(English intro to Spanish lang. post) A Spanish follow-up of yesterday’s post by Paul Raeburn about links to primary sources reveals that none of the online versions of the major newspapers in Latin America are used to including links in their stories. In Spain, a few reporters put links occasionally, but they tend to be generic and not tremendously useful. Now for results of tracking recent stories. We found a good set of articles in El Espectador about the worrying obesity rates in Colombia. In Juventud Rebelde (Cuba) there is a very nice and original story about the mechanisms how certain parasites, food, and environments induce sleep. La Nacion (Argentina) explains that Argentinean researchers heal lesions of competition horses with stem cells derived from fat tissue (a link to the primary source might be useful here). In Guatemala, a reporter argues that they should learn from Costa Rica on how to take economic, social and educative advantages from their biodiversity richness. In Spain, stories about gene therapy for Parkinson, later -than-thought arrival of hominoid primates to Europe, and a study saying that people who are out of shape are at higher risk of heart attacks after sporadic and intense physical exercise or sex encounters.

Interesante la reflexión del compañero de Tracker Paul Raeburn sobre el texto de Ben Goldacre, quejándose de que los artículos periodísticos online no suelen enlazar a la fuente original. No decimos que sea imprescindible, pero sí podría ser una práctica a ir instaurando.

En artículos sencillitos que vienen de agencias de noticias quizás es un engorro ir a buscar todos los enlaces, y a no ser que queramos comprobar que no se trate de una barbaridad (en no pocas ocasiones se cuelan), tampoco vamos a darle muchas vueltas. Pero en las piezas más elaboradas, en las que se nota que el periodista sí ha estado consultando las fuentes originales, puede significar muy poco tiempo y ser una información útil para un cada vez más amplio grupo de lectores ávidos de profundizar. Pongamos como ejemplo la buena nota aparecida hoy en El Mundo por Patricia Matey “¿Sexo de infarto?” explicando que si no se está entrenado, episodios puntuales de ejercicio intenso o sexo desbocado pueden provocar ataques de corazón. La información de Patricia es muy completa, bien presentada, y se cita la revista JAMA (e incluso se enlaza a su página de inicio). Pero seguro que muchos agradeceríamos leer el abstract del artículo original. No es por “comprobar” que no sea un desliz del medio. Esto lo tiene que hacer cualquier blog, donde no ha habido el filtro de un editor y no tenemos porqué confiar en lo que allí se exponga, o ante noticias impactantes de dudosa credibilidad en medios de comunicación menos serios. En estos casos sí que poner el enlace marca una diferencia.

Otro ejemplo donde no es imprescindible pero sí aconsejable sería la pieza en Público de Nuño Domínguez “El mono europeo rejuvenece dos millones de años”. De nuevo, la información está bien trabajada y seguro Nuño tiene la referencia en sus archivos. No estaría mal que en la versión online aparecieran algunos enlaces. Lo mismo con el interesantísimo primer caso exitoso de terapia génica contra el parkinson que nos explica Ainhoa Iriberri; quizá nos gustaría ver el enlace a Lancet. Vemos que en ABC, Judith de Jorge pone algunos en “Un experimento de 1958 pudo haber demostrado cómo se originó la vida”. Pero –aparte del de Stanley Miller- son genéricos y quizás no tan útiles. Curioso el caso del servicio de noticias SINC, que siempre cita la referencia bibliográfica, pero sin enlazarla.

Pero en general, y revisando los principales periódicos españoles y de Latinoamérica, lo que vemos es que en España sí aparecen muy puntualmente algunos links. Pero la práctica es inexistente en Latinoamérica. Aprovechemos para rastrear algunas buenas notas que hemos encontrado.

En la sección de salud de El Espectador leemos un buen reportaje de Gabriela Supelano y Mariana Suárez “Una epidemia de peso”, sobre un nuevo estudio que sitúan en el 52% el número de colombianos con sobrepeso. El texto explora los aspectos ambientales y cambio de alimentación, y los fisiológicos. Viene acompañado de una entrevista a un experto con información muy útil para el lector, una nota más genérica sobre la encuesta, y un ilustrativo gráfico (foto arriba). Información muy completa, pero no estaría de más algún enlace a los datos del estudio.

Juventud Rebelde es un periódico cubano que a menudo nos sorprende con muy buenos artículos científicos. Es el caso de “Los sueños, sueños son” de René Tamayo León, que bajo la excusa inicial del descubrimiento de varios hongos parásitos que inducen el sueño a sus víctimas, amplia la información a temas como la hibernación o porqué algunos alimentos nos dan sueño, y escribe una variada e interesantísima nota sobre el sueño.

En La Nación (Argentina) vemos gracias a Nora Bar que ya se utilizan células madre para tratar caballos de étlite. Una investigadora argentina asegura que puede diferenciar células madre del tejido adiposo en células de cartílago, hueso y tejido nervioso, y reconstruir músculo y tendones de equinos lesionados. En este caso, y sabiendo las exageraciones que rodean el campo de las células madre (y unas muy notorias son las clínicas privadas que ofrecen tratamientos fraudulentos con células madre de origen adiposo), un lector crítico sí pediría alguna referencia de publicación científica para confirmar la información.

De nuevo, puede ser útil o no. Pero no sobra que Daniela Hirschfeld en “Cáscara de Bananos purificarían el agua” añada el enlace a la fuente original al final de su nota en SciDev. Lo curioso del titular puede generar sospechas. Con el link sabemos que por lo menos viene de un estudio serio. No lo dudábamos de SciDev, pero sí lo podemos hacer de otros medios o blogs.

En otro tema diferente, leemos en el Periódico de Guatemala un enfoque sobre la biodiversidad que habíamos solicitado hace tiempo. Diana Choc en “El camino hacia el desarrollo de la biodiversidad” plantea la biodiversidad como (aparte de todo lo que ya sabemos) yna fuente de riqueza económica, social y educativa. Dice que es un “tesoro que los guatemaltecos no reconocemos, y que el país debe aprender de la experiencia de Costa Rica que sí le está sacando partido. Este enfoque que va más allá de la pura investigación, es algo que también queremos leer en la información científica.

- Pere Estupinyà

After I knocked The New York Times three days ago for inserting a link for “wrinkle” in a story on shar-peis (the link went to a Health Guide explaining that “wrinkles are creases in the skin”) I was surprised to open Science Times yesterday and discover the shar-pei story there. (I use Times Reader, not newsprint; so I can’t be sure this was also true on paper. In the Reader, the story was clearly part of Tuesday’s Science Times.)

For a moment, I thought I had uncannily developed a way to read Times stories several days before they run. I immediately tried to conjure up tomorrow’s stock market story.

Then I realized, to my dismay, that the Times was using stories in Science Times that had run days earlier on the web. The same was true for a story on competing memories that appeared Tuesday in Science Times but had run a day before online.

Neither one of these stories is what you would refer to strictly as breaking news. And Science Times generally runs features, commentaries, and evergreens of one sort or another–not breaking news. Still, there is something a little disturbing about a newspaper rerunning stories it has published earlier on the web.

If newspapers have any reason to exist on the mew media landscape, it is because they tell us what happened right up until deadline. The latest on the Japanese nukes, or from the New England Journal of Medicine or the CDC, let’s say. And the Times often features longer, more analytical news stories, in which it tries to surpass what can be done with a quick blog post or a short item on the web.

But if the Times is rerunning stories from the web, which I could have read online days earlier, is that not one more reason to discard the paper in favor of the web? We can only guess at the thinking behind this strategy. I would welcome a comment from a Times editor defending or explaining the practice.

And I would never trouble Tracker readers with annoying or silly links.

- Paul Raeburn

The end of the nuclear age - claimed by the Spiegel

With a little bit more time between the bad news from Fukushima, the German language science sections have several interesting, more in-depth stories. Or at least with unique perspectives.

Hartmut Wewetzer (Tagesspiegel) had the right story on the topic for a Berlin newspaper: He reports, that the dye “Berlin blue” (aka “Prussian blue”), which formerly tinted the uniforms of Prussian soldiers, can be used as a medicine to transport cesium and thallium out of the body. Of course, a Berlin company is getting a surge in orders from Japan and other Asian countries for the former dye, now called “Radiogardase”, a “mixture of iron, carbon and nitrogen” (well, actually, its: “ferric hexacyanoferrate(II)”, which contains atoms of carbon, iron and nitrogen ). Wewetzer writes quite early, that there is no need to swallow such pills in Germany in precaution. The pills require a doctor’s prescription, anyway. He also explains the mode of action of the drug. But I wish he wouldn’t have written that the drug has only “marginal side effects”. The company writes that “serum electrolyte levels should be monitored during treatment, particularly in patients with pre-existing cardiac arrhythmias or electrolyte imbalances, as should possible clinical responses to critical orally administered drugs.” And, even more important in a situation like Japan where pregnant woman are particularly eager to keep their baby safe there is this: “Prussian blue’s potential effects on pregnancies have not been studied.” Another point: The article looks a bit like promotion for the Berlin company, to my knowledge the only company providing this medicine. And they were farsighted, or lucky,  enough to establish a Japanese branch office in the autumn of 2010…

Like the Tagesspiegel, other media warned their worried readers about preventively swallow other  pills, too. The Swiss Tages-Anzeiger (here), Zeit.de (here), agencies like AFP (here), Stern.de (here), the Austrian Standard (here), even Bild (here) and locals like Ludwigsburger Kreiszeitung (here) and Badische Zeitung (here). But still, some just don’t get it: the news website of the ZDF headlined “Iodine – the only protection”. Only in the last third of the article does the author give Germans any clue to the current needlessness and risks swallowing iodine. (And the headline is not true, anyway, as anyone who reads the Tagesspiegel’s Berlin-Blue-story should know).

The science section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung not only warned about the “moronism” of iodine uptake, but decided to react to the radiation hysteria (“fear of radiation”) in Germany with a very sober-toned piece about the dosage effect of radiation.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung (Christopher Schrader) compared,  in “Pools for Pins” (how I would paraphrase the headline),   the storage of the fuel rods in special pits in Fukushima with the practice in German power plants – and found, that in six nuclear power plants the pits are at the same apparently dangerous position (outside the containment), just like in Fukushima. Schrader explains in detail the risk of such a construction and raises a lot of questions, who should definitely be discussed during the “German moratorium”.

UPDATE (3/25): The weekly Die Zeit (Hans Schuh and Gero von Randow) wrote about the same topic – the underestimated risk of the storage pools for the fuel rods.

The Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung had two articles, worth mentioning: “The number-GAU“, first, which sub-headline shouts, that either 56 (IAEA) or 93000 people (Greenpeace) died due to the blow-up of Tchernobyl – depending on the “political agenda” of  study authors. But right in the beginning, the article of Simone Schmid makes clear, that this is also a scientific problem. An example: are the heart failures of the kids of a Ukrainian worker, who helped to control the Tchernobyl catastrophe, a coincidence or result of radiation damage in the father’s sperm DNA? The article goes on to explain how hard it is to get reliable data. “Nuclear power still an option“, is worth to mention, because this would be a headline one cannnot (I didn’t) find in Germany these days. In a rather opinionated, sometimes even polemic style, NZZ editor Andreas Hirstein gazed over the Rhine and wrote, that only hours after the first explosion in Fukushima, “the public’s fuses burned out” and the German news magazine Der Spiegel proclaimed the “end of the atomic age”. By now, the “meltdown” has reached Swiss and Middle-European politics, too, he wrote. And the German chancellor Angela Merkel acts like she aims to found “a new kind of anti nuclear power movement”. Then, Hirstein follows the argument that Germany (and other European nations) just can’t switch off nuclear power plants, because it would fall back behind the plan to substantially cut CO2-emissions. He is right to hint, that the discussion in Germany still lacks explanations, how alternative energies could help to reach the European goal to cut back CO2 emission by 20 % (compared to 1990). He is also right to hint, that the US and China and others keep planing new nuclear plants. But I would like to shout back over the Rhine, that the discussion just began. Two weeks ago, the end of the atomic age (in Germany) was 30 years away, now it is a sudden political reality. Of course Germany (and whole Europe, too) needs a discussion about how to reduce CO2 and exclude the risk of a Fukushima-like event. The article starts the discussion, gives numbers and calculations (as far as they are available) and asks several experts. Though, I wouldn’t have gone so far to already provide the conclusion of the discussion, saying, that the idea of a fast pullout from nuclear power is an “all-or-nothing-gamble”.

Other newspapers are thinking about the future without nuclear power, too. The Kölner Stadtanzeiger explains “Öko-Energie“(“alternative energy”). Die Welt writes, that “Not everything green is really alternative energy” (Nicht alles, was grün ist, ist wirklich Ökostrom)” (Same headline from the Sächsische Zeitung). And Focus sees a “run on alternative energies“.

Sascha Karberg

This week’s section lead on the Japan earthquake is handled a few posts down. A related story, perhaps a sidebar,  by Gardiner Harris on mass evacuations due to imminent hazard merits its spot on the front page too. A salute to his discovery of a perfect opening vignette involving a bridge and Three Mile Island.The photo right is from a slideshow of eye-popping images at NYT, not linked to any specific story.

Also related to the quake and its aftermath is Elisabeth Rosenthal’s primer on radioactive plumes and other ways that nuclear material spreads with possible dangerous impacts. While I’m at it, another tough-minded investigative report on the Fukushima Daiichi reactor breakdown and its public perils, by Hiroko Tabuchi, Norimitzu Onishi, and Ken Belson is on the Time’s front page, That describes the regulatory culture in Japan that contributed to this old plant’s recent receipt of a renewed operating permit.

Other stories:

• John Tierney: Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s The Only Choice : Interesting philosophical ponder here, but sort of pointless. If we have free will, we choose who we punish for crimes. If we don’t, then we might as well punish the same ones anyway – what choice have we?
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Older Elephant Matriarchs Keep the Lions at Bay ; Rather short, part of her Observatory roundup, and diverting. It raises my eyebrows. It says here, without ado, that male lions are the  predators most dangerous to elephants. Haven’t we all read, and some of us reported, that male lions tend toward the layabout side of the ledger while the females do most of the hunting? Or maybe these are mostly solitary males out being bachelors – so dumb they attack elephants?
• Denise Grady: Riddled With Metal by Mistake in a Study: Gripping, scary report on an odd mishap with implications for how the FDA regulates medical devices. But too little on what happened. How did tungsten get from a simple radiation shield into the flesh of women? Did somebody neglect to dust them off?  If they’d just put the  things in plastic sleeves would that have prevented this tragic sequence?
• Claudia Dreifus: A Conversation With Samantha B. Joye ; The U. of Georgia woman who was in the news last summer, many times, as she documented ecological effects of BPs big mistake in the gulf.
• Madonna Behen: Rear-Facing Car Seats Advised at Least to Age of 2 ; This is big news all over. Here’s a thought: make all the passenger seats in cars face backwards. Buses and cabs too. Let’em watch the front by video screen.

Elsewhere in the NYTimes, mainly Business section:

• John Markoff: Open Networking Foundation Pursues New Standards ; Nerdy, but fascinating on cloud computing and the search for shared ways of working.
• Jad Mouawad: Natural Gas Now Viewed as Safer Bet ;
• Andrew E. Kramer: Nuclear Industry in Russia Sells Safety, Taught by Chernobyl ; Not the first sales pitch starter I’d have thought up, “Hi, we brought Chernobyl to the world and do I have a reactor deal for you.”

- Charlie Petit

The British Isles used to have European beavers. The ancient fur trade took care of them centuries ago, well before later generations established the Hudson’s Bay Co. in the New World and set about clearing North American versions from much of their range.

A search for other things uncovered a couple of nifty, small tales on the  wire about the return, with assistance from naturalists, of beavers to Wales, and on the general state of beaverdom in the UK:

• BBC: Beavers set for return to Wales for Cerediion project / ..reintroduced for the first time in at least 900 years ; A breeding pair on the way, and handlers say they’ll be prevented from general spread, at least at first.
• Western Mail (via Wales OnLine) Rachael Misstear: Beavers to be reintroduced to Wales after an absence of 900 years ;
• BBC: Legal challenge over River Tay’s wild beavers ; In Scotland, some of the newly imported beavers there  have gotten away and are bearing young.

In the meantime, and despite the lasting imprint of heroic Badger of The Wind in the Willows fame on the collective psyche, some want to see a lot less of the real thing …

• BBC: Wales badger cull: Trust appeals to AM’s before vote ; AM being Welsh Assembly Member. It appears that badgers may carry a bacterium that causes tuberculosis in cattle. Much argument in this piece over what the best science suggests be done. For background on that, see this at Wildlife Online.
• Daily Post – Andrew Forgrave: Welsh badger cull faces blocking vote ;

- Charlie Petit

As news in Japan trends away from worry over widespread public death and illness from the nuclear emergency(and to investigation of what went wrong and the specific planning and regulatory mistakes behind it), primary attention is shifting back to where some would argue it might better have stayed all along. That being the twin headed horror of monster m9.0 earthquake and a tsunami that flooded at least several hundred square miles of northeastern Honshu Island and swept many thousands to their deaths,  erasing towns and parts of cities. For science journalists that means further coverage of the geophysical events that spawned the catastrophe.

This morning’s NYTimes Science Times gets most of its stories treated in a separate post. The lead article belongs in this roundup. Reporter Kenneth Chang takes a global view – is this unexpectedly huge quake an anomaly in earth science? The answer, one learns without surprise, is no. Hidden and undetected faults are common. Lots of quakes are the first signs to structural geologists that they missed seams right under our collective feet. And huge earthquakes on large, known plate boundaries may come as surprises only because human data don’t go back far enough to reveal their frequency or normality.

This is a good explainer. Its illus of the tsunami overwhelming a berm is terrific – and shows why a tsunami up close is not a normal wave, but a big patch of ocean that has deepened on encountering land and simply pours ashore. But the story is about faults. Better would have been a diagram or other photo-computerized whatever illustrating the lithospheric convulsion that spawned this mobile blister on the sea. Up right is a vastly, vertically exaggerated map of the ocean floor off Japan, making plain what a drastic difference there is between oceanic lithosphere and  continental margin. The foreground abyssal plain is a portion of Pacific Plate that is crunching its way under that escarpment that holds Japan and is part of interlocked crust of the Eurasian Plate. The star marks the spot on the surface beneath which, well down, the rupture first began to rip. (source: NOAA, via UC Berkeley seismoblog where one can right click it to get the hi-res version).

Chang, one must add, appears to have inverted something in describing the thesis behind a 1980 theory by famed Caltech professor Hiroo Kanamori when, in a second reference, he applies it to the Java Trench. It’s not an obscure inconsistency. An editor should have flagged it. Maybe I’m just not reading it correctly, but one guesses Chang called the oceanic side of the Java Trench young when he meant to write old. (Late addition: The generally steady Ken says by email it was a brain freeze, the trench is old, will be corrected soon. While it’s mainly on him an editor really should’ve spotted it.)

Other Japan Seismology, Tectonics etc Stories:

• AP – Robin McDowell: Japan quake loaded stress on fault closer to Tokyo ; Good enough, but one wonders about the remark that the quake “created a trench in the sea floor 240 miles long and 120 miles wide as one tectonic plate dove 30 feet beneath another.” Is this a reference to the Japan Trench that has been there for, one can only suppose,  millions of years? Or is there a new trench there of that breadth, a little adjustment deep in the standard, ancient one?
• Bellingham Herald – Zoe Fraley: Earthquakes a possibility for Whatcom County, tsunami threat smaller ; Lesson – Bellingham may be okay because its partly shielded by the San Juan Islands. So, one infers, don’t move to the beach on those islands, especially on their sides exposed to the open sea, without high ground close by.
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Tom Hawthorn: Disasters abroad offer chilling look of what quake could do to West Coast ; Some, not much, geology. But the G and M’s British Columbia correspondent does a good job making a giant Cascadia quake’s results, particularly the tsunami, vivid. Vancouver Island’s West Side could get slammed and he names the towns most vulnerable – Ucluelet, Tofino, and the logging town of Port Alberni at the end of a long fjord that’d channel the wave for miles and then through town like a freight train. He also contradicts the Bellingham story listed immediately previous  -  a tsunami would, one source tells him – follow the Juan de Fuca Strait into that city.
• Our Amazing Planet – Brett Israel : Shinmoedake volcano: Japan’s explosive geology explained ; Don’t let the hed fool you, the story is about both tectonics generally and volcanology. It also has a fabulous picture of volcanic lightning.

Meanwhile, a pronunciation tip for those ruined reactors:

I’ve been ruminating in a few posts on how to pronounce Fukushima, the name of the prefecture in which are the nefarious and precariously unstable reactors of the ruined Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station. A close friend, who works with a man from Sendai which is about as reliable as it gets, reports that it is neither FookooSHEEma as most US reporters have it, nor the f’KOOshima that an earlier post at this site hazarded via reader comment. Rather, in Sendai at least, it is like a little stuttering rip through the initial syllables – a real fast fukushi where the f is hardly heard -  and a big finish:  (f)-kushiMA. If we hear more about this issue, we shall share.

- Charlie Petit

source http://tinyurl.com/46w3vn9

Last week while earthquake, tsunami, and multiple melting reactor cores pretty near paralyzed interest in following other things here at tracker central, Nature published some intriguing new results. They address geologically-rapid cases of entirely natural global warming . Called hyperthermals, or thermal maximums, surges of planetary warmth got into a rhythm – driven by orbital factors – about 50 million years ago. They recurred every 400,000 years or so, lasted around 40,000 years each, and boosted temperatures by an average of 3 to 6 degrees F, roughly. Several outlets picked up the news, thanks both to their being in Nature and to a press release from the influential  Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where the paper’s author worked before recently returning to the UK’s Open University (see Grist).

The news in this is that, contrary to what earth scientists believe was the case in a giant, somewhat earlier “Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum” and several other big events boosted by CO2 releases from geological formations, the later sequences of short-lived hyperthermals may have been more like what is happening now due to fossil fuel use. The carbon may have cycled out of deep ocean reserves rather than crustal deposits. Moreover, these newly detected hyperthemals did not see extreme waves of extinction. That seems like good news, but a downside is that the same results indicate the underlying natural systems that control Earth’s temperature are more unstable than had been thought.One notes that there ancient episodes of global warming occurred rapidly by geological standards, and set in within several thousand years. Todays’ warming is causing deep changes on time periods of decades to centuries.

Stories:

• Orange County Register – Pat Brennan: Scripps study: 50 million years ago, a warming planet ; Nice enough job, filling in the basic formal reports with a review of the animals of the time, such as early horses.
• San Diego Union Tribune – Gary Robbins: Scripps: Warming more common than thought ; Interesting if not significant: Robbins was science editor at the Register (previous story), and Brennan was a science reporter there, before Robbins moved to San Diego. Robbins in displayed the greater initiative, getting reactions from NASA’s James Hansen, Gavin Schmidt of a different NASA facility (and a main player at the Real Climate blog) , and from a man at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. The three welcome the study but seem cautious about looking at  these paleo-data to decide on policy over what is happening now. [Correction: Schmidt, like Hansen, is at the Goddard Inst. for Space Studies in Manhattan not, as originally implied and believed by CP, the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. Thank you to reader Steve Bloom]
• Discovery News – Tim Wall: Climate Change Frequent 40 Million Years Ago ; A look at the paper and releases suggests that he should say 50, not 40 million years ago. Wall’s angle is that if the past is a guide, humankind is creating a climate change that won’t get back to its starting point for thousands of years.
• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Rapid warming in Eocene shares features with glacial cycles ; A bit on the technical side, but also best of the bunch in examining the puzzle of how carbon cycled into and back out of the atmosphere at the pace the data imply. Could the deep ocean do it all?

Grist for the Mill:

Scripps Inst. of Oceanography Press Release; Open University Press Release; European Commission Cordis News Press Release/Article ;

- Charlie Petit

The transformation of Japan’s nuclear woes from disaster news to recovery and lessons-learned mode seems to be underway. Maybe Fukushima Dai-ichi somehow still manages to disgorge a substantial fraction of its inventory of highly radioactive material, including loads of Iodine-131 and Cesium-137, but one guesses not. Rather, its greater legacy will be radical re-adjustment of operating and design principles of nuclear power in much of the world.  This is so even with the immediate news flow remaining immense, relaying among other things the spectacle of heroic and self-sacrificing work by emergency crews at the plant.

Even the easy presumption that a modern, Generaton III plant with a passive cooling system would have ridden out the Great Tohoku Earthquake tsunami just fine, which one hopes is true, is surely due for tight review.

A fine example of the lessons-learned, investigative reporting already well underway is:

• Wall St. Journal – Rebecca Smith, Ben Casselman, Mitsuru Obe: Japan Plant Had Troubled History ; Most interesting here is not the plant’s background as site of a higher than average accident and radiation history, which the story documents assiduously but has been reported in outline elsewhere, but the hard look at standard practices at Japanese nuclear plants that may have worsened risks.

Without as much detail but hitting the same main points, Reuters‘s Kevin Krolicki and Ross Kerber in a “Special Report” tell readers of the unluckily unusual factors – including that the plant was “stacked high with more uranium that it was originally designed to hold – that increased its vulnerability to disaster.

Other related or breaking news:

• Bloomberg BusinessWeek – Jim Efstathiou Jr., Simon Lomax: Japan Reactor Containment Intact, Crisis ‘Stabilizing,’ NRC Says ;
• Reuters – James Pomfret, Benjamin Kang Lim: China’s nuclear plan slowed, not stopped, by Japan quake
• Mainichi Daily News : Japan nuclear plant workers praised as heroes say they’re just doing their jobs ; Not a bad story. But it’s hard to find much in local (and English language) press that reflects original reporting on the disaster’s scope rather than relay of official announcements. It does appear that the most incisive, aggressive reporting is coming from non-Japanese news agencies. One hopes that some of these outside reporters eventually file stories on how the Japanese press performed overall.
• on the other hand .. New Zealand Herald – Paul Harper; ‘Wall of shame’ – media slammed for Japan crisis coverage ; Outside coverage of the nuclear emergency is not getting all rave reviews inside Japan.
• Kyodo News Service: Work to restore power delayed as smoke seen at Fukushima reactors ;
• Foreign Policy magazine – Clyde Prestowitz: The good and bad of Japan on display ; I’ve no way to judge the accuracy of this portrait of Japanese society and its bureaucracies strengths and weaknesses. But it’s interesting reading, fodder for conversation.

And finally, the black swan effect – US outlets may be helping add a new buzzword, at first refreshing, eventually maddening (think tipping point, or the long-overdue-for-burial habit of putting a “-gate” on scandal) new shortcut usage.

• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Japan’s ‘black swan’: Scientists ponder the unparalleled dangers of unlikely disasters ; A  fine and reflective analysis. It’s the eventual  degradation of the term that worries.
• NYTimes – Jeff Sommer: A Crisis That Markets Can’t Grasp ;
• Investopedia via SF Chronicle – Brian Bloch: Black Swan Events and Investment ; In which we are remined whence the term arose. It’s not with Natalie Portman’s portrayal of ballet dancing.

- Charlie Petit

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Ben Goldacre, the estimable British blogger, has pointed out a problem that is so egregious I wouldn’t have even thought to look for it. Too many bloggers and journalists, he tells us, are not linking to primary sources. And what’s worse, many of those missing links are obscuring grotesque distortions of what the primary source contained.

Goldacre is a doctor and the author of the Bad Science column in the national British daily, the Guardian. His bio describes him as “an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dodgy government reports, evil pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.”

In a post entitled “A Case of Never Letting a Source Spoil a Good Story,” Goldacre rails at examples in the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, and the Express in which writers and editors neglected to link to primary stories. With a very quick check of those sources, Goldacre suggests that linking to them would have entirely undermined the stories–because the primary sources did not say what the news stories claimed they’d said.

Here’s one of Goldacre’s examples:

This week the Telegraph ran the headline “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”. It continued: “Offshore wind farms are one of the main reasons why whales strand themselves on beaches, according to scientists studying the problem…”But anyone who read the open-access academic paper in PLoS One, titled “Beaked whales respond to simulated and actual navy sonar”, would see that the study looked at sonar and didn’t mention wind farms at all.

And another:

Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became “Why stilettos are the secret to shapely legs”, for the Mail “Stilettos give women shapelier legs than flats”, for the Express “Stilettos tone up your legs”. Yet anybody who read even just the press release would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn’t look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance from the back of your ankle joint to the insertion of the achilles tendon.

With examples like this, Goldacre should perhaps rename his blog–Bad Science isn’t strong enough to describe what he’s writing about. I’m thinking something like The Worst Examples of Science Journalism You’ve Ever Seen blog.

These are easy shots. This stuff is awful, and the papers are clearly more interested in displaying pictures of Victoria Beckham or Angelina Jolie’s legs than they are in reporting on science. But Goldacre’s entertaining post made me wonder about other mainstream science journalism. Are newspapers linking to primary sources? And would that, as Goldacre claims, help to keep them honest?

Let’s look at a couple of the best papers in the country, which happen to be two that I read regularly–The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The first science story that popped up on the Times site was this one: “Canine Genetic Wrinkle Has Potential for Humans.” It’s a story the discovery of a gene that appears responsible for both the wrinkly skin of Shar-peis, and also the dogs’ frequent bouts of fever. It’s a serviceable piece, and it does indeed link to the study. It also has links under the words “fever,” and “wrinkles,” among others. The fever link goes to a Times “Health Guide” that tells us that “fever is the temporary increase in the body’s temperature, in response to some disease or illness.” The wrinkle link goes to the same health guide, where we are told that “wrinkles are creases in the skin.”

Who on Earth do they think is reading this story? People who are willing to wade through an explanation of the hyaluronan synthase 2 gene but don’t know what a fever or a wrinkle is? What editor is responsible for linking to wrinkles? Stand up and identify yourself! To make matters worse, the hyaluronan synthase 2 gene link goes to a Stanford University blog that in turn links to the BBC’s story on the Shar-pei gene.

Verdict: The Times links to the primary source, so it meets Goldacre’s criteria. But it also links to a lot of unhelpful nonsense. A reader can waste a lot of time clicking on that story’s links.

How about The Washington Post? The first story I found (aside from the Japan nuclear coverage, for which the reporting itself is the closest we have to a primary source) was about the recent study in Nature in which researchers tallied evidence for the idea that the Earth is now undergoing its sixth major extinction. I was delighted to see that the Post did indeed link to the study, but crestfallen when I got to the end of the story and realized that the Post didn’t write the story. It was a pickup from ScienceNOW, the news service of Science magazine.

This was distressing for two reasons: There was no indication until I got the end of the story that this was not a Washington Post story. Readers need to know that upfront. And Science magazine is a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a pro-science lobbying group. Should the Post be picking up science stories from a politically active science organization? Should it pick up stories on gun control from the NRA? Or on nutrition from the American Dairy Association?

Disappointed by both the Times and the Post, I searched for something that could give this post a happy ending. I looked to see how American papers had covered Goldacre’s stiletto example which was, I should say, about a study done at Harvey Mudd College in California.

Searching Google news several ways, I couldn’t find anything. So the good news is, I guess, that while the Brits did several bad stories, the Yanks didn’t do any at all.

Thanks to Goldacre for pointing out something that we should all be doing as a matter of course in our online copy–linking to the primary sources. And maybe the print copy ought to include a few of those links, too. Shortened links are not too tough to type into a browser by readers who want to follow the trail.

From now on, I’ll be watching. And you should, too.

- Paul Raeburn

For the first time that we know about, Mercury has a moon – a tiny one, it’s  called Messenger, and a team of scientists, engineers, and others built it on NASA cntract at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. In an earlier post a week ago we gathered a few of the stories anticipating this event. Later posts will doubtless gather some of the reports of scientific payoffs (or, fate forfend, malfunctions). For now, this may be the biggest spot of media attention it’ll get, generating stories that have nothing much to say about what this event is good for that we did not already know. That’s how it goes sometimes – unless it finds Judge Crater standing in a you-know-what up there. It could be two weeks, one reads, before its first orbital images are available.

Stories:

• Baltimore Sun – Frank D. Roylance: Messenger successfully goes into orbit around planet Mercury ;  It’s his hometown story. Catches the excitement well in the control room. Forgive the presumption, but here is a note for copy desks everywhere, hungering to compress their heds: This one could gracefully have done without the “successfully” in it. If one does what’s planned, which in this case was to go into orbit, the successful part is baldly implicit. I am right now successfully sitting in the comfy chair our children bought me for Christmas a while back, too. And if you do need the longer word count do it with brio (for instance: Success at Planet Mercury. Messenger in orbit.)
• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: For three on science team, craft’s success is personal ; Good idea – no results yet, so why not go out in the parking lot with some Messenger team members, look at the planet Mercury on the horizon, and get some of the back story up close and personal? Good choice of closing quote.
• Boulder Daily Camera – Laura Snider: Messenger starts orbiting Mercury with CU-Boulder instrument on board ; Similar news instinct as Beal’s above, from a different town and with different project participants. Best quote’s highlight: “It didn’t blow up.”
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: NASA Milestone: MESSENGER spacecraft enters orbit around Mercury ;
• National Geographic – Rachel Kaufman: NASA Probe Successfully Orbiting Mercury – A First ; See note successfully placed in first story bullet, regarding empty words in heds.
• CNET News – William Harwood: Messenger probe eases into hellish Mercury’s orbit ;
• AP (byline strike underway) NASA spacecraft now circling Mercury – a first;
• PC Magazine – Chloe Albanesius: Messenger Spacecraft Successfully Enters Mercury’s Orbit ; …. I could successfully lose this battle.
• Wired Science – Lisa Grossman: Spacecraft Swings Into First Orbit Around Mercury
• … could do more ;

Grist for the Mill: Messenger website ; Press release ;

- Charlie Petit

As heroic emergency workers in Japan try to tame broken reactors chiefly at the Fukushima Deiichi power station and as response effort leaders continue to clam up before providing solid information (US agencies with less info have embarrassed local bureaucrats by being more forthcoming), some reporters are trying with varying success to explain the dangers of radiation. How much will make a person quickly sick, or be lethal? How about raising longer term risks of cancer?

Thoughts of taking a look arose after seeing an erroneous caption in the NYTimes, a minor thing considering the scale of reporting that newspaper is undertaking. But it illustrates the confusions that arise when trying, at a dead sprint after days of reporting this immense story, to explain millisieverts, rads, grays, or other measures of radiation. I cannot find it on line, but it is in illus accompanying a sizable story on spent fuel rods by Keith Bradsher and Hiroko “Tabuchi. The print edition story has an infographic with a cross section of a spent fuel pool and a list of  reactors at the complex and their inventories of spent as well as installed fuel rods.

Here are the offending passages:

“Radiation doses from a completely drained pool could be as high as 3,000 millisieverts per hour at the top of the pool and would drop to 100 millisieverts per hour about 300 feet away.” Elsewhere it says “other experts say more than 10,000 millisieverts per hour of radiation, a lethal dose, may be emitted directly above the pool, posing graver concerns.”

Close, but no. It implies perhaps that it is referring to the dose one would get in an hour, but there is no way to parse the language and get extract that meaning. A dose is rate multiplied by time. Those figures at their high end are horrendous exposure rates. A few thousand millisieverts in a short period of time is a huge blow- if applied to the whole body it is enough to cause acute radiation sickness and, frequently, death (here’s my source). But 3000 millisieverts per hour is not a dose. It is a rate. A nanosecond of it is (I’d guess) trivial, five minutes of it are bad, an hour is to invite dreadful illness or even ugly death. It’s like a hose’s flow. Five gallons per minute is not one hefty bucket. It can be a thimbleful if you are real quick on the nozzle valve. It is a swimming pool’s worth if you stand there squirting it for quite awhile.

I’ll bet various readers have already alerted the Times to its unfortunate phrasing.

Doses, rates, and millisieverts need explanation when a nuclear power plant  has lost primary and backup coolant,  its spent fuel pools are boiling and their fuel rods bared to the air, and several reactor vessels with fractured containment and erratic cooling are leaking radioisotopes from hot and probably melting fuel rods into the sky. Complicating things are the modes of the radiation – ingestion of radioactive materials spewing alpha and beta rays, plus gamma rays from those that are nearby. Some do better than others.

Other story samples:

• National Geographic  – Charles Choi: Is Japan Reactor Crew Exposed to Fatal Radiation? The answer is maybe. The story’s meat is a clear explanation of rates vs. doses by a reporter who knows the difference. He also has somewhat reassuring news – the radioisotope fallout, due in part to snowy, rainy, foggy weather, is not going very far from the plant. The story’s sources say rather emphatically that this emergency shows no sign of rivaling the seriousness of the uncontained Chernobyl meltdown and fire.  Choi, incidentally and by coincidence, was at Chernobyl when Japan’s calatimities began. A few days ago he filed, from there, The worst nuclear plant accident in history, Live from Chernobyl; It’s very good, including a sly remark on how effective a personal coat of lead shielding is but “it slows you down.” (Aside: Where did Charles’s customary byline middle initial Q go?)
• io9.c0m – Esther Inglis-Arkell: Explainer/How does radiation travel, and what kinds of damage can it do? ; io9 is a geeky site devoted largely to gaming, sci fi, and science. This piece is on the excessively wordy side. But the information (largely aggregated from other media plus a few scientific or gov’t sites, listed at the end) appears reliable.
• Mainichi Daily News – Hidetochi Togasawa: Public urged to avoiod unnecessary panic amid nuke plant crisis ; First person explainer why the writer is not at all worried about a widespread public health calamity. I’d agree with that part. However, while his initial reference is to a widely-quoted 400 millisieverts per hour reading near the plant (which he writes, with reason, was misused. The rate fell far under that level very quickly), the story begins using the unit millisieverts alone as a shorthand for millisieverts per hour. One sees such jumbled and ambiguous sentences as:  “Compare that to a CT chest scan, a single one of which will expose the recipient to approximately 6,900 microsieverts (note: earlier he’d spoken of millisieverts, without alerting readers that microsieverts are different. Milli means thousandths, micro means millionths / CP). Even if a level of 30 microsieverts were to be maintained, one would have to stand outside for 230 continuous hours to be exposed to the same amount of radiation as a CT scan.What?  The whole article’s technical side is hard to figure out. One wonders if it suffered from mistranslation.
• CNN – Elizabeth Landau, Madison Park, Sabriya Rice: What you should know about radiation; The first thing to know about radiation is to go someplace else than this article to learn what you need to know about radiation. It starts right off with: “Radiation levels at the plant Tuesday were between 100 and 400 millisieverts. Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edana said. To put that in perspective, in the United States, a person typically gets a radiation dose of 6.2 millisieverts per year.” It gets no better. Another sentence: “At the higher end of that spectrum at the Japan plant, exposure to millisieverts for three hours would lead to radiation sickness.” A word may have dropped from that second example, but the entire story reflects failure to differentiate between integrated exposure dose and rate of exposure. It also conflates radiation and things that are radioactive, as in “Radiation from the Japanese power plant is getting into the atmosphere because of the explosions that have happened there.” Right. You aim some gamma rays into the sky, you never know how far the wind will carry them, eh?
• Forbes – Christopher Helman: What Are Millisieverts? And Should Tokyo Be Scared Of Them? ; This one, you’ll learn something. I can’t judge his specific stats, but Mr. Helman is at ease with what the units mean.

And we won’t even get into the slipperiness of a sievert – a sort of quasi unit that normalizes into one scale the varying biological effects of different kinds of radiation – X-ray, gamma ray, alpha, beta… .

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The only governments, apparently, that allow embryo selection to avoid genes associated to higher risk to certain cancers are those of the UK and Spain. The first baby without a mutated version of the BRCA1 gene was born in London in 2009. The second case was reported yesterday in Spain. It’s the son of a woman with 5 cases of breast cancer in her immediate family. The entire cost was covered by the public health system, which argues that (apart from the obvious benefits for the newborn and his descendants) it will save money.  The Spanish government has announced that it is considering broadening the scope of the embryo selection and that is plans to make Spanish researchers leaders in the field. The analysis of this news is, however, a bit superficial .

Sólo Reino Unido y España permiten seleccionar embriones para evitar genes con mutaciones que predispongan al cáncer, como es el caso del BRCA1 fuertemente asociado al cáncer de mama. “libre de cáncer”, como tantísimos medios han expresado, no está nadie, pero sí es cierto que el primer caso en que mediante selección de embriones se logró reducir drásticamente esta posibilidad tuvo lugar en Londres en 2009, y el segundo nació en e hospital Sant Pau de Barcelona el pasado diciembre de 2010. La noticia se dio a conocer ayer, y todos los medios españoles la han difundido. Como de costumbre, con una redacción informativa pero más bien aséptica, y sin buscar “la historia” como nos tienen acostumbrados en el mundo anglosajón.

En El País, profundizando un poquito en el ámbito personal, Mónica Ferrando explica que en la familia de la madre del recién nacido ha habido 5 casos de cáncer de mama, e intentar erradicar esta nefasta herencia fue lo que la motivó a someterse a la selección e embriones. El bebé es un varón, por lo que evitar la mutación del BRCA1 no le va a beneficiar directamente a él, pero sí a toda su futura descendencia. La nota informa que la comisión que regula estos casos ayer mismo dio luz verde a 5 nuevos tratamientos, y que se está evaluando ampliar la lista de dolencias a aplicarla. De hecho “España lidera la técnica del diagnóstico genético embrionario” titula Sara Carreira en La Voz de Galicia, recogiendo la satisfacción mostrada por la ministra de sanidad.

En El Mundo, una muy buena nota de Cristina Rubio explica de manera sencilla el procedimiento tanto técnico como de solicitud, que la seguridad social ha costeado todo el proceso, y aparece de refilón la palabra “ética”. ABC aborda estos dilemas el texto “Debate ético por el bebé libre de cáncer de mama” de Esther Armora. Ester argumenta que “siendo estrictos” este cáncer no es muy frecuente, que según expertos en bioética “se debe poner límites”, y que la duda es “si el fin justifica los medios”. Pero no describe explícitamente cuales son los problemas que conllevan en estos “medios”. Si decidimos titular “debate ético”, deberíamos profundizar un poco más. Para ser justos, en el mismo ABC, un doctor defiende contundentemente esta tecnología, y Esther Armora publica una segunda nota muy bien desarrollada dando datos más concretos sobre el destino de los 4 embriones sobrantes del total de 5 que se produjeron para proceder a la elección del más sano.

Fuera de España, destacar que Clarín presenta una buena nota de su corresponsal Juan Carlos Algañaraz, pero incurre en la desdichada expresión “bebé de diseño” en su titular. Y anecdótico, que La Vanguardia diga que es una niña la nacida sin la mutación.

Seguro que hay mucho más ángulos a cubrir sobre las ventajas y limitaciones de una posible expansión del uso del diagnóstico preimplantacional. Seguiremos la pista.

- Pere Estupinyà