The other day this here tracker jumped ahead of some of the facts, which is not the first time it’s happened. This one came as, citing one single AP story, I posted that US press did not try to blame the gigantic winter storm that swallowed the Midwest earlier this week on global warming. I did have a few caveats in my declaration but have to confess thinking nobody in media overtly made that connection. This was all as set-up for the contrasting  global warming angle that many reporters in Australia pursued after a cyclone swept through Queensland, which already has been hit by floods of historic scale this season.

Well, just now, I noticed at the Christian Science Monitor pickup of a story that straight-up says the recent big snow here is exactly what one should expect in a warming world:

• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: Climate change will bring more monster winter storms / The massive snowfall currently blanketing large swatch of the US East and Midwest are exactly what climate models predict in a warming world.

That’s a lot of verbiage for a hed and deck. It also captures the story. Pappas even called the embattled scientist, Michael Mann, whose hockey stick plot of millennial scale global temperature trends has become for contrarians a favored punching bag (never mind that refereed-journal and top scientific panel reviews strongly validate that hockey stick, even while acknowledging that skeptics did find some (non-fatal)weaknesses in its initial data analysis methods.)

The story works hard to assure readers that no specific storm can be blamed in isolation on global warming (by the way, in the same earlier post linked above, I left a comment reply today explaining why, in my humble opinion,  it is ALL global warming but that this can mean nothing). Pappas’ story also explains pretty well why and how a warming world can make winters in some places stormier and even colder.

Related News:

• USA Today – Doyle Rice: Arctic warmth: Sea ice at record low levels in January ;

Perhaps the hed on Rice’s story should have said for January. But even if it had, the string of howling public comments his story elicits would probably be about the same.  Is there a tribe of people who seek out climate stories every day to lambaste them with comments of the sort that this one got? It’s a very brief report, on uncontested observations that temperatures in parts of the Arctic have been high and that sea ice, while growing in the winter’s darkness, has lately been growing slower than at any time since satellites started providing data on it.

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Snow and Ice Data Center Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis.

- Charlie Petit

In December a small bolus of news stories from Japan, including one on the Associated Press, celebrated rediscovery of the black kokanee, or kunimasu salmon that had been thought extinct for decades in its lake habitats near Fuji. This site ran a post on it. To quote that post, which noted there remain many questions, “It is to be hoped that a reporter, somewhere, will follow it up in a few months to see how it holds up in light of genetic studies or other additional research.” I  wondered if it is best regarded as salmon or trout, for one thing.

A reporter somewhere did follow up:

• National Geographic – Julian Ryall (Jan 31) : ‘Extinct” Salmon Discovered in Japanese Lake ;

Except it’s not a follow up, it’s a re-do. This one has better pictures than the earlier ones I’d tracked, and better-explained detail on who found what and where and the meaning of it. The puzzle is that while  NG’s news service generally comports itself as a regular news service, this is written as though it has discovered something fresh. The report would better have acknowledged that the main aspects have already gone public fairly broadly, and then have told readers what there is further to say.

- Charlie Petit

Rising in prominence within the club of laboratory science model organisms, alongside such stars as various white mice (and rats), Planarian flatworms, the mustard plant Arabidopsis (and the tobacco plant), and Drosophila fruit flies, is the ubiquitous little pond-flittering water flea, Daphnia pulex. This I didn’t know as a model animal, although surely I’d run across it somewhere. Plenty of other people are getting to know Daphnia a little better this morning. It already is heavily used for study of its diverse reactions to changing environments. Now its genome has been sequenced and found to be quite large – in fact a record-holder -, dynamic, and loaded with novel genes unlike any seen in any other creature. Yet its genome has little of that mysterious stuff called junk DNA. It is the first crustacean genome in the ledger. So says an int’l team in today’s Science. The authors call this their flagship paper, but at their site (in Grist) they list 50 other papers they’ve published on details too numerous to fit on one flagship. Indiana U., headquarters of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium, splashed the news wider via press release. A few other universities and the NSF did too. Several  outlets wrote it up.

First I saw of it was this morning long after diligent reporters did so, via  Science‘s own SciPak corner for its embargoed stuff at AAAS’s EurekAlert! service. Any creature that, upon merely smelling a potential predator, can promptly grow “tail spines, helmets, and neck teeth” is hard to turn away without a closer look.

It provides a chance for science reporters to show what they can do as story tellers, entertainers, and explainers. Such a paper has no particular or urgent policy implications one can think up beyond justification of public money for basic science. Immediate impacts for the person on the street  – even though this creature is a barometer of pollution’s effects – are nothing compared to development of a good malaria vaccine or safe weight-loss pill or something of that sort. Write on.

Stories:

• Cosmos – Elizabeth Finkel: Sequencing Daphnia ; The news may be the genome, but Finkel makes the right call. Introduce the little jitterbugs first, then get to the news part.
• NPR – Joe Placa: Tiny Water Flea Clocks in Record Number of Genes ;  Promptly, he explains why early naturalists called them fleas. They turn red sometimes. Looked like they were bloodsuckers. But no, they make their own hemoglobin.
• Toronto Star – Debra Black: This flea has more genes than we do – and why it matters ; Pedestrian hed, but story with a beguiling intr0 to the main author, who has been nuts about these things since high school.
• USA Today/ScienceFair blog – Dan Vergano: Water flea genome makes leap from lab ;
• Irish Independent – John von Radowitz: Water flea has most complex genome ;
• LiveScience via MSNBC – Stephanie Pappas: Tiny water flea’s promising role: environmental monitor; Not sure here, but I think the writer mistook reference to “duplicated genes” to mean just two copies. But am unsure of that – the paper is, no surprise, hard on lay eyes. Pappas’s story has a nic,e if unclear in precise meaning, term for the creature: the Swiss Army knife of crustaceans.
• CBC (Canada) Sharon Oosthoek: Tiny water flea, many genes ;
• Nature News – Virginia Gewin: Water flea genome offers revolution in toxicity testing ; Technically a high water mark among this group of stories, and best on institutional context.
• Wired.UK – Mark Brown: Tiny water flea has more genes than any other creature so far ;  Good enough, but I’d argue against calling it “near microscopic.” They’re pretty big – larger than regular fleas. More like good-sized ants. They tend to be translucent, but one can see them with the naked eye. (But they’re not green and red like in this micrograph.)
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: Copious Genes of Tiny Water Flea Promise a Leap in Understanding Environmental Toxins;

*UPDATES

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman (Feb. 13) : Water flea vital to our survival ; Perlman gets off the daily news frenetic pace and writes a reflection on the water flea and modern science (’tis likely, one thinks, his breaking-news story got held so he buffed it to run as a Sunday thinker in the ‘Insight” section).
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II (Feb. 5) :Tiny water flea has longest genome ;

- end updates -

There are others out there I could track. Perhaps I missed it, but none that I saw tell readers how much this effort cost in grant money, public and private. Somebody must have a rough count. Our society has curmudgeons who resent their taxes going for things that can be made to seem like mere entertainment for intellectuals who they’d prefer to see working on somebody else’s dime. This must’ve cost millions, many and perhaps most of them federal dollars. So somebody might as well find out the number and get it over with. Otherwise we’ll read, during elections to come, of the $X-travagant amount spent for DNA paternity testing of water fleas (which is how an infamous, yet important, study of grizzly and black bear DNA got zinged).

Grist for the Mill:

Indiana University Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; UC Davis Press Release; Univ. New Hampshire Press Release ; Woods Hole Marine Biological Lab Press Release ; Daphnia Consortium bibliography ;  ;

YouTube: Lots of videos of this things, some with fancy music. I like this one. It looks like a jumpy flea. But it needs a soundtrack.

- Charlie Petit

Image source ;

Cyclone Yasi Feb. 2, NASA MODIS image

One thing for sure in coverage of that massive and violently windy storm that just blew to sea after rendering the Midwest briefly blind, inert, white, cold, and unplowed – few pinned it on global warming or anything else anthropogenic. The AP’s Randolph E. Schmid in his write-up, mainly blaming La Niña and the Arctic Oscillation writes that his source answers the question “Can we blame climate change” with a firm no.

Not so firmly agnostic on climate change is the press in Australia after Cyclone Yasi, a real monster with wind gusts estimated at 180mph+ as it came ashore yesterday and blasting parts of Queensland. Down under and in much of world, to remind us all, what we’d call a hurricane is a cyclone and, axial tilts being what they are, it is now summer there and hence cyclone season.

It seems that a government science adviser has warned (again) that climate is changing, storms and other extremes will get worse, and that Yasi is just one in a parade of foul weather events heading Australia’s way. Thus the climate link to specific storms – a link that may not be narrowly causal so much as illustrative of the ruckus to come – is getting lots of play.

Stories:

• Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Garnaut warns Yasi is only the beginning ;
• Melbourne Herald Sun – Phillip Hudson: Worst disasters to come – professor ;
• The Australian – Sid Maher: Science suggests there’s much worse to come: climate change adviser ; It says here that in every range of possibiities forecast by the IPCC, reality is tracking “right at the top,” and that there is “no area where sceptical vies of the science coulddraw strength from peer-reviewed research published in the past five years.” It also says the science adviser on climate change is not, um, an actual scientist. Well, that’s not a fatal flaw, is it? Plus the adviser actually says “you ain’t seen nothing yet.” Isn’t that, Jimmy Durante be blessed, supposed to be nothin’ yet?
• The Age -Lenore Taylor: Future cyclones could be more extreme: Garnaut.
• News.com.au – Malcolm Farr: Government’s global warming adviser Ross Garnaut warns of worse natural disasters to come ;

None of these reports, unless I missed something, has contrary or further opinion from researchers who might be eager to comment on the adviser’s analysis. Too bad. The news cries out for greater diligence by reporters.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a nice example of why it is important, if there is time, to call around on a science story and talk to some experts who didn’t do the research that led one to write up a topic in the first place.

Science News‘s Daniel Strain tackled some news on optical cloaking that has gotten a dollop of coverage elsewhere too. The basic news involves calcite crystals. If you’ve never fooled around with one of these natural minerals, you’ve missed some fun. Put a little slab of it on a printed page and its aligned internal optical avenues transport the print’s image underneath it to its top surface. Now two teams have shown one can arrange such crystals in a fashion that they make a so-called carpet cloak, one that has a wrinkle in it but looks flat and in which one can hide things without all the mumbledy-jumble of exotic metamaterials that demand a PhD in mathematical physics to really get. Plus, it works with things larger than worked in previous efforts.

Fine, and the story has a reference to hiding submarines, and allusions to Harry Potter, all well done but routine for such news stories. But he also called up a fellow in Scotland who pioneered the really complicated field of metamaterial cloaking for his reaction to this research, which he did not help produce himself. Strain was rewarded with a terrific quote. It’s his kicker, and you ought to read the whole story, but here it is:

(Ulf) Leonhardt says the future of optical legerdemain lies not in hiding things, but in revealing them. He uses the same geometric tools to design better microscope. “We use similar ideas not to make things disappear but to make them visible,” he says.

- Charlie Petit

(Top of post filed yesterday, Feb 2. Updates below)

The Tracker is reeling back on his heels, late in this Wednesday morning after a check to see what reporters have on the Kepler Mission’s teleconference that summarized the big cache of data on extrasolar planets that the team has been sitting on. Some colleagues were steamed over the withholding till now. There’s a trove already out and many reporters no doubt are still scrivening away, their deadlines hours away yet.

Tomorrow or maybe later this afternoon I’ll try for a fuller roundup. This partial one is prompted in part by that illus top right, which for an artist’s rendition is well above the norm – evoking perfectly the proliferation of planets that this new pronouncement provides (and I can’t help it, my brains are wired for alliteration). The pic at left show where, in Kepler’s little field of view, its inferred planets are. And if after digestion any high-falutin’ critical comments rise in my cranium, I’ll share those too. So far I can see that headline writers are trying to decide – it the news the few dozen that might be like Earth, that 1,200 new planets in all are now (potentially) on the list, or the star Kepler 11 that has a whole big litter of planets all by itself, and whizzing like fireflies too close to the flame?

Early-landing stories, a few:

• AP- Seth Borenstein: NASA spots 54 potentially life-friendly planets ;
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Kepler Planet Hunter Finds 1,200 Possibilities ; A piñata he says! This may be the best lede of the lot.
• Washington Post – Marc Kaufman: Solar system with six exoplanets, others in habitable zones found by NASA’s Kepler ; If it’s another star why is it a solar system?. And once were talking about another star, does that star have exoplanets or does is have plain planets, as the exo part is built into it being another star. Just wondering…
• Nat’l Geographic News – Victoria Jaggard: Six New Planets; Mini-Neptunes Found Around Sunlike Star
• Wired News – LIsa Grossman: Exoplanet Hunter Finds Bounty of Multi-Planet Solar Systems ;
• Space.com – Denise Chow : NASA Identifies 54 Potentially Habitable Alien Planets ;

*UPDATES (Thur Feb 3)

One thing of little consequence to notice is that  the word exoplanet has retaken a substantial lead over the more unwieldy term extrasolar planet.  A Google poll indicates it has held the lead for some time, but my impression, admittedly data-free,  is that for awhile extrasolar planet was gaining ground. Brevity is better.

The first story listed here, from BBC, includes a link to the main paper from the Kepler team, submitted to Astrophysical Journal and now on the ArXiv astro-ph on-line-preprint-firstloook-astronomical-watering-hole thing. That led to discovery of a series of related papers at arXiv. All are thornily technical. I’ve added them all to Grist for the perusal of those highly educated in real deal physics and astronomy among ksjtracker’s bright audience.

This mission is already so astoundingly successful and exquisitely difficult to craft, one thinks it’s too bad there are few Nobel Prizes for cool instruments. One thinks in a perfect world the original Swiss team and US team that provided with their precise doppler spectrometry the first wave of exoplanets, and now Wm Borucki and his Kepler program debouching a tsunami, ought to share something of Nobel-caliber. This planet-finding thing, on full rage since 1995, is big and a big share of the public loves it.

The news is so info-packed that initial stories can’t embrace it all. How many of the stars are sunlike, G-stars. Are there red dwarfs among them? How much like our sun’s habitable zone are those of the planets now on parade? How long before, or how hard will it be to make, instruments that can take these worlds from inferred dots to spectroscopically decanted worlds with air that looks as though life is pacing its composition, and to find (closer than this lot) similar examples of which we might take pictures of  clouds, hints of ocean and land, circling moons?

• BBC – Jason Palmer: Exoplanet hunt turns up 54 potentially habitable worlds ; Good use of  stats, making the point in machine gun style: 68 Earth-sized candidates, 288 Super-Earth, 662 Neptune sized, 184 Jupiters, etc. And as he points out, this in just the first four months of a multi-year mission ( longer observation is needed to be sure of more beguiling other earths, with year-scale orbital periods).
• New Scientist – David Shiga: Found: Dozens of planets candidates smaller than Earth ; At least two dozen, anyway, smaller than Earth. Maybe 20 percent of overall haul may be  false positives, Shiga reports.
• Universe Today – Ken Kremer: Kepler Discovers First Earth Sized Planets inside Habitable Zone.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Exoplanet Bonanza Boosts Count By 1,200 ; Some editors out there say lots of numbers in a story is a turn-off for readers. Too bad. Klotz packs hers with numbers, and it works just fine. She also reveals she had a firm grasp of this mission, its history, and its significance even before the press conference yesterday. And her last graf shows she understood the multiple strands of data making news in one day. Not all reporters did.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Telescope offers hope for new life in the cosmos ;  Hed seems askew, as what we all want is life old enough to have gotten intelligent and to have invented radios. Dan’s story has nothing to do with new life as much as it is a sprint through the data highlights. He writes this is one year of discovery – it’s more like four months. See also Vergano’s ScienceFair blog Kepler exoplanets excite astronomers ; Notes that the 1,200+ planets so far – actually, first four months and who knows what fresher data the team is sitting on – are about what mission boss Borucki said he expected from four years of observations. Vergano’s brief post includes sizeable reactions from astronomers outside the core team.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Kepler spacecraft finds more than 1,000 planets ; Perlman’s probably discounting the 1200+ “candidates” reasonably enough, putting the likely number that will be confirmed as beyond 1000 for sure. He however should have rephrased the part about the telescope surveying only 1/400th of its field of view. I’m guessing it surveyed a large patch of what it can see at one time – its field of view – which perhaps is 1/400th of the whole sky.
• The Economist : Vulcan’s mates / The search for other Earths is hotting up ;
• AFP – Richard Ingham: Astronomers discover six planets ; This dispatch from Paris is hard to figure. It has the news of one paper in Nature, confirming a six-planet system at one star, while saying nothing of the larger Kepler announcement.
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Alien Planet Hunt’s Next Big Step: Finding Another Earth ; Holy Grail alert! But after one fights through the cliche at the top, a much-needed perspective on what the mission has accomplished: to vindicate plans for further generations of far more powerful instruments to reveal the worlds behind Kepler’s census of blips.
• Belfast Telegraph: Kepler telescope finds Earth twins ; Where to start? This story is an example of what happens when staff rewrite turns press releases and other people’s stories into hash. It mixes up the announcement on the star Kepler-11 with the larger one on the first four months’ census, and powerfully implies astronomers have confirmed a few planets of Earth size as well as climate.
• Reuters – Maggie Fox : Space Telescope spots odd new solar system ; This is better than the one in the immediately preceding bullet, but appears to be a rewrite of an account on the one, six-planet system to include just a bit on the bigger news of 1000+ new planets of hundreds of stars, some in the habitable zone. The result gives the better stuff short shrift.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Kepler telescope’s astonishing haul: 54 planet-candidates in ‘habitable zone’ ; Nice job, no Holy Grail, but an ‘ultimate goal’ instead. One doubts however that the ultimate goal is to merely detect an Earth-sized planet in a similar orbit of a similar star. That may be all Kepler can do, but the ultimate goal is to then closely inspect such planets.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft finds planetary neighbors ; He has the longest word of all among  these stories. It’s the one that you can sing. He also has a good sense of perspective on what the trove implies for further discovery.
• LA Times – Amina Khan: NASA finds dozens of planets that might support life ;

And finally, a Kepler story with a different angle. This was filed on the eve of the big announcement, but has valuable and calm perspective:

• BoingBoing – Lee Billings: Science and press conferences:  Seeing our own shadow ; On groundhog day and, “misleading statements to the contrary,” on the deeper reason Kepler is staring into that star field day after day after day. Billings concocts a clever term when he writes that the hunt for life, however easy it is to get journalists to obsess on it, is an “asymptotic frontier.”

Grist for the Mill: NASA Kepler Mission News Page ; Kepler team posted on arXiv-astroph: Overview by full team, Transit Timing Operations , Kepler’s Multiple Transiting Planet Systems , Atmospheres of hot-Jupiters Kepler-5b, 6b ; Orbital eccentricities ;

- Charlie Petit

I have three not-quite news stories on climate change that have recently landed on the doorstep, each sticking in my memory. So I’ll lump them all together and, just to throw some polemical spice and melodrama on top, finish with one of the most distressing -  if unfathomable in its larger scheme importance – news stories I’ve read recently.

Two of these are from Yale University, one apiece from its overlapping climate change public outreach projects. Each is something for reporters on the climate beat to have read.

• Yale e360 – Michael Lemonick (Jan 18): Can We Trust Climate Models? Increasingly, the Answer is ‘Yes.” ; Lemonick, best known recently for work at Climate Central and Time Magazine before that (and still, on occasion), does not dance around the pure impossibility of getting all the physics into general circulation models. Nobody know what all the physics is. Clouds are too complicated, for instance. So the public’s right, there are fudge factors (parameterizations) and grid-size problems. But, it says here, the models do okay and are getting better.
• Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media – Zeke Hausfather: Global Temperature in 2010: Is is the Hottest Year on Record, and Does it Matter? ;  This is a paper, not a journalism exercise, but it is the best synthesis in plain English that I’ve seen on the many annual trackings of global temperatures that all landed recently with their figures for 2010. Most interesting from here is its reminder that while global averages are going up and get the most ink, the data subset that may be more pertinent to most of us is the land temperature trend. Oceans are so slow to react, and so broad in area, they partly mask what people experience.

Third, an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at U. Missouri-St. Louis, Richard D. Schwartz, has been sending a commentary of his to several of us in the science journalism community, hoping to provide some background on global warming, climate models and their embedded physics. It is well-written, a bit on the pedagogic side, and not a news story at all. But I am happy to share it around if only because it explains something to me I’d not known at all (and would hardly make it into a news story either).  If you’d like to know something about greenhouse gases beyond which molecules are such and that they absorb infrared radiation, specifically about how they do that and why they turn it into mechanically heating their neighborhoods and why it works differently at low v. high altitudes (and on other planets) , this’ll tell you. It the author’s bio at the end.

• Richard D. Schwartz: Climate Change: Supposition or Science? ; (MSword document) ;

Fourth and  last, & at the risk of sowing melancholy….a news story on a polar bear and her cub who swam away from a spot near Barrow, Alaska, seeking sea ice.

• Los Angeles Times – Kim Murphy (Jan 29): Polar bear’s long swim illustrates ice melt ;

* UPDATE: Okay, we got a FIFTH ITEM. A tipster alert us to an example of a science reporter (term used loosely) who is looking for professorial sources, but only ones who agree already with the contrarian angle he is pursuing. He reports, and he decides for you too…

• Gawker – Hamilton Nolan: Fox News Columnist Seeks Sources to Scoff at Global Warming ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Lots of ink in the Spanish press regarding the therapeutic AIDS vaccine designed by researchers at the Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, that reduced the viral load in the majority of AIDS patients that participated in the phase I study. The vaccine is crafted from the dendritic cells of the actual patient. Although it does not have the strength needed to eradicate, these are the best results up to now. The ultimate aim is to avoid expensive and life long treatments with antiretroviral drugs. Spanish reporters show varying optimism regarding this goal. But in general, the stories were quiet similar. We found more discussion regarding the plan proposed by a former Minister for Health, and funded by a private pharma company, that aims to throw light upon the Spanish medical system. Some reporters stress his suggestions, others seems to think that they only represent good intentions, and a few wonder why the Ministry didn’t propose anything while he was part of the Government.

Las vacunas clásicas que nos ponen de niños actúan antes de que aparezca la enfermedad, generando anticuerpos que reaccionarán cuando llegue el agente infeccioso. Desde hace un tiempo los científicos están investigando en un nuevo tipo de vacunas llamadas terapéuticas, que activan el sistema inmunitario cuando ya se tiene la enfermedad. No sabemos si la población distingue bien unas de otras. Por eso, una primera recomendación sería incluir siempre la coletilla terapéutica cuando se habla de este segundo tipo de vacunas. Así lo indica por ejemplo el servicio de noticias SINC “La vacuna terapéutica del sida reduce la carga viral en la mayoría de los pacientes”, con información básica suministrada por el Hospital Clínic de Barcelona.

Al tema: Inyectando células dendríticas del propio paciente de SIDA sensibilizadas para que ataquen al virus HIV, un equipo de científicos españoles ha conseguido disminuir la carga viral en la mayoría de pacientes que participaron en el estudio (12 controles y 12 que sí recibieron la vacuna). Aunque el descenso es muy insuficiente todavía para plantearse sustituir otros tratamientos, representa un paso adelante para minimizar los caros y necesarios de por vida antirretrovirales. Publicado en la revista Journal of Infectious Disease, es un resultado muchísimo mejor de iniciativas similares probadas hasta el momento, y sin duda merece la atención que le han prestado los medios. Repasemos:

Público – Ainhoa Iriberri “Una vacuna española reduce el virus en pacientes con VIH”. El texto más completo, junto con el de El País. De lejos. Por las referencias a trabajos antiguos, a otros del grupo, la explicación de este concepto de vacunas, las perspectivas de futuro, y lo bien esquematizada que está la información en la parte final del texto. Además; deja clarísimo que la vacuna terapéutica sólo ha reducido la carga viral a la mitad, y según los investigadores para hacerla indetectable (lo que consiguen los antirretrovirales) debería hacerlo 100.000 veces. Por eso no ha sorprendido el siguiente titular:

El Mundo – María Sainz y María Valerio “Diseñan una vacuna anti-VIH tan eficaz como los antirretrovirales”. Siendo honestos, debe ser responsabilidad sólo de quien con exceso de sensacionalismo ha escogido el titular, porque el cuerpo de la noticia reconoce que la vacuna no es una alternativa a los retrovirales. En cuanto a cifras, se prefiere dar el dato que la reducción fue de un “90% menos en ocho de los 18 pacientes tratados”. (algunas notas dicen que son 24 los participantes en el estudio, y otras 36)

El País – Mónica L. Ferrando “Una vacuna experimental frena el avance del VIH en infectados”. Nota muy bien redactada. Gran introducción a las ventajas de esta alternativa, detallada explicación de cómo funciona la vacuna, y de las fases del proceso. Muy pertinente también el resumen final de los diferentes remedios parciales al Sida. Buen trabajo, y recomendada lectura.

ABC – Esther Armora “El hospital clínic prueba con éxito una vacuna terapéutica contra el sida”. Incluye el matiz “terapéutica” en el titular, que acompaña a una nota sencilla y clara. Curioso; en la versión de ABC Cataluña Esther presenta una nota más detallada y que da muchísima más información.

La Razón – Noelia Ramírez “La vacuna (casi) definitiva para frenar el VIH”. Horrible titular. Pero buen texto y excelente gráfico esquematizando todo el proceso (el que vemos en la parte superior del post). Quizás un enfoque demasiado optimista.

La Voz de Galicia – R. Romar “Una vacuna reduce hasta tres veces la carga del virus del sida”. También bastante optimista, pero muy amena lectura y manera de presentar la noticia.

Nos sorprende que los periódicos barceloneses El Periódico y La Vanguardia hayan firmado noticias de agencias. Pero sí es cierto, que tampoco es una noticia que se presta a grandes valoraciones más allá de la información básica aparecida en el paper, y las declaraciones de los científicos responsables. Quizás es mejor centrar esfuerzos en una inicia como La Vanguardia de la ciencia, que esperamos comentar más adelante.

Sí da juego la otra noticia en el ámbito de la política sanitaria: El ex ministro Bernat Soria acaba de presentar un informe sobre la situación de la sanidad española financiado por el laboratorio farmacéutico Abbot, tras pasar meses recogiendo datos y entrevistándose con todos los actores implicados. Aquí sí vemos diferencias en el tratamiento periodístico. A grandes rasgos: En Público, Antonio González “Frente común contra el copago” destaca el rechazo a la propuesta de que el paciente pueda pagar un mínimo por su asistencia. Es en lo que se han centrado la mayoría de notas. En El País, Emilio de Benito escoge como titular que “El ‘informe Soria’ suspende al sistema sanitario en prevención”, y recalca que los dos puntos en que insiste Soria son el la necesidad de un Pacto de Estado que asegure la sostenibilidad del sistema, y depurar la mala imagen pública de los laboratorios farmacéuticos. El primer punto es el que destaca en ABC Núria Ramírez de Castro “El sistema sanitario será insostenible en cinco o diez años”. El tono del artículo deja entrever que el informe realmente no dice nada nuevo, y que a Soria se le achaca que ahora proponga medidas que ni citó cuando era ministro y tuvo la oportunidad. En El Mundo María Valerio “Bernat Soria presenta su plan para mejorar la sanidad” tampoco se muestra muy efusiva, y empieza recordando que hace 20 años ya se presentó otro plan que iba a transformar la sanidad española. María es la única que se atreve a decir que “El ‘Informe Bernat Soria’ está más plagado de buenas intenciones que de propuestas concretas”. No parece que Soria haya dejado muy buen sabor de boca tras su paso por el gobierno, ni que el informe vaya a tener un impacto considerable.

- Pere Estupinyà

R. Cicerone @ another talk, better crowd, no storm

Maybe the hooters will swamp the comment box at the St. Louis Beacon with the usual chorus of contrarian talking points on global warming. But for the town’s on line, new media, non profit outpost freelancer David Baugher managed to both miss an angle, perhaps deliberately, and provide a solid and unvarnished news account of a speech on climate given in notable circumstances.

It was Monday night at the St. Louis Science Center. The monster blizzard with its freezing Arctic winds that has since walloped the Midwest and is now heading east was setting in. National Academies President Ralph Cicerone, a steadily reliable man when it comes to making speeches in public and spreading his NAS glitter about, was at the dais to talk of climate change and the scientific confidence it is very real and not at all trivial. All Baugher writes on the context of the talk is that although “the live audience may have been sparce [sic] because of the weather (more than 300 RSVP’d), it was broadcast on HEC-TV and relayed live to 24 other science centers.”

Monster Storm, the MODIS view from above

Most reporters would have jumped on the irony of a global warming talk from a top-drawer expert on climate that is delivered as a sub-zero storm roared in and kept the crowd at home. And that’s sub-zero Fahrenheit, in Missouri. It’s a somewhat cheap shot to do so, mildly reminiscent of the igloo Senator Imhoff’s family built for Al Gore a year or so ago, but hard to resist. Resist Baugher does.

The story reads as a sensible summation of Cicerone’s remarks and of his worry that the public is not sufficiently interested in hearing such things to listen up when experts talk about them.

I am checking with NAS’s news dept. to see if Ralph C, one of the truly standup and nice guys in science, got blizzarded in by the sideways snow and may even still be there watching the arch get covered in ice. I do not resist such ironies, yet also aim to avoid using them as polemical bludgeons. So far the NAS news office says it does not know where the boss is.

- Charlie Petit

If one seeks a range map for the American mink, one gets one that shows pretty much the entire US and Canada outside the extreme high Arctic and southwest deserts. But the true map of its range would include almost the whole of the UK, including Ireland. Half a century ago mink farms leaked their livestock into the creeks and stream. The otter-like creatures spread, gobbling up such natives as the UK’s chubby little water voles.

I didn’t know much of that when I poured a first cup of coffee this morning. After watching a BBC dispatch from Scotland, by Rebecca Morelle, I got a good taste (followed by a little nosing around the web). Morelle’s report is on a huge eradication effort in Scotland.

No word whether the removed mink lose their skins to the coat trade, or what fate awaits them after the trap door shuts. But looking at this and other accounts, this program in a part of Scotland may portend one of the largest deliberate non-native wildlife eradication  programs in history.

Other stories:

• Scottish Daily Record – Toby McDonald: 350 mink are culled in Cairngorm National Park ;
• Leicester Mercury – Shirley Elsby: Returning Ratty to our rivers comes at a price – removed of the American mink ; They are, she says in an aside, vicious predators. Ratty? Consult your Wind in the Willows. This one notes one reason so many mink reside in Great Britain – animal rights groups invaded several mink farms and liberated them. Nobody asked Ratty for his advice on that. Ms. Elsby notes that, these days, there is an animal rights lobby defending the mink’s right to be treated with sensitivity and respect. Just like the native stoats, weasels, otters, and martens.
• Conservation Magazine – David Malikoff: Mink vs. Vole ;

Grist for the Mill:

Water Vole Conservation projects ; plus A pretty good backgrounder here, at a site called suite101.

Other eradication news:

• Nature News – Brendan Borrell: Where eagles die / Flaws in Alaskan island rat-eradication project laid bare ; That’s on infamous Rat Island. The good news is that agencies are mulling a new name for the island. There are now no rats, thanks to prodigious poisoning. Bird populations – gulls, eagles, the whole lot eventually one presumes – should recover.

- Charlie Petit

Donald G. McNeil finds for his section leader an arresting secondary angle for an engrossing profile of Bill Gates’s drive to eradicate polio. Some people are against it. How can anybody be against that? The answer is simple – it may be nigh on impossible, and to try will only soak up dollars better spent on other public health problems of even greater danger to humanity. This is international health reporting of very high caliber, with a narrative focus that makes it come alive. (Late Addition: As seen in comment below, USA Today this week – and a day before the NYT – also highlighted Gates’s campaign in a story by Steve Sternberg, but without noting the skepticism of some public health officials).

Below the fold in the print issue is one of those eye-catching artist’s impressions of a space ship of the kind that never fails to catch my eyes. Kenneth Chang follows up his piece of a short time ago on NASA’s nurturing of entrepreneurial space taxis, or capsules, with another in the same vein on small winged orbiters that could carry people and maneuver in the atmosphere as well. That would give them more flexibility in where they go up there while still being able to reach an intended landing area.

The picture is of something called the Dream Chaser, in early stages of design from a small Nevada Company. It is the story’s lead example of a small coteries of winged space craft – like shuttles but without the big cargo hatch – NASA has in competition for further development contract. Chang’s reporting offers welcome history. This one and at least one other are derivations of designs pursued for years in house by NASA at the Langley Research Center, and that were in turn inspired by a design that Soviet Russia actually tested, in scale form but all the way to orbit and back, 30 years ago. I went looking for a picture of that and, among many, found a wonderful animated GIF image of how to make one, at a site the Russian aerospace company Buran-Energia maintains. The pic there is a still. If this NASA-contracted version flies, maybe Buran-Energia files a patent dispute?

Other headlines to note:

• Abigail Zuger MD – Reputation of a Berry is Difficult to Confirm; Wonderful run down of the elusive power of cranberry juice to curb bladder infections. It seems to work. Scientists have tried their darnedest and can’t pin the reason down.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Add Gray Wolf to List of Canines in Africa ; A so-called subspecies of golden jackal in Ethiopia is actually a wolf, DNA says. This was covered several places last week, too, including (with better picture) in the Daily Mail.
• Natalie Angier : Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch ; Crows are clever, and the New Caledonian Crow seem to be the most so.  The question she explores, wittily and cannily, is why this one subspecies stands out among these stand outs.
• Carl Zimmer: A Truth of Butterfly Evolution That It Took a Novelist to Reveal ; OK, I relent. After passing on several other accounts of a British journal article, on confirmation of a Vadlimir Nabokov surmise on butterfly radiation, here’s the Times’s version. Good enough. But isn’t the hook to this as  news – Nabokov’s second career as a serious lepitopterist – a well-worn rut to plow again? Carl at least makes that old angle, discovered by literary critics about as soon as they discovered Lolita, part of his account.

As ever, plenty more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

Argentine ants take on bigger Harvester ant (source below)

The other day, after more than a week without rain, I ran a hose into a big blue pot in the backyard to keep alive its spiky-leaved plant and little flowered herb that drapes over the side. In hardly more than an instant it exploded – with ants. Little brown things poured out, many carrying eggs and larvae, thronging the leaves and branches and mobbing up to the garden wall by climbing the irrigation tube used only during the dry season.  The whole thing seemed to squirm. Goddam Argentine ants! When I was a kid in So. Cal. my brother Stevie and I saw big red ants ( red harvesters, I now believe), big black ants, little black ants, teeny weeny black ants, and some ants of a pale caramel color. Now one must get out of the city, into the desert or mountains, to see any such variety. Wherever there are irrigated gardens in town, its nothin’ but these intrusive, clonal, cooperating colonies of introduced Argentine Linepithemia humile.

The good news carried by several outlets today is that, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers say they have sequenced the genomes of three ant species including the one that inhabits that pot in the backyard and, it seems, almost every other cranny out there. Another is the even more dreaded fire ant. A fourth ant species’s sequence is due from the same group in a few days in the PLoS Genetics. Maybe some smart entomologist will find a way to turn back the Argie tide and give the natives reentry to urban California and other states where they’ve taken over adn often invaded homes (hmmm. Some of the natives bite and sting, painfully.  At least the newcomers don’t. My grandkids hardly even know about ant stings).

This utterly sensational news doesn’t get much coverage, but some…

• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Argentine ant genome: Revealing peek at a pervasive pest ; Nice profile of the warpath these Argentines are on, including the advantage given them here by the US genetic bottleneck. All those around here are in the same tribe.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman : Ants’ genome project might unlock mysteries ; It’s a local story for Perlman, and he bulks it up by consulting an ant guy nearby who is not on the team publishing the genomes.
• AAAS ScienceNOW – Sara Reardon: An Army of Ant Genomes ; A focus on what one of the authors  says is the “chemical world” in which ants live, dependent on taste, odor, and other molecular signals to navigate and interact. Such systems seem ripe for intervention by people who’d like to see fewer ants, or at least a different mix.

Grist for the Mill:

UC Berkeley Press Release ; SF State U. Press Release ;

Image source:

- Charlie Petit