Days up without much done. Things got sidetracked by a neighborhood ambulance run  – not to this household -  that diverted attention to more immediate local matters.

But can’t let things go without at least recognizing the tremendous special section the New York Times’s Business side  put out this morning on US energy policy, on innovation, and on the country’s historic inability to wean itself of imported oil. It ran, by no coincidence at all, the day after President Obama’s nationally televised speech on those exact topics. It includes a breaking news story about that speech  in this package that must have taken a week, or weeks, to pull together. There are few signs of rush. There many photos and few graphics inside to explain things – but on line there are quite a few. It may not be a money maker at all. There are some big ads, but not (excepting Chevron) from big corporations. One from Louisiana touting its friendliness to technology investment, another from makers of Scottish whisky promoting ingenuity there. Northeastern University has a big one, promoting its work in energy but it’s unclear what it hopes to get as result (more post-docs and grad students? Corporate grants?)

Stories:

• John Broder: An Energy Plan Derailed by Events Is Being Retooled ;
• Clifford Krauss: Can We Do Without the Mideast?
• Tom Zeller Jr.: Trading Pumps for Plugs: We Aren’t There Yet ;
• Matthew L. Wald: Nuclear Industry thrives in the US, but for Export
• Kate Galbraith: Ethanol Industry Hoping for Surge ;
• Matthew Wald: Tucking Carbon Into the Ground ;
• Todd Woody: Start-Ups Work to Reinvent the Combustion Engine ;
• Jim Witkin: Building Better Batteries for Electric Cars ;

The speech itself drew scores of major stories. I can’t get to them all. But here’s one, from an outside service that covers energy policy as well or better than anybody (and picked up in the NYT):

• Climate Wire / Environment & Energy Daily: Evan Lehmann: Obama, Steering for the Center, Draws Dissent From Both Sides ;

- Charlie Petit

hi res http://tinyurl.com/4uj6fku

It’s about time. A whole, um, 13 days ago NASA engineers skillfully, and after a long and looping trajectory, got the science probe Messenger into orbit around the innermost planet Mercury.  Now they’ve finally released some fresh photos of that slow-turning, half frosty and half baked planet. It appears there were housekeeping and other chores keeping the mission managers busy, because the release say the first photo was not taken until this week.

Personal note: That’s slower than the first close-up of photos of Mercury that old Mariner 10 radioed back almost the instant it made the first flyby of that planet way back on March 29, 1974 – just about precisely 37 years ago. That one crawled, in live broadcast, across the grainyvideo monitors in JPL’s press room  raster line by line.  Every 42 seconds, a new one showed, “the only delay being the eight minutes it took” for the signal to travel through space. The new photos are much better. I remember my lead like it was today: “The surface of Mercury revealed itself yesterday .. as an awesome jumble of craters upon craters, rent and torn by billions of years of meteor bombardment.” The same day brought first data on the planet’s magnetic field and atmospheric composition too. I remember the lede because I just pulled the story from a fraying manila envelope of my yellowed clips rescued years ago from discard at the SF Chronicle library back when it went digital. Those were the days.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: First Mercury images in orbit show lots of craters ; Notes the large size of the craters and the secondary craters from their splashed debris.  Cites a mission scientists explanation that, closer to the Sun and deeper in its gravity field than is our Moon, stuff smacks it harder. Not that everything is all about me, but that clip I mention above quotes the late great Bruce Murray explaining the first time around that meteors might typically hit Mercury at 150,000 mph, twice as fast as they’d hit the Moon. In just the first few days, Borenstein reports, the new, first-ever orbiter will have returned 15,000 more pictures.
• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: In NASA’s Lens, Mercury Comes Into Focus ; This one has history, and makes clear why Messenger is a vastly more sophisticated probe, and in orbit yet, than was Mariner 10 in its few, fleeting fly bys. Or maybe those are flys by.
• LA Times – Amina Khan: NASA gets first close-up look at Mercury ;
• Wired News – Roy Wood: Messenger Probe Sends First Images From Mercury ;
• NPR (blog) Adam Frank: Why Mercury Matters ; Good, pithy job explaining how this “giant iron cannonball” of a planet fits into larger questions.
• MSNBC (Cosmic log blog) Alan Boyle: Probe sends marvels from Mercury ; Mostly photos, plus link to AP.

Could go on, but the “lots of ink” I put in the title for this blog was composed on seeing how many outlets picked up the news. I no doubt have missed some stories, but most are collections of the photos with small captions.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab  Messenger site ;

- Charlie Petit

About one or two percent (says Wikipedia) of fossil CO2 put into the air comes from airplanes. But new research says aviation may contribute twice that share to global warming. That’s because the high altitude haze left by contrails or so-called vapor trails contributes about as much as and maybe a bit more to trapping the sun’s heat than the CO2 does.

The news is in Nature Climate Change, by a team based in Germany. It received wide coverage – albeit in most cases via brief stories. That’s understandable. The irony and surprise of the finding does not take long to report, and to go into the atmospheric chemistry and solar forcing mechanisms is not, for most outlets, worth the space it would take. What few stories do is put the news in context. Aviation is a measurable source of greenhouse gases. It’s still fairly marginal compared to emissions from ground transportation and industry. It comes up mainly when climate contrarians accuse climate activists of hypocrisy if they took an airplane to an event to bemoan the failure of the world to reverse the rise in CO2 emissions. Doubling a small number still produces a pretty small number.

Of course, the CO2 will stay there for centuries while, if  flying stops, the extra clouds will clear in almost no time. The impact on the sky was remarkable during the pause following the 9-11 attacks in the US.  Not that an abandonment of the aviation industry, or of engines that leave contrails, is foreseeable.

Stories:

• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Aircraft contrails stoke warming, cloud formation ;  An odd and interesing  idea is high in this story – that perhaps modified engines may shed much of the water from combustion as water drops, or form ice chunks, that would fall from the air. The copy I saw included a poor choice of illus. Those look like vortex condensations of vapor already in the atmosphere and momentarily generated by control surfaces, not the far more common and problematic contrails from engine exhaust.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: Contrails warm the world more than aviation emissions;
• Ars Technica via Wired News – John Timmer : Contrails Worse for Climate Change than Planes’ Carbon Emissions ; Timmer or somebody found the best possible photo illus, a NASA satellite pic. Story does a commendable job distinguishing between the angle in Nature’s summary for reporters, and what the paper’s authors focussed on – which is the whole impact of aviation engine emissions including particulates, aerosols, oxides of nitrogen, etc.. The press release below, from the authors’ home institute, has both the research paper’s focus and that contrails currently have a greater warming effect than all the aviation carbon emissions built up in the atmosphere since the Wright Brothers made the first ones (hot air balloons too, I suppose).
• ABC (Australia) David Mark: Contrail effect greater than CO2: study; Mark reports that aviation CO2 accounts for 3 percent of all human-caused CO2 increases, a bit higher than this post reports at its top.
• LiveScience – Wynne Parry: Earth warmed by Trails of Clouds that Jets Leave Behind ; Ms. Parry or her editor are smart to link to a story on ship contrails. One wonders – if low altitude clouds cool the globe, while stratosphere ones warm it, to what extend do aviation and maritime traffics’ mists cancel?

Related News:

• Scripps Howard/ Chicago Sun Times (Mar 5)  – Janet Zimmerman: Increased air traffic may be a factor in climate change;

Grist for the Mill: Institute for Physics (Germany) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Brazilian researchers suggest “a radical change in the treatment of Chagas disease”. Their hypothesis is that the parasite integrates part of its DNA into the host genome, and the immune system reacts against its own organs. If this is true, they say that once a person is infected, focus should be on the immune system reaction apart from fighting against the parasite. The reporter who writes story in Folha is properly very cautious,  saying that this is only an initial hypothesis. El Espectador from Colombia is not so cautious in saying that the synthetic vaccines of Manuel Elkin Patarroyo could cure all the diseases. Yes; all of them! The exaggeration comes originally from the Spanish news agency EFE, but only a few newspapers have corrected it. El Tiempo (Colombia) publishes a well-reported review of synthetic vaccines and the principles that Patarroyo pubished in Chemical Review.

In Spain mainly one finds big headlines but poor discussion regarding the Royal Society report saying that China is going to lead scientific production in 2013. Plus a roundup of stories on clean energy tells us that renewables were the primary sources of electricity in 2010 in Spain, that Argentina has a notably high budget increase for clean energy, and that a Paraguayan minister says that the country is the region’s biggest exporter of energy and gets all its electricity from clean sources.

Also, this week the US government released documents showing that civil servants in Guatemala knew about Dr. Cutler’s experiments that infected  prisoners and mentally retarded people there. The coverage of this is strangely poor in Guatemala. We would welcome a reporter who tackles it in depth.

Si nos ponemos un poco filosóficos y en la mente de Thomas Kuhn, las noticias que más nos deberían interesar no son la ciencia acumulativa del tipo “la NASA ofrece una foto de Mercurio”, sino la revolucionaria tipo “un conocimiento nuevo dice que el anterior es equivocado”. Esto es lo que nos sugiere Folha por medio de Reinaldo Jose Lopes en “Estudio sobre chagas sugiere cambio radical en tratamiento”. La expresión “cambio radical” nos estimula, y si va asociada a el tratamiento de una enfermedad, todavía más. Lo que ocurre es que es una hipótesis todavía muy inicial, e inspirada en animales de laboratorio (pollos). La idea de los investigadores brasileños es que el parásito que causa la enfermedad integra su ADN en el genoma de sus huéspedes, y es el propio sistema inmunológico quien ataca al cuerpo causando los daños. Según eso, una vez infectados el tratamiento  no debería ir tanto contra el parásito Tripanosoma cruzi, sino a regular el sistema inmunológico. Idea interesante que mereces ser explicada, como muy bien ha hecho Reinaldo, quien matiza que los trabajos iniciales fueron rechazados, y en ningún momento exagera dando prematuramente la hipótesis por buena.

Menos precaución muestran los medios colombianos sobre la extensa revisión de la obra en vacunas sintéticas del controvertido Manuel Elkin Patarroyo en la revista Chemical Reviews. El Espectador se atreve a titular la nota de EFE “Patarroyo halla fórmula para crear vacunas contra todas las enfermedades” ¡¡Todas!! Por favor… cómo puede un periodista titular algo así… Anyway. Mucho más serio y moderado es el artículo de El Tiempo escrito por Carlos F. Fernández y Sonia P. Santamaría: “Patarroyo presenta avance mundial en vacunas sintéticas”. Utilizando siempre el condicional, el artículo explica que el trabajo son unas bases que podrían servir para construir vacunas sintéticas para casi 500 enfermedades infecciosas. La nota explica muy bien el enfoque de Patarroyo: no utilizar microorganismos atenuados sino fabricar fragmentos sintéticos para que el sistema inmunológico actúe. Es una aproximación con muchas críticas, y al genial Patarroyo se le ha acusado varias veces de exagerar. Más lo hizo el titular de EFE sin ninguna duda.

Y en la ronda habitual, dos grandes temáticas. Primera: China superará a EEUU como potencia científica mundial en 2013; N.D –Público, siendo ya en estos momentos la segunda-El País. Recomendable el post de Charlie Petit en el Tracker. Poco a añadir, porque tampoco es una noticia nueva. Los propios investigadores estadounidenses llevan tiempo advirtiéndolo en busca de mayor financiación, y fue una de las temáticas del último encuentro de la AAAS, por bien que ahora el reporte de la Royal Society ha puesto datos sobre la mesa.

Segunda: oiremos hablar cada vez más de energías renovables. El País explica por medio de Santiago Carcar que “Las renovables son ya la primera fuente de generación eléctrica”. En concreto generaron el 32.3% de la electricidad en 2010.

En un magnífico ejemplo de cómo adaptar un titular a la información de la sección de América latina, BBC Mundo nos dice que “Argentina, el país con más crecimiento año por año en energía limpia”. Un 568% nos dice en el único párrafo que dedica a este país, sin explicar muy bien de qué inversión venían.

Y en La Nación (Paraguay) la viceministra explica que Paraguay podría suplir toda su demanda energética con renovables, y de hecho es el país “mayor exportador de energía”.

Último tema: Varios medios informan que según unos registros recién revelados por el gobierno estadounidense, funcionarios guatemaltecos estaban al corriente de las infecciones con sífilis a presos y enfermos mentales – Prensa Libre, con información de AP (ya les vale). El tema lleva dando vueltas varios meses, y estamos convencidos de que esconde una historia apasionante, ideal para cualquier periodista guatemalteco que quiera hacer algo de investigación. Estamos ansiosos de leer textos que provengan de Guatemala. Extrañamente, no llegan todavía.

- Pere Estupinyà

Rick Lovett sent us a note the other day saying he practically has the gigantic American Chemical Society meeting in Anaheim, CA., to himself. Went to a press conference, everybody there except him was a non-reporter. Travel budgets being what they are that’s not a total surprise. But the place used to crawl with them.

*UPDATE – See comments. It’s not as though the press room is empty of bone fide journalists.

One story getting modest pickup  is that an MIT team and small spinoff company called Sun Catalytix, working apparently with the Tata industrial group from India, has developed a simple new catalyst that uses solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. It supposedly does so with more efficiency in ultimate energy yield than  photovoltaic solar cells. The significance of that is that one does not need to generate the electricity only when the sun shines. Do some now, save some for use in the fuel cell later. Lovett, being there, was able to get in more followup questions than those sitting far away on the phone and computer link. But there is a twist to this tale. This post started as a glimpse of the new, cheap-o journalism that seldom pays to actually send reporters to meetings. In checking  this story one finds an unexpected wrinkle, as you’ll see.

Lovett also filed another story today – see below – that looks like a genuine  excloo on one possible way to minimize the longterm radiation threat from nuclear accidents.

But first,

ACS  Stories on artificial leaf:

• NatureNews (Great Beyond blog) Richard A. Lovett: MIT scientist announces first ‘practical’ leaf ;
• * UPDATE .. AAAS ScienceNOW – Robert F. Service: Spinning the Sun’s Rays Into Fuel ; Hmmm. Service was at the meeting too. So much for Lovett being the ONLY corporeal reporter on hand, not that this changes larger point. This piece provides essential history, and insight on the secretiveness (pending patent) of the process at MIT and its professor’s start-up company.
• Yale e360 (via Reuters) Solar ‘Artificial Leaf’ Is Unveiled by Researchers ;
• Daily Mail (UK) holy moly and here we go again with this tab: The “Holy Grail” of science: The artificial leaf researchers claim will turn every home into its own power station; Ummm. I do not for a second believe that the researcher said one playing-card sized “leaf” placed in one gallon of water “could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day” unless that household has zero electricity now and may want enough to, oh, top up a cell phone for a few minute’s worth.
• Grist – Jess Zimmerman: Artificial solar leaf beats trees at their own game ;

Why this news is pretty new but not spanking new… A general search for stories on the general topic generated surprise.

• Wall St. Journal (life mint blog, Mar. 23)  Samar Halarnkar: Tata signs up MIT energy guru for power from water ; This was a few days before the ACS meeting.
• Fast Company (Mar 23) Ariel Schwartz: Tata, MIT Collaborate to Creat Energy From Water, Bring Power to 3 Billion People ; Includes a YouTube video of the MIT researcher explaining all this. Video highlights that the company got a fair piece of investment from federal stimulus funds. This story includes an inexplicable assertion “If Nocera’s research pans out as hoped, a swimming pool-sized container could meet the entire planet’s electricity demands.” Gee, maybe if one ran the hydrogen through a thermonuclear fusion energy machine, which does not yet exist and may never be?
• CNET Green Tech blog (Sept. 28, 2009) Martin LaMonica: MIT spin-off stores sun’s energy to power the world. ; And this was a year and a half ago. NOt as well developed, but the same catalyst.

Grist for the Mill: ACS Press Release (via EurekAlert!)

Lovett’s other story from the meeting so far, which he reports he picked up not in the press room but in a small session in a distant hall with a dozen or two people in it:

• NatureNews – Richard A. Lovett: Algae holds promise for nuclear clean-up ; On a species that selectively concentrates strontium and deposits it in crystals – which could be an important new remediation tool in case of a spill that includes the radioisotope strontium-90.

*UPDATE: Grist for the Mill: ACS’s own in house reporters, at Chemical & Engineering News, are there, of course, and are filing blogs and stories on line.

- Charlie Petit

Knowledge is good, correct? The more science that goes on around the world, discovering new things and correcting old beliefs or just nudging verities asymptotically closer to sublime truth, inventing and refining, surprising us or scaring us or just making things clearer, the better. Win win, no zero sum in sight. Surely. And yet. Word from the Royal Society that China in particular, plus other fast-developing nations, are rapidly gaining on the US, Japan, Europe,and other established scientific centers of innovation does, somehow, trigger a little anxiety in those old-line scientific centers.

And is it just me or does that report cover with its use of auspicious red and yellow look a bit like Chinese lacquerware? Like they’re gonna shellac us? Or the flag itself?

The RS released the report in London on Monday. You could just go read it, linked in Grist below (including a whiz-bang interactive graph), or first take a look at the media reception it received (hmm, there’s a sort of self-cancelling usage. Or, perhaps one may receive a reception that is receiving one in turn and simultaneously? Sort of like  a kiss.)  Most striking if not surprising to these eyes is that the always-international culture of science has gotten even more collaborative across borders.  More and more papers have authors from many nations, some of whom  may never have met and yet deeply share a common research project. So, whose science, by national identity, is it?

(Maybe, pretty soon, we in the rest of the world will remember fondly when, like up to about now,  China got a bunch of its science and technology the old fashioned way: by extortion of international corporations when they seek to trade or invest, or outright theft and piracy. Maybe some of the rest of us soon will be trying those tactics on China.)

While the RS’s report stresses the increasingly collaborative and international nature of science, media reports tend to frame the issue as a horse race among nations. That is no surprise. Many outlets  also glomm onto a fact in the RS press release – Turkey and Iran have seen some of the most dramatic surges upward in scientific co-authors and authors. Some frame their performance as nearly as dramatic as China’s. Good for them, but one should not confuse growth rate (from a small start point) with size.

Stories:

• Reuters – Kate Kelland: China leads challenge to “scientific superpowers” ;
• USA Today – Dough Stanglin: China on track to overtake U.S. scientific output in 2 years ; Well, maybe. This report cites a BBC story for that assertion. But the report itself makes 2013 as potentially the crossover year for total papers published. China doesn’t catch up that quick in money invested – but the  gap is closing.
• AFP – China set to outstrip US in science research output ; True, if the only metric is number of papers published.
• Telegraph (UK) Royal Society’s Knowledge, Networks and National report: would Einstein get funded today? (Cute hed, but one is unsure how funded Albert E. was back then, working days at the patent office).
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Emerging world on science fast-track ;
• CNN – Richard Allen Greene: China shoots up rankings as science power, study finds ; Very short.
• China Daily via Xinhua – Chen Zi: Chinese scientists set to lead the world;
• China.org.cn – Mi Xigang: China surges in science; may pass U.S. ;
  
• BBC – David Shukman: China ‘to overtake US on science’ in two years ; Too much conflation here of “scientific output” with “publication total.” But it does point out that the kinds of journals counted are ones of some int’l standing, and that China’s citation rate still lags. But the trends are clear, whether or not the date when the US is #2 is not.
• PressTV (Iran): ‘Iran tops global science growth’ ;

Best of the Bunch seen so far:

• BBC (blog) Jonathan Amos : The Sun rises on Chinese space science ; Amos does a riff off the report, looking at just the space sector and using a powerful vignette on one professor’s decision to take an assignment at a Chinese university to work on space probes.

On the other hand…

• Wired-UK: Mark Brown: China, Turkey, and Iran emerge as scientific giants ; To be explicitly fair about Mr. Brown’s complicity, his story does say Turkey and Iran did shoot up, but relatively only to their previous scientific vigor. The nuance-free headline is a keeper for the curiosity cabinet.

Grist for the Mill:

Royal Society Press Release ; RS report Knowledge, networks and nations. And don’t miss the reports somehow mesmerising interactive graph of collaborative science, by nation and by year.

- Charlie Petit

Josef Mengele

The president of the German Medical Association, representing more than 400,000 German physicians, bluntly announced last week: “The truth is: During the Nazi-regime physicians caused, ordered or mercilessly administered death and harm to humans.” And: German physicians admitted their guilt  “late, too late”. Until today, the Medical Association president said the organization had not done enough to acknowledge and understand the role of German physicians within the Nazi Regime. Starting with these quotes, the article in the Tagesspiegel (Rainer Woratschka) reports a scientific research project (independently researched but by order of the Medical Association) that tries to shed light on the many waysup until 1945 that physicians were involved in the violations of human rights. By 1937 about half of the German physicians had been registered as a member of the NSDAP. And they weren’t passive: About 300.000 people were victims of the euthanasia programs, executed by physicians, who had the option to object but most  supported the programs, probably for the pay to perform such procedures as forced sterilizations.

Though German physicians probably tried harder than other professions to come to terms with their past (at least after 1987, when the former president of the Medical Association started the dig in the past), the research report still found hints to even more victims. It urges more effort to understand how the wrongdoings during the Nazi-regime continued to cause harm even after 1945.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Nina von Hardenberg)  writes in more detail of 200.000 so called “ballast existencies” had been registered within a program called “action T4″, and 70.000 of them had been murdered by 1941. Merely to be described as “fragile and lonely” in medical records was a death sentence for psychiatry patients at the time. The Süddeutsche also had a commentary piece (Joachim Käpper). Worth reading, because it hints to other professions that should think about a deeper dig into their past.

Die Welt-kompakt,did not spare more than a few lines. But the mother issue had a longer piece. Agencies like AFP reported relatively long (Zeit.de mixed dpa and AFP), as well as physician newspapers like Ärzteblatt (here), Ärztezeitung (here), and Pharmazeutische Zeitung (here, though copied from dpa). The Austrian Standard printed the wire copy of the Austrian Press Agency (APA), which is (I think) based on the German wire dpa. But I think, it misses the hint, that Austrian physicians still did not try to come to terms with their role in the past (as fas as I know).

In his article for Neues Deutschland, Fabian Lambeck describes the reasons, why so many physicians were eager to fulfill the race ideology of the Nazi regime – because the were profiteers of the new system. E.g., it was in favor of German physicians that Jewish competitive physicians (8000 of 52000 in 1937) lost their approbation. He also mentions one of the worst parts of the wrongdoings: experiments with humans for the sake of research. And, by the way: The knowledge, that these “experts” acquired, was valuable enough to convince American officials to use it in the US.

Sascha Karberg

As the morning closed I discovered, and spent a long time floundering about trying to get more information, that a Reuters reporter and a photographer have snagged a pretty rare assignment. From first glance, it was evident that one and maybe both have spent time aboard a rather new US nuclear attack submarine, the USS New Hampshire, in the Arctic. There’s a challenge and an adventure for you.

I tried calling the Reuters DC bureau to get more info, but didn’t know enough the first time even to get through to anybody who might know more. Eventually, the outline of events emerged.

First,  the stories:

• Reuters – Andrea Shalal-Esa (Mar. 24, datelined Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Camp, Arctic Ocean): Exclusive: US Submarines show force amid race for Arctic riches.
• Reuters – Andrea Shalal-Esa: (Mar 23, datelined Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Camp, Arctic Ocean) Raytheon helps US subs stay in touch ; Datelined A medical emergency at a field camp on the ice, and a new technology helps get a very large underwater ambulance to the spot.
• Reuters – Andrea Shalal-Esa (Mar 21, datelined Aboard USS New Hampshire): EXCLUSIVE -UTC-built oxygen generator fails on U.S. submarine ; Interesting news, with background, on a gadget that didn’t work perfectly.
• Reuters (Photographers blog) (March 24) – Lucas Jackson: An Arctic Adventure ; Mr. Jackson posts on how the assignment occurred, what he packed, and the logistics and challenges of such a thing. Photo above is from his posting.

After getting this far through the post, and writing it quite differently from this point down, adn thanks to help from a Reuters editor in Chicago, Matthew Lewis, I reached reporter Shalal-Esa by phone. She’s back in DC, after spending a few days at the ice camp, including a night aboard the sub (She slept in the officers quarters. She’s not sure whether photogger Jackson got such a swell berth). Based in DC, she covers the Pentagon. Over the past year, hearing submariners there describe how fast the Arctic is warming, and also hearing of an upcoming Congressional visit via submarines to the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Lab Ice Camp, she asked the obvious: any room for press? She reports there were plenty of other dramatic, and some funny, things that happened. She plans to put it all up in a blog pretty soon.

It would appear she went up there for a feature, and got two breaking news stories as bonus – an oxygen gadget that conked out, and a camp employee who needed an emergency doctor’s call.

Reuters got a close look at the changing Arctic from under and atop the ice. Thus the agency is able to take a few, vivid snaps of the geophysical and political events that are opening the region to commerce, to diplomatic and maybe military posturing, and perhaps some vital scientific research.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) “After witnessing the choreography of public relations that accompanied the discovery of new fossil species in Brazil, there is no denying that paleontology has come of age in the country”. These were the words of the science editor of the Brazilian Folha regarding the presentation of fossils of extinct species of a crocodile and a lizard, evidence of feathered dinosaurs, and Oxalala quilombesis, an exceptional 14-meter-tall carnivorous dinosaur that might be kin of Tyrannosaurs. Interestingly, the studies were published in the journal of the Brazilian National Academy of Sciences in order to reinforce Brazilian scientific institutions. Maybe because of this, they didn’t get so much international coverage as another fossil found in Brazil: the eccentric saber-tooth herbivore mammal presented in Science last week. Comparing the stories, O. quilombensis received much more attention in Brazil, and Tiarajudens eccentricus overseas.

In the last two weeks: ;  Uruguayan media have written about the first dinosaur footprint in the countryArgentinean press has one about a fossil that could represent an ancestor of the first dinosaurs; In Chile are reports about Atacamatitan chilensis, a” new” sauropod that lived 70 million years ago.

In a completely different matter, the Spanish El Mundo presents a good story today about Kenyan farmers who are forced to abandon their villages and crops because of the arrival of companies intent on growing crops for biofuel production.

Si entras en algún departamento de biología evolutiva de una universidad grande, todos los investigadores reconocerán con disimulada resignación que la atención prestada por los medios al paleontólogo que estudia dinosaurios es mucho mayor (“injustamente” te podría decir alguno), que a sus compañeros que investigan invertebrados, mamíferos, plantas o cualquier otro ser vivo a excepción del hombre. Es así. Al público le fascinan más estas criaturas, Science y Nature también le tienen más predilección que a cualquier otro grupo de especies animal o vegetal, y nosotros le damos espacio siempre que aparece la palabra dinosaurio. Sí; comparado con otras noticias de ciencia, salud o medioambiente, y depende los criterios que consideremos, les damos más relevancia de la que merecen.

Algo así se lee entre líneas en el interesante comentario del editor de ciencia de Folha (Brasil), Reinaldo José Lopes, como análisis un gigantesco dinosaurio carnívoro en Brasil. Contexto: hace dos semanas paleontólogos brasileños publicaron en la revista de la Academia de Ciencias Brasileña (muy relevante que decidieran hacerlo en su revista, probablemente buscando fortalecerla internacionalmente), los hallazgos de una nueva especie de cocodrilo, un lagarto extinguido, un indicio de dinosaurios con plumas, y el fósil estrella: el Oxalala quilombesis, un dinosaurio carnívoro de 14 metros de altura y emparentado con el Tiranosauro que podría convertirse en el quinto más grande del mundo encontrado.

Reinaldo entrevista al científico responsable y explica muy bien los puntos principales de la noticia, pero además escribe un Análise en el que dice: “Después de presenciar la coreografía de las relaciones públicas que acompañaron al descubrimiento de nuevas especies fósiles en Brasil, no se puede negar que la paleontología ha alcanzado la mayoría de edad en el país”. No parece decirlo en tono de crítica, sino de confesión hacia el lector. Habla de que “los anuncios impactantes, las ruedas de prensa y las bonitas imágenes preparadas de antemano para la prensa ya son tradición entre los mejores equipos de cazadores de fósiles del mundo. Ahora ha ocurrido aquí”. Y lo justifica, diciendo que es normal por la fascinación que generan los dinosaurios, y porque la paleontología “tiene que ganarse los corazones y la mente del público en todo momento”. Estamos de acuerdo.

Como ya hemos dicho en otras ocasiones, la aplicación derivada de un investigador en vacunas es un compuesto que podrá salvar vidas o producir mejores animales de granja. La de un paleontólogo es conocimiento sobre nuestro pasado. Y el conocimiento, si no llega a la gente por medio de divulgación o periodismo, sirve de poco. Tanto por este motivo noble, como para justificar ante políticos sus presupuestos, tienen que hacer propaganda. Y esto, es algo que los investigadores estadounidenses saben muy bien, y en Latinoamérica no tanto. Bien por la actitud de los científicos brasileños, y por los matices de Reinaldo.

También O’Globo – Renato Grandelle “Maior dinossauro carnívoro do Brasil é descoberto no Maranhão”, Último Segundo – Priscilla Bessa “Museu Nacional anuncia descoberta de maior dinossauro brasileiro” y otros medios brasileños e internacionales cubrieron bien este anuncio. Pero para qué engañarnos… en cuanto a repercusión internacional, Science y Nature siguen mandando.

Y en eso volvieron a mandar la semana pasada los de moda paleontólogos brasileños, con el fósil de un mamífero (no dinosaurio) publicado en Science que recorrió todas las secciones de ciencia, gracias a ser herbívoro pero disponer a pesar de eso unos grandes dientes de sable. Viviendo hace 260 millones de años, tenía el tamaño de un jabalí (los primeros mamíferos eran pequeños para poder escapar de monstruos como el O. Quilombensis), y tenía unos enigmáticos incisivos que desconciertan (esto es parte del juego) a los investigadores. Explican la excentricidad del Tiarajudens eccentricus R. Grandelle en O’Globo,  con más extensión Reinaldo J. Lopes en Folha,  … y éste sí llega por ejemplo a España con El Mundo (a cuya sección de ciencia le encanta estas criaturas) por medio de Teresa Guerrero, que empieza la nota destacando que Brasil no es un país propicio para estos hallazgos. También le dedica espacio Público con Javier Yanes “Hallado un raro herbívoro primitivo con dientes de sable”.

La verdad, tampoco hay para tanto. Pero si exploramos un poco, vemos que en Uruguay descubren sus primeras huellas de dinosaurios: José Esteves – El Pais (Uruguay), que según AFP – Daniel Merilla, un investigador Argentino asegura haber descubierto un “eslabón perdido” (como gusta esta expresión) con los primeros dinosaurios (publicado en Plos One), y que apareció el “Atacamatitan chilensis”, el primer dinosaurio 100% chileno  (La Tercera-Agencias).

Qué gracioso lo de los dino’s… mientras. Una reportera publica desde Kenia y para El Mundo una interesantísima pieza sobre los efectos negativos del cultivo de plantas para biocombustibles. Joana Socias en “Un pueblo acorralado por los biocombustibles” nos trae el testimonio de agricultores locales que deben detener su cultivo de alimentos para plantar plantas que darán combustibles a las empresas del “hombre blanco”. Bien ponderado, el artículo dice que los políticos aseguran que eso dará trabajos y riqueza a la población. Lo veremos. De momento 20.000 campesinos tienen que abandonar sus tierras, amenazando la supervivencia de las comunidades locales.

Seguiremos hablando de energía, pues una de las consecuencias del desastre de Fukushima es que se escribe mucho más (por lo menos en España) de enregías renovables.

- Pere Estupinyà

Many people like to think of science as the realm of the certain and the rational. Rationality yes, pretty much when it is pursued with skill, but it’s otherwise  about doubt, uncertainty, double-checking, correction, and a whole lot of maybe.  Today’s Science Times doesn’t say as much about itself, but it lets its writers explore a lot of slippery terrain including the perils of nuclear reactors, of vaccines, of radiation generally, and one on the lead poison potential of some ceramic dishware.

The result is a selection of stories that might make one feel either confident or scared of modern civilization, depending on how one’s brain is wired up. Or maybe, like much in our uncertain world, indifferent. Gad.

Stories on Peril, Uncertainty, and you makes your choice and takes your chances…:

• John M. Broder, Matthew L. Wald, Tom Zeller Jr. – When All Isn’t Enough to Stop a Catastrophe / …no one can predict everything that might go wrong ;  Fukushima Daiichi makes it back to Science Times from the front section (‘tho there plenty on it up there, too). It starts off detailed, conventional, and nervous-making, listing the impossibility of calculating odds of meltdown-scale accidents that mean much, and lists of ways that plant accidents (with a map of them) have already defied best efforts to do just that. Then, sneakily and craftily, it offers a clear-eyed reminder to readers that nuclear energy generates fears in the public way out of proportion to its historic and computed risks compared to other industries. A subhed signals the shift: “Alternatives carry risks too.”  Risk authority David Ropeik gets cited. Not that  this piece will change many minds. It comes to mind while reading this: 1) I bet U.S. spent fuel rods get stored someplace besides next to reactors within ten years, 2) that backup generators get back ups with one set up high enough in a really stout building that no flood no how can reach them. And maybe wrapped in heavy, waterproof plastic just in case. With a third set on trailers someplace else not too far away. That and GenIII passive cooling would help to0.
• Denise Grady: Scientist At Work / David J. Brenner. Amid Noise on Radiation, Just the Facts ; She interviews a radiation health physicist who believes there is no risk-free radiation level. No threshold. As linear as Helen Caldicott might say. But even he says that local (off the plant’s site) and regional perils, so far, are modest at most. Not that he’d drink the milk. The dangers are to the plant workers struggling (with a success that is modest at most) to corral the beasts.
• Abigail Zuber MD – Defending Vaccination Once Again, With Feeling ; A book review of a topic, as she writes, that may seem exhausted. But she loves the book anyway. It’s about irrational fear, fixed beliefs, selective perception etc.
• Nicholas Bakolar: Pretty Patterns That Camouflage a Poison ; Isn’t that glazed wear up right pretty? And full of lead. Some dishes like that can poison people. It was found in Philly. Some pieces tested dozens of times over the legal EPA limit. Interesting, not my problem you say? What if the same plates in your town held plutonium that arithmetic said posed the same risk? Some people would evacuate the city without even being told. (OK, if that much plutonium were in ceramics it WOULD be huge news over how it got there).
• Murray Carpenter: A Century Later, Jury’s Still Out on Caffeine Limits ;

Other Science Times Stories:

• Benedict Carey: Teasing Out Policy Insight From a Character Profile: This one could go in the upper list, as it is at heart about misplaced faith in and misunderstanding of science. Carey does not come out and say so, but the story  convinced me that tax dollars are going to psychologists etc. for almost totally bogus diagnoses. The aim is to divine the mental hangups in foreign despots and other influential people and that might give the US a sort of diplomatic precognition of their next moves.
• Guy Gugliotta: Deciphering Old Texts, One Woozy, Curvy Word at a Time ; Sidebar:  A Speech Lost in Digital Translation. You know that spam and hacker-foiling Captcha thing you must puzzle out before buying things on line or otherwise sending info to somebody else’s site? Captchas have another, amazing, inverted utility.
• Cornelia Dean: A Guide to Entice Heads Into the Clouds ; Sales of this sky guidebook will now skyrocket.

As usual, lots more: Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

Drill baby drill my foot. A lot of science journalists who cover energy issues have probably gone through an infatuation stage, and then break-up, with a seductive actor: Peak Oil. It appeals to any reporter trying to cover a beat where numbers and natural (that is, based on reality and science) processes are important. Plus it’s geology.

In my case the crush came and left years ago, triggered by the first oil crisis in the 70s and discovery of one M. King Hubbert and “Hubbert’s pimple,” a rising line on a graph that turned around and went back down. It was part of a phenomonally persuasive analysis of US oil pumping history decades ago. It foretold a similar global collision with finite resources. But I got over it, seeing that prices and demand, plus oil industry ingenuity, kept finding more of the stuff.

Well! All this to bring attention to veteran Science magazine reporter Richard Kerr and his story, filed late last week, with the arresting headline Peak Oil Production May Already Be Here.

It has a big caveat – that OPEC’s production may well continue to rise. But, by a small margin, production from non-OPEC nations is larger. And OPEC may choose to pump only as much as it needs to make money, but not so much that it would cause prices to fall. So, the article’s sources tend to observe, the conventional oil now hitting the market may be about as much as we’ll ever see.

There is other fuel out there. Natural gas can be converted (the green in the ExxonMobil forecast above, which Kerr has in his story), and Canadian tar sands are making a blip. But regular old crude oil coming up in a pipe, outside OPEC, looks like it’s hit the wall, the article suggests.

Hard to know what exactly to make of it. It has none of the apocalyptic suddenness of a lot of Peak Oil fulminating one sees at some bloggy websites. But the politics of energy are going to bring the world’s great powers to even more serious diplomatic and economic conflict, it looks like, even without worry over global warming.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a taste of the politics of climate change policy from Down Under. In The Australian Lauren Wilson and Matthew Franklin describe in commendably disinterested terms, what happens when a scientific adviser to Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard of the Labor Party  says that if all fossil carbon emissions stopped right now the planet’s temperature might wait 1000 years to begin to drop.

That’s one way of saying that temperature would stabilize sort of soon and sort of near the livable levels of right now, rather then keep accelerating into a who-knows-what regime. On the other hand it has a lot of information behind it that most members of the public don’t know. Opponents of carbon taxes or other measures with teeth are jumping all over it as good reason to shrug and to stick with business as usual.

Sometimes, taking the long view only encourages others to keep their eyes fixed on the short term. At least, in Australia, the politicians are still talking about carbon dioxide, the physics of the greenhouse effect, and tax policy.

The image above is from a two-year-old blog post that mentions the same adviser, a paleontologist who is, it would thus appear, among the more worried climate spectators in Australia.

- Charlie Petit