This just in – science is not an entirely dispassionate and cordial collective enterprise of converting ignorance into solid theory and data. It is done by mortal people with ambitions, envies, alliances, grudges, embraces, and changes of heart. Data count. But so do the combative, defensive lizard reflexes raging up from our brain stems.

The small gaggle of reporters who follow the hunt right underfoot for the dark matter that holds galaxies and their clusters together – by scientists setting their germanium detectors inside mountains or deep underground and thus shielded from most cosmic rays – will know that some sort of joust is underway.  Some competing groups say they see a glimmering of an inkling (enough for intriguing statistical significance) in their results. Others do not.

A small nudge of progress occurred this week. A paper landed at arXiv (in Grist below) with an analysis, by two scientists in Chicago not working directly for any of the four primary experimental collaborations, that sides lightly with the groups that think a few dark matter particles, most likely so-called WIMPS -  have gently thumped the atomic nuclei in their detectors.

It has not received a lot of coverage. It is a bit incremental, with a feel familiar to early news flurries (see earlier post May 4).

Here’s the point. At Science Magazine reporter Yudhijit Bhattarcharjee has a report that, as one source says, “There’s a little bit of Nobelitis going around.” The knives are out. He has the men and women of competing teams saying unkind things about one another’s work, even one another’s mental balance. He finds that some know how to knit cutting words together cleverly – as in one team’s account of its work getting called “pure, weapons-grade balonium” by a rival. I gotta remember that, put it in the part of my brain where I store the miracle materials impossibilium and unobtainium. This piece came out before arXiv published the latest data. He was ahead of the game, laying out the field of play for other reporters to study.

See also:

• MIT Tech Review arXiv blog – The Dark Matter Data Bonanza ;

Grist for the Mill: arXiv preprint ; Univ. of Chicago Press Release ;

Other Dark Matter News:

• Space.com – Four dark-matter hunters share $500,000 prize ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) In April 2010 the Bolivia’s president Evo Morales said that Europeans are bald because they consume transgenic food, and that is one reason genetic modified crops were not an option in Bolivia. But he seems to have changed his views. On Monday the Bolivian government announced a plan to improve yields with biotech tools that include GMO. Officials announced the change quietly and ambiguously. Some members of the government saw through that and objected to the decision. This has created a diversity of opinion in Bolivian media. Some reporters focus on benefits, others on risks, and still others try for balance. We’ve found only one story that asks a researcher about things, and gets an interesting reply:  “Bolivia is not technologically ready to produce its own genetic modified seeds, so they will probably be imported”.

Also today we track a  good story from Costa Rica. A reporter at La Nación has been following  a local study’s assertion that coffee plants fix as much CO2 as a secondary forest, and that they could get carbon credit bonuses from agreements to reduce greenhouse gases. The story has several parts. The reporter explores the economical implications, confirms the legal difficulties to get these bonuses, explains the science involved in the study, and he even follows a researcher in her fieldwork.

En Abril de 2010 Evo Morales aseguró públicamente que los europeos estaban más calvos porque comían transgénicos (y no parecía decirlo en broma), y que Bolivia estaría libre de organismos modificados genéticamente. El rechazo a los transgénicos por parte del gobierno peruano ha sido una constante. Pero el pasado lunes se anunció que el gobierno impulsaba una nueva ley para permitir la producción y comercialización de alimentos transgénicos en bolivia, que hasta estos momentos estaba restringida a la soja. La Razón aporta la información más moderada y oficialista con la nota de Willy Chipana “Gobierno apoyará la biotecnología de los alimentos“. Queremos fijarnos en el primer párrafo de la nota: “El Gobierno afirmó ayer que incentivará y desarrollará la biotecnología consistente en la mejora genética de los alimentos en calidad y cantidad, lo que no es igual a los productos genéticamente modificados que son conocidos como transgénicos“. ¿¿¿¿¿Cómor?????. Confusión innecesaria. ¿a santo de qué viene esta frase? Por la ambigüedad creada en el anuncio del ministerio. Pero al fin y al cabo, de lo que habla tanto la nueva ley como el texto de Willy es de transgénicos convencionales. Eso sí, con interesantes matices: – No se introducirán semillas genéticamente modificadas de especies de las que Bolivia es centro de origen o diversidad, ni aquellos que atenten contra el patrimonio genético, la biodiversidad, la salud de los sistemas de vida y la salud humana. – el Gobierno es consciente de que los cultivos orgánicos no son suficientes para garantizar el abastecimiento internos, y se fomentará un mejor y mayor rendimiento de la producción que permita alcanzar la soberanía alimentaria así como la generación de excedentes. – los alimentos que sean comercializados en el mercado interno y que hayan sido producidos con base en transgénicos deberán llevar una etiqueta con la finalidad de que los consumidores decidan si lo compran o no. – se establecerán disposiciones para el control de la producción, importación y comercialización de productos genéticamente modificados (transgénicos)…. Sinceramente, una posición muy lógica y acorde con utilizar la tecnología de manera equilibrada para mejorar la vida de las personas. No hace falta tenerle miedo a la palabra transgénico.

Claro está, la obligación del periodista es ser desconfiado e inquisitivo. Otros medios lo han sido con diferente grado. En La Prensa, Lidia Mamani Sinani “Contradicciones en el MAS por el uso de transgénicos” refleja las desavenencias internas entre miembros del gobierno partidarios del uso de OMG y otros contrarios. Habla de las restricciones, y da voz a representantes de organizaciones que se sienten indignadas con esta luz verde a los transgénicos.  Los Tiempos,  en la buena nota “El gobierno se contradice en el uso de transgénicos” explica la confusión de conceptos que utiliza el gobierno, y obtiene declaraciones fuera de ninguna duda: “En el caso boliviano no es que los transgénicos no existen, existe autorización para incorporar transgénicos en la producción de soya en condiciones de bioseguridad que estable el Estado boliviano (…) Los que se hará ahora es ampliar además de la soya eventualmente a otros productos. Se lo hará bajo una previa evaluación de un comité de bioseguridad“.

La confusión, como muy bien explica Los Tiempos en su último párrafo, es por esta mezcla de expresiones “recursos genéticos” y “transgénicos” que utilizó el ministro al anunciar que impulsaría la nueva ley. De hecho, la confusión se puede convertir en noticia como en la edición impresa de El Deber “Romero diferencia transgénicos de uso de recursos genéticos“. Y respecto las diferencias internas, la nota breve de El Diario “Oficialismo elabora proyecto para producción de alimentos” las describe muy bien, con un senador que llega a decir “Para nosotros el tema de transgénicos es destruir la tierra”. Interesante enfoque el de El Mundo (Bolivia) “Ven que aún faltan condiciones para producir transgénicos“, recogiendo por fin palabras de investigadores, que en esta caso opinan que Bolivia no está técnicamente capacitada para producir semillas transgénicas, y por tanto sólo se limitaría a la importación. Punto muy interesante, como siempre ocurre que hablamos con científicos en lugar de políticos. Seguro que en los próximos días aparecerán nuevos enfoques. Y controversias. Por ejemplo El Día ya refleja que Lidema alerta sobre los transgénicos, por sus posibles efectos sobre la biodiversidad y dependencia de campesinos. En principio, esto es lo que promete tener en cuenta el gobierno. La Jornada presenta un texto a favor de la decisión donde leemos “los radicales defensores del ecosistema satanizan a los productos transgénicos sin mayores bases que el temor”. Los Tiempos plantea un interesante riesgos y ventajas, con algunos topicazos como la disminución del hambre o a la seguridad alimentaria, y ejemplos más moderados como la disminución de necesidades de agua, o el efecto de la pérdida de competitividad local sobre el mismo producto cultivado en otros países, Y en La Razón, Willy Chipana obtiene unas declaraciones sugiriendo que el gobierno boliviano ya ha comprado fuera semillas de maíz transgénico. Estaremos pendientes de más reacciones.

Pero no queríamos terminar el post sin citar un buen y original trabajo en La Nación (Costa Rica) de Michelle Soto “Cafetales con árboles absorben tanto carbono como bosques“. El enfoque es muy bueno: según un estudio costarricense los árboles de café fijan tanto CO2 como un bosque secundario. considerablemente más que la mayoría de otros cultivos. Y por tanto, podrían ser susceptibles de recibir subvenciones de los fondos internacionales para proyectos de reducción de gases de efecto invernadero. Esta es la visión del científico. Pero Michelle contrasta con expertos en sistemas ambientales para decir que la legislación es más complicada, porque debería considerarse una acción adicional. La historia cubre la parte social, legal, económica en la nota-despiece “Este tipo de cafetal podría traer beneficio económico“, y científica en “¿Cómo se sabe cuánto captura un cafetal?” también de M. Soto, describiendo las tareas diarias de la investigadora encargada de medir las toneladas de carbono que absorben los cafetales. Buen trabajo.

- Pere Estupinya

Ok Ok, one must agree that this site really should have covered the burst of news recently over publication in Science of some blowback, and response from the original author, by scientists who don’t buy the famous report late last year of arsenic-rich microbes in Mono Lake, CA. Supposedly, we all recall, that these little creatures  build a lot of their DNA and protein by substituting arsenic compounds for the normal-everywhere-else-on-Earth-that-we-know-of phosphorus varieties. That’d be a big exception in the rule book of life on Earth.

But in partial compensation and recognition that the news did occur, and because this is a swell followup to it, you are invited to read..

• Philadelphia Inquirer – Faye Flam: A second genesis? No proof yet ;

Yes, she says, the case was not made. More important, her story puts that small episode in the back-and-forth of science into the larger context of evolutionary theory and the goal of showing that living tissue can arise, one way or the other but without requirement for intelligent and supernatural intervention, from the non-biological organic chemistry of a young planet.

She talks with some astrobiologists and others seeking to show how it might happen. One thinks the piece may have benefitted from mention of the full-on press for such a thing underway at the Harvard laboratory of Jack Szostack’s group, but that’s a small matter. The important achievement of Flam’s here is to give her readers a taste of broader issues to think about. Unfortunately, and unlike the story in the next post down, one cannot tell how well it went down, as there is no (that I saw) link to any comments this received.

- Charlie Petit

Here’s an interesting enviro story that not only has a lively way of describing a prominent aspect of local wildlife management, but gives one a sense of the rewards a reporter might get for doing a good job (those rewards being decidedly mixed, positive and negative, in this sampling).

Reporter Julia O’Malley spent part of the day with the sole state fish and game agent in Anchorage proper, driving around with her in her truck with the gun cases adn rain gear and wildlife-securing hardware stuffed in it and mainly checking on the troubles that bears make for people who leave garbage where it’s easy to get at.

The account moves right along, and gives sympathetic treatment for the agent as she tries to cope with the immense public demand for her services.

But just check the comments. Several to be sure appreciate the woman’s job adn the reporter for describing. Many of the rest just can’t get snarky enough about the usefulness of her PhD topic, the idiocy of federal and state regulations, her perceived hypocrisy as revealed by an untidy desk…

-  Charlie Petit

Maybe it’s just me waking up chipper. Today’s ScienceTimes seems particularly diverse, entertaining, and satisfying. This despite its having next to nothing on my usual synapse ticklers – stories heavy on hardware (especially telescopes), climate change, and evolution.

Well, actually, there is an evolution angle in the lead story, but one I don’t think is handled quite right, and a climate change angle ignored too. It’s about jellyfish or, as sticklers for phylogenetic accuracy sometimes call them, jellies or even sea jellies. Natalie Angier does them up grandly. It is an encomium. For one thing, rather than brainless blobs of pulsating goop, one is encouraged to think of them as floating brains, neurons distributed through their whole cranium-shaped bodies, adorned with tentacles and built around a combo mouth and excretory orifice. It is, as is Angier’s tendency, in first person, jammed with expertly crafted description (written so well it looks like it just flowed effortlessly from her brain to the page, but I can guarantee you is very hard work), and combines a lot of history with dollops of the new.

I’ll move on quickly as I can, but this yarn has two small demerits worth mention. One is that Angier and her sources consistently call jellyfish ancient creatures, among the oldest on Earth. When she writes “the jellyfish are preposterously ancient,” she might better write that jellyfish, a preposterously long time ago, were among the first multicelled creatures on Earth  except she’d compose the thought better than that. This is fussy of me, to be sure, and it borders on peevish, but as with the almost universal decision by science writers to call sturgeon ancient (and, yes, actual) fish, or blue-green algae super super ancient organisms, the accumulated implication is that today’s versions of such things as jellies are somehow frozen in time, that such so-called living fossils are little different from ancestors hundreds of millions or even billions of years gone by. One supposes there are some elements of stasis that make some of today’s jellies resemble some from the preCambrian. But it also seems presumable that  the species today have evolved and are evolving apace still, sporting recently derived enzymes and other metabolic components, behaviors, proteins, colorations, tentacle architectures, and other features that do not show up in gross body plan. Ditto for crocodiles, coelacanths, sturgeons, ants, and photosynthetic bacteria. Are they not as fresh as we are? Yes they have a distinct and deep lineages with modes of life that have worked for a very long time. There is a difference between that and being ancient, no?

As for climate change, these days a lot of jellyfish news comes with hints that, when the oceans acidify and overfishing runs its course and warming stagnates oxygenation of the deep, we may have a lot more jellies and a lot less other living things. This icky prospect does not come up in this fine story. (UPDATE: For a less adulatory story on jellies and their poo, check ScienceNow‘s brief account by Sara Reardon.)Nor is there any hint how a jellyfish fossilizes. It must take a special circumstance to entomb one of these things and have slow lithification  preserve an imprint of something so squishy. That the story leaves an appetite for more information is a reason to read it.

Finally, onward!

Other headlines to note:

• Benedict Carey: Brain Calisthenics for Abstract Ideas ; I sure wish I’d had, as a junior high schooler first taking algebra, one of these drills that implants a knack for guessing what sort of plot a given equation will produce. It’s an example of perceptual learning – the natural kind.
• John Tierney – Could Liquid Nitrogen Help Build Tasty Burgers ; From Tierney a whimsical story and keenly reported story with intriguing implications for tomorrow’s cuisine. Just an aside – am I remembering wrong, or were Tierney’s and Angier’s columns initially set up to run in alternating weeks?
• Gina Kolata – Women Atop Their Fields Dissect the Scientific Life ; The text is a well-edited summary of a 22-minute-plus conversation Kolata had with four women of great scientific stature. But the audio, its link embedded on the story’s page , which I jumped through, is better. It has to do with what it takes to succeed in science while avoiding something with a label that does not come up in the story: the mommy track. One has to remark that not every field is a loser due to what one of the professors calls the “choke point” for women scientists in academia – the jump from post-doc to assistant professor and tenure. Science may lose geniuses and potential discoverers of great things at that point of conflict between a whole life and a life in science. Science journalism however is one of the beneficiaries – its news members are mostly women, and many of them are gifted, PhD- and Masters-toting refugees from the time-voracious grind of the lab bench. Some men make the same leap (I did, but I saw the light that said no-future-in-science-for-you as an undergrad). I dunno if that’s a net gain for society, or for many or most of the women who make the switch, but it sure is for the trade to which this here website is devoted. (UPDATE: Another recent account of women in science is at Science Magazine where Karen Frenkel reports on a gathering of women and their war stories at the World Science Festival in NYC. )
• Tara Parker Pope (a package of two stories): 1)  Piercing the Fog Around Cellphones and Cancer and 2)  A Doctor Who Must Navigate a Contentious Divide ; Why didn’t I see anybody else report this last week? That was right after a WHO advisory committee said cellphone maybe might possibly cause some kinds of brain cancer. Big fuss. Now I learn from Parker Pope, although maybe somebody else had it already, that this committee has, over the years, decided that only one, as in a lonesome 1.0, substance it has considered has been labeled probably not carcinogenic. Everything else among the 900-odd things it considered ranked at least possibly or even scarier on the cancer peril scale. Even allowing for the apparent fact that nobody asked the committee about easy targets like, oh – water, talcum powder, cotton, or petroleum jelly – this means that the committee takes the word “possibly” very seriously and very literally to emphatically include its corollary “probably not.”
• John Noble Wilford – After 90 Years, a Dictionary of an Ancient World ; And it is not, as Wilford tells us and despite the name on the dictionary, a guide to Assyrian. It is Akkadian.
• Emma G. Fitzimmons: Piercing a Tongue, in the Name of Mobility ; A little gem, way back in the section, on an idea that celebrates a conceptually simple answer to a maddening problem.
• Gina Kolata: In Update on Sperm, Date Show No Decline ; Several outlets covered this (Time’s Bryan Walsh for one). One hopes that this old canard about the industrialized (and plasticized) era rendering men less potent now fades into history. Kolata does a keen job explaining how unusual is the new data set and the manner in which it has gone public.

As usual, there is more in the whole section.

- Charlie Petit

From Michael Specter, in the May 30th issue of The New Yorker:

In the early eighteen-seventies, a smallpox pandemic that accompanied the Franco-Prussian War killed more than half a million Europeans. Smallpox claimed the lives of tens of thousands of French soldiers, yet the Prussians lost fewer than five hundred men. That was because Prussia vaccinated its entire Army against the virus, and France did not. There has never been a more dramatic demonstration of a vaccine’s power to alter the course of history.

Specter uses his review of Pox: An American History, by the Brandeis historian Michael Willrich, as an opportunity to look at the complex ethics of mandating medical care. Smallpox has now been eliminated from the Earth, with the exception of samples held in vaults in the United States and the Soviet Union.

Because small pox was so deadly, U.S. health authorities thought little of vaccinating people against the disease, whether they chose to be vaccinated or not. In the 1890s, U.S. marshalls armed with needles “rode from town to town,” vaccinating the healthy and quarantining the sick. “The logic …was straightforward: the good of the community had to outweigh objections raised by a minority.” Those who did not want to be vaccinated–and there were many–were vaccinated anyway.

Vaccination has become controversial again, and some argue that they have a right not to be vaccinated. Specter acknowledges that, but does not confuse that with the question of the effectiveness of vaccines–which is indisputable. “Modern vaccination is a triumph of medicine,” he writes. While some make a case against vaccination, nobody argues that getting smallpox is a choice some people might like to make.

The issues are far less clear in another piece in the same issue of The New  Yorker, a moving but fundamentally flawed piece by Rachel Aviv about compulsory treatment of psychiatric disorders–in which she suggests, at various points, that having schizophrenia is a choice some people might make.

Aviv circles repeatedly around the notion of “insight” as applied to people with psychiatric ailments. Many people with such illnesses don’t think they are sick. In psychiatric terms, they lack insight into their conditions. Aviv misunderstands the concept.

Aviv’s piece follows the sad final years of Linda Bishop, who, from 1999 until her death in 2008, “drifted between homeless shelters, hospitals, and jail.” She was repeatedly diagnosed as psychotic, but refused to accept that. It’s a paradox for psychiatry, Aviv claims: “an early sign of sanity is the ability to recognize that you’ve been insane.” And she goes on to note that “a ‘correct attitude’” for “most Western psychiatrists” would exclude diagnoses involving “spirits, demons, or karmic disharmony.”

“A correct attitude?” Aviv writes about this as if it’s what psychiatrists choose to believe, not the product of a century of careful observation and study. And putting “correct” in quotes suggests that theirs is not the only acceptable attitude–that spirits, demons, and karmic disharmony deserve equal time.

If the facts in this account are correct, Linda Bishop is an unfortunate woman with a terrible psychiatric illness. (The diagnosis shifted between schizoaffective and bipolar disorder, Aviv writes.) Recognizing that she is sane is not a paradox, but an indication that she is stepping outside the psychotic delusions that plagued her for years. Indeed, that’s a sign she’s getting better, and there is nothing paradoxical about it.

Psychiatry, Aviv writes, “is the only field in which refusal of treatment is commonly viewed as a manifestation of illness rather than an authentic wish.” So? It’s the field that deals with people whose mental faculties are corrupted. Refusal of treatment can be a wish in some patients, and it can be a manifestation of disorder thinking and illness in others. Again, what is Aviv’s insight here? The subtext seems to be that psychiatric illnesses are not real illnesses. These are simply a group of people who think differently from the rest of us–and they should be allowed to do so, rather than be forced to conform to “correct attitudes.”

Aviv quotes an anthropologist who refers to “the biomedical model” of psychiatric illness. Again, the suggestion is that there are other models. There are–spirits, demons, and karmic disharmony, which led to the creation of asylums in which mentally ill people were horribly mistreated for centuries. Should we reject the “biomedical model” in favor of that?

“There are many valid reasons that people choose to refuse treatment,” Aviv writes. Linda Bishop “chose” to refuse treatment and starved to death alone in an empty house during the winter of 2007-2008.

Her sister sued the hospital that had released her, and the attorneys representing the hospital argued that Linda “was making a reasoned decision to pursue an alternative life style.”

That might have been true for the thousands of French who died of smallpox in the Franco-Prussian War. Their opinions were not corrupted and distorted by psychiatric illnesses. Aviv is wrong to leave readers with the impression that Linda Bishop chose to starve to death, or that she could have foreseen the consequences of remaining alone in that house.

Next time, perhaps, Aviv or her editor should run the copy by Michael Specter, a seasoned science writer who could have saved them some embarrassment.

- Paul Raeburn

AP went and switched headlines in mid-cycle this morning. The swap was atop an Arthur Max report from Bonn on the looming post-Kyoto era of no deal of CO2 controls, or of none with teeth. Earlier in the day it was Greenhouse Emissions Hitting Record Highs, which struck me as fairly feeble. The essence of the carbon problem (ditto for most other greenhouse forcings of H. sapiens‘s making)  is that concentrations keep going up. A record high is business as usual. But suddenly the science feed has essentially the same story cycling through as Expiry of emissions pact in 2012 bedevils talks. This seems to be a better theme, with real news even if it’s no eye-opener. The news is that in this year’s round of climate talks, a standoff between established industrial nations and countries developing fast has gotten even more stiff-necked. Some hope to find tactics, it says here, outside the box that the talks are now in. That is to say, to do the best possible given the mess that’s been made. Plus, it’s not often, not in the US for sure, we see ‘expiry’ in a headline.

The world’s other primary wire service has a story with perhaps even less long term importance, but one that superficially bears good tidings.

• Reuters – Alister Doyle: Rising forest density offsets climate change: study ; Don’t get too ruffled by the hed, which almost says fatter trees have cured the climate problem. Doyle’s text is clear from the top that denser forests are at most slowing the buildup of carbon dioxide, not stopping it. It says here that US forest cover has held roughly steady for the last half century, but the total mass of vegetation – meaning mostly carbon-rich tissues – went up by half. The story could have used more perspective. One is that climate contrarians cannot be wrong on all counts. They’ve been saying that CO2 ‘fertilization’ is good for forests, and in a rough way the new data show that is something like true. The report is in PLoS One.

Grist for the Mill: PLoS One article A National and International Analysis of Changing Forest Density ;

- Charlie Petit

Last week a paper and accompanying commentary in Science threw a story at reporters that, at a glance, is a natural. It’s weird, new, seems inherently important, and has done something implicitly simple but with tremendous implication. It is a DNA-based computer. Such things, says press material and the authors, could mean organic processors could someday be fused with living systems. Sort-of-tissues, if implanted, might watch for illness, dispense drugs, and other things without wires or chips or electricity and maybe without stirring up antibody problems.

But boy is it difficult to explain in any way that people who don’t even understand regular computers can grasp and internalize. I mean, most of us sort of feel comfortable with carburetors (Oops, dating myself. Make it fuel injetors)  or telephones, even though we don’t understand them as an engineer does. But it will take awhile for the average person to come away from any the present and future press coverage of DNA computing with its essence tucked comfortably in the brain.

The authors did their best to help the public and reporters and others, sharing a 12-minute video on YouTube (link in Grist below), with the illus up right a screen grab off its opening moments. Another one is here. It’s loopy, it’s even charming. PacMan comes up. So do And gates.  Graduate students in genetics and computer science will eat it up. Most reporters will bail out.

The news is that Caltech researchers diagrammed a system by which snippets of single-stranded DNA binding to one another – and displacing one another from binding sites in one-way reactions – could reach a statistically robust molecular endpoint that is the answer to a question formulated in the starting mix: what’s the square root of X?  And X could be anything up to 15. Embedded in the reaction sequence are the familiar logic gates of computer science. It takes hours for the result, rounded down to the nearest whole integer, to emerge. But it seems to work. After all, some big thinkers liken the genome as it already is to the logical equivalent of a computer. Some say the whole universe, described in appropriate information theory language, is a real big computer. So is, it appears, a bucket of sticky, stringy molecules in water.

A few writers with audiences up to the task went hard core. At Ars Technica, its readers largely in the first-adopter and professional class of the gadgets and coding universe, science editor John Timmer wrote it without a whole lot of pause – none, actually – to define such terms and AND Gate, OR Gate, NOT GAte, etc. He can write “the logical operations are so simple…” and expect many of his readers to be nodding in agreement, one must suppose. Some other reporters referred their readers to Timmer’s yarn for further detail.

A different tack is in the Los Angeles Times. There veteran science writer Thomas H. Maugh II stuck to generalities and metaphors. To these eyes he got a good result. Readers will learn that the DNA sequences can act like circuit elements, that the process is slow, but that speed is not the point – it is that explicit computation can occur in a bucket of chemicals that are compatible with living systems.

Other Stories:

• New Scientist – Jacob Aron: See-saw logic gates make DNA computing easier ; Gets right to the pith of the achievement: this is an embryonic compiler able, in the language of computer science, to translate a bio-coding designer’s higher language instructions in future analogs to C or Cobol or whatever, into the DNA equivalent of machine language. I think. He lost me at dual-rail logic.
• BBC – Jason Palmer: DNA computer ‘calculates square roots’ ; Makes it sensible, while evading the need to explain much molecular detail, with a concise history of DNA computer theory and practice. Palmer reached an outside authority for a (positive) review of the new work.
• Science News – Daniel Strain: Flexible DNA computer finds square roots ; Successful effort. Lots of similes and metaphors – model trains, zippers, toeholds (a technical term in the paper, too), lone wolves, and even a test-tube abacus. And he finds a DNA computing pioneer declaring this deliberately composed calculating system a close relative of what living cells already do all by themselves.
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: DNA Computer Used Google-LIke Logic Functions for Math, Rearchers Say. Aimed at biz readers, strong on what it does, not how, and reminds them that while uses are pure speculation, so were the uses imagined for the first personal computers.
• NatureNews – Zoë Corbyn : A molecular calculator ; Record number of DNA computing pioneers consulted for opinion: four of them. And one is already incorporating the Caltech achievement into his own research. For such scope, it’s a not a long story – a model of paring a lot of info to fit the space one’s editor permits.
• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: Largest DNA-Based Computer Ever Built Can Calculate Square Roots ; She describes the implications in general terms – and explicitly tells her readers, with a link,  to go look at Ars Technica for details.
• ComputerWorld/IDG News Service – Joab Jackson: Caltech researchers scale up DNA computing ;
• Discover Magazine/Cosmic Variance blog – Sean Carroll: DNA Takes Square Roots ; This cosmology-minded Caltech physicist and science popularizer’s angle is that the whole universe, by some acrobatic redefinitions of the term, is a computer. And he, too, refers readers to the Ars Technica post.
• Discovery News – Eric Niler: DNA Computer Gets Scaled Up ; Nice job and has links to other related stories, including one on DNA tattoos – or ‘dattoos’ ;

Grist for the Mill:

Caltech Press Release ; YouTube video The seesaw magic book ;

 

Other Recent DNA Computer news outbreak: A team in China last month reported on its plans for such things. Not many outlets picked it up, but Physorg.com – which usually runs what look like light rewrites of press releases – got a short feature on it from Miranda Marquit. In this view of the field, it is the potential speed of organic computers that give them the edge. The lead author, at Nanyang Technical U. , tells physorg “there are computations that the human body performs naturally” that are much faster than any silicon-based system could do.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) There were only 2 cases of measles in Spain in 2004. But 2010 had about 250, with more than 1,300 cases so far in 2011. A good story in El Pais explains that experts relate this increase with the decrease in child vaccinations in recent years. The story’s text is solidly critical of the anti-vaccine movement. The  first sentence of the story is “Europe moves back one decade in its fight against measles and rubella”. It says also that France has had 6 deaths and more than 5,000 cases. In other news, Spanish scientists published in Nature that 4 genes with mutations associated with leukemia. It received good coverage in the Spanish press including a detailed story in Público. Also, all science sections reported CERN’s report on trapping atoms of antihidrogen for more than 16 minutes, a feat that should help reveal the origin and properties of antimatter.

Que fácil es aferrarse a la ideología, y no pasar por el difícil proceso de cambiar tu manera de pensar. Ya lo dice la expresión: “rectificar es de sabios”. Todo el mundo la defiende, pero pocos la implantan. Qué fácil es aferrarse a lo que uno cree, piensa, o le han dicho, y negar sistemáticamente lo contrario. El proceso de cambio es demasiado costoso para el cerebro. Qué fácil es aferrarse a los datos que refuerzan sus ideas, y desestimar los que las contradicen. Nadie se escapa a esta manera tan humana y subjetiva de interpretar el mundo; Quizás los científico son los únicos entrenados a priorizar los datos experimentales sobre las ideas, pero nadie se escapa a esta manera tan humana y subjetiva de interpretar el mundo.

Pon la polémica que rodea a las vacunas y su supuesta relación con el autismo u otros daños a la salud. Hace unos años saltaba la alarma porque un estudio publicado en Lancet sugería una posible relación entre vacunas y mayor número de casos de autismo. Las emociones condicionan más que la razón nuestra manera de pensar, y el miedo de muchos padres hizo que este riesgo quedara desde el principio implantado en sus cerebros. Una vez allí, ya es muy difícil de erradicar. Estudios posteriores desestimaron la relación entre vacunas y autismo, muchos centros de investigación e instituciones de salud pública hicieron campañas alertando de los peligros de dejar de vacunar a los niños, e incluso el año pasado The Lancet retiró el artículo al demostrar que su autor se había inventado los datos. Todas las evidencias y datos objetivos apuntan a que si bien la inocuidad nunca se puede garantizar, el grave error es dejar de vacunar a tus hijos. Pero cualquier evidencia se puede desbaratar con la simple frase “el artículo se retiró por los intereses ocultos de las farmacéuticas”, expresada por un homeópata y activista antivacunas catalán en el gran reportaje de Antía Castedo “La moda que disparó el sarampión“, publicado en El País.

El texto empieza contundente: en 2004 se dieron 2 casos de sarampión en España. Este 2011 ya llevamos 1300 casos, cinco veces más que el año pasado: se están empezando a notar los efectos de esa disminución de las vacunaciones que empezó hace unos años tras los miedos a la vacunación. La frase inicial de Antía es: “Europa ha retrocedido una década en la lucha contra enfermedades como el sarampión y la rubéola, casi erradicadas en el cambio de siglo y que hoy vuelven a causar grandes brotes comunitarios“. Un muy buen reportaje, con muchas referencias, del que queremos destacar dos cosas: la importancia de ir más allá de la noticia y hacer este tipo de piezas sobre temas de salud y ciencia que son vitales para que la población tome decisiones basada en la mejor información posible, y el posicionamiento a favor de los datos. Ya hemos dicho muchas veces que en información de ciencia no se trata de contraponer opiniones a favor y en contra, sino de atender a las evidencias experimentales. Éste es un buen ejemplo de ello. Otras veces hemos discutido lo contrario.

Más piezas a comentar: Importante avance en genética del cáncer publicado en Nature por científicos españoles. Lo explica muy bien Público por medio de Nuño Domínguez “España pone cerco al tipo de leucemia más común“. La información está contrastada hasta con cuatro fuentes distintas, dos de ellas no involucradas directamente con el consorcio que ha obtenido el importante resultado: identificar 4 genes cuyas mutaciones están involucradas de manera habitual en la aparición de la leucemia. También El Mundo prepara una buena nota por medio de Cristina de Martos “España secuencia por primera vez el genoma de la leucemia“, que incluye un muy acertado apartado “Tenemos los genes, y ahora qué”. La primera frase del artículo es “habrá que trabajar más para saber cómo utilizar los resultados”. Esto es en lo que insisten y quieren escuchar a toda costa los científicos. Pero nuestra obligación es -sin dejarnos llevar por el sensacionalismo- apretarles todo lo que podamos. En este caso, las palabras de los científicos nos vuelven a desalentar, pues continúan con su tendencia de los últimos años  en genómica en decir que cuanto más aprenden, más complejo ven que es el problema. En ocasiones parece que el conocimiento en lugar de acercarnos a la esperanza de la curación nos aleja.

La otra noticia del día: El CERN ha conseguido atrapar átomos de antihidrógeno durante 16 minutos. Ya hacía tiempo que habían logrado mantener antiátomos aislados, pero no durante un período de tiempo tan largo, que les permite hacer prometedores experimentos para comprender el origen, propiedades y comportamiento de la antimateria. No hay descubrimiento todavía, sólo acercamiento (o alejamiento, quien sabe;) ). Pero la noticia sí vale unas líneas y titulares atractivos, que es a lo más que de momento pueden aspirar los reporteros de ciencia. Si debemos elegir una nota como referencia, quizás la de J. de Jorge “Confirmado: físicos logran atrapar átomos de antimateria por más de 16 minutos” (ABC) por empezar hablando de cómo los investigadores primero lo publicaron en el ArXiv.org, y se sentían cautelosos con sus datos hasta atreverse a confirmarlo. Al final, lo de comprender la estructura de la realidad no son noticias sino historias.

Pere Estupinya

One wonders whether news that a radar-toting airplane has spotted deep, ancient fjords under East Antarctica’s ice sheet would have gotten as much pickup had that airplane not been ancient itself – originally a DC-3 gooney bird of WWII vintage.

But it was, and it got fairly wide pickup. Never mind that while the airframe is old and classic. those are modern turboprop engines and one presumes the avionics are up to contemporary spiff too. It is now a DC-3T (at least – see Grist below).  American, British, and Australian scientists used the ski-equipped airplane, flying out of a French research base in East Antarctica, to penetrate the ice with its radar and map the underlying bedrock. It revealed several deep incisions or fjords where, tens of millions of years ago, fluctuating sea levels and glaciation carved the canyons through mountain ranges now buried in ice. Their report is in this week’s Nature.

The release, down below in Grist, from the Univ. of Texas-Austin says this might provide a hint how the place will look, a century or much more hence, should the ice melt substantially away again. This news also reveals one of the least-strained acronymic names for a project ever devised to be exactly on topic: ICECAP (Investigating the Crysopheric Evolution of the Central Antarctic Plate).

Stories:

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Antarctic survey reveals rugged buried landscape ;
• The Australian- Amos Aikman: Stunning terrain lies under Antarctic ice ;
• AAP / Melbourne Herald Sun – Scientists peek beneath Antarctic ice ;
• Our Amazing Planet/LiveScience via MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: Beneath Antarctica ice: Miles of hidden fjords ;
• ABC (Australia) : Mountains found under Antarctic ice cap ; Hmmm. Rather weak. The hed is generic (we’ve known about mountains down there for a long time) and it merely says the results are in “an international science journal.”

Grist for the Mill:

UT-A Press Release ; Journal Article Abstract;  And for Av buffs, I think that DC-3T is also called a BT-67, and here are some specs.

- Charlie Petit

We’re all going to die of something, and it will probably have a name in medical textbooks. We’re all going to get sick of things that doctors know about (and a few they don’t). Yet, according to a thoughtful long piece in the June 9 issue of the New Republic medical costs are going through the roof in large part because the public, politicians, and probably more than a few physicians seem to be under an illusion that modern medical care can somehow lift those burdens.

I’m not sure I buy the whole thesis. Nobody really thinks there is any chance of getting through life without disease, or that good medical coverage is supposed to get awful close to it, do they? The present news of a killer E. coli outbreak in Germany is not being taken as an affront to civilization, but a reminder that microbes and other ailments are constants of existence …. isn’t it? After all, plenty of Americans think modern medicine is hooey. Some of it is, for sure.

Still and yet… this is important reading for anybody who might get sick and blame the insurance company or Medicare or somebody for letting it happen, or who thinks any limit on access to health care and particularly by the elderly is the kind of thing that leads to ‘death panels’,  (or for medical reporters,  or for most anybody):

Daniel Callahan, Sherwin B. Nuland: The Quagmire / How American medicine is destroying itself ; .

Other reaction to this piece:

• The Hastings Center – What Can We Do About Death? In The New Republic, Daniel Callahn and Shep Nuland Proposed a Reinvention of American Medicine ;

Thanks for the tip to Jonathan D. Beard.

- Charlie Petit

With hairy chins, 8 bulbous eyes, almost comically-meaty fangs, and delicate pedipalps the large, fleet-footed arachnids known as huntsman or giant crab spiders are a memorable and lively bunch. Somehow, about two weeks ago, this site managed to miss a sizable burst of news on the remarkable images of one such creature, extracted from a nearly opaque chunk of 49-million year old amber in a Berlin museum. Since its original collection, the piece’s surface became so oxidized it is impossible to see what is inside. That led to doubt of 19th century labels declaring it held an ancient variety of a sort of spider still around. So with a modern CT setup, researchers took at high-resolution peek.

A report on it, led by X-ray imagers at the University of Manchester and the German museum, ran in the  journal Naturwissenschaft (Springerlink) . It and the news it generated came to notice at ksjtracker this morning as the eye fell on a list of most popular videos at the Reuters science site. It included this eye-popper, Scientists revive ancient spider in stunning 3D detail. It’s worth the two minutes, featuring not only the spider and portions of its legs (truncated by the edge of the amber)  turning before the eye but a delightfully enthused explanation from a Brit, Jason Dunlop, of the natural history museum at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

If you, like me, missed this first time around, do enjoy. And while we’re at it here’s a round up of other outlets that leaped upon this like a huntsman snaring a beetle or even small lizard that got too close. The first on the list is a particularly rich trove of more videos and other illus. Overall, this is science and science journalism unburdened by policy or economic or ethical burden, unrelated to peril or opportunity. It’s purely interesting, bracing news about smart people who did something well and who revealed something fresh about the natural world. Not many outlets, if any at all, ventured beyond what was handed them and did additional reporting. The images alone, one concedes, are the main reason to do it at all.

• Daily Mail (UK) – Brush away the cobwebs: 49 million-year-old spider fossilised in amber recreated using 3D imaging technology ; Great set of images and videos at this mainly celebrity-besotted tabloid (esp. the last one, a YouTube sample). The story, it appears from here,  bollixes up its explanation of the spider’s species. It implies it is the same as one still around, igniting a ferocious and not very civil string of comments pitting evolutionists against Biblical history. But it is deemed by the researchers  to belong to an extant genus, a remarkable instance of evolutionary stability in itself.
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: It’s a 49 million year old spider face – in 3-D. Several outlets refer to the images as 3-D. They do carry info on depth, especially the videos rotating the reconstruction. But I did not notice any that provide binocular vision and a sense of 3-D directly. So do these count as 3-D?
• New Scientist – Sandrin Ceurstemont: Zoom into an ancient spider ;
• NDTV (based in NY, focus on China) Scientists Revive Ancient Spider in 3D Detail ;

Grist for the Mill: Journal article abstract ; University of Manchester Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit