One, namely I, must concede to wondering in this year when tornadoes are erasing whole towns whether something big and ominous is going on, or merely big and awful but just one of those things that happens in an unpredictable world.

After Joplin, Mo, was run through a deadly mill yesterday, with deaths counted at 89 and much of the town flattened, about a month after a huge outbreak killed many more in the Ohio River valley, it seemed a good time to round up stories from reporters trying to put a scientific perspective on things. The bag is mixed. Some good ones on forecasting such things. Nobody, and this is also sensible, reports that there is a convincing, broad explanation for why so many this year.

Quick Science Stories on Sunday’s Storms:

• ABC World News – Ben Forer: Joplin, Missouri tornado: What’s causing the Rise in Deadly Storms? ; Short answer from some weather service workers: Nobody knows. Deaths are up. Number of tornadoes may be, or not. They are hitting more places with people in them. Global warming cannot be judged as a prime factor with info now at hand. Nice job – the situation is ambiguous, the story doesn’t try to squeeze out anything more.
• Forbes – Kenneth Rapoza: Climate Change Unlikely Factor in US Tornado Spree; A compendium of conclusions from existing reports.
• NPR Morning Edition – Jon Hamilton: The Science of Predicting Tornadoes ;
• LiveScience – Andrea Mustain: Tornado Grew with Rare Speed on Way to Joplin;
• Christian Science Monitor – Patrik Jonnson:Joplin, Missouri, tornado: Warnings pale in season of violent twisters ;
• Slate – Brian Palmer: Are Tornadoes Environmental Disasters? ; No, he says. Awful. Terrifying. But too tiny to rank high on enviro threats. Nothing like big hurricanes, it says here. One question: are there many who say tornadoes are, collectively, an environmental disaster?

*Pop-in-the-mouth Op-Ed Update ; ie, somebody’s not afraid to say exactly what he thinks:

• Washington Post – Bill McKibben: A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never! ; McKibben, we know, has been fretting about climate change for many years. So have many of us. One thinks he speaks here for a broad range of semi-activists, hard-core organizers, and officially disinterested climate scientists in this sarcasm-laden diatribe that is aimed at the reality-respecting base – and will only prompt any delusionary contrarians who read it to dig in their heels.

-Charlie Petit

I just unlearned something. The big black beetles that walk with their noses down and fannies high and that my brothers and sisters and I all called stink bugs as kids are not the real stink bugs. (I also just looked through the Audubon Field Guide to Insects and Spiders – it appears that we were stepping wide of broad-necked darkling beetles,  native to California).

*UPDATE: Maybe we had it right after all. Here’s an essay at High Country News by Sharmon Apt Russell. She describes stink bugs as exactly the creatures I’ve been calling stink bugs – black, rear-high beetles.

Real stink bugs, it says here, are flattened and roughly triangular insects that smell dreadful if squashed. According to the Associated Press‘s David Dishneau and Genero C. Armas, a voracious immigrant variety of them got here from Asia a few years back and is now marching across North America. The brown marmorated stink bug, it says here, has no natural predators and does have a taste for a lot of stuff we find tasty too: “everything from apples to lima beans.” ( That last declaration, one grumbles in a plea for more punctilious copy editing, may get the point across but also is an example of false range.  Amoebas to zooplankton is an alphabetic march, mice to elephants is a gradient  in girth, Eastport Maine to Key West Florida  an excursion on the Eastern seaboard. Apples to lima beans, that is a continuum I don’t comprehend.)

A quick look indicated this is a true bug – kind of like aphids – so don’t get all huffy over calling this insect a bug. I had to look up marmorated too. It means marbled or streaked in appearance. And these streaked and marbled sap suckers are making farmers poorer, and backyard gardeners angrier. Both are wondering: what happened to these beans? Or, as these AP reporters tell us quite ably (ie I’m not going to carp on the minor sin of false ranges — oops, I just did) they dine ominivorously: “cherries, tomatoes, grapes, lima beans, soybeans, green peppers, apples, and peaches.” Some fruit they really wreck, others they marely mar with feeding bruises so wretched that they turn fruit from still-life worthy to, maybe, something to run through the juicer before the customer sees it.

The story winds up where it should: crop advisers and their scientific colleagues don’t know what to do about it. They are trying a number of chemicals and thinking about biological controls with imported wasps. My thought, for backyard gardeners, is that at least these things are large. Maybe hosing  the bean plants will knock the stinkbugs off but not the blossoms. But it says here a new bunch will show up fast.

This is not, as one might expect, and while noting that this is not presented as a scoop, a problem discovered by the Associated Press. Specialty outlets and ag advisers, plus some biggies as listed below,  have been yelping about it for awhile. The AP’s attention does elevate it from local nuisance to a national predicament packing significant economic threat.

Earlier stories:

• NY Times – Ken Maguire (Sept. 26, 2010) : Move Over, Bedbugs. Stink Bugs have landed.
• Pa. Valley News Dispatch via Pittsburgh Trib-Review – Rossilynne Skena (Sept 22, 2010): Bugs raise stink throughout region;
• New Jersey Times – Erin Duffy (Aug. 21, 2010): Stink bugs present a problem for farmers, homeowners in Mercer County;
• Daily Mail – Daniel Bates (Mar 31, 2011): Stink bug epidemic spreads as 33 US states now report infiltrations of the smelly pest ; Ah ha! The Daily Mail is not necessarily to be taken as the automatic punching bag of choice, choose any page at random, for those who like to hoot at tabloid excess. This may be a little big exaggerated (dunno for sure) and mostly off press releases (ditto), but it’s thorough and lavishly illustrated and has a tidy info box.
• Baltimore Sun (via Hagerstown Herald-Mail) Mary Carole McCauley (Feb. 28, 2011): Tiny wasps could curb a massive stink bug invasion / USDA researchers are working to find a safe way to dispatch the region’s newest pest ; The proposed nemesis is “black, stocky and about the size of the comma in this sentence,” it says here. And the wasp larvae work horror-movie style, consuming their prey from the inside out. These things for now, it says in this well-reported piece, are in a biohazard lab with five pressurized doors between them and the great outdoors.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Here is a “controversy”: adult stem cells treatments might improve the recovery of some muscular lesions in athletes. But; can they improve performance too?  And if so; should they be considered doping? The story showed up 2 weeks ago in the NYT and some other US media regarding the case of Bartolo Colón, a Dominican baseball player whose elbow and shoulder were healed by treatment that included injecting a culture of his own fat and bone marrow stem cells. The surgery was in the Dominic Republic. At 38, and after one season without playing, he is pitching the ball at 96 miles per hour. If one pays careful attention to the experts’ quotes, we see that this therapy might be helpful for a faster recovery. But to consider it doping – and allowing performance greater better than before the injury – is totally exaggerated. But that doesn’t sell, so “La Tercera” in Chile published yesterday a story titled “stem cells are the new doping”. The content of the article itself is good. It gathers information published during recent weeks bolstered by interviews with additional, original sources. The reporter makes a noteworthy effort to explain the science behind procedure. There is even a graph describing the whole process from the extraction of the stem cells to their enrichment, purification, and transplantation. We only have a few reservations and they are over the accuracy of the main message that the headline gives to readers.

La Tercera es un periódico chileno que cada sábado ofrece un excelente suplemento/revista llamado Tendencias, con gran abundancia de contenido científico. Arriesgando un poco, podríamos decir que en la prensa latinoamericana, es el suplemento de fin de semana que más (y quizás mejor) artículos científicos aborda. Cada semana encontramos como mínimo 3 o 4 piezas, tratadas con esmero, y buscando la cercanía con el lector. En varias ocasiones hemos alabado su combinación de rigor con amenidad, y la selección de temas que son de interés real en el lector amplio. Pero sí es cierto que muy de vez en cuando, esa necesaria tendencia al impacto conduce titulares o mensajes ligeramente sensacionalistas.

Es el caso del interesantísimo reportaje de Marcelo Córdoba “el nuevo doping toma forma de células madre”. La historia es la siguiente: El antaño buen jugador de baseball de origen dominicano Bartolo Colón pasó las últimas temporadas arrastrando lesiones en codo y hombro que le impedían rendir al 100% de sus capacidades. De hecho pasó la temporada 2010 en blanco. Pero la primavera pasada viajó a República Dominicana para someterse a una terapia de recuperación que incluía la inyección de células madre adultas de su propio tejido graso y médula espinal. (Si queréis entender el proceso, aquí está la fabulosa infografía preparada por La Tercera. El punto de calidad que distingue de otras piezas que se quedan en la anécdota)

Resultado: Bartolo Colón reapareció y a sus 38 años está lanzando a 154 km/h y batiendo todas sus marcas. Controversia: La terapia con células madre, ¿simplemente aceleró su recuperación, o contribuyó a aumentar la potencia de sus músculos? Si es lo segundo; ¿se podría considerar una nueva forma de doping? El texto de Marcelo Córdoba gira alrededor de esta polémica. Recoge las opiniones de expertos en el NYT, la cadena ESPN, y otros medios, pero también hace su propia investigación entrevistando a un par de especialistas en el tema. Buen trabajo de recopilación y de complementar la información. Si uno lee con detenimiento todo lo acontecido (alguien que está siguiendo el tema es Associated Press por medio de Dionisio Soldevilla “Médico: No se usó HGH en operación Bartolo Colón” / D. Soldevilla “Dominicana: Varios lanzadores interesados en operación de Colón”) percibimos que los expertos consideran exageradísimo pensar que las células madre hayan ido más allá de acelerar la recuperación de Colón. De hecho algunos (también entrevistados por Marcelo Córdoba para Tendencias), explican que todavía está por ver si las células madre han tenido un rol importante o no. Sí hay evidencias de que este tipo de terapias puede ayudar a recuperar lesiones en atleta, pero en todo caso, respecto al doping, el consenso parece ser que no llega a tanto, ni de cerca.

Pero eso no vende en un medio de comunicación. Y aquí es donde vemos que el titular de La Tercera “el nuevo doping toma forma de células madre” se aleja un poo de la realidad en busca del impacto. No lo vemos como algo tan grave, sobre todo porque la información que contiene el cuerpo del artículo es de alta calidad. Y felicitamos al autor por la vocación de explicar las bases científicas de la terapia, el matiz al comparar la inocuidad respecto las embrionarias, el número de fuentes citadas y varios otros aspectos. Pero sí nos hace reflexionar de nuevo sobre  la poca importancia que a veces le damos a los temas científicos. Podemos poner un titular un poquito distorsionado, que “no pasa nada”, porque se trata de “hacer la ciencia interesante y cercana al lector”. Sí; es cierto. Totalmente de acuerdo. Ese es el reto. Pero sin perder el respeto al rigor y la precisión.

– Pere Estupinyà

If you would like a chatty, brilliantly clear, and expertly detailed and illustrated explanation in plain English of the discovery and nature of Saturn’s largest ring, a wispy donut of gas and dust far from the main ring system and signature of the orbit of a little moon named Phoebe, lo0k no further:

Planetary Society What We Do Blog – Emily Lakdawalla: The Phoebe Ring ;

That ran more than a year and a half ago, after Nature published a paper – and its authors amplified on it at a meeting -  describing a ghostly halo shed by one moon of Saturn (and whose fallout paints one side of another, naturally pale moon nearly black). It took immense effort and a special space telescope, the Spitzer, even to see it. Lakdawalla, a planetary geologist by training, a writer, and the Planetary Society’s Science and Technology Coordinator traced the investigation and discovery beautifully. The Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society just announced her and her story as winner of the third Jonathan Eberhart Planetary Sciences Journalism Award – named for the poetic,  late musician-science writer for Science News magazine. Previous winners were George Musser of Scientific American, and J. Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope.

The email announcement today of the prize winner gave me a moment’s pause. I remembered, vaguely, the news but not this story. So I missed it. I posted on it here, listing stories including one by the man now on Eberhard’s old beat at Science News, and I whined that this object is not a ring, it is a belt, or a ghost torus, but not a ring like we think of a ring. That’s not my point though, it is that I failed to notice her story.

There is a reason, one that illustrates how the word “journalist” has changed. If I did see it, I am confident that I scrolled right on past. A Planetary Society blog, by an employee? That’s probably not journalism -  it is likely part of the society’s public out reach, more like p.r. I don’t remember thinking that, it’s just what I think would have flitted through my frontal lobes. Plus if I’d read it, I might still have passed, although I am uncertain. It is unconventional journalism – no quotes from anybody, little setting of the scene, just lucid explanation of what scientists did and excerpts from published papers.

Yet it is journalism of the new kind. Flackery it is not – among the Planetary Society’s main aims is to further the field by encouraging better budgets for NASA and NSF and other agencies important to the science. She blogs about discoveries in planetary science but, far as I can tell, without policy ham handedness.

Again, congratulations. She even gets to go to France to receive the award in October. I’ll try to remember to look for her stories from now on.

Grist for the Mill: Planetary Society Blog What We Do (scroll down an item to read Lakdawalla’s own reaction to the announcement.

- Charlie Petit

The Yale E360 online magazine haven for long-form environmental and energy journalism at the school’s forestry and environmental studies department has been turning out reliably solid and sometimes superb articles for several years.

Here are two this week that share little in common except for two things. A look at them shows why it is hard to write strict rules for writing about  environmental problems or opportunities – and probably for that matter about anything.

In common is that each deals with a fairly confined issue. Also, each relies for its sources on people who are directing research or writing studies that bolster a fairly narrow conclusion. Each, to add a third commonality, is well worth reading or was for me for sure – I learned things I didn’t know, and came out better informed on serious matters. But in one case the narrow and one might say partisan selection of sources works. The other story would however benefit immensely from either a cautionary additional perspective – or explicit reason to think there is none worth reporting.

• David Biello: Using CO2 to Make Fuel: A Long Shot for Green Energy; Why not burn gasoline or other fuels, then take the exhaust (CO2 most important) and run it through a nuclear or solar or other cleanish-energy powered machine and turn it back into fuel? Presto – a carbon-zero-sum process that let’s us turn on the lights and drive around guilt free.
• Elizabeth Grossman: From the Fields to Inner City, Pesticides Affect Children’s IQ ; I don’t think she wrote the hed, as the story has more wiggle room – but it does say new studies find a highly suspicious inverse correlation between body burdens of organophosphate pesticides in specific communities and the intelligence of their children.

Biello’s excursion through labs and outdoors test facilities gets away with sticking to various scientific dreamers’ plans and experiments toward a carbon-neutral energy cycle. For one thing, even his sources say, and he repeats a bunch of times, none of their strategies is going to make fuel cheaper than or even close in price to standard fossil fuels any time soon. Thus by its nature it is a visit with hypotheses that are not yet affirmed. It’s not selling a conclusion, only relaying iffy words from a research frontier.

Grossman set a higher bar for herself but did not leap it. Hers is a story of possible unfolding, immediate threat to children. To solve it, should the thesis of prefrontal cortices wilting in a dilute broth of pesticides be proven, would require costly and urgent measures. It is persuasive, to me at least, that these chemicals could be causing the harm that the three studies she cites say they seem to be. But could=maybe, and maybe commonly means probably not, and that’s not generally good enough to start screaming at members of Congress and the EPA.

You’ll need to read it yourself to see if you agree, but the situations studied – children in Eastern urban inner cities, and in an agricultural area out West – are surely loaded with potential confounding variables. Correlation, don’t we all know, is not causation. I’m not proposing that she should have given the pesticide manufacturers more room than she did for reply. Their self interest torpedoes any presumption of objectivity. But surely there are plenty of academic toxicologists and epidemiologists with no axes to grind who could give the studies a gimlet eye. Or, who might assure the reader they move the ball forward significantly, heighten the case, or offer other support for getting some laws and regulations changed and soon. (Plus on a lesser but significant note – she should name the journals that published the studies.)

I mean no fundamental criticism of  Grossman’s skill as a reporter. She may have done all that and came out convinced that a threat to children, insidious and immediate, requires correction. But if so the reader should be in on more than she shares. As seen in another E360 piece of hers on radioactive contamination in the ocean near Japan’s melted down reactors, she’s not a habitual one-note environmental crusader. This latter story, while full of worrisome hints of lasting danger and written with an ominous tone, also says forthrightly that the long term effect of the hot runoff is impossible to know and nobody’s suffering that we know of – not even the fish and the crabs.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Mostly stories from Latin America: 1) Argentine researchers are very proud of the satellite that have designed with NASA and will be launched in 3 weeks. 2) In Uruguay local geneticists discovered two variations causing predisposition to severe pneumonia.  3) Peruvian scientists generate energy from farm wastes, and also propose a new strategy to fight against dengue based on a study in Iquitos about the places where the mosquitoes prefer to inbreed. 4) Colombian president promises a much more money for research. 5) In Bolivia scientists dismiss a sect’s declaration the world is going to end soon. 6) In Puerto Rico and Mexico researchers write directly – and without apparent editing – about chemistry, quantum physics and optogenetics. 7) Reporters from Ecuador and Chile highlight students and companies that won contests that will take them to  US research centers. Elsewhere,  from Spain, an Oliver Sacks-like case of a woman who woke with a French accent after surgery.

Seguro que todas las secciones deportivas hablarán dentro de unos días de la final de la Copa de Europa de fútbol. Pero sin duda darán más espacio a la información de sus clubs y deportistas locales. En ciencia debemos lograr lo mismo. La prensa latinoamericana cita hoy el gran número de planetas errantes que existen el en Universo, y la controversia por las palabras de Hawkins. Pero también encontramos buenas (aunque pocas) notas resaltando la labor de científicos locales.

De sur a norte, en Argentina La Nación elogia por medio de su corresponsal en EEUU Silvia Pisani la presentación del satélite que la NASA ha codiseñado con Argentina, y será lanzado en unas pocas semanas. Muy completa nota, con declaraciones para La Nación del director del proyecto por parte de la agencia estadounidense, y un ingeniero del Conae argentino. También en La Nación, Fabiola Czubaj nos hablaba esta semana de una cápsula espacial construida exclusivamente en Argentina, y Gabriel Stekolschik de que un programa contra el dengue no fue tan exitoso como en su momento se anunció. Buen ejemplo de medio comprometido con las investigaciones hechas por sus científicos.

Hablando de dengue, interesante la nota en SciDev de Zoraida Portillo “Estanques de huevos blancos para controlar el dengue”. Según un estudio hecho en Iquitos (Perú), las hembras de mosquito ponen sus huevos donde ya hay muchos. El estudio propone la estrategia de dejar estos huevos para que atraigan a las hembras pero tratar las zonas con insecticidas que afecten a su desarrollo. Si se eliminan todos, los mosquitos simplemente se desplazan a otra zona. Sin abandonar Perú y la ciencia local, El Comercio presenta una muy buena nota de Sandro Medina Tovar sobre biodigestores que aprovechan el gas emitido por los desechos orgánicos de las ganaderías para generar energía.

Claro que sin inversión en ciencia local, poco tenemos de qué hablar… y esa reivindicación es la que expone en El Espectador (Colombia) un buen texto de sugerente título de David Mayorga “Un revolcón a la ciencia”. Según la nota, el presidente Santos se ha comprometido a invertir 9.5 mil millones de dólares en ciencia e innovación en los próximos 10 años, con especial foco en tecnologías de la información. Muy buena redacción y intro de David. No es local, pero sí interesantísimo el texto “Manzanas buenas y manzanas podridas” de Pablo Correa, sobre la vuelta de tuerca que Phil Zimbardo ha dado a su mítico experimento en la prisión de Stanford, para fomentar el bien en lugar de constatar que el mal se expande entre los seres humanos.

Ya hace algunas semanas de su publicación, pero se nos pasó la nota en El País (Uruguay) sobre una investigación uruguaya descubriendo nuevas variaciones genéticas que predisponen a la susceptibilidad a la neumonía grave. La recuperamos, para destacar lo bien estructurada que está.

Algo que solemos encontrar en medios Latinoamericanos es la redacción directa de artículos por investigadores locales. No podemos depender sólo de esto, porque no es periodismo crítico sino divulgación, pero sí resulta una muy buena opción. Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico) lo hace con frecuencia. Por ejemplo esta semana encontramos un muy didáctico texto de Jose A. Prieto “Tecnología para ver lo invisible” sobre el rol que tiene la química en la imagen microscópica. Otro ejemplo a valorar son las dos notas en La Jornada (México) de Adrián Pérez “Música y Mecánica cuántica”, y “Optogenética y Conectómica” de José Bargas. Irreprochables desde el punto de vista científico, muy didácticos, y un verdadero regalo para el lector interesado que cuenta con cierta base científica, a los textos les falta proximidad con el lector. Desde el propio título (sobre todo el segundo), hasta la estructura más convencional que no pretende atrapar al lector en el primer párrafo. Sin duda aprovechar el conocimiento y predisposición de los científicos es buenísimo. Por eso les animamos a que continúen, y que algún editor trabaje con ellos. Son una gran alternativa a la falta de periodistas especializados.

También suele destacarse en la prensa de América Latina el estímulo de jóvenes científicos y empresas que visitan o participan en concursos en EEUU. Por ejemplo, en el chileno La Tercera vemos una nota de Axel Christiansen sobre 9 empresas chilenas que visitarán Silicon Valley durante 3 meses.  Y en El Comercio de Ecuador que 4 jóvenes informáticos ganaron un concurso y viajarán a NY para participar en otro internacional. En este periódico encontramos también un peculiar artículo sobre las propiedades nutritivas de las algas. Hablando de ciencia y cocina, el chileno Mercurio presenta una simpática nota de Paula Leighton sobre las curiosidades que unen a estos dos mundos más cercanos de lo que creemos.

Un nuevo ejemplo de investigación realizada en el país, y que genera interés internacional, pero al final en los medios se cubre sólo con noticias de agencias: La Razón (Bolivia): “Fósiles de 35 marsupiales son hallados en Bolivia” (EFE). Es un tema importante sobre el que trabajar. Destacamos como positiva la nota de Jannett Oporto “el fin del mundo está lejano”. Una acertada respuesta buscando la opinión de científicos ante el disparate del nuevo anuncio de fin del mundo anunciado por una secta. En ciertas latitudes, esta lucha contra la superstición también es responsabilidad de los reporteros de ciencia.

Detenemos el resumen por hoy. Como notas curiosas, un excelente texto en BBC Mundo de Manuel Toledo sobre los mecanismos fisiológicos responsables de que un parásito tome el control del cerebro y comportamiento de una hormiga. Y en El Mundo (España) un caso típico de libro de Oliver Sacks: por Laura Tardón, la mujer que se despertó con un acento afrancesado tras pasar por cirugía.

- Pere Estupinyà

Ars Technica is a geeky site, devoted mainly to (what else?) the technical arts, ie high tech and related consumer gizmos, that also has a few writers on call to do science news. I’ve usually skipped over it when linking to general media in a roundup of examples from outbreaks of herd journalism. It’s not clear how much reporting it does, and how much of an audience it commands, and the funny name does not help.

But perhaps I should pay closer attention – and I did just now dive back into the report on forlorn, castoff planets a couple of posts down and add the Art Technica story on that. The partial change of heart comes after discovering at Ars Technica a story of some inside-the-craft interest to tracker readers:

• Jonathan M. Gitlin: Stemming the tide of careless science reporting, one post at a time ;

It demolishes pretty well two recent stories on other outlets. The first is a tiny, and hardly general media site, called HubPages. It tells readers – apparently via reprint of an obscure press release – that an industrial solvent called DCA cures cancer but has been ignored. The other story, from the UK’s Daily Mail, asserts that cell phones may contribute to the colony collapse disorder that is giving honeybee keepers and many farmers the fits.

Folks in the science new business will find them worth reading, but will likely come to the same conlusion, and advice, that I do. Which is that if the condemnation of terrible science writing is the aim at Ars Technica, it would do well to raise its sights. These two outlets are too easy as targets.

The DCA posting, by the way, triggered other reactions in more mainstream news outlets:

• LiveScience – Natalie Wolchover: Is Big Pharma Ignoring a POtential Cancer Cure? ; Wolchover looks into a patent angle (DCA has none). Sources tell her that even if DCA works in some cancers, drug companies won’t be very interested without patents to protect them while paying off their R&D costs.
• Boing Boing – Maggie Koerth-Baker: There is no miracle cure for cancer: A more standard, and calming, explanation why the new attention to DCA is neither so new, nor news.

By the way – while a Swiss ‘study’ fingers cell phones for honeybee problems, it is not the first time that link has been asserted in the press. A search found another from last year – a discovery made while hunting up a suitable illus for this post (and which is at top right).

• Maka Media News Services (India) : Cellphone buzz threaten honeybee survival: Study ;

- Charlie Petit

The Miller-McCune non-profit and savvy magazine runs an occasional column by a Southern California college sociologist named Peter M. Nardi, who runs it under the tag “Skeptics’ Cafe.” One up today is about a few bible scrutinizers who count begats and perform other numerological mumbledy-peg and come up with Scriptural forecasts. A conclusion to catch the eye is that the Rapture or the End of the World or something damned big is to occur the day after tomorrow. A Christian talk radio network is promoting it. And if that doesn’t get us maybe the similar goofy 2012 end of the Earth inferred from Mayan glyphs will finish us off.

At one level, Nardi’s amusement that people take such prophecy seriously shines through. But the piece is way too subtle. Folks who believe such things as this on faith might not be acutely sensitive to sarcasm, parody, or other inflections of wit. Near the end Nardi writes, “Its not my place here to challenge religious people who interpret the Bible literally or to dissuade people from following their faith.” Why not? If he’s the skeptic, why not tell them up front and repeatedly there is no rational basis for believing such scriptural implications? The audience is not, by the way, hard core believers – likely to be impervious to counter arguments – but readers who have had better things to do than develop a good nose for b.s., and might thing there could be something to such talk.

He even, at one point, seems to judge one sort of criticism – that the number-adding process got the arithmetic wrong so one date with doom is wrong anyway – as on par with the deeper flaw. To even perform such an exercise in futurology is thickheaded.

Its unneeded tongue-in-cheek nuance aside, this is a pretty good walk through the more primitive regions of human belief.

Doomsdays always make the news. I do hope that never ceases. That  would mean one of them actually happened. Search engines detect thousands of news articles on this. Most are, natch, skeptical. I am nonetheless too weak of spirit to trudge through them.

Grist for the Mill (if you really want it): Family Radio Worldwide.

- Charlie Petit

Astrophysical theory has long carried hints that when planets form, the whirligigging and writhing gravity fields in accretion disks toss some of them into the void – warm  worlds hardly born yet propelled and banished to a dark, freezing interstellar and interminable loneliness.

Now along comes a New Zealand-Japan-US-etc. team of astronomers that looks for little upsurges in the brightnesses of stars and attributes certain ones of them to gravitational lensing by just such lonely, Jupiter-sized planets as they pass between Earth and a much more distant star. They saw ten such signals. (Littler lost worlds are presumably out there too, but are undetectable to the telescope’s sensitivity limits). A bit of statistical digity-doo then yielded an amazing conclusion: there are more rogue planets wandering in solitude than there are stars in the Milky Way. Perhaps twice as many. Maybe the Sun’s infancy tossed a few out there, still on solo peregrination and getting colder all the time. If so, good thing: Their departure left room for our cozy abode.

Maybe the links are stout as oak planks off Old Ironsides, but that’s quite a chain of inference to base on a few stars that had up-ticks in brightness for a day or two. But it got into Nature Magazine, so one supposes it hangs together.

And as it is in Nature, with the embargo just expired today, I’d usually wait to post on it till tomorrow, after the main wave of breaking news stories has crested. But first, a stupid aside on indecent astronomy. No, I’m not talking about black holes or the big bang. Inset explainer follows.

This is too strange and dumb (that is, kind of dumb of me to care) to let wait. Down there in Grist I’ve put a press release on this from the U. of Notre Dame, which has an astronomer on the Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics consortium that got the data off a telescope in New Zealand (MOA, as in giant bird, New Zealand …. get it?). Actually I’ve put two of them, the one at EurekAlert!, and another that was at that site earlier today but may not last because it has one of the most inexplicable typos I’ve ever seen. So I saved that earlier version on a separate server. Just read the paragraph just under the ### marks at the bottom and ask yourself – confirmation came how?, and what was the writer trying to type? Don’t worry, it’s not dirty. Just weird. I’m thinking something or somebody was thinking ‘independently’ and ‘recently’ at the same time and split the difference? But I dunno.

To get back on course, we’ll update this tomorrow. But I expect a fair turnout from the astro-writing science press corps. Dark, cold planets drifting free, tossed from the nest by cruel fate, perhaps with alien civilizations constructing elaborate underground lairs to escape the deep freeze – the imagination runs amok. Poor planets, ejected and dejected, it tugs the heart strings.  It is, in other words, an astronomy story easy to sell to editors and easy to slap with an eye-catching headline. (Late addition: One could construct a thesaurus entry off this news flow. We have rogues, runaways, vagabonds, orphans…..

First rush of stories:

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Billions of Lonely Planets, Adrift in Space ; Several sources tell Overbye that many or most of the ten the tripped the meter might just be orbiting so far from their parent stars they look like they’re on their own.
• AP – Malcolm Ritter : “Exciting” Find: Possible Planets Without Orbits ; The hed’s meaning is clear enough but technically they do have orbits – around the Milky Way’s center of mass, adjusted for concentrations of closer stars, dark matter, all that stuff. What they don’t have is a star to mark the passing years.
• USA Today ScienceFair blog - Dan Vergano: Ejected planets aplenty in our galaxy ;
• BBC – Neil Bowdler : First ‘orphan planets’ discovered ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall : Lonely rogue Worlds Surprisingly Outnumber Planets with Suns ;
• TIME Magazine – Michael Lemonick: Rogue Planets: Billions of Jupiters on the Loose in the Milky Way ;
• Guardian (UK) Alok Jha: Astronomers discover 10 more free-floating planets in the milky way ; Good for Jha. He notes that a few signs of free-floating planets are already in journals. Some other reports tell readers these are the first ones.
• NatureNews – Nadia Drake: So many lonely planets with no star to guide them ; That’s a lovely hed.

* UPDATE – A few more (Thur May 19)

• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Planets may be vastly more numerous than believed ; Maugh calls them vagabonds. Good word. And, he notes (as do Overbye and perhaps others) that a primary challenge to explanation, as one source tells him, “you have to be kicked out by somebody bigger than you.”
• ABC (Australia) Meredith Griffiths : Planets found free-floating around universe ; “Around universe” seems overkill for a discovery extrapolated from nearby in the Milky Way. But Griffiths has a source to explain the “free-floating” metaphor clearly.
• Universe Today – Jason Major: Lone Planets “More Common Than Stars” ; One way to handle it quickly in this new-media, aggregator-proliferated world and without evident fresh reporting – a few introductory remarks by the writer, then excerpts and links to acknowledged press releases and a link to the NatureNews article.
• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Free-floating planets more common than stars? ; She’s an astronomer, so she starts right off with an explanationette of microlensing and gravitational warping of starlight. Good enough. One wonders – if the event makes a star temporarily brighter to us, are there times as the planet approaches the microlensing sweet spot when the star gets detectably dimmer? Or does it just move about a bit in apparent location? Both? The star has only so much light to go around – if it looks dimmer from one place it’s gotta be fainter as seen somewhere else. I think.
• Nat’l Geographic – Ker Than: Alien Planets Outnumber Stars, Study Says .. Jupier-like ruanways common in our galaxy ; Lede captures what a lot of people who read this news will be thinking next time they look at the night sky.
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Newly Found Planets Aren’t Tightly LInked With Solar Systems, Report Says ; Good: Lopatto describes a planned space mission that should be able to see lots more. Not so Good: She id’s the third author, at the U. of Notre Dame, as the leader of the team – an implication but not overt declaration by the ND press release. Generally, the news flow does not clearly say who’s in charge. Nature’s editors pin the lead author, at Osaka University, as the man to contact.
• Ars Technica – Christopher Dombrowski: Exoplanets without a sar: galaxy teems with lonely Jupiters ;
• And finally, a byline mashup, or, seen one Times, seen’em all – Sydney Morning Herald – Thomas Maugh, Dennis Overbye: Stunned scientists discover Milky Way awash with planets ; the tag does credit both LA and NY Times. For me the story page started talking to me – an explainer, investigation revealed, by the well-known Brian Schmidt, an American astronomer at Australian National University.

Department of Non-acknowledged Confusion:

Now look here, all you astronomy writers. Most if not all of you have already written about the Kepler planet finding telescope, which infers planets in orbit around other stars when, if they happen to cross in front of the star as seen from here, the stars get an ooonch dimmer for a few minutes, hours, etc. Now along comes this microlensing dealie bop, and it infers planets when they cross in front of stars because the starlight gets an ooonch brighter! Dontcha think a few readers who actually retain some science news they’ve read or heard will be scratching their heads and wondering why, no matter in which direction a star’s light departs the norm, it whispers “planet” into the astronomer’s ear? To be sure, explaining the difference between a dimming due to what amounts to a teeny partial eclipse, and a brightening due to relativistic bending of light by gravitational lenses, is not done in one sentence or even a dozen or more with any clarity.

So I don’t know how to solve this muddle in a brief daily story, but it does exist. Maybe follow ups will get into it. In the meantime here’s an extra-credit question to add to the quizzes given upper division students in relativistic and gravitational astrophysics, if there are such courses. If, close enough, an intervening planet dims a star, but if the star is way, way behind the planet, it gets a little brighter, is there a place in between where there is no signature at all, a sort of transit-invisibility zone? Or maybe as the planet reaches the star’s limb the flux goes down and then it wiggles up at perfect opposition and thus leaves a little squiggle in the photometry plot with no net, time-integrated change in flux? That is, can these effects compete? Curious minds want to know. OH! – what if the background star is so far away that the planet’s disk totally, geometrically a’la Euclid, covers the star as we view it, will lensing make it brighter anyway?  The questions go on and on.

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill:

U. Notre Dame Press Release via EurekAlert!, and just in case that one gets the oopsy at the end edited out of it, the Original Press Release ; NASA-JPL Press Release ; Massey Univ. (NZ) Press Release that includes animation of a planet and microlensing;

- Charlie Petit

Almost seven years ago a pair of academics proposed in Science a way to stabilize CO2 emissions – a daunting task – that broke it down into separate goals. The paper’s hypothetical illus is to the right. It added up to an imaginable task. It became known as the wedge strategy – add up a lot of slim wedges and one gets a fat, steep one. A dollop of efficiency, of wind + sun power, of sequestration, of nuclear plants, of biofuels, of agricultural and land use reform, and like that and pretty soon the forecast steep rise in emissions flatlines itself.

That’s not exactly up there with the hockey stick as an issue for red-faced public discourse on climate, but among energy policy mavens it became a slide show standard. Well, what’s new is that a long-time science and environmental reporter got hold of one of the authors, Robert Socolow of Princeton, after a talk at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He learned that Socolow now regards the wedge proposal as a mistake. It sort of backfired, it appears, by morphing into a false assurance that throttling carbon is not such a tough job after all – more like a snap.

• National Geographic – Doug Struck: Climate Scientist Fears His “Wedges” Made It Seem Too Easy ; Struck’s story puts it more baldly: “It was a mistake, he now says.”

One quickly infers that Socolow doesn’t mean that the wedge strategy would not work. But, rather than the intended effect of pushing society toward hard work with the wedges a general blueprint of the goal, it inspired greater complacency. It sapped the challenge of its urgency. As a result, back when a consensus was starting to build among world leaders to do something, climate policy dropped down the priority list. Or something like that.

It is no surprise that Struck is the one who saw this subtle development as news. He has a rock solid resume on the beat . His 30 years in journalism, including service with the Baltimore Sun and Washington Post trotted him around the globe covering global warming and got him a break for a Nieman Fellowship. He was close to a Pulitzer one year, his resume also says. Struck is now teaching at Boston U’s College of Communication.

*IMPORTANT UPDATE: Socolow, it says here, is unhappy with the story:

• Nature Newsblog – Quirin Schiermeier: Iconic climate strategy was no mistake – scientist hits back at media reports ; He did say what Nat’l Geo’s Struck says he said – but he did not mean it in the way reported. i.e., the wedge idea  “was not a mistake.” He has contacted Struck, it says here, and is awaiting reply.

I have a nomination for another catchphrase in the climate business that  backfired. Since the 90s at least and maybe late 80s advocates of a  low-carbon world have waved the “no regrets” banner. Google it along with “climate change” and you’ll get a bunch of hits. No Regrets – and I don’t know who used the phrase first but I wouldn’t be surprised if John Holdren or Stephen Schneider were in at the beginning – means doing things that would be a win-win even if global warming turns out to be a false or exaggerated alarm. Insulate houses, mandate higher gas mileage in cars, build high speed rail to compete with regional air routes, etc. When “energy independence” is urged as an alternative goal to cap-and-trade, it’s an example of a no-regrets tactic. But no-regrets, too, may have made the situation look almost like something to be solved without pain.

Dunno how much popular or political impact this reconsideration by Socolow will have. At least one thoroughly wired-in policy blogger who says global warming is the real deal (but who also doesn’t seem enthused by any proposed solution to it from the environmentalist crowd – and is more concerned with adapting to the inevitable but imprecisely known changes coming our way) jumped on Socolow’s revision:

• Roger Pielke Jr.‘s Blog: Socolow: Wedges Were a Mistake ;

I also have a nomination for a catch phrase that may make sense today – climate triage, as in when people are dying left and right and maimed ones are coming in the emergency room door or scattered across the freeway, who does one save first? That’s a term that screams urgency, that encourages desperate measures. Credit for this goes to:

• Huffpost Green – Peter H. Gleick: Climate Triage and the “New Normal”; We’ve denied and ignored too long, he writes. Now the climate pipeline is full of unstoppable trouble. We’ll be paying for our collective dither, forced to choose which species, which towns, which floodplains, which nations to try to help and which to abandon in a world full of regrets. Sounds a little bit like Pielke Jr., actually. A policy convergence?

- Charlie Petit

Most of the major news outlets covered yesterday’s smooth launch of the shuttle Endeavour from Florida. It is this particular shuttle’s last mission. It is also the next to last one for a program that by some estimates has cost $200 billion in the last 40 years. I don’t think that figure includes the space station – the shuttles’ main reason to exist. Readers learned yesterday’s blastoff went smoothly, that Arizona Representative and gunshot victim Gabrielle Giffords took a break from rehab and watched it soar with her husband Mark Kelly at the helm, and that the chief item in its cargo hold is a large scientific instrument called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer for detailed measurement of the most powerful and exotic cosmic rays.

As it caught my eye, let’s look first at the somewhat idiosyncratic write-up at a small and specialty, on line outlet, a technology news site called eWEEK.com – IT & Network Infrastructure News. There one finds a writer named Wayne Rash with a dirge for the US manned spaceflight program. He describes any shuttle launch as an incredible glory. And a bit on (take the jump to the second page) bemoans that China will have the first station on the moon. He writes, as have many, that a New Jersey woman recorded the launch from an airliner seat and promptly – upon landing – posted the photo and video and tweeted on it.  That’s a screenshot top right.

But here’s the highlight. After referring to the AMS instrument he adds “I could go on for pages about the science that’s being done by Endeavour and its crew. ” For pages? Perhaps he could, but I could not. I cannot, sitting here and after having covered the shuttle program’s first launch and followed it regularly, recall any significant science the program has produced, on any flight, other than research into the physiological factors that make human spaceflight a health challenge. The AMS may yield some new science, but not yet. It’s an engineering extravaganza, the shuttle crews have been heroic, but science is another matter. That’d be a circular justification – to go into space to get the data on whether going into space with people should be done for extended periods.

A Few Other stories with Significant Science or Exploration slant:

• ABC – Matthew Mosk: NASA’s Charles Bolden: Americans Will “Go To Deep Space’ ; A Q & A. the dwells mainly on the history of Russian assistance to the space station, and their role as prime, and perhaps sole, providers of transport to and from the station for the rest of its operating life, now set to go at least through 2020.
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz:Hunting Antimatter: Space Shuttle Endeavour’s Biggest Science Experiment ; Another Q&A, this with Sam Ting, the Nobelist and father of the AMS device. Ting has a loopy way of answering, and sometimes evading, her questions.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: UK technology’s magnetic space future; Amos salutes the AMS instrument, and also some British engineers whose contribution got cut from it. So it has a weaker, but longer-lasting, Chinese magnet on board rather than the divine British one. The theme involved hope that powerful magnets might one day provide shielding for deep space crews from electrically-charged cosmic rays – and the UK still has a role in that pursuit.
• Xinhua – Zeng Qian, Zhao Renwei: US space equipment blasts off with Chinese-designed thermal control system ; It appears it not just the magnet that’s made in China. But Xinhua has that other angle covered too:China-made giant magnet helps AMS detector’s hunt for anti-matter in space ;

And finally, thank goodness for the silliness gene;

• Huffpost Comedy – Pablo Andreu: “I’m on a Motherf**king Space Shuttle,” Tweets Captain Kelly.

Grist for the Mill: NASA AMS page, NASA launch Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The health and medical science side of the Times science staff sprang from the back pages and pretty much took over Science Times today. Some of us astronomy, critters, and climate buffs may be a bit put off by that, but fair’s fair – and health is probably where the larger readership is, too.

The lead story is a tale of tragedy disguised as one of sentimental triumph. Denise Grady attended a year-after get-together by several of the seven (even eight, it’s unsure) people who received tissue or whole organs from one donor who had died suddenly of a brain aneurism. There is weeping for the fine man whose death made it possible, and celebration of the lives extended (tempered by expected rejection episodes and other bumps in the road). A reporter with any kind of heart doing this story is likely to hope her or his story encourages organ donation. So, an emphasis on the joy and gratitude of recipients and their families is natural. But the meat of the story is not that some people on the transplant waiting lists eventually receive them, but that most do not. The ratio of recipients to those who never get an organ is nowhere near close., it says here.

The story also, one thinks while being glumly practical, implies without saying so one more reason that medical progress may drive the cost of full, universal health care sharply up. Artificial organs cannot foreseeably be cheap. If bioengineered or culture-grown hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, and what not become practical and effective, think what a demand there will be for them. Expect arguments over rationing of health care to become more shrill.

Below the fold is a more challenging glimpse of future health. Carl Schoonover and Abby Rabinowitz write of mice with brain circuits selectively altered with foreign genes to make them light sensitive. Optical fibers implanted through through their skulls permit activation of tiny portions of the rodents’ brains that dramatically alter their behavior. In this example, it’s like a courage, or recklessness, button.

Seems to me I’ve read about something like this before? Maybe it was the mice that became brave around cats when their olfactory sense was blocked. Anyway, this is potentially a serious issue. The story declares that human applications are far, far in the future. For one thing, the genes for photosensitivity are inserted via viral vectors, a technique that won’t pass muster easily with human experimentation review panels. But c’mon. If one could alter emotional balance with a touch of the button, pressure to try it on a person, legally or otherwise, could be immense. Not just for treating emotional disorders, but to correct performance anxiety, or the yips, that may afflict highly paid athletes. A professional golfer with prospects for fabulous wealth, given only a cure for a distinct tendency to shank or slice shots when the stakes are high, might willingly pay a lot for a little remote in her or his pocket that brings immediate, calm confidence. I could use one of those.

I have to say something about Gina Kolata’s self-referential story that gets the rest of p.1 and a jump inside. It is about the euphoria, exhaustion, pain (sort of) and agony of long distance running. If you are or have ever been a runner, you identify with this story’s conversations. There is not much science to it. But there is argument – is the burn, the ache that makes part of your brain want to stop running – really pain, or something else?  And does Gina really fell euphoric, as in very very happy, when the running gets serious? I used to run, and found it satisfying but never euphoric. And the agony of running for a long time at the threshold of oxygen debt was, upon reflection, not really pain. A real injury caused an unmistakable pain, but  the agony of not stopping when the muscles tell you too is something different. Not pain. But it is physical agony. Grief can do it. So can holding one’s breath for a long time. Or getting tickled mercilessly. It’s a powerful desire for escape, for relief. I once had too much coffee before a short flight in a very small airplane from the Bay Area to Bishop at the foot of the White Mountains in eastern California. By Yosemite the bladder was screeching at me. It was not pain but it was agony for sure. The astronomer pilot put down at the tiny strip at Hot Creek, near Mammoth Lakes, so I could sprint past the giggling guys in the control shack and get better in the little room down the hall. From there it was just another 15 minutes down to Bishop. That’s one condition where no countering euphoria ever kicks in until it ends.

Other headlines to note:

• Nicholas Bakalar: A Lizard That Builds With the Family in Mind ; A shorty for the Observatory roundup, with a touch of finesse. Delightful is that Bakalar found room to note that this lizard’s singular sociality was well known to residents of Australia’s northern desert. It is scientists who are surprised. It’d be so easy to squeeze in some more science and sacrifice this tiny bit that makes another society, the human one, part of the story. Good that he did not.
• Carl Zimmer - Turning to Biomechanics to Build a Kinder, Gentler Rib Spreader ; Not just about a better surgical appliance, but more a profile of the zeal, nay the near obsession with narrow interests, that drives some people to distinction. I think Carl Z. has one of those buttons in his pocket that I imagined above and that’d provide instant cool, calm confidence. How else write so much so smoothly and ably without bursting one’s seams from anxiety and the yips?
• John Tierney – A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness ; Nice exploration of what a satisfying life entails, emotionally. Also an illus that oddly resonates with the fibieropticalized mouse story above. And, finally, nice to know there are people at the top of the American Enterprise Institute that think about things other than why the answer to all economic problems at all times no  matter what is to make sure the nation’s overtaxed and underappreciated rich people get much richer than they already are.
• Tara Parker Pope – Taking Measure of Weight-Loss Plans, and the Studies of Them ; Xlnt take-down of a Consumer Reports analysis of which popular diet plan wins.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit