What’s in a picture? A lot, as we shall see from today’s news, when it comes to helping readers grasp a story’s essence. But, to back up about a thousand years…

In 1054 – July 4, in fact, say some – Arab and Chinese astronomers recorded a bright star that appeared in the constellation Taurus. Even in daylight it remained visible for more than three weeks. It left behind a fuzzy, expanding nebula still easy to see with a modest telescope or even binoculars. 18th-century astronomer Charles Messier made it the first object, M1, in his famed Messier Catalog of things that first looked like comets, but just sit in one place. Today we sort them as galaxies, planetary nebulae, supernova remnants such as this one, and other gassy, broad things. After better telescopes revealed M1′s elaborately wreathed arms of glowing dust and gas, it gained the name Crab Nebula. Modern instruments show it as a spitfire. Some 6,300 light years away and now about ten light years in diameter, it crackles with emissions all across the spectrum. They include high energy X-rays and gamma rays. At its center is a pulsar, a dizzily-spinning neutron star squashed by its gravity to a size less than some asteroids but with the mass of a sun, white hot. It is in a real sense the high level nuclear waste left from its parent star’s thermonuclear exhaustion and gravitational self-destruction.  The Crab Pulsar whips intense magnetic field lines through surrounding ionic soup and provides steady power to the whole stirmash. It is degenerate, too, and among astrophysicists that is not taken as a character judgment.

So? It’s in the news because what was once thought to be mostly pretty-looking, and mostly a reliably steady source of electromagnetic glow, and a good place to see high energy astrophysics fairly nearby, has for months been squirting sudden, intense blasts of gamma rays even though the rest of its emission spectrum has stayed pretty much routine. Some of these gamma rays are muscular photons indeed, exceeding in energy any particle that the Large Hadron Collider will ever spawn (unless it finds new physics that is really really new). Something different, something  violent is happening in the Crab.

Two stories so far today catch us up:

• Science News – Ron Cowen: Crab Nebula activity keeps confounding ; News is from The Third Fermi Symposium, a meeting in Rome devoted to results from NASA’s Fermi space observatory.  Cowen covered it from afar after looking through the program and doing interviews. Reviews the first puzzling outbursts, seen in January (see earlier Tracker post), and new data gathered last month. “The nebula outdid itself,” he writes. The bursts fluctuate so quickly they must come from a small region, for a reason associated with the speed of light that Cowen touches on but does not quite explain. More important is that the Crab’s behavior is a mystery.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Crab Nebula’s gamma-ray flare mystifies astronomers ; Filed from Rome. Palmer includes links to the meeting’s web page and, notably, to a NASA press release that describes the first round of gamma bursts in January and a coincident, equally weird overall dimming of its luminosity. At the meeting, he finds good explanation why the recent, even more intense bursts make no obvious sense and are spectacular with or without explanation.

What’s interesting to me, aside from the natural fascination to find big-brained experts completely befuddled, is the pictures, and also is these two stories’ different stress on the neutron star in the middle. The photo here, by astronomers who overlaid Hubble telescope data across visible and IR wavelengths, goes with the BBC story. Science News, far as I can tell, provided no image. Another distinction between the stories is that while Cowen at Science News barely mentions the whirling neutron star as a likely key to the puzzle, Palmer dwells on it extensively.

This colorful picture just above that BBC used doesn’t really help readers, except to illustrate that the Crab is stunning, and is a busy place. But to just look at this image provides little hint where in that vast tangle a relatively tiny spot is machine-gunning gamma rays in our direction and who knows where else.

Well, here’s my suggestion to help get readers in on the mystery. This last photo, from the Chandra X-ray telescope, is the Crab, too. All it shows is its innermost region – but still a large expanse – and only in X-rays. The bright spot is the Crab pulsar. A jet of shmutz is shooting to the left and one sees hints of another one going the other way.  Arrayed in axial symmetry are wreaths of intensely shock-heated plasma, resembling the arms of a hurricane. Looks like a big ray gun to me. A reader sees this – along with the prettier ones above – and he or she is at least in on the mystery, has a clue where to start. That pulsar’s gotta be the key, one thinks. And if it turns out not to hold the answer, then one gets to be stupefied in surprise right along with the folks with the PhDs.

*UPDATE: More stories are in, powered in part by a fresh press release:

• Space.com (no byline) : Crab Nebula superflare has scientists mystified ;
• Daily Mail (UK) Eruption of enormous flare from exploded supernova baffles Nasa scientists ; Mashup and rewrite, but pretty good – and lots of illus, as is par with the Mail on line. But alas, not the Chandra image I championed.

Grist for the Mill:

Third Fermi Symposium ; Chandra, etc., collection of Crab Nebula images.

*UPDATE NASA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Yesterday I posted on a BBC story that provided links to some of the source material, including long reports, that went into the writing of it. Today, another good example comes along. To be sure, since the web began some news stories on line have including hyperlinks to supporting information. But is it a growing practice at major outlets? Seems so. Can’t be sure. Welcome if so.

Here is another such buttressed piece from a major news outlet:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Fire and rain: Fed scientists point to wild April ;  Several sources, not all in agreement, discussing whether there is any underlying reason for such severe storminess, drought, flood, and wildfire to have hit the country in just one month. Maybe its El Niñ0-Southern Oscillation, in part, but that isn’t the whole answer, says here. At the bottom are links directly to a pair of NOAA reports.

A question is whether articles such as  that in the Guardian recently from Ben Goldacre have sparked more on line publications to include direct access to the reports or other base material that reporters used. A subsidiary question is whether reporters ought to include a link to any press releases they consult. We do it here at the Tracker, often enough, but that is to share with colleagues, as well as those members of the public who read us, a glimpse of what reporters had to work with (and also to reveal reporters who rely mostly or entirely on press releases). Some releases are sublime. But for a news outlet to routinely circulate press releases, in light of the traditional high-end opinion among reporters that they are good as news tips but subject to deep doubt regarding their objectivity, might be a poor idea.

- Charlie Petit

An AGN, we all surely recall, is an active galactic nucleus. They power quasars, radio galaxies, and lots of other of these once-called island universes whose central regions pop and sizzle with X-rays and a huge spectrum of other radiation. Some galaxies have AGNs, some don’t, and word is that for the first time astronomers have watched one switch to a have from a have not. The supposed reason is that a black hole, previously isolated from significant amounts of matter to consume, encountered a cloud of gas or something and lit up.

Last month we highlighted a small burst of stories heralding discovery of a mysterious, bright beacon in the distance that lit abruptly and didn’t go out. Even then the notion that a formerly quiet black hole got suddenly busy consuming matter was a leading hypothesis. At Science News vigilant astronomer writer Ron Cowen moved the ball forward this week, reporting a new paper that strengthens the argument for the rousing of a galactic supermassive black hole as the reason. Interesting is the semi-embargo of the article. It is on line where, doubtless, it has been read by every scientific authority interested in such things. However, it has also been submitted to the journal Nature. So, the authors would not talk with Cowen. Other experts did not hesitate to weigh in with their thoughts.

What, exactly, is then the  reason for such an embargo?

image source ;

- Charlie Petit

Three reviews and updates on familiar themes grabbed the front of the nation’s premier newspaper science section today. So let’s start on page 3 with something fresher and more surprising.

That news story, which itself could have been written any time in the last few years but has not, so much, brings word Antarctica’s most abundant penguins. These are the Adelies, which live down there by the millions but maybe not as many millions as there have been. They are thriving in the southernmost end of their range in the Ross Sea that comprises McMurdo Station, Ross Island, and a lot of glacial shelves and sea ice. Northern California freelancer Andy Isaacson filed from there news not just on the Adelie, but the region’s general ecosystem. This notably includes an argument that these mid-sized penguins’ recent, local flourishing is due in part to a slight warming of East Antarctica, shifting its range south. Also in the mix are a rise in winds that blast clear spots, or polynyas, in sea ice and, most interesting, fishing fleets that are taking out some of their competition, toothfish, for smaller fish that , along with krill, sustain the birds. Sadder for me is that, just as penguin researcher Bill Fraser said 11 years ago on one of my more fabulous assignments ever would happen – two weeks at Palmer Station on the dramatically warmer Antarctic Peninsula – the northern Adelies up there are now down to about 10 percent what they were half a century ago. If things keep up, sources in the Ross Sea tell Isaacson, the same will happen in the Ross Sea – pushing Adelies from their last redoubt  as the floating ice shelf melts farther up the sea,  toward the pole , and into a winter darkness where Adelies dare not and cannot reside.

The section front carries three stories, each a revisit to a familiar topic:

• Claudia Dreifus: Life and the Cosmos, Word by Painstaking Word ; An interview, conducted with weeks of preparation and presubmitted questions, with Stephen Hawking. The famed, nearly paralyzed physicist assembled answers on his word processor and voice synthesizer. Good questions – such as do you really have ALS? – but the saga adn triumphs of Hawking’s career are familiar. It’s the lead article, with a zippy drawing. I’d have swapped it for the penguins.
• Guy Gugliotta: Fountains of Optimism for Life Way Out There ; Signs and inferences of liquid water across a broad swath of the solar system encourage astrobiologists’ optimism. One is unsure why Titan’s Ontario Lacus is the illus – a pool of hydrocarbons seems an unlikely abode for microbes. But slushy cryovolcanoes nearby may have water. There is even word here of watery mists high above Venus’s scalding surface.
• John Noble Wilford: Tracking Lineage Through a Bramble: Three decades after a dramatic face-off between Don Johanson and Richard Leakey over the best way to diagram the descent of mankind from various lines of more primitive relatives, the pair meet again at the same place in New York. It’s a mellower conversation. One infers that  the second one was richer, too. But our ancestral route is not a lot clearer, what with new species and new ways to give competing answers to paleontologist’s questions. Still on the wish list is to find a good fossil candidate as last common ancestor of us and of chimpanzees. This says it existed perhaps 6 million or more years ago – a bit further back than was the standard guess a decade or more ago.
• Nicholas Wade – Neanderthals and Early Humans May Not Have Mingled Much ; Perched inside on the inside jump to Wilford’s story. Reports that better carbon dating implies modern humans and Neanderthals probably met, probably interbred, but the latter didn’t last very long once the newer species showed up.
• Perri Klass MD – Fixated by Screens, but Seemingly Nothing Else ; Not that the press is all that good at debunking bunk that almost everyone believes. Many parents persist in believing that their kids get even more hyperactive due to what they call a “sugar high.” N0 candy,” they might tell a grandma or babysitter, “The kid’ll be tearing the house apart.” Dr. Klass tries here to puncture another unsupported idea about true hyperactivity – that one can diagnose his or or child as definitely not having attention deficit disorder because look!: he or she can watch TV or play video games for hours. Such feeling, it says here, is to misunderstand the nature of video games and most commercial television.

As usual, much more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Somewhere in its broken bowels the Fukushima Daiichi power plant is still glowing, still leaking, still triggering readings nearby that something is radiologically amiss. So along comes the Committee on Climate Change, established in the UK to advise the government on how to meet greenhouse gas targets, saying a few more atomic power stations are sensible parts of the mix – even better than any rush toward costly, offshore wind farms.

One wonders how well this will go over.

First story I spotted on this is from BBC‘s Richard Black, with “Nuclear ‘cheapest low-carbon option’ for UK energy. ” He filed that Sunday. Today he files a report that would seem to demand cross referencing with the first: “Renewables can fuel society, say world climate advisers.” This one is from a meeting in Abu Dhabi of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that concludes with guarded reassurance that, despite the unspoken-here surge in public doubt over greenhouse effects, the world can drastically cut its carbon emissions via solar, wind, and other renewables.

Two things to note here. First, in a perfect world a reporter like Black, rather than frantically trying to file stories as fast as he can for the daily feed, would have stepped back, chewed on both items, and assayed to blend them into a coherent whole (along with other floccules of energy news).

Second, in each of these pieces he linked, at the bottoms of the stories, to the raw material – the Committee on Climate Change’s report, and the IPCC site and its latest report on renewables. This is worth mentioning as the Spring issue of ScienceWriters, newsletter of the US Nat’l Assoc. of Science Writers, just came in. It has much good stuff in it, including reprint of a plea from Ben Goldacre, a columnist at the UK’s Guardian newspaper, that science journalists include as many links as possible to the raw papers, reports, and other fodder used in writing their stories. I linked to the original Goldacre piece (which also was topic of a Paul Raeburn post here at the tracker.)

Seeing examples of such links to primary sources is refreshing. Many do it. Not enough.

A third thing: both the UK report and IPCC report received wider coverage, which I couldn’t get to (see p.s. below).

And by the way, and circling back to nuclear power, its benefits, its drawbacks, and the leaking Fukushima, before signing off for the day here’s a useful, evergreen update and fact-box type account on that:

• Reuters – Mayumi Negishi, Ten Ed Lyn: : Health risks from troubled Japan nuclear plant; Seems accurate enough. If readers in Britain read it, maybe they won’t be too skeptical of seeing some new nukes built.  But wouldn’t it be better were it to link to some official info sources of further use to the reader?

- Charlie Petit

p.s. Not much of a haul today. The creaky Toshiba laptop and its Windows XP that has served well for six years now is locking up a lot. New machine with TONS of RAM and a faster processor etc. is in the works. Productivity, one hopes, will go up.

Ford Vox is a medical writer. So is Theresa Brown. They are good at it.  Each has a different day job – she as a registered nurse for cancer patients at a big Pittsburgh hospital, he as a brain injury doctor in Boston. (Corrected – earlier post put her in NYCity).  She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times‘s Well blog; he writes a regular column for The Atlantic. And over the weekend they had an agreement over the general nature of medical work place bullying but disagreement about the best response to it.

The gist is that on Saturday, on the Times’s op-ed page, she wrote of an incident in which a surgeon, asked by a good natured patient whom to blame for a late test result, pointed at her, the nearest nurse, and said ‘if you want to scream at anyone, scream at her.’ He later told her sure she could quote him, as it’s a time honored tradition among doctors to advise one another, ‘blame the nurse whenever anything goes wrong.’

Nurse Brown’s column blistered the doc, without naming names, as providing an example of lingering mistreatment by doctors of nurses. Doctor Vox, at his blogspot at the Atlantic, promptly wrote in agreement that too much bullying and disrespect infects clinical settings, but saying also that Brown raised the ante too much. It wouldn’t be hard for people at the hospital to know which doctor did the supposed bullying, so to parade the one incident in the New York Times was a sort of retaliatory public bullying in turn, but of much higher impact.

This is quite a conversation starter in health care circles, I’d venture. Vox clued the tracker in on it, thank you very much.

The two articles:

• NYTimes (May 7) – Theresa Brown: Physician, Heel Thyself ;
• The Atlantic (May 8 ) – Ford Vox: It’s Nurse vs. Doctor on the New York Times Op-Ed Page ;

At least one other blogger doctor rose to the defense of his profession – while agreeing yes of course doctors or anybody else should minimize public harassment or ridicule and so forth of colleagues. Not all docs, not even a sizeable minority, would have popped off a gratuitous insult like the one described, this additional column says – ie, Ms. Brown’s account tars  with too large a brush.

• MedPage Today – Kevin Pho, MD: Theresa Brown unfairly blames doctors for hospital bullying.

This is a tough one to call. Is there really an issue? Nobody seems to think the doctor’s quick quip was very smart. But I’m not sure he deserved to be singled out as an exhibit of insensitive workplace denigration or aggression. The patient, in a joking mood, asked whom to blame and the doc immediately points at the nurse. Shoot me, but I laughed when I read that. It’s funny because it is so stupid. It’s almost self-denigrating, although I don’t know if it worked without having heard it myself. Perhaps it’s a bit like the punchline to the old joke about a farmer, hearing suspicious noises in the henhouse, who shouts  “Who’s in there?!” and the would-be pullet purloiner shouts back, “Nobody in here but us chickens!”. It’s funny because, again, it’s idiotic. So maybe the doc was deliberately and transparently acting the arrogant top dog and it’s the best joke he could think up on the fly. Or maybe he’s a habitual offender. I don’t know. But to frame a serious discussion of hen-pecking in the workplace by this incident is a bit much.

By the way, to keep the larger worlds of both in mind, here are these two medical professionals-cum-science-writers’ recent missives on other topics, both worthy:

• NYTimes Well Blog May 4 – Theresa Brown: One Nurse, One Patient ; On the intense stress of making fast, tough calls when a patient is in trouble ;
• The Atlantic May 5 – Ford Vox: Bogus Balms Bureau: Business Group Props Up STD Scams ; A serious bit of legitimate medical muck raking, naming names.

- Charlie Petit

Book reviews are not something we look at often on the Tracker, but when a review includes science reporting and speculation on the nature of illness, it’s fair game.

Roger Rosenblatt is a distinguished journalist who has written for The Washington Post, Time, and many others, including The New Yorker, where he wrote a piece that’s relevant to this post and which I will mention in a bit. In yesterday’s New York Times Book Review, Rosenblatt wrote a front-page review of The Boy in the Moon, a painful memoir by Ian Brown, the father of a child with a severe genetic abnormality. Underline the word severe. Rosenblatt’s review begins this way:

At night, Ian Brown’s 8-year-old son, Walker, grunts as he repeatedly punches himself in the head and ears. His face is distorted, with an over-large brow, sloping eyes and a thick lower lip. He cannot speak. He cannot eat solid food, and takes in formula through a tube from a feedbag powered by a pump. The tube runs through a hole in his sleeper into a valve in his belly. When Walker’s own punches begin to awaken him, his father must disconnect the tube and lift the 45-pound boy out of his crib, carry him down three flights of stairs and try to coax him back to sleep. He also must change Walker’s ballooning diaper, as the boy is not toilet trained, and prevent him from smearing excrement every­where. He then feeds him a bottle and tiny doses of Pablum. The kitchen is covered with the film of Pablum dust.

That sounds real to me, and terrifying. I have not read Brown’s book, but if that’s representative of what’s in it, I can’t imagine why I would want to pick it up. I get it. The situation is horrible, almost unendurable.

My reaction is, however, beside the point. What I’m interested in here is the way Rosenblatt reports this in his review. He works hard to turn this terrible tragedy into something that is somehow enlightening and instructive, something that tells us what it means to be human. This isn’t a horribly ill, suffering child; he’s a lesson, a moral guidepost. The boy’s name is Walker (Rosenblatt notes the irony). Rosenblatt writes, “…Walker is close to us. He is the underdeveloped us, the unreachable us of whom we are always dimly aware.”

That is incorrect. Walker is not an underdeveloped human; he is a child whose development has tragically gone awry. And what does Rosenblatt mean when he writes that Walker represents something in us of which we are always dimly aware. What could that be?  It’s a nice bit of language, but it’s hard to know what it means.

Rosenblatt is similarly confusing when he writes about the relationship between Brown and his wife. This is his description: “Along the way, the parents despair, quarrel, blame themselves for Walker’s lack of progress, fall into dark silences. There are money worries. Walker’s formula alone costs $12,000 a year. Husband and wife have no privacy. They pay less attention to each other than to Walker. They learn to live with him as a sideshow attraction in public.” Elsewhere, Rosenblatt writes that “Walker brings a strange, sweet love to his family, not because he exhibits love himself, but rather because he elicits their capacity for it.” Further, when Brown finds out that a genetic test is now available that would have alerted his parents early during pregnancy to his condition, they argue over whether it would have been right to have an abortion. I wouldn’t describe any of this as “a strange, sweet love.”

Again, I give Brown a pass. We all need to do whatever is necessary to cope with life’s challenges, and some of us face greater challenges than others. Many of us try to find meaning in tragedy. And I applaud Rosenblatt for trying to find something redeeming in Walker’s story. I’m not going to comment on what Brown says about Walker, because as Walker’s father, he’s entitled to say and believe whatever he wants, if it helps him survive. (And I haven’t read the book.)

Rosenblatt, too, has known family tragedy. In a book and in an article published in The New Yorker in 2008, he described the sudden death of his daughter, Amy, at 38, while she was running on a treadmill in the downstairs playroom of her house. Rosenblatt, too, gets a pass from me on whatever he wants to say about that; he’s a father who lost a child.

But that’s not a reason to report and write inaccurately about disease in his review of The Boy in the Moon. In his review, Rosenblatt repeatedly substitutes metaphor and speculation for what he might have reported about the book. We don’t help readers by romanticizing severe illness, or turning Walker into a story teller, as Rosenblatt tries to do: “Walker cannot tell the stories inside him, but his inability may be his story, the one told in silence, of frustration and gratitude.”

I’d like to believe, as Rosenblatt writes (paraphrasing someone else), that “as relentlessly difficult and sorrowful as is the life that Walker shapes, it also insists on something beautiful in reaction to it.” We know too well from the headlines that lives like Walker’s often elicit ugly reactions, and that our society’s treatment of disabled children is far from ideal. Rosenblatt should have conveyed that.

The review reminds me of the bestselling book, and subsequent movie, The Lovely Bones. Wouldn’t it be nice if, as in that book, people didn’t really die, but were able to watch their friends and families on some celestial cable show, and comment? Wouldn’t it be nice if children like Walker inspired us and elicited nothing but love and told us stories of frustration and gratitude?

It would be nice. But reporting this as if it were true doesn’t make it so.

- Paul Raeburn

It was back in the mid-1970s, I’m pretty sure, that I first heard about the Gravity Probe B experiment, and it was already an old idea. The plan was to put, inside a cavity of a large satellite, a  tiny additional satellite – containing perfectly spherical,  fast-spinning orbs of niobium. The latter, were to orbit the Earth while their protector sealed them away from distraction and maneuvered itself enough to prevent any variations in their relative velocities from drifting them to the wall of their chamber. Thus would they be  effected purely by gravity, free of other magnetic, trace atmospheric, or other bother.

Such a system was to reveal whether one implication of Albert Einstein’s formulation of gravity is, ever-so-slightly, torqueing the geometry of space near the turning Earth. So sublime. So hard to do. There was even a fire in the lab where it was developed. It was a punching bag for the accountants and reviewers at NASA. Year after year passed with the project sputtering and nearly dying. The odyssey of frustration finally seemed to end seven years ago after it left the pad and set out, for several months, gathering data. Then further gloom – patches of static electricity on the surfaces of the spheres were discovered to have schmeared the results close to and perhaps all the way into meaninglessness

The news this week is that, after further years of analysis of the data gathered by the snake-bit bird’s instruments, Gravity Probe B’s handlers say it worked. The boss of the project, Francis Everitt, started in on it as a young man, and now is old. Congratulations. Congratulations even though astronomers, watching spinning pulsars and other such things far off in space (I’m going by memory now), had already concluded that Albert got another one right. This time it was proven, and further refined, by a work of mankind.

Much more detail in the stories, most of which by my reckoning don’t do this mission’s drama justice but do have the facts of it:

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: 52 Years and $750 Million Prove Einstein Was Right ;
• ZDNet -Rupert Goodwins: ‘Epic’ GP-B NASA probe proves Einstein right ;
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Stanford study backs Einstein’s relativity theory ;
• Science News (via USNews&World Report) Devin Powell: Gravity Probe B Finally Pays Off ; NIce detail here on the private funding that allowed data reduction to continue after NASA pulled the plug.
• Wall Street Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Good Thinking, Einstein ;
• New Scientist -David Shiga: Beleagured mission measures swirling space-time at last ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Gravity Probe B confirms Einstein effects ;
• Time Mag. Techland – Chris Gayomali: Over 50 Years Later, NASA Probe Proves Two of Einstein’s Theories Correct ;
• … could go on, there is lots of coverage.

Two things to add.

First, nobody can describe – not that I’ve seen – what the heck frame dragging is via plain English metaphor, analogies, and other tools science writers use when they don’t really know what they’re talking about (and those who do, can’t get it across to readers anyway.) That doesn’t detract so much from the story, and is explained best by this cartoon that science writer Ed Yong, Brit tweetermaniac, shared around today.

Second, many years ago I encountered the best press kit, one of poetic grace, I’ve ever read. It was on Gravity Probe B. One of my regrets is that I lost it – I’d saved it for quite awhile. The writer was Arthur Fisher, who was later to be science and technology editor at Popular Science. He was an exceedingly fine man. He passed away a few years ago. I wish Arthur were around to learn that the thing worked.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford U. Press Release

- Charlie Petit

I got all excited when I saw this headline, over a BBC story by Jonathan Amos: US and Europe plan new spaceship.

But it’s not spaceship as in the old Buck Rogers, Isaac Asimov mode, or sleeker new shuttle either, but is a nascent plan to make an unmanned, largely robotic delivery truck to take cargo to the Int’l Space Station. It would, says here, draw on docking and other hardware from the existing, European-made Automated Transfer Vehicle, or ATV. That one has been sharing with Russian-made Progress ships and Japans HTV-2 the job of taking good stuff up to and trash back down from the station.

So,  it’s not as exciting as something tourists might ride in.  But after looking into it this far, I might as well put up the post. Amos’s story gives the rough specs, the current state of delivery services to the station in light of the looming last flights of the US shuttles, and word that ISS users plan to keep the station’s lights on well into the 2020s (at one time, the US was set to scrap it, dump it into the Pacific, soon after the shuttles’ last flights.) That’s good. It was a waste of money to build the station, according to widely shared opinion, but that does not mean it is a waste of money to keep using it.

What the story does not explore is whether US participation in any joint, gov’t run space cargo system is plausible any time soon,  considering current emphasis on turning such tasks over to private industry initiative. (Check out this missive from SpaceX’s Elon Musk, the favorite billionaire of most space-tech geeks if one does not count movie Iron Man CEO Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.).

Amos’s story got picked up and rewritten, with acknowledgment, at Popular Science by Clay Dillow, and at the redOrbit website.

- Charlie Petit

Trend in selected cropland growing seasons

Well, no wonder America is the leading industrial nation in percentage of population that says HAH & BOSH!  to global warming. We got none. Or not much. So far. In fact we Yanks may have cooled off a bit in our vast tracts that grow staple crops. That is among conclusions of a study in this week’s Science on the impacts of climate change on harvests of rice, corn, wheat, and soya. Globally, corn (maize) and wheat appear to have yielded a few percentage points less in recent decades than they would have were there no rising average temperature and associated climate changes – and is a likely, partial explanation for rising food prices.

Rice and soy are roughly unaffected to date. The upshot is that further, expected warming will make it harder to feed a growing human population. The US stands out – it is four for four in having no perceptible climate impact on those crops’ yields since 1980. The reason, again: it’s among the least warmed regions of the world. The report says nothing about impacts of grain diversion to biofuel production on food costs. It also, apparently, did not try to parse out the possible impacts of higher CO2, or CO2-fertilization, on yields of these crops (they handle carbon differently – wheat, rice, and soya are so-called C3 plants, while maize is C4).

Just wondering here. How does this peculiar sort of American exceptionalism fit speculation that epochal recent tornado outbreaks in the US South, and Ohio River Valley are a signature of changing climate?  One supposes that the US average temp could sit, but changed storm patterns and other wind shifts plus higher humidity brought globally by greenhouse forcings could alter tornado odds. That’s my research-free quasi-hypothesis.

The study in Science, by authors at Stanford U., Columbia U., and the National Bureau of Economic Research, was news in several outlets. As reflected by quotes several reporters contacted one or more authors, but collection of outside reaction is sparse – with a few noted exceptions.

• Reuters – Gerard Wynn: Climate change has spurred food prices: study ; Points out that the study did not try to account for any changes in weather intensity – more cloudbursts, more heatwaves, etc. – that may not be reflected by simple temperature averages.
• BBC – Mark Kinver : Climate shifts ‘hit global wheat yields’ ; Kinver gave the lead author, at Stanford, a call to get his own quotes and further explanation – and a caution that the last 30 years may not be a guide to how coming decades will go, with changing crop patterns and other adaptations by farmers.
• NY Times – Justin Gillis: Global Warming Reduces Expected Yields of Harvests in Some Countries, Study Says ; The hed is too ambiguous and fuzzy – ‘expected’ yields implies it reflects guesswork on what’s in store. “GW reduced yields…” better characterizes the study’s chief finding. Gillis quotes the lead author directly, but provides no comment from authorities unaffiliated with the study. It is a fairly brief piece.
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman:  Climate change disrupting food production: study ; It’s not just the US grain belt that has been spared, but so also have neighboring regions of Canada and of northern Mexico, says here. He quotes the author – says explicitly it’s via email.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger : Scientists: Climate change takes a toll on crops ; Good for Berger. He called around. He quotes a Farm Bureau Federation man opposed to cap-and-trade (says it’d drag farmers back to 40 acres and a mule) and follows that immediately by wondering whether US skepticism reflects lack of US warming. He also gets regional reaction to the report from two professors.
• Bloomberg – Rudy Ruitenberg: Climate Change Reduced Wheat, Corn Yields, U.S. Researchers Say ; He cites a few commodity prices, but otherwise kept it short and without outside comment.
• The Economist: Hindering harvests / Changes in the climate are already having an effect on crop yields – but not yet a very big one ; the writer, with no byline as is customary at this pub, pointedly notes that the declines are of a narrow sort. Harvests are up for all four crops – the analysis says however that for two of them climate change seems to have limited growth below where it otherwise would have been. The writer also finds speculation that without biofuel complications, food prices might not have gone up despite global warming’s effect.
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag, Juliet Eilperin: Report: Global warming already crimping crop production, pushing prices higher ; Two reporters can usually get more done than one, and do so here. They cite the authors, the UN’s Food and Ag. Organization , a Nebraska professor who faults the study for not getting into farming adaptations, Lester Brown at the Earth Policy Institute, a man at Oxfam, and an oldish IPCC report that said that for the US, when warming hits it ought, initially, to raise crop yields.
• PostMedia/Calgary Herald – Tom Spears: Climate change hardly visible here: Crop study ; A conversational and localized lede: When your lawn scorches or the geraniums croak, it may be premature to blame global warming.’ That’s because most of N. America including the crowded parts of Canada haven’t been hit (one has to murmer at this point, check Nunavut in the north. Warming is profound up there. But not enough for wheat).  Spears has a remark from the top climatologist at the federal Environment Canada.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: Crop yields fall as temperatures rise ; Two outside experts, one US, one Brit.
• Science News – Daniel Strain: Warming dents corn and wheat yields ; Shorty, but he squeezes in pertinent work from England.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The great worldwide amphibian decline, reported among scientists for two decades or so now and echoed in popular media, got a sharp update this week in the San Francisco Chronicle by science editor David Perlman.

Given the scant room available for science or anything much else in this age’s shrunken Chronicle, Perlman jammed in a lot. As has been widely reported, a fungus called chytrid is the prime, lead suspect. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he reports, a team from San Francisco State University described how DNA tests on old collections of preserved frogs, toads, and such things as that document the spread of the fungus across large regions of the globe.

There was no picture, but I found the one above in a Scientific American article in 2009, on the exact same general issue.

See also:

• Discovery News – Emily Sohn: An Epidemic Among Amphibians ; From the same report as in the Chronicle story.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Eggs head for the hills in project to save endangered frog species; An enterprise report from the field, where Australian scientists are trying to keep some frogs thriving in a chytrid-free-zone. One also learns (me anyway), or the story at least implies, that it snows in Australia.

Grist for the Mill: SF State U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

To digress. I recently met a friendly bunch of people who won’t believe a word of the news that is behind this post. Moved to keep up on things, and expressly on what people in the science communication biz are saying, yours truly recently attended a meeting of Tea Party Patriots. The speaker was of interest – he was to describe tools for recognizing the difference between politically-driven science and real science. For my dashed-off report on that meeting, read this. By its lights, all that follows below reflects mere politically-driven science. It is not the real deal. So I heard and a substantial fraction of Americans believe. That picture is not from that meeting, but from the scientific congress in the news below.

The news, which to make things clear in light of the above sure looks believable to me,  is that an umbrella scientific body, the International Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, pre-released in Copenhagen a report yesterday (linked in Grist below). Ministers and other policy makers of Arctic nations are to receive official notice at a meeting in ever-greener Greenland next week. Its executive summary says predicted, strong  feedback from the moderate warming already in place has kicked in. Floating sea ice is shrinking faster, and so are permafrost regions, grounded marine glaciers, and ice caps. River flows are are swelling, fed by ice melt as well as more rain.  Recent changes “are dramatic and represent an obvious departure from the long-term patterns.” Not good if you want to keep an Arctic and a planet like the one in the history books. Sea level rise could be a meter or two by 2100 with the Arctic one big reason – a lot more than the most recent IPCC report held out as the best, documented supposition.

It got picked up widely, largely reported straight and without much attention to what climate contrarians might say about it. That is, very little false balance evident in popular media. The lead angle, most places, is the report’s global implications for sea level.

Stories:

• AP – Karl Ritter, : Climate scientists told to ‘stop speaking in code,” ; The angle here, taken from one speech calling for scientists to say what they think in plain language, might be taken as a slap at the influence or skill of popular media. That’s exactly what science and enviro writers on the global warming beat have been trying to do for decades, with some effect but not enough to dissolve political logjams against action. One might suggest that scientists already have been saying things pretty directly. Elocution lessons are unlikely to change things much. Genuine political leadership, rather than opinion poll deference, could however help.
• AP: Charles J. Hanley, Karl Ritter : As Greenland melts faster into sea, researchers forecast up to 5-foot rise in ocean levels ; A more straight-news story from Ritter’s solo job, immediately above. Notably, includes input from independent sources outside the report’s authors.
• Nunatsiaq Online – Jane George: Calls for political action on Arctic climate hcange: scientists / “The planet is going to be roasted by 2100″ ; Ordinarily I’d bump this tiny pub, which circulates in northern-most Canada’s Nunavut Territory, way down the list. But reporter George quotes and paraphrases lines from the meeting right at the top that are too pithy to put off. Plus it’s clear Ms. George is there – she took the photo top right, showing Arctic specialist
• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Seas could rise up to 1.6 meters by 2100: study ; News of interest here – this report was supposed to have been embargoed for one more day. Doyle does not say who pushed it out earlier than AMAP wanted – even the site EmbargoWatch had nothing on it when checked this morning.
• AFP – Marlowe Hood: Oceans could rise 1.6 meters by 2100: Study ;
• TIME Mag Ecocentric Blog – Bryan  Walsh: The Arctic Meltdown Accelerates ; Picks up some from the AP, with credit, and concludes with “We can’t say we weren’t warned.”
• Voice of America – Rosanne Skirble:  Arctic Ice Melting Faster Than Predicted ; The text and audio are essentially the same, but listening is somehow more persuasive than reading it.
• Sydney Morning Herald – Ben Cubby: Sea levels rising higher and faster ;
• Alaska Dispatch – Doug O’Harra: Arctic: Long-term outlook for summertime sea ice grim as ever ; Notable for linking the Copenhagen news with this week’s reports from US labs and  agencies that monitor Arctic ice. For this date, for instance, sea ice volume in the Arctic is lower than any other time on the instrumented record. I don’t know much about the Arctic Dispatch, an on line outlet, but it is substantial enough to host an upcoming conference on responsible development in the dawning new and warmer, less-icy Arctic.
• The Voice of Russia – Natalya Kovalenko: Arctic ice is melting fast ; This one has that ‘balance’ others don’t. You decide if it looks false.
• Daily Mail (UK) David Derbyshire: Cities under threat as sea levels set to significantly rise by 2100 ; Not bad, just a bit hyperbolic. It does have, well buried, more of that balance we read about. Derbyshire rang up well-known neo-catastrophist and climate contrarian (but non-scientist) Benny Peiser for a comment. The latter said bosh – the new report is “a bit alarmist.”

Grist for the Mill: IMAP report – SNOW, WATER, ICE and PERMAFROST in the Arctic ;

- Charlie Petit