Data have the jarring habit of messing up sweet theory with hard fact. Cosmologists a few years ago were happily sketching out a timeline for the early universe – After the bang faded, a murk of hydrogen spawned a few giant bright stars to re-ionize and thus clear the haze, more stars agglomerated into big galaxies, and gradually in galactic cores black holes gained mass until they had the brawn to blaze away as quasars. Now comes evidence that at least one or (and thus surely a lot) more fully formed supermassive black hole every bit as mature-looking as what we see at much later epochs was gobbling dust and stars a ‘mere’ 700 million years after time zero. Who ordered that?

This from the journal Nature. A team led by British astronomers got the  infrared data, with painstaking effort,  from telescopes in Hawaii,Chile, and elsewhere. Nature ran a commentary by another Brit who said this monstrous signal is rubbishing some hypothesis on how things went in those early aeons. The mystery how it got to a mass two billion times that of the sun so early will give theorists panic attacks. Having something that is the farthest and oldest-which-really-means-earliest-ergo-youngest anything is news. Having it wreck an arcane but deeply-felt paradigm is even better. That it is baffling is best. Those, and a few press releases, roused a platoon of the science journalism corps to action.

Hmmm – wonder if we’ll ever know whether this biggie is in a galactic core, proto or otherwise, and if so how massive that galaxy it. With so much evidence that masses of galaxies and their black hole hearts are today well-correlated, it’d be great to know if this one fit that pattern.

Stories:

• AP – Alicia Chang: Scientists discover brightest, earliest quasar ; Clear enunciation that the signal may be ancient, but the source is of one of the first of these to form, hence young. The hed says brightest. Story does not. Neither does the journal article. But it does say it is very bright.
• AFP – Bright galaxy sheds light on early universe ; The galaxy part is guesswork. Nobody can see a galaxy there, but one may be supposed. Hed should have just referred to what is seen, a quasar. The story says quasars are galaxies. They do tend to be in galaxies.
• Science News – Nadia Drake: Most distant quasar raises questions ;
• Wired – Mark Brown – Infancy of Universe Seen in Brightest Quasar Yet ; I am starting to lose confidence that it is not the brightest ever seen, for this is the second news report to say it is. It is extremely massive, hence very bright. And it is at the Eddington Limit, meaning it is consuming matter fast as it can. But I still don’t see in the paper or the accompanying commentary that it is the brightest. The ESO release calls it brightest seen yet in the early universe, not of all time.
• The Atlantic – Nicholas Jackson: Early Quasar Is Brightest Object Ever Found in the Universe ; Rewritten from AP, largely. And it says it is the brightest “because is took nearly 13 billion years for its light to reach Earth.” I remain unconvinced.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: ‘Monster’ driving cosmic beacon;
• ABC (Australia) : Faraway quasar sheds light on early universe ;
• Cosmos (Australia) Iain Coleman: Universe’s most distant quasar found ;
• Washington Post (blog) Elizabeth Flock: Quasar found from dawn of time ; Derived from AP – it is unclear why to bother posting on it rather than just running the AP account.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Brilliant, but Distant: Most Far-Flung Known Quasar Offers Glimpse into Early Universe ;

Grist for the Mill:

European Southern Observatory Press Release; Imperial College London Press Release ;

Volunteers in La. re-plant a salt marsh

An AP reporter in Texas, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, filed versions of pretty much the same story twice this week. The distinctly different tone and impact are instructive.

The basic news is shared. The Gulf Coast has been in trouble for years as erosion swept away marshes starved of sediment once supplied by natural streams and rivers. Now with money extracted from BP after it spilled oil over lot of the same marshes, new ones are being built.

The difference in these stories is that the first one emerged from a public meeting by a consortium using the money to rebuild marshes. Okay story, but dry and distant as stories from meetings often are. The second is much more satisfying. Plushnick-Masti got herself a boat ride out to see one of the marshes and came back with a vivid, atmospheric yarn that people won’t so easily forget. I haven’t tried to reach her to ask exactly how this one-two punch came together, but it sure looks like an example why it’s worth going to meetings, dull as they are. You might find somebody willing to get you, and your readers, a road trip that brings the news to life.

• AP – Ramit Plushnick-Masti (Jun 27) : Task force: Restoring sediment key to Gulf revival.  (Jun 30): Texas wetland restoration could be model for Gulf ; The first talks abstractly about dirt and restoring it to a useful job – the second brings to readers the sight and sound of wildlife chattering and flittering about in the result.

Plushnick-Masti is a busy tweeter on this and other topics. Among other things she shares with followers is the link to the video she shot while on the field assignment.

Also on Roughly the Same News:

• Houston Chronicle – Matthew Tresaugue: Dirt: The key to restoring wetlands, task force says ;

Grist for the Mill: EPA Press Release ; RestoreTheGulf.gov Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) During a panel  session “What editors want?” at the World Conference of Science Journalists in Qatar, an African reporter in the audience asked , Are you interested in Africa? And what kind of stories do you expect from us?”. Mariette DiChristina from SciAm replied immediately: “Yes, we are indeed interested in Africa, but it’s you who have to tell me what’s happening in your country”. The same logic should be applied to Latin America. One of the take home messages from the conference is that institutions, outlets and reporters do want to know what’s happening in Science outside US and Europe. Many people approached this Spanish lang. tracker to ask how to make connections and to do work with Latin America. Latin American reporters have a lot to offer, and they are in a very good position to pitch original stories with new angles to English speaking publications. And the rates these outlets pay are much higher than what reporters will ever get in their countries. But there is a singular problem to solve: the language barrier. Writing a story for a newsmagazine it’s not like writing a scientific paper. Being a good writer requires specific language skills that are very difficult to obtain if English is not your first language and you regularly write and live in Spanish. This discussion about how to break language barriers (and the one-way flow of information due to US monolingualsm) emerged during the conference. Perhaps it can be a topic for a session at the next WCSJ in Finland. We also wish to have seen more Spanish speaking reporters. In Qatar were only 4 journalists form Mexico, 4 from Argentina, 3 from Chile, 1 from Colombia, 1 from Guatemala, 6 from Brazil, and 2 from Spain (one it was the Spanish tracker, who is sharing the impressions of many of them in this post).

A más de uno se nos abrieron los ojos cuando el editor de la revista alemana PM dijo que pagaba 1500 euros por pieza de 2.500 caracteres. ¡6 veces más de mi tarifa! Medio gritó un periodista latino americano sentado a mi lado. Y al mismo tiempo, todos los periodistas, editores e instituciones del mundo anglosajón, mostrando interés por saber qué ocurre fuera de sus fronteras. En realidad no es un interés altruista, porque como muchos periodistas del mundo en desarrollo explicaron, “ellos se sienten inmensamente superiores y no les interesan para nada nuestras opiniones”. El interés viene de un fenómeno exclusivo de países como EEUU o Inglaterra: hay tantos buenos science writers, que incluso tienen competencia entre ellos. De aquí emergen sus egos inflados, sus pseudodiscusiones sobre si un blogger puede ser considerado periodista científico, la compartimentación que les hace asegurar que el rol del periodista es sólo informar y no educar ni defender la ciencia, y sobre todo, la necesidad constante de buscar historias originales y ángulos novedosos. Aquí es donde nace el interés por salir de sus fronteras, y buscar originalidad en investigaciones en el Amazonas, casos médicos en Centroamérica, nuevas tecnologías en países emergentes, etc, etc, etc. Aquí está la oportunidad: hacer llegar artículos a medios e instituciones de EEUU. El tiempo extra de búsqueda y adaptación se compensa con la alta tarifa. Pero queda el problema de la barrera lingüística. Como dijo Federico Kukso de Muy Interesante Argentina: “nosotros tenemos ventaja porque leemos los dos idiomas. Debemos aprovecharlo”. Totalmente cierto. Nuestro bilingüismo es bueno, pero como en realidad es “a medias”, provoca que la información sólo viaje de Norte a Sur. El Chileno Nicolás Luco incidía en la misma idea: “El espacio geográfico determina el tipo de ciencia que se hace, y las condiciones culturales y socioeconómicas también. Hay países donde se hace ciencia que no se puede hacer en ningún otro lugar. Eso es valiosísimo, y ahora Internet permite que las fronteras ya no existan”. Cierto de nuevo, pero a menudo nos encallamos con la frontera lingüística. ¡Claro que hay gente con nivel de inglés excelente! Pero escribir una historia para un medio estadounidense no es como escribir un documento de trabajo o un artículo científico. Se necesita un dominio del lenguaje y la narrativa más sofisticado. Y una traducción buena resulta cara. Se discutieron muchísimo más temas durante la conferencia –y aquí reproducimos algunos en boca de los periodistas latinoamericanos que atendieron- pero a la hora de elegir un tema del que proponer seguimiento, la barrara lingüística fue uno de los que más nos impactó. Más comentarios:

Estrella Burgos, editora de la revista mexicana ¿Cómo Ves? Participó en el panel de editores arrancando sonrisas y aplausos de los asistentes cuando a la pregunta ¿qué quieren los editores de los escritores? Respondió: “Queremos vuestra alma! Vuestra carne, vuestros huesos, vuestras ideas, vuestra dedicación, vuestra imaginación… lo queremos todo de vosotros!”. También añadió una reflexión interesante: en su revista están haciendo textos cada vez más largos. Estrella explica que los empezaron a alargar a ver cómo reaccionaban sus lectores, y que funcionó. También puede ser una manera de distinción entre la versión impresa de una revista, y los contenidos digitales. Una manera de dar valor al producto.

La Colombiana Ángela Posada Swafford de Muy Interesante España emite optimismo y energía: “El periodismo científico en nuestros países está totalmente en explosión!”. Bajo su dilatada experiencia recuerda que cuando ella empezó no había nada de nada, y que ahora no sólo hay más profesionales dedicándose  a cubrir ciencia, sino que “hay una maduración a nivel mundial, y mayor sofisticación”.

Valeria Román de Clarín (Argentina) lo secunda al decir que “las nuevas generaciones están abriéndose al mundo”, y que ya hace tiempo han dejado de traducir del inglés y de copiar y pegar: “Ahora hay mucha producción propia de contenidos buenísimos”. También apunta una tendencia que puede servir de indicador: “se están publicando muchos más libros de divulgación científica con autores locales”. Esto implica dos cosas: que hay más lectores interesados en ciencia, y que hay más y mejores escritores de ciencia.

Respecto al congreso en si, la implicadísima y actual miembro de la junta directiva de la WFSJ Lucy Calderón (Prensa Libre – Guatemala), planteaba que uno de los retos es “llegar a los más jóvenes. Tenemos que trabajar más en esta dirección, porque es el futuro, y son los más absorbentes”. Cecilia Farré, periodista científica freelance de Argentina y exproductora de radio, opinaba que el congreso estaba muy bien, pero bastante limitado a la palabra impresa: “respecto ediciones anteriores han incorporado alguna sesión de radio, pero todavía falta hablar de televisión”. Acertada observación, muy pertinente para países donde la TV continúa destacada como principal fuente de información.

Javier Cruz de la UNAM también ladeaba la cabeza al ser preguntado sobre el congreso. “algunas sesiones muy muy bien”, decía. Pero reclamaba incluir cierto enfoque más académico y hacía la siguiente crítica constructiva: “Hay aspectos fundamentales del periodismo científico que no se pueden abordar con anécdota tras anécdota, como han hecho en algunas sesiones donde el ponente salía y explicaba sólo su caso personal”. Sin duda, este es un aspecto también a mejorar. Uno puede acudir al panel de publicación de libros, escuchar el caso de éxito de un escritor concreto, y salir con la conclusión de que esa es la receta, sin haber tenido en cuenta todos los ejemplos parecidos que fallaron. Demasiada subjetividad en un congreso que algo tiene de científico.

En una línea parecida la freelance mexicana Aleida Rueda se mostraba muy directa: “Yo lo que quiero son herramientas para periodistas, que me ayuden a hacer mejor mi trabajo. Para mi; la sesión de cómo interpretar un estudio médico fue la más interesante”. Este aspecto es interesantísimo, y refleja algunas diferencias entre lo que busca un periodista de África y uno de US. A los “grandes e influyentes sabios” del periodismo anglosajón ciertos temas les van a sonar repetitivos, y hasta algún blogger de joven estrellato y ojos achinados puede responder al ser preguntado por el tracker que “las preguntas que le hacían de países en desarrollo eran muy básicas”. Pero es que estas herramientas básicas son las que demandan muchos periodistas. Quieren sesiones donde se discutan temas serios, importantes, prácticos, relevantes para la población… y no sesiones para acaramelar el ego de los popes del periodismo científico, o “de catarsis, de psicoanálisis de personas que trabajan mucho y en solitario”, como decía Federico Kukso.

La más paradigmática de estas sesiones fue quizás la de “¿Soy un periodista científico?”, donde además de constatar que el debate sobre si es periodismo lo que escribe un científico se ha sustituido por si es periodismo lo que escribe un blogger, la experta en periodismo científico C. Russell expuso la posición más establecida del periodismo científico: “Nuestra función no es educar, sólo informar de manera rigurosa. Y no somos amigos de los científicos, ni debemos defender su causa. Mantenemos las distancias para ser objetivos y críticos”. Aquí, particularmente, defendemos esta visión watchdog en lugar de la cheerleader, pero es totalmente cierto que en muchos países la función de este emergente periodismo científico va mucho más allá de informar. Andrea Obaid desde Chile respondía: “Obvio que no es sólo informar! El objetivo de mi trabajo es educar. Yo trato la información de manera objetiva, pero defiendo que la ciencia es fundamental para el desarrollo de nuestras sociedades. Y pido que en mi país se dediquen más recursos a ciencia, tecnología e innovación. Es una cuestión de responsabilidad, y la asumo”. Además, Andrea se mostraba un poco disconforme con el supuesto interés de EEUU en el periodismo científico del mundo en desarrollo: “Cada periodista vive en su burbuja, y no les interesa lo que piensan otras culturas. En realidad desde EEUU nos perciben como inferiores”.

Y ya en la sesión que se dedicó de manera exclusiva a América Latina, desde Brazil la editora Marulice Moura nos mostró su muy recomendable revista Pesquisa. Y Luisa Massarani de SciDev.net mostró los resultados parciales de una encuesta que están realizando entre periodistas para analizar el estado global del periodismo científico. Son resultados preliminares, pero entre ellos vemos que en América Latina el 60% de periodistas científicos son mujeres, el 60% tienen menos de 40 años, y el 60% tienen trabajos a tiempo completo. Se puede participar en el cuestionario en esta dirección.

Muchos más temas interesantes salieron durante las sesiones. Otros deberán aparecer en el próximo encuentro en Finlandia, o en los seminarios que se organicen en América Latina y estén pensados para realmente mejorar el periodismo científico, y no que las instituciones puedan poner en sus reportes anuales que han apoyado la comunicación de la ciencia, invitando a burócratas y gabinetes de comunicación del gobierno que hablan mucho pero hacen poco. También discutimos largo y tendido sobre la calidad  de las iniciativas que se están llevando a cabo en América Latina. Periodistas, sed más proactivos y proponed proyectos en lugar de exponer quejas. Dirigid vosotros los papeles, sesiones y conferencias; organizad vosotros los programas y decidid las temáticas a tratar; organizad vosotros una red; y pedid soporte económico a las instituciones. Pero no dejéis que sean ellos quien lo organicen, porque después ocurre lo que ocurre.

- Pere Estupinyà

If I were to tell you that organisms that gruesomely maim or kill hundreds of people yearly are being sold to children, you might think that’s a dreadful thing. But if I explain I’m just talking about puppies, which turn into dogs and sometimes dogs snarl and bite and attack, you might start off  leery but with a sensible perspective.

Poor old E.coli, a bacterium that we all have by the millions in our gut and if we did not, we’d probably suffer. Some of its variants, such as the 0104:H4 E. coli that killed and sickened so many people in Europe since May, are awful. But not most. How are people going to keep their heads on straight about E. coli in general when reading such stories as this:

• Reuters – Sarah McBride:E. coli seen spawning biofuel in five years ; The lead is “The bacteria behind food poisoning worldwide, the mighty E. coli, could be …’ and so on, with the further declaration a few grafs on that “When ingested by humans, E. coli can be dangerous, even fatal.”

It’s not as though we can have a science-fact police patrol of crusading science writers running around upbraiding and whacking across the shins every general assignment reporter who merely needs a catchy gimmick for a story but doesn’t know much about E. coli or other topics usually confined to small scholarly circles. And if a nasty E. coli strain is on the loose, that’s news. But it is a shame that, increasingly, this ubiquitous and usually benign microbe must be seen by the public as, above all and foremost, a terrible public health threat.

Microbial profiling, that’s what it is.

- Charlie Petit

Your tracker is in Reno, Nevada, gathering notes for a little freelancing on the side. Got here motoring up from Berkeley yesterday through an unusual cool, driving rain that dropped more than an inch on our house – and we’re supposed to be in the dry season. The rain spanned nearly the whole state. The high mountains  were still white, still loaded with snow at the top. The plunging Truckee River was full, foaming its way down from Tahoe to the Nevada basin. The rain reached here last night.  The hotel parking lot is glistening wet. That’s weather, not climate. Strange weather, but word is that it’ll be hot again as normal, away from the coast, reaching toward the 100s some places around Reno by the ‘Fourth of July. Doesn’t mean a thing by itself. Not a thing.

But what does mean a thing is, again this year, the annual State of the Climate Report from National Climate Data Center. The planet continues to warm on average, CO2 emissions by fossil fuel combustion (plus non-fossil but human-caused sources such as clearing of forests) are accelerating, sea level is up, and sea ice is down. And more. We’ve read this before. And in accord with the way things work, the report is getting some attention, about as much as it merits as news. That is, this is the new business as usual and BAU does not make many headlines. This business as usual for the last many decades has been to increase greenhouse gases and to watch climate markers respond in the manner that diligent scientists expect it to. The steady prod for news is the battle over what to do about changing that BAU.

Few who cover this as a story emerging from the science community called around to get a contrarian’s scoff. The primary false balance out there is in the general public, not the mass media.

Stories:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: Global warming continues as greenhouse gas grows ; It’s a long list of examples that Schmid dredges from the report. I like one, and it led to this punch in the face hed on the story at the Wash Post (which also left off Randy’s byline): More than 300 months since the planet’s temperature was below average ;

And that’s about it.  This is the 21st annual edition after all. I did see a run-down on it yesterday evening, killing time in the hotel room. It is this segment on  The Weather Channel (it skipped and stuttered on the hotel wi fi just now – maybe it’ll work better for you).

Grist for the Mill:

NCDC State of Climate 2010 General Info,  webinar briefing ;

And while we’re at it, a related NOAA Press Release on the “new normal.”

Other Pertinent Opinionizing:

• Fall River Herald News (Conn) – William Collins: GUEST OPINION: Keep corporations away from climate ; The writer is a former mayor.
• NYTimes Dot Earth Blog – Andrew Revkin: Online Climate Explored at Google ; Revkin draws attention to this report from Yale and George Mason University on the six, nearly-fixed communities into which climate change divides American adults.

Grist for the Mill: Yale Project on Climate Change Communication Press Release ;

-Charlie Petit

To drop the other shoe, or hoof, after saluting Donald G. McNeil’s lead story in the  NYTimes ScienceTimes section on the elimination of rinderpest from the world’s populations of domestic cattle and their kin in yesterday’s post (just scroll down one), a roundup of other coverage is sensible. Ditto for the multiple avenues and timings of this news’s repeated recent emergence. As one learns more about this news’s history, it is easy to think that McNeil shouted “Again?! I’ll write this so nobody can ever again say it like it’s news!” Good idea.

The latest iteration of this news, again, is that the United Nations and a collage of allied agencies declared in Rome yesterday victory in a decades-long struggle to vaccinate the devastating rinderpest virus into oblivion. It’s gone except for a few research samples kept under very high security. It is only the second erasure of a major contagion, the other being smallpox.

The news has had a stutter-step of a roll-out.

While MacNeil’s story has the muscle, scope, and prominent play appropriate for this feat, word that the deed was done and that a ceremony has marked it with an official seal has been circulating. In fact, while the UN was getting ready for this week’s official ceremony, two US organizations put out press releases a while back – one two weeks and another nearly a month ago. And the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health announced it at the end of May.  All in Grist below. Some reporters have followed it as it happened, starting last year, including McNeil at the Times.

Stories Previous to this week’s burst:

• NYTimes (Oct 15, 2010) Donald G. McNeil, Jr: Virus Deadly in Livestock is No More, U.N. Declares ;
• Guardian (UK, via The Age, Australia) Ian Sample, Oct. 16, 2010: Rinderpest virus follows smallpox into history;
• Wash. Post (May 26) David Brown: Rinderpest, or ‘cattle plague,’ becomes only second disease to be eradicated.
• Reuters (May 25) Sybille de La Hamaide: World has wiped out cattle plague rinderprest: OIE ; (Oct 14, 2010) James McKenzie: Scientists poised to wipe out deadly cattle disease ;
• Guardian, IRIN agency (June 22) Is eradication livestock diseases the best way forward?; With rinderpest in the bag, what next?

This Week stories:

• Los Angeles Times – Marissa Cevallos: Rinderpest officially eradicated – and why it matters ;Includes perspective on the multiple proclamations leading to the official UN one.
• Voice of America – Steve Baragona: Cattle Plague Declared Eradicated ;
• Wired – Mark Brown: UN declares cow-killed rinderpest disease eradicated ; Lede notes that this confirms the event.
• The World (BBC, PRI, WGBH) Anders Kelto: The Eradication of Rinderpest ; The big story with an intimate spin on it – on site with the perspective of a Masai herder in Kenya, the last or near-last place the disease was eradicated.

Grist for the Mill:

Last few days: UN Food and Agric. Org. Press Release ; UN Analysis, Background ; FAO Statement with links to document;

Some previous releases  (Jun 15) American Veterinary Medical Assoc Press Release ; (June 1) Assoc. of American Veterinary Medical Colleges Press Release ; (May 27) World Org. for Animal Health Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The Times and Donald G. McNeil do a good turn today, shining a bright spot light on an epochal and epic achievement: eradication of the bovine-killing Rinderpest virus from the planet. The disease is gone at least. McNeil does not say whether, like the smallpox virus that is so famous for being gone from nature, a few experimental just-in-case vials of it are kept in well-locked and layered labs somewhere. This lead story in the science section is muscular, sweeping reporting of a historic feat that, because it killed livestock but not people directly, most readers would not spontaneously recognize for its importance.

Other ScienceTimes headlines to note:

• John Tierney :  A Release Valve for Cyclists’ Unrelenting Pressure ; Nothing really new here, but Tierney’s exasperation with the thickheaded stupidity of people who don’t pay attention to facts when style is at stake is delightful. It largely has to do with men who sit on their weenies’ roots for long minutes, hours even, at a time. The picture shows one of the cures. Standard bicycle seats don’t do women any good either. One thing Tierney ought to have covered – maybe Tour de France riders won’t change for good reason – they spend so much time pedaling madly while in a half-crouch above their bike seats that risk of erectile dysfunction is modest?
• Kenneth Chang: One Math Museum, Many Variables ; Yep, a math museum. Get a load of the square-wheeled road-conforming tricycle. I know some videos it should run, too. They’re at a site from a Harvard phenom that Mrs. Tracker the math genius in this household is crazy about – she can’t wait to master the 2ⁿ binary finger dance.
• Nicholas Wade – Magnetic Field Sensed by Gene ;

As usual, lots more at whole section.

BUT WAIT, THERE’s MORE..

• NYTimes (June 25)  Ian Urbina: Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush ;
• NYTimes (Jun 26) Ian Urbina: Behind Veneer, Doubt on Future of Natural Gas ;

Y’know how just about every time there’s a technology failure or a bubble bursts, reporters dig into obscure data files and other dusty alleys to find that we were warned, or at least there were a few seers who saw it coming. And then a lot of people ask Hey! Why didn’t anybody tell me about this before?? Just in case the natural gas boom goes bust, Urbina has found some of those people in advance. Some time, musing along further here,  it might be useful for a sociologist to dig into the back history of things that worked out just swell, and see if they have a higher or lower cassandra quotient than those that went bust. Maybe everything that humankind does that’s new and big has about the same doubting chorus.

Anyway. Urbina’s stories seemed interesting when I read’em the first time, but also clearly a reflection of possibility, not a forecast. The reporter, one infers, has enough respect for readers to expect them to keep perspective. Maybe there’s scads of oil and gas in shale, ready for fracking. And… maybe not and here’s evidence that  a few in the know think so. But from some of the reaction you’d think the NYTimes is on some kind of party-pooping green berserker freakout. From here, it appears that the Times and Mr. Urbina are calmly saying we should learn a lesson from the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, suggesting investers and regulators and gov’t planners step with care and not be blinkered by all the money that’s pouring in. Reaction to the story was mixed, and immediate.

• Council on Foreign Relations – Michael Levi: Is Shale Gas a Ponzi Scheme? He says no. The Times is merely waging war on shale energy.
• Forbes – Christopher Helman – New York times Is All Hot Air On Shale Gas ;
• Bloomberg – Jim Snyder: Democrat Asks Energy Agency to Say How it Estimates Natural-Gas Reserve; Lovely quote from an oil man: saying that companies “don’t invest billions of dollars in non-profitable ventures.” Uh huh. Tell it to the mortgage providers.
• Reuters – Helen Chernikoff : Natural gas drilling might disappoint investors: report ;
• Greener World Media via Reuters – Mindy S. Lubber: Why We Need to Calm the Natural Gas Frenzy ; Not a reax to the NYT stories – but in the same genre.

- Charlie Petit

Nobody said cheese to these cool people in Qatar

With or without a forecast high of 44 degrees today – that’s Celsius, or 112° F – it’s easy to know where all the cool people are in Doha, Qatar and we’re not referring to industrial grade hotel air conditioners. That’s at the World Conference of Science Journalists. Its host is a nation of considerable monarchy if not much democracy. With oil money flowing lavishly through a small population, it has little vulnerability to the hopeful but precarious and courageous Arab Spring.  The meeting was to have been in Cairo, an exciting but dicey and uncertain place these days. Qatar authorities scrambled to make room in their desert oasis. One suspects that regular tracker readers know that.

A reported 600 participants are there by at least one news account, about 1,000 according to another, and 720 according to the meeting website.  The link has the tweet link and Facebook presence right on its first page. Here are additional dispatches, some from panel participants posting what they said into a microphone.

• Discover Mag/Intersection Blog  – Chris Mooney :  “Am I  a Science Journalist?” Opening Remarks. After some boiler plate he gets to the nub of a trade’s collective angst – even when science journalism seemed to be thriving, the good old days, did it make much difference to public knowledge, beyond the small percentage of readers who are already science-savvy?
• Discover Mag/Not Exactly Rocket Science blog – Ed Yong:Am I a science journalist? ; Great hyperboreal simile.
• Wired / Neuron Blog – David Dobbs: Unveiling Middle East Science – A Reading List ; posted as session  organizer Dobbs was on his way to Doha. Looks like a resource to keep in mind.
• Nigeria Daily Independent – Onche Odeh: INL staff, others at world meeting of science journalists ; An up close glimpse of the meeting’s importance in many developing countries.
• Qatar The Peninsula newspaper -Western media ignores Arab science: Writer ; Dobbs’s remarks make the local press.
• Ali Bawaba (Jordan-based regional news and  press release service)Nobel Prize-winning chemist to kick off World Conference of Science Journalists ; Said Nobelist is Ahmed Zewail, a Caltech professor from Egypt and wizard at measuring what happens during chemical reactions. This is, it appears, a press release from the Qatar Foundation.
• Qatar Gulf Times – Ross Jackson: Nobel winner reflects on the sea change in science, technology ; Interesting way to report it, and perhaps best suited to a readership that may not often see a succinct summary of arcane but exciting science. Jackson simply quotes Zewail’s presentation at length.
• The Peninsula – Fazeena Saleem: Scribes urged to pressure govts on research ;More conventional – Zewail’s plea to reporters to step up to the science plate. One is unsure that’s a reporter’s job. And Zewahl’s plea is not limited to the Middle East or developing nation’s in particular, but at rich ones (US included) too. Plus, here we learn that Zewail is a director of the sponsoring Qatar Foundation. And we learn that Zewail is the catalyst for a City of Science and Technology to be built outside Cairo. That could still happen one supposes – Zewail is among ex-pat Egyptians who went back to try to influence and perhaps lead  the formation of a new government
• Qatar Gulf Times – Peter Townson: 80 nationalities for journalists’ meet ; Digital storytelling, Zewail, and more – a grab bag of info here.
• The Peninsula – Turmoil hits Arab writers presence at meet: Official ; Turmoil is in region, not the meeting.
• The Peninsula – Fazeena Saleem : Arabs need catching up ; We learn here that 60 Arab journalists did get there, a record for a WCSJ. Report is on remarks by an Al Jazeera science writer based in Qatar, Waleed Al Shobakky.
• The Peninsula (June 27) Fazeena Saleem: Qatar major player in Arab science renaissance ; From the opening night dinner.

- Charlie Petit

Among the first epochal, global science campaigns in history was in 1769 when the British Admiralty dispatched Captain James Cook to the South Seas in order to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun and thus gain improved measurement of the Earth’s diameter. Aiding his navigation was one of his time’s greatest mechanical inventions – the motion and temperature resistant chronometers, or clocks, made by master craftsman James Harrison.

(Ooops Dept – This post looked bare for awhile. I just noticed, a day after it went up, that it had gone the whole time with no little picture. It did when I last had seen it – must’ve gotten occulted by a bad finger stroke as I published it. Note to self:  Always and that means always check the site before sending the emails out and again after, and before leaving the desk!  )

Well another event  sort of like that just passed, but without the hooplah of Cook’s epochal voyage. In this case expeditions set out far across the Pacific to watch the planet Pluto transit – actually, to totally occult – two distant stars. The aim was to get some info about Pluto’s atmosphere and diameter. Navigation, one presumes, was aided by Cesium atomic clocks aboard global positioning system satellites.

The prime expedition was a flight out over the Pacific by NASA’s latest airborne astronomical machine, the new SOFIA or Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy. It’s a converted long-range  747SP  jetliner with a big German-made telescope mounted in a fuselage port. It was overbudget and late, but is at last at work.  This was its first for-real assignment. Other teams, mostly amateurs, set out for Australia to catch the fleeting, flanking shadow of Pluto’s tiny moon Hydra. Not many results are yet analyzed, but NASA at least hit it on the button.

I think the news is quite cool. But it received little coverage outside a few specialty outlets. Tis true that such occultations have happened before. One expects more coverage will emerge in the next few days.

Stories on the Kuiper’s Interception of Pluto’s Star Shadow:

• Space.com – Flying Telescope Chases Down Pluto’s Shadow ;
• InfoZine -  SOFIA successfully Observes Challenging Pluto Occultation.
• UniverseToday – Nancy Atkinson: Double Occultations This Week Will Reveal More Details About Pluto ; Filed just before SOFIA’s flight, describes both events and who’s looking for what.
• Irish Weather Online – Mark Dunphy: Pluto Casts A Shadow Over The Pacific Ocean ;

Stories on Amateurs Hunting the Shadows of Pluto’s Tiny Moon ; Nat’l Geographic Soc’y put up some money so, natch…

• Nat’l Geographic – Victoria Jaggard , a series of posts. June 20: NG Field Notes: Chasing Pluto Across the Pacific ; June 25 Got a Telescope? Pluto Hunters Need Your Help ;
• Nat’l Geographic – Brian Handwerk (Jun 22) Pluto to Make a Star “Wink Out” Twice This Week ;

Grist for the Mill: Williams College Press Release ; If an eclipse or occultation is unfolding somewhere on Earth, chances are Jay Pasachoff is involved.

- Charlie Petit

There are unanswered, vital (to yours truly)  questions to ask of a tidy story, and a scoop Friday midday, that the AP‘s Seth Borenstein got off a tip from what he calls the “time geek community. ” It is about a possible softening of one of the fundaments of the American industrial age – good old alternating current from the local utility (and the national grid beyond)  flipping its polarity at a steady 60 cycles per second with precious little variation.

That’s how a typical plug-in clock moves in pace with official time. It doesn’t have balance wheels or pendulums or escapements or other pacemaker widgets of its own – it gets its ticks on route 60-cycles, which if you pronounce it like in tricycles sounds a little like Nat King Cole’s old pop standard. But why would letting the frequency of the US electrical grid drift on its own, not far but enough to throw clocks off by a minute or more a month, save energy, save money? Why is it hard to keep it tightly roped to 60 cycles? One cannot tell from the news so far.

The news is that  something called the North American Electric Reliability Corp., or NERC (it used to be “National ERC” until Canada joined up), set up to comply with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s guidelines, plans soon to do an experiment. It will, starting next month and on for a whole year, drop demand on utilities to keep constant watch on the frequency of the AC power. Electric motors on your house fans, the lightbulbs, and just about all other electrically-driven gadgets won’t much care. Watches and computers and cell phones and wall clocks with batteries in them won’t care either and will keep time same as usual. But, Borenstein reports, many programmable appliances such as coffee makers and alarm clocks will lose or gain time if their power’s pulse shifts significantly.

Some places might see their plug-in clocks, digital as well as analog, gain five or ten minutes per year, or even more. The only ones I care about are the coffee machine and bedroom alarm clocks, which get readjusted often enough to keep impact minimal. But still. People fussed so much over changing inches to centimeters, why assume monkeying with our standard electricity will be accepted without quibble? And why exactly would it make life significantly easier, and our power more reliable, if the AC pace is on looser rein? Seth tells us that NERC was not very open with details. But it has, he also  tells us, to do with the cost of firing up extra plants. Apparently, when the rate starts going off kilter, grid operators adjust it by shuffling generators in and out of operation. That is not cheap. Still, one asks: why is it difficult here in the 21st century to put cruise-control gizmos in the system that modulate the frequency?

Other stories:

• Business Insider – Robert Johnson:  A Change to America’s Power Grid Could Make YOur Electric Clock Run Up To 20 Minutes Fast ; Story does not mention that this means 20 minutes fast per year. Most would assume it means per day.
• … not much else that is not a straight rewrite of the AP.

Alerted by the AP story, one finds that there are documents on the NERC website that lay out the basics if not the rationale of this test.

Grist for the Mill: NERC Time Error Correction Elimination Field Trial; NERC TEC Field Trial Webinar ;

- Charlie Petit

I cannot say I’ve read it end to end carefully, which I will, but the weekend cannot pass without acknowledging the 7000-word essay  in Rolling Stone, from Al Gore.

The theme is manifest from the top – that the media is acting like a referee in on the fix at a professional wrestling match, and that President Obama has been far too willing to meekly delay action on global warming in order to appease the far-right in this country and perhaps get it to shut up just a little bit about anything.

Unfair to media, but the White House is fairer game. Politics may in fact make tough action on emissions impossible for now, but the President, one thinks, should have shown more gumption and leadership by declaring emphatically that the nations of the world are almost surely committing a mortal error by shrinking from their responsibility. He ought to be saying it again and again. Bully pulpits exist, so use them.

Media, it’s a mixed bag. But to excoriate reporters and editors who by nature don’t want to tell the same story every day is to ignore where the trouble lies. There are idiots and sycophants in media, with Fox just one redoubt of aggressive ignorance, but that’s not the problem. Plenty of excellent reporting at important outlets has consistently remained aligned with sense and science, Climategate be damned. It’s in Congress, here and in its counterparts abroad,  in the dynamics of market economics, in political-business blinders and misplaced loyalties of many sorts and in grassroots ideologies plus understandable reluctance to deliberately make prosperity hard to attain anytime soon, where the problem lies. When one is not believed, yelling louder is not usually the best response

It’s already been reported that nearly all scientists in the field are confident that climate is being sent toward drastic change by our species. It’s already been reported that some climate activists have shaded the truth in fighting for climate change measures – but that those failings hardly connect to the essential problem of too many greenhouse gases too fast. It’s all be reported.

If reporters can find new ways to expose the intellectual bankruptcy of the contrarian movement in industry, economics, politics, and grassroots gut belief, fine. I hope they do. Other sorts of pertinent news that is really new must be reported straight, including arguments over how much and whether this or that even in meteorology this year is a lesson in climate change. There really are big pockets of doubt about how much, how soon, and where that must be reported. In the meantime the main fault for inaction is not of the media,or even of people like Obama.

Some reporters are rising to defend their trade. One, notably, is Time Magazine‘s Bryan Walsh in a blog entitled Al Gore Chides Obama on Climate. But His Real Beef – Not So Fairly – Is With the Media.

And thank you Keith Kloor for prodding something from ksjtracker before another day goes by. He has his own verbiage:

• Collide-A-Scape blog: The Confusion Over Climate Reporting ;

*UPDATES

• NYTimes / Dot Earth blog – Andrew Revkin: On Gore’s Climate and Obama Complaints ; Revkin agrees with much of it,  wishes Gore had said something new, and thinks things were left out. He has a good line, which he has used before regarding human nature: “An Inconvenient Mind.”

- Charlie Petit

It is hard to say which is the bigger news lure – the cleverness of the method, or the answer it yielded  to an old question about dinosaurs – but it got lots of takers. The question is whether some or all dinosaurs were warm blooded as are the only clade of their kind that still survives, birds. And the answer, which is yes of course and bolsters long speculation that it must have been yes, came via a method that, by odd evolutionary happenstance, would not work with birds today. But would with some extinct ones. That’s because no birds today have teeth.

The stories nearly all say they were as warm-blooded as mammals, and I suppose because that’s true that it is the most easily understood comparison. But the simile with birds seems more apt. Plus, the fact that birds are warmblooded has been a pretty good clue, ever since their kinship to dinos became generally accepted, that dinosaurs ought not to be assumed any more to have been cold-blooded reptiles.

A Caltech team and colleagues at the University of Bonn in Germany and elsewhere report in Science today that they got the bodily temperature of two sauropod specimens, a Brachiosaurus brancai and a Camarasaurus, from distribution and ratios of carbon-13 and oxygen-18 in the mineral apatite within enamel of these long-necked planteaters’ teeth. The calculated results, in order: 100.8F / 38.2C and 96.3F/35.7C.

But because the specimens selected represent huge dinosaurs, left unanswered is whether smaller and lither dinos such as predatory theropods thermoregulated with the precision of mammals and birds today. Big ones’ tremendous thermal inertia would easily keep them on the warm side with less sophisticated metabolic nimbleness. In fact, says the research, these two are cooler than one might naively expect, and thus surely had a still unexplained way to cool off.  For reporters, the challenge is how to explain all that in plain English – or if space is tight, to settle and merely declare that wonder of wonders and gee whiz those clever scientists figured out how to read a dinosaur’s basal temperature 150 million years since it last had a pulse. Plus, there is the question whether to emphasize that they (some anyway) had warm blood, which is true, or that they had cool blood, which also is true if taken to mean cooler than expected.

Next, presumably, will be to get a reasonably large sampling of temperatures of a given species, but from different specimens, to see if they are nearly all the same – and to see if different species of similar size and habit had different normal temps. If so, that would imply they did regulate their temperatures robustly, or at least lead to new questions to chew on.

Stories:

• Reuters – Steve Gorman: Researchers take dinosaurs’ temperature with teeth ; All the basics, but a quibble. The Caltech press release tells reporters to “think apatosaurus’ to envision a genetic sauropod, and puts a helpful “brontosaurus” in parantheses. Reuters mentions only brontosaurus as an archetype, a genus that has been demoted to history after a skull mix-up got straightened out. Every dino-loving kid and ex-kid under age 30 or so knows apatosaurus is the right terminology. I’d have gone with that. It makes one excellent point – its fairly easy getting the big teeth of sauropods to knock of a chunk and run its powdered remains through a mass spectrometer or whatever they did. But collectors and museums are loath to part with the sexy big sharp teeth of the large predators. So T. rex’s temp may need to wait on heavy negotiation.
• Fox News – Loren Grush: How Cold-Blooded Were the Dinosaurs? ; Fine job, at least to these eyes. For one, it brings up birds right away. It also skirts the warm-or-cool dilemma with that hed that permits either point of view. She took the time, too, to explain just what an isotope is. But not why they’d vary in teeth by temperature.
• AP – Randolph E. Shmid: Scientists take temperature of long-gone dinosaurs ; Does the job, but has little technical detail (and it is so short, not much choice on that). But here’s a question. Is it just fine, journalistically, to extend a non-scientific myth if doing does no harm at all? Schmid, a testimony to the trade, makes the standard reference, declaring “People average 98.6.” No we don’t,  not that I’ve ever seen persuasively argued. First of all, the German who first tried to say what’s normal rounded his blurry data to 37C, which gains unmerited significance when converted to F. Second, his thermometers weren’t very accurate. Third, as the 19th century researcher said but which has been widely ignored (I learned this from Wikipedia), body temps change with time of day and location of measurement (under tongue, arm pit, rectum, body core…etc.) And perfectly health people can typically run a degree or so above or below one another. But who has time to explain all that? Who has the courage to write “human temperatures tend to run between 98 and 99″ and fight with an editor who wants to read a comforting 98.6 that his mother checked for when he or she hoped to stay home from school? Now, these isotope measurements in the news  are probably good enough to imply the precision given for the average lifetime temps of these two Jurassic specimens, but even so the actual animals no doubt varied a lot one to the next.
• Pasadena Star-News – Beige Luciano-Adams: Caltech researchers get dinosaur body temperatures for first time ; Terrific. Much here on the important further work needed before answering something more than whether big dinos had warm blood. Yes was already the supposition. But how and why remain open. Also good – that a post-doc’s question to a geology professor led to the study,  which included calibration using contemporary shark teeth and a systematic work-back through extinct mammals. Even Jack Horner gets a quote, a telling one.
• MSNBC / Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: How to take a dino’s temperature ; Lots of reporters say this is like sticking a thermometer under a dinosaur’s tongue. Boyle hears it differently from one of the authors. He also gets, maybe in a scooplet. an application of the technique that could answer another good question: were eggs kept warm in the nest by mother dino?
• USA Today / Science Fair- Dan Vergano: Dinosaur teeth tell temperature tale ; He puts in modern version the old question whether dinos were cold blooded: how did they keep from overheating?
• Ars Technica – Scott Johnson : Dinosaurs had mammal-hot blood ; Better than usual explanation how the isotopes got sorted in the living animals according to temperature.
• Orange Country register – Pat Brennan: Hot blooded? Scientists read dino body heat ;

Grist for the Mill: Caltech Press Release ; U. Bonn Press Release ; NSF Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit