Those were the days, not so many years ago, when big American metros regularly sent eagle-eyed, sharp-writing reporters off to exotic places to get the skinny on big issues. I’ve been wondering whether any in the US, outside NYTimes, Wash Post, maybe Wall St. Journal, still did it.

The Miami Herald does it.  At least, it just did. This week it features a story from staffer Jim Wyss who filed on the long-running lawsuit battle between envirogroups and allied native tribes in Ecuador’s share of the Amazon Basin, on one side, and Chevron on the other. At issue is pollution and other damages left behind years back by Texaco, a company that subsequently merged with Chevron. The issue is that while Texaco and its local subsidiary were absolved of further responsibility by Ecuador’s gov’t  for their open pits of crude waste and stream contamination after a lump sum payoff in the early 90′s, the nation’s court said later that third parties still could sue. And they have. It’s been going on for years. Plaintiffs have won judgment of billions of dollars. The oil company says the problem is greedy lawyers and falsification of evidence. Etc etc. and fingers are pointed in all directions.

One would think that if a newspaper sends a crusading journalist into a jungle to check out this odyssey of industrial exploitation of natural resources, that the reporter would come back with a blistering indictment of corporate greed and a suffering culture and ecosystem as its victim. That’s the script.

There is a lot of that. But the oil company gets a pretty fair piece of the story to present its side too. I’m betting Chevron winds up paying the billions. I doubt that it has been railroaded by greedy green lawyers. But one has to hand it to Wyss, when confronted by conflicting evidence and narratives, for not just assuming the big corporation has gotta be guilty and as black of heart as the oil it sought. Ambiguity is the bane of narrative-seeking journalism. But when it’s all you got, that’s the story.

- Charlie Petit

LISA - could'a would'a should'a?

As some bloggers and others had noticed, NASA is abandoning an ambitious space-based gravity-wave detector called LISA, as well as a new X-ray satellite instrument. And the over-budget James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA has been protecting as its premier new instrument, may be pushed back a few years. Some say this signals a coming void in NASA’s support for astrophysics missions.

Reasons are mainly that, while not hit as hard as some agencies, decision by Congress that got White House compliance to slash non-military discretionary budget items – as though that semi-symbolic fervor will make an important dent in the Pentagon and entitlement-driven federal deficit – have put a lid on NASA’s money supply. With that on top of  the Webb budget overdo, plus  inflation, etc., the line-item knives are out.

At least two astrophysicist bloggers, Steinn Sigurdsson at Dynamics of Cats and Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance, have had this for more than a week. But now it’s front and center. Sigurdsson provides a profile of the whole parade of NASA science mission, explaining how such a hole is being knocked in the laborious sequence of proposal-approval-build-launch-mission-extended mission that astronomer may soon have hardly any US space platforms to use at all. He notes that successful missions tend to get their operations extended – which takes money yet NASA budgets ahead only for their so-called nominal mission duration.  Carroll singles out LISA, or Laser Interferometry Space Antenna, for mourning. Also out with this a bit ago was Jennifer Ouellette at Discovery News (Sean Carroll is her husband, so the household got this news well-covered).

The latest stories:

• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Space Mission to Hunt Gravity Waves Shuts Down Over NASA Funding Shortage ; European partners may soldier on, it says here, but without NASA’s money, there is no telling when or if anything as ambitious as the current design will be realized.
• Science News – Ron Cowen: NASA pulls out of astrophysics missions . Europe now on its own for spacecraft to study black holes, gravitational waves ; In addition to the X-ray observatory and the interferometric gravity-detector, another project, the Webb Space Telescope, may not go up until 2018 or later, a two year delay, and another high-priority mission, the Wied-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, could slip from 2020 to 2025.

Related News on the Webb’s budget snafu:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: (Apr. 9 issue of print magazine) Star Cents / How the cost of NASA’s next big space telescope skyrocketed ; It was almost deliberate deception by NASA’s business-as-usual that flew in the face of common sense. Former administrator Michael Griffin tells Cowen, in essence, it was customary for NASA to knowingly use irrational methods to calculate its budget needs. That sounds like lying to me.

- Charlie Petit

In the Pulitzer world explanatory journalism is usually taken to mean science and medical writing. This year’s prize goes to, as their publisher says:

• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Journal Sentinel wins Pulitzer in Explanatory Reporting ; Recognized were reporters Mark Johnson and Kathleen Gallagher, photographer Gary Porter, graphics editor Lou Saldivar and interactive producer Alison Sherwood. ;

The paper’s proclamation story is on a web page with links to its three part winning series on modern, DNA-driven medicine. This new brand of medicine is crystallized in the heart-grabbing story of a five-year-old boy with a horrific illness attacking his gut, and of the odyssey of research and daring that led a team at a local hospital to a treatment that, thus far, appears to be working. This site’s previous posts on the series are, here for the initial series that ran in December last year – which we called astounding -  and here for a followup last month.

This is just the most recent example of the strong medical reporting from this regional newspaper. It is to be congratulated for its devotion to nurturing that side of the newsroom and giving its reporters time and room to stretch their legs and to engage and educate their readers.

Examples of other staff work include, with links to our previous posts:

• John Fauber (Nov 29, ’10): Disjointed regulation; About jaw implants – see also Paul Raeburn post here: Fauber: Jaw implants a ‘long road to hell’.
• John Fauber (Aug 28, ’10) : Bone-fusion protein raises questions about doctors’ financial stakes, followed by Part II Complications rise along with off-label use of BMP-2 ; Which Raeburn summarized under the tracker hed, “Fauber … Hits Another Home Run.
• Susanne Rust, Meg Kissinger (Dec 20, 2008) EPA veils hazardous substances ; Just one example on pthalates,  Bisphenol A, and other plastics ingredients that the paper has assigned to a team that has been reporting on them for several years now. A page devoted to that coverage, a series called Chemical Fallout,  is here.

The Pulitzer to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel was not the result of a one-time spike in brilliance or a riveting case of breaking news right under its nose, but one recognition for years of devotion to a powerful medical and environmental journalism team.

Runners up were entries from the Wall Street Journal staff for reporting on Medicare fraud and abuse, and the Washington Post for reporting on battlefield trauma medicine.

Grist for the Mill: Pulitzer Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

On April 20, 2010, a year ago this week, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded into flame with deadly result. It came after a mishandled deep water well sent flammable natural gas surging up the riser tube in the water and into the rig’s work spaces.

So official reports and news accounts of varying enterprise are taking a look back. More important they are assessing how the Gulf of Mexico’s ecosystem and human economy are doing after the four months’ long siege of orange-hued crude oil that rode the waves into coastal marshes, coated parts of the sea floor, and put a fluid mist of gunk in the sea from its surface to its bed. BP and its contractors and gov’t regulators were at fault, natch. But they also – along with local and federal overseers – battled heroically to stop the thing. That is no mollifying badge of honor. The feat would have been done far quicker were they to have had the wit to plan and practice for such an exigency in the first place. It should not have required a Nobel-laureate Secretary of Energy to doodle on his desk the specs for the new flow-stopping plug. That it did is clear evidence that the screw-up has deep history. One could go into the nation’s addiction to oil and reasons for such drilling in the first place, but that’s a bigger rant…

Somehow here we are, a year later. The oil is long gone from plain view. Fish and turtles are swimming. Birds flap. What was that all about? A: it is likely a testament to natural resiliency but too soon to say for sure.

Stories:

• AP – Cain Burdeau, Seth Borenstein: Scientists: Gulf health nearly at pre-spill level ; Which is to say, as the body text say, fair-to-middlin”. No tar balls on the beach, but if you know where to dig you’ll find some.
• CNN Money.com – Steve Hargreaves: BP’s $20 billion fund barely tapped ; But BP cannot count on getting back the change ;
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: A year after BP oil spill, fate of gulf ecosystem remains murky ;
• Huffington Post – Joanna Zelman : Gulf Oil Spill Cleanup workers Report Mysterious Illnesses Year After Disaster ; A huffy and reproachful essay, not a news story. There must be illnesses from the contamination, no argument there. But nothing in this story remotely passes as persuasive evidence.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: One year after spill, where’s the oil? ; This is not an exasperated or apologist’s question in the hed. Boyle’s answer: It went lots of places, and the overall picture is complex and contentious. Nice: two scientists whose findings are often portrayed as contradictory are, says one, complementary Boyle’s overall summary: Some of the oil evaporated, some was gobbled up by microbes, some was burned, some washed up onto shore, some is still washing up as tar balls, some was dispersed in the sea, and some settled to the bottom of the ocean. Most researchers also agree that the spill was a catastrophe no matter how the percentages for those various categories add up ;
• NPR – Carrie Johnson: Legal Drama Over Gulf Oil Spill Could Last Years ;
• Houston Chronicle – Matthew Tresaugue: One year later: a coated coastline ; The headline writer didn’t read the story, which says parts are, most is not coated. And, important, it notes: Even before the spill began..the vast sea was hurting…
• New Orleans Times Picayune: Too much to separate – here’s the paper’s Oil Spill Gulf of Mexico 2010 search result. Of note is the paper’s editorial.
• Yale e360 – Carl Safina: One Year Later: Assessing the Lasting Impact of the Gulf Spill;
• Telegraph (UK) Geoffrey Lean: One year on, the Deepwater Horizon story is far from over ; He starts on the spill, and quickly moves to the larger, global situation ranging from black carbon to the Yangtze turtle.

- Charlie Petit

Gary Schwitzer’s HealthNewsReview.org is now five years old, and, according to Schwitzer, it has evaluated and critiqued 1,488 stories since it was launched.

Those of us who follow Schwitzer regularly (at HealthNewsReview.org and also on his smart and equally essential HealthNewsReview blog) might be tempted to take him for granted, as we often do with people who do something so well so consistently.

So it’s worth remembering what Schwitzer did when he created HealthNewsReview: He developed a scoring system for medical news stories; he recruited an able group of reviewers to apply the criteria; and he made sure they kept at it. Schwitzer’s tally of almost 1,500 stories in five years amounts to almost one a day–weekends included.

Schwitzer recently gave up a tenured position at the University of Minnesota to pursue this project full time, for which we should all be grateful. We will continue to cite him on the Tracker, and I urge you to follow him yourselves.

In honor of the fifth anniversary, we have a gift for Schwitzer. Google tells me the fifth anniversary is the wooden, or clock, anniversary. So here is a wooden clock for HealthNewsReview. (I believe Schwitzer is the one in the middle.)

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The community of science writers in Catalonia is jumping on a two-page article in the newspaper “Ara.” It says that a veterinarian from Barcelona has an elixir from eggs that stops cellular aging and allows you to live forever. There is not a single scientific publication associated to this work, nary a scientific hypothesis about the mechanism of action. The elixir has passed no safety test. It is not commercially approved. The reporter gives eager credit to the veterinarian without, it appears, consulting other researchers. There is an impressive quote: “If you take this elixir daily, you will live forever as a healthy 33-year-old person”. The tracker called the veterinarian to ask if he literally said that sentence, or if the reporter used it out of context. The veterinarian confirmed that he said it, and that he totally believes his elixir stops aging. The original article trustfully takes him at his word. After strong criticism, a few days later the newspaper published a second story in which credentialed scientists denounce the practices of the veterinarian. Still, the veterinarian told the tracker that he is happy with the controversy and believes that “the debate is necessary”. He also told me that demand for his elixir multiplied after the publication of the articles.

Hoy comentamos un artículo en catalán. Lo hacemos porque representa el paradigma perfecto de pseudocientífico que se inventa una fórmula mágica para mantenernos eternamente sanos, utiliza terminología científica y afirmaciones no probadas para convencer a un periodista no habituado a cubrir temas científicos, y le ofrecen 2 páginas de publicidad a su fraudulento producto. Un gran favor para él. El tracker llamó por teléfono al vendedor del elixir de los huevos, y entre otras cosas le confesó: “la demanda se ha multiplicado después del artículo. No damos abasto”.

Ara es un diario en catalán nacido hace escasamente 5 meses que por sus buenos contenidos y ágil estructura se ha hecho rápidamente un lugar entre la prensa catalana. Pero el domingo 10 de Abril aparecía a doble página un extravagante artículo firmado por Cristian Segura sobre un elixir de huevo que regenera el organismo. (pdf 1, pdf 2).

¿Por qué extravagante? En el primer párrafo el creador y vendedor de un elixir a base de extracto de huevo (que todavía no ha pasado ninguna prueba científica para validar eficacia -o más importante; seguridad-) le dice al periodista: “si te tomas diariamente este elixir vivirás eternamente con el mismo aspecto que tienes ahora, el de un hombre sano de 33 años”.  Esto, es imposible. Cualquier científico lo sabe. Y si alguien lo defiende, es un farsante.

Ante tal rotundidad, llamé al veterinario autor del elixir para preguntarle si había dicho esa frase textualmente, o si el periodista la había sacado de contexto. Dubitativo, Joan Cunill me dijo “si, si… está bien. Yo lo dije, y es lo que creo”. Repliqué: “un momento… no puede ser… ¿pero de verdad me dice que el elixir permite vivir eternamente?”. “bueno, salvo en caso de accidentes, o cosas así, yo creo que sí es posible”. Le pregunté cómo se suponía que actuaba el elixir a nivel molecular, y no supo darme una respuesta. Le pedí pruebas, y me dijo que tenían perros de 22 años corriendo como si tuvieran 10. “¿pero cuanto tiempo hace que tienen este elixir?” “4 o 5 años”. Es decir, que todavía podemos ir más lejos: el elixir rejuvenece a los perros (ironía). El primer diagnóstico era obvio: el veterinario se había inventado un elixir, anunciado propiedades milagrosas, y pretendido engatusar al periodista y clientes. ¿Qué debería haber hecho el periodista? Respuesta corta: No hacer ni caso a Cunill, y no publicar el reportaje. Respuesta larga: si quieres publicar sobre el elixir de los huevos, al menos contrasta la información con científicos de verdad.

Vamos al artículo: en las dos páginas, Cristian no logra explicar lo que sería un descubrimiento científico que daría la vuelta al mundo: unas proteínas que pueden regenerar el organismo. No es falta de capacidad didáctica. Simplemente, Cunill no tiene siquiera una hipótesis científica que lo sustente, ni datos experimentales publicados en ninguna revista científica. Ni de mínimo impacto. ¿Qué pruebas aporta? Gente diciendo que le funciona. Esto no es serio. Con esto no se puede afirmar que el elixir elimina los efectos secundarios del cáncer, te devuelve el pelo si estás calvo, o puedes vivir eternamente. Entre muchos otros beneficios que defiende el artículo. Y digo “defiende”, porque el periodista no le exige datos a Cunill, ni busca la opinión de ningún investigador en envejecimiento. Inaudito. En información deportiva uno puede argumentar que un equipo jugó mejor a pesar de terminar perdiendo 2-0. La ciencia no funciona así. Los datos son más importantes que las palabras. Nunca lo podemos olvidar.

Después de varias críticas al artículo de científicos, comunicadores, y gente con criterio; el diario Ara publicaba la opinión independiente de científicos en el artículo de Maria Ortega “Los científicos cuestionan la eficacia del elixir de huevo” (pdf). Evidentemente, nadie  daba credibilidad al elixir. Desde el directo “no me lo creo”, a la reflexión de que esas proteínas (como cualquier otras) se digerirían en el estómago y dejarían de tener eficacia. Los científicos dejan a la altura de charlatán a Cunill. Lo más grave, argumentan, que no haya publicada ni una única evidencia científica que lo sustente y que se publicite en los medios un producto que no ha pasado los controles de seguridad. Recordemos: el elixir de huevo promete –nada más y nada menos-: ¡frenar el envejecimiento!”. Un científico que sí investiga desde hace años formalmente en envejecimiento celular, explica que no es así de fácil.

Pero en la misma página, y con igual extensión de texto, Cristian Segura vuelva a defender a Cunill (pdf) con estas contundentes pruebas: personas de clase social alta creen que les funciona, y Cunill dice (podemos creerle o no) que dos médicos fueron a visitarle a la mañana siguiente (no se aportan nombres). ¿Suficiente? de ninguna manera. Resulta graciosa la frase de la esposa del actual presidente de la Generalitat de Catalunya: “me aporta una vitalidad que me ha demostrado que no es placebo”. Con todos los respetos, a diferencia de lo que ocurre en información deportiva, si hay placebo o no se demuestra con experimentos, no con opiniones subjetivas. A continuación, un médico deportivo asegura que el elixir tiene propiedades antiinflamatorias beneficiosas. Puede ser. No hay pruebas que lo respalden, pero hay muchas sustancias que tienen potencial antiinflamatorio. El elixir podría ser una de ellas. Eso no es imposible, ni una sandez. Pero que frene el envejecimiento y te mantenga eternamente como si tuvieras 33 años, sí lo es. Y debe encender las luces de alarma de cualquier periodista, escriba habitualmente de ciencia o no.

En el artículo se saca de contexto la cita del carismático comunicador Eduard Punset “en ningún lugar está escrito que me vaya a morir”. Carl Sagan también inmortalizó una máxima que todos deberíamos tener siempre presente a la hora de enfrentarnos a productos como el de Cunill: “las afirmaciones extraordinarias requieren evidencias extraordinarias”.

- Pere Estupinyà

Creepy, lurching news emerged late last week from the meeting of the Seismological Society of America in Memphis, TN. Noticed lately we’ve had some big quakes? Are the gods or their tectonic agents stirring in the underworld? Are some of the turtles restless all the way down??? Maybe. For the last six years a pair of USGS researchers have been arguing that perhaps (maybe maybe) our planet is entering a period of megaquakes – something they say has happened before and could be starting up now. The monster Sumatra-Indonesia 9.1 in 2004 and then Chile and most recently the 9.0-mag Tohaku quake off Honshu, Japan, seem curious. So did a trio in the middle of the 20th century in Chile, Alaska, and Kamchatka. Maybe these things come in bursts. Maybe we’re due for more soon.

(Pic credit: From a peculiar, disaster, plot,  and prophecy besotted  site.)

Or not. Stochastic events, random and unrelated, too little paleo data to check it out, said others.. But this is a good story if not told with screaming headlines one might see in a Brit tabloid: Report: Megaquake Barrage Forecast to Batter Earth Again!. I made that up myself. It does catch the eye. The outlets that ran with this news direct from the meeting or its on line teleconference and including several by experienced reporters, did so with sober restraint:

• NatureNews: Sid Perkins: Are larger earthquakes a sign of the times? ; Perkins reports he was the only US journalist therein the flesh. An Asahi-TV Japanese news crew was there too – although not directly from Japan but from an NYC bureau.
• ScienceNews – Alexandra Witke: Seismologists rumble over quake clusters / Japan tremor may be part of  second grouping of great quakes; Alex ties the SSA report to other work (see also the Becky Ham piece at LiveScience in the next cluster of megaquake stories, below).
• Seattle Times – Sandi Doughton: Series of big quakes mean more on the way? ; She, of course, writes from atop the Cascadia subduction zone.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – John Roach: Is this the age of megaquakes? ;  Cites “media reports” presumably including the three above as his news hook, and links to additional reporting by himself and others on the general topic. One notable previous piece by Simon Winchester and to which Roach links is also in the bunch below.

Other Related News.  searching around for this story led to others, notably at LiveScience. One was picked up by the Christian Science Monitor and brings to my eyes for the first time a new term – the “Complex Megadisaster,” a sort of event that has not happened before, says here, but could see some more. Japan got the first one. Another anticipates the notion of a cluster of megaquakes.

• LiveScience – Charles Q. Choi: Mega-Quakes and mega-distasters: Will US heed wake-up call in Japan? ;
• LiveScience – Becky Ham (apr 8 ) : Are Mega Earthquakes on the Rise?
• AFP – Richard Ingham (Mar 27) : No long-distance risks from mega-quakes: study.
• Eurasia Review: Yang Razali Kassim (Apr 15) : After Japan: Waiting for Asia’s Next Big One – Analysis.
• Newsweek – Simon Winchester: The Scariest Earthquake is Yet to Come (March13) ; A bit overwrought, but of course we’ll see worse, and perhaps before long. Also this is the first account I’ve seen of a vast withdrawal of the sea from Honshu as the approaching wave’s leading trough drained the waters away – and of the subsequent sight of the corresponding rise racing in.

Grist for the Mill: Seismological Society of America Tip Sheet-Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A random walk this morning stumbled me across, at the Daily Camera in Boulder CO, a column by Kate Becker about the planet Mercury and its new artificial moon. It’s a delight, it has news, it has reflection, it has context as wide as the solar system, is witty, and quite different. Which is to say, it showcases her writerly style. It’s now about ten days old, but I’d bet nearly all of you out there missed it. Give it a look.

Becker is at NOVA in Boston. She freelances her column to the Camera regularly. I’d warrant that with some marketing she could get the column into other outlets and perhaps has done so. One learns with a few clicks she has a masters in astronomy from Cornell and worked in public outreach for UCAR in Boulder, which presumably explains the connection at the Daily Camera.

One last eye-popper. I found something from Becker interesting to read for anybody, and to watch for anybody unless it is just my computer system. I ran across it at her website, sciencecrafty.com. It is linked below, a very nicely done, two-years+-old story on physics and the mapping of hard problems into coordinate systems where they become easier. A forbidding topic to tackle and to lay before a lay audience. She does it with charm. It has a black and white illus of graphene that is below the bottom edge of the opening window. One must scroll down to see it. The curious thing is: the first time I scrolled through the piece I used the scroll wheel on my mouse. The illus seemed weirdly three dimensional – make that four dimensional – squirming and expanding toward me as it came up. But I found that when brought into view with the scroll bar on the right of the browser, It is as flat, dead, and static as a toad on a well traveled road. Why’s that? Does it for you? It must be the sizes of the jerks by which my scroll wheel moves the pane. Weird optical illusion.

• Foundational Questions Institute FQXi – Kate Becker (Oct. 10, 2008) The Black Hole and the Babel Fish ; It’s about dimension, time, quantum fields, phase changes and the intersections of domains. My personal reaction to its discussion of black holes and entropy is that somehow this may be connected with the way, which a black hole guy told me about, that nothing in our time frame has yet hit the middle of a massive black hole. Not in the whole visible universe, not even close. By the grace of warped time at  event horizons, it’s all laminated in a shell just out of sight. Falling in its own frame swiftly and scarily toward a tidally ripped singularity, but frozen to us were we magically able to see it like streaming video on  bandwidth vanishingly close to zero.

- Charlie Petit

This post is purely about anti-synchronicity. The two biggest papers in Northern California have recently published engaging stories on large or at least fairly large predatory mammals native to the region. But the messages are diametrically different. Either stirs imagination. Perhaps the sum means nothing. But either or both stories will engage all who have an interest in natural history and in the urban-wildland interface.

• San Jose Mercury News – Paul Rogers: Despite high-profile mountain lion incidents, encounters with people are down ; Perhaps, it says here, the big cats numbers are shrinking despite a hunting ban.
• San Francisco Chronicle – Kelly Zito: Coping with coyotes in ‘wilds’ of San Francisco ; Says here coyote encounters, sightings, and numbers are up. The animals are even spreading through San Francisco, from park to park. As of this posting, the full text is  behind a pay wall. This is to come down Sunday, April 17.

- Charlie Petit

If the sheer diversity of phonemes – individual sounds such as consonants, vowels in all their variety, and other clicks and similar single-sound structural elements of words – are any guide, human speech arose first in southern Africa. That should be no stunner, as paleontology and genome studies suggest that’s where modern people first arose too. But an article in the journal Science by an Australian evolutionary psychologist reveals by far the most ambitious effort to use contemporary linquistics to imply where speech began.

This deep look at humankind’s most distinctive ability – to talk and thus to share stories and amass in collective memory narratives of ourselves including myths – cannot avoid getting broad attention.

Stories:

• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: Phonetic Clues Hint Language Is Africa-Born ; Clear explanation how the author got around, via statistics inspired in part by genetics, the inability to chart affinities of today’s language back more than a few thousand years. Now the lookback appears to have a  reach of 100,000 or even  more years.
• Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik: The Mother of All Languages ; Evocative hed, even though the work provides no hint what the first language or language family sounded like.
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Africa birthplace of human language ;
• The Economist – Babel or babble? /Languages all have their roots in the same part of the world. But they are not as similar to each other as was once thought ;
• Babel’s Dawn: Edmund Blair Bolles ; Last Common Language was in Africa ; A blog, yes, but by a science writer with a book coming out on this very topic. Here’s a spoiler, and in insight into the neuroses of having an upcoming book. Bolles’s last line in this article is: “I must confess that while all this work is interesting, none of it seems surprising. If Atkinson had discovered anything else, I would have had to take a long hard look at my forthcoming book and I’m in no mood to quote Emily Litella. (“Never mind.”)” ;
• Telegraph (UK) Richard Alleyne: Language like people came out of Africa ;
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Is this how Eve spoke:? Every humanlanguage evolved from ‘single prehistoric African mother tongue ; Another instance of a headline which misleads readers to think the actual sound of the first language has been hinted. The story has a touch of hyperventilation, but appears to be sound.
• Cosmos (Australia) Gemma Conroy: Human language spread from African origin ;
• ScienceNOW: Michael Balter : Language May Have Helped Early Humans Spread Out of Africa ; Smart hed – the sourcing of Africa as the font of speech is not such a surprise. Perhaps of greater heft is the paper’s argument that this correlation of where modern people arose, and where language started too, are not just coincidences prior to the species’s spread across the globe.
• New Scientist – Ferris Jabr: Evolutionary Babel was in southern Africa ;

Grist for the Mill:

University of Auckland Press Release ;

After more than three months operation a detector called XENON100, carrying 62 kg or about 135 pounds of liquid xenon and a bunch of photoelectric cells to see if the xenon flashes in a subterranean lab off a traffic tunnel through Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain, has gotten zilch. That is, nothing looks like what a dark matter particle might leave behind if scientists are correct about there being such things as dark matter particles heavy enough to be called WIMPs. Hi def version of illus here.

It still could be there, but have a mass or energy beyond what this detector’s sensitivity. As often happens, this null result has meaning. Personally, it is fun to think that dark matter might remain a perennial mystery. Unless they turn out to be the key to teleportation to distant worlds or something equally exceedingly exciting. Then it would add spice to life.

The team put up their report two days ago on the arXiv site for physics and astronomy papers that may (or may not) later be in journals. Reporters spotted it. Then came press releases. Now word is getting around outside the inner circles of dark matter science.

• Science News – Ron Cowen: XENON100 fails to find dark matter ; Filed Wednesday, this may have been the first news story.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Particle Hunt Nets Almost Nothing; the Hunters Are Almost Thrilled ;
• PhysicsWorld – James Dacey:  WIMP no-show casts a shadow over dark matter ;
• NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Dark matter no-show confronts supersymmetry ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: No Joy for Dark Matter Detector’s First 100 Days ;
• SpaceDaily: New Data From XENON100 Narrows The Possible Range For Dark Matter ;
• NewScientist – Celeste Biever: Dark matter no-show at sensitive underground lab ;
• Science2.0 – Tommaso Dorigo: The New XENON100 Results On Dark Matter ; A bit wonky, but even thought the writer says he’s no expert, it makes a convincing case that this is useful science even if it saw nothing.
• CosmicVariance (via Discover Mag) Sean Carroll: No Dark Matter Seen by XENON ; Sean says these results are deflating. Maybe that’s a cosmic inflation joke, but I think not.

Grist for the Mill:

UCLA Press Release ; NSF Press Release ; arXiv preprint ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) The Spanish tracker spent 9 days in Perú helping the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) to design a strategy to boost the communication of science and innovation in the country. After talking to researchers, editors, reporters, communication officers, business people and policy makers, there are several ideas to reflect on. An intriguing one is the perception that the approach to science in Perú is kind of qualitatively different than research done in US or Europe. With only 0.15% of the GDP devoted to R&D, and private sector not committed to research, “we try to focus in local and practical goals”, a policy maker told the tracker. It means the use of science for the basic and direct principle of solving “real” problems. “They might be interesting, but we don’t care about black holes”; I was reminded in a meeting.

On the other hand, I was amazed by the highly interesting stories of things that are yet to be explained (yes; real stories with initial problems, people involved, research done, solutions, and socioeconomic factors to discuss). Examples are 15-second TB diagnosis tests, fish farms in the Amazon, biofortification of the sweet potato, software to improve productivity, insecticides against dengue-carrying mosquitos, and many other scientific studies that often are not published in peer review journals. “It’s too expensive”, said a researcher to a shocked tracker.

This lack of formal publication and poor institutional dissemination might be two of the reasons local research doesn’t reach the editor’s mailbox. And consequently, or the general public. “When we have something new, reporters only cover the end of the story; the final application. They usually skip all the science behind”, explained the communication director of a research center. “We don’t have time”, responded the only full time science reporter that I met, who was in charge of 2 full pages with a minimum of three different stories each day.

Perú is in the middle of an important election runup. Regarding S&T, the bottom line is to improve this scant 0.15% of the GDP (one of the lowest in Latin America). After several years of continued economic growth; many Peruvian institutions and associations are pushing for more. But science was totally absent in debates among and platforms of the five pre-candidates. It was  also absent in the science pages of the newspapers. Only SciDev published a story exploring the views towards science of the different candidates. El Comercio had written a good story, but several weeks ago.

And good news showed up yesterday: “Caretas”, the oldest and most influential weekly magazine of the country (equivalent to TIME magazine), published the views of the presidential candidates Humala and Keiko. The story is part of the first edition of a scientific supplement that the magazine is going to publish periodically. Careta’s editor confirmed in person to the tracker: “we decided for the supplement because it’s important, and because readers are increasingly interested in scientific topics”.

Me da pereza repetir lo escrito en inglés. Y asumo que –errores y desorden míos aparte- cualquier periodista que pretenda escribir de ciencia debe leer sin problemas dicho texto. Por eso me centro en mensajes concretos: Con un 0.15% del PIB dedicado a ciencia, Tecnología e innovación, todos los sectores de la sociedad peruana defienden que se deba aumentar el gasto en ciencia. Menos los precandidatos presidenciales. Por lo menos, en los debates públicos. Esto es lo que SciDev transmitió por medio de Zoraida Portillo en “Perú: poca mención a CyT entre candidatos presidenciales”. Una muy buena nota que debería haber tenido algún símil en las páginas de ciencia de los principales diarios peruanos. No fue así. Y esta es una primera crítica.

Hace varias semanas El Comercio publicó en Vida y Futuro un buen texto de Bruno Ortiz sobre el recién creado Foro de CTI, acerca de cómo hacer que los candidatos se interesen por la CyT. Pero no hemos visto seguimiento. Y es importante. Sabemos que los candidatos se centrarán en temas más relevantes como pobreza y corrupción. Pero aunque no lo saquen en el debate, debemos urgar en sus iniciativas sobre ciencia. Hay la oportunidad de hacer una historia en profundidad sobre qué medidas plantean Humala y Keiko. Más lectores de los que creemos estarían interesados.

Este “más interés de lo que creemos” se pone de manifiesto por un hecho muy positivo y significativo como es el lanzamiento de un suplemento periódico de ciencia por parte de la mítica revista “Caretas”. Excelente noticia. En este primer número podemos justo leer un análisis crítico en clave política de F. Sagasti y J. Kuramoto sobre la necesidad de invertir en ciencia e innovación. Le acompañan un texto acerca de un querido y vocacional ingeniero peruano, divulgación sobre 5 grandes inventos de la humanidad, un análisis de la evolución de la computación, la peculiar llave diseñada por un joven inventor local, y las dos piezas de política científica que comentábamos: El gran Vacío, y Circuito Cerrado. Felicidades a Caretas por la iniciativa, ánimo en continuar con tan importante suplemento, y ojalá se convierta en un referente para incrementar la cobertura de ciencia en el Perú. Historias no faltan.

Esto último es una de las principales conclusiones extraídas de mi visita a Perú acompañando al BID. Desde los diagnósticos rápidos de tuberculosis en la Cayetano Heredia, la preservación de patatas y biofortificación de camotes en el Centro Internacional de la Papa, los criaderos de paiche en el Instituto de la Amazonia Peruana, y muchísimos otros, el país está llenísimo de historias apasionantes relacionadas directamente con el bienestar y desarrollo socioeconómico de su gente. No cubrirlas es como ignorar el campeonato de futbol peruano y hablar sólo de lo que haga el Barça con el Madrid. O de la NBA a pesar de que en Perú se juegue menos al baloncesto.

Es difícil. Y existen limitaciones. Pero no lo contemplemos como un reto, sino como una oportunidad. La demanda empieza a existir. Y la oferta a florecer. La selección natural irá estableciendo quienes colonizan el nicho. Pero como ya sabemos de tantos otros procesos naturales, artificiales y comerciales, quien primero llega parte con gran ventaja.

- Pere Estupinyà