Indulge me by permitting, first, a sort of house-ad note of thanks to regular medical tracker Paul Raeburn, and to the former Knight Fellowships director Boyce Rensberger – who thunk up this tracker site six years or more ago – for pitching in and filing a pile of thoughtful posts this week so I could help select next year’s fellows (winners to be announced, I believe. on Monday).
Thanks, guys.
- Charlie Petit
I sat mesmerized this morning by some of the video of the tornadoes that pummeled so much of the nation’s south and nearby regions this week. A fabulous and terrifying collection of mostly-amateur and local TV show videos is at Al.com, apparently the website for the Birmingham News, that Christine Kneidinger compiled. Sit down, watch, be glad you were not in any of these movies.
Aside from direct disaster stories, a number of outlets looked hard for signs from authorities that they know why so many, now. Well, global warming. Or maybe it’s the jet contrails. Or the clearing of forests. Actually were any of those different historically than they were, we’d be in a different weather parade. The bigger question is whether chances for tornado outbreaks are up or down or what. Nobody really knows.
Here are how two major outlets handled the inevitable question and its corollaries: is this climate change?
- Charlie Petit
This is a little out of date, but as I’ve been off for a few days, all the better for having stuck in my mind for awhile. At the Wall Street Journal on April 23 Robert Lee Hotz did what he does often and very well: Flesh out a news item by digging up a lot of recent and broad context. He transforms the kerfuffle over phone company slipups when they take too much personal data on their cell phone users, or even worse, share it with marketers, into a general story on modern sociology.
While the cell phone company news is about invasion of privacy, Hotz gathers up samples of researches that (I hope) had phone users’ permission. It says here they could tell, just from the patterns of movement and of interaction with other phone users, which people were getting the flu even before they themselves knew it. Initial patterns of movement allowed spooky ability to forecast where people would be going next, and after that, and after that. Lots more arises from such pointillist info on us individuals as we wander the people cloud. Maybe we’ll learn which is more true: Birds of a feather flock together. Or monkey see, monkey do. That is to ask: is obesity contagious? Perhaps our blackberries and droids and iphones will tell us. With or without signed release forms.
- Charlie Petit
Beta-Methylamino-L-alanine
Yesterday, about to catch a flight to SFO from Boston’s Logan airport after helping select next year’s Knight Fellows (and man it was hard not being able to take more), I grabbed some airplane reading: the May issue of Discover Magazine.
Lots of it was unvarnished pleasure, including one on Kepler’s new planets, and the cover story “You Are Not Human” which I’d have rephrased “You Are More than Human,” but fine reading.
More surprising and informative than any of those, yet also more problematic, is a piece by Kathleen McAuliffe, “There’s Something in the Water.” That link goes to a pdf on a page set up to make it awkward to read – and where the magazine keeps trying to steer readers to a place to pay to read it conveniently. Sorry about that – and nobody can blame the publisher for wanting a return on investment in this piece.
Perhaps you can find an easier to read version on line, or just pop over to the nearest newsstand and buy it.
What you’ll find is a thesis new to my recollection, perhaps not to a lot of people. It stems from epidemiology of Alzheimer’s disease, and somewhat to ALS and to related degenerative neurological diseases. They seem associated with proximity to bodies of water where blue-green algae bloom once in awhile. Best to call them cyanobacteria, as they are not true algae. A community of researchers suspects that an amino acid that these blooms secrete, beta-methylamino-L-alanine, or BMAA, is somehow bollixing neural circuits. One reads of a parallel to an ALS-like disease in Guam linked suggestively decades ago to fruit bats, and of bioconcentration of cyanobacterial BMAA in sea food, and much else that is interesting.
Here’s an irony. This story is of a genre I often regret for its rarity, and here I am grumbling at an example. Onward. We in science writing often say a frustration is the few opportunities to write about the process of science. News tends to stem from conclusions, the kind that tempt headline writers to slap “breakthrough” atop our carefully couched accounts.
But the tricky part about many process stories is that they are midstream snapshots of work that is incremental or uncertain in meaning. McCauliffe has such a piece of news. Legitimate enough, but unsure. That’s how it goes.
The piece’s troubling aspect is akin to mission creep in diplomacy and warfare. It starts off with suggestive evidence that BMAA is one cause of some dreadful ailments (It never implies it is the only or even major cause, by the way). But following the suggestive association, it declares we are dealing here with hypothesis, and a page later the story flat out labels it a theory. The epistemology of science is important. Science writers and their editors need to know and respect that theories have a good deal more heft and persuasive implication than hypotheses. Asserting a theory implies one has a hypothesis that has been subject to pass-fail tests in the collection of substantial evidence and that has passed. One may not have proof, but one supposedly has something pretty convincing. By the end of the piece one finds the pursuers of this hypothesis looking for “stronger proof,” implying they already have proof, and in need of the “clincher.” It has an anecdote of one patient whose life might have been saved had the BMAA hypothesis and related tests been available at the time. The tale thus has a trajectory with an implied certain splashdown point: MPAA is bad for the brain and cyanobacteria put it there.
The evidence in hand, and the coordinated search for more, are enough to sustain the story. This is enterprising reporting. It seems to advance the ball. It reveals vividly the process and emotional roller coaster of science as it proceeds. But I’d like it better had the tenor stuck with hypothesis. That means unproven, by a mile. There’s no buckle, much less a belt, to cinch or clinch.
I don’t find any other, recent mainline media accounts of the work. But I did find an oldish press release attesting to the validity of its line of inquiry.
Grist for the Mill:
University of Dundee Press Release (April 3, 2005);
Blogpost at Droplets – Bill Harding (Mar 18, 2011) CyanoAlert. This is from a South African environmental consultant with an alarming summation. It also is a good roundup of the general ground covered in the Discover article. It’s up to date. Says here that this line of research goes back 40 years.
A few days ago we posted on an article in the Boston Globe about inocculating larval zebra fish with cyanobacteria. Maybe the researchers should check the fish for Alzheimerish brain lesions? Just a thought.
Typo note: Original version of this post, in a failure of proofreading called gently to my attn. by reader Wendee Holtcamp, inexplicably substituted mpaa for bmaa about half way through. Oh, sigh.
- Charlie Petit
Milw. Journal Sentinel "Right On" columnist McIheran
To be sure, political leanings color perception, and one expects that anybody who writes a lot for the American Enterprise Institute will tend to side with industry over its critics from the realms of regulatory agencies or from the gadfly press. They just instinctively bristle if they see anybody messing with free enterprise. (We liberals, who typically defend and admire the private sector but want it well-policed, are apt to regard such bristling as excessive toadyism to corporate capitalism.) But at the Huffington Post‘s HuffPost Media page one columnist, Jon Entine, has nonetheless laid out a good argument that traditional lines of free speech protection have been crossed in a news room.
Under the magnifying glass is the oft-heralded Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, a pub that this site has saluted often for its broad range of aggressive reporting on medical and environmental matters. Among its campaigns in recent years has been to reveal worries by some, perhaps many if not a majority of specialists, about bisphenol A and pthalates. They are ingredients in plastics goods that not only mimic estrogen to some degree, and may (say some) pose significant development hazard to infants and children as well as to many wildlife species.
It’s a contentious issue. So far the FDA has not deemed the evidence strong enough for vigorous regulatory action, although it is sympathetic to precautionary moves by consumers. The paper’s reporters have chronicled many angles, but the tenor of their pieces has leaned toward stronger FDA action and that in the meantime buyers should avoid certain products for certain uses – such as baby bottles or some containers for children’s food.
Read Entine’s piece above for the details. The gist is that a generally right-wing JS columnist, Pat McIheran, a little over a week ago indirectly but unmistakably raised a pronounced cocked eyebrow at his own paper’s news coverage of BPA. He did so by citing a recent German study largely exonerating BPA, and citing as his primary source Entine himself via an earlier column for the AEI’s magazine site, The American. A storm of to-and-fro on line comments to the column ensued, rather civil in this day and age. Some argue that the German study was done by shills for industry, others that it fairly well represents the true consensus among experts. Columnist McIlheran and his source, Entine, chimed in regularly in the digital conversation (at the bottom of the JS column linked at this graf’s start).
So far, so normal. A little less normal is that the newspaper’s managing editor, George Stanley, briefly joined the parade of commenters. His one sentence remark declared that the German study is tainted because “all the scientist-authors of the study have financial ties to the plastics industry.” Implication: they are conflicted, probably partisan, and their conclusion is suspect. Ergo, my paper’s columnist erred in trusting the study.
Anybody from outside says that, no big deal. But this is the managing editor, boss of the news team. Back in 2008, m.e. Stanley wrote a column extolling the independence of his news staff and its ability to write freely, and also declaring that personal politics and opinion are not part of his publication’s news making process. This raises the question – if the reporters are trusted not to let politics color their coverage, is it not a corollary that people PAID to share opinions, such as McIlheran, not have reason to worry about public ripostes – to reasonably justified opinions – from senior members of the news team?
It’s in interesting issue. A point of reference may be the tempest that busted out two years ago or so at the Washington Post. Its conservative columnist George Will listed a bunch of reasons he believes anthropogenic global warming is hogwash. The Post came under fire from many quarters for NOT upbraiding him and for NOT insisting Will provide better foundation for his assertion. Actually, and here’s my opinion: I’d agree that Will cited only hogwash. He deserved some in-house blowback and stronger control. But the criticism aimed at the Post was that the Op-Ed section’s managers – not the news side’s biggest suit – should have jumped on their superstar columnist for providing such weak sourcing. The J-S situation is different. McIheran was hired to write opinions based on reasonable grounds. The German study seems to provide them, even if it turns out to be wrong. The ME should have pushed “delete” before adding his thoughts to the public comment string. That he didn’t is no felony. He didn’t get him fired or any such thing as that. But it is a misdemeanor violation of journalism’s non-codified book of ethics, I’d say.
– Charlie Petit
What bloody can of worms have I opened by posting on The Wedding? Now comes Faye Flam at The Philadelphia Inquirer with a nicely reported story on royal families and inbreeding.
It includes this insightful analysis of the wedding, which I trust we will not hear from Katie Couric: “It can’t hurt for William to be adding more diversity to the royal gene pool.”
Ah, how romantic…
- Paul Raeburn
Kristina Miller, a scientist at the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, was the lead author of a January 14, 2011 article in Science that suggested that viral infections may be linked to higher salmon mortality. But when the study came out, the government did not allow anyone to interview Miller, “citing a possible conflict of interest because of her scheduled testimony before a commission looking into the decline of sockeye salmon in [British Columbia's] Fraser River.”
That comes from a story posted April 26th by CBC News, on a move by the Canadian Science Writers Association to “unmuzzle” government scientists. In an open letter to the government, the science writers said, “We urge you to free the scientists to speak. Take off the muzzles and eliminate the script writers and allow scientists — they do have PhDs after all — to speak for themselves.”
Kathryn O’Hara, the president of the Canadian science writers’ group, told the CBC, “In the last few years we’ve seen — under the Harper government, at least — a real concerted effort to keep controls on what the evidence is saying,”
In another episode highlighted by the CBC, Margaret Munro, a science writer with the Canadian news service Postmedia (and a board member of the Canadian Science Writers Association) sought data from Canadian radiation monitors following the Japanese earthquake and nuclear plant crisis. “Munro said Health Canada would not allow an interview with one of their experts responsible for the detectors. An Austrian team later released data from the entire global network of radiation monitors, including stations in Canada,” the CBC reported.
The government has so far not responded to the science writers’ letter.
Here’s a story American science writers might want to match. Then again–why worry? This could never happen in the U.S., right?
- Paul Raeburn
Yesterday, I argued that science writers had missed a good bet by (mostly) not covering a study concluding that doctors at Guantanamo had failed to inquire about, or document, potential abuse of detainees.
Today, The New York Times and a scattering of others covered a story about legal action being taken against psychologists alleged to have designed or consulted on abusive interrogation techniques. And once again, science writers are mostly absent.
We’re often quick to jump on the stories that put psychologists in a favorable light–new findings that help us understand our behavior or can lead to new treatments or therapies. Should we not be just as eager to take a close look when they come under fire?
- Paul Raeburn
Elizabeth Weise at USA Today put it succinctly in her lede: “Researchers know that sleep deprivation makes people and animals less functional. Now a team of researchers in Wisconsin and Italy has found that in rats kept awake past their bed times, their brains begin to turn themselves off, neuron by neuron, though the rat is still awake.”
So, in rats at least, individual neurons (oddly floating in a void in the artist’s conception above) know when they need some rest and voluntarily catch some Zs whenever they need to. (How’s that for teleological anthropomorphizing?) As Weise notes in her second graf, the first neurons to go offline are the ones used most during the day. She quotes the scientists saying that this is worrisome because it means that, if the same thing happens in people, even though we are still awake and thinking that we can function normally, we are working without the help of many of the neurons on which we depend during the better part of the day.
Stephanie Pappas at CBSNews.com fearlessly extrapolates directly to humans in her lede, protected by that most overused word in science and medical writing, “may”: “If you’re staying up past your bedtime, you may not be as awake as you think you are.”
The findings, published in this week’s Nature, were based on experiments on rats with fine-wire probes into various parts of their frontal cortexes, each probe reading electrical activity in a single neuron or a small group of connected neurons. As the animals were kept from sleeping by such things as distracting them with toys, some of the neurons went quiet for long periods.
Tina Hesman Saey, writing at Science News, gives a useful bit of background, saying that the old paradigm of sleep held that some kind of central control center told the whole brain when to sleep. “But,” she writes, “researchers have been building a case for the past two decades that sleep may originate in single cells and eventually spread all over the brain.”
Ed Yong has a nicely colloquial account of the experiments at Discover‘s blog, “Not Exactly Rocket Science.” Almost alone among the English-language stories, Yong’s attributes the work to the Nature paper’s first author, a post-doc who almost surely did the real work, rather than to the lab chiefs cited in most other accounts. That’s smart, and more science writers should do it.
–Boyce Rensberger
One should never put too much credence in studies that claim to show a relationship between brain size, even when calculated in proportion to body size, and any specific behaviors. But, with that caveat out of the way, we note a study by researchers in Sweden and Spain who looked at relative brain sizes among 82 species of birds in Europe and concluded that city birds belonged to families with relatively larger brains than birds that have not adapted to life in urban areas. The study was published in Biology Letters.
The photo shows one famous example, the English blue tit, which long ago learned to pull the caps off milk bottles left on front doorsteps. (Note to younger readers: In olden days milk came from doorsteps before it came from grocery stores.)
The story didn’t make it into any major outlets that the Tracker could find. Perhaps that’s because of the caveat above. Perhaps its because the paper’s abstract didn’t answer such questions as: How much bigger were the brains? Perhaps it’s because the abstract gives this explanation of the type of study: “We apply phylogenetic mixed modelling in a Bayesian framework to show that passerine species that succeed in colonizing at least one of 12 European cities are more likely to belong to big-brained lineages than species avoiding these urban areas.” Perhaps it’s because the journal kept the full text of the paper behind a pay wall. ($27 to read just this one article online!) Perhaps it’s because there aren’t that many science writers left at major outlets.
A sampling of journalistic takes:
Ella Davies, writing on BBC‘s Earth News site.
Jennifer Viegas at Discovery News.
Karen Hopkin at Scientific American, which includes a brief podcast with avian accompaniment. Hopkin knows her cell biology, but not her birds. She includes pigeons among the city birds studied when the study was limited to passerines, which pigeons are not.
–Boyce Rensberger
The ever inventive Robert Krulwich is one of the best science explainers around, especially on broadcast media. But he also blogs at NPR online under the title “Krulwich Wonders: An NPR sciencey blog.”
He posted one a couple of days ago on the astonishing mimicry of an Australian species called the superb lyrebird (illustration), specifically one at the Adelaide Zoo. Krulwich’s text is fine, but what will likely blow you away are the videos (with their audio) on YouTube, to which he links. Turn the sound on, and click on Krulwich’s name above. Just do it.
–Boyce Rensberger
The Tracker would be remiss if it ignored the wedding of the century. Fortunately, we are able to take note of this blessed event without actually reading gigabytes of copy, thanks to Ed Yong, of Not Exactly Rocket Science, who has rewritten all of this week’s posts as wedding tie-ins.
For example:
Just as Will and Kate will join hands in matrimony to sail into the future, colonies of 8,000 fire ants can stay afloat by joining claws to form a waterproof raft…
And:
Female kukrisnakes find and capture turtle nests with their dagger-like teeth, just as Kate Middleton has captured the nation’s heart with her winning smile…
More from Ed here, where you will also find this link to wedding “humor” from the journal Cell. (Where it riffs on, among other things, “the epigenetic changes that transform a ‘commoner’ into a queen…” Heh-heh.)
Ignore Cell. Stick with Ed, whom we thank for the chuckle.
- Paul Raeburn
