Rhinos, even baby ones, are not quite cute, but this news fits the cute critter category. A World Wildlife Fund team reports that its robotic cameras have returned images from a national park showing  young javan rhinos and what presumably are their parents. Thus, while poaching remains a dire threat, the presence of a breeding population – or pair at least – has WWF and others determined to maintain pressure for better protection of the rare animals.

Stories:

• AFP – Hope as rare rhino calves filmed in Indonesia ;
  
• AP (via Huffington Post) Rare Javan Rhinos Filmed In Indonesia With Hidden Cameras ;
• NYT (DotEarth blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Rarest of the Rare: Javan Rhinos ; Conveniently embedded videos.
• USA Today (ScienceFair blog) Dan Vergano: Video: Javan rhino calves spur recovery hopes ;

Grist for the Mill: WWF Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

When it comes to Nature vs. Science and mention in either’s news pages of the other, one is alert. Occasionally there arise signs of pettiness or mere chortling by either towards its arch rival at the top of the world of science journals. All quite amusing.

That acknowledgment is appropriate even though one doesn’t find anything overtly unseemly, but a lot that is instructive about science journalism and the need for general wariness toward press releases, in a piece that Richard A. (Rick) Lovett had last week in Nature about a paper that ran in Science.

The topic is arcane. It would not, in any case, get much ink outside specialty publications. The news is that a research team – its lead author a Russian living in Paris – has used diamond-faced anvils to subject sulphurous compounds to the temperatures and pressures of the Earth’s deep lithosphere and mantle. They discovered it converts on the benchtop, and presumably down deep in Earth too, to a deep blue form akin to a material in lapis lazuli that includes something called the tri-sulphur anion, S­3­­­­­-.

This is important, reports Lovett, because geophysicists and geochemists use ratios of sulphur isotopes in ancient sediments as proxies, for complicated reasons, of atmospheric oxygen levels at the time. Now, with a new pathway in which sulfur may fractionate as it gets recycled through the depths, the oxygen-estimating system may need serious recalibration.

But, Lovett tells us, the summary of the story for the press that Science distributed in advance says nothing about that. Rather, it merely says this exotic form of sulphur may be its dominant mode inside the planet, and that something called sulfur dating is involved. He tells us that he spent more than a day chasing the sulphur clock angle before learning that there is nothing much to that, but a great deal to implications for paleo-oxygen. And he wonders whether any other reporters chased the story up the wrong alley.

Judge for yourself. Here is the summary for reporters that Science ran:

New Sulfur Species Stirs Up Debate:
It’s time to change the way we think about sulfur and how it affects Earth’s internal geochemical processes, according to researchers. Gleb Pokrovski and Leonid Dubrovinsky performed experiments with sulfur-rich fluids at high temperatures and high pressures to find that a particular sulfur ion, the tri-sulfur anion known as S­3­­­­­-, was stable under such conditions. Though sulfides and sulfates are the most common forms of sulfur in surface waters, these researchers suggest that this tri-sulfur anion could be the dominant form of the element in other places that are difficult to study, like in the magma brewing deep below a volcano. If this is true, then the sulfur-dating techniques that researchers sometimes employ to investigate Earth’s geologic record needs to be reconsidered, they say. Many experts have believed that sulfides and sulfates transport precious metals, such as gold, copper and platinum, through high-temperature fluids to form massive ore deposits in cooler fluids. But, this new study suggests that those common sulfides and sulfates might actually be products of rapid reactions involving the tri-sulfur anion, S­3­­­­­-, at greater depths. A Perspective by Craig Manning explains these findings in more detail.

But few other reporters wrote this, none from major outlets. So to what degree this news summary may have deflected reporters from the best angle is hard to tell. Also, while I am persuaded of it, I am too little of an authority to be completely sure Lovett got the right one too. But he’s a smart guy – has a PhD even…okay, it’s in economics and he has a J.D. too – and is a reliable reporter. Here’s his website. Plus, his undergraduate studies were in astrophysics. He’s also, in case you are wondering, the same Richard Lovett who is an ace science fiction writer.

Other stories:

• ANI via Hindustan Times:  Rare sulphur could rewrite theories of early Earth ;
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Sulphur secrets uncovered ; A few good additional angles, including a Pinatubo mystery, but nothing on early oxygen levels in question.
• Ars Technica – Yun Xie: Unusual form of sulfure may move inerals around the Earth’s crust.
• Physorg.com : New form of sulfur discovered in geological fluids ;

Neither of those stories reflects serious effort at independent reporting. Thus, whether Lovett might have been the only reporter to see the real story behind the press release has not gotten a serious test. But judging by the summary above, sifting out the oxygen angle was not easy.

- Charlie Petit

AP photo

Sunday’s New York Times ran the first of what promises to be a revealing series on the risks of natural gas drilling, and the challenge local and federal agencies face in regulating the industry. The launch come via a long article by Ian Urbina on hydraulic fracturing, infamously known among doubters as fracking, that several news outlets have in recent years heavily documented for its tendency to foul drinking water in some wells.

Quite aside from a big caveat explained below, the story is dramatic, heavily illustrated,  and well-modulated in tone. Not once does it flatly declare that people are drinking water that is demonstrably poisonous or carcinogenic because of natural gas drilling. It suggests that whatever the dangers are  from natural gas extraction, coal is worse.  It switches tone quickly – the lede suggesting a general story on pollutants of all sorts. Benzene and salts and other things one would rather not drink in quantity come up. But it focusses its concern on radioactive isotopes, chiefly of radium and uranium. The story reports that most water companies don’t even do a radiation check on water that, before treatment, included discharge from natural gas operations. Urbina also discovers, from public records he had to work hard to ferret out over several months of investigation, that the radioactivity of some well waste is substantially  above what has been generally reported.

If nothing else, when the nation’s most influential newspaper puts a story like this page one, lawmakers should – even those allergic to such terms as “government regulators” -  insist on diligent monitoring of water supplies for radioactivity.

On the other hand – how about dilution? Urbina packs his story with numbers of wells and associated stats. He singles out Pennsylvania as a state that is not only well-fracked top to bottom and side to side by drillers stunning the Marcellus Shale into yielding its gas, but that is sending much of the used, chemically laced (plus uranium and radium) water to standard treatment plants that are not very good at taking such stuff out before returning it to streams and rivers.

We learn that some of the well waste is hundreds to a few thousand times higher in radiation than federal drinking standards allow. Several times Urbina quotes water companies and gas industry officials as saying dilution is the solution.

Nowhere does Urbina take a hard look at the dilution assertion. Readers would at least understand the crude scale of the problem if he did so. Flow rates for Pennsylvania rivers are readily available. If dilution factors are hundreds of thousands to millions to one, then the question may become one of biological re-concentration in fish or shellfish, or of how well-mixed a discharge is by the time it reaches a community’s drinking water intake.

Never trust the Tracker with arithmetic. However, I have some numbers. I was pretty good at math but as a reporter, beyond converting miles to kilometers or such things as that, I tended to ask my scientists sources to check my figures. Now I’m doing mathematics without a net. But here we go.

The story says the highest factor it found, anywhere, by which gas well waste water exceeds safe radiation standards is 2,122 times. Most were  considerably lower. One of those more typical  levels one finds in the story is the 275-fold excess of radium and 780-times excess of all radiation in  a 20,000 gallon per day waste stream delivered to a plant on Pennsylvania’s  Clarion River. Let’s just say it’s 1000 times too hot for anybody’s tap.

The Clarion River, according to the USGS National Water Information System, which I found in a few strokes, has a mean flow rate for February 28 of 2120 cubic feet per second, and a 25th percentile of 786 cfs. I dunno what the year-round rates are.  But today it’s running at 2370 cfs.

A cubic foot has 7.5 gallons in it. The day has 86,400 seconds in it. By my rough and rounded figgering, if one stirred 20,000 gallons of this crud (and this will be after the treatment plant takes out a bunch of stuff, but maybe not much that’s radioactive) into a river running at about 500 million gallons a day, it will have been diluted about 250,000 times. This is the rate on 25th percentile days. Today it’d be a lot more. The result, naively estimated perhaps, would be a discharge with radiation well under one percent of the federal standard.

That sort of result’s safety implications should be explored in a story this long and generally thorough. No doubt I’ve left something out. But the Times should have sifted such numbers with experts and told us whether and why there is still reason to worry.

And if I’m off by a lot on those calculations, please let me know.

For another barb aimed at the NYTimes – not for its reporting but for thin acknowledgment of the extensive reporting on hydrofracking by other outlets – blogger and journalist Keith Kloor has it.

- Charlie Petit

Did anybody run this front page?  In the NY Times, under Leslie Kaufman‘s byline and the single column hed Scientists Are Cleared Of Misuse of Data, it was on p. A18. So dies ClimateGate (in a perfect world). The news, which reinforces similar conclusions reached by investigators in ClimateGate Central, the UK, is that for all their snark about climate contrarians the scientists whose e-mails touched it off did not distort, hide, or deliberately analyze incorrectly the data they’d gathered on the world’s climate, weather, or much of anything else – except for being  impolite behind their backs to people who had been hooting about their work.

The news is that after Senator James Inhofe requested that the Inspector General of the Natinal Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration investigate whether any of its affiliated scientists whose e-mails were among the purloined missives had fooled around with data or otherwise committed misleading or fraudulent scientists, the IG found no such thing.

Other stories:

• USA Today – Wendy Koch: NOAA climate scientists cleared in US report;
• NYTimes (Dot Earth Blog) Andrew C. Revkin: Slim Pickings for Climate Science Critics in Inspector General Report ;
• Washington Post (blog) Brian Vastag: Commerce Dept. report clears U.S. scientists in ‘climategate’ ; He reports, without phrasing it this way, that Inhofe’s office li…, uh, misspeaks in its response to the new report.
• Reuters – Timothy Gardner : US clears NOAA scientists in climate email review ;
• AP – Randolph Schmid: New report exonerates climate researchers ; Not only have the Brits already cleared their people of anything egregious, but the NRC and a Penn State investigation over here have too, it says here. That’s a lot. Maybe answers why it’s not p.1 in NYT.
• AAAS ScienceInsider – Eli Kintisch: US Ocean Agency Mostly Unscathed on Climate E-mails Inquiry ;
• Huffington Post – Travis Walter Donovan :  ‘Climategate’ Investigation Clears U.S. Scientists ;

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA Press Release ; NOAA IG  report ; Sen. James Inhofe office Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

As soon as the embargo lifted yesterday an arresting, and throat-catching, report in Science on paleoanthropology and archeology of the New World got a big media ride.  The news is that in the central part of the state a team of University of Alaska scientists, with University of Arizona colleagues, last summer  scorched bones and teeth of a child, perhaps three years old at time of death. The remains, the few that escaped destruction by fire, are dated to about 11,500 years ago. These are the oldest human remains known from North America’s near-arctic. They were in a covered-over firepit of a seasonal dwelling with six postholes of its structure found. The house,  evidence suggests, was abandoned soon thereafter. The burial of the child appears to be the pit’s last use. Deeper layers in it and at the site suggest an intermittent human occupation that began perhaps 13,200 years ago. Bones of birds and small game animals are deeper. Nearby artifacts include skillfully-knapped stone tools.

While the site is the oldest in N. America, it is of similar age to ones across what is now the Bering Strait in Kamchatka, Russia. At the time, lower sea levels had connected the two regions into one combined unit geologists and archeologists call Beringia. It is the most prominent presumed route of early human migration to the Western Hemisphere.

The press releases and the formal journal report both describe the remains as having been cremated, implying a ritual or respectful ceremony after the child’s death. Cremation figures prominently in news reports also. That seems reasonable and most likely. One hesitates to darken the conversation, but wonders whether it is easily plausible too that the death could have been accidental with the cause being the fire itself, or even deliberate. How many reporters asked about the certainty level of a planned cremation after the child’s death?

It is in any case a remarkable bit of work  by archeologists who first consulted and collaborated with representatives of Athabascan (Healy Lake) residents of the area and with a traditional chief’s conference. As for the cremation angle, it’s understandable. Imagine you were the lead archeologist and had worked closely with local people to get their approval, and many of whom regard the child as possibly an ancient relative and link to their culture’s roots. Would you – absent any clear evidence to back it up – risk giving insult by expressing the slightest hint the site might have been what we would today call a crime scene? Neither would I.

Stories:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Earliest human remains in US Arctic reported; A solid job with a sentimental lede, describing a long-ago, nomadic family laying its dead child to rest. Is it too insensitive to wonder if there ought to be a prominent caveat in there somewhere – something like it appears that such a thing is probable? Schmid however gets credit -  well down he reports other scenarios as possible including one (non team-member) archeologist’s supposition of possible cannibalism. Minor point: the locale is not in the US arctic but, as the U. Alaska release linked below in Grist says, the sub-arctic. A suggestion that sidesteps semi-technical terms:  “far north.”
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Michael Balter: Child Burial Provides Rare Glimpse of Early Americans ; Just the clear facts in the lede here: the child died and was buried, perhaps ceremonially, in the hearth. And as he writes, cremations of that general era and time are known, but not in houses. He also reports on the possible implications, culturally and archeologically, if DNA can be sequenced from the scorched bones for comparison to today’s native Alaskans and indigenous peoples to the south.
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag:  Oldest human found in Alaska is a child, cremated 11,500 years ago. Nice job, overt sentiment is via sources’ quotes. One wonders at a tiny piece of grammatical awkwardness. He refers to the site as in “an subarctic region.” I’m guessing he first wrote “an arctic” and thought better of it, leaving the widow in his wake.
• NPR – Christopher Joyce : Child’s 11,500-year-old Remains Unearthed in Alaska ;
• Fairbanks News Miner – Jeff Richardson: Body of ice age child found in Interior Alaska ; Better story than hed – doesn’t call it a body. It also details the careful negotiations with locals that preceded full excavation of the site, going back five years and quotes community chiefs regarding the interaction.
• Anchorage Daily News – Casey Grove: Ice-age child’s remains discovered in Interior ; More insight into the project, including that the hearth’s human remains were discovered on the last scheduled day of excavation last summer. After discussion with the area’s indigenous leaders, work on the remains resumed several weeks later. Grove also talks directly with some of the locals. And reasons to rule out cannibalism are given by the lead archeologist. Interesting: the ADN site includes a link to the whole paper’s PDF, which I’ve put in Grist below. Grove’s story circulated widely via McClatchy’s news service.
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Child’s burial in Alaska highlights Paleolithi settlement of America ;
• National Geographic News – Brian Handwerk: Ice Age Child Found in Prehistoric Alaskan Home/ Cremation site hints at how first American lived – and where they came from. The story’s strong on the ethnography and culture that the site reveals.
• AFP – Scientists fine oldest sub-Arctic human remains ;
• New Scientist – Jeff Hecht: Child cremation gives glimpse of first North Americans ; No nonsense lede on what probably happened, then builds toward description of the answers the site provides and the remaining mysteries it highlights or raises.
• PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Margaret Munro: Ice-child’s remains shed light on North’s earliest settlers ; Here’s how to be accurate and to respectfully skirt anything explicitly uncomfortable at the top:  “..who appears to have been gently placed in a hearth and cremated inside a house…”
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: 11,500-Year-Old Remains of Creamted 3-year-old Discovered ; Good enough job, but I cannot recall any professional archeologist or paleontologist calling field sites “digs.” I’ve seen some wrinkle their nose at the term. Should reporters care, or abide by the profession’s preferred “site”, “excavation”, etc? I really am unsure.
• Daily Mail (UK) Meet Xaasaa: Scientists make historic discovery of 11,500-year-old toddler bones in Alaska ; Adequate rewrite of releases and all with added context. It leaves a longish look at the cannibalism angle to the very end. The strength, as usual at the Mail, is the extensive illus.

Grist for the Mill:

AAAS Press Release ; University of Alaska-Fairbanks Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; Science Mag. article pdf, via Anch. Daily News.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Four Chilean reporters have a story in La Tercera explaining that this year’s ocean-atmosphere phenomenon “La Niña” is the most extreme in South-America in the last 35 years. They use many different sources, data and infographics to explain how “la niña” is created, and what affects its intensity. It’s  nice work. Chilean science journalist Eduardo Reyes Frías sent the story to the tracker, along with historical context and a discussion about the differences between “el niño” y “la niña”: “El niño” receives extensive coverage in the media because of its more dramatic and direct effects, but the consequences in agriculture and hydroelectric energy production caused by “La niña”‘s droughts are often misrepresented.

El experimentado periodista científico chileno Eduardo Reyes Frías hizo llegar al tracker una muy buena nota publicada en La Tercera, junto con un texto que a continuación reproduciremos. La nota está firmada por C. Araya, P. Césped, J. Peña y C. Pizarro “Fenómeno de La Niña es el más intenso de los últimos 35 años”, y explica las consecuencias de que esta temporada “La Niña” haya sido la más intensa desde 1975: sequías en el centro del país, y previsión de más lluvias en los altiplanos. El trabajo cuenta con gran cantidad de datos y fuentes, y una muy ilustrativa infografía explicando el origen en la interacción océano-atmósfera de este fenómeno, que ha servido a Eduardo Reyes para introducir su colaboración con el Tracker:

Eduardo Reyes Frías: La iconografía de La Niña, publicada  en “La Tercera”, diario nacional en Chile,  ilustra con sentido didáctico la interacción de los factores oceánicos y atmosféricos del fenómeno que genera diferentes repercusiones en países sudamericanos. Por ejemplo, la sequía en los valles interiores de Chile se contrapone actualmente a un mayor aporte biológico en la corriente de Humboldt.

El Centro Internacional del Pacífico Sur Oriental, CIIFEN, confirmó en su  boletín de enero que “se mantienen temperaturas del mar bajo el promedio, asociadas a La Niña, mientras la fuerza de los vientos alisios provoca el ascenso de aguas profundas, frías y ricas en nutrientes.” En consecuencia, el color  azul de la imagen también indica productividad en la franja costera de Perú y Chile, donde se realiza pesca industrial.

La identificación del fenómeno contrario se originó antiguamente en los pescadores peruanos, quienes denominaron “corriente del Niño” a las aguas cálidas con peces tropicales que llegaban al inicio del verano, en coincidencia con la Natividad del Niño Jesús. Sin embargo, los estudios científicos del evento cálido sólo comenzaron alrededor de 1960, a raíz de los desastres materiales y centenares de víctimas humanas en Perú y Ecuador, afectados por lluvias inusitadas y aluviones terrestres.

Desde entonces “la corriente del Niño” se considera vinculada a un debilitamiento del centro de alta presión atmosférica del Pacífico Sur Oriental que sucede con intervalos de 4 a 7 años, lo cual disminuye la productividad en la corriente de Humboldt. A su vez, La Niña involucra  el enfriamiento marino y una relativa estabilidad climática.

Pronóstico difícil

¿Niña o Niño? El registro histórico ha comprobado la alternancia. No son mellizos ni pareja. El problema consiste en anticipar la fecha de nacimiento y la duración o la intensidad que tendrá cada evento…Las dimensiones del océano Pacífico y de la atmósfera superior señalan la complejidad del tema.

El Niño motiva mayor cobertura informativa en vista de sus impactos más directos y dramáticos; no obstante, en los últimos años se advierte que La Niña perjudica la producción agrícola y las fuentes de energía hidroeléctrica por falta de lluvias. Un factor preocupante puede ser el menor tiempo de separación entre ambos episodios del Pacifico Sur .(por Eduardo Reyes Frías)

- Pere Estupinyà

(*UPDATE: We have at this site some of the best and most on-point commenters. I failed while doing this post what is supposed to be the first step – to check the clips. To see if the news is brand new, pretty new, or not much new at all. So at the bottom this update continues…..)

Here’s is some weird, cool news, and that is no figure of speech. Two groups of researchers, one led by a researcher in Mexico and the other by man in Russia, report strnge doings inside an expanding supernova debris cloud, well known to astronomers and called Cassiopeia A. The neutron star born of the progenitor’s collapsed nucleus has in just ten years cooled off by a whopping four percent.

Cooled off? Just sitting and whirling there, it’s chilling that fast. All that astronomers looking at the data can think of that would absorb heat that fast is that the degenerate protons, or maybe the dominant neutrons (I’m trying to master or just merely glimpse the physics of this) inside this star have undergone phase transformation to a superfluid. To me that means an endothermic reaction, but most coverage doesn’t say exactly how the superfluid would speed the cooling. Nor does it say how the researchers see the temperature drop.

Whatever the concept is, it’s not new to theorists  but it apparently is a rare case of data directly attributable to such a thing. Coverage is sketchy, most of it appears to be off press releases rather than interviews long enough for the reporters to tell readers plainly what the astronomer saw and how they inferred a superfluid.

Stories:

• USA Today ScienceFair – Dan Vergano: Video: Neutron star hides superfluid heart ; Also, a story to go with the video. Vergano did interview an authority on such things, although not among the authors.
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel – Mark Johnson: Weird science inside a neutron star ;
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Chandra Captures the First Direct Evidence of Superfluids at the Heart of Neutron Stars ;
• Columbus Dispatch – Spencer Hunt: Strange stuff: Scientists find ‘superfluid’ inneutron stars / Discovery offers new data about the deaths of stars ; Hunt does tell us that the thermal energy is supposedly carried off by neutrinos, formed as neutrons pair up to form the superfluid. This helps imagine it. But how is the temperature change measured? the papers in Grist say pretty plainly – it’s the surface spectrum. Reporters should say so too, somehow.
• Space.com – Exploded Star Reveals Strange New Matter ;

Additional Very Recent Stories:

• PostMedia via Vancouver Sun -  Andrea Sands: ‘Weird’ phyiscs found in frictionless fluie inside neutron stars ;
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: Exotic Superfluid Found in Ultra-Dense Stellar Corpse ;

UPDATE Cont’d: As seen in the comments section, two readers brought to our attention that this news above is a second bounce. The essence of the story was reported recently, and in some cases longer and deeper. The papers, as hinted in Grist below  in the first place, were floating around on the arXiv service well before formal journal publication.

Earlier Stories:

• NatureNews (Feb. 1) Kate McAlpine: Superfluid state for Galaxy’s youngest star? ; Honed narrative and satisfying, lay explanation how a neutron star refrigerates itself (and the neutrons themselves go into a hip hop of uncertain pairing) and ships thermal energy into deep, deep space.
• New Scientist (Feb 4)  Rachel Courtland: Neutron star seen forming exotic new state of matter ; Nuance alert – ie, example of collegial competitive science. A critic says the two teams haven’t marshalled overwhelming evidence. But it’s good enough for him.
• Science News (Feb 4) Devin Powell: Supernova to superfluid ; Sci News’s new physics writer makes a funny remark about bitter brews, and also provides the news in easy narrative form. No flub really, but this story contains an error in fact, one born of a singular astro-science writers’ dilemma: Did something happen when we saw it, or when the light signal left the source? The latter really. But that’s so-o-o-o tedious to explain every time. In this case, the star is 11,000 light years away, so its neutron-pairing, superfluefaction refrigerator phase did not really start at the turn of the 20th century. Powell implies as much in earlier text. So he gets a pass for sure.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Chandra Space Telescope Press Release ; Royal Astronomical Society Press Release ; Univ. Alberta Press Release ;  paper via arXiv in Monthly Notices of Astronomical Society; paper via arXiv in Phys. Review Letters

- Charlie Petit

Researchers at Yale and U. of British Columbia said today in Nature they’ve come up with a persuasive reason why volcanoes that explode often display characteristic harmonic tremors in advance. They call it “wagging” while concluding that dense hunks of magma oscillate against blankets of gassy, less dense magma as they move along. Their equations, expressed in a computer model, show that it ought to happen similarly in volcanic conduits over a wide range of geometries. Ergo, that could be why volcanoes of many different kinds tend to tremble in like manner and over the same ranges of frequency just before going off.

The news is on the technical side, but several outlets tackled it. Applying in a new fashion the familiar term “wagging” makes it a bit more enticing to reporters, one supposes.

• Postmedia News via Montreal Gazette – Margaret Munro: Magma ‘wagging’ may predict eruptions ; She makes it sounds as though it’s like a dog wagging its tail in a pipe.
• LiveScience via OurAmazingPlanet – Charles Q. Choi: Trembling of Volcanoes Could Predict Their Eruption ;
• CBC – Emily Chung: Volcanoes drop hint before deadly eruptions: study ; Nice effort at describing a magma plug sloshing in its own outgassed foam as it rises.

Grist for the Mill:

UBC Press Release ; Yale Press Release ;

As it happens, a few volcanoes are acting up right now, including Bulusan in the Philippines. Here in the Philippine Star is a  account by Cet Dematera of a recent burst. It and other reports suggest the eruptions are more on the phreatic side (ground water flashing to vapor) than they are directly magmatic. One can only suppose that the Philippine volcanologists know about harmonic tremors and perhaps even have already downloaded this Nature paper – and might have provided a pretty lively quote.

- Charlie Petit

It does look suspicious – the dead, young dolphins being found along Mississippi and Alabama shorelines right about now, their ages suggesting their mothers were just starting gestation when BP’s oil leak began. No media are declaring clear evidence it is  the cause, but it is an inevitable and justifiable angle in all stories.

(Late note – see update below for important caveat).

And while standard nomenclature for young dolphins is to call them either calves or pups, baby is the term that nearly all reporters use in their stories. It packs more emotion.  One supposes that’s okay. It would be hard in any case to remain clinically detached on seeing a three-foot, dead, young dolphin fetching up in the surf.

The first report, it appears, was filed Monday in McClatchy’s Biloxi Sun Herald,where Karen Nelson reported that while newborn dolphin mortality is fairly common, with babies seen in all years washed up, the rate this year is about ten times higher than usual. They appear, her first report holds, to have been either stillborn, or to have died soon after.  The photos suggest they are bottlenose dolphins but (unless I just missed it) Nelson does not report the species. She has updated it several times ; Wednesday and today. Later stories suggest that the exact timing of the deaths – including whether the young dolphins wer stillborn – is not sure. While the spill is on everybody’s mind, and certainly that of the public, one quote by a researcher captures the situation for now, “We’re trying to find out what’s going on here.”

Other Stories:

• USA Today – Michael Winter: Gulf researchers report jump in deaths of baby dolphins;
• AP: Dead dolphins in Gulf: scientists seek explanation ; This one says scientists have ruled out the oil spill. But it does not say how they know. To leave out that – even this short piece could have had a hint – is a puzzle.
• ABC News – Matt Gutman: Baby Dolphins Found Dead on Gulf Coast ;
• Reuters – Steve Gorman: Baby dolphin deaths rise along Gulf Coast ;
• Mississippi Press – Harlan Kirgan: Dead dolphin calves found in Mississippi, Alabama ; Fairly long, multiple sources, several hypotheses suggested. Looks like Mr. Kirgan put significant effort into it.

*UPDATE:

• AP – Janet McConnaughey: Scientists scrutinize rise in baby dolphin deaths ; Which has this important passage: She paraphrases an investigator as saying that toxins from oil or chemicals used to disperse it may be a “less likely cause than cold or disease. That’s because only one species of dolphin – and no other kind of animal – is dying, and because the calf deaths appears concentrated in Mississippi and Alabama rather than Gulf-wide.” This is important, but one is still wondering where the shorter version of this AP story, bulleted above, got that the spill is ruled out. Could be client rewrite. It is a stretch, but it seems sensible to put BP well down the suspect list. McConnaughey also reports that occasional, similar focussed clusters have been seen in years past.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Scientists try to explain rash of baby dolphin deaths in Gulf ;

Unhinged story award to…

• Examiner.com – Deborah Dupre: More dead baby dolphins: Could it be Gulf Blue Plague related ; …don’t ask. It’s not worth following her links to find out what the blue plague is (a conspiracy).

- Charlie Petit

(Original post filed Feb. 23.)

Were you surprised to see the pictures of slumped road beds and high ground, collapsing buildings, landslides, and general chaos from Christchurch, NZ, after a moderate-to-large but hardly huge earthquake?  If so you weren’t the only one. How, one might think, could an M 6.3 quake, on whatever offshoot of the old Richter scale one is using, pack such a punch? That’s a big quake, but outside the developing world where unreinforced masonry and stacked mud bricks are the norm, it ought to be tolerable. Busted glass, downed chimneys, and goods knocked from shelves, sure, but whole city blocks choked with rubble and mud?

Fortunately while many outlets just declared it a huge or massive or whatever quake and left it at that a few writers, including those on the science beat, rose to the occasion.

• AP – Alica Chang: Weaker New Zealand quake packed a deadlier punch ; It was right under town, and not far under it at that.
• Independent – Jerome Taylor: New Zealand earthquake caused by new fault line ; Nice job on geology, but no explicit recognition that the relative magnitudes of quake and damage were a little worse than the usual correlation.
• ABC (Australia) Radio – Mary Gearin : The science behind earthquakes ; Yes New Zealand is in a geologically unstable region, but Christchurch was thought to be pretty far from active faults.

*UPDATES (Feb. 24):

• LiveScience/OurAmazingPlanet – Brett Israel: The Science Behind the New Zealand Quake: Different sources, basic info similar to AP but withwelcome tectonic context. Best of this short lot so far. Minor remark: Editors should have changed description of waves set off by a shattering Tasman Glacier from “in the lake under the glacier” to “below the glacier.”  The latter usage more naturally means just downhill or downstream, not underneath it.  Or call it an outlet lake.
• Scientific American: Larry Greenemeier: Why Was New Zealand’s Latest Earthquake So Deadly? ; Another good one, most of it a transcript of an interview with a geologist who appears to know very well  the region’s structural setting and earthquakes generally. And bad as this was, the man says, the same sort of shallow quake in a city without New Zealand’s good -  and enforced -  building codes could have been largely flattened. (But I don’t see much rebar in that photo up there).
• BBC – Jonathan  Amos: New Zealand earthquake: Depth and location key; Another well-told explainer, and I lifted from it the pic immed. above.
• AFP – Christchurch out of luck with second quake: seismologists.
• ABC (Australia) Emily Bourke, Michael Edwards: Tough building codes couldn’t save Christchurch ; Actually, one thinks, that is exactly what the building codes did. It’s banged up and scores died – but the city was saved from utterly devastation (think Haiti). Story’s better than the hed. Old buildings, some of them, went down. News ones did well, the story reports.
• ABC Radio – Heather Ewart: A seismologist speaks ; Q & A.
• Wall St. Journal – David Fickling: Latest Quake Tests Geological Views ; A much larger sweep here, relating how the quake fits into trans-Pacific tectonics. Local geology in it too. A quibble on editing. WSJ has some of the best line editors. One of them should have changed a further to a farther as it refers to spatial distance.
• The Australian – Jared Owens: Stronger tremor on North Island ‘overdue’ ;
• Discovery News – Christina Reed: New Zealand-like Quake Disaster Could Strike Seattle ; Good combo of reporting and citation of other media outlets – and more than most outlets had on the remarkable force of the shaking, nearly twice gravity. It appears to be referring to vertical movements, but is not clear on that. Nice selection of illus, including a cumulative map of 20 years of  quakes on NZ’s South Island.

Let us know if you have or have seen additional stories on the quake written from a technical or science angle.

Late Addition: For some of the blogging on this, see the third comment below.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Several journalists from  Latin America (none from Spain) attended the AAAS meeting last weekend in Washington DC. They wrote about bionic limbs, bioprinting, international science policy and diplomacy, cognitive benefits of bilingualism, or the next solar storm. But also important: they met to discuss the 3 year project that the WFSJ has already implanted in Africa and Asia, and is planning to implement in Latin America.

La reunión anual de la Asociación Americana para el Avance de la Ciencia (AAAS) no es un encuentro pensado para anunciar impactantes noticias científicas. Evidentemente se presentan estudios interesantes; pero más bien es un espacio para reflexionar sobre temas de actualidad desde una perspectiva amplia, sacar ideas para reportajes más elaborados, contrastar visiones, establecer contactos con científicos, anticipar futuros temas que serán noticias, y conversar y hacer networking entre colegas. Realmente; es muy útil para los periodistas científicos. Pero no pensando en noticias que generarán jugosos titulares.

A pesar de eso, los periodistas de diferentes países latinoamericanos que atendieron –nos pareció que ningún medio español estuvo presente- sacaron buenas notas para sus periódicos. (y aprovecharon para discutir un ambicioso proyecto de capacitación de periodistas científicos en LA)

Andrea Obaid de Chile fue muy productiva; publicando en La Tercera: “Presentan Bio impresora en 3D que reproduce piel y cartílagos para implantes” (muy buena nota e infografía), un reportaje también en La Tercera sobre un robot para discapacitados controlado por señales cerebrales, y alimentó el blog de la Asociación chilena de periodistas científicos. Blog en el que Nicolás Luco comenta la propuesta de proyecto de tres años de la WFSJ para la formación de profesionales del periodismo científico.

Desde Brasil y para Folha, Ricardo Mioto narró la consternación entre científicos estadounidenses al constatar que su país va en camino de perder la supremacía mundial en investigación científica; y presenta un original trabajo sobre las consecuencias en el clima (un invierno global repentino) que tendría la explosión de varias bombas nucleares.

Para Clarín (Argentina), Valeria Román habla sobre el pasado presente y futuro de la manipulación de objetos o brazos robóticos con la mente. Además, nos envía para el tracker este texto:

“El AAAS 2011 es interesante aunque te genera ansiedad: se presentan muchos resultados preliminares de investigaciones y pocas evidencias o aplicaciones disponibles. Aunque hay sesiones como la que pone en foco sobre qué puede hacer el mundo para alimentar y mejorar las condiciones de vida en el planeta, incluyendo a otros seres vivos. Frente al consumismo sin reflexión, el encuentro de científicos de diferentes disciplinas -como ecólogos que se encuentran con demógrafos- es prometedor.”

En esta línea, otros participantes como Iván Carrillo de Quo México, o Federico Kukso de Muy interesante Argentina, o Lucy Calderón de Prensa Libre Guatemala contestaron al tracker que prepararían próximos reportajes con la información extraída del congreso. Vimos también a Estrella Burgos de ¿Cómo Ves? Javier Cruz de la UNAM, o Luisa Massarani de SciDev. Y seguro que nos olvidamos a varios. Protestad, enviad notas, actualizaremos el post, y ampliaremos las referencias.

Entre el resto de noticias del congreso, quizás las dos más reproducidas han sido la posible catastrófica tormenta solar que nos podría llegar en los próximos años, y los beneficios del bilingüismo. Y la noticia que llegará pronto para los periodistas científicos de todo el mundo: la cancelación definitiva de Egipto como sede de la conferencia mundial prevista para el próximo junio. Durante la reunión se barajaron alternativas, y en los próximos días conoceremos la opción escogida.

- Pere Estupinyà

(c) Patrick J Enders, more info http://bit.ly/e0T6pM

I started off this morning with an impulse to be wise-guy snarky, then thought better of it. But then again what the heck, here’s my cheap shot and then I’ll take it all back.

There is a brand of lead paragraph within nature and outdoors writing,  in both travel and science stories,  that starts off anecdotally and agog. I’ve done it myself. It occurs after one is blown away by the staggering splendor of locale. One may therefore be tempted to a lede such as “Our guide Boris, stirring the tiller like a butterchurn, kept our puny craft skittering madly among mountainous scallops of churning river. As we ricocheted   through an unnamed canyon amid dark cliffs of metamorphosed schist and glacial masses crystallized under eons of snowfall, the roar of the falls suddenly seemed to fade and time slowed. The transfixing majesty of Mount Stupifactdiferous rose before us, punctuating the purple tundra steppe beyond. ‘That’s it,” he shouted. “If we’re not drowned in the next hole, we’ll be at the basecamp by noon!’”

Such things, but written seriously, one suspects helped drive Joyce Carol Oates to sniff (famously)  at nature writing as “painfully limited … to reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness.”

Sure, sometimes a writer just has to share, however inadequately mere prose may serve, a great moment. I could not help myself from a brief giggle after reading, at a nearly-flawless pub*, two such openings in a row. Please check them out but withhold pre-judgment:

• High Country News – Tracy Ross: Palin, politics, and Alaska predator control ;
• High Country News/The Goat Blog – Sarah Gilman: Missing the subdivisions for the trees ;

Those are funny, but both are super stories anyway. To see such parallel starts is merely amusing.  Gilman’s, the second one is a blog. Its strength is in its truncation. It is about people spreading their carbon footprints while bemoaning everybody else’s, a seemingly hypocritical situation that is not only sometimes unavoidable but usually is pointed out by jerks amid much coarse hooting and jeering without merit. This is a cut above. She knew when to stop, wham. Her last line is perfect. See what comes after the text stops.

The first, from Ross, is on a serious and contentious topic. To shoot wolves in order to boost prey population or other reasons, it offers, is not an issue answered by quick or visceral instinct but demands research and reflection. For a scientist’s view of the issue, another good one:

• The Scientist – Gary Luck: Opinion: When to hunt the rare / Hunting can generate rvenue to boost conservation efforts, but when should it be allowed for endangered populations?

- Charlie Petit

* I went looking for HCN stuff this morning, after a return from AAAS in DC. I was taken by this year’s award winners of the AAAS journalism prizes. They included HCN regular Hillary Rosner, whose story One Tough Sucker won for small newspapers (HCN is a newspaper? Who knew?). Disclosure – she’s also a fellow this year at the Knight Science Journalism program at MIT, my employer.  We did post on Her HCN story when it came out.  In the lecture hall of the splendid new Nat’l Museum of the American Indian Rosner gave a fine thank you (as did all the winners). She  included another big thank you to her editors and you know who you are Michelle. So I looked to see what’s there now. Plus, good for me. I finally, after using “Hey I’m press”  to get access on line to its subscriber-only stories too many times for it to remain seemly , finally subscribed to it.