One of the greater puzzles in planetary science is how, exactly, do the processes that form stars also provide planets to orbit them?

After all, simply discovering extrasolar planets has gotten to be routine. The count is at 531 (so says NASA) and the agency’s Kepler orbiting telescope, staring at 156,000 stars for signs of planetary transits that slightly but abruptly dim their shine, has a list of more the 1200 more candidates. Most seem likely to be verified.

Such observations are bound to get more exciting as new instruments and further observations eventually make clear how many planets that resemble Earth are out there. None with a close kinship have been found yet – Earth is small and on an orbit that takes longer then most found so far. Sooner or later we’ll know whether worlds with water and conditions as hospitable for life as Earth is (for life as we know it) are common. That will be big news. Maybe we’re in a very rare place. Maybe we have a lot of company.  Stay tuned.

In the meantime, theorists are getting more ideas why planets exist at all. A few reporters are paying close heed. Some report on planetary possibilities around distinctly non-sun-like stars.

Stories:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Planets take shape in embryonic gas clouds / New theory of planetary formation may explain variety ; Cowen cites several papers, on line at the arXiv site and due soon for journal publication. He also links to an impressive animation stemming from a computer model by a team in the UK. A frame is in the image above. The theory’s twist is that gas clumps, not aggregations of small solid bodies, are the first steps toward planetary formation – and also provide a way for planets to wind up very close to their stars. Back in January, Cowen forthrightly shares with us, at Scientific American George Musser filed a blog post laying out the ferment in planetary formation theory colorfully – and included there word of the theory Cowen highlights this week. Cowen says he wrote his story then discovered that Musser had been there first.
• PhysOrg.com – Deborah Braconnier: Habitable planets and white dwarfs ; Far out speculation about chances planets might form around or get captured by white dwarfs (which are massive but smaller than many planets).
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Could dead stars support life? ;
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Dead stars may harbour Earth-like planets ;

- Charlie Petit

At USA Today Dan Vergano wrote late last week a graceful appreciation for the Acheulean handaxe. In doing so he highlights news from India on human evolution and migration.   The case that Indian and French researchers made, that tool makers had reached the subcontinent as many as 1.5 million years ago, may have been last week’s most important archeology paper in the journal Science.  But it got overshadowed by word from Texas in the same journal that people left stone tools in the Americas 15,500 years ago. The latter’s a big story,if somewhat incremental. It marked new and perhaps the stoutest evidence so far that the Clovis culture of 13,000 years ago or so was not the first to populate the Western Hemisphere. It’s a topic the public, especially here in N. America, can get a grip on.

Speaking of grip, the handaxes from India seem to these eyes the more fundamentally important (assuming both reports hold up – each has brought murmurings from critics that the dating techniques leave room for doubt.) I also have to concede sentimental attachment to handaxes. So some bias may be at work inside me. The late, great archeologist J. Desmond Clark, an African specialist, many years ago in his home in Berkeley took from the bookshelf and handed to me a lustrous, pink handaxe crafted 100,000 years ago or more in East Africa. He’d been telling me of his first discovery of hand axes, in World War II, near Gondar in Ethiopia. The specimen he showed me had startlingly fine symmetry. The heft in the hand felt just right. (For more on that, see this site with its copyrighted photos of handaxes Clark and others first found, and another site for a vignette on his early work in Africa.). Clark explained it was a key representative the Acheulean tool kit, one that dominated human industry for eons. I was smitten by the idea that somebody of a species antecedent to H. sapiens napped that tool so long ago.

Vergano writes not just a news story but an homage to handaxes. He links to the primary literature, too, a fairly rare practice that my colleague Paul Raeburn here at ksjtracker has been highlighting recently. Dan’s article describes one likely species that would have been making handaxes in southern Asia so long ago, and relates the fairly convincing (to me) evidence from paleomagnetism that the dates are sound. And he includes some history of paleoarcheology in India, by Brits, in which I see parallels to Desmond Clark’s later work in Africa.

Not many others in the news business paid the handaxes from India much mind. Partly that’s due to the inherent greater interest in the settling of N. America by our very own species. Plus, while the news of stones from Texas got a push from press releases and news conferences, the work in India had only Science magazine’s summary for reporters, plus a perspective article in the same issue, to stoke the fire.

Other Stories:

• Science News – Bruce Bower: Go east, ancient tool makers / Hand ax innovators reached South Asia earlier than thought ; Bower explains the puzzles over the which tool-making Homo species was in India at the time, and provides context in prevailing ideas about which ones went where, when. Sources tell him it was likely H. erectus.
• The Hindu – R. Prasad: Acheulian stone tools discovered near Chennai ; This reports holds that the India discovery matches other evidence of Acheulean (or Acheulian, the spelling varies) tools in and near India 1.5 million years ago.
• PhysOrg.com :Stone cutting tools link early humans to prehistoric India ; Picked up by this aggregator directly from Science.
• *UPDATE: AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Ancient stone tools found in India ;  For US readers Schmid put the Texas discovery first with small and deeper reference to the work in India. But for elsewhere, he led on the international wire with this substantial account of the ancient handaxes that archeologists found near the modern city of Chenai. For most of the world, the Texas news got second billing at AP. Good call, that.

- Charlie Petit

A few tidbits from the past week or two, thanks mostly to suggestions from Tracker readers and Twitter friends:

• The Boston Globe put out a fine feature piece Mar. 20th on Ryan Westmoreland (left), once a top Red Sox prospect, who is now recovering from a sudden illness that could have killed him. The story is by Charles P. Pierce, a Globe magazine staff writer. You could call it a sports story, or a medical story. However you want to characterize it, it’s one heck of a piece of writing. From the lede:

The afternoon is fading, and he is standing in the lobby of a salesman’s hotel in Cleveland Circle in Brookline. He looks like any other kid in a gray sweat suit, but you notice upon meeting him that the left side of his face has kind of a slide to it and that his speech is just a bit waterlogged. Ryan Westmoreland … left only this morning from the Red Sox spring training facility in Fort Myers, Florida. He did his workout, and his stretching, and his hitting, and his weight lifting, and all the other things that baseball players do every day to get ready for the season. Then he went in and did all the things he does that most baseball players don’t have to do, because these things are part of his life now.

And from the body of the story:

…Over the next 24 hours, Ryan fell off a cliff.

He went deaf in one ear. His vision began to blur. They [he and his girlfriend, Charlene] went back to Solomon. “He walked into the doctor’s office,” Charlene recalls, “and he came out in a wheelchair. The rate of progression was unbelievable. You see him sitting there and you know you can’t do anything for him, and then he starts to blink . . . differently.”

The story is moving, engaging, and superbly crafted. The kicker brought tears to my eyes. I can’t help stepping out of my role for a moment to say, as a reader, that I wish Westmoreland well.

***

• From the outside, one would guess that being a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine would be one of the best jobs in journalism. You get more space than most writers do, your copy is improved by the smart editors and meticulous fact-checking staff at the Times, and you presumably are far better paid than most of your colleagues.

Don’t accept the job, however, until you’ve read Robin Marantz Henig‘s candid and frightening account of what happens before a Times Magazine story sees print. Even for a contributing writer, such as Henig–an insider, a member of the team–it’s a brutal process.

You can find Henig’s tale on The Open Notebook, the valuable blog by science journalists Siri Carpenter and Jeanne Erdmann. Henig says she wrote 15 or 20 drafts before sending the story to her editor. “Not 15 or 20 totally different versions, but a lot of different versions.” Henig reports that her editor, who should be her champion at the magazine, “was very nervous—she told me later that she didn’t think I’d be able to pull it off. I think she was still worried about an article that I’d had killed a full year earlier after many, many attempts at fixing it.” An editor who has worked with a writer for years assigns a story that she doesn’t think the writer can pull off? That’s bordering on sadistic.

A word about what Henig earns. She doesn’t tell us, but she does say that it takes her six months to write a story for the Times Magazine, and at least another couple of months after she finishes to come up with another idea. That’s less than two stories a year. Unless Henig is earning close to six figures for each story–more than what many writers get for writing a book–she’s not nearly as highly paid as we might imagine an NYT Magazine contributing writer to be.

And, a bonus: Henig shows us the lede the editor-in-chief of the magazine asked her to write, after she begged him not to. Thankfully, it was discarded.

***

• On Saturday, March 12th, NPR‘s Guy Raz interviewed a Dutch researcher about a study in The Lancet on the causes of ADHD and a possible new treatment. The researcher told Raz that ADHD was usually caused by diet, and that diet could usually cure it. Here are a few excerpts from the four-and-a-half-minute interview:

In 64% of children with ADHD, ADHD is caused by food. It’s a hypersensitivity reaction to food. (1:20)…

I think in all children we should start with diet research. If that is not successful…then we do need drugs, of course…but now we are giving them all drugs, and I think that’s a huge mistake. (2:02)

After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior. They were no more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper tantrums. (3:40)

“It was a miracle,” a teacher said. (4:05)

Nobody else was interviewed, and Raz made no effort to put the story in context–namely, to note that others are far more skeptical about the relationship between diet and ADHD. At the very least, NPR should have interviewed one or two others with different points of view.

In contrast, here was how the story appeared on MedPage Today:

A limited diet that focuses on a few selected foods including rice, meat, and vegetables may provide symptom relief for children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, researchers said, but skeptics question the validity of their study.

NPR, you know better than this. Or you should. Was the science desk closed over the weekend? If so, you should have held this until Monday so the science folks could take a look.

One final note: In a recent post, I seconded a call for online news stories to link to primary sources. NPR did not link to the ADHD study, which you can find here, but it should have. There you can see the study’s conclusion, which is much more cautious than the researcher was in the NPR interview. Instead of claiming that a diet could cure ADHD, the study said, “A strictly supervised restricted elimination diet is a valuable instrument to assess whether ADHD is induced by food.”

- Paul Raeburn

15500 year old stone artefacts hint to an earlier colonization of the Americas.

The ongoing catastrophe in Japan, especially in Fukushima, still dominates the German media. But other topics were able to reconquer some news space last week.

The finding of a pre-Clovis culture in Texas, which antedates the first proven human colonization of the Americas about at least 4000 years, got a lot of press. “Flintstone Family needs to be antedated” headlines the Austrian Standard (Klaus Taschwer) – though the article does not mention the comic characters at all.

Neither dpa (here, or here, e.g.) nor AFP (here), provided any information or quote beyond the Science source.

The article from Stern.de (Lea Wolz) included an independent source (anthropologist Gary Haynes, University of Nevada) who feels there are some residual doubts regarding the dating method (luminescence) used by the archaeologist. The last third of the article explains, that the finding raises a lot of questions – how did the pre-Clovis-culture reached North-America, despite the icy Canadian landscape 15000 years ago? Did they  walk over the Bering land bridge along the American west coast or did they cross the Pacific, like other theories suggest?

Though the Stern article included Haynes it did not mention that he has been for years a prominent defenders of the “Clovis first”-theory – making even more significant his acknowledgment that humans lived in America before the Clovis-culture. Die Presse (Jürgen Langenbach) mentions this in an interesting article, along with other discoveries, that add doubt about Clovis-first, including genetic analysis.

Die Zeit (Nicole Franciska Kögler) quotes Tom Dillehay from the University of Kentucky who can’t understand, why the current discovery merits such. Lots of different discoveries in the past (including his own work in South America) had not merely cast doubt on the Clovis-first-theory but disproved it, he states.

The focus of Die Süddeutsche Zeitung (Hubert Filser) is on the question “by feet or by boat?“. The article starts with a hunting scene from 12000 years ago – on the islands of Santa Rosa and San Miguel offshore from California. That means hunters there  used boats and opens speculation that  America might have been colonized via the Pacific. Furthermore, the article summarizes different research approaches trying to shed light on the early American history. Linguistic research hints to three distinct language families – three different colonizing events? Genome analysis suggests, “that the Indians are not descendants from the first, but a second or third colonization event.”

In summary, none of the articles quoted a source not mentioned or suggested by Science. Not a single German archaeologist was asked about his opinion. Don’t they exist? Did someone actually try to add a European angle to the story? Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a neutral view on the highly controversial debate among US archaeologists?

Also on the plate this week:

“Artificial sperm bred for the first time”,…

Such headlines jumped from a couple of German language newspaper science sections. Well, artificial mouse sperm, actually. Bravely, the Süddeutsche did not try to cover this up in their headline (article based on dpa). Most others did: Focus (here), Spiegel-online (here), Standard (here). The Austrian Wiener Zeitung (Eva Stanzl) mentioned the mouse-source, but got something else wrong, somehow: “Frankenstein from Mouse-Sperm” (Surprisingly, I couldn’t find a hint to any Frankenstein-like creatures in the original Nature paper).

… Baby Grammar,…

Test for grammar learning capabilities of babys via EEG

Even four-month old babies are already able to learn basic grammar rules. The (PLoS-published) research from the Max-Planck-Institute for Cognition and Neuroscience in Leipzig was picked up all over Germany: Welt (here), Die Presse (here), 20 Minuten (here), Krone (here), Freie Presse / dapd (here). And the article from busy Adelheid Müller-Lissner was published at Zeit-Online (here), Handelsblatt (here) and Tagesspiegel (here) (all part of Holtzbrinck Media). Spiegel-Online had a very smart introduction to the topic: The very first sentence included a grammar mistake! Probably, to raise the readers awareness, how difficult grammar is even for adult journalists (“Leipzig – Säuglinge können schon sehr früh die Grammatikregeln einer neuen Sprachen lernen.”). Though this one made me smirk, I was, again, disappointed, that none of the articles included any other opinion or expert than provided by the Max-Planck-Institute (press release). Not that I distrust the Max-Planck-Scientists, but adding the perspective of an independent researcher would make the articles sound less than a rewritten Max-Planck-announcement. My question is, whether it is really journalistic work to just rephrase a press release (more or less) and not put the new research into perspective?

… and finally:

The Financial Times Deutschland (Michelle Röttger, Marion Schmidt) picked up the investigation of public prosecution against a German professor, the head of the European Business School EBS. Breach of trust is the accusation because the professor had multiple sidejobs (as an adviser, e.g.) and interests in a couple of companies. Officially, professor are allowed to work eight hours on the side. The universities know that many professors work more time on the side or that many do not even announce their activities, but they turn a blind eye. The article quotes from the book of the professor Uwe Kamenz (“Professor Untat”, kind of “Professor Misdeed”), who tested his colleagues by offering them a sidejob. Dozens replied, despite the job would have required more than the allowed amount of time. But the article makes clear, that this behavior has its roots in a deeper problem: On one hand, professor should have contact to the “real world”. On the other hand, how far should they be engaged in activities outside the universities? And what consequences do these sidejobs have regarding their scientific results? Worth reading. And worth effort to dig deeper…

Sascha Karberg

Gotta wrap it up for today and the weekend, but happened late this morning across a topic that has gotten increasing coverage – and bitingly so here:

• Los Angeles Times – Ralph Vartabedian: Lack of data from Japan distresses nuclear experts ;

He puts his finger on a problem that not only hobbles outside experts in judging events, but has made telling the story difficult for reporters hoping to make the sequences come to life with vignettes and personal details. For one example, we know there are fire hoses squirting reactors – but how did the workers, and at what personal risk, actually do it? Did they creep in behind screens of water, slither about behind barriers, lift the hoses with cranes, wear lead-lined coveralls, or what? The story is accompanied by links to a sampling of other LATimes staff reporting on the crises in Japan.

Another one, on a topic done by others too, and worth another look here :

• LA Times – Michael Hiltzik: A nuclear renaissance in U.S. was unlikely even before Japan disaster ;

- Charlie Petit

Some pretty good archaeologists have been saying for years, decades even, that the first people to N. America arrived here long before the famed and well-documented Clovis culture arose maybe 12,000-13,000 years ago. Meadowcroft in Pennsylvania, Monte Verde in Chile, and South Carolina’s Topper sites come to mind. But ambiguities in dating and other confounding variables always kept such data from full professional endorsement.

Now another site is garnering a lot of media attention. At a site called Buttermilk Creek in central Texas a team from Texas A&M and several other universities reports that it has found a large collection of stone tools from undisturbed sediments, some of which date to more than 15,500 years ago. The report is in Science magazine. That, and extensive press release and news conference promotion give it far more prominence than had it been in a less widely famed journal or presented at a meeting of specialists.

One caveat, or perhaps vindicating wrinkle, that ought to be but is not at all  given  prominence  is that the report’s lead author directs The Center for the Study of the First Americans. For many years this institute has organized itself around strong belief  that people were here well before Clovis. Maybe it takes a fossil reporter (like me) to know about this organization. Founded at the Univ. of Maine and then moved to Oregon State University in 1991,  it relocated again to Texas A&M in 2002. Nothing wrong with it. Its scholarship is respected. But it does have a strong streak of hope and conviction in its nature. Somewhere in some way the shade of the center’s late founder and director, Robson Bonnichsen, once a voice in a wilderness of doubters, may be smiling and whispering,  ‘told y’so!’

Stories:

• NYTimes – John Noble Wilford: Arrowheads Found in Texas Dial Back Arrival of Humans in America ; Wilford’s account is remarkably free of caveats or probablies. He writes emphatically, “The new findings establish that the last major human migration, into the Americas, began earlier than once thought.” Okay in general meaning, but does he really mean to say the most recent migration? This looks more like one of the earliest ones to me. Eskimo/Inuit/Aleut peoples, for one group, started coming over much more recently than this migration.
• (Here’s a big package) Wichita Eagle – Roy Wenzl : Discovery of artifacts in Texas may rewrite human history ; That’s a bit much to call it a rewrite of the whole tome. Maybe the 1.5 million yr old Achulean tool kit found in India and also reported this week in Science does that to a greater degree. This Texas news is a minor amendment to the great epic. But still, kudos -  this is one lively, feature-ish tale as told by Mr. Wenzl, no doubt with a few days warning and time for some interviews. It is full of dire wolves, saber toothed cats, and doughty peoples migrating along -  some of them pregnant or carrying babies, others elderly.  It probably was like that. But Mr. Wenzl might watch his unconscious gender assumptions in his phrasings and in the quotes he chooses to use – he tells of these earlier people moving along and then mentions that they also brought their wives and grannies. It’s subtle, but implies that the women somehow are due no credit or status among the people collectively. He has a sidebar too: Kansas evidence may predate Texas discovery.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Texas find suggests earlier settlers in N. America ; Uh oh, a holy grail. It is, at least, in a quote. Schmid adds another piece of archeo-news in Science, a report of stone tools more than 1.5 million years old in India crafted by more primitive ancestors of us Homo sapiens.
• AFP – Jean-Luis Santini : America’s first settlers lived 15,000 years ago: study ; Just to quibble over a hed: It was 15.5k yrs ago and more important, ‘s no way to know how close these were to being the first ones. First you gotta paddle and hike all the way to paleo-Los Angeles or something from Beringea in ancient Siberia, and then walk to Texas. That takes a whole tribe a long time.
• Fort Worth Star-Telegram – Bill Hanna: Texas artifacts ‘strongest evidence yet’ that human arrived in North America earlier than thought ; This (as do many) puts stress on the implication that , to get here 15,000+ years ago around the ice sheets then draped across much of Alaska and Canada, migrants probably paddled boats along the coast.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Scientists: The first Americans may have been Texans ; That’s first known Americans. As you’ll see, a few headlines and a few (not Berger) reporters in their stories imply, without doing it on purpose, that people were somehow teleported to Texas before they got anywhere between there and Siberia.
• New Scientist – Ferris Jabr: First Americans arrived 2500 years before we thought ;
• NPR – Joe Palca: Texas Find Turns Back Clock on Settlers In America;
• BBC – Paul Rincon, Jonathan Amos: Stone tools ‘demand new American story’ ;
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: New discoveries Suggest Earlier Settlement of Americas ; Sound account, if brief. The illus  with this is puzzling. Berman also reports there are about 1,600 artifacts. Correct figure is roughly 16,000.
• Washington Post – David Brown: Dig solidifies evidence that first Americans were here 15,000 years ago ; Hate to harp, but how can one say these were the first ones or even close, like the grandkids? Why not just write “early Americans” and give it wiggle room?
• Daily Mirror (UK) Mike Swain: Native American tool discovery pre-dates US colonisation theories by 2,500 years ; Yes. Predates all of North (and presumably South) American colonisation theories too.  It’s only a brief story.
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Texas Trove of Artifacts Blasts Theory on Arrival of First North Americans ;
• PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Randy Boswell: Texas site points to earlier human settlement of North America;
• Guardian (UK) Alok Jha: Humans arrived in North America 2,500 years earlier than thought ;  Again, I am tiresome, and this is merely a hed but the story says so too – all one can say confidently is they were here at the time. Don’t know when the first arrived.
• Toronto Star – Lesley Ciarula Taylor: Settlers came to N. America thousands of years earlier: study ; Oh  my. Hed’s good, lede says the first arrived then. What, with parachutes shot from Siberian stone cannons? I am henceforth giving up on voicing  this line of nit-criticism.
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: People Were Chipping Stoen Tools in Texas More Than 15,000 Years Ago ; Ahhh. Nicely done all the way through.
• AAAS ScienceNow – Heather Pringle: Texas Site Confirms Pre-Clovis Settlement of the Americas;
• Science News – Rachel Ehrenberg: A new glimpse at the earliest Americans ; This does a good job that the Clovis-first hypothesis was already pretty well knocked apart. This evidence just helps to finish the job.
• Chronicle of Higher Education – Josh Fischman: Turning Back the Clock – a Lot – for the Peopling of the Americas ; Fischman is among the few to tell readers straight out that this news is news, but not huge and not all that different from the trend in N. American archeology going back some time.
• LiveScience via CBS – Jennifer Welsh: First humans in U.S.: Prehistoric Texans? Answer: No. The story’s fine. And the hed clearly and merely goes for a laugh.
• ..could do lots more

Grist for the Mill:

Texas A&M Press Release ; University Illinois Press Release ; Texas A&M Center for the Study of the First Americans ;

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The introduction of transgenic crops in Latin America is one of the most sensitive topics that a science reporter in the region can handle. One might talk about local research versus multinational companies, how GMOs affect the original varieties, specific benefits, or many other angles. But too often we see very simplistic stories that talk about transgenic crops as if they were all the same, and take one side of the story depending on who the reporter is interviewing each time. For example, this week in Mexico we’ve found two opposite stories in different newspapers: the first one explains the benefits of transgenic maize using just one source: an “expert” (whatever this means) from Monsanto. The second one gives voice only to the representatives of Greenpeace, and they give a completely opposite view. Neither provides data or references to studies,  just opinions. Related to this, we’ve found another article saying that a group of research centers from Costa Rica, Peru, Colombia and Brazil have just launched a project to evaluate gene transfer and environmental risks of several transgenic crops. A similar story comes from Paraguay, showing that the government is clearly in favor to introduce more GMO from US multinational corporations.

Cualquier periodista que vaya a escribir un artículo sobre transgénicos debe partir de la base que los trnasgénicos no son, por sí solos, ni buenos ni malos. Depende de cada caso y circunstancias. El debate transgénicos sí vs transgénicos no, tan aireado por organizacions a favor y en contra, está pasado de moda. Esto no es como la energía nuclear, en que la tecnología existente y riesgos no dista mucho de unas instalaciones u otras, y se puede aspira a hacer una valoración global. En el caso de los cultivos transgénicos, hay mucha diversidad de alteraciones genéticas que se están barajando, ya sea para intentar aumentar producción, resistencia al agua, biofortificación, evitar pesticidas… cada modificación es diferente, y se debe analizar de manera específica. A nivel económico y social no es lo mismo que un maíz transgénico venga de una multinacional estadounidense que de un centro de investigación local. ¿mejor o peor? Eso dependerá del caso. Tampoco se puede decir que siempre o nunca haya fuga de genes y representen o no una competencia para especies nativas. Dependerá del caso. Y sobre riesgos para la salud, si aparece una situación problemática, pues esa será sobre la que hablaremos.

Decimos esto, porque notamos una extendida tendencia en los medios latinoamericanos a hablar en genérico de los transgénicos. Como si por sí mismos fueran buenos o malos, peligrosos o nocivos para el medioambiente o la salud, o beneficiosos o perjudiciales para los intereses de los agricultores y la sociedad. J—-! Que cada caso es diferente!. Y si queremos hacer buena información, debemos exigir datos y concreción, no limitarnos a ir reproduciendo un día las palabras interesadas de Monsanto, y otro las exageraciones de Greenpeace. Justo eso es lo que hemos visto esta semana en México. Milenio publica la pieza de  Gómez, Palacio “Transgénicos, una herramienta para la productividad”, defendiendo los beneficios de los transgénicos con una única fuente: un “especialista” de Monsanto. Aparte de que la palabra “especialista” es muy vaga, esto no puede ser. Es propaganda (y además, un poco demagógica). Pero da igual, posiblemente sus productos serán inofensivos y no afectarán al medio ambiente, pero un país tiene otros motivos por los que favorecer su entrada o no.

El artículo de Milenio decía que servían para aumentar la producción del campo, y éste en El Universal “Temen que maíz transgénico se disemine en México” que la productividad en el maíz aumenta como mucho un despreciable 1,3%. Efectivamente hay estudios mostrando que algunos transgénicos logran evitar pesticidas, o herbicidas, o mejorar las propiedades nutricionales, pero que en cuanto a producción no son tan ventajosos. En este caso no se cita estudio alguno, y se termina con una extraña pirueta diciendo que la productividad depende de 35.000 genes y sólo se modifican 5. Demagogia de nuevo, pero por lo menos este artículo enfoca con datos la situación. También en El Universal Miguel Ángel Sosa escribe que Greenpeace promueve alimentos libres de transgénicos. Buena exposición de argumentos, pero la frase “diversos estudios de laboratorio muestran que el consumo de transgénicos presenta serios riesgos para la salud”, vuelve a ser un claro ejemplo del mal uso del término. Equivalente a decir “las setas provocan la muerte” (o incluso mucho peor, porque dichos estudios no están tan claros).

Estudios serios son los que según La Nación van a hacer en Costa Rica. Nos lo cuenta en una breve nota Irene Rodríguez “País empieza estudios en cultivos transgénicos”. Serán sobre temas medioambientales para ver si afectan a cultivos silvestres, y se realizarán con varios productos en Costa Rica, Perú, Colombia y Brasil. Debido a la complejidad de esta temática, estaría bien informar también de quien ha desarrollado estos productos, y quien financia los estudios. El País de CR publica una sencilla nota anunciando un seminario sobre transgénicos, peor nos llama la atención el buen resumen final de argumentos a favor y en contra.

Muchos datos y nombre concretos de empresas aporta SciDev por medio de Patricia Benítez en “Paraguay inicia cultivo experimental de maíz transgénico”. Averiguamos que el gobierno de Paraguay ya apostó claramente por importar esta tecnología de empresas estadounidenses, y que va a continuar haciéndolo si demuestra seguridad a nivel ambiental. Es una nota informativa, que incluye la réplica de organizaciones ecologistas. Más que correcta, el tema de los transgénicos –debido a la importancia que tiene su extensión por Latinoamérica y la sensibilidad social que despiertan- es una de las áreas del periodismo científico en que debemos mejorar la calidad de nuestra información, e incluso servir para reivindicar la importancia de esta profesión.

- Pere Estupinyà

My old paper, the one that still gets delivered here so it gets a natural leg-up in this tracker’s trapline, has three stories worth a look today. They even get front page play:

• SF Chronicle – Peter Fimrite: Old-growth redwood stand saved ; Less than 500 acres total and less than half is in old redwoods up in Mendocino County. But having ridden (and recommending) the 40-mile tourist Skunk Train ride from Fort Bragg to Willits, I can vouch for these trees and the whole run through both old and second-growth groves. It seems so last-century that a logging company would even consider cutting some of these giants, but that’s business for you. Now they’re in good hands. Also good to hear, and hope it’s true, that red-legged frogs are teeming in the region’s creeks. No other outlet, it appears, has this story.

Grist for the Mill: Save the Redwoods League Press Release (2010 – at fund raising campaign start).

• SF Chronicle – David R. Baker: PG&E seeks fee to opt out of meters ; Here as in many places, are to be found people who fear health hazards from the radio signals from electrical meters – which make them on line to the utility and hence saving on meter reader salaries which is hard on the people laid off too, but also allow better load management options for the electric company. Straight story, but one objects to its reference to “fierce controversy” over the reality of health hazards from cell-phone type signals. Unadorned, it implies that serious people with sensible brains are fighting fiercely and with evidence that the hazard is real. Baker does report that a state study by standard-issue health authorities sees no problem. That falls short of evidence for fierce controversy between similarly plausible schools of thought.

Other PG&E smart meter stories:

• NYTimes – Felicity Barringer: PG&E Offers Critics Option to Turn Off Smart Meters ;
• Lake County News – Elizabeth Larson: PG&E submits SmartMeter ‘opt-out’ plan; included higher costs for those opting out. Including the information that these meters send their info in bursts four times per day for 45 seconds in all.
• Bloomberg – Mark Chediak: PG&E to Charge Up to $20/Month to Turn Off Wireless Meters ;
• Daily Finance – Ucilia Wang: Smart Meters: PG&E Plans to Give Customers a Choice – at a Cost ; Well tempered and non-judgmental description of the numbers and influence of those worried that these transmissions are a danger.

Grist for the Mill: PG&E Press Release ;

One more from the local paper. This makes three stories on page one today from the beats to which ksjtracker pays attention:

• SF Chronicle – Erin Allday: Record low levels of TB in S.F.; state falls short of goal ;

- Charlie Petit

As Japan’s nuclear emergency continues, with new wrinkles every day (today’s: Iodine-131 in Tokyo’s water supply, provided by catchments to the north and east and nearer the ruined Fukushima Daiichi, is too high for babies to drink), here are two very different and deeply consonant reviews:

• Yale e360 – David Biello: Anatomy of a Nuclear Crisis: A Chronology of Fukushima ; Outstanding job, even if written from far away, of slogging through news and other reports to assemble a cold, dry, and devastating review of what has happened (as of three days ago when this was filed).
• AP – Seth Borenstein: What’s behind our conflicted feelings on nukes? A portrait of the leaking, leading example of a common neurosis over threats that are invisible and insidious. It could have been written any time in the last 30 years, not that that discounts its power. This is a story that must be written frequently. Borenstein provides, in easy prose and without overt judgment, a set of observations about why nuclear hazards generate such strong reaction compared to others that have been be far deadlier. One small, and deft section makes a telling observation – Even the Springfield nuclear station, where the cartoon Homer Simpson works, has never blown up. Several large buildings at Fukushima, he does not need to mention, did exactly that and do so again and again on TV.

In the meantime, in breaking news:

• New Scientist – Debora MacKenzie: Fukushima radioactive fallout nears Chernobyl level; Story appears solid, somehow the hed should reflect an important caveat. The fallout involved here is dangerous, and volatile, Iodine-131 and Cesium-137 from Japan’s emergency. Other heavier, often longer-lived, nuclear waste that was propelled by massive fire into the air at Chernobyl has not been much of a factor in Japan.

- Charlie Petit

In case you never noticed, if you sit at midnight in an unlit hut in the forest with all the windows and shades shut and and put a piping hot cup of tea to your lips – you still can’t see a darned thing.

But there it is, an artist’s impression of two remarkable brown dwarf so-called failed stars orbiting one another just 75 light years away. One of the mammoth telescopes of the European Southern Observatory parsed their faint infrared glows recently after two ‘scopes in Hawaii detected the pair. One looks a very pale pink, the other a little brighter and redder and cleverly adorned with bands of clouds, even an oval spot, of slightly Jupiterish mien. They both appear merrily glowing. Hmmpppphhhhhh.

Just about every outlet that covered this diverting if not exactly astounding news used this handout art from ESO as illus. And most of them picked up from press releases that the temperature of the cooler of the two is around 100C, about the same as tea made fresh with a boiling pot. My tea does not light up the dark. The hotter brown dwarf’s temp is around 400C, where things just barely start to glow red enough to see with the lights out. Artistic license I guess. Maybe the hotter one would make the smaller one visibly faintly detectable by reflected light, but not this easily – surely not, one supposes, at an estimated 2.6 astronomical units separation which is more than Mars’s distance from the Sun. With my handy dandy photo manager’s help here to the right is what my oft-employed SWAG routine (scientific wild ass guess) yields.

Other than that it’s a good, basic astronomy story. Old and cool brown dwarfs are inescapably out there by the scads, some far chillier than these, but none had been apparent before. There might even be water clouds and other planet-like chemicals in their outer atmospheres. The discovery is a  reason to catch the public up on the explosion of discovery recently about  the blurry boundary between stars and planets where reside brown dwarfs, their interior pressure and temperature inadequate to trigger the thermonuclear fusion of true starshine. (I’ve emailed the lead author of the paper to ask if I’m all wet about the visibility of this pair to unaided eyes. If I get answer, I’ll share).

Stories:

• Universe Today – Anne Minard: Coolest Brown Dwarf Spotted by Earth-bound telescopes ;
• Nat. Geographic News – Andrew Fazekas : Coldest Star Found – No Hotter Than Fresh Coffee ; He writes these two are “locked in close orbit,” but two stars no larger (if much more massive) than Jupiter, nearly 250 million miles apart, on an orbit that takes 25 years or so per lap seem not particularly closely locked. He (as do some other reports) notes that the record for coolest brown dwarf may soon fall, if the Spitzer Space Telescope’s indications of one at just 86F pan out.
• Space.com – Coldest Known Star Is a Real Misfit ; No byline. No clear evidence of reporting, beyond rewrite. Lotta stories like that.
• USA Today (ScienceFair blog)- Dan Vergano : Video: Coolest stars ever discovered ;
• Cosmos (Australia) Very cool pair of brown dwarfs identified ;
• Sky and Telescope – Robert Naeye: The Coolest Stars Ever Found? With a good illus of several small star types, compared to the sun, including the hypothetical “Y” class in which these two may fit. Looks kind’a like my stab in the dark illus above. This story includes on equal footing the even-cooler one under investigation by astronomers using the Spitzer Space Telescope.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Brown dwarf pair cool as coffee ; Excellent story, as one might expect from an astronomer working for a specialty pub. Worth praise even though the hed implies both are cool as coffee -  one is hot enough to roast a chicken pretty quick. It also points out that the photographic image of this pair, with the same rendered colors as that painting topmost right, was assembled entirely from near infrared wavelengths.

Grist for the Mill:

ESO Press Release, preprint of Astrophysical Journal paper on arXiv.

- Charlie Petit

There has been a great deal of focussed, terrific, and balanced reporting on the nuclear emergency in Japan. Unfortunately it has been bobbing like those shattered remnants of houses 15 miles offshore, the ones around the US Navy fleet whose helicopters are ferrying supplies. Which is to say, swept away by volumes of semi-hysterical reports of imminent radioactive catastrophe in world media. Coverage of that hypothetical and far-fetched scenario, now ebbing, for awhile took the gaze away from where it should have stayed – on the titanic struggle by Japan to rebuild from earthquake and ocean flood, and to properly grieve for those who died in the tsunami.

At the BBC site one may get a first-hand view of UK reporters, competing for ways to say run for your lives without looking too foolish, in the days after the scale of the very-real and very dangerous emergency at nuclear power stations in the tsunami zone.

• BBC – Fiona Fox: Media meltdown over nuclear threat ;

For another take on the same phenomenon, try this:

• The Atlantic – Jesse Jenkins, Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger : Nuclear as Usual: Why Fukushima Will Change Less Than You Think ; This from writers who are hard to peg – Nordhaus and Shellenberger in particular and of “the death of environmentalism” fame. These men consistently appear to scoff at conventional global warming worry warts (me! me!) as ineffectual while, at the same time, saying the problem of global warming is so colossal that those same worry warts underestimate it. Are we supposed to be frantic, or relaxed? Anyway and However… one must say this analytical piece is convincing. The nuclear renaissance would have been lucky to get two or three new US reactors in the next 15 years. Ditto for Europe. It’s real hotbed is in nations that are going to plow ahead no matter what. So they say.

And Finally – The great question at ksjtracker. How to say Fukushima like a native, Part III.

Of course, it does not matter. Most outsiders will probably keep saying it foo-koo-SHEE-ma. Another recent suggestion in this space is that (f)’kushiMA is more like it. Even if most of us who are outsiders heard the correct pronunciation straight from the director of the power station (who may be looking for work soon, one hazards as a totally uninformed guess), we’d probably screw it up and just look pretentious in the effort.

Nonetheless here is another offering, verbatim except for a few typo repairs, as relayed by New Scientist regular and New York-based writer Jonathan D. Beard:

Hi , I forwarded the part of your report about the problems of pronouncing Fukushima Daiichi correctly to A…., who is now a reporter in suburban NYC.

In her prior life, she was a TV news anchor in Sapporo.

and she writes:

I consider myself a professional Japanese speaker. All are wrong. It’s possible that you don’t hear ‘f” if the speaker is not a trained Japanese speaker. But the length of ‘ku’ , ‘shi,’ and ‘ma’ should be the same. If you insist, I suggest you to stress ‘ku.’

- Charlie Petit

Just in case the Fukushima Daiichi reactor complex surprises everybody and blows a chunk of its junk into orbit, a new idea provides a possible way to keep it from smacking the space station. Aim a fairly modest laser beam at it, and fire it long enough to just slightly alter the debris’s course  (and that’s just an opening joke, all you readers who may fear such a thing is possible. The laser idea is real).

A NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford U. team describes the idea in a paper submitted to the journal Advances in Space Research. It is circulating on the arXiv-physics preprint server. It holds that an affordable laser could over time impart a big enough momentum shift, via photons, to modest-sized orbital debris to steer it away from collisions calculated to otherwise be very likely and thus to add to the already stupid-bleak junkyard humankind is assembling in low Earth orbit.

This paper has been public for a week or so. Several news reports have resulted.

At Wired Science, for instance, Lisa Grossman has the essence in a pithy quote from one of the authors: “There’s not a lot of argument this is going to screw us if we don’t do something.” By some calculations, the authors tell her, a few such lasers in continuous operation might so blunt the formation rate of new debris that the threateningly growing density of orbital flotsam will shrink and eventually fade. That’d put paid to something the report and she and several journalists  describe – the dreaded Kessler syndrome.

Other stories:

• MIT Technology Review/Physics arXiv Blog: NASA Studies Laser for Removing Space Junk;
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Laser proposed to deflect space junk ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Daniel Bates: Nasa to shoot lasers at space junk around Earth to prevent collisions with satellites ; Oh well, it’s just the Mail, shooting itself in the hed with its laser mouth. Ignore the headline, the story has it much closer to right. This is no program, merely a speculative paper. The Mail has a nifty photograph of, ostensibly, some space junk that crashed to Australia’s red earth three years ago.
• PhysOrg.com – Deborah Braconnier: NASA proposes laser use to move space junk.

One wonders whether a bunch of such lasers, swiveling routinely to caress onrushing bits of LEO space debris and firing from locations without a lot of airliners and other potential innocent victims overhead, might speed reentry of small bits enough to distinctly increase decay rates of their orbits. Worth asking…

Grist for the Mill:

Paper “Orbital Debris-Debris Collision Avoidance” , NASA Orbital Debris Program Office ;

- Charlie Petit