Other members of the tracking team may have posts tomorrow, Tue Feb. 22, but I’ll be flying back home from AAAS to CA and may not get much, or get nothing up. That includes my weekly run through the NYTime’s Science Times.

Catch-up and normalcy resume Wed.

- Charlie Petit

Let’s put a few true but statistically furry numbers on a transition now fully in place. That is the abandonment of daily science reporting. esp. when it requires expense account, by all but a handful of US newspapers. These  outlets once had dozens of correspondents in the annual pressrooms of the AAAS meeting.  The Wa Post is here, NYTimes has a presence, I saw an LA Times guy yesterday, but all in all, zilch. I shall tot up a snapshot compilation at the end of this post. I’ll list by category the kinds of pubs that are behind the many individual stories out of this meeting. That’ll include stories by reporters among the ~1,000 press room registrants on site, and others elsewhere using phone, email, teleconference feed, on line press release, or other kinds of virtual presence.

Now to the haul, with a brief description of the main news streams and the dispatches as I can find them. Some commentary will ensue. I’ll scan most, maybe almost all of them, top to bottom. I don’t expect that enough will stick to allow very many confident comments. I’ll not have them all, but enough to count on more than all my fingers and toes:

[] Mimosa Plant – or, by any other name it’s still biomimetics, plant division. Just one outlet covered news that the fast reflexes of mimosa plants may lead to new, quick-change, self-morphing materials. But of note is that it’s from Jean-Louis Santini, long time science writer at Agence France Presse. Recently I’ve been seeing more bylines on AFP’s English-service stories. One such other newly-emerged byline belongs to Kerry Sheridan of AFP’s DC Bureau, who’s sitting across the AAAS PressRoom workroom table from me (with Santini to her left). An upstate NY native who recently was in the MidEast Bureau, she informs us they’ve just added two reporters to the US science beat: , herself and lifestyle-science writer Karin Zeitvogel (sitting to MY left). Sheridan also will be translating more of Santini’s material to English. Good to see the service bulking up (and getting more generous with bylines on the science feed).

• AFP – JeanLouis Santini: Mimosa plant ‘could inspire machines of the future’ ;

[] Kepler Planetary Update: Bill Borucki of NASA Ames and other members of the wildly successful Kepler planet finding space telescope expanded on their recent revelations.The news is not so much new as it is a reinforcement of the burst early this month. Hence little coverage, but for beat reporters plenty of things to follow up later, more deeply.

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Cosmic census finds crowd of planets in our galaxy ; Seth says 50 billion planets, minimum, in Milky Way. Nobody said that at the press conference. Minor consternation ensued among other reporters after he filed. How’d he get that angle? Explanation: Seth missed the press conference. Saw Borucki afterward talking with a few reporters including Michale Lemonick of Time. “Just a nice chat where you riff together,” Borenstein says. Borucki says one in two stars has planets, Seth says let’s do the math, Borucki complies and double checks, and that’s why it can pay to be there in the flesh.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Planet probe spots hot prospects ; Boyle attended not only press conference but most of the session’s presentations – and queried Borucki from the hall audience about a sub-Earth-sized candidate. He also dove back into his story late in the day to update it and match the AP’s simple but dramatic statistics.
• Daily Mail (UK) – Daily Mail Reporter: First cosmic census estimates there are 50 BILLION planets in Milky Way ; Daily Mail does have a reporter here, David Derbyshire. Maybe he pitched in on this, which also seems to sample AP, among others. Story’s fine, long, and as is the Mail’s wont, LOADED with illus selected with considerably savvy.
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Milky Way Stuffed With 50 Billion Alien Worlds ;

[] A giant X-class solar flare, and worries about worse storms to come.

• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Scientists warn of $2000bn solar ‘Katrina’ ;
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: Space weather could wreak havoc in gadget-driven world ; The money quote: “Please don’t panic” (and the reporters laughed).
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: U.S. Must Take Space Storm Threat Seriously, Experts Warn ;
• BBC – Space storms threaten technology ; This must be a web-only posting. No voice over, no intro to this extended video clip of one NOAA man describing the flare and video of the flare popping off. A bit below, a BBC video of John Holdren is similarly scanty on intro, background, or voiceover.

[] Learning New Language Good for Brains, and not just when lost in France. It has to do with becoming adept at code switching. The news prompts a question: how well did the protocol deal with the chance that extra languages are associated with more education generally, and that such may be a more controlling factor? One hope some reporters asked.

• The Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: Speaking a second language could delay dementia by five years ;
• Science News – Bruce Bower: Bilingual babies cue in to languages ;
• AP - Speaking 2 languages may delay getting Alzheimer’s ; Nice line here: “Never learned to habla or parlez?” What about sprechen?
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Bilingualism delays dementia, say experts ;
• Western Mail (Wales) Aled Blake: Speaking Welsh may delay onset of Alzheimer’s ;
• The Independent – Steve Connor: Speaking a second language can delay dementia onset for years .
• AFP – Karin Zeitvogel: Being bilingual a good brain work-out, experts say.
• Guardian – Alok Jha: Being bilingual may delay Alzheimer’s and boost brain power ;
• Daily Mail – David Derbyshire: People who speak two languages are ‘better at multi-tasking and less likely to develop Alzheimer’s’ ;
• Nat’l Geographic News  – Christine Dell’Amore: To Stave Off Alzheimer’s,Learn a Language?
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Ability to speak two languages can delay dementia, research shows ; Dick’s not so bilingual himself, not even much Irish Gaelic. O’ course there’s a reason for that don’t ye know. He’s from Philadelphia, Pa. My, the things one learns in a press room.

[] Goop on the Gulf Floor, remnant oil spill, and the leftover mucus “bacterial spit” of microbes that dined on it.

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Scientist finds Gulf bottom still oily, dead ; Includes several points of view.
• Science News – Janet Raloff: Gulf floor fouled by bacterial oil feast; Patchy seafloor deposits are mix of microbial waste, oil, and other remnants of clean-up effort ;
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Oil from BP spill still on gulf floor ; Nice job presenting, concisely, the likely simultaneous truths that some seem to regard as incompatible: Bugs ate most of the oil; the gulf ecosystem is healing; some spots are still ruined for now; more research is needed (big surprise there), and BP is far from off the hook financially and politically.
• BBC – Jason Plamer: Gulf spill’s effects ‘may not be seen for a decade’ ; I can’t quite get that hed. True, the longterm eco effects will take awhile to assess, but most of the damage was manifest from the first weeks. It really means “Full Gulf spill’s effects……etc” It’s a profile of one scientist’s, Samantha Joye, assertions, likely true, that some regions won’t be healthy for a long time.

[] Science Adviser John Holdren on climate, on change, on risk, on Congress, and on doubt.

• BBC – John Holdren criticises US Congress over climate change ; A straightforward, extended video of Holdren answering a few questions. He says he looks forward to Congressional hearings. (for a glimpse of what’s coming, see a recent AAAS ScienceInsider report by Jeffrey Mervis).
• Independent – Steve Connor: US science chief warns: ‘China will eat our lunch,”

[] Deep Carbon Observatory:

• ISNS (Am.Inst. of Physics) Eric Betz: The Hunt For Earth’s Missing Carbon;

[] Aeroecology and swirling blips: Air traffic and doppler weather radar and years of their data archives detect populations and habits of massed birds and bats, bees and maybe swarms of gnats. Once more, as they say, one scientist’s noise is another’s data. This spot of news was, one offers, among the freshest and quietly delightful developments at the meeting.

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Weather radar clutter is boon for biologists ;
• Irish times – Dick Ahlstrom: Radar use sparks new science ;
• Science News (no byline?) Biologists go bats for storm-watch data ;
• BBC – Jason Palmer: ‘Aeroecology’ uses radar to track flying animals ;  Good description of watching on radar as bats rise from their caves and find insect swarms that weather fronts have caught and concentrated.
• The Beeb’s Pallab Ghosh also filed a video report. Among clips of the radar’s amazing portrayal of bats on the move he found a nice little bush with butterflies and bees on it for his stand up (actually sit down) face time with viewers.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Elizabeth Pennisi: Scientists Use Weather radar to Track Bats ;

[] LHC, the Higgs, and other Particle-Cosmology Intersection News ;

• The Telegraph – Andrew Hough: AAAS: Large Hadron Collider to prove ‘God Particle theory within two years / .. or it probably does not exist..; One would like to see this interesting angle pursued more deeply – do most particle physics theorists agree that if the Higgs is not in the LHC’s search space, it is probably nowhere?
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Big Bang Machine revs up again ;

And the totals are, by my count scrolling the screen as I’m in a hotel room with no printer so this may not be perfectly accurate:

• AP                  4
• BBC                  5
• AFP                 3
• US online      10
• UK newspapers  23
• US newspapers   0

The flat-lined zero for US newspapers is a misleading instance of small-number statistics Last week’s look at stories earlier in the meeting included ones from the LA Times, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, and Vancouver Sun. N. American newspapers are not entirely absent.

There are no shocks here. Times have changed. This is not a complete tally of the last few days, only the early arrivals from news events that may trickle on. Plus inevitably I’ve missed some stories that belong on the compilation. If I get word of examples I’ll add them and change the totals.

Every freelancer among the dozens, maybe scores or them here and most of them American, that I’ve asked says he or she has gotten leads on stories they expect to sell. I’ve also not tried to enumerate blogs and tweets or other such reports. These are mostly news stories written or broadcast in traditional style, although much of it on new platforms.

- Charlie Petit

Egyptian Alchemy - Science has a long tradition in Egypt

The whole world is listening to the news from Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Tunisia, Lebanon etc. Political turmoil. The leap toward democracy. So much news. But what about the science in these countries? Isn’t it important to get an idea about the scientific (and technological) background of Egypt and Tunesia and other Middle East/North African countries? How free are scientists in their research? What cultural or legislative hurdles do they face, when they try to do their research?

The question is, how sustainable can a democracy be without a thriving research community, without a societal consensus of acceptance of scientific thoughts? Democracies need independent scientists, because a rational, scientific view is needed for political discussions – especially in hot (emotionally hot) countries like the Middle East.

Actually, I don’t know much about the life of scientists in Tunisia or Egypt, about the funding system, about evaluation of the quality of science, about publication rules and censorship of scientific reports, about the influence of scientists in the political systems etc. But late 2009, I visited a conference about Darwin and evolution in Alexandria. (Perhaps my first biology conference ever, where I saw people praying in the lobby between speeches!). It was interesting and kind of puzzling (for a German) to observe. that biologists from Egypt and other Middle East countries may face  harsh reactions if they speak or even teach about Darwin and evolution. I learned, though evolution may not be literally in conflict to the written word of the Koran, evolution theory is seldom taught in high school and sometimes not even in universities in Egypt and other Middle East countries. This is just a glimpse, but I would like to read much more about the reactions of Egyptian scientists to the revolution and what role science will or will not play for the society and economy in a new Egypt.

Here are some articles from the science sections of German language newspapers dealing with the topic, at least a little bit.

Most science section just dealt with how the turmoils threatened the artefacts within the Egyptian Museum in Cairo: Süddeutsche Zeitung (here) writes very cautiously about the lootings, because different reports about what actually happened hint, that the regime tried to use the incident to discredit the protesters. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung had a short piece. And the Austrian Standard had an early article and one, two follow-ups. With a third one, stating, that some stolen artefacts have been found and brought back to the museum.

Die Zeit took a different path writing about German archaeologists in Egypt and how the revolt influenced their work on site (also: an interview here). Nevertheless, they also had the news about the looting (first, second). Digging a bit deeper than others, Die Zeit also had an article about the historic role of the military in Egypt.

The Tagesspiegel had an article about the fate of Zahi Hawass, the popular Minister of State for Antiquities Affairs in Egypt, his amount of companionship with the Mubarak-regime and his unclear role in the looting of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The Süddeutsche Zeitung had a piece about the fallen hero Hawass, too.

- Sascha Karberg

Yesterday morning and today I hauled my my Toshiba laptop plus Dell external monitor with its homemade plywood mount  for a dual-screen desktop, a bunch of cables, a fat pack of handouts and programs, plus Mrs. Tracker’s Kindle to read the NYTimes app, to the second floor of the Washington DC Convention Center. My office away from home is now sitting in a broad press workroom, a part of the usual  warren that is the press room for the  American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

The spot I took yesterday, early in the a.m. while everybody else was across town at a press breakfast with the AAAS president, was a lucky shot. Turns out a pack from the British Isles has encamped in the same corner. In sight right now,  putting  faces with bylines I’ve tracked for years, are Clive Cookson of the Financial Times, Dick Ahlstrom of the Irish Times, David Derbyshire of Daily Mail, Steven Connor of the Independent, Alok Jha of the Guardian, Mark Henderson of the Times, John von Radowitz of the Press Association, and Tim Radford – freelance now, helping out as a press conference moderator, and  formerly at the Guardian. All are within a span of 30 feet. And that’s hardly all of this year’s participation in the annual migration from Britain and Ireland to wherever the AAAS is meeting.

There are, of course, daily US reporters here plus scads of freelances and j-school student. Next to me is a freelancer from San Francisco, Lizzie Buchen, who writes often for Nature, and also nearby is another fellow Northern Californian, the very tall, outdoorsy freelancer Erik Vance. Across the way I spotted the NY Times’s Q&A wizardess Claudia Dreyfus, and several AP guys are here along with a gang from Science News led by its editor Tom Siegfried. NPR’s Joe Palca just drifted through too and Richard Harris was on a press panel a little bit ago in the next room over (along with a free lunch from the Kavli Foundation).

Many more old pals too. But I doubt as many working reporters as I just listed from the UK are here from American newspapers. Shrinking staffs, paltry travel budgets, and belief  that the AAAS is no longer a sure bet for cutting-edge news, all are factors.

We’ve already had one free wine-and-beer-and-tinyplatesoffood event last night, the reception for International Science Writing. There speculation was intense whether the World Federation of Science Journalists meeting in June, in Cairo, will go ahead as planned. Some worry it won’t be safe, that it ought to be moved or postponed or both. That could be wise – but while political and international affairs and general purpose war-and-calamity journalists head for Egypt to cover history, it would be a shame, one offers, if science journalists are too nervous to take a chance on it. The horrific beatings and other brutal attacks upon reporters in the last two weeks would give anybody pause. Still…   I had not planned on going in the first place. It looks more interesting now. Hmmmm.

Ah, there is a reason other than idle musing to put up this post. That is to list in one place some of the news and its coverage flowing from the halls, symposia, and press conferences. Some are by reporters here, others by those who sat in electronically or took advantage of tip sheets and press releases from elsewhere:

AAAS Stories:

[] Hibernating bears and their metabolic surprises: This was topic of an early press conference yesterday and, as it is in today’s Science, a natural focus for this meeting’s unavoidable herd journalism. News is that black bears, while not quite technically in full hibernation, are able to lower their metabolisms to a surprising degree, in some cases even while maintaining normal or near normal temperature.

• Telegraph – Richard Alleyne: AAAS: Bears take three weeks to wake up from hibernation ; Alleyne reports correctly that the study is on black bears. On line, at least, the illus looks to me pretty plainly to be a grizzly (not the one just above, that’s from the Independent) So it goes…
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Hibernating bears yield surprises ;
• NPR – Joe Palca – Hibernating Bears:  “A Metabolic Marvel’ ;
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Hibernating bears slow down but don’t chill out ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Hibernating black bears suggest new paths for tissue preservation ;
• Independent – Steve Connor: American science summit: How bears could help man get to Mars ;
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Hibernating black bears teach scientists space-age lessons ;
• Guardian – Alok Jha: Hibernating bears teach scientists tricks for human hibernation ;
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Hope for human hibernation heats up ;
• Times (via the Australian) Mark Henderson: Hibernation secrets of black bears could help humans ;
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: Hibernating bears could help human rescues ;
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: 5 Hibernating Bears Let Scientists Peek Into Their Dens ; Dunno aobut the “let” part of that hed. The story makes clear that uninvited intrusion occurred.
• Science News – Susan Milius: Hibernation Mystery ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Christine Dell’Amore: Hibernating Bears Keep Weirdly Warm ;
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise Hibernating bears drop metabolism – and snore;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: What hibernating bears can tell us about space travel ;
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Black bears’ metabolism dips significantly during hibernation, study shows,
• there are surely more..

Grist for the Bear Mill: U. Alaska Fairbanks Press Release ;

[] Radar, Bats, and Birds – Some people’s data are other people’s noise.

• Randolph E. Schmid: Weather radar clutter is boon for biologists ;

[] The Overfished Ocean ; A Univ. of British Columbia reported on the patterns of fishery declines and how society might be smarter about management.

• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: Fewer big fish in the sea, say scientist.
• Vancouver Sun – Predatory fish in sharp decline, UBC researchers say;
• Guardian – Alok Jha: Eat more anchovies, herring and sardines to save the ocean’s fish stocks ;
• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh (blog): Why the World’s Fisheries Are Going Bankrupt ;

Grist for the Overfished Mill: U. British Columbia Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

I don’t know about you, but I think of belugas as big white sausages with smiles on their faces, posing for post-card pictures while hogging Arctic inlets and leads in the ice pack. I’m no cetacean authority. Maybe they’re pretty tough customers. But I don’t assume them to be much good in an alley fight. So, when I ponder the possibility of a bunch of those pigment-free charmers sharing space with orcas, another image promptly pops up:  fatter killer whales and fewer belugas.

A few years ago I heard Inupiat whalers declaring amazement at the appearance of porpoises north of the Bering Strait. I hadn’t the wit to imagine orcas following along too. But at Yale’s Environment 360 a feature story by Ed Struzik provides many troubling scenarios of polar wildlife in collision with opportunistic migrants from the south. Struzik’s specialty is nature reporting stiffened by worry over climate change. He leads this story on grizzly bears showing up increasingly in white bear country and eventually gets around, among other things, to the belugas and narwhals and their new, and hungry, co-travelers. It’s a feature length expansion on recent formal reports, including a paper in Nature that got significant coverage as breaking news when it came out.

This is a readable and coherent long take. If one unbundles its antecedents a bit, one finds that Struzik in several days or perhaps weeks  crafted a needed, polished, longer, more atmospheric and narrative perspective on events that have been nibbled upon by daily press for years.

Stories from Dec 2010  Nature Paper:

• AFP (Dec. 19) Inter-species mating could doom polar bear ;
• Toronto Star (Dec. 17) Debra Black: Melting ice in Arctic could trigger new species of wildlife ;
• LiveScience (Dec 16) Janelle Weaver: Hybrid polar-grizzly bear a sign of Arctic’s future?/Narwhal-Beluga whale mix another possibility, experts say as habitat shrinks ;
• NYTimes (Dec 16) Leslie Kaufman: A Grolar Bear? The Perils of Shrinking Arctic Ice ;

And samples of other, earlier stories featuring Nature paper co-author Brandon Kelly, NOAA-Juneau researcher:

• Anchorage Daily News/Fairbanks News Miner (Apr 28, ’10): Melting Arctic ice could foster species interbreeding;
• Scientific American – Susannah F. Locke: Life at the Poles: Eight Polar Animals That Face the Promise and Peril of Climate Change ;
• AP (Mar ’07) Dan Joling : Low-profile ringed seals are warming victims ;

See also earlier post May 11, 2006, Canadian Press: “Grizlar” Shot in Canada’s North. Half Polar, Half Grizzly Bear ;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Massachusetts, Amherst, Press Release (Dec. 16) ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Perú has more than 2.000 different native species of potatoes. Many are endangered by environmental and socioeconomic reasons. In an effort to preserve this diversity, an agreement between the International Potato Center in Perú and The Global Crop Diversity Trust will send 1.200 seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway. We find decent reporting about this in Peruvian newspapers. Also, a good story about biofuels from sugar cane, and a Manifesto signed by Peruvian scientists, academics and business people asking to take advantage of the good economical moment in the country to reach the 1% of the GDP in research. Nowadays it is only the 0.15%. (Thanks Yazmín Rojas from Concytec for the information sent on the seeds preservation)

La impresionante diversidad de variedades nativas de papas en Perú (3.000 según esta nota en El Comercio) es una fuente de riqueza ecológica y económica para el país. Pero debido al aumento de fenómenos climáticos extremos (como heladas o sequías), y a que su cultivo óptimo se hace a altitudes cada vez más altas debido al calentamiento global, conservar esta biodiversidad es un reto cada vez más importante. Una iniciativa al respecto la anuncian esta semana varios medios, como El Comercio “1.200 semillas de papas nativas serán conservadas en el Ártico”, con información de la agencia peruana de noticias Andina: un acuerdo entre el Centro Internacional de la Papa y The Global Crop Diversity Trust permitirá enviar 1.200 semillas (no sabemos de cuantas variedades diferentes) a un centro noruego especializado en preservación de semillas de alta diversidad genética. Cubre la noticia también, sin mucha variación, Radio Programas del Perú (rpp), Nuevo ojo, o la versión impresa de El Peruano-pdf. (*) Quizá no es una noticia tan relevante, pero en un cultivo estratégico para el país, es justo que se transmita a los ciudadanos.

Y nos sirve para fijarnos en dos notas aparecidas el viernes pasado en El Comercio. No es periodista sino ingeniero, pero Ari Loebi en “Biocombustibles y alimentos” hace lo que siempre solemos pedir: adaptar las noticias globales a la realidad local. Según varias organizaciones los biocumbustibles son una de las causas del aumento de precio en los alimentos, y no deberían ser promovidos. Eso es cierto, pero como muy bien matiza Loebi, sólo en casos como la poco eficiente producción de etanol a partir de maíz que realiza Estados Unidos. Esa estrategia sí debe ser analizada con cuidado, pero otros cultivos como la caña de azúcar o la palma que pueden beneficiar al Perú, no deben ser considerados de igual manera. Con la salvaguardia que Loebi es Presidente del Comité de Biocombustibles y su opinión puede no ser neutral, muy buen artículo. De hecho, en otra nota vemos que la empresa Maple empezará a vender etanol obtenido a partir de caña de azúcar sembrada en el Valle del Chira. Y es que la innovación es clave para el desarrollo industrial y económico. Y social.

Ese es el mensaje principal del Manifiesto por la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Innovación (por el recién creado Foro por la CTI) que se puede leer en la versión impresa de La República, o Perú21 entre otros. El manifiesto ha unido a científicos, empresarios y académicos, que abogan por aprovechar el buen momento económico de Perú para establecer un progreso sólido apoyado por la inversión en Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación. Se marcan el objetivo de influir en el gobierno para aumentar el pobrísimo 0.15% del PIB que Perú invierte en ciencia, hasta el 1%. Nos parece genial. Sólo queremos añadir que, como muestran muchos estudios y ejemplos de éxito, la difusión de la ciencia y sus valores entre la población –desde el ciudadano al empresario y al político; es decir el conseguir una sociedad involucrada con la ciencia (public engagement with Science)- es un elemento facilitador imprescindible ante este objetivo. Y la presencia de la ciencia en los medios, tanto los convencionales como los nuevos, es fundamental. Ánimo ante esta importante tarea.

- Pere Estupinyà

(*) Muchas gracias Yazmín Rojas Blanco del CONCYTEC por apoyar en la búsqueda de información

Ksjtracker  cannot let pass without mention that a quick, momentarily near-vicious, and now more or less amicably resolved kerfuffle has this week put a bright light on the co-dependent but often awkward relationship between press officers and journalists / science writing division.

In catching a plane for AAAS and surviving other distractions, I failed to get to it now. Thank You to Charles Q. Choi, of LiveScience and other outlets, for bugging me and relaying various other reactions to this episode.

The short version is that well-known blogger and science writer Ed Yong of the UK, a tweet machine of the first water with a zillion followers, hoped to get a jump in reporting an embargoed story. He is best known for his blogsite Not Exactly Rocket Science on Discover. The p.r. man he reached may have been having a bad day, and it got worse. He stiff-armed Yong’s request for an advance copy of the paper and a way to contact its author.As the interaction went on, all recorded let it be known on email, he let fly with a few untoward remarks to Yong to the explicit effect that as a mere blogger he is not worth any more attention than than initial press release already had provided. Yong blogged on it (without naming names), other netizens filled in details, much ruckus ensued, and the dust is now settling.

Here are some  accounts, including the first one from Yong, another part way through the episode, and others suggesting it’s now ending amid a return to near civility, that provide details.  Best read in order:

• Ed Yong’s Posterous (Feb 13) : I think you have all you need for a blog. Very long, on-topic, string of comments, barbs, and counter-barbs from the principles and the bystanders.
• Embargo Watch – Ivan Oransky (Feb. 15) : How to demonstrate you’re not about transparency – and piss off reporters – as a PIO.
• Wired / Superbug blog – Maryn McKenna (Feb 15): How not to publicize science: A sad and cautionary tale. (Bring popcorn).. Terrific insight into the landscape of this skirmish, with updates.
• Embargo Watch – Ivan Oransky (Feb 16): Update …. An apology,  accepted.

- Charlie Petit

CREDIT S.WestRes Inst, via Space.com

Here’s an example of a feature story that got mistaken for breaking news – not by its publisher, but by a few other news outlets.

Planet X, under various guises, is a staple of science fiction that occasionally drifts like a hyperbolic comment through the orbits of science. Take Tyche. It’s been imagined for years, a planet bigger than Jupiter but far, far from the Sun, at the edge of the Oort cloud. All this inferred from oddities in the paths of comets it may have deflected. It’s not crazy, not a crank idea, merely a hypothesis with scant data.

The latest round (and we’ll get momentarily to earlier rounds) appears to have arisen at The Independent where Paul Rodgers, on weekdays a copy editor or sub-editor in UK parlance, wrote it as a Sunday feature  story. Rodgers is expanding his career to include science, and the Sunday pages get his offerings often. The hunt is on for this distant, gassy orb, he writes, and data gathered by NASA’s WISE spacecraft – optimized for detecting comets and asteroid -  could be the clincher to its reality. The Independent included a nicely done graphic (except for an astronomical misspelling, and take that literally) to show where it is. The story has a feature feel, explains that two  University of Louisiana astrophysicists have been pushing this idea uphill for a long time, and even mentions one flaw in the notion that, by implication, is a reason it has not carried the day among their colleagues.

Many followed this as breaking news. The angle at most is – who needs Pluto? -  that we may soon enough have again nine full-sized planets in our solar system.

Other Stories This Week:

• CBC : New huge planet may hide in solar system ; Yes, but this also cites a blog post from Bad Astronomy‘s Phil Plait on why to keep eyebrow cocked.
• PC Magazine – Petre Pachal : Is There a Massive Planet Hidden in hte Outer Reaches of the Solar System?
• Huffington Post – Dean Praetorius: Tyche, Giant Hidden Planet, May Exist In Our Solar System ;
• NY Daily News – Michael Sheridan: Could space telescope WISE reveal Planet X? Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire hope so ;
• Village Voice – Nick Greene: The solar System Has a Badass New Planet Named Tyche ;
• Space.com via Fox News – Natalie Wolchover: Astronomers Question Existence of Solar System’s Mystery Planet Tyche ; Good for Wolchover – she dissects the claim and traces its roots. One question is why, upon finding this feature is not news, she didn’t just tell the assignment desk this is old so forget it? Still, well done. Her beat, by the say, is listed as “Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer.”
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Mystery Planet: Is a Rogue Giant Orbiting Our Sun? This is a good one.  Lemonick, an old hand at these things, treats it as a sampling of internet-fed frenzy, and traces its origins nicely. He gets into corollaries, such as the Nemesis death star idea.
• Time Magazine NewsFeed – Elizabeth Tyler: A Nine-Planet Solar system Once More? NASA Telescope May Reveal New Planet, Tyche; This ran two days ago, a credulous rewrite. One surmises it is what inspired Lemonick’s piece, one bullet up.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: 2012 Watch: Don’t fret over PlanetX ; Boyle, too, seems to be making a sigh, and patiently explaining that this is not a nutso-fruitcake idea, but it’s not new and not yet persuasive to the rest of the academy. He even, thank you very much, includes a link to the Louisiana pair’s latest paper, see Grist below.

The lesson here is that other major outlets did not pick up the Independent’s piece, but it appears to have set off a frenzy among bloggers and aggregators, and the difference is, one expects, that other reporters did some checking. This is not so much a dig at the original story, clearly to these eyes a feature. One that merits checking, but such checking would show it has little that is essentially new. The waiting evidence from the WISE telescope seems too slender a reed to support fresh coverage generally.

Anyway, even this has been reported before:

• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman (Nov. 29, 2010): Dark Jupiter May Haunt Edge of Solar System ; Much the same, in its info, as the Independent story – also more calmly composed.
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi (Dec. 1) Giant Stealth Planet May Explain Rain of Comets from Solar System’s Edge ; Ditto.
• Rp.pl – Krsysztof Urbanski: (Dec 7)  Czy Słońce obiega gigantyczna planeta. I can’t read a word of it. Looks like Polish. But seems to be the same story.

Grist for the Mill:

Original paper in Icarus, via arXiv: Persistent Evidence of a Jovian Mass Solar Companion in the Oort Cloud ;

- Charlie Petit

An official shift may just have occurred not only in news coverage of climate change, but the way that careful scientists  talk about it. Till now blaming specific storms on climate change has been frowned upon. And it still is, if one is speaking of an isolated event. But something very much like blaming global warming for what is happening today, right now, outside the window has just gotten endorsement on the cover of Nature. Its photo of a flooded European village has splashed across it, “THE HUMAN FACTOR.” Extreme rains in many regions, it tells the scientific community, is not merely consistent with what to expect from global warming,  but herald its arrival.

This is a good deal more immediate than saying, as people have for some time, that glaciers are shrinking and seas are rising due to the effects of greenhouse gases. This brings it home.

The news is in two papers published today. One, by a team based mainly in Canada, looks at broad statistics across the northern hemisphere and concludes not only that rising rates of extreme precipitation events can be pinned directly on changes in greenhouse gases, but that models on which researchers have relied for prediction have underestimated the effect. The team spells it out in its paper: this is “the first formal identification of a human contribution ot the observed intensification of extreme precipitation.”

The second, from a UK-dominated team, used a “multi-step, physically-based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework” to pick apart a stretch of intense flooding in England and Wales in late 2000, the worst since record keeping started in 1766. The conclusion: without greenhouse forcing those floods probably would not have occurred.

Many reporters leapt on the news. Here are some of the stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Scientists connect global warming to extreme rain; He writes, “Essentially, the computer runs show climate change is the only way to explain what’s happening.”
• NY Times – Justin Gillis: Heavy Rains Linked to Humans ;
• NPR – Richard Harris: Researchers Link Extreme Rains To Global Warming;
• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: Floods linked to manmade climate change: studies ;
• Guardian (UK) blog – George Monbiot:  Climate change and extreme flooding linked by new evidence ; Nice job dissecting the difference between labeling a change in the pattern of weather, and one particular storm, on climate change.
• Telegraph – Louise Gray: Floods caused by climate change ; This one pays attention only to the UK floods of 2000, with nothing for the perhaps more significant hemispheric analysis.
• NatureNews – Quirin Schiermeier : Increased flood risk linked to global warming ;
• AFP – Marlowe Hood: Increased flooding driven by climate change: study;
• National Geographic – Brian Handwerk: Extreme Storms and Floods Concretely Linked to Climate Change?
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: Greenhouse gases led to increase in deluges, researchers say ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Climate change raises flood risk, researchers say; Note the difference between these last two heds. Small but important. The first one says it’s already done it. The second that the risk is getting higher, which is far more abstract, sounds like what we’ve read before, and less likely to hit a reader in the gut.
• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Study: Climate change linked to extreme rain;
• Scientific American – David Biello: Are Greenhouse Gases Uppng the Risks of Flooding, Too?

There are many more. This is enough to show that  the big, mainline outlets tend to agree this is important.

Grist for the Mill: Oxford University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

In Monday’s Washington Post Brian Vastag recounts what appears to be a disturbing example of a missed opportunity to save many lives. Data gathered by a European weather institute indicated a week or more ahead of time signs of trouble for Pakistan last July – and  that the immense floods and stalled monsoon system that devastated much of the country did not have to come with next to no warning. But nobody analyzed and highlighted the information for the affected region.

This news has been around for a few weeks. In Grist is the press release Georgia Tech (Correction: American Geophysical Union) put out at the end of January to bring attention to a paper, in Geophysical Research Letters, by one of its scientists. But Vastag gives it proper attention. (Minor flub note: it’s the World Meteorological Organization (not Association), and Geophysical Research (not Review) Letters.)

Thank you to science writer Catherine McMullen for the tip and for the link to another outlet, SciDev.Net, where reporter A. A. Khan a few days ago reported that Pakistani scientists reject the idea that they may have been able to issue warnings. They tell Khan that the data did not provide reliable indication of the immense storms that followed.

Grist for the Mill: AGU Press Release (Jan 31) , also reposted by Georgia Tech.;

- Charlie Petit

Look at that picture. It’s a comet. One sees no jets of stuff flying off, perhaps due to contrast settings in the video, but it does look sort of like what one expects of a comet. It’s smooth, looks bright, and has only a few and mostly subdued craters. Just as one expects of something that has been subliming itself into the void for a long time. Some other comets have looked rather rugged and craggy, more like asteroids. This one is comfier.

As heralded, NASA’s Stardust Mission – long after making a pass by another comet – passed near comet Tempel 1 late last night US time and took pictures. One doesn’t know if any show the scars of the heavy pellet a different probe, Deep Impact, fired into it. As I write, the pics and their analysis are still in process. It could be, one must concede, that the experts will say my intuition of what a proper comet ought to look like is loonie. Maybe the classic ones are all fluffy and bumpy. This one does look like a stream-smoothed quartz pebble, come to think on it further.

Early reports include:

• Chr. Science Monit0r – Pete Spotts: 72 new images of ocmet Tempel 1 streaming in from Stardust-NExT flyby ; Including that one top right.
• AP – Alicia Chang – NASA craft snaps pics of comet in Valentine fling ; Chang reports that NASA got surprised by the first images – they were coming back in backwards order from what it expected. Instead of the tightest images, the first to arrive are the long distance shots of a dot.
• I’ll catch up, maybe Thursday (or Wed., but am spending early part of the day on a plane to DC for AAAS meeting).

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

*UPDATES (Feb. 17) First reports of the early analysis by mission scientists focus not only on the smushed spot where Deep Impact did exactly that, but also a series of subtler erosions to its surface since the last close-up photos in 2005.

• Los Angeles Times via Washington Post - Amina Khan: Tempel 1 comet surface may be much more fragile than thought ; The kind of hyperbole that no one takes seriously yet works – the mission, researchers told reporters, was 1000% successful.
• USA Today ScienceFair – Dan Vergano : NASA comet flyby sends belated Valentine’s Day image ;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: ‘Deep Impact’ comet revisited ; NASA takes pictures of Tempel 1 five years after shooting it with probe ;
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: NASA’s Stardust braves cometary flak ; Sensible job, no boffins. I sort of miss them.
• Nature News – Richard A. Lovett: Stardust-NExT measures changes over one ‘comet year’ ;
• Space.com – Tariq Malik: Artificial Crater on Comet Spotted in New Flyby Photos ;

More Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release

- Charlie Petit

The chewiest piece today in NYTimes’s science section is not the lead article, but just below the front page fold. Ace information technology writer John Markoff outlines a book he ought to write as he smushes a load of information into about 50 column-inches, marching readers through the history and rapid recent progress in making computers that can talk, reason, infer, deduce, answer, and almost free-associate in ways that will put a lot of people out of work. Speaking of the book he should write, anybody interested in this article should also read the review by the Times’s Katherine Bouton of a book, of the same general genre, recently out from Michael Chorost with the discomfiting title, World Wide Mind.

Kirk Johnson‘s recent visit to the National Solar Energy Laboratory in Colorado is recounted in his section leader on the new, close-to-net-zero energy using headquarters building. Johnson provides further reflection in a blog on this assignment. Fine pictures and well-detailed reporting on the myriad ways this building reconfigures itself through the day to let sun and other natural weather elements displace air conditioning, light bulbs, and so forth. I want to visit it some day. But, as he reports, it’s still relying on the outside grid to get along. A parking structure covered in solar panels, not yet done, could put it over the hump. Perhaps underplayed is his brief mention that the cost per square foot of this place is less than the average for such efficient structures. I usually don’t mention who took photos – just too busy – but the ones from Patrick Andrade for this piece are stunning. The one top right is so stark and geometric it looks like a video game operation invented the scene.

Other headlines to note:

• Donald G. McNeil, Jr.: Can Polio Be Eradicated? A Skeptic Now Thinks So ; McNeil wrote two weeks ago on the attack on polio (ksjt post here), with Bill Gates the spear carrier in front. New he shares important info with readers. It is also among the stranger events that might befall a reporter. One prominent source, just a few days after the interview with McNeil, completely reversed his position. That position was an important element in McNeil’s report.  The man now tells him, “I apologize … It’s not my wont to turn on a dime like this.”
• Carl Zimmer - Camera Doesn’t Lie: Fleas’ ‘Feet’ Unleash That Spectacular Leap ;

As usual much more – whole section.

- Charlie Petit