Sometimes as a science reporter I get battle-envy regarding war correspondents, out there braving bullets and uniformed bullies and lots else too awful to think about, and then can come home to tell awesome stories, nonchalantly. Of course such envy occurs generally while safe and snug. The closest  to organized threat I recall being while on the job was more than 20 years ago, talking with an angry rancher called Junior deep in Brazil’s Amazon. He looked spookily like then-SF Giant first baseman Will Clark. Junior wanted SF Chronicle photographer Scott Sommerdorf and me to forget visiting his property, supposedly a place of illegal burning of the forest, or else. The else? He told our would-be hired boatsman in Portuguese that if he took us up the Acre River to his place  his outboard motor would be sleeping with the fishes. We offered more, but not an engine . Tense, no bullets.

The hazards are significant for many environmental journalists. They get documentation this week in the dominant US news industry trade pub, by the executive director of Internews‘s Earth Journalism Network,  :

• Columbia Journalism Review – James Fahn: Red Alerts on the Green Beat / Violence and threats severely restrain environmental coverage in much of the world; His lead example comes from Samoa, which would not have been on my list of nations where it’s dangerous report on the environment (eg Philippines, Thailand, Mexico, Russia, Myanmar, Belarus, Iran, maybe Mendocino County….).

Grist for the Mill: Fagogo mai Samoa blog: Whatever happened to the Taumeasine Tourist Project? ; A bit of backstory to Fahn’s lead anecdote.

- Charlie Petit

In mid-April operators of the Xenon100 experiment in a lab inside a mountain in Italy reported new limits on the nature of wimps or whatever dark matter particles may be – meaning they’ve seen nothing in their first 100 days of operation. Too bad, but the field got a little perkier this week.

At the American Physical Society meeting in Anaheim, workers at another underground lab, in Minnesota, said their CoGeNT experiment can do a tad bit better. It has an asymmetry in results. Something seems to be slapping their device’s detector – its heart a one-pound hunk of germanium crystal -  a little more often in summer than in winter. That’s consistent with something a different Italy-based test with sodium-iodide crystals has said it seems to have been seeing for years now. Such seasonality is tentatively credited to greater interaction when the Earth’s orbit sends it for half the year upstream in a putative flow of the ethereal stuff. Other experiments, it appears, have not seen this yearly cycle.

Dark matter, don’t we all know, is the ‘missing matter’ that provides 80 percent of the gravity that sculpts galaxies and galactic clusters and superclusters and whatnot. That’s not to be confused with dark energy, don’t we also all know, the even stranger phenomenon that counters such gravity and is blowing the cosmos toward a cold, dark void of everlasting death by expanding bleak, humorless void.

Lots of maybes in this stage of dark matter study. Press coverage consistently quotes the experts as saying the evidence is suggestive but ambiguous. Hold the champagne.

Stories:

• Science News – Ron Cowen : Signs of dark matter from Minnesota mine, One problem, Cowen reports via sources, is that the seasonal variation has to be considered iffy, considering that just 15 months of data are in hand. That’s quite aside from inability to say for sure what is tickling the detectors even if it is seasonal. A few years worth would at least make the cycle clearer. Cowen’s story is picked up in Wired with a loopy, nearly self-negating headline there: Experiment Confirms Hints of Dark Matter.
• Discover/Cosmic Variance blog – Sean Carroll: Dark Matter is Just Messing With Us Now; Things like this are right in our favorite blogging Caltech professor’s wheelhouse.
• New Scientist – Valerie Jamieson: Second experiment hints at seasonal dark matter signal ; An extra morsel of real news here: The experiment in Minnesota’s Soudan Mine lab stopped in March after a fire. They still haven’t let anybody back in to check the apparatus for damage.
• Photonist (blog) David Harris: New Possible signal of Dark Matter Subject of Debate ;

- Charlie Petit

For more than four years the PBS-NPR public TV and radio operation in San Francisco, KQED and KQED-FM, has been edifying and entertaining the locals with top-flight science programming including radio spots and features and each year 20 new half-hour episodes of a high-def TV show.  The  polish of its science unit, called Quest, has not escaped notice. Last month it received a grant for nearly $1 million from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to train teams from six more PBS stations to provide such professional, local science programming  for their audiences.

Good for Quest, congratulations etc. More important, today the embargo expires for the first of this year’s TV shows. Its two segments are fine and quite different examples why it makes a good template for other PBS  outlets eager to put some TV science on their platters. (Maybe science radio at public stations could use more such training, too, but the impression is that the radio side of community science broadcasting is better established around the country than is the more costly TV equivalent. I recently spoke at a radio workshop led by Bari Scott of SoundVision Productions and met some very impressive participants. )

KQED Quest TV shows today:

• Searching for Life on Mars – Rachel Silverman, producer, (blog here)  ; Mostly about the Mars Science Lab Rover now getting buttoned up at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab for eventual launch. One focus is on local researcher’s roles; the seamless presentation of NASA and other graphical previews of the rover’s flight, landing, and expected excursions, plus Quest’s own digital derring do, shows what a local outfit can manage.
• Into the Deep with Elephant Seals – no idea who produced this (y’know, it ought to be declared prominently at the web site so such hard workers can used them to show off to parents, friends, etc. Significant news articles whether in print or on video or audio for broadcast all merit bylines) ; Viewers don’t get just the necessary looks at a bunch of gigantic  brown maggots squirming and bloodily snot-fighting on the beach, which do not present these creatures’ most lovely sides. There also are much cooler sequences of them in the water, lots of science, and mesmerizing motion-graphic data from satellite tags revealing the big animals’ migrations across the eastern Pacific. Amazing history, although it should not have said all the elephant seals in the world are descended from a few dozen living on a Mexican island a century ago. Should have mentioned at least in passing the large and more genetically robust population of Southern Elephant Seals in and near Antarctica. Still, fine job.(UPDATE! – KQED p.r. ace Sevda Eris reports producer is Sheraz Sadiq, his producer’s notes here)

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Bitter polemic between one of the best-known scientists in Spain, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: Last year the oncologist Mariano Barbacid published in Cancer Cell a therapeutic target for lung cancers carrying c-Ras oncogenes. But yesterday, he sent a public communicate saying that he was forced to stop the research because the Spanish government didn’t allow him to accept a big amount of money from private funds.  Barbacid is a very influential scientist. He’s been extremely critical with the Ministry of Science, accusing it to loose a big opportunity. But the Ministry reacted fast, saying that the way Barbacid pretends to get the funds is not legal, that there are other ways he can follow, and that he has already done exaggerated announcements in the past. The scientific sections have done a good job contrasting both sides, but in general, they give more support to the Ministry’s view. Even some quotes from other oncologists defend that this time Barbacid has gone too far with its accusations.

Revuelo en la comunidad científica española (por lo menos la biomédica) por la controvertida nota de prensa que el exdirector (pero todavía investigador en activo) del Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Oncológicas Mariano Barbacid ha enviado criticando duramente al Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología, y acusándolo de bloquear la entrada de financiación privada para el desarrollo de un fármaco contra el cáncer de pulmón.

Muy buena reacción de los principales medios. Se nota que en España sí hay muy buenos periodistas dedicados a cubrir ciencia, con dilatada experiencia, y que conocen muy bien las interioridades del mundo científico.  Tras contextualizar la información, casi todos publican notas críticas con la posición de Barbacid.

El resumen básico es que Barbacid publicó en Cancer Cell un trabajo en ratones que abría una prometedora vía para diseñar fármacos contra el cáncer de pulmón. Pero se quejó pública y agriamente de que el ministerio le había retirado fondos para el proyecto, y no aprobado financiación privada de 10 millones de euros. El ministerio responde indignado que la vía que él propuso no es legal en España, que hay otras, y que resulta inaudito decir que ellos frenen un posible fármaco contra el cáncer. La conclusión tras leer las notas es que esta vez, Barbacid se ha excedido.

En El Mundo se pueden encontrar todos los detalles, de la mano de María Valerio: “Nuevo enfrentamiento entre Barbacid y el Gobierno”. La única pieza que además de las frases de Barbacid y del Ministerio, busca opiniones de investigadores en oncología. Uno espeta un contundente: “lo único que logra el CNIO con esto es ‘cabrear’ al resto de científicos del país”

En el El País encontramos un extraño titular de Javier Sampedro: “Barbacid paraliza el desarrollo del fármaco contra el cáncer de pulmón”. Dicho titular parece dar completamente la vuelta a la polémica y culpar directamente a Barbacid. El único argumento que encontramos para justificarlo es que al haberlo publicado, ahora el fármaco puede ser buscado por farmacéuticas extranjeras. Si andáis un poco perdidos sobre de qué va la ciencia detrás de esta diana terapéutica y posible estrategia terapéutica, leed el texto de Javier. Porque fiel a su estilo, Javier hace un valioso esfuerzo extra en explicar de manera llana el trasfondo de la investigación, qué es una diana terapéutica, o cómo actúa el c-Raf. Aplaudimos de nuevo esta capacidad y actitud de Javier.

Público también se decanta contra Barbacid por medio de Manuel Asende: “Ciencia censura a Barbacid por ‘jugar con el dolor’”. Buena nota, que a diferencia de las anteriores incluye declaraciones de Barbacid en exclusiva. En ellas Barbacid afirma que merece la pena explorar la vía que él proponía, porque solventaría la financiación del CNIO por 50 años. Aunque admitiendo que de momento sólo era un resultado experimental. El ministerio se acogió a esto último para declarar que Barbacid ya ha levantado falsas expectativas en el pasado sobre algo tan doloroso como el cáncer, y que “No se deben anunciar hallazgos básicos realizados en ratones como si el paso a la curación en humanos fuese inmediato”

Aunque más sencilla, el contenido de la nota de ABC es similar; contraponiendo las declaraciones de Barbacid y el ministerio. Sin embargo, el titular de Núria de Castro “Barbacid acusa a ciencia de frenar una investigación sobre el cáncer” transmite al lector que efectivamente quien ha obrado mal fue el gobierno.

En realidad, merecería profundizar un poco más en el asunto, y entender cómo es que se pueden escapar tan alegremente 10 millones de euros de financiación privada. Barbacid es un personaje controvertido, y quizás en esta ocasión sí ha patinado. Fue uno de los primeros grandes fichajes de científicos españoles que triunfaban en el extranjero, pero hace un año y medio anunció su dimisión como director del CNIO por discrepancias con el gobierno. Posiblemente este malestar ha hecho que se excediera; pero seguro que algo muy interesante se puede extraer de sus palabras.

Hablando de científicos españoles que triunfan fuera de su país, otra fórmula es no retornarlos al 100%, pero sí permitirles que dirijan en la distancia centros de investigación en España. Una curiosa nota de El Mundo nos aclara quienes son los elegidos como principales caras. En “Genios Insomnes”, María Valerio elige a Valentín Fuster, José María Ordovás, Juan Carlos Izpisúa, Josep Baselga y Joan Massagué, y nos relata que el secreto de su éxito es madrugar, trabajar durísimo, y ser capaces de conciliar las pocas horas de sueño disponible con facilidad. Algo más habrá; seguro. Pero interesante boceto de los ritmos de vida de estos científicos.

- Pere Estupinya

At ScienceInsider, part of the news operation at AAAS’s Science magazine, reporter Sara Reardon latched on to a sure-fire different angle on the killing of Osama bin Laden  by US special forces troops. However, after following the comments appended to it from readers and editors, one imagines that she and section boss Eli Kintisch wish they had taken one more steady look at the story before putting it up.

The underlying news, which I recall the first time it broke a year or so ago, is that a student-professor team of geographers at UCLA calculated on the basis of biogeography principles the most likely sorts of places the al Qaeda leader might be hiding.  Their paper is below in Grist.

But, apparently, and again judging from comments, the first version of the ScienceInsider piece said that not only did the exercise predict a very high likelihood that the world’s foremost mass murderer who does not run a nation would be found in a large, walled compound in a sizeable town not far from the Afghan-Pakistani border, but that it gave nearly a 90 percent chance that town would be Abbottobad.

Since then, it has been corrected to say more merely that Abbottobad is within a circular area of probability of that scale, but that includes plenty of other cities. Furthermore, it assigned its highest probability to a different town, and even provided pictures of compounds in that town that look suitable for hiding a tall, bearded, most-wanted person. They look spookily a little like the property where the assassination actually occurred a few days ago. Commenters are still arguing with ScienceNow, it appears, over what probability to assign to Abbatobad’s category of towns, too.

Good for Science to amend the piece rapidly. But errors and oversights (as I well know) don’t disappear from the web even after re-edit. The original, as of this writing, is still excerpted at blogs, including this one by Jim Galloway at the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Ditto for a blogpost at the Los Angeles Times. A better job of picking up the story from ScienceInsider, but thinking it through afresh, is at a Foreign Policy blogpost by Joshua Keating. He notes that while the conclusion he’d be in a crowded urban area, and in a distinctively-build compound, was correct and perhaps even brilliant, the percentages of probability and the selection of which town was not.

Grist for the Mill: Journal article Finding bin Laden ;

(..hat tip to Sylvia Wright for the lead)

- Charlie Petit

Denise Grady‘s long and wrenching report on the damaged victims of torture in Iraq – inflicted by Iraqi gov’t agents, by thugs, by forces opposed to the government and to US forces, and by American agents too – must be close to setting a ScienceTimes record for column inches. It fills a good piece of the section front and a double-page spread inside. It reads faster than it looks. Readers may think they have heard enough about torture and don’t need to visit the topic again. For most, that would be a mistake.  Grady visited a region in Jordan where many Iraqi refugees live. She interviewed several undergoing therapy and counseling that a US non governmental organization provides, and handles the story delicately and with appropriate sympathy. How appropriate that this story, long planned, runs so soon after bin Laden’s death. To read assertions of torture by and for the US – even if it was not as extensive or brutish as what Iraqis were  and continue doing to one another – is distressing. Nobody misses Saddam. But what a waste of attention – all that pain inflicted after 9/11 in a country that had nothing much to do with it at all.

Other headlines to note:

• Pam Belluck: Hearts Beat as One in a Daring Ritual ;  Nice outline of the challenges of doing medical-sociological studies in the field. It’s about firewalkers, their heart rates, and those who watch them.  In PNAS, but few others picked it up. One is at  WebMD, by Jennifer Warner, but without the heavy reporting that Belluck did.
• Natalie Angier – Job Description Grows for Our Utility Hormone: On serotonin and its ever-growing list of functions, not just in the brain but neck to toe too. Rightly admired stylist Angier might better have dialed her fancy back a bit with this one. News is interesting to be sure. But I had to look up “bibelo.” The desk dictionary says it means something small, beautiful, and rare – yet her point is that serotonin is actually quite common, nearly ubiquitous. And calling the placenta a silent, headless genetic twin of the embryo throws one off stride.
• Jane E. Brody: A Thief That Robs the Brain of Language ; On a degenerative brain malady called PPA. Great. Another reason to get more nervous with every senior moment.
• William J. Broad: Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts ; Solid rundown – read more on it in next post down.
• Nicholas Bakalar (Observatory shorts): An Antarctic Buffet Where Whales Gather to Feast; This news, in PLoS ONE last week, got a lot of pickup. It’s a curiosity, however. It’s on line, but absent from the print issue of the ScienceTimes that hit the front walk this morning. Also, it has a strange typo- omission (…in the southern hemisphere, and. For four weeks…)  Maybe after that hanging ‘and’ it included reference to the journal source,PLoS ONE.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s a lesson in how varying emphasis on specific facts (or plausible stabs at facts) may produce what appear to be views of reality from alternative universes, but at root are consistent. Bear with me -  another way of saying I’m not sure what I’m writing about but will make a stab at it anyway.

Sunday’s NYTimes ran an op ed by a physician and longtime gadfly of nuclear power or pretty much nuclear anything, on the cancer toll of Chernobyl and on the Japanese nuclear emergency’s chance of posing a danger in the same league. Today in the NYTimes, a veteran science writer weighs in with a news article, in the ScienceTimes section, seeking to find the expert consensus on danger to humanity at large from this tsunami-wrecked, multiple meltdown of an atomic power station. Finally, at a professional magazine popular among biologists and other scientists, a package published about two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami seeks to provide that expert consensus on Fukushima’s health hazards from within the academy, just-the-facts style. Boy, are they different. Here they are, with short summaries but if you’ve time, look at’em yourself:

• NYTimes op-ed – Dr. Helen Caldicott: Unsafe at Any Dose ; In which this lion of Physicians for Social Responsibility sort of implies without quite saying that one or more of the containment vessels or waste pools exploded, meaning millions of extra cancer cases are now due in the Northern Hemisphere over coming decades. None exploded, in the Chernobyl sense of disgorging a huge share of their radionuclides, but that’s not the point of this post. For context, and despite wide estimates that Chernobyl 25 years ago may have caused but a few thousand cancer deaths, she asserts that nearly a million have actually occurred. There is no safe dose of radiation, says here. The more, the worse. Ergo: nuclear accidents never cease; nuclear power is too dangerous, period.
• NYTimes Science Times – William J Broad: Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts ; It says here that medical X-rays and other deliberate exposures, natural radiation even more so, plus leftover fallout from long-ago bomb tests and rotting barrels of radioactive materials dropped into the sea years back dwarf whatever of the broken reactors’ stuff is escaping the immediately surrounding area. As one credible authority tells him, the Japanese nuclear fiasco disappears in the big picture, overwhelmed by larger sources. His sources also give news media a drubbing for amplifying public fears born of confusion over radiation and a common tendency to give radiation dangers more weight than others of similar magnitude.
• The Scientist F1000 – Faculty of 1000: Fallout at Fukushima Part 1 (on hazards both immediate and longer term)) ; Part 2 (on genetic mutations among workers fighting to control radioactive materials at the plant, and chances of cancer among them and in the gen’l population) ; Part 3 (impact on agriculture and wildlife) ; Upshot: Some serious dangers locally. It is strongly reassuring for the world at large. Notably, in part 2 it says that “An increased risk of cancer is “epidemiologically detectable starting at exposures of 150 t 200 millisieverts,” which is more than anybody other than plant workers are likely to have experienced.

So one has two news sources, in The Scientist and Wm. Broad at NYTimes, saying in essence that dilution is the solution, and a third, op-ed by a  crusading physician who says millions of lives could prematurely end due to radioactive releases from the ruined reactors and fuel pools.

Is somebody starkly wrong? That’s the question. Maybe the answer is yes. But maybe these arguments are more about morality than about statistics. Crucially, recall the The Scientist‘s Part II noting  that the vast bulk of the population even in Japan is outside a penumbra of “epidemiologically detectable” risk of cancer. Well, is that okay?  If you can’t tell from the stats whether a population has suffered a health insult, is it sensible to enact laws about it? That’s a good question. My personal opinion is that if one can’t find the damage, even if if can be theoretically calculated, regulators and the public should not get terribly exercised about it. Many will disagree.

As for the facts of the matter, Dr. Caldicott calculates nearly a million people have already died from Chernobyl cancers, and fears the same or worse from Fukushima for the Northern Hemisphere. Even if she’s correct, is that epidemiologically detectable? By one estimate at the American Cancer Society, about 7 million people died worldwide from cancer in 2007 . Most of the world’s population is in the Northern Hemisphere. Let’s say, ballpark, in the last 25 years 4 million people per year in the N. Hemisphere, or 100 million since Chernobyl in all, have died of cancer. Thus if one accepts Caldicott’s estimate it still accounts for less than 1 percent of those deaths.  That looks to me like an increment impossible to spot or to blame on anything.

IF so it gets back to a moral judgment, and a practical regulatory question. What’s the right thing to do if in principle something is doing something bad, but you can’t see it in any statistical summary? And does it mean that these  articles in news outlets that seem to be saying diametrically opposite things are based on roughly equivalent factual foundations? I dunno. Maybe.

Possibly Pertinent: MORALITY as SCIENCE side bar:

In case you missed it – as I would have had not reader Jonathan Beard brought it to my attention – the New York Review of Books carries a long and thoughtful review by H. Allen Orr of a book called The Moral Landscape, by Sam Harris. I have not read the book. It’s author is well-known for being an upfront atheist with little patience with religious organizations or their dogmas. The review lays out its arguments. It punches a few holes in them and, more important, leaves one wondering whether there is any rational non-theistic way to determine fundamental morality at all. By extension to the news that touched me off this morning, there may be no rational way to  find sure reason to either oppose, or support, nuclear power by arguments based on experiences with Chernobyl, or Fukushima Daiichi.  The argument is about more than mere fact and reason.

- Charlie Petit

One finds a pretty good example of broad-brush story with a telling, finely-focussed example to give it punch in the Sunday Charlotte News & Observer.

Reporter Bruce Henderson has a story that, as a type, is common enough. North Carolina is warming up. Birds and other wildlife are shifting their ranges. (Link goes to sister paper, the Raleigh News & Observer). OK, that’s important but it’s been reported, in general, many times. Also not unusual is to find a naturalist quoted on fear that surprises are in store, nobody knows what. But what is gratifying at that point is that writer Henderson provides a terrific, short example of one such surprise recently, one having to do with temperatures, nitrogen fallout, Mount Mitchell, and beetles that nobody did or probably even could have foreseen. One presumes Henderson could provide documentation for the individual parts of his summary. One hopes so, for the tale is an arresting and revealing one (a quick check finds that his example got some ink back in the 90s, little since then, and I put documentation of the event in Grist).

Grist for the Mill: US Forest Service Nitrogen deposition and water stress… ;

Other, slightly related news: Some complex ecosystem switcheroos might be predictable. So say researchers who saw a Wisconsin Lake reconfigure its food web and believe it left a lesson. There is no generalized balance of Nature. Some systems are just examples from among many stable possiblities for a given place. And before they jump from one island of stability to another, there are signs. The paper was in last Friday’s Science.

• BBC – Richard Black: Boom and bust signals ecosystem collapse ;
• ScienceNOW – Jennifer Carpenter: An Early Warning Sign for Ecosystem Collapse? ;

Grist for the Mill:

Cary Institute (via EurekAlert!) Press Release ; Univ. Wisconsin (EurekAlert!) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

At the AAAS in February came news that was new to me and I’d suppose a lot of people who read this site. It is that a new subdiscipline called aeroecology – the study of life in the air – has gotten perhaps its biggest boost from aircraft control and weather tracking doppler radar systems installed in the last 20 years. A UC Santa Cruz press release on using them to track bats, and issued to boost attention to one paper at an aeroecology session at the DC meeting, got a little attention. The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid did some additional reporting and wrote it up. Also giving it a ride was Elizabeth Pennisi at ScienceNOW and in Science, both outlets of the AAAS itself.

Here’s the point of this post. If such stories put a big blip on your own personal mental radar screen, at Miller McCune magazine freelancer Wendee Holtcamp has assembled the news from its root. She went to Texas – actually, stayed home, as a glance at her website shows that’s where this nomadic scientist-cum-sciencewriter went to college and still is – and tramped through big woods near the Gulf southwest of Houston. She introduces her readers to a US Fish and Wildlife Service biologist who loves how the radar reveals migratory songbirds toward a stopoff in this preserved hunk of old growth hardwoods, a place where the trunks of live oaks are wide as cars. More important, one meets an old Cajun who has pretty much single-handedly – since he was a highschooler in the late 50s – pushed ornithology into recognizing that some radars can see birds just fine. Some had doubted it. Said birds are too small and soft. He says birds, and bats, are just distinctive, big raindrops to radar.

The piece reveals how technology, natural science, preservation, the works of both public and private sectors, plus happenstance and what some called angels in the Battle of Britain, entwined with rich and heartening result. Nice job. (Bonus: click through to the story and learn what a devil’s walking stick tree is).

- Charlie Petit