(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Neuroscience is not an easy topic to cover. There are plenty of  “experts” writing books with overstated claims, some hype in imaging techniques like fMRI when applied to behavioral studies, and novel research topics like optogenetics or connectomics have an inner complexity that makes them difficult to handle accurately. The scientific study of the brain is nonetheless a very compelling subject for the general public. Compared to US or Spain, it is not often tackled by reporters in Latin America. But a few stories have appeared in L. Amer. in recent days. We found good articles about the use of laser in brain research, a mathematical model to apply in neural networks, a fair story about mirror neurons – with a focus on brain plasticity and the exceptional medical neurorehabilitation case of a Spanish patient who recovered vision several years after brain damage. But we found also some pseudoneuroscience. These include assertions about huge differences between the brains of men and women, neuromarketing claims with few data and weak methodology, a statement that human intelligence has reached its limit, and the prediction that we’ll be able to slow down Alzheimer’s disease in the next 10 to 15 years.

La neurociencia es apasionante. Escribir sobre la comprensión científica del cerebro y su relación con nuestro comportamiento, es de las tareas más agradecidas y estimulantes para un periodista científico. Pero también es difícil. En el workshop para periodistas que atendí la semana pasada en el MIT de Boston, la neurocientífica Nancy Kanwisher (una de las principales expertas del mundo en imágenes de fMRI) nos dijo textualmente: “se publican muchísimos estudios de fMRI con metodología pobre y conclusiones exageradas; incluso en Science y Nature… ¡sobre todo en Science y Nature!”. Este comentario ilustra el problema de que science y nature a menudo suelen dejarse llevar más por el impacto que por la metodología, y presentar resultados menos contrastados que revistas consideradas menores. Pero sobre todo nos transmite a nosotros la presión de saber identificar qué estudios son relevantes, y cuales no. No es nada fácil. Veamos algunos ejemplos.

En La Tercera (Chile) leemos el interesante artículo de Marcelo Córdoba “Los hits musicales se pueden predecir”. La idea es sencilla: pones a varios adolescentes de entre 12 y 17 años bajo el escáner registrando la actividad de las áreas cerebrales del placer mientras están escuchando canciones, y ves cuáles generan más satisfacción en el cerebro. El estudio está hecho con sólo 27 jóvenes. ¿es suficiente? La revista científica que lo publicó opina que sí, pero la verdad, es que es el típico estudio de neuromarketing que los expertos suelen criticar como demasiado osado, y a la vez en realidad irrelevante. Puede ser, pero en este caso, como tampoco es un tema de vital trascendencia, si lo redactas de manera inteligente como hace Marcelo, pues tampoco resulta grave.

Si es un poco más peliagudo alimentar mitos como que los hombres y mujeres somos extremadamente diferentes. La investigadora Louann Brizendine se ha hecho de oro vendiendo sus libros “el cerebro femenino” primero y “el cerebro masculino” después, pero antes de sacar una nota en la Revista Ya de El Mercurio como la de Daniela Mohor “Los secretos del cerebro masculino”, debemos saber que la comunidad científica no le otorga demasiada credibilidad. El texto de Daniela está trabajadísimo y muy bien expuesto. Resulta de enorme interés para el lector. Pero refleja sólo la visión de Brizendine, que dista mucho de ser aceptada por la comunidad científica. Es lo mismo que nos dijo Kanwisher sobre Oliver Sacks: “es un gran escritor, sabe mucho de neurología, y redacta historias muy elocuentes, pero como fuente de información cientofica no es fiable en absoluto”.

En La Razón también hay cierta neuroexageración con la postura de Brizandin en el texto de Belén Conquero “La guerra de sexos nace en el cerebro”. Se llega a justificar que las mujeres hagan tareas del hogar y los hombres carezcan de la capacidad de leer emociones en sus hijos. No negamos que tenga parte de razón en otros aspectos, claro, pero se trata de pseudoneurociencia que vende mucho. Desmontar mitos como la supuesta gran diferencia entre hombres y mujeres vende considerablemente menos, pero es lo que recoge La Información haciéndose eco del blog experiencia Docet.

Tendencias nos vuelve a desasosegar con el artículo de Marcelo Córdoba “La inteligencia humana está llegando a su límite”. En principio parece hablar de limitaciones en términos de proceso evolutivo, pero luego de unas surrealistas técnicas para miniaturizar neuronas, y todo bajo la asunción de que el tamaño es lo que condiciona la inteligencia. Inexacto. Nos desasosiega porque el artículo está muy bien redactado, se nota que Marcelo domina los conceptos, el ángulo es original, y ha entrevistado a científicos en exclusiva para la nota. Pero creemos que aquí arriesga demasiado con su titular, y se excede en busca de originalidad.

Hablemos de neurociencia más fronteriza. La de la optogenética o el estudio de las redes neuronales, cuya cobertura suele tener papers científicos como fuente y no libros de divulgación. En El Pais por ejemplo encontramos un muy buen artículo de Malen Ruiz de Elvira “El laser ilumina la biología” (foto de este post). No habla exclusivamente de neurociencia, sino de manera más amplia de las aplicaciones de la luz en investigación biomédica. Pero incluye aplicaciones para el estudio del cerebro, y es un reportaje tan completo y con participación de científicos locales, que merece ser destacado. En El Universal intentan explicar las investigaciones de un matemático mexicano sobre conectividad cerebral. Chapó por sacar a relucir investigaciones de científicos locales, a pesar de que sean sobre temas abstractos y difíciles de enganchar al público. Pero digo “intentan”, porque parece el típico ejemplo de nota donde la complejidad del asunto ha dejado tan perdido al redactor, que junta frases sin ser capaz de transmitir cual es el método diseñado por el científico mexicano. Por otro lado, en El País leemos el artículo de Emilio de Benito “Un par de electrodos en el cerebro recuperan la memoria en ratas” que pretende utilizar un lenguaje divulgativo. Pero con expresiones tan coloquiales que parece tomárselo a guasa. Además, a sabiendas de la decepción de los modelos animales en el estudio del alzhéimer (todo lo que parecía funcionar en ratas ha fracasado en estudios clínicos en humanos, y se empieza a asumir que es un mal modelo para estudiar el envejecimiento del cerebro humano), en la primera línea especula que la cura del alzheimer “puede estar más cerca”.

Sobre Alzheimer, el típico titular que escandaliza a investigadores: Agencia EFE “Expertos prevén retrasar el avance del alzhéimer en 10 o 15 años” (ABC). Nos podemos imaginar la cara del científico que en un congreso habla con el periodista, le insinúa que sí sería un tiempo realista para quizás frenar un poco la enfermedad, y luego lee el contundente titular en la prensa apoyado con sus declaraciones. Tierra trágame debió pensar. Cierto que las investigaciones avanzan, pero debemos ser conscientes que en el caso de terapias frente al Alzhéimer, los neurocientíficos andan bastante perdidos todavía. No es de los campos de la ciencia que más esperanza generen.

Dos muy buenas historias para terminar. En el argentino Página 12 encontramos el artículo de Marcelo Rodríguez “¿Cuáles son las neuronas más bellas?”. En el primer párrafo Marcelo ya cita neuronas espejo, redes neuronales y fMRI. Define a las neuronas espejo como las “niñas mimadas de la neurobiología”, y advierte de que se suelen lanzar mensajes exagerados, sobre todo ante la supuesta posibilidad de leer la mente. Interesante nota.

Y entrando en la parte más médica, citemos como referencia un extenso reportaje publicado en El Magazine de La Vanguardia por Marta Ricart “Cerebro en reconstrucción” sobre un paciente que tras quedar ciego por una lesión cerebral, fue capaz de recuperar su visión gracias a intensas sesiones de neurorehabilitación. Y es que la plasticidad cerebral es otro de los grandes temas de esta revolución tan maravillosa que representa el estudio científico del cerebro.

- Pere Estupinyà

First,  just to be clear, your tracker is pretty much a religion ignoramus. That is, happily secular and not afraid to use the A-word in reference to self. Hardly a clue – despite a childhood in Sunday schools that ended at age 13 or so when I said goodbye to that – which gospel says what and god knows what Revelations is trying to declare other than display exuberance and a knack for meter. Zero on the Talmud although scholars of it always seem terribly kind and wise, nothin’ on the Koran except it inspires wonderful non-representative-of-people artistic and architectural motifs. Next to zip on the Upanishads. The tales of  Siddhartha’s enlightenment did not engross back in the day when they were the rage among America’s young and long-haired. Bafflement at those of non-American-Indian heritage who are earnest in their respect for sacred sites in the US that are just mountains, or valleys, or other geographic formations deserving of care but not for animist cosmology reasons. As for Scientology, the fabulations of L. Ron Hubbard seem funnier than serious. LDS – what is up with it and American Indians and Israel anyway?  It is clear to me that all or almost all scripture contains wisdom and reflects the thoughts of many very serious people determined to codify proper behavior. Prayer is undoubtedly a good way to focus one’s thoughts on a proper course.  But it seems deeply doubtful that, when one prays silently, anybody or any thing else pays attention. One thing religion generally gets right is the sense of awe, reverence even, one ought to feel when looking at our world including down by microscope or up by telescope.

Nonetheless, at the urging of a regular ksjtracker reader, NY science freelancer Jonathan Beard, I just read a longish essay and article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Steve Paulson, a top exec. and producer at Wisconsin Public Radio. I am glad I did.  His topic is on the role, or lack of it, by science in most of the world’s Islam-majority nations and whether there’s much chance for secular science – including tolerance of evolution as a norm in public education – in those societies.

It is an impressive piece of reporting for its scope. Read it. I got a clearer sense of what the Golden Age of Islam contributed to medieval science and preservation of older texts. One learns that many within the small corps of Islamic scientists strive to remain faithful to their prophet but to employ all the muscle of modern science available to them including the theory of evolution. One reads that efforts at modernization are underway. Also that resistance to broad swaths of science is tremendously deep in much of Islam – as deep as what one may find in any fundamentalist Protestant congregation.  The huge price that Islamic-majority nations pay in education, economic vitality, and scientific plus technological achievement gets sharp documentation,

Only one complaint, a big one. Paulson mentions the most essential difficulty Islamic-majority societies may have in reforming their use of science, and in joining the modern, prosperous, and largely peaceful industrial world. His primary nod to this fundament is this sentence: “There is no clear separation between church and state in most Muslim countries, so scientists lack the autonomy that they enjoy in the West.” Science is not all that lacks autonomy. Ditto for art, for the courts, and for protectors of free speech. Why? Ataturk cut the cord in Turkey in the 1920s – by iron fiat, not anything democratic. But he showed it is possible (for awhile anyway – Turkey’s leaders are moderate but nonetheless real Islamists now). This seems to me to be the nub of the problem – as long as a religion is officially part of a government, and as long as elements of that religion have their own authority to order punishment including murder of non-believers, apostates, and the like, that country has little chance of escaping the dark ages. This I’d like to read more about – whether a genuine separation of church and state is becoming an acceptable topic for public conversation in Islamic nations. Or, is “Islamic Republic of….” a permanent feature of the U.N. roster?

- Charlie Petit

Once upon a time I opened the front door and was astonished to see a small spotted cat curled up on the welcome mat. No! That’s no cat – it had absurdly long legs curled under it, and huge ears. It was a newborn fawn. Its instincts kept it motionless. I took a picture and closed the door (alas, dunno where the photo file has gone). We left it alone. Didn’t know what else to do. Then a doe hanging out in the yard with a second fawn made a noise or something . The baby rattled to its feet and teetered off.

I thought of that when New York writer Karen Frenkel forwarded to ksjtracker a story with some of the same elements. Enjoy, have a good weekend:

• North Jersey media / Record – Jack Hope: If you find a fawn ….

- Charlie Petit

Often, when I pay too little noticeable attention to Mrs. Tracker, she accuses me of thinking about black holes (or quarks) when there are more important matters at hand. I never, almost, spontaneously think about either. They just don’t come up that much. But black holes (and quarks) are standards on the science journalism beat. This week, independent spots of research put supermassive black holes – the kind that sit in galactic lairs and sometimes spout quasar beacons, giant radio lobes, or otherwise show off – into the news several ways.

Too much to gather them all but here are example stories.

1) Early Universe had massive black holes as soon as galaxies began forming. The news, first reported in the journal Nature, is that data from several telescopes on Earth and in space see signs of rapid black hole growth – toward the supermassive variety seen in nearer and more contemporary galaxies – in emanations from when the universe was a few hundred million years old. This is a big deal for people who theorize how galaxies evolve and what role central black holes play.

Stories:

• Wired – Mark Brown: Astronomers find ancient supremassive black holes, 13 billion years old ; Again the old conundrum, as in a conundrum about oldness. They found young supermassive black holes, and not 13 b. but just 700 to 950 million years old. But it’s taken nearly 13 billion years for us to see them. This is a usage conundrum. It’s played out entirely in the headline – Brown’s story explains explicitly what we’re looking at, temporally speaking.
• PC Magazine – William Fenton: Early Universe Riddled With Black Holes ;
• Time Mag – Matt Peckham: NASA; Supermassive Black Holes at Heat of Ancient Galaxies ; Yes, it’s a NASA observatory, the Chandra X-ray telescope, that got the main data. But it’s not quite NASA making the discovery. It’s university-affiliated astronomers who use it who got the data and wrote the paper.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Chandra Press Release ; Yale U. Press Release ; U. Hawaii Press Release ;

2) A Galaxy not so very far away, with two supermassive black holes. Chandra, again, and other telescopes gathered from a well-known, pretty nearby galaxy called Markarian 739 startlingly clear proof that twin black hole beacons – lit up by matter spiraling in each to its oblivion – stare from separate lairs near its heart. It looks a little like a smiley face, or maybe a scary clown.The news stems from a paper submitted to the  Astrophysical Journal.

Stories :

• Astronomy Now – Emily Baldwin: Galaxy boasts two monster black holes ;
• Space.com – Tariq Malik: Twins! Another black hole found in one galaxy ;
• Huffington Post – Dean Praetorius: Dual Black Holes Inhabit Nearby Galaxy ;

Grist for the Mill: Nat’l Science Foundation – Press Release/story ;

3) MUNCH! A supermassive black hole is eating a star for lunch. A powerful burst of gamma rays looks a bit different from the usual gamma ray burst associated with the collapse of giant stars into smallish black holes (all this in the course of a superrnova explosion). Astronomer think this brilliant episode marks the violent rending of a solar-type star as it spins to its doom in the accretion disk of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy’s heart. The report is in Science.

Stories:

• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Black hole shreds star, sparking gamma ray flash ;
• AP : Black hole that ate star caused blast ;
• Montreal Gazette/PostMedia News – Margaret Munro: Scientists record ‘death rattle’ of star hitting black hole: It hasn’t really hit the black hole yet (and will asymptotically-close-to-never hit it in our time frame), but never mind the relativistic weirdness of reality. It is on its way there.

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ; Warwick U. Press Release ; Science paper abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

A lot more potassium, pits that look as though the surface were etched with acid and look nothing like meteor or asteroid strikes, strong hints of ice, a odd shaped magnetic field, plus a few other distinctions and all of a sudden Mercury has escaped its reputation as the dullest kid at the party.

So while it may still look at first glance like a big gray sphere of cratered rock – an oversized and hotter version of Earth’s Moon – operators of NASA’s Messenger probe say they’ve found enough to vindicate the money spent on the machine. Included are mysteries left to explore, and several theories on how the Sun’s closest planet formed that are in need of major re-think, or a toss into the dust bin.

The  spacecraft has been orbiting Mercury since March 18.  The news burst came out of a press conference yesterday in Washington where Carnegie Institution of Science researchers and others that NASA has on mission contract released photographs and data and shared their ideas on what they mean. Overall this is not news of a sensation, but of a collection of small mysteries and surprises, about a strange little world. That it managed to worm its way into the news cycle without offering any overarching and easily overblown discovery is a surprise. No alien life, no cosmic explosions, no perils to our world. It is just a placid planet that is not quite what it seemed. It got lots of pickup. It remains, to these eyes, less interesting than several other smallish solar system bodies (Titan, Europa, Ceres, Pluto, Triton, Io…). Maybe it’s like noticing past an askew window shade one day that the neighborhood’s dullest resident could be seen practicing tap dancing while shaking a tambourine with a companion you don’t recognize. That’d get everybody at the block party buzzing.

Routine searchers turn up nothing from AP. That’s odd.

Stories:

• NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: Close Up, Mercury Is Looking Less Boring ; Puts Mercury mission in context with missions to the other three rocky planets of our solar system.
• Christian Science Monitor: Peter Spotts: How Mercury is like Saturn (and other surprizes from NASA’s orbiter ;
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Mercury’s origins may differ from sister planets ;
• Los Angeles Times – Daniela Hernandez: Ice may cover parts of Mercury ;
• Time Mag – Matt Peckham: NASA ‘Messenger’ Spacecraft Changing Picture of Mercury ;
• Wired – Lisa Grossman – Brilliant New Images of Mercury From First Year of Orbit ; This is funny – it says the surprises are sending planetary scientists scrambling for their pencils. I get it. But pencils? I guess it could be. Usually scientists are imagined to be grabbing a piece of chalk or marker to scribble on a blackboard. Or noodling on a computer or touch screen.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Probe’s pictures prove that Mercury ‘ain’t the moon’ ; Nice bit of history on  hints of  ice many years ago, their discard due to other observations, and revival as Messenger’s polar orbit gives it a good view of polar crater bottoms.
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Mercury’s Surprising ‘Personality’ Revealed For the First Time ;

Grist for the Mill:

Carnegie Institution Press Release ; NASA Press Release ; Johns Hopkins U. Applied Physics Lab Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The AP‘s Randolph E. Schmid has an enterprising story out on wildfires that puts this year’s blazes in the US  into a long context of land use change, of growing population, of the changing habits of people who visit flammable camping and hiking country, and of shifting strategies of fire and range management – plus it provides a nod to global warming climate change. His handling of the climate change angle is smart. It’s almost certainly a factor, one gathers, but even without it we’d be seeing a lot more forest and other landscape fires.

It could be that climate change, as it unfolds, would make transformation of the landscape and its vegetation inevitable in many places with fire a prime, proximate agent of the change along with such things as increased insect activity and tree-killing drought. But as climate change only makes some people go into a rant and to change the subject, and as the topic is why there are so many fires now and in store for  the immediate future -  but is not why one ingredient (climate change) seems sure to intensify over coming decades – a decision to write it this way may have been prudent.

Other wildfire news, the local angle (and it’s not even summer yet):

• Pearland Journal (Texas): County fire danger approaching extreme levels ;
• Leesburg Daily Commercial (Fla) Brad Buck: Fire officials: “Extreme” wildfire danger ;
• Cañon City Daily Record (Colorado) Carie Canterbury: More evacuations as fire grows ;
• Prescott Daily Courier (Ariz) Joanna Dodder Nellans: No signs of monsoon to help halt wildfires ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s been several years since scientists discovered that the so-called “missing neutrinos” from the Sun’s core had merely changed their identities on the way to Earth. Such “neutrino oscillations” are now part of standard textbook physics. But they are back in the news. This time a new kind of transformation has physicists buzzing. It happened in Japan. There a machine called the J-PARC in the city of Tokai shot a beam of neutrinos through the intervening swell of  Earth’s crust and straight at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Kamioka, 295 km way.  In a twinkling some of the starting batch of muon neutrinos showed up at  the detector as electron neutrinos, an identity-shift for neutrinos of a sort new to science. It may provide a way to see if and how matter and anti-matter are not perfectly symmetrical opposites. The next step, after repair of earthquake damage, will be to try the same test with anti-matter neutrinos. Maybe there’ll be a charge-parity symmetry violation.  Maybe science will glimpse the reason why matter dominates the universe and why antimatter is an ephemeral curiosity. Maybe.

Well, that all sounds pretty incremental. Fascinating and technically impressive as these results  may be it’s not as though the secret foundations of the universe are laid bare. Most news outlets that covered this handle the news as a possible gateway to interesting and more fundamental revelations, but do not hyperventilate. A few – one at least –  go a tiny bit, Holy Grail-invoking, um, berserk.

Oddly, this news appears simply to have been announced  in Japan by members of the international scientific team – not at a conference or in a journal. A paper is in submission at Physical Review Letters (see Grist below) with the usual endless list of of particle physics authors. Ordinarily one would not expect such a splash. But many researchers got their home institutes around the world to issue press releases. That may be why it got as much ink as it would have were it in Science or Nature. Or done with NASA money.

Stories:

• New Scientist – David Shiga: Neutrinos caught ‘shape shifting’ in a new way;  A straightforward and unembroidered account.
• Los Angeles Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Neutrino observation a step toward undersanding the Big Bang ; The hed’s overly big bang-centric. Maugh’s text makes clear that only one aspect is in direct play, the matter-antimatter divide.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Neutrino particle ‘flips to all flavours ;
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Japanese Neutrino Finding Could Explain Why There Is Matter in the Universe/ A new kind of oscillation could be the key to life, the univese, and everything ; Oh, c’mon. That qualifying word “could” is a mighty hedge.
• Daily Mail (UK) Daniel Bates: Are we on the verge of the science-fiction Holy Grail? Reseachers ‘one step closer’ to finding out why matter dominates the universe ; Holy moly, and thank you Jim Handman for flagging this wretchedly excessive headline for us complete with that most common thing in news (just put holy grail in a search engine’s news mode and stand back) . Bates’s story, for all that and for all this tabloid newspaper’s celebrity obsession as shown by the accompanying story blurbs, undergoes a little personality shifting itself as it goes on and comes back down to Earth.
• Mainichi Daily News : Research team detects changes in elementary ‘neutrino’ particles in world first ;
• ScienceNOW – Adrian Cho: First Results From Japanese Neutrino Experiment Hint at Big Things to Come: Makes clear that this test says nothing about antimatter. But the effect is big, so should be easy to see it again in an antimaterial sort of way.

Grist for the Mill:

Article preprint ;

J-PARC Press Release ; Duke University Press Release ; U. British Columbia Press Release ; U. Colorado Press Release ; U. Rochester Press Release ; University of Warwick Press Release ;Sci. Tech. Facilities Council (UK) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

With Congress ordering the feds to let state agencies manage wolves in parts of the Rockies – including hunting seasons – it is natural to wonder about how wolf management is doing elsewhere in the contiguous 48. And here’s one answer.

• Minnesota Public Radio – Stephanie Hemphill:Grand Rapids audience shows support for wolf delisting  ; She reports 2000 wolves have now pretty much occupied all the available wilderness-type habitat in the state’s northeast woods and are moving into more populated areas.

  To listen to the audio, or read the closely-equivalent text, one figures state management is sure to follow. Wait’ll you hear what happened, says a veterinarian who heard the tale first-hand, when a pack of wolves showed up at house with a large labrador retriever on the porch and a five-year-old boy nearby. You’d be pretty upset too.

   There is a difference between this and how the wolf management issue got portrayed just a year ago.

• Minnesota Public Radio – Bob Kelleher (Jul 20, 2010): Petition: Wolves should be restored across more of US ;

- Charlie Petit

I have to confess that I once fretted about China’s draconian one-child order, of decades past, to its population, and then I fretted as it faded. It probably did the world a huge favor, with the ends at least taking the edge off the means. You think China’s demands for fuel and raw materials are high now, imagine if its population were another billion or so higher.

   As enforcement waned I’d wondered whether birth rates would shoot up. They have not. Demographers say reasons include the ones in other advanced nations where internal population growth has stabilized or even started to fall on its own: rising education especially for women, technological  development, and urbanization.  But a dramatic report at NPR  spotlights another reason China would be hardpressed to expand its birth rate even if it wants to. Culture there as in many places puts preference on boys. Along with rising prosperity and development has come easy access to ultrasound and modern obstetric medicine. And men can’t bear children.

  NPR Morning Edition – Renee Montagne with Mara Hvistendahl: In Asia, The Perils of Aborting Girls and Keeping Boys ;

  The topic, aside from schoolrooms with far more boys than girls,  is the wrenching social dislocations when men desperate for wives, or just a companion for the night, compete for women. The latter, you’d think, would be calling the shots. That has to be true in some cases – young women from strong families able to choose from among marriage-bound men those on course  for success and with decent temperaments and looks to boot. This report is on the sadder flip side, a new chapter in trafficking in and exploitation of women. The demographics of it in the long run will be interesting to see.

- Charlie Petit

http://tinyurl.com/3m2ayvp

If it were alligators in an urban Florida pond biting and chasing off dogs – sometimes with fatal result – one supposes animal control would clear out the gators pretty quick. Things appear to be different in Alaska. In a long story with more than a dash of information on the natural history of beavers, the Anchorage Daily News‘s Rosemary Shinohara relates the recent misadventures of town pooches that got into a body of water called University Lake.  Beavers bite the pets, and almost always run them out of the water.

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- Charlie Petit

Several groups of top solar specialists told a solar physics meeting of the American Astronomical Society in New Mexico this week that evidence is rising for a true rarity – a solar cycle with few or no sunspots in ten years or so. While sunspots themselves are darker and cooler than the rest of the sun, they occur during periods of igh overall activity. Thus no sunspots = a bit less sunshine. The effect will be to cool things below where they’d otherwise be here on Earth. The last time it happened, the Maunder Minimum of the 17th and early 18th centuries, hit Europe and much of the Earth with what is called the Little Ice Age.

This cooling is a recipe for overheated media reaction. There is some, not much, opportunistic bell-clanging. Calmer and more predominant coverage reports this could, if it happens, provide some respite from greenhouse warming – not reverse it, just temper it a bit (while the accumulating CO2 sets the stage for a spike once the sun after a few years or even decades gets back to its usual behavior).  One thing’s for sure – this could mean a boost for investment in solar weather and solar observation research.

Stories :

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Goodnight sun: Sunspots may disappear for years. Nothing to worry about, he writes. Could be good. A slowing in global warming. Fewer solar flares and related magnetic storms to fool with satellites and Earthly transmission lines.
• NYT -Op-ed/Dot Earth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: Would Solar Lull Snuff Climate Action? ; Only piece I’ve seen so far to ask a severaloutside experts whether these forecasts of a sunspot hiatus are persuasive. Revkin says answer looks like no, maybe at most.
• *UPDATE/LATE ADDITION — Wired – Brandon Keim: Sunspot Drop Won’t Cause Global Cooling ; Missed this careful piece of context-reminder and science review first time around, as Mr. Keim bashfully pointed out in comments below.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: New ice age? Don’t count on it ; Marshall writes that the world’s newspapers report the sun is about to send Earth into a new Little Ice Age. Perhaps the UK’s newspapers trend toward that. Not the world’s. Behind most of the dramatic headlines are, mostly, reasoned and reasonable stories. Marshall’s argument why any cooling would be swamped by ongoing warming seems in line with mainline science and how most, not all, media reort it .
• ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: End of the Sunspot Cycle? ; The if “is a big if,”it says here. But if it happens, cooling would be slight but easing of solar storm threats might be big.
• National Geographic News: Victoria Jaggard : Sun Headed Into Hibernation, Solar Studies Predict ; A calm story, its tenor suggesting something very interesting seems to be underway – exciting for science -  but that’s about it.
• Telegraph (UK) Stephen Adams: New Little Ice Age in store? ; Tenor of hed might suggest  that answer  is yes. But as has been pointed out, a question mark in a hed is usually a precede for No.  Story itself is eqivocal, with one source expecting greenhouse to overwhelm in small solar dropoff.
• ScienceNews – Ron Cowen: Next solar cycle could be a no-show ; Puts a delay, not suspension, of the next solar cycle as more likely. Emphasis is on solar science and the coincidence of this behavior with a surge in instrumentation to watch whatever happens.
• Register (UK) Lewis Page: Earth may be headed into a mini Ice Age within a decade ; Uh, right. None of this  story’s outright warnings of impending ice age is backed by a quote. Rather, it reports correctly that something like the Maunder Minimum’s absence of sunspots may be coming, and that the last time it happened the Earth cooled. Ergo – invest in anoraks. This version got picked up immediately at Fox News.
• TIME Magazine -Matt Peckham: Claim: Sunspots to Disappear, Global Cooling May Ensue ; Not as off-base as the hed suggests, and cites the Arizona Daily Star as its source (next bullet);
• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: Fewer sunspots could help offset global warming ; Solid job, including history of the thesis and its earlier rejection when data were less convincing. The declaration that global warming might be entirely offset for awhile is not explicitly backed up by quote or other citation.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Solar forecast hints at a big chill ; NO “big chill” back up in the story – but it does say “might cool down temperatures’ or “at least slow down the warming.” One important source, climatologist Gavin Schmidt of the Real Climate blog, supposes that greenhouse effects are ten times stronger as climate changers than would be a loss of sunspots.
• Discover Magazine/ Bad Astronomy Blog – Phil Plait: The Sun may be headed for a little quiet time: Phil the astronomer says it is impossible to guess confidently how this will effect Earth – but doesn’t see a net global cooling as at all likely.
• Christian Science Monitor – Peter Spotts: A sun with no spots? What that could mean for Earth and its climate ; Solar basics. Little hint whether this could mean change in global warming’s arc.
• LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II: Sunspots may quiet down for a while, scientists say ;
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: Scientists predict rare ‘hibernation’ of sunspots ; One of few stories to put a numerical comparison on the scale of influence over climate from greenhouse forcing and solar radiative changes. Source says a sunspot drought cannot get close to a full offset of global warming.

Grist for the Mill:

National Solar Observatory, Southwest Research Institute Press Release;

AAS Solar Physics Mtg abstracts: Where is Cycle 25? , Whither Goes Cycle 24? , A Decade of Diminishing Sunspot Vigor ;

Sort of Related News: Volcanoes vs. Humans at climate changer. A contrarian trope gets put to the test.

• Live Science – Stephanie Pappas: Humans Spew more Carbon Dioxide than All of Earth’s Volcanoes ; A USGS volcanologist gets tired of being asked how much CO2 gets put into the air by eruptions compared to human industry, and runs the numbers. Answer: it’s not close.

Grist for the Mill: USGS Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Lots of behavior science in today’s NYTimes science section. Top of the heap is its lead story, by Abigail Zuger, a profile of a curly-haired Mexican-American in charge of the NIH’s drug abuse agency. When I first glimpsed that this woman, Nora D. Volkow, is a non-starter as director of a proposed new NIH agency that puts together all addiction research – on alcohol, illegal drug, and legal drug abuse  – I figured it’s because she’s a relative of Trotsky and grew up in the house where he lived in Mexico and where he was assassinated 71 years ago. Conservatives in the Senate would never greenlight somebody so easily tagged as tainted by anti-American associations, surely.

But no, it’s just that she now heads one of the agencies to be subsumed in the new one, and the internal politics of NIH demand a neutral new leader. And anyway she already got approved as head of one agency, Trotsky or no Trotsky. The story’s a surprising portrait, rich in personal detail and it lays out growing recognition of the shared physiology (dopamine #1) that binds  addictions.

Other headlines to note:

• Tara Parker-Pope: Digital Flirting: Easy to Do, and Easy to Get Caught ; About you know who, and his what. It makes clear (to me) that Rep. Wiener ought not be compelled to quit. Urged, sure, but not forced. It wasn’t illegal, did not hurt or even physically touch anybody else, and there’s built-in comeuppance for such scandals as this: the next election,  which for him is in 17 months. Parker-Pope makes clear how banal the misdeed is.  It’s not morals so much, and not the stupidity (sex makes people stupid in so many ways), that torpedoes his reputation. It’s the creepiness, the sheer pathetic ick of it.
• Nicholas Wade: Scientists Measure the Accuracy of a Racism Claim: On Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and its flaws. It manages to avoid saying, and thus to avoid a lot of distracting headache, that these or those clades of mankind, if any, tend toward bigger or smaller cranial capacity. But Gould may have gone off half-cocked.
• Bronwyn Garrity: Social Media Join Toolkit for Hunters of Disease ; Typhoid Marys, and Marvins, may get tweeted- and friended-out quick.
• Katherine Bouton (book review): From Hitler to Mother Teresa: 6 Degrees of Empathy; On absence of empathy being the root of evil. It brings up toward the end the outlier situations in which generally nice people commit evil. This makes me think of a quote, attributed to Steven Weinberg in a recent post, to the effect that good people will always act well and bad people will be evil but for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. Not quite true. But it has punch.
• Kirk Johnson – In a “Perfect Storm,’ One Case of Equine Herpes Becomes Many ; Some of us here in the lefty half of the US cannot forget Rachel Madow’s recent segment on a Utah event that had  half-grown girls – with lots of cute curls, makeup, and Stetson hat -  ride stick ponies in the rodeo queen equestrian contest due to a horse  quarantine. Here’s the poop on the disease. No stick ponies.
• Sandra Blakeslee: A Defect That May Lead to a Masterpiece ; If your kid is crosseyed, walleyed, lazyeyed, or one-eyed, sign him or her up for painting class. Maybe there’s a reason to refer to somebody as having the eye of an artist (note that it’s not the eyes of an artist).

As usual lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit