Want to watch a tornado video that does not sow terror – or very little of it? Just to start this post off with a grace note, check the video from Australia that the AP is circulating, showing a cluster of waterspouts on a remarkably nearly-sunny day not far off shore.

Back to the terrors of tornado alley in the U.S.

Reporters continue to run stories seeking to put into context and into scientific terms – that is, to answer the why now? angle – the weeks-long pummeling that the US midsection has gotten. One reason to do another round up is to underscore a point made in an earlier post. That is, contrary to at least one notable blog prediction, main stream media has not overshot the boundaries of scientific consensus and proclaimed this another example of global warming’s growing footprint. To be sure, an inevitable back-door way of amplifying an idea is by, objectively, knocking it down in public.  That is, stories not uncommonly raise the subject, thereby legitimizing it, while reporting that one cannot tie GW to tornadoes (with an implied-to-some  ‘not yet, anyway’ at the end). But I don’t think that’s the motive in this case for mentioning GW and tornadoes in one sentence.

Stories:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid – Science can’t design away tornadoes’ deadly threat ; Good round-up, but a better story might have backed up the hed. The “design” reference stems from a source’s quote. In the headline it implies a story is coming about building codes or construction practices that might, or might not, make more homes and other structures highly tornado-resistant. That’d be interesting. But the primary topic is more standard: the difficulty predicting these storms and, even when warnings are provided, human nature and a tendency to not jump in the cellar or concrete-reinforced bathroom right away. That, and bad luck when a city is on the twister’s route.
• ABC World News: Tornado-Proof House? Safe Room Is Better for Purse and Family ; I went looking for something like this after realizing Randy Schmid’s AP story is not about sturdier houses. It says here that to stand up to 200 mph winds is one thing, but to  stand up to the stuff blowing along in those winds – like great big oak trees and cars and cows – is to missile-proof a house. Translation: it’s cheaper to have a basement with protected places to crouch, or a concrete vault.
• NYTimes – Guy Gugliotta: Despite Advances, Tornado Forecasts Show Limits;  He mentions climate change only long enough to append “not”.
• *UPDATE – PBS Newshour – This is a placeholder until I can run down a clip. But  last night’s Newshour had a terrific two-headed interview with a Weather Underground man and a woman at Texas Tech University. They agreed – can’t hang this on global warming with any available solid data. Ah ha, thank  you Curtis Brainard, here it is – Judy Woodruff: Meteorlogist on Severe Weather: ‘We Have Never Seen a Year Like This Before.”
• Washington Post: Weather patterns, urban sprawl, human nature add up to extraordinary tornado death toll ;

- Charlie Petit

Three days short of thirty years after writing an early, perhaps the first, newspaper story on what would become to be known as AIDS, the nominally retired – as are several of the NYTimes’s old-guard of science writers – Lawrence K. Altman reviews today with somber aplomb and a tinge of chagrin what has happened since. His chagrin is displaced a bit – he notes that an early New England Journal of Medicine editorial that reviewed the puzzling disease never even considered that a novel virus or other microbe was responsible. One must note that his July 3, 1981 article similarly did not carry any evidence that Dr. Altman even asked sources about that possibility (to be sure, the story focussed only on one common sign of a new disease – the rare cancer-like lesions of Karposi’s sarcoma). Not that he was alone. Dave Perlman and I at the SF Chronicle, writing at about the same time and slightly behind Altman, didn’t get ahead of the medical field at all, either. A feature I wrote in October that year, which recognized the broad range of manifestations of what was to be known as AIDS, has to my retrospective dismay no hint that a novel infection might be at work.

The story by necessity omits many things, one being the epic Montagnier-Gallo rivalry. But it strikes the right balance. Two key passages:

For the patients who died in the early years, the wait for effective treatments — a decade or so after the first reports of the disease — was far too long. But that is a relatively short time in the history of medicine to develop treatments and preventions; after all, many incurable cancers and other diseases have been known for centuries.

And the concluding graf:

One of the most daunting challenges is to stay vigilant until AIDS is at last conquered. Consider that it has been almost a quarter century since federal health officials confidently predicted that a vaccine would be available in the late 1980s — a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.

Other notable headlines:

• Abigail Zuger – BOOKS – Broad Brushstrokes Obscure a View of Brain Trauma ; A good book, it says here, is out on a peculiar episode of post-stroke transformation of one patient. It has to do with art, and with drastic personality deficit. Read it for Zuger’s explosive frustration, which she vents at the very end (better by not looking ahead but I’ll give away the reason for her anger). The book has no pictures, inexplicable even given the cost of adding some color plates to the imprint. We’ve all seen examples. Such printed books give more reason to surrender to electronic slates where it may not be so costly to include vital illus. Another example that had me seething – the Wash. Post’s Joel Achenbach wrote a gripping, inside-the-pressure-cooker book, A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea, on the BP oil spill. It does not bother with much hand wringing over turtles or shrimpers, but is heavy on who did what to spill the oil and then to stop it, full of grit, grease, and detail on heavy hardware. It lays the guilt collectively on all of us. Fine, and yet not a single damned diagram of a drill string, a BOP, a riser. Nothin’. I recommend it … but no pictures?!!
• Felicity Barringer – Groundwater Depletion Is Detected From Space ; Some welcome detail, and back story, on the GRACE satellites that, dancing around Earth, do geodesy and in the bargain hint where the water is coming and going, including in aquifers. Not fundamentally new. Writers have written it before, but seldom with such perspective. I did look up some of the earliest coverage – such as this 2002 APstory by Andrew Bridges with some of the same angles, and some additional ones (such as the Aqua satellite of a special kind of A-train fame). The latter piece is diverting for another reason. This instance ran in the Southeast Missourian, a smallish regional pub that back than had, it appears from this scanned copy of Bridges’s yarn, a regular science page. One wonders if it, by any small chance, still does.
• Tara Parker-Pope: Tuning In to Patients’ Cries for Help; Boy will this ring a bell for a lot of former and current hospital patients. And the solution to a near-universal complaint is so simple – hire an  operator. Don’t expect every nurse to drop what she or he is doing, every time, right away, at each interruption for the umpteenth time by a little red light or ding-dong.
• Jane E. Brody: A Good Night’s Sleep Isn’t a Luxury; It’s a Necessity ; What could be a toss-off topic, handled well. Also source of the delicately composed graphic artistry top right.

Lot’s More: Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Amazings.es is a community of more than 80 Spanish scientists and bloggers. One might expect something like scienceblogs.com, but it is not an aggregation of independent blogs. It is a single one that each day publishes between one and three original posts from contributors. A few are journalists. Some are educators. Most are professional scientists on topics related to their specialities.

Three of the best-known scientific bloggers in Spain founded it in July 2010. It is already the most popular science blog in Spanish. Amazings.es has become a standard reference source for the general public in addition to journalists checking its critical analysis of current topics. Examples are in its information during Fukushima crisis and immediately after the arsenic-life announcement.

Two of its founders participated last Friday in a workshop in Bilbao together with: the producer of a TV program about skepticism, the editor of Publico’s science section (the newspaper with the largest daily section about science), a successful science disseminator, and this Knight Tracker. Amazings’ founders announced that they are going to print a magazine on science, and to organize a yearly event similar to TEDtalks. Amazings.es is a bottom-up initiative that could inspire initiatives in  Latin America. It’s totally worth a look. We will include it our regular routine in tracking  science stories for the Spanish Language Knight Tracker.

Aquí nos quejamos a menudo que en los seminarios o encuentros destinados a intercambiar ideas sobre comunicación científica solemos repetir los temas de siempre. Que hablamos mucho de redes sociales y nuevos modelos pero continuamos enfrascados en el formato clásico de tipejos hablando, otros escuchando, y una interacción reducida a un turno de preguntas que siempre se queda corto.

Todo lo contrario ocurrió el pasado viernes en Bilbao en la jornada “nuevos modelos de comunicación científica” organizada por la Cátedra de Cultura Científica de la UPV/EHU. Primera prueba de ello, la crónica del encuentro: un resumen de los tweets que los asistentes y participantes intercambiaron.

Y es que el cambio de paradigma es radical: La participación en un seminario ya no se limita a los asistentes presenciales (unos 160 en la sala), sino a los varios centenares que lo siguieron por streaming, y a los que comentaron y preguntaron vía twitter siguiendo el hashtag #sccbilbao2011. En varias ocasiones las preguntas y reflexiones más interesantes llegaron vía twitter. En estos momentos, nadie puede organizar ya un evento dedicado a la comunicación sin tener en cuenta estas herramientas. Es inconcebible.

2º prueba del nuevo estilo de jornada: poca presencia institucional, y protagonismo absoluto de los mensajes de unos conferenciantes elegidos no por nombre sino por el éxito de su trabajo. Gran equilibrio también en el programa: un científico divulgador como Xurxo Mariño (@xurxomar) que organiza obras de teatro científicas y lleva a los investigadores a bares para que se rodeen con gente ávida de preguntarles de manera informal; Patricia Fernández de Lis (@pflis) como la responsable de la sección de ciencia del periódico (Público) que más apuesta por la ciencia de todos los de habla hispana; un blogger/articulista/productor y líder de opinión seguidísimo en Twitter conocido por @mimesacojea (Jose Antonio Pérez) que dentro de unos meses nos sorprenderá con un interesantísimo programa de televisión llamado “Escépticos”; el divulgador científico @Perestupinya autor de este Knight Tracker defendiendo que para divulgar “hay que empezar por los corazones, y luego por los cerebros” (El País); y Antonio Martínez (@aberron) y Javier Peláez (@irreductible) como responsables de un verdadero nuevo modelo de comunicación científica: la plataforma Amazings.es. De Amazings queremos detenernos a hablar. Porque puede ser un modelo a tener en cuenta en países de América Latina.

Los responsables de Amazings dicen que es un blog. Pero es más que eso. O por lo menos, llegará a serlo. Nació hace menos de un año con la unión de tres exitosos bloggers: Antonio Martínez de Fogonazos, Miguel Artime de Maikelnai’s, y Javier Peláez de La Aldea Irreductible. Pero con una vocación: aglutinar un equipo de divulgadores y científicos con ganas y conocimiento para publicar contenidos de ciencia que sean originales y excelentes. Ojo a la palabra “originales”: Amazings no es un agregador sino una fuente de nuevo contenido. Esta es una gran diferencia. La otra: en escasos meses de vida cuenta ya con un excelso equipo de más de 80 colaboradores que a menudo llegan a cooperar en la redacción de los posts. Y muy importante: va a continuar creciendo en otros formatos. Antonio y Javier anunciaron que la plataforma Amazings.es va a publicar una revista periódica de divulgación científica, y que en septiembre se celebrará un encuentro al estilo TEDtalks que todos podremos seguir vía online. Viva la emergencia y la construcción de abajo a arriba; es el nuevo mundo en el que nos encontramos. La ilusión y la capacidad cuenta tanto o más que los recursos. Y si no, comparemos con el resultado de tantas otras iniciativas impulsadas de arriba abajo desde instituciones, como el prometedor pero fracasado programa interamericano de periodismo científico que algunos tenemos en mente. Pero hablemos de contenidos, que al final, es lo que verdaderamente importa.

¿Os acordáis del fiasco de la NASA y la revista Science con el paper de la vida basada en Arsénico? Al principio, la mayoría de medios convencionales andaban desconcertados. Los periodistas de ciencia percibían algo extraño, pero tardaban a reaccionar. Como muestra del cambio que estamos experimentando, en el mundo anglosajón los bloggers de referencia fueron los primeros en denunciar y hacer periodismo desmantelando lo anunciado en Science. Los periodistas convencionales recurrían a bloggers para informarse, y empezaron a transmitir el nuevo mensaje. Pasó en los medios de habla inglesa, pero también en Amazings.es con el gran texto crítico de Jose Miguel Mulet “Arsenicleaks: la vida en arsénico hace aguas”, sobre la noticia que ya había sido tratada con reservas por Experientia Docet. En ambos casos, los autores no son periodistas sino científicos. Pero si uno atiende sólo al contenido del texto, verá que la aproximación es periodística. También representativo es el post “carta de un jefe de  una central nuclear española” sobre el desastre de Fuskushima. Su texto y más de 1000 comentarios son información científica de calidad y muy valiosa.

Algo que también caracteriza a Amazings es su cruzada contra las pseudociencias, que podéis revisar en la sección “Alerta Magufo”. Como se comentó en el seminario, cuando alguien expande una barbaridad como las pulseras power balance o las propiedades de beber agua de mar, los medios no suelen sentir la responsabilidad de desmentirlo. Y eso provoca que al lector que busca por Internet no le lleguen opiniones críticas. Amazings (y muchos otros blogs escépticos) cumplen esa función.

En definitiva; que en Amazings podemos encontrar una amplia gama de textos sobre ciencia. Unos más divulgativos y otros más de actualidad Algunos mejor que otros, como en todos los medios. Pero sí es un modelo exitoso que ha conseguido aglutinar un enorme número de divulgadores y científicos bajo un marco riguroso y atractivo para el lector. Ya es muy popular en España (el blog de ciencia más leído), y cada vez será más conocido en América Latina. Incluso puede motivar experiencias similares para unir esfuerzos y movilizar divulgadores inquietos de la región. Seguiremos hablando de ello, y estaremos pendientes de los relatos y críticas de Amazings.es.

- Pere Estupinyà

Two very different space agencies – in the UK and the famous one here in the US – ballyhooed this week decision to proceed toward and maybe to construction of new generations of human-ferrying spaceships.

One of them is the Skylon. Ring any bells? Easily not, but it does for me. As a reporter who has been a sucker for nearly every fanciful and heavily illustrated (by artist’s concepts) idea for rocketships in history, Skylon rings loud. It seems like forever that this British notion has circulated. It’d be an airplane like craft that takes off from a runway, jets and rockets its way to blinding speed in the air, and then leaps even faster all the way to orbit on rocket power alone. As I recall, its roots lie in the WWII-era, German “Sanger” plan for a transatlantic bomber-rocketplane that’d skip along the fringe of the atmosphere from Europe to New York and sow Third Reich fury on the US.  And it’s a little like the Reagan-era Aerospace Plane Orient Express. And the UK’s HOTOL, forerunner to Skylon. And like NASA’s more recent, vertical-launch single stage Clinton-era X-33 flying doorstop. All those and more have foundered on technological and economic shoals.

Now comes news that the Skylon, rooted in dreams pursued for decades by small British teams to little avail till now, has gotten a gold star from the European Space Agency. That doesn’t mean it has much money, or a prototype, only that it passed a technical review that might push it closer to building serious hardware. But the picture is so neat looking, quite a few pubs ran stories. But still…. fat chance.

Sample Stories:

• Universe Today: Adrian West (via DiscoveryNews): Skylon Spaceplane Finally Gets Approval / British and European apce agencies have given the go ahead for ..spaceplane that’s been under development for 30 years.”
• Fast Company – Kit Eaton: The Skylon: Britain’s Bad-Ass Rocketplane And Possible Shuttle Successor ; with video, and some hyperbolic verbiage. He calls it the love child of an SR-71 Blackbird and a Naboo starship.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Skylon: Ending 40 years of hurt ; The hed’s ref is to the last time the UK had a space launcher program. Amos says the big hurdle will be to get investors. Ah, yes. Investors.

Grist for the Mill: Reaction Engines Ltd. Press Release ;

Second up is NASA’s less-surprising news that it will base a next-generation spaceship, suited for ferrying astronauts to a space station, or (with mods) to lunar orbit or off to an asteroid, or the Orion crew capsule that was part of the Bush administration’s post-shuttle launch Constellation moon-return program that, in turn, the Obama White House shelved and which through the Orion an embarassing sop as life raft for the space station. This more glorious new revival will be called the MPCV, for Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle.

Sample Stories:

• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor: NASA to Use Lockheed Vehicle ; Details of the back-and-forth within the Obama administration that led to this decision. Even the company that will make it, Lockheed Martin, was caught largely by surprise.
• Voice of America – Rosanne Skirble: NASA Announces Next Generation Spacecraft ;
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: NASA ‘deepspace’ ship: Human beyond orbit by 2020? ; Long, sensible-reading report on where this might lead, and what it won’t do any time soon.
• Christian Science Monitor – Dan Elliott: New spaceship to take astronauts to asteroids, Mars moons ;
• USA Today – Michael Winter: NASA to modify Orion design for new deep-space capsule ;
• Space.com – Karl Tate: How NASA’s Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Stacks Up (infographic) ;
• ZD Net/CNET News – William Harwood: NASA resurrects Orion-style capsule for deep space travel ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release;

- Charlie Petit

This is the week of the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston, bringing with it a spike in news of near space, far space, and places in between.

Here is a sampling of stories on one heavily covered piece of news, filed by reporters there or following things via the web, teleconference, and other remote means. Below that is another piece of space news that broke at about the same time, but not at AAS.

1) Farthest explosion ever seen. NASA’s Swift gamma ray satellite spotted it more than two years ago. A US-UK team now publishes analysis of the event, id’d as a gamma ray burst unleashed by the collapse and simultaneous supernova explosion of a massive star, concluding it occurred 13.14 billion years ago – about five hundred million years after the universe is believed to have formed and the farthest and earliest such thing so far recorded (by now, so long after it occurred, whatever remnant remains has moved even farther away than 13.14 b light years – maybe ten time farther). This breaks the earlier, oldest-farthest record by about a 100 million years.  It also, as news stories relate, provides a calibration point for models of how fast, and just plain how, the first stars formed. The analysis took awhile because weather on Earth cut short efforts to get a good spectrum of the afterglow.

• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Cosmic explosion may be most distant object in Universe;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Cosmic distance record ‘broken’; If you read just one story to see what this is all about in plain, news-style English, this is a good choice. It has population III stars, the epoch of reionization, and other far-off things for context. (Amos also hints that the universe has an edge – but he calls it the observable edge and that takes the, uh, edge off any grimace at the term).
• Universe Today – Tammy Plotner: Gamma Ray Burst 090429B… Far Out! ;
• AP – Rahael G. Satter: Farthest-ever explosion found at edge of cosmos?
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Astronomers Detect Most Distant Object in Universe ;
• Discover Mag./ Bad Astronomy blog – Phil Plait : Most distant object ever seen … maybe ; Usual spicy stuff from Dr. Astronomer – with such lines as “this takes a wee bit o’explaining … after all, it’s an explosion so big  it’ll crush your mind into dust.” He’s also among the few to make emphatic the iffy, error bar stuff that fuzzes almost any new discovery’s detail. But it looks very, very likely this is as advertised, he explains.
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Huge space Explosion Is Farthest Thing Ever Seen ;
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Huge explosion most distant ever seen;
• AlJazeera – Astronomers claim star is universe’s oldest: The good-natured anchor, a former CNN man (I think) clearly knows nothing at all about astronomy – but that’s okay. The lead author of the paper answers his questions.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Extending the edge of the observable universe ;
• Wired – Duncan Geere: 13.1 billion years ago, on the edge of the Universe, a star exploded ; Rather brief story, not very detailed. Worth tracking just to provide a chance for a tedious correction to the hed, which reporter Geere may well not have written. The universe has no edge. The signal comes from near the limit of what we here can see, but it was and is as central as we are.

Grist for the Mill:

University Warwick Press Release; Penn State U. Press Release via ScienceDaily ; Astrophysical Journal research Paper preprint ;

 

2) Wet Moon: One may say it didn’t do much, but never say the Apollo program did no serious science. The moon rocks and dust and grit the astronauts fetched back to Earth are still yielding important conclusions – such as that the interior of our moon, once thought drier than the Sahara at noon, is as wet in places as the Earth’s upper mantle. This broke in Science,  independently of the AAS meeting where interest tends to focus far beyond the solar system.

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Evidence of Water Beneath Moon’s Stony Face ; Gets the reader inside the lab, examining the soil grain by grain, scrutinizing olivine crystals and finding a glassy, ah ha moment. The result is confusion over the lunar past.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz ; Inner Moon As Wet as Earth;
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: The Moon gets wetter ;
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Moon Has More Water Than Previously Thought in Challenge to View of Origin ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: NASA study of moon soil reveals plentiful water ;
• Independent (UK) Steve Connor: Water in the Sea of Tranquility? Oh yes there is … ; OK, but more interesting is an accompanying muser on mythology, Earth, Moon, Sun, etc: Earth-Shattering ; It’s a pastiche of moon thoughts, but seems to arise from a misapprehension. The idea of the Moon as offspring of Earth, via ancient collision, is decades old. The new findings do not introduce the theory but, more, complicate and partly confound it.
• Toronto Globe and Mail – Oliver Moore: Moon has more water than believed ;
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: Water find may open up moon’s resources ;
• AFC :  Moon may have more water than believed: study;

Grist for the Mill:

Brown U. Press Release ; Carnegie Institution Press Release ; Case Western Reserve U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

It will be one sensational piece of navigation if managers of the OSIRIS-REx mission can pull it off. It’s in the news because yesterday NASA chose it as an official mission on the calendar. Its target is a very dark and pristine asteroid called 1999 RQ36 –   about 1,900 feet wide. Its orbit is not too unlike Earth’s – its “year” is 20 percent longer than ours – and lies in roughly the same plane. In 2016 the  spacecraft is to leave Earth, loop the sun for a while while achieving a matching trajectory that puts it along side the asteroid, initially several miles off. The machine, presumably puffing little steering rockets to be sure it doesn’t bump RQ36 due to the latter’s weak gravity field, will send pictures so mission managers can scout the terrain. It eventually will sidle over, reach out, and pluck a few ounces to as much as several pounds of stuff from the surface, presumably including a lot of organic compounds. It will report on progress via video that will let the public in on the fun. It is then to veer off for an eventual return past Earth. In 2023 down to Utah will come a parachute and the carbonaceous payload. Answers to asteroidal questions will flow.

So cool. In this budget-slashing, spare-the-rich era of fevered thinking in DC, chances the money really will flow seem on the shaky side. But maybe it will. For another budget-contingent corollary, its data could be important to a mission not even approved yet but proferred in the Obama-administration’s image of a future NASA: an astronaut visit to a different asteroid in 20+ years.  Plus, RQ36 is a “Near Earth Object” asteroid with a teeny possibility of hitting Earth in or around 2170. That means a slim possibility that anything NASA learns from its dirt (or regolith – the REx part of its name is for regolith explorer) will become urgently interesting.

Stories :

• AP – Alicia Chang: NASA spacecraft will pluck samples from asteroid ; She keeps it simple – it’s exciting, it won’t land, and a Japanese probe has already returned to Earth a tiny smidgen of asteroid. Oddly, she doesn’t even mention that this is not only the solar system’s darkest known asteroid, but has the highest calculated odds of hitting Earth (one in 1800, in 170 years).
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: NASA aims to grab asteroid time capsule ;
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: NASA mission will ‘kiss’ an asteroid to get vital information on life’s origins ;
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: Roboprobe spacecraft off to grope asteroid ; He finds a fine quote, the mission’s primal moment “will be more like docking than landing” in a weak gravity where a dropped can of beer would take half an hour from hand to land. This techie pub’s accounts are nearly always on the feverish and wise-guy side, but well informed.
• Time Magazine Techland Blog – Matt Peckham: We’re Finally Going to an Asteroid and Bringing a Piece Back ; Clever man, Peckham dismisses what NASA says the misson’s name means in acronymese, and gives us the Latin: Fertility King. But Peckham cites National Geographic as his primary source. So, next bullet…
• National Geographic News – Victoria Jaggard: NASA Asteroid Mission Set for 2016 ;
• Vancouver Sun – Randy Boswell: Canadian lasers to aid NASA asteroid exploration / US agency chooses to probe distant space rock hurtling towards Earth ; Hmm. Such enthusiasm. But slow down man. Too much effort went into pumping this up. Not sure ‘hurtling towards Earth’ has any useful truth to it. It also says here it could shed fresh light on the birth of the universe. Even without the cliche about shedding light, that’s wrong – it could push astrobiology and origin of life theory along and that’s about it. The asteroid also did not survive “the formation of the universe” in any way I understand that phrase. He writes that the spacecraft will orbit the asteroid – I’ll have to check that. The press release suggests it will merely hold station a few miles away – each on nearly identical orbits around the Sun — and then move closer to get a piece. Amazing how ambiguous the press material is. (Late Addition – I spoke with a helpful scientist on the project at U. of Arizona, Bashar Rizk – and he said yes it will spend some time orbiting the asteroid, balancing weak gravity and photon pressure forces). And despite what this story says it won’t “land,” unless a hummingbird hovering next to a flower with its beak stuck into it has landed on the bloom.  Hmm and hmmm again.
• Space.com (via MSNBC) Mike Wall: New NASA mission aims to bring back pieces of asteroid ; Good job with what’s at hand – with plenty of context with other space missions.

There is lots of time before launch, and lots of time before rendezvous and lots more before sample return. Clearly the first day’s deadline rush does not, and could not have been expected to, capture the delicacy of a mission of this intricacy – getting to an asteroid, driving alongside it for awhile, then setting up a slow orbit while balancing gravity and pressure from sunlight, and finally easing close enough to reach out and touch it at a speed matching the asteroid’s angular velocity. A few reporters will get deeply into this mission’s details. And then it has to pass close past Earth and drop a parachute on Utah. An ambitious orbital ballet is coming up, fingers crossed.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Press Release ; Univ. Arizona Press Release ; plus a bonus – NASA JPL Earth Impact Risk Summary for 1999 RQ36.

- Charlie Petit

A post Monday gathered up a few stories that, right on the heels of the Joplin, Mo, tornado that left a death toll not at 200+, looked for stories that compiled what a few experts think about why it’s happening now.

Since then, more have landed, several of them today. The collisions of hot and cold air masses, coupled with winds that put a spin on them, are continuing. Meteorologists can see the immediate reasons for these tornadoes, but judging from coverage, there are scant data to judge whether climate shifts or other regional or global change is at work. Stories do dwell on increased population density, and the inability of warning systems to be very specific more than half an hour or so ahead of a tornado’s arrival, as reason for a death toll this Spring of about 500 people across the South and Midwest. Plus, bad luck – the places within storm systems where tornadoes touch down must of course, one reasons, be random. But this year a randomly large fraction is hitting towns and cities.

By the way, see that photo? I noticed it the other day and disregarded it as a clear case of photoshopping or similar mischief. But the NYTimes ran it today, with a caption that says one Lori Lehman of Orchard, Iowa, took it in June, 2008, just before running back inside the front door and hiding. I guess it’s real.

*UPDATE: As seen in a comment below, and verified by some hunting around on the web, this photo is famous among storm trackers. It’s been touted as being of several different tornadoes, too. The Orchard, Iowa part appears true enough but the smart money is betting it was not a tornado, but a related (and less hazardous) rotational structure called a mesocyclone with a low-hanging wall cloud. One convincing discussion is here.

Stories:

• Washington Post – Andrew Freeman: Mind-boggling tornado count, deaths raise hard questions about causes, warnings & response ;
• NYTimes – John Collins Rudolf, John Schwartz, Justin Gillis, Henry Fountain, Kenneth Chang, Denise Grady, Erica Goode ; The Facts (and Fiction) of Tornadoes ; How bad? Awful. Climate Change? Probably not. Do twisters sometimes drop from a dark, green sky? Yes.
• 
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Explaining the science of this spring’s tornadoes ; Among special ingredients: the Gulf of Mexico is about 2 degrees above normal for late May.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger: Another tornado outbreak. When will it end? Is it unprecedented? Could it happen here?
• Huffpost Green: Missouri Tornado Aerial Photo Shows Extent Of Destruction in Joplin ; Not science, but a very high-def photo of the trail through a town’s heart.
• LiveScience – Andrea Mustain : The Science Behind This Terrible Tornado Season ; The jet stream has gone rogue, one NASA climatologist says.
• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Repeat deadly storms ‘unusual but not unknown’ ; Nice job, AP. Inexplicably also on the wire service’s science feed, from Rome and without byline: Pope praying for US tornado victims. Couldn’t hurt.
• Reuters – James B. Kelleher: Despite advances in science, tornadoes take deadly toll;

Dept. of Failed Predictions, Contrarian Division:

• Global Warming blog – Roy Spencer, Ph.D.: Today’s Tornado Outlook: High Risk of Global Warming Hype ; Spencer, formerly of NASA and now at the University of Alabama, does not believe global warming is a serious problem.  He also believed yesterday that major news media also would drastically exaggerate global warming as cause of these tornadoes. On the latter, so far, looks to my eye that he’s wrong.

Grist for the Mill:

NOAA National Weather Service Storm Prediction Center ; At last look, 3 p.m. Wednesday, moderate to high tornado warnings are out for an arc from Northern Louisiana nearly to Lake Michigan.

- Charlie Petit

Time to blow two favorite horns this morning. One sounds mindless pride in happening to have lived a whole life in California (ok, born in Texas, right after WWII at an Army Air Base but that does not count) where the world’s tallest and largest trees grow, as though that’s a credit to the character of people who live here. The other is to marvel at a local outlet’s nifty way with science and environment news. To wit:

• KQED TV Quest -  Gabriela Quirós producer : Redwoods and Climate Change , with link to 11:37-min program streaming vid., plus text Producer’s Notes: Angst in the Redwoods.

Two things are notable in this program. One is that if you’ve ever wondered just how immense these trees are, or sort of remember and want a reminder, this is for you. It’s one thing to see a picture of people standing around at the bottom of a coast redwood (or a giant sequoia up in the Sierra). It’s another to focus on a climber on ropes half way up – more than 150 feet above the ground -  and still nearly lost against a trunk as wide as a small garage. Some of us recall reading Richard Preston’s vivid reporting in the New Yorker about six years ago, in which he trained to climb these trees and then went up with several pioneers of  S. sempervirens canopies. The KQED video is illustration why Preston wrote with such amazement and conviction.

Oh, the other thing about this is that its overt theme is climate change. But there is nothing in it about stopping climate change. Perhaps this is one sign of a spreading unspoken assumption in environmental science – the old Save the Earth slogan, as though one can still blunt climate change any time soon, is old hat. Now, as many said would happen, much and maybe most energy is going into adaptation. The slogan ought better be Remodel to survive in What’s Left of our Old Earth if that weren’t so wordy. Without much sense of surprise, the narrator and the program’s sources describe their plans to use weather stations to gauge the trees’ ability to withstand a warming along the Pacific Coast. And if they can’t, and if their natural range starts flowing northward as is easily surmised, plans are already under discussion to boost them along by planting seedlings in Oregon’s woods.

That’d be the end of an era for sure. Right now, as though by magic as one drives north on US 101 the redwoods vanish, ploomp!, a few miles short of the Oregon border. The great Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, and red cedar forests of the Pacific Northwest take over on the other side. They are big, but… in my grandchildrens’ lifetimes Californians may have to start sharing the distinction of living among the tallest-of-all forests.

Grist for the Mill:

Save the Redwoods League Redwoods And Climate Change Initiative ; UC Berkeley Press Release on fog decline in redwood country ; Humboldt State University Institute for Redwood Ecology ;

- Charlie Petit

Chevron boilers at heavy oil facility, Saudi-Kuwaiti border

When is it okay to ignore the elephant in the room? Maybe it is when everybody already either knows it’s there, or think they know that the elephant is a fraud and phantom that other people merely think is there. (Or it’s a gorilla. Different genus, same metaphor).

A little bit of an ado rippled the blogosphere this week after the Wall St. Journal ran a long piece Ben Casselman filed from Kuwait. He reported serious efforts  -  even in the land of crude practically bubbling from the sands by itself  – to use costly, carbon-spewing methods to prize heavy, tar-like oil from the grip of sandstone, shale, and other sedimentary formations. It’s like the Alberta tar sands but with more camels. The story makes clear this is a high-stakes venture that could fail, and illustrates that cheap oil is fading into history so fast even the petro-sheiks of Araby are investing in heavy lift (or inviting Western oil companies to come back in and front the money at their own risk). The story nowhere mentions – as blogger Keith Kloor pointedly saw – that such techniques seek to keep the fossil fuel economy going by resorting to practices with far bigger carbon and climate footprint than conventional oil drilling has. Or: what about climate change?

It’s not just the WSJournal choosing to overlook the fixity of climate change in our collective consciousness while reporting important energy news. The New York Times does it today, in its biz section, with a story Keith Bradsher filed from the city of Yiyang ,the home of China’s champion badminton team. The topic is a festering row between governmental regulators determined to keep electricity prices low and utility companies pinched by a rising cost of coal. The story has a bracing graphic reminding us just how deeply, and increasingly, that country’s power surge depends on coal. Once a huge exporter, it now imports the stuff.  We may be impressed or even dismayed by  China’s dominance in supplying the world with wind energy equipment, and about its huge wind farms, but one almost needs a microscope to see wind (and nuclear) on the diagram. Bradsher leaves the obvious but unchanging climate angle alone.

Both stories could perhaps benefit from small mention of the climate implications of such vast expansions of fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. But it’s no longer required every time. That is testimony to the extent to which climate change has permeated conventional wisdom – as a dire threat as just about every advanced nation’s academy of science argues or, if you wish, a concoction of besotted, arrogant, elitist, power-hungry, and conniving leftists and their scientist enablers suddenly gifted with unprecedented talent for cohesive action against free enterprise. Climate will come up again in news. Again and again. Guaranteed.

By the way, I know the gas-fired (oil-fired?) boilers lined up in the desert in that picture top right comprise an insult to climate and to wise use of resources blah blah blah. But the mega-engineering loving side of my reflexive self finds them singularly handsome.

- Charlie Petit

Years ago, many of us may remember, there were reports that vines – tree strangling lianas and their kin – are proliferating in rain forests. Some places, they were taking over. Ominous, spooky. After mostly reporting from the mechanical, made world The Times’s Henry Fountain this time treks into a forest in Panama for a scientist-guided look at trees and vines in an unstable relationship. It has not gotten any less spooky, it appears. It’s happening there, and in many other forests. His examples come mostly from New World forests. One wonders whether the Old World’s tropical forests are seeing the same thing. Climate change and, more directly, CO2 enrichment come up as causes. Climate feedback does too.

Other headlines to note:

• John Noble Wilford: Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time ; If we can send a man to the moon, is there no folly we might not also attempt? It’s not quite that stark, but this account – a book review at heart – sneaks up on the readers after a top that reviews that colossal effort of will by both JFK and the nation that it took to put footprints on the Sea of Tranquility. Sure, okay, Apollo was not an elegant strategy for scientific or space supremacy. The space station is its ill-begotten offspring, too. Still, Wilford’s measured phrasings sting: “Since the last of six landings, in 1972, no one has been back.”
• Jim Robbins: Getting Wise to the Owl, a Charismatic Sentry in Climate Change ; Not so much a climate change story as an appreciation of natural science. And of owls of course. Plus of one resarcher’s devotion to staying up all night to study them.
• Gina Kolata: 2 Studies in Conflict on Growth of Bone ;
• Heartbreak alert – Karen Barrow: The Youngest Casualties of Cancer ; I told myself, don’t read this. Did anyway. Not over it yet.

As usual, lots more: Whole section.

- Charlie Petit

Staff writers frequently behold in dismay the accumulation of their articles in editorial limbo and then, boom, a bunch of them come out all at once making them look like dervishes of the Fourth Estate. But even with such natural irregularity of editorial flow, it remains notable to see it at the New Yorker. But here it is – two fully formed pieces from science and medical writer Michael Specter in consecutive issues.

• May 23: Test Tube Burgers / How long will it be before you can eat meat that was made in a lab? ;
• May 30 : Resistant – Why a century-old battle over vaccination continues to rage;

To be sure, the second piece is in essence a long book review, but still…two in a row at the New Yorker! For awhile there, one easily imagines, he must have been in fact-check hell as two manuscripts’ worth of nitpicking (and, of course, mortifying but reputation-preserving catches) hit him.

The first of these two suffers from one, big flaw that no amount of reporting or careful wordsmithing could avoid. He admits it is there, too. Which is, while he found a hotbed of research in Europe into synthetic meat, and scouted out some secondary hotspots of that quest elsewhere including in the US, and has all manner of detail on layering up muscle cells into no-beef hamburger, he never tells readers what most of them want to know. What would vat veal, petri pork, tank steak, lab lamb (all coinages thx to this blog) or other factory-made, suffering-free flesh actually taste like? That illus up there, lifted from the story, makes it look like meat-grinder worthy pink stuff is being grown. But Specter tells readers that what has been made so far is smaller than a lima bean and has the muscle tone of jello. But as a snapshot of a culinary revolution that seems certain to occur, squeamishness be damned and on a date still unknown, this is solid and informative.

The second story, on vaccination, is an appreciation of, yet partial repudiation of, a new book that traces vivid detail the history of vaccinations. The book apparently also salutes resistance to such innoculation (think autism) as, while perhaps ignorant, also as a noble battle for individual liberty from governmental dictat. Specter says bosh to that. This review  has more muscle to it than the one on the new meat.

*UPDATE – As reader Don Monroe pointed out in a comment, thank you very much, Scientific American this month has its own long feature story by former Newsweek man Jeffrey Bartholet on lab-grown meat, a yarn as colorful as or even more than Specter’s. Reading this one through, and looking again at New Yorker’s, got me to thinking. We all remember – and the food supplement and diet scam industry has embraced – news in 2006 that the red wine extract resveratrol seems able to make sedentary mice and rats get fit without exercise (and not age and lot of other things that have not worked out as the short path to health-in-a-pill that initial hype foresaw). Wouldn’t it be weird if rodent meat is peculiarly suited, when juiced up on resveratrol, to make this a profitable way to feed people healthy PETA-endorsed meat without having to have the little in vitro muscles doing Petri dish pushups? If in the post-slaughterhouse age, will we be eating rat meat? (I have a feeling those industrious Dutch scientists already tried this. If it worked, we’d have heard).

- Charlie Petit

Well aren’t we special? Not only do we have a rare planet – water vapor, ice, and, uh, water all coexisting on a rather attractive blue, cloud-swirled world – but it looks like our galaxy is near tops in beauty too if one judges by symmetry. At Science News magazine Ron Cowen puts it this way : “.. the Milky Way doesn’t need a makeover: It’s already just about perfect.”

The news, off a paper in the pipeline at Astrophysical Journal Letters and already out on the arXiv pre-publication server,  is that two astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics used a radio telescope right on top of the center’s building in Cambridge to map the faint radio wave emissions of hydrogen at the 21-cm wavelength plus other emissions by carbon monoxide, which reveal where star forming regions are. They detected an additional stretch of a previously-known spiral arm near the Milky Way’s fringe. The mapped result gives a new symmetry to the galaxy’s primary spiral features, the Perseus Arm and the Scutum-Centaurus Arm. They are rooted at opposite ends of the roughly bar-shaped galactic core. A new and distant column of gas and stars in our galaxy is hardly front page news for major media. But to discover a feature that gives our island universe an uncommon grace merits reporting somewhere. Next will come adjustment to new editions of textbooks.

The image top right shows just those two arms, omitting the welter of lesser arms. An image of the whole thing, as it is now known, is here. Not positive  what those colors mean – am fairly sure they mark for-sure arms and the white billowy stuff is artistic imagination to fill in gaps where they are merely inferred.

Other stories:

• Scientific American – John Matson : Arms’s Trace: Astronomers Spot a Newfound Piece of the Milky Way Galaxy/ A looping spiral arm of gas some 70,000 light-years away seems to preserve the galaxy’s spiral symmetry. This is the source for the top right pic, in turn from one of the authors. 
  
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi : Milky Way Galaxy Is Bent Like a Sombrero ; Different angle, quite literally too, same story. As Matson at Sci Am also noted but in passing, Choi gloms onto that this extra stretch of young stars veers somewhat from the inner-galaxy’s plane, so had eluded notice before now. It also gives the galaxy’s rim a warp like on a broad-brimmed hat.

It must be noted that a few even-more-specialized outlets noticed this paper a week or so ago:

• io9 – Alasdair Wilkins (May 16) : Newly-discovered galactic arm means the Milky Way s more warped than we thought ; Fun to read the comments. Some wry fellow who goes by Lizardo tried some sly humor, watched it backfire among the literal-minded in comment-land, and could only sigh.
• MIT TechnologyReview Physics arXiv Blog: The Milky Way is Warped, Like a Beer Bottle Cap ; If you’ve a taste for real data and not arteest’s renditions, this illus is for you.

Grist for the Mill: arXiv” A Molecular Spiral Arm in the Far Outer Galaxy.

- Charlie Petit