Sometimes, to recycle an old truism, one discovers the most rewarding things while on the way to find out or do something else. Yesterday I offered a small post profiling a solid press release on algae as potential sources of biofuels. Pacific Northwest Nat’l Lab sent it around, it had an optimistic tone, and found a quick home at the web sites of several small news sites even if – so far at least – major media did little with it.

I’d debated doing it at all, as it was a post not about a media splash or about particularly fine or crummy resultant reporting, but about the splash press releases can make without a big pickup from the big guys in journalism.

Glad I did. You can see it in comments on yesterday post, but it’s worth highlighting here. It is at Greenwire, one of the many focussed (and pricey) subscription newsletters from Energy & Environment Daily aimed mainly at DC policy makers, biz analysts, and industry. There, Paul Voosen two weeks ago published a thorough explanation and exploration of the differences between a newish strategy and the long-heralded, never-realized takeoff of algae that can convert sunlight and CO2 into liquid fuels – alcohols or things similar to diesel and gasoline. He made a comment on yesterday’s post, modestly calling attention to his effort. Glad he did. It is a long profile of an embryonic new industry using another photosynthetic breed of single-celled green glop creatures: cyanobacteria, or what are also if misleadingly called blue-green algae even though they are not even in the same phylogenetic kingdom as are algae. The piece highlights a startup company called Joule Unlimited, Inc. in Cambridge, MA.

Anybody who wants to keep up on green energy possibilities and isn’t already in the business devouring technical literature ought to read this. It is out in the open because the New York Times picked it up and put it on its website. It is solidly reported and compellingly written. Better, it is fully hedged with caveats to temper but not dismiss the wild-sounding optimism of this new branch of energy pharming. Voosen reports it is the first of an occasional series on biotech energy research and entrepreneurship.

Other recent stories on Joule Unlimited:

• AP - Jay Lindsay (Feb 27): Mass. company making diesel with sun, water, CO2 ;
• Fast Company – Ariel Schwartz: (Sept 14, 2010) Revealed: Bacteria That Turns (sic) Sunlight Into Fuel ; (Feb. 22, 2011)  Is Joule’s Renewable “Liquid Energy: Far More Efficiently Produced Than Biofuel? ; Actually it IS biofuel, but hed aside, story’s brief but okay. Interesting is that this story gives the conversion efficiency of the energy in the sunlight hitting the reactors to what is available in the fuel output: 7 percent. That’s about half what a really good photovoltaic solar panel does at converting it to electricity. But this stuff you don’t have to use right away, and you can pour in your gas tank.
• NYTimes – Matthew L. Wald (Sep 13, 2010): Biotech Company to Patent Fuel-Secreting Bacterium ;

Grist for the Mill: Joule Unlimited News + Media page ;

- Charlie Petit

This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features an unusual story by Gary Taubes, whom some of you might remember as the author of the controversial story in the Times in 2002 touting the virtues of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet.

That story appeared under the headling, “What if It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie?” The headline on the web version of this Sunday’s story is equally direct: “Is Sugar Toxic?” (The magazine’s cover language is “Sweet and Vicious: The case against sugar.”)

The answer to both questions, as Taubes himself says repeatedly, is that we don’t know. In neither case is the evidence conclusive enough to make the case one way or the other. But that doesn’t stop Taubes from taking strong positions and arguing his case forcefully, even if, ultimately, he can’t prove it.

Such controversies make for good stories, and reporters who do them well try to weigh the evidence, to convey the differing points of view, and to try, when possible, to come to some conclusion. It’s not always easy, when the evidence is uncertain, but sometimes it’s enough to say which way the evidence is leaning, or when and whether the controversy might be resolved, or what additional pieces of the puzzle might emerge from current or future studies.

That’s not the approach Taubes takes. His piece is more an essay than a reported story. While it’s evident that he did a lot of reporting before writing this story, he uses few quotes and doesn’t try to present an even-handed appraisal of the current state of affairs. Instead, he marshalls evidence to support a case. This is an essay intended to persuade.

In both stories, Taubes adopted the contrarian view. Low fat diets are a big fat lie, and low carbohydrate diets are better, he argued in the first story. And sugar is toxic, he argues in this Sunday’s story.

The 2002 story prompted considerable debate. This is how I was quoted in an article in the American Journalism Review a few months later:

Paul Raeburn, a senior writer at BusinessWeek and president of the National Association of Science Writers, credits Taubes with exploring an emerging viewpoint in the nutrition field–a valuable endeavor for a science writer. But Raeburn objects to Taubes’ presentation. Although Taubes acknowledges at the outset that he’s writing about the views of a small but growing minority, Raeburn says Taubes should have emphasized throughout the article that he was advancing an unproved viewpoint and that many studies support the other side.

“I do think that Gary Taubes’ piece was misleading,” says Raeburn, who covers science, medicine and the environment. He notes that the cover art and the story’s opening anecdote suggest that people can eat as much fat as they want. “Not many people believe you can eat all the fat you want, and people quoted in the article didn’t make that case,” Raeburn says. “If you just look at the article, you might think that.”

I feel the same way about the article that will appear Sunday. Taubes will likely persuade many readers to abandon sugar, or to try to. (We can guess that the resolve of some of them will weaken by the middle of the week, when somebody brings donuts into the office.) And that might not do a lot of harm; if it makes them slimmer, all the better.

But encouraging readers to make radical shifts in their diets might be unwise. Taubes can’t make the case that sugar is toxic, though he says he believes it. And I can’t make the case that his article will be damaging to the public’s health, although I worry about that. Taubes’s editors should have worried about that, too.

Most of the piece makes an argument that excessive consumption of sugar or high-fructose corn syrup can lead to obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. (He talks about sugar for quite a while before telling us that it’s fructose he’s worried about, not glucose; table sugar is made of both.) That link is plausible, even if one doesn’t agree that, in the view of one researcher Taubes paraphrases, “sugar should be thought of, like cigarettes and alcohol, as something that’s killing us.”

But toward the end of the piece, Taubes raises an even more controversial question: Does sugar cause cancer?

If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they [some researchers] say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite the fact that this suggestion has rarely if ever been voiced before publicly.

I’ve met Taubes, and I like him. He’s smart, and he’s a good writer. But he’s not the person I would turn to for advice on whether sugar causes cancer.

There might be a reason why this question of sugar and cancer hasn’t often been voiced publicly. Maybe it’s because the sugar industry has muzzled the nation’s researchers. Or maybe it’s because people who know don’t think they can make the case–and that they shouldn’t yet try.

Ordinarily, I trust the reporting in the Times. In this case, I don’t know what to think, or what to believe. I can’t be sure that Taubes gave me the straight story, because he has such strong personal views–and because he’s trying to persuade me, not enlighten me. That, in my view, is a missed opportunity. This is important stuff; I would have liked more help.

- Paul Raeburn

(Late addition – sheesh. I composed this yesterday and somehow forgot to push the little <publish> command. It was already late, now even later)

Last week we got a burst of news, and burst is the term to use, over a strangely prolonged and tumultuous stream of X-rays and gamma rays detected to have suddenly spewed from something or other in a galaxy some 3.8 billion light years away.

It lasted more than a week, flaring, sputtering and hiccupping erratically and for all I know is still going on. That rules out any variant of a gamma ray burst – which has a peak that  lasts typically only a second or two tops and then goes into a steady fade.  Theorists see two ways to make them, and hence two kinds of gamma ray bursts – jets of tortured radiation and matter spewed from near the core of a large, exhausted star collapsing into a black hole and bouncing most of itself into a supernova explosion, or jets of tortured radiation and matter spewing from the merger of two neutron stars that also form a black hole remnant.

The new and puzzling news is such a jet, but one that went on and on and  that NASA’s Swift satellite detected March 28 in the constellation Draco. It got a catalog number(GRB) 110328A. GRB is just a catalog heading and stands for gamma ray burst even though this is not, nearly all agree, a GRB. Other space telescopes joined the inspection, including the Hubble and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. That’s an all-star lineup.

The news was released April 7. Much speculation ensued in print. Most followed NASA’s press release declaration that the leading explanation is the tidal shredding and consumption of a star by a supermassive black hole at the center of a galaxy.

Stories:

• Wired-UK – Mark Brown: Nasa’s telescopes team up over puzzling cosmic explosion ;
• New Scientist – Caitlin Stier: Black hole unleashes enduring cosmic blast ; Nice, except it uses imagery one often encounters but seems amiss to these eyes. A star, it says, “wandered too close” to a black hole, as though it were a little antelope strolling along nibbling daisies and suddenly POUNCE, a leopard grabbed it by the throat. Stars don’t wander when they get anywhere near black holes, they follow sharply prescribed orbits and only when they get swept up in an accretion disk and lose energy do they spiral inward to destruction. It’s a drawn out thing. That’s unless they are unlucky enough to get somehow aimed straight at the black hole. Then it’s a straight line until doom is upon them and frame dragging or other weird physics whip them to bits.
• Science News – Ron Cowen : Baffling Blowup in distant Galaxy ; This has the standard black hole and star eating scenario, plus Cowen stirs himself to call a famed UC Santa Cruz supernova authority and is rewarded with an alternative to the hypothesis that NASA spoon fed to media in its press release.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Space Telescopes Observe Unprecedented Explosion;
• ScienceNOW – Yudhijit Bhattacharjee:  Star-Eating Black Hole May Be Producing Universe Biggest Blast ; Emphasizes that while ordinary GRBs are huge blasts, this is like a firecracker string of them – an immense total energy output.
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Unprecedented Cosmic Explosion Spawns an Intergalactic Mystery ; Another rewrite of handouts, iwth a mystery in the headline of PopSci’s making. Yes, this is fussy. But how can one event in one galaxy be an intergalactic mystery? It seems not to be among or between galaxies. It’s inside just one, an intragalactic mystery at most unless and until it is shown to have some collective, galactic significance.
• Bad Astronomy blog via Discover Magazine – Phil Plait: two posts, Astronomers May Have Witnessed a Star Torn Apart by a Black Hole ; which explains that this event looks like the opposite of a GRB in which a star makes a black hole. Here, a black hole unmakes a star. Second post , Followup on the star torn apart by a black hole: Hubble Picture ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ; arXiv paper ;

- Charlie Petit

There is a sameness, a non-newsiness, to projections of how much clean fuel we can get and minimize petroleum imports if we would just follow these or those directions. You’ve read them, they all sound like candidate wedges of renewable transport fuel that add up to a low-carbon economy. Cellulosic ethanol, solar conversion of CO2 into fuel (or geothermal or wind or other electric power doing the same); bioengineered legumes that make petrol in their leaves, and of course electric cars that don’t use liquid fuel at all.

Such news easily elicits yawns and thus, and particularly in these sour and defeatist times,  are unlikely to get much mainstream pickup. It’s not just that contrarian thinking on climate change has dulled our senses. Many editors and readers also are weary from seeing such things before and not seeing enough action, or seeing such misfires as corn ethanol. But maybe here’s one that will gain traction.

To ditch the usual format of putting releases at the bottom of posts in Grist for the Mill, here’s the starting point:

• Pacific Northwest Nat’l Lab Press Release – Franny White: Study: Algae could replace 17 percent of US oil imports ; Wouldn’t be simple, what with enough acreage to equal all of South Carolina. But lab researchers say if it were done in open ponds of fresh water, but in areas with high humidity to minimize evaporation, the water consumption would be manageable. And things might be a lot better using sea water or covered ponds – that’s for the next study.

So far a few small outlets, one from within the DOE itself, and aggregators are all that have bitten on this interesting, if generic, news. For major outlets there is are challenges – how to get a fresh angle, or to dig up some whisper of technology breakthrough that sets this report apart, or in attack mode to find an interesting and valid argument that the study is useless.

Stories:

• CNET – Candace Lombardi: Algae oil could dent US oil imports, report says ;
• DOE Energy.gov – Niketa Kumar: Study: Algae Could Replace 17% of US Oil Imports ; Same hed as the PNNL release, and written by a p.r. writer for the feds.
• Treehugger – Matthew McDermott: Algae Biofuels Could Replace 17% of US Imported Oil; One senses a certain skepticism here at this advocacy site. First words: ‘Seemingly perpetually just over the commercial-viability horizon,..’.
• Energy Efficiency News: POLICY – Algae could replace 17% of US oil imports, says study ;
• Physorg.com: Algae could replace 17 percent of US oil imoprts: study ; Aggregated straight off PNNL info.
• Domestic Fuel – Joanna Schroeder: Study: Algae Could Replace 17% of Oil Imports by 2022 ;
• UPI: Algae as biofuel source contemplated ;
• 
  

One could say, from this list of small and specialty outlets, that the release sank like a stone. Few if any reporters give it truly wide, general audience or added info from other sources. But keep in mind that press releases these days are written for immediate, direct consumption by the public, not merely as tips to old-media gatekeepers. From that point of view, its producer agency probably views it a reasonable success. It is out there.

- Charlie Petit

Monte Davis, Philadelphia science writer, an editor of the old Omni magazine and a book writer, wrote in 1979 a meditation on waves, particles, and James Clerk Maxwell to mark the 100th year of the great man’s death. It found no home in that pre-internet time. He’s put it up at least once on the web, in 2006, and now again. This is the first I’ve seen it. Bravo.

A practical minded commenter calls it, upon this emergence, arty farty and asserts it is peppered with scientific mistakes too. Well, perhaps on the latter, maybe even the former, and of course the world needs sensible shoes. But I like this thing. It’s like a meander of notes artfully knitted together.

- Charlie Petit

Simon Singh, the British science writer who got in hot water over his low opinion of chiropractic, the practitioners of which sued him, and who came out clean following a thorough scrubbing of the issues in UK court, recently visited Australia. There Fiona MacDonald, ass’t ed. at Cosmos Magazine, grilled him over lunch to learn what he’s learned and what he plans next.

Singh went through emotional hell but seems to be fine now.

- Charlie Petit

Light haul today due to a “corrupted data base” that shut down most of this site’s functions. That included ability to compose new posts directly, forcing use of a word processor and then cut-and-paste until MIT’s mighty IT team cured the server. Contacting us via the site’s built in messaging system, I suspect, also was down. All better now.

- Charlie Petit

This won’t bring the eruption of a supervolcano in North American any closer, but maybe it means it will be bigger than has been thought when it does occur. By taking account of the distinctive electrical conductivity of the briny fluids  around magma  a University of Utah team has revised maps of the chamber beneath the Yellowstone Caldera. It found the magma’s signature across a broader area than what was implied by earthquake waves traversing the region.

A few reporters figured this is interesting:

• BBC – Paul Rincon – Yellowstone supervolcano fed by bigger plume ; Discusses why the two imaging methods would produce different results, but perhaps not change overall hazard assessment.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log - John Roach: Supervolcano plume sized up ; He quotes the press release – and says so, a practice that more reporters should follow.
• Tucson Citizen – Jonathan DuHamel: Yellowstone Super Volcano Update ;
• Salt Lake Tribune – Brian Maffly: U. research: New image of Yellowstone plume shows bigger size ;
• LiveScience – Yellowstone Supervolcano Bigger Than Thought ;

- Charlie Petit

When one burns natural gas, which has four nicely combustible hydrogens for every nasty CO2-making carbon, that’s better for the atmosphere and the climate than getting the same heat from burning  carbon alone, which pretty much is what coal is (Correx note: initial, brain-cramp edition of this post had three hydrogens per carbon).

Now along comes a Cornell study that got heavy media attention this week. The conclusion is a slap in the face for some. What was green for go just turned red for stop. It says that natural gas, especially the sort extracted by hydrofracturing from shale, is just about as potent as a climate changer when one factors in the methane – its primary component – that leaks unburned into the air during extraction and processing prior to burning. And methane is considerably more potent as a solar forcing agent than is CO2.

If true, this discovery could be salutary in the long run. My 2 cents worth: There has been self-delusion in the pursuit of natural gas. While it ought to be cleaner than coal, cleaner is not the same as clean. Considering that fossil carbon emissions need to be cut by 80 to 90 percent or so in coming decades just to keep CO2 concentrations at their present, elevated level, then the priority is non-fossil energy, period. That is, unless somebody learns how to sequester carbon dioxide cheaply and in staggering bulk.

Image Source: Nat’l Geographic

Stories:

• NYTimes (Bus. Section) Tom Zeller Jr.: Studies Say Natural Gas Has Its Own Environmental Problems ;  Zeller had this in Tuesday’s paper, and ties the Cornell report, in the journal Climatic Change, to other analyses with similar gloomy news – including that whether natural gas is green or not the recent spike in supply cannot last. Following the furious reaction from industry, Zeller blogs on the story and its repercussion, Methane Losses Stir Debate on Natural Gas.
• Pittsburgh Post-Gazette – David Templeton: Study says gas may be worse than coal for greenhouse effect ; But gas producers say they are not leaking nearly as much as the study asserts that they are.
• Guardian (UK) Chris Sherlock: Shale gas is not a credible ‘new green message,’ ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Shale gas ‘worse than coal’ for climate
• Reuters – Daniel Trotta: Shale gas pollutes more than coal, study finds
• Houston Chronicle – Brett Clanton: Study questions clean claims about natural gas / Scientists from Cornell focus on methane ;
• Wall St. Journal – Tennille Tracy: Study: Some Natural Gas Threatens Climate More Than Coal ;
• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh: Frack: Is Shale Natural Gas Worse for the Climate Than Coal? ‘
• West Virginia Public Broadcasting – Erica Peterson: Study finds natural gas fracking could harm atmosphere ;

Of special interest is a post at a blog called Class: M, from science freelancer James Hrynyshyn, who dredges up an old supposition from Bill McKibben’s book End of Nature that came to the exact same, if hedged, conclusion. Mr. Hrynyshyn runs some numbers on his own and concludes things could be even worse than the Climatic Change letter suggests.

*UPDATE: The lead author of the paper, Robert Howarth at Cornell, has circulated his general conclusions previously. Thank you Dan Berman at Politico.com for pointing this out to us. Among stories that have reported them already:

• ProPublica – Abrahm Lustgarten (Jan 25) : Climate Benefits of Natural Gas May be Overstated; A piece that had impact, but the essence was percolating for months prior to this.
• CBS News 60 minutes – Lesley Stahl (Nov 14, 2010):  Shale Gas Drilling: Pros and Cons:
• Energy & Environment Daily Greenwire – Mike Soraghan via NYTimes (Sept 30, ’10) Natural Gas Drillers Protest Nominations of Fracking Critics for EPA Review Panel ;
• gas 2.0 blog – Nick Chambers (Apr 19, ’10): Coal, Oil, Natural Gas Industries Butt Heads; Natural Gas May Not be as Clean as Thought;
• Reuters – Jon Hurdle (Mar 31, ’10) : Fracking not a cleaner alternative – Cornell prof ;

Previous, Pertinent News:

• NY Times (Oct. 14, 2009) – Andrew C. Revkin, Clifford Krauss: Curbing Emissions by Sealing Gas Leaks ;

Grist for the Mill: Cornell U Press Release ; Climatic Change article ;

- Charlie Petit

Maybe this is the next motto, or ploy, by Japanese whalers determined to keep bringing giant cuts of meat from the Southern Ocean. “Eat Whales! Save the Penguins!” In PNAS this week are results of a study of population declines among penguins, chiefly the chinstraps and adelies that nest along and near the quickly-warming Antarctic Peninsula. And while heavy snowfall and egg-killing melt on rookeries, plus shrinking of seasonal pack ice, are factors in their struggle,  the study identifies faltering shoals of krill as its prime suspects. Mortality of fully mature penguins, it appears, is not terribly high, but the failure of young but fledged penguins to get through their first seasons at sea on the own points suggests they are just not getting enough to eat. And factors in krill loss including commercial harvesting and nature’s biggest krill-eating machines, baleen whales such as blues, fins, and sei whose numbers may be rising. The irony is that while the study says krill harvesters are doing adelies and chinstraps no good today, the birds’ surge in numbers early in the last century was probably also mankind’s doing – via slaughter of whales.

‘Must be a press release out there. (*UPDATE 1- Joanna Knight at the Lenfest Ocean Program, a sponsor of the study, sent the press release link, now down below in Grist. Thank you Jo.)  The research was by scientists at with the National Marine Fisheries Service stationed in La Jolla, CA, and at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography there as well.

Stories:

• BBC – Mark Kinver: Penguins suffer as Antarctic krill declines ; Surely krill in this hed is plural. Ergo they decline. If one wrote “as fish declines” you’d think we’re talking about one guppy. Nothing wrong with story, at a quick read.
• Nat’l Geographic – Brian Handwerk: Penguins Numbers Plummeting – Whales Partly to Blame ; That’s a brave angle in the hed, but legit. The study seems to put more emphasis on rising whale numbers than on krill fisheries, even it documents the rapid increase in harvests. But to write anything about great whales that suggest there is a downside to having more of them takes some nerve. (UPDATE 2: The lead author of the research says there is no evidence whales are a major factor).
• Reuters- Deborah Zabarenko: Fewer penguins survive warming Antarctic climate ; This one focusses on the decrease in ice as a major factor in declines in krill, which do depend in part on ice floes and the algae that grow on their bottoms. But a reading of the PNAS paper finds as much reference to whales and krill harvesting as to the dependence of krill on under-ice nurseries.
• NY Times – Nicholas Bakalar: Observatory: Taking a Second Look at Penguins’ Decline ;
• CBS News – Wynne Parry – Antarctic warming may be starving penguins ;
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan : Young penguins dying due to lack of food ; Nice clean hed, to the point. The story however declares that “melting sea ice cuts back on the tiny fish they eat.” Later it says krill, and calls them crustaceans. Maybe an editor decided they are fish?

There are plenty more but time to wrap up for the day. One factor in the paper, however, that is fascinating but got little or no attention in the stories I had time to read, is that fossil evidence from the debris under long-lived rookeries indicates that a long time ago, presumably when whales were vacuuming up krill like crazy, adelie penguin diets comprised mostly small fish. It suggests that, push comes to shove, they could go back to fish. On the other hand, adelies are particularly habituated to feeding under and around sea ice, which is fading.

Grist for the Mill: Lenfest Press Release ; Report Summary ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s so new that you can still be a charter follower–that is, you can read the first post while it’s still the only one up (aside from a brief welcome note).

Newman

We can’t yet say too much about Patient POV, the new blog from New York medical writer Laura Newman, but we can say that it’s off to a promising start. The first post described how Paul, a Manhattan lawyer, responded to a PSA of 4.3 during a routine annual physical. One of Paul’s insights, by way of Laura:

“Most everyone spoke of what is called ‘definitive’ treatment, having some surgical, radiation, or ablative treatment to eradicate the cancer. What was especially striking  was ‘that no one was objective, everyone was convinced that the procedure that they were selling was the best, resulted in the fewest side effects, and resulted in far fewer than their competitors,’ [Paul] told me. Put another way, Paul said: ‘Nobody was procedure-neutral.’”

An interesting idea–look for a doctor who’s procedure neutral.

And look for more from Patient POV.

- Paul Raeburn

We get the science journalism equivalent to comfort food to lead Science Times today – a long yarn about long-necked dinosaurs. Officially but not really retired, John Noble Wilford previews both an exhibition in New York and a new book compiled in Europe on sauropods - think brontosaurus but say apatosaurus. This is relaxed and sure writing by an old pro. The topic makes it easier than most lay discussions of paleontology because nearly everybody already has a reasonably accurate mental image of what a long-necked dinosaur was. The strong themes are lung structure, plus diet and weight management. How did these monsters eat enough to sustain such big bodies? How did they get their necks so long without their being so heavy the dino couldn’t stick its neck out if it wanted to? The answers and hypotheses are convincing. Plus, the evidence for warm-bloodedness is interesting. One wonders, and wishes Wilford had raised the question. If these creatures’ innards were gigantic microbial digester systems, wouldn’t that generate a lot of heat? Think compost pile. I’ve heard horses don’t freeze to death in a January Dakota blizzard because their internal fermenters keep them cozy. Ditto for cows. Could be that the job is easier if one has a warming drawer with a ton or so of decaying cycads in it.

Other headlines to note:

• Leslie Kaufman - Gulf’s Complexity and Resilience Seen in Studies of Oil Spill ; A lot of reporters have told us it’s a mixed bag – not as horrid as many feared, but not all gone either. Kaufman provides a bigger sack of examples than most. Good touch – she points out that the Lawrence Berkeley Lab man who found evidence of microbes so voracious they have virtually cleansed the water column of BP’s oopsy works under grant from BP itself (although it says here, and I’m convinced, he was on nobody’s leash). There are still mucked up marshes and at least a few devastated reefs and such on the seafloor. Thousands of birds and maybe porpoises died. Maybe it’s like a drought – rough on wildlife but it’ll bounce back. Final verdict not in. So it goes.
• Roni Caryn Rabin: Rabbis Sound an Alarm Over Eating Disorders ; Interesting medicine, more interesting look into ultra-orthodox life that isn’t focussed on the orthodoxy itself. It does mention, or assert, that women have life a little rougher in that society – many of them are sole breadwinners whose able-bodied husbands spend all day and half the night studying their religion.
• Denise Grady: Is This the Poster Food for a Radiation Menace? ; On bananas, and how to so insult an audience that your underlying sensible message is lost.
• Nicholas Wade: As Mammals Supplanted Dinosaurs, Lice Kept Pace ; Many of us have read a lot, maybe even written about, the louse as an evolutionary surrogate for the phylogeny of its host. Wade finds researchers who extend the louse clock back a few hundred million years.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit