the story will get corrected by the time you read this – another reader noticed the same brain cramp and commented on it at the site. One can imagine that the outlet may have an automated unit translating routine in its word processor. Such things can get one into trouble.

Grist for the Mill: Environment Canada : Trends and Variations Bulletin – Annual 2010.

- Charlie Petit

Astronomy all over. We’ll keep our eyes out for enterprising excloos – stories from the AAS meeting in Seattle not laid on the platter via press release and other means but reflecting a little poster cruising, hallway schmoozing,  program perusing and general sleuthing and buttonholing on reporters’ parts. Most of these listed below say press agent all over them, with NASA’s crew the masters of their craft.  That’s the dilemma of a meeting full of news releases and press conferences – such spoon fed items do include many and maybe all the top news. Low hanging fruit may include some of the best, but where’s the thrill?  Bragging rights go to the journo who scours up something that has the rest of the press corps feeling jealous and, maybe even better, resentful. What’sa big idea, coming in here and digging for stories?

Please advise us if somebody even yourself got the jump on the pack – AND got it pass an editor and published it. Unedited bloggers welcome too.

In the meantime, we do have on astronomy enterpriser for a starter – an incipient new chapter in the Pluto planetary nomenclature tussle, as reported above the fold in today’s NY Times Science Times by Kenneth Chang. Under the hed The War of the Worlds, Round 2, he pierces enough of the fog thrown up by the journal Nature to report that a paper apparently pending there will unseat the Kuiper Belt object Eris, three times farther out than Pluto, as biggest of its clan. Pluto itself, so recently demoted from full planethood and seemingly not even king of the dwarf planets, gets its championship belt back. By a smidgen. Probably. His story is in small part a review of a new book by astronomer Michael Brown, “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming,” but goes far beyond the scope of most recent reviews.  Nice job, and not from the AAS meeting.

AAS stories:

Kepler-10b, NASA Artist's concept-o-fabulation,

1. A rocky, hot extrasolar planet, via Kepler spacecraft : Another victory for the transit method of planet detection, but still not much like Earth.

• Time Magazine – Michael Lemonick: Planet Discovery: One Step Closer to a Second Earth ; Except its star-hugging orbit keeps it hotter than molten iron.
• NPR – Joe Palca: Kepler Space Telescope Spots Its First Rocky Planet ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Kepler spacecraft finds hot,distant planet ; It’s a local story for Dave. The deputy leader of the Kepler team is at San Jose State University and at Ames Research Center just down Rte 101 from SF.
• USA Today  – Dan Vergano: NASA reports first rocky planet outside our solar system
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Kepler’s rocky exoplanet reaction round-up ; Vergano moves the ball forward, focussing on getting reax from other extrasolar planet specialists. Which is, on large, enthusiastic.
• Nat’l Geographic – Richard Lovett: NASA Finds Smallest Earthlike Planet Outside Solar System ; Maybe smallest (see Vergano’s piece for a demurral, altho one asks – do pulsar planets count?). Lovett by the way is actually IN Seattle. Many reporters seem to be covering via electronic link. He lives not far away, in Oregon.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Rocky exoplanet milestone in hunt for Earth-like worlds ; Nice touch, a reference to astroseismology as a gauge of star size, even though the method is not really explained.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: In search for Earth-size world, a historic first: Kepler finds rocky planet ; Hmm. Maybe first rock for Kepler. Other putative rocky planets include Corot-7b and Gliese 581. But Pete does say this one is less ambiguous. It’s dense, and so hot its atmosphere may have mostly boiled off.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Kepler Finds an Exoplanet, Rocky, small and Very Hot ; Also datelined Seattle. Says it is not just rocky but “unquestionably rocky,” and that’s incremental science for you.
• —- Lots more

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

2. Hanny’s Voorwerp ; That’s the green blob spotted, during the crowd-sourced Galaxy Zoo astronomy sleuthing project a few years ago, by Dutch school teacher Hanny van Arkel. she’s an honored guest at the AAS meeting.  Its full explanation seems in, finally, and this pic is no artist’s rendition but a real photo. It seems that a quasar in that nearby galaxy has blinked off, its beam of light is still exciting a big belt of ionized oxygen, and thus we get this patch of green gas glowing away for no easily apparent reason.

• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Weird “Voorwerp’ in the spotlight ;
• Wired Science – Dave Mosher: Hubble Snaps Sharpest-Ever PHoto of Dead Green Quasar ; Don’t necessarily blame Dave for the hed. His brief story doesn’t say the quasar was green – but it did make the gas cloud light up green.
• Birmingham News – Hannah Wolfson: University of Alabama professor finds more questions in space cloud known as Hanny’s Voorwerp ; A little week in explanatory detail but best story of this bunch even if it did take a press release, one assumes, to provide muchof the info. Ms. Wolfson talked to the local man in charge of the followup studies. She reports one thing not in the release: he’s now gotten the amateurs of Galaxy Zoo to find him a bunch more green Voorwerps (Dutch for objects) for comparison out there.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Hubble telescope zeroes in on green blob in space ;

Grist for the Mill: U. Alabama-Birmingham Press Release ; Hubble Press Release ;

3. Antimatter shoots from Earth’s thunderstorms ; Just some positrons. It’s not whole anti-atoms flying around. But antimatter is a knee-jerk evoking, semi sci-fi word that tweaks imagination and draws reader eyeballs. For more on that, check this blogger’s reaction. That NASA Goddard illus there is very imaginative too.

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Today’s weather: thunder and antimatter beams / Positrons appear to be common in terrestrial lightning storms ; Another from a reporter on scene. Cowen rightly segues from the positrons, which are not so interesting in themselves, to the powerful gamma ray bursts  they (and co-flying electrons accelerated to ridiculous energy) trigger, and recently discovered slamming into space from thunderheads and recorded by instruments in orbiting space telescopes.
• Daily Mail (UK) Graham Smith: Scientists monitor ‘first direct evidence’ of thunderstorms blasting antimatter clouds into space ; So much fun to read this sort of giddy overstatement. Lot of good detail, but why make this kind of thing up?: “Researchers hope the study will eventually shed more light on the theory that a whole antimatter universe exists alongside our own.” Not sourced, and wriggle words like “hope” and “shed more light” and “theory” and “eventually” can’t undo such burbling, cheerful yet utterly nonsensical fiction. Plus, they’re not clouds. The Mail, as usual, provides a LOT of good illus for its on line version.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Antimatter caught streaming from thunderstorms on Earth ;
• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: Beams of Antimatter Blast Into Space From Earthly Thunderstorms, NASA Finds.
• New Scientist – David Shiga: Thunderstorms caught making antimatter ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Goddard Press Release ;

Also,  see a blog post from the meeting:

• Astronomy Magazine – Liz Kruesi: AAS meeting, Jan 10, 2011;

- Charlie Petit

There may be lots of astronomy news this week with the American Astronomical Society’s annual meeting unfolding in Seattle. I’ll try to restrain myself.

One chunk of entirely arcane and, to us astro-nuts, entirely engrossing news already has landed. It’s not only being presented in Seattle, but is on line at Nature. Astronomers using a large ground bases radio telescope, the Hubble, and the Chandra space telescope, think they found a pretty big supermassive black hole in the dwarf galaxy Henize 2010 just 30 million light years away. “Pretty big supermassive” is not an oxymoron, as supermassive means, for black holes, ones with masses ranging from a few tens or hundreds of thousands to billions of times that of our sun. This one is middling in size, an estimated million solar masses.

If such a thing is there, it upsets normal visions of them residing only in well-developed, large galaxies, a sign that galaxies come first and then the big monsters in their cores. To find one in puny little galaxy like this may mean that such black holes start to form well before any fully developed galaxy develops around them.

A consistent flaw in coverage is to imply that this supermassive black hole is particularly or notably supermassive. It less than one percent the mass of the really ginormous ones, to filch from one story’s hed. No sense exhausting the language before one reaches the true extremes.

Stories:

• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Ginormous Black Hole May solve Longstanding Mystery ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Hole’s on First? : New Evidence Shows Black Hole Growth Preceding Galactic Formation ; Other than the hed’s strained allusion to the old Abbott and Costello routine, pretty good.
• Nat’l Geographic News – Rachel Kaufman: Huge Black Hole Found in Dwarf Galaxy / Discovery may solve galactic chicken and egg mystery ;

Grist for the Mill:

National Radio Astronomy Observatory Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Image by P. Cusumano, source info below

Deja vu.

First, the AP‘s  Jay Lindsay over the weekend filed from Boston a heartening (if true)  piece of news. Without saying why or where the main source said it, it quotes this recently retired NOAA chief scientist  as saying US fishermen for the first time known for at least a century are not taking more fish from the sea than can be sustained. It implies this is true for  every major fishery.

If this were formally reported as a published study with multiple authors and peer review or other signs of heft, the news would be much bigger. But still, if this person with this recent job said this, it is worth reporting.

It also is worth, it appears, rewriting. An on line outlet called the Cleveland Leader carries a remarkably similar story with the same quotes, but trimmed a bit in length, under the byline of Julie Kent. It is impossible to learn much, through the usual naive searching,  just who Ms. Kent is, what the parent corporation Cleveland Media Group LLC is, or anything else. But the story under that name appears entirely derived from AP’s account, without attribution. And a look around the Cleveland Leader site finds a tremendous amount of news that Julie Kent, whoever or whatever that is, manages to cover. Long ago a  newspaper called the Cleveland Leader merged with the Plain Dealer, but whether this new Leader is part of that news group I don’t know.

Just one more example of the strange news ethics and ethos that one can find on the web.

Image source;

- Charlie Petit

Such a war of words has followed what is at heart, at the Portland Oregonian by Scott Learn, a sensible enough if flawed story: Reports of Pacific Ocean’s plastic patch being Texas-sized are grossly exaggerated, Oregon State University professor says. He got the tip from OSU (see Grist below). The Oregonian is not the only pub to have picked it up, but let’s stick with this rendition for a bit.

This ran a week ago. Reader Oakley Brooks brought it to our attention, thank you very much. Its strength is its angle – propelled by a researcher’s effort to correct misunderstanding – that tells readers that if they think that the Pacific Garbage Patch is a tangled and near-continuous mat of visible trash sprawled across two Texas’s worth of Pacific, they’d better think again.

It weakness is that on close inspection few if any articles ever described it as such. However, photos used to illustrate articles did, for understandable reasons given the punch that art editors like their images to deliver, generally show floating debris such as this iconic one here. It looks like a single fishing boat’s lost trawl, not the gathered debris of our plasticized civilization choking turtles and strangling sea birds. From that, a reader’s imagination can easily conjure up something like that wondrous floating meerkat island of carnivorous vegetation that novelist Yann Martel published in 2001 in his Life of Pi, but stretching across hundreds of miles.

The core of the article is that whatever it is that is the size of two Texases, “it’s not really a patch.” Okay, not a patch. What the story should also say, but does not with any particular clarity, is that not being a continuous visible patch is not that same as saying the problem is less than researchers and environmentalists say it is.  It only means that many members of the public has been led, deliberately or not, to picture something that does not exist. (The reality, as the story implies and as a few commenters among the overall rabid horde of readers say, most of it is a sort of haze of tiny and near invisible plastic bits interspersed with the occasional clot that a photographer can shoot and sell to the art editor.) On the other hand, the researcher behind the press release estimated that, at most, the area of plastic and other debris is  just one percent of the oceanic surface in the gyre that is sort of holding the mess in one area. Wow. One percent. That’s a lot, actually. If one percent of my blood stream is arsenic or just bits of plastic ready to jam my lung or brain arteries I’m dead.

Speaking of comments, Learn’s piece in the Oregonian has more than 50 of them. There is a disheartening familiarity to their overall tenor (with a few rational souls timidly raising their hands). At least half of them fulminate against the likes of environmentalists and grant-hungry scientists hoodwinking the public, somehow in league with government bureaucrats, to create a politically correct myth that the planet’s general environment is getting trashed. I liked it better back in the days when the loons of all tribes, left to right and simultaneously sideways to reality in often astounding ways, had to get paper, pencil or typewriter, envelope and a stamp before unleashing their paranoia and fantasies. They were just as demented and angry back then. They served then as now as reminders to writers not to assume the great majority of readers are elucidated as we imagine them to be when perusing our prose. We just didn’t have to see so many of them.

For an example of the Texas or more-sized analogy for this grimy gyre out there, the NY Times Lindsey Hoshaw was among those who, in a piece in November 2009, made the comparison. Earlier that year in The Guardian Robin McKie managed to evade any such comparo, and had this very nice map shown to the right plus a description of it as not a patch of big hunks of trash but more of an extended, plastic soup. And after I imagined a connection all by myself, I discover that  syndicated newspaper columnist Cecil Adams in 2007 mentioned Martel’s island, the Pacific Garbage Patch,  and even Curtis Ebbesmeyer’s fantastic research involving floating masses of rubber duckies (see earlier post) in one place. It puts such floating island and vast patch talk into eminently sensible perspective.

Other Stories:

• Contra Costa Times – Suzanne Bohan: Pacific Ocean’s ‘garbage patch’ exaggerated, new analysis asserts ;
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: ‘Great Garbage Patch” in the Pacific Ocean not so great claim scientists ; As the source is one scientist, the plural attribution in the hed is not so great either.
• Telegraph (UK) David Santillo, Paul Johnston: ‘Great Garbage Patch”: size doesn’t matter ; authors are Greenpeace-employed researchers in an op ed;

Grist for the Mill: Oregon State University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The campus of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society (now Max-Planck-Society) south of Berlin.

What is now renowned worldwide as the Max-Planck-Society was established on January 11th, 1911, exactly 100 years ago in Berlin. At first it was the “Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft” (KWG). The today 80 institutions (with about 5000 scientists) make it one of the most successful scientific endeavors in Germany. The Berlin Tagesspiegel has the general story, explaining that it was quite an innovation. Its founder, too, was unusual politically: Adolf von Harnack (a theologist and director of the Royal Library), who set up this  basic research institution using (at least partly) private money. Harnack’s concept of science management  was to find a brilliant scientist and build an institute “around” him. Although inherently authoritarian and hierarchical it succeeded. The article does not spare the dark times of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society during the first world war, when its Haber Institute  was engaged in toxic gas research, or under the Nazi-regime, when the KWG did not resist expulsion of Jewish scientists.

However, the article lacks a deep assessment of the KWG’s and MPG’s past and, first and foremost, its current role in the German society. And that’s not a surprise, because the author is a scientist from the Max-Planck-Institute for Science History in Berlin. An independent journalist might have been a better choice and could have asked more uncomfortable questions, in my opinion. I mention this here, because Newspapers like the Tagesspiegel tend to allow more and more “guest authors” (well, they do write for free, you know). Sometimes it might be fine to get an inside view from an expert or the perspective of authors other than journalists. But this topic is one that may have been served much better by a journalist – and not what Germans call a “Hofberichterstatter”.

Also: Flatulence a disease?

The Austrian Standard published a story about flatulence, based on a survey from the food company Danone Activia (which, what a surprise, sells products with claims against flatulence). Nine out of ten Austrian women, according to the “study”, are said to know the feeling of a bloated stomach. The article explains early on, that flatulence is a normal condition and not a disease. But than, why is it worth to be printed, anyway? This is not a scientific study, but it will be read as such, if journalists frame it the same way as peer-reviewed studies. Of course, such a survey (and the accompanying press release) might serve as the starting point for a journalist story. But than the author should hint the reader, that last year Danone drew back an application to get approval from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) for a health claim for their yoghurt products Actimel and Activia? And that the British advertisement agency ASA stopped Actimel spots claiming a positive health effect of the yoghurt for kids.

We just shouldn’t make it too easy for companies to get their (unproven) messages out to the consumers.

Worth to mention: One against Big Pharma

Is it worth to spend hundreds of millions of tax money every year for influenza vaccines? The Neue Zürcher Zeitung published a profile of the British-Italian doctor Tom Jefferson from the Cochrane Collaboration, who try encourage evidence based decisions in medicine and health care. Jefferson, part of the Concrane’s Acute Respiratory Infections Group, claims, that the evidence for the widespread use of influenza vaccines and medications is weak. The article not only explains the reasons for Jefferson’s doubts regarding the “influenza pandemic” but also his personality.

Sascha Karberg

Update: The patient who alerted me to the subject of this post asked that her name be removed, which I’ve done.–PR

Last week, I received an email raising questions about a press release put out by the Wellcome Trust on Dec. 20, 2010. The author of the email brought this to the Tracker’s attention because she has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome. She said in an email that she has no connection to the story or any of the participants.

The release’s headline is “Chronic fatigue syndrome is not caused by XMRV.”

And the release says, at the outset, without qualification, “A virus previously thought to be associated with chronic fatigue syndrome is not the cause of the disease, a detailed study has shown.”

XMRV is the unwieldy acronym for xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus, which is itself not especially wieldy. In October, 2009, Judy Mikovits and colleagues at the Whittemore Peterson Institute in Reno, Nevada, the National Cancer Institute, and elsewhere reported that they had discovered a link between XMRV and chronic fatigue syndrome, as I noted on the Tracker at the time. (Earlier, XMRV had been linked to prostate cancer. This virus gets around.)

The press coverage of the Wellcome Trust release seems straightforward; many stories repeated the conclusion that XMRV does not cause chronic fatigue syndrome. But is the release an accurate portrayal of the study?

Compare the release’s blanket denial of an XMRV connection, above, with this from the paper. (This is one of four studies published together, but the Wellcome release referred to only one of them.) Here’s the study’s conclusion, from the abstract:

We propose that XMRV might not be a genuine human pathogen.

That’s not quite the same thing as saying XMRV “is not the cause.” I emailed the Wellcome press people about the criticism of the release, and this is what I got back, in part, from Craig Brierly, senior media officer at the Wellcome Trust:

Whilst it may be written in layman’s terms, we still believe it [the press release] accurately reflects the findings of the paper, which go beyond showing that XMRV is most likely a lab contaminant to actually showing that is highly unlikely that it is even a human pathogen and therefore not the cause of CFS in the original samples.

I disagree. At the risk of being excessively pedantic, let me point out that “might not be” and “is not” do not mean the same thing.

Much of the coverage that I looked at repeated what was in the release, dismissing XMRV entirely. Amy Dockser Marcus of the Wall Street Journal, who has covered this issue closely, did not accept the conclusion of the press release, but evidently read the studies. The papers, she wrote, “are unlikely to resolve the debate over whether XMRV is linked to diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome or prostate cancer, especially since the authors of the papers disagree on the interpretation of their data.” That’s a much more nuanced, and more accurate, interpretation of what the researchers found.

I could go through some of the other coverage, but there is a broader issue here I’d like to address. Three weeks ago, I posted a critique of a Chicago Tribune story on chronic Lyme disease. I said I thought the reporters had been unfair to patients who claim to suffer from chronic Lyme disease. I also said that the reporters had not done a good job of explaining why the consensus view among many scientists is that the disease does not exist.

Various science bloggers, some of them anonymous, pounced. Raeburn is guilty of demanding that reporters create false balance, they said. He wants to give the patients as much credence as the scientific experts, they charged.

I agree wholeheartedly about the problem of false balance. For far too long–and it happens still–many reporters wrote that scientist A thinks global warming is a serious, man-made problem, and scientist B thinks it isn’t. Never mind that scientist A reflected a broad scientific consensus, and that scientist B–the critic–was, say, paid by a think tank funded by the energy industry. Many stories portrayed the situation as a scientific controversy, when it was not. Twenty years ago, when I was covering tobacco issues, I persuaded the Associated Press, after months of discussion, that it was not necessary to call the tobacco industry every time we ran a story on a new study on the dangers of smoking. That was false balance: Allowing the tobacco industry to say smoking wasn’t dangerous, when research clearly showed that it was. I fought that fight, and I won.

In my critique of the Tribune story, I was not suggesting that the opinions of experts and patients should be treated identically. I thought the Tribune reporters treated the patients unfairly and dismissively. That undercut the reporters’ credibility, and made their story a weaker story. The correct way to do the story was to treat the patients with  respect, quote them fairly, and then explain why so many experts disagree, and show the research that led them to that conclusion.

Chronic fatigue syndrome can lead reporters into the same trap. Multiple causes have been proposed for this illness, which many researchers and doctors think does not exist, or is not an infectious illness. Again, the right course is to report what the patients have to say, in fairness, and then to explain why many scientists and researchers disagree with those views.

I don’t know what the consensus is on XMRV and chronic fatigue. If I were to report it, I’d want to talk to a variety of people who think it can’t be the cause, and to legitimate experts–if there are any–who think it can.

The woman who emailed me says she has suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome, and I take her at her word. I would not report her opinions in the same way that I would report those of the authors of the studies, and she doesn’t claim to have scientific or medical expertise. The views of patients like hers are an important part of the story, but that doesn’t mean a story has to be agnostic on whether or not XMRV is the cause of chronic fatigue.

The evidence for XMRV seems to be weak, and weaker now with the publication of the four studies in December. Quoting patients accurately does not have to mean that the resulting story will falsely balance inexpert patient views with expert scientific opinions–unless the writers do the story badly.

I don’t expect this to be the last word in this debate, but I hope it clarifies some of the issues. Please add your comments below, and be sure to sign your name and stand behind them.

- Paul Raeburn