At least Fuji stayed quiet. Science writers as a community write warnings of the sort of thing that slammed much of Japan’s north Friday. They now  are playing second fiddle as usual (also inevitable, and sensible) to the disaster-response coverage. And the reporting must cover a baleful trifecta of the beat’s most fearful, urgent kinds of news – massive earthquake, immense tsunami, and unlike the Christmas quake in Indonesia and the Bay of Bengal in 2004 that killed far more people (200,000+) than is likely to be the final count in Japan, this one has a very real set of nuclear emergencies  to go with it.

This broke Friday with the news flow not picking up till that day’s tracking was done. The tracker is way behind. Today we have some selective posts focussing on one head or another of this catastrophe hydra and will continue tomorrow and, most likely, off and on for weeks to come.

It’s hard to know where to start. Posts follow. But half way to Japan is Hawaii, a place with much familiarity with tsunamis. So far a fine explainer form a seasoned science writer of the geology and oceanography of what happened:

Honolulu Star Advertiser – Jim Borg: Powerful science lurks in deep ;

- Charlie Petit

What does a trained, and stunned, geologist  say after his visit to Japan for an earthquake conference is interrupted by this symphony of destruction’s opening movement? Here’s a quote that got some pickup from science writers far from Japan putting an urgent local angle on the news:

“The main shock lasted an entire five minutes. We were in the middle of a talk, and just bailed and went outside. .. you could literally feel the plates grinding; the high-frequency P-wave arrival was like nothing I’ve ever felt. Then five minutes of S-waves and feeling sort of seasick.”

That was in the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon, where on Saturday its reporter Susan Guard was quick off the mark in a story under the hed, Experts say Japan quake a wake-up call for the Northwest. Indeed, to the lay eye, the Cascadia Subduction Zone west of the Pacific Northwest from Vancouver south to northernmost California, is spookily like a mirror image of the Japan Trench east of Honshu. That’s pretty much how it looks to professional gaze, too.

The region’s press outlets extensively re-warned their readers but with fresh graphics this time, that every few centuries the Juan de Fuca Plate offshore – a small satellite of the Pacific Plate -  squeezes itself violently several to many feet deeper under North America’s continental lithosphere. Prehistoric quakes, as pieced together from such evidence as tsunami sediments and evidence of coastal rise and subsidence, indicated magnitudes of around 9.0 for such quakes. That is like Japan’s latest earthquake.  This particular quote was circulated promptly in a well-put-together press release from Oregon State University.

Other stories:

• Seattle Times – Sandi Doughton: Subduction zone quake could also hit Northwest ; Includes another vivid interview, with both seasickness and a sickness in the heart, with a U. of Washington researcher visiting a Japanese university, on video.
• PostMedia news via Nanaimo Daily News (Vancouver Island) Cassidy Olivier : ‘Big One’ in BC would be akin to Japan disaster ;
• Vancouver (WA) Columbian – Howard Buck, Erik Robinson: Similar quake due to hit Northwest ;

Silliness Dept:

While checking for significant local-angle stories on subduction and quakes and tsunamis, I happened across, at the on line remnant of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a piece it picked up on word from the rumor and idiocy wing. The topic is the idea that an upcoming super moon (a maximal perigee) somehow caused the Japan earthquake. First, this is a reasonable story and a needed debunking. Second, the public comments that it elicited once more reveal the feebleness of the press in overcoming, at least among members of the public moved to display their reasoning powers in the open, the broad streak of ignorance among our fellow citizens. Mostly nice people, sure, but many seem unable to look anything up before prattling away on their keyboards. Here is the story as it appeared at its originating agency.

• Space.com :   Did approaching ‘supermoon’ cause Japan Quake? A: No. And, one is moved to surmise, even if a tidal stress were to trigger a quake, it only means it moved the even earlier in time – and the longer it takes, the worse it’ll be due to accumulating strain. Ergo, dreadful as it is no time is a good time and best to get it over with.

- Charlie Petit

We’ve all seen the gut-wrenching videos of thick sheets of ocean pushing and pouring their way through towns like liquid bulldozers miles wide and as high as three story buildings, carrying ships, cars, and buildings like leaves in the gutter on a rainy day.

A fine, understated sensitive, and vivid  account of what remains after such a thing:

• Asahi Shimbun – Narumi Ota, Daisuke Ono: Half of coastal town’s residents are missing ; Filed form Minami-Sanriku.

The videos of this community’s destruction, and that of many others exposed to the full power of the earthquake’s oceanic offspring, are telling.

I’m in Orange County, south of Los Angeles, hence read much of the news in the LA Times delivered to our daughter’s home. One explainer in that paper, giving readers a sense of what a tsunami is, got most of it right, but a few aspects seemed off:

• LA Times (Mar 12) Amina Khan: The science of tsunamis:

These are little things, and this is not the only story that doesn’t seem to describe how an ocean-spanning tsunami behaves while moving through deep water between the time it’s kicked off to its encounter with a distant continental shelf or island. Ms. Khan, an able reporter, describes the waves traversing the sea as “little higher than ripples.” That’s a fact, but the word ripple in it is a mistake. And she calls the hump in the sea over a suddenly heaving tectonic plate as a “tiny mountain, perhaps a yard in height.” Both sentences may lead readers to picture things not only short, but not particularly broad. Further, the story describes the pile-up of a swell miles wide from trough to trough in the open sea as an impasse for “the rapidly moving water.” In mid-ocean, the water is hardly moving at all, merely subtly rising and falling as the wave goes by.

I am unsure the best way to phrase these things perfectly. But to evoke images of mid-ocean ripples, and fast-moving streams hitting barriers, is not it.

For that matter, there is no blocking this metaphor  but describing a tsunami coming ashore as a wall of water is to not quite capture the event  either. It is more like a plateau of water, or a rise in sea level that pours inland. Walls are narrow barriers. A tsunami is as though the sea has risen on its legs and comes in not as a wave, but a flood. It is instantaneous high tide, higher than any ordinary wave. A wall is basically two dimensional – height and length, not much width. A tsunami has all three. One often sees the term surge applied, and that’s a  better and more evocative term than wall.

By the way, some pics of the areas where towns once were seem to show portions of them still flooded, even right to the sea’s edge.  Somebody should check to see if there has been significant subsidence of the land following the release of pent-up strain by the earthquake’s thrust. Some of those towns’ old locations may now be permanently submerged. And some ports may find themselves suddenly, markedly shallower or even stranded.

- Charlie Petit

Evacuations and distribution of potassium iodide pills to block thyroid absorption of iodine-131 , large buildings astride containment structures blowing sky high, briny sea water being pumped through the heat exchangers and the cores of aging, failed nuclear reactors, cesium-137  radioisotope wafting across wide regions –  the sort of scary scenario painted by anti-nukes at public hearings is playing live and for real in Japan. In some respects it’s worse than the usual worst case scenario, for several reactors appear simultaneously to have had their emergency cooling systems overwhelmed first by grid failures that knocked out prime power, and then the tsunami that swamped facility outbuildings and diesel backup generators. One also imagines, looking at the filthy debris washing across the coast generally, that any exposed intake or outlet pipes would be likely to get clogged up even if the generators worked.

Some call it the Japanese Three Mile Island. With triple the units in trouble, make that the Japanese Nine Mile Island.

Any way you count, it is a colossal story. Breach of containment, via releases of gases but not actual rupture of massive reinforced concrete, has occurred. People have been exposed. Yet it is not yet even close to a worst case, nothing remotely like Chernobyl with its deadly mix of incompetent reactor management, and a reactor made largely of graphite (like coal, noticeably flammable) with no heavy containment structure.

One sees the frightening word “meltdown.” In the public mind, as decades ago at Three Mile Island, meltdown is conflated with imminent, ultimate failure. The last time I checked, the concrete floor of reactors, even old ones, are supposed to withstand molten uranium fuel and its cladding. Meltdown means, at the least, a ruined reactor and a long cleanup and isolation headache. Perhaps the supposedly resistant floors of Japan’s three (and counting) stricken reactors will receive a full melted down load, and engineers will learn how well they planned.

Over the weekend it was distressing to see, at least on television, the extensive appearance on news programs of representatives of, for one instance, the Union of Concerned Scientists as reliable first-resort explainers. UCS is a superb outfit. But when a nuclear plant is in trouble, news directors should know better than to make their first call to advocacy organizations that are constitutionally skeptical about nuclear power. Call them.  But the first call ought to be to something like a university nuclear engineering school, or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or the Int’l Atomic Energy Agency. I love Greenpeace, but would never call it first for an opinion whether Japan’s whalers threaten sei or minke whales with oblivion. Nor the Sierra club to learn how dire are things for the desert tortoise. Find the mainstream opinion and work out from there.

Here’s a sampling of coverage by major outlets:

• NY Times  – Anahad O’Connor: Nuclear Emergency is Worst in Decades ; True headline. The caveat is that there have been no drastic nuclear accidents in decades. The story is spot-on, going through the general categories of nuclear plant failures and where this one ranks. High, but not yet horrifying (esp compared to Japan’s other problems in the quake and more important and literally, the tsunami’s wake.).
• Boston Globe – Carolyn Y. Johnson: So far, little fear of a new Chernobyl. That’s the better hed. And the first expert consulted, a nuclear engineer (ok, disclosure: he’s at MIT that pays me), says the most likely result is one or more ruined reactors, maybe some slag in their basements but with the vast bulk of the bad stuff still  inside and no regional radioactive catastrophe. But – that doesn’t mean worse can’t happen.
• Reuters: Japan crisis unlikely to be another Chernobyl – IAEA ;
• Japan times – Kanako Takahara: Reactor fuel rods fully exposed ; An account of what happened at the height of the nuclear emergency at Fukushima power station, the hardest hit. The story indicates that after loss of coolant exposed the fuel rods, which likely began melting, drastic measures such as pumping in sea water have likely stopped any further meltdown. For now, at least.

Background explainers – Several reporters composed some basic fact sheets about how reactors work, and sometimes don’t:

• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Japan’s nuclear crisis: the causes and the risks ;
• NYTimes – Henry Fountain: A look at the Mechanics of a Partial Meltdown ; If it’s just the cladding that melts, leaving the ceramic uranium fuel pellets exposed it not yet melted, dangerous radioactive materials may escape into the wider containment structure. That’s a partial meltdown – with full meltdown enormously worse. He describes a lava-like pool in the containment’s floor that could reach surrounding soil and vent dangerous radioactive clouds.
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II : Q&A: What caused the blast at nuclear plant, and what are officials doing to avert a meltdown?
• Gizmodo – Kyle VanHemert: Just How Bad Is Japan’s Radiation Problem ; For a specialty consumer technology (mostly) outlet in particular, this is a well-reported analysis.

More roundups on nuclear (and other) aspects of Japan’s tragedy tomorrow…

UPDATE – Good to know department..

• New Scientist – Michael Reilly: Third explosion rocks Fukushima ; In the middle of a very sensible rundown, Reilly pauses to deliver this,  and I can’t quarrel with that: [source] “syas there is no chance of a “China syndrome” scenario, with the fuel burning its way through to the earth’s core with potential to blow up the planet.” Well! Even in the movie, the term was used as deliberate, witty hyperbole. Could this be Mr. Reilly’s exasperation with hyperventilated fear of all things nuclear from some members of the public, and that circulates widely? Plus, a question – is it FukuSHEEma, as many broadcasters say, or the  FuKOOsh’ma that a few smarter-sounding people are saying on the air?

- Charlie Petit

Keeping his eye on new papers popping up at the snowstorm of refereed, un-refereed, polished and some not-so-polished papers at the astro-ph arXiv site where astronomers share their goods first, Science News‘s Ron Cowen found a good – or at least singular – one. A staple of science fiction, the wormhole that somehow connects two places widely separated by space and time like they’re almost simultaneous in both, gets serious treatment.

We read that the report has hardly carried the day among colleagues. Wormholes are still hypothetical things that inspire deep doubts among physicists and others able to calculate ways that extreme gravity or other relativity-harnessing phenomena might provide ultimate short cuts through the universe. That is, they could exist, but not in any way that’s useful. It’s like teaching elephants to dance. You can do it. But you can’t teach them to dance well.

To be sure, it would ordinarily appear just a bit dodgy to write a news story based on an unrefereed – so far as we know – paper with authors from Kazakhstan and the Kyrgyz Republic (plus, ok, some affiliations in Germany, and there’s nothing inherently dodgy about science in those other two former SSRs), and that hardly anybody believes. Wormholes get a pass. The math looks heavy duty, the authors have a bunch of reports on arXiv about this line of physics, the story is well-qualified and hedged, and besides that, as Cowen says, it’s fun.

Grist for the Mill: on arXiv:  A Star Harbouring a Wormhole at its Center ;

- Charlie Petit

According to the wiki guttenplag, 76 percent of the Guttenberg's law school thesis seem to come from other authors. Black: plagiarisms, Red: multiple plagiarisms from different sources on one side. White: pages without plagiarisms. Blue: Contents

Scientific misconduct rarely reaches the political arena. Scientists found guilty of plagiarism, data manipulation or deliberate misinterpretation will quickly find themselves expelled or ignored from the scientific community. But usually the wider public won’t take too much notice of such cases. Is this the reason why or is this because science journalists rarely dig deeper, rarely write about and explain the financial and scientific harm caused by fraud in research to a public, where most do not know much about the work of scientists or their code of conduct?

The story of Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg, a nobleman and (now former) Minister of Defense, reveals just such lack of knowledge about or interest in how  scienceworks. Guttenberg, a young politician from the Bavarian party CSU (Christian Social Union), made a very quick career rise. – with much help from the daily Bild and other boulevard media (summarized brilliantly here at the Frankfurter Allgemeine). His popularity reached heights rarely seen in Germany. This helped him survive a couple of severe crises during his tenure with the ministry of defense.

But then a law professor (featured at the Süddeutsche Zeitung) actually read his doctoral thesis at the Law School of the University of Bayreuth. And found several copy-pasted paragraphs. With the help of the web community (a wiki called guttenplag), Guttenberg was found to have lifted about 70 percent of his thesis without crediting the original authors.

Surprisingly, the broad public in Germany didn’t get the point, didn’t see why such behavior might disqualify Guttenberg from continuing as Federal Minister of Defense in the cabinet of chancellor Angela Merkel. Dozens of polls showed that sympathy for Guttenberg was still higher than for most other politicians. And Dr. Angela Merkel, herself a physicist, declined to fire Guttenberg, claiming, that she distinguishes his work as a politician from his former scientific work.

Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg

Is this public reaction, to judge scientific plagiarism as a trivial offense, caused by a common lack of understanding how science works, how scientists try to establish high quality, how they handle and value intellectual property? Finally, the sympathy that polls revealed in the public crumbled a bit after scientists and universities started to protest and to explain how important proper citations are in science. And finally, after politicians from his own party criticized him, Guttenberg stepped down. But he still claims, that he copy-pasted “unintentionally” (though, a Bavarian public prosecutor opened a fraud case against Guttenberg, today).

I once heard a speech from the head of a newspaper’s science section say that the public has no interest in researcher’s internal quarreling. So, he won’t report about it at length. Well enough, but people who never saw a book won’t develop interest in a book, right? People will continue to be ignorant about science if no one explains how scientists actually work and how scientific misconduct influences the broader society (wasted money, bad science, bad irrational political decisions, etc.,etc.). Science journalism is not only about the nice impressive blooms of research but also about the fights for funding, the flaws of the review system, the systemic and financial circumstances of innovation transfer to the market – in short, the societal side of science.

Here are a few links, how the German science sections dealt with the “Guttenplag”-topic.

Zeit: How scientists disposed Guttenberg and How scientists deal with plagiarism

Klaus Taschwer (Austrian Standard) summarized cases and causes of fraud and plagiarism in science, internationally as well as in Austria.

Stern.de explained, how one can loose a doctor title. And Frank Ochmann comments in his column “Kopfwelten”, why so many Germans still stick to Guttenberg and trivialize his fraud…. and much much more ink.

- Sascha Karberg

PS: The name  Guttenberg is not a misspelling, but is simply different from that of the famous inventor of printing press Gutenberg…

With the Messenger spacecraft – after years of looping close around the Sun and zipping past Mercury for fast glances – now about to take up residence in a mercurial orbit, several outlets are getting readers primed for whatever it sees. Orbital insertion is to be in week, on March 17.

Sample Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Mercury visible Sunday as NASA craft approaches ; Angle here is that not only will NASA instruments get their first prolonged closeup of Mercury, but on Sunday it will make one of its fairly uncommon naked-eye appearances in the sky shortly after the sun goes down and near the spot on the horizon where it happened. This story is a cut above the norm, capturing why the planet is interesting,  odd, hot, maybe icy too, and not well understood.
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: When Messenger Arrives in Orbit: Q&A With Sean Solomon, NASA’s Mercury Boss ; Her second question gets this in reply: “That’s an unfair question!” Which tells the reader: good interview. She also runs a more standard news story: NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft Gears Up to Orbit Mercury;
• Guardian (UK) Robin McKie: On the ultimate mission to Mercury;
• BBC – Pallab Ghosh: Messenger Nasa probe will soon enter Mercury orbit ;
• Wired News – Lisa Grossman: NASA’s Messenger Spacecraft Zeroes In on Mercury ; This is a help, and reminder of the tyrrany of acronymania. The name is painfully concocted from MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging.

*UPDATE:

• Scientific American – Scott Murchie, Ronald J. Vervack Jr., Brian J. Anderson: Journey to the Innermost Planet ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA/Messenger Mission Press Release ; Indiana University Press Release (re seeing Mercury yourself).

- Charlie Petit

You may recall that, in the fall of 2009, the website Futurity launched as a news service, of sorts, where users might find fresh, interesting, perhaps useful science and technology news (see earlier post). It was up front in its business plan, if not entirely transparent at the site. Its news would be streamlined, maybe rewritten, but at heart be press releases from member institutions – chiefly and perhaps entirely research universities.

That may be science writing but is certainly not journalism. It is the work of public relations people who work for the same people as do those they write about.

So, today – and thank you reader Susannah Locke for pointing this out to ksjtracker – at a business pub one finds a story that looks outwardly like journalism:

• Fast Company – Futurity staff: “Dirt Cheap” Seaweed Chips Spot Disease ; It’s about gel “beads” from seaweed, presumably related to the colloidal stuff used as a thickener in things like ice cream, that Rice University researchers find makes a great scavenger of trace molecules in fluids. They also containing antibodies or something like that to label the trace stuff that gets stuck in the goo. Voila, a bio molecule sniffer chip thing that might fast and efficiently detect signs of disease, such as viruses or cancer marker. For all I know this is a seriously lovely bit of research.

However. Right off the bat, those of us who have heard of Futurity suspect that Fast Company is posting press releases as news. At the story’s bottom Fast Company expands on the “Futurity Staff” credit line this way:

An educated public needs access to clear, reliable research news. Futurity finds all that really promising good stuff—fresh from the lab—and funnels it directly to you. Think of it as a snapshot of where science is today and where it just might take us tomorrow.

But smart readers of the tracker know more than that, don’t you?  Readers of Fast Company, not that they’re stupid, might easily suppose independent editing and judgment not to mention reporting is involved. If they follow the link in that italicized source-explainer they will see at the top right of Futurity’s site that its content is “Research news from top universities in the US, UK, and Canada.” That’s ambiguous. Few are likely to follow the link, and fewer to say to themselves caution, engage the spin-detector, p.r. at work ahead.

Let’s chase the provenance down some more. Indeed, the root press release from Rice University is easy to find. The version at Fast Company is rearranged, rewritten in stretches, and some text blocs are identical. That is distinction with no difference. It was sent around to reporters in advance of last month’s AAAS meeting in Washington DC:

• Rice University Dept. of Bioengineering / News Press Release – Mike Williams: Microsponges form seaweed may save lives ;

So here is where it gets more  interesting. Ever more curious, The Tracker pretty quickly found the Fast Company ‘article’ as it appears at Futurity’s own site:

• Futurity – posted by David Ruth-Rice: ‘Dirt cheap’ seaweed chips spot disease ;

Honestly I first thought Ruth-Rice was a hyphenated family name. I even looked up his other stories at Futurity. All from work at Rice. oh. David Ruth is the director of national media relations at Rice University. The Futurity staff, in this case, appears to be his staff.

I’ve no reason to question Mr. Ruth’s integrity, skill, or bonhomie. Rice University is chock full of important research. But somewhere between Futurity’s fairly up-front repackaging of Rice’s p.r. to its masquerade at Fast Company, a vital distinction between independent, honest journalism and dependent, agenda-driven p.r. got lost.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) “US scientists are not better than Spanish ones” is the headline in El Mundo. Its story features an MIT neuroscientist from Spain. The argument is that while funding and promotion are different in the two nations,  know-how and creativity are very similar. The story is part of a commendable initiative by El Mundo in the last 2 months: to collect experiences from Spanish researchers around the world. Including on-line video interviews, we learn about Chagas disease from Bolivia, animal cloning in South Korea, and obesity from Sweden. A total of 9 scientists have participated so far. They go further than the research itself, including remarks about differences between the Spanish system and the one they are experiencing. Many Latin American National S&T organizations are looking for ways to take advantage of the local scientists who  are doing research abroad. We suggest that this series of stories by El Mundo offers inspiration to other science sections in L.A.

Also: In the last post we collected critiques in academic circles of the quality of science journalism in Mexico. We received a few comments demanding more respect for the constant and good work of dedicated professionals  working in tough environments. So here, to be fair, we track stories this week in El Universal, Milenio, and Cronica de Hoy about transgenic crops, research on aquaculture, science policy, women in research, kidney transplants, and scientific journals in developing countries.

Interesantísima iniciativa en El Mundo para dar a conocer los jóvenes y talentosos científicos españoles investigando fuera de su país, que podría servir de inspiración para medios Latinoamericanos.

Pensando no sólo en transmitir información sino en la importancia social de la ciencia, uno de los puntos clave de cualquier sistema nacional de ciencia y tecnología es cómo aprovechar la masa de buenos científicos nacionales que están logrando éxitos en el extranjero. Muchas veces, retornarlos es complicado porque no se les pueden ofrecer los mismos recursos de que disponen en sus centros de investigación de alto nivel. Pero existen iniciativas para crear vínculos, investigaciones conjuntas, o formas de que su experiencia y knowhow revierta positivamente en su país de origen. Pero para ello, antes debemos conocerlos. El periodismo científico es una buena vía para hacerlo.

Ya hace un par de meses que la excelente sección de Salud de El Mundo lanzó “Investigadores por El Mundo”, una serie de reportajes donde cada semana una científica española (de momento hay 6 mujeres y 3 hombres) explica las investigaciones en biomedicina que está llevando a cabo, junto con sus valiosas apreciaciones sobre la manera de hacer ciencia en el país que la acoge. Son percepciones subjetivas, a veces un poco tópicas, y no nos las vamos a tomar al pie de la letra; pero esa visión externa es realmente interesante, cercana, y los periodistas que están al frente de la sección siempre buscan mensajes que calen entre el público. Hoy por ejemplo, Ángel Díaz proponía que “los científicos de EEUU no son mejores que los de España”, sino que es cuestión de recursos, por lo que ha observado una investigadora del MIT en EEUU. María Valerio preparaba la pieza “El Chagas es un mal olvidado de pacientes olvidados” entrevistando a una almeriense que investiga en Bolivia. “Aquí es mucho más difícil hacer trampa que en España”, incita Ángel Díaz (quien más notas ha firmado), a través de un inmunólogo afincado en Inglaterra y muy crítico con el sistema de CyT español. “Clonando vacas para producir medicamentos”-A.D. desde Corea, o “emigrar (hacia Dinamarca) hacia la independencia” son otros sugerentes títulos de la muy recomendable sección. Destacar cómo no que cada pieza cuenta con una entrevista en video de Javier Beneytez. Se graba directamente una videoconferencia, siendo un recurso interesante y fácil de realizar. Hay una mínima edición, y una muy bonita cabecera, aunque creemos que el formato todavía podría aprovechare un poquito mejor.

Justicia con los periodistas científicos Mexicanos

Tras el post anterior del Tracker donde recogíamos las críticas de algunos académicos y gestores por la escasa presencia de ciencia en los medios de comunicación mexicanos, Antimio Cruz de Crónica de Hoy escribió un comentario diciéndonos que había demasiada gente opinando sin buen conocimiento de la profesión, y pasándonos una lista de periodistas científicos mexicanos haciendo un buen y constante trabajo en sus respectivos medios. Es de justicia citarlos, y revisar las buenas notas que esta semana han producido.

Crónica de Hoy – El propio Antimio Ruiz publica “Crean sistema para criar peces de agua dulce con agua de mar”; una investigación de científicos mexicanos que permiten criar en piscifactorías de agua marina peces de agua dulce como la tilapia. Buen detalle de cómo se realizaron los experimentos para averiguar los pasos óptimos a seguir hasta adaptar a las crías. Esta semana Antimio presenta también “Bebidas como el vino y el sake aumentan superconductividad” (nota interesante con información foránea) y que “Siete mil 500 personas esperan trasplante de riñón en México”. Todavía en Crónica, Isaac Torres Cruz cubre en profundidad la llegada de un nuevo director al Conacyt, cuya intención es que la ciencia y la innovación sirvan para fortalecer el sistema productivo y aumentar la competitividad. Isaac habla también de una cámara de la Nasa para captar meteoritos, y escribe una buena nota sobre las enormes dificultades que tienen las científicas mexicanas para salir adelante en su país.

El Universal – A este respecto, destacar la completísima serie de notas que Renata Sánchez dedicó a las cientoficas en el día de la mujer. Escribió sobre casos concretos, mujeres en unas ciencias exactas que parecen territorio exclusivo masculino, o recoge los mensajes a las jóvenes científicas de una experimentada oceanógrafa activa reivindicando la igualdad de sexos. A Renata le queda tiempo para tratar los dos grandes temas de la semana: la pérdida evolutiva de la espina del pene en los humanos –R.S, y el adiós al transbordador Discovery tras 26 años de misiones espaciales. En El Universal también, y entre otras notas, Nurit Martínez también nos hablaba del nuevo titular del Conacyt, y Guillermo Cárdenas que las hectáreas destinadas a cultivos transgénicos no están aumentando en México.

Milenio – Antimio nos citaba al carismático Horacio Salazar en su comentario. De su columna El país de las maravillas, queremos rescatar el texto “Un gran paso hacia atrás”, donde Horacio Salazar nos advierte que hace unas semanas países en desarrollo como Bangladesh, Kenia o Perú estuvieron a punto de perder su gratuidad a revistas como Science, The Lancet, y decenas de otras del grupo Elsevier. Muy interesante nota, por un verdadero periodista científico, de una temática importante y que quizás le pasaría por alto a un divulgador.

En definitiva; más que aceptable productividad en algunos medios. Sin duda aspectos a mejorar, pero desde aquí –y reconociendo la distancia desde la que escribimos-continuaremos intentando siempre que las críticas sean constructivas.

- Pere Estupinyà

Being way over here in the US, and seeing BBC’s science coverage only a peek at a time through the slender straws of searches for reporting on specific topics, I can’t say that this famous broadcasting outlet has been much worse or better than others in reporting climate change. By and large the coverage my periscope spots is decent.  But I have noticed it generates steady criticism, one reason being (alleged) failure to call out climate contrarians when they make statements contrary to the general conclusion of mainstream researchers. That is, too much ‘false balance.’

A good example of the argument over BBC’s handling of such things is at the Guardian this week. There, in an opinion blog piece, writer Bob Ward of the London School of Economics and Political Science lambastes a BBC broadcaster for sitting mum in the face of errant nonsense. One statement that went unblinkered is that we are surely not changing climate because, for one thing, “only 4% of the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere is put there by man.”

That is perhaps true, you know, but in a narrow way irrelevant to the speaker’s point. It’s like, if you will, your job were to fill a box with rocks every day that you rake off the patio while barefoot, carry them up to the balcony, and pour them out. Next day, same thing. But each time some rascal in the neighbor’s yard tosses one little stone into the box when you’re not looking. It’s only 4 percent of the total. But boy, in a few weeks or months that patio’s got a lot more rocks on it and you’re feet are bruised and bleeding from walking out there to fill your box. Same deal with the little fossil increment of carbon we generate each year, dwarfed by the annual absorption and emission of CO2 by seasonal cycles of plant growth and decay. After a century or so, it’s a load.

Anyway, back to the Guardian story. Mr. Ward dissects the logical and factual idiocy that his target at the BBC let pass, and explains clearly why it was dimwitted even without my box of rocks analogy that, on a second read, is pretty strained.

The thing is, such standard tropes that the skeptical and scoffing platoons of climate contrarians deploy have been debunked lots of times, in press and at standing sites on the web. Doesn’t do much good. People keep using them. Ward mentions several others – like the hoary and really, really ignorant assertion that volcanoes blow scads more CO2 into the air than do the industrial practices of modern societies. Contrarian lions with educations like Dick Lindzen and Pat Michaels know that’s just untrue and surely would say so if asked point blank, but on the blogosphere and down at the lodge it passes for a good, Gore-beating gotcha. People who learn and read very selectively still fall for such things. The blame for that, one thinks, goes way beyond one BBC host’s failure to know enough to recognize this kind of crazy talk on the fly.

Still. It never hurts to correct them when we can.

- Charlie Petit

A look at the Reuters feed finds quite a sympatico duo of stories of independent origin.

First off, as Reuters news service is a wing of the larger Thomson Reuters business, the latter’s latest Science Watch survey summary gets prompt coverage. Hence today the news side’s  Ben Herschler reports from London that seven of the world’s top 13 research scientists, as measured by citation activity and similar metrics, work in genetics. The hottest  individual researcher is Eric Lander at MIT. The second place field is materials science.

A bullet or two down on the Reuters rss science feed one finds, what ho!, a genetics story:

• Julie Steenhuysen: How humans got big brains, barbless penises ;  Say what you will about pandering with penises as bait for good play, this is a decent report on comparative genetics. The news, from a Howard Hughes Med. Inst. fellow at Stanford Med School writing in Nature, stresses the important role of genes that regulate expression of other genes when it comes to producing marked differences between species whose genomes look pretty similar on coarse examination (as in us and chimps). The barbs on other animals’ penises, it appears, act to maximize stimulation of the male – perhaps to get the deed done as quickly as possible. We don’t have ‘em. But we have big brains. We seem to have lost the genes that in chimps enhance expression of pertinent genes.

Naturally, barbed penises – reported in a formal letter to Nature yet where the promotion to the press was entitled simply “How the penis lost its spines”  – could  not escape the attention of other reporters and assignment editors.

More Stories:

• AFP – Marlowe Hood: Lost in evolution: a hairy penis, a tiny brain… ;
• Discover/Not Exactly Rocket Science blog – Ed Yong: Control Altered by Deletion – is lost DNA behind our bigger brains and spineless penises? ; Yong asks around and gets other reasons these specific enhancer genes may have faded from the Homo line. One of his sly commenters declares that the absence of this spiky sensory hair enhancer in both H. sapiens and H. neantertalensis “pushes the change back in time toward Homo erectus. How apposite”.
• Wired Science – Dave Mosher: Genetic Errors Nixed Penis Spines, Enlarged Our Brains ; Good story and all that, but let’s think about calling these genetic errors. The power of evolutionary genetics comes from mutations, or imperfect replication between generations. We call’em errors, but these are productive errors. So in a headline, unadorned, “error” might imply that something went wrong between chimps and us that is somehow distinct from the way things ought to go. Sometimes language just can’t quite express the meaning one wants. “Happy accident” comes close, but isn’t quite there.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Chimp penis spine DNA lost to humans ;
• ABC (Australia) Dani Cooper: Lost DNA led to spineless penis, big brain ;
• LiveScience via Fox News – Stephanie Pappas: How Men Lost their Penis Spines ;

Grist for the Mill: Thomson Reuters Press Release on hot researchers; Howard Hughes Med. Inst. Press Release on DNA that makes us human.

- Charlie Petit

Several reporters have done some second-day tidying up, one might better call it coffin nailing, on the fossils-in-meteorite report that Fox News broke over the weekend (see previous post).  At issue is whether  mineral strands and wormy-looking cavities are the remains and imprints of microbes, and date  to when the meteoroid was part of a larger comet or other orbiting body.  That would be sensational, not least because the author, writing in the Journal of Cosmology, saw affinities with known terrestrial species. That would build the case for panspermia – the hypothesis that life arose in space and fell,  perhaps still is falling, through our atmosphere in meteors.

The journal’s non-standard style of peer review, its editor’s frank belief in panspermia, the unusual (if engaging) style of the paper’s writing, and most important the questionable nature of the direct evidence it marshals along with the ready plausibility of alternative explanations generated doubt from the start. Initial skepticism from experts appears only to have grown.

This is not the same thing as disproving panspermia, even if it is one of science’s more long shot hypotheses, and is not the same as refuting that this meteorite just maybe does carry evidence for it. But so fast has the paper hit the skids that one would be surprised to see many reporters going deeper with it. One avenue to explore is the broader idea that life can not only evolve on smaller bodies in the solar system, but readily spread from one body to the next – even in extreme formulations among adherent, from one solar system to another. Such stories can be interesting and sound. This news bit seems unlikely to whet public interest in reading them. We’ll see.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA disavows its scientist’s claim of alien life ; Borenstein reports that he (AP anyway) contacted a dozen others in the field. None think the paper holds water. This resembles what freelancer Carl Zimmer did when the arsenic-eating bacterium of Mono Lake story broke. He could find no outsider experts that believed it. That pretty much broke the back of that idea, too.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: Meteorites may hold fossils form space – or not ;
• Wired Science – Brandon Keim, Lisa Grossman: Alien Microbe Claim Starts Fight Over Meteorite ;

And an astronomer states the obvious  – and it’s not about exobiology, but our trade:

NPR (blog) Adam Frank: Alien Microbes Attack! Dangers Of Science News That Isn’t Science Or News ; Sentiments in this piece have been voiced so many times at ksjtracker that they are passe, but coming in a general-audience blog from an astronomer (Frank’s on faculty at U. of Rochester, and moonlights as a science writer) they reach an outside audience that may not have thought of such things. The piece starts off as a standard enough take-down of the article and its medium – the Journal of Cosmology. Next thing you know, it’s pointing out that CNN has nobody assigned to the science beat, neither does Fox News if one doesn’t count people who only count industry-friendly ‘sound science’ as worthy science. In fact, science writers are in very short supply. Even the National Association of Science Writers gets mention. I’d reply that there remain a large and perhaps even growing number of science journalists who write with skill and maturity – but they tend to be a online outlets, or bloggers, that don’t reach many people who aren’t in the small minority of folks who seek out solid, careful reporting on scientific progress.

Here’s another take-home from this story. Next time you encounter somebody convinced that climate scientists are skewing their results, and seeing global warming where there is none, to keep the grant money coming in, think of what happened to this paper. Panspermia’s verification and life in outer space would open the faucets for those scientists who make the case for it. Their temperaments are not likely to be much different from those in climatology and related fields. But this opportunity to hail panspermia and prime the granting pumps at NASA and NSF got booted out the back door almost as soon as it came in the front.

- Charlie Petit

- Charlie Petit