In Science this week a Cambridge paleoanthropologist and his group report some reasonably hard numbers to back an old hypothesis: Modern peoples rapidly supplanted Neanderthals in Europe 40,000 years ago or so, in short order, because they just plain outnumbered them. Coverage is extensive.(Note: scroll a few posts down, see Pere Estupinya  on coverage of this in Spanish language press).

Ironically perhaps, the editors at Science threw a great deal more effort into a far more important (if, yes and alas, duller) package in a highly related issue: contemporary population growth and what it bodes. Ah well, let’s write a snappy story evoking a horde of slender and brainy bipeds arriving in Europe, toting good stone tools, and swamping and evicting the existing, sturdy bipeds who weren’t so stupid and had pretty good stone implements too – and that soon disappeared entirely. As for whether overpopulation is upon us with dire consequences, or perhaps we’re in for near-endless boom in numbers and prosperity alike, that’s so…..scholarly and serious and important. It can wait. Neanderthals are an easier sell to editors and readers alike.

Which is to say – I’d rather write about Neanderthals and make allusions to Clan of the Cave Bear, too. But in idle moments, I think about precious babies and more and more of them fitting on our finite planet a lot more.

Stories:

• Guardian – Ian Sample: Neanderthal’s demise caused by modern human invasion; Not bad but why write that the team “found that” modern humans arrived in numbers ten times that of Neanderthals. Why not write “concluded that,” which is all one can say for sure?
• Mail – Riddle of the vanishing Nanderthals finally solved … they were overrun by modern humans ; And even more drastic illus of the Brit press’s allergy to any hint of a hedged bet anywhere near the lede or hed.
• LA Times – Amina Khan: Humans may have crowded out Neanderthals, study says ; Not long, but Khan manages to get three outsiders for expert comment – one of them rather dismissive.
• Telegraph – Nick Collins: Neanderthals overrun by early humans ; Again, no hint of the scientist’s favorite crutch: the error bar.
• USA Today – Elizabeth Weise: Study: Neanderthals out-numbered, out-cultured by humans ; Interesting quote, from the lead author, with another unprovable assertion: Neanderthals had been “thriving in these European glacial areas for at least 300,000 years, and along come these black Africans from the tropical south and they replaced them in a few thousand years.” If they were pretty recently from sunny Africa, black is a good guess. I suppose. I’m unsure why it is jarring to see it expressed however.
• Bloomberg – Oliver Renick: Humans’ Sheer Numbers Enabled Europe Dominance 40,000 Years Ago ;
• Best hed prize  (supposition, plus implication of displacement, not slaughter) LiveScience – Jennifer Welsh: Masses of Humans May Have Sent Neanderthals Packing ;
• SEcond place hed prize, for originality, New Scientist – Colin Barras: Industrial revolution sealed Neanderthals’ fate ;
• AP – Researchers say humans crowded out Neanderthals ; No byline, not evident anyway in a quick search around. A rather skeptical piece.

Grist for the Mill: Cambridge U. Press Release , which is rather emphatic that the paper not only has conclusions, but that they are just plain true. Not many caveats to be seen here. This may have pushed some  reporters into leaving out the maybes, too. ;

- Charlie Petit

One of these pubs hits the steps every day and the other comes in the mail each month, so this reflects a pretty small and wretchedly passive sampling routine. But they brought two stories in the last few days that plucked the same cord of hope for future collective brain power.

• Wired – Clive Thompson: The New Way to Be a Fifth Grader/ How Khan Academy Is Changing the Rules of Education ; All about the video library assembled by Salman Khan (no, Bollywood fans, not that Salman Khan), simple things in which only his stylus is seen doing equations, unstacking chemical reactions, exploring biology etc., and his voice heard, and that have been an internet sensation and now are making some teachers swoon at how smart their students suddenly seem to have become.
• NYTimes – Rachel Cromidas: A Sleepaway Camp Where Math is the Main Sport ; Different propellent (Summer Program in Mathematical Problem Solving), similar results. Kids who one might expect to be math-phobes are gobbling up quotients, tangents, and integrals like popcorn.

Our son-in-law over the hill, an IT pro, mentioned the Khan videos to us a while ago, but it didn’t quite sink in. Thompson’s story makes one giddy. Which means he probably overlooked a few things. I did go to the Khan site (see Grist below) and came away impressed. I impulsively chose his lecture on domains, and found myself goggling at the idea that gradeschooler would be so effortlessly learning a little bit about equations, a little bit about abstract algebra’s conventions, and a whole lot about math being just a short cut to clear thought. Those aren’t equations (shiver), they are sentences that can be made easy for almost anybody to read. I enjoyed the part where one teacher sends students home for their lessons, via internet videos, and spends classroom hours on, essentially, what would ordinarily be homework. Ditto for the discussion of school board befuddlement and pedagogical tumult if every child is on his or her own path toward knowledge. Where’s the standardized test schedule, the course syllabus, the control, the unified system of grading?

The summer camp for math is not so unconventional, but also a reassuring indication that remarkable achievements in education, and in extracting the best from the present generation of school children, are occurring. Both are written with enthusiasm and in colorful, intimate style. This is high-end reporting in each case.

Grist for the Mill: KhanAcademy ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s possible, and I’m just surmising here, that when folks at some of the smaller news agencies and aggregators ran stories this week on a member of the National Academy of Sciences and senior professor at one of the US’s leading research universities who says that cancer fills the bill as more of a new species that has evolved inside oneself than a mere derangement of a gene in one’s own cells, the result of some little point mutation, they figured (if they figured anything) it was a solid piece of news for sure.

And one might also surmise that for awhile, until perhaps a few emails or other tips came in, they wondered why no major news outlets touched it.

After all, the press release did not spell out for them the history of the professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is lead author of a new paper: Peter Duesberg. One asks – what professional journalist, in alliance with professional and experienced editors, would use such a story without mentioning that Duesberg has near saint status among those who deny that the human immunodeficiency virus is the cause of AIDS? Other scientists known for impactful work tend to see that mentioned should they do something else that makes the news. If Jim Hansen, of climate change fame, invented a revolutionary new weather balloon instrument, his testimony to Congress and his relentless campaign for carbon taxes  and a flat ban on new coal plants would get at least some mention. (To be clear here, I’m a big Hansen fan.)

More likely, seasoned reporters and editors took one look at the press release, saw Duesberg’s name, and moved on. Just guessing again, but it is easy to believe that a spontaneous blacklisting arose against a man whose fine-toothed analysis of HIV, of the formal rules of epidemiology such as Koch’s postulates, and mindful of the usual harmlessness of retroviruses, led him to conclude some years ago that  HIV could not possibly cause AIDS. Epidemiology be damned. He thus helped propel a deadly and delusional mischief. HIV denial abetted derailment in some nations of public health campaigns built around life-saving anti-HIV medications. Now Prof. Duesberg has looked at the definition of new species, at the whole-scale reshuffling of chromosomal sections in many tumors, and other oddments of tumor behavior and declared that because the appearance of cancer thereby can be squeezed into the definition of a speciation event, that is what it is.

The relabeling may not make much difference to curing cancer, but it is an offbeat and interesting point of view. From most anybody else with a PhD in a pertinent field and at a fine research institute, it’d make a small but broad news splash. It could have merit, it might lead to new insights for all I know.

None of the stories I’ve seen mentions Dueseberg’s history. The press release from UC Berkeley, written by one of the more experienced public affairs writers in the university world, makes no mention of it. Why exactly it is mum on the topic is hard to say; perhaps it is because such background is not routine for other press releases so why make an exception here? But it is safe to say that a press release is a press release and is therefore a tip to a story. It can never be assumed to be the whole story. Thus one further suspects that the news outlets that ran with the story, at face value and no value added from, uh, reporting, were clueless and made little effort to get one.

The news was on the web yesterday. I waited a day to see if any stories ran with both Duesberg’s new big idea, and a mention of his most famous previous one. None so far from straight news outlets. I cannot even find any blogs that make the association. There must be some.

The paper behind the press release and news is in the journal Cell Cycle, which explicitly promotes itself in part as a vehicle for scientists whose papers were rejected by Science, Nature, Cell, and others.

Stories:

• Popular Science – Rebecca Boyle: Cancers are Newly Evolved Parasitic Species, Biologist Argues ;
• Discovery News – Jennifer Viegas: Cancers Might Be Newly Evolved Species ;
• io9 – Alasdair Wilkins: Biologist says cancers might actually be newly-evolved species inside your body ;
• Salon – Peter Finocchiaro: A different beast entirely ; Based on a rewrite by another outfit, PhysOrg, of the Berkeley press release.
• SF Chronicle blog – Cameron Scott: Is cancer a new form of parasite? 
• Gizmodo : Are Cancers Actually a Newly Evolved Parasitic Species?
• Earthweek: Cancers Are Actually New Evolved Species: Biologist:  I thought I had found one that included some back story. It says “controversial” prominently. But it’s all about speciation – and does not even demonstrate that any controversy is underway about anything.

*UPDATE: On the other hand…this came in over the weekend.

• Discover – Veronique Greenwood: Are Cancers News Species? Probably Not – and it Probably Doesn’t Matter ; A vigorous demolition of the paper, in context.

Grist for the Mill:

UC Berkeley Press Release ; Journal abstract ; Peter Duesberg faculty page, UCB Dept. of Molecular and Cell Biology.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) It sounds simplistic to say that Neanderthals became extinct only because H. sapiens outnumbered them by a factor of 10. But that’s what all Spanish language press is stating. The paper published yesterday in Science by UK scientists establishes that 40.000 years ago Sapiens colonized quite fast a region in the south of France, pushing Neanderthals out to other harsher areas. But to use headlines like “the mystery of Neanderthal’s extinction is finally solved” (El País) or “Sapiens’ bigger numbers ended up with Neanderthals” (El Mundo) are exaggerated. The scientific paper establishes that Sapiens outnumbered Neanderthals by a factor of 10, it suggests that this could have been an important factor to the Neanderthals’s extinction, and the principal author defends that it was the main cause. But this is the typical scientific story that needs other opinions from scientists in the field but are not involved in that particular research. There are plenty of excellent paleoanthropologists in Spain; a country with the sites where the last Neanderthals lived. But neither El Pais nor El Mundo (the two most important newspapers in Spain), nor any other Spanish speaking science reporter spent time searching for this second sources.

Absurdos titulares en los principales periódicos españoles. Fijaos en lo que dice El País: “Resuelto el enigma de la desaparición de los Neandertales en Europa”. ¿Solución al enigma?: “La superioridad numérica del ‘homo sapiens’ es la respuesta a un misterio de 40.000 años”. Alucinante. Con lo enorme que era Europa, y lo escasas que eran las poblaciones de homínidos en esa época (decenas de miles de individuos en total como máximo), que hubieran llegado 10 veces más sapiens que neandertales había puede ser un factor importante en la lucha por recursos, pero nunca causa única de su desaparición. Perfectamente podrían haber coexistido en otros asentamientos. Había espacio para todos. Algo más tuvo que ser decisivo en la extinción de los neandertales, y por mucho que Science publique un estudio explicando que había más y mejores sapiens, continuará siendo un misterio de esta rama de la ciencia que se alimenta justo de esto: de ir planteando misterios y teorías para resolverlos.

Y no; no estoy exagerando al decir que la prensa está siendo simplista. En El Mundo, Rosa M. Tristán titula “La superioridad numérica del Homo sapiens acabó con los neandertales”. Tal cual. Claro que en el texto se explica que también eran más sofisticados socialmente, con un cerebro más desarrollado, y que había competencia por recursos, y que los iban acorralando a espacios más inhóspitos… pero todo esto ya lo sabíamos. Nada nuevo. Lo que ofrece de nuevo el estudio de Paul Mellars realizado sólo en una región pequeña de Francia es una muy completa estimación de poblaciones diciendo que hace 40.000 años, en el momento de la transición de una especie a otra, el número de sapiens era 10 veces superior al de neandertales. Sólo prueba esto; nada más. Luego Mellars defiende también que éste fue un facto crítico en la extinción de los neandertales. Pero aquí ya entra en valoraciones más especulativas. Él se muestra plenamente convencido, como debe hacer alguien que defiende una teoría, pero no es algo que pueda demostrar. Él sólo ha demostrado que en el momento de la transición había 10 veces más sapiens.

Entonces… ante una situación así, lo normal es que reflejemos los datos y opiniones de el autor del estudio, pero que luego las contrastemos con otros investigadores del mismo campo no relacionados con el estudio de Mellar. Debemos buscar una fuente o varias que nos digan si están de acuerdo o no con las hipótesis de Mellars. Que corroboren, critiquen o maticen sus afirmaciones. En España hay buenísimos grupos y expertos que tendrían mucho que decir al respecto. Pero (de momento) ni un único artículo les ha preguntado. Quizás serán las vacaciones. Pero si comparamos con algunas notas en los principales medios anglosajones, todas tienen segundas fuentes. A ningún periodista científico reconocido en EEUU o UK se le ocurriría escribir el artículo sin ir a buscar fuentes no relacionadas con la investigación. Es casi de estilo, obligado. Quizás no imprescindible siempre, pero sí en un tema como éste.

Si buscamos otras notas, todo muy parecido. Texto simple pero buen titular en Muy Interesante: “El homo sapiens inundó al neandertal” que transmite una imagen muy visual de la tesis defendida por Mellars. Muy Interesante utiliza información de la agencia de noticias SINC, cuyo reportaje “La supremacía numérica del homo sapiens provocó la desaparición de los neandertales” tampoco busca otras fuentes más allá del autor principal del estudio. SINC es un muy buen servicio de noticias científicas con foco en investigaciones españolas. Aquí ha perdido una pequeña oportunidad de diferenciarse ofreciendo la visión de los paleontólogos españoles. Seguro que bastantes medios los hubieran citado.

Curioso que la amplia sección de Público no incluya la nota. Quizás no lo ha considerado tan interesante. Otros medios importantes estadounidenses tampoco la han sacado.

En ABC encontramos un buen texto de Judit de Jorge: “La invasión que terminó con los neandertales”, con un correcto “puede explicar” en la entradilla del artículo. Refleja la tesis de Mellar de que los sapiens avasallaron a los neandertales, junto con todos esos temas de sofisticación, lenguaje y desarrollo tecnológico que ya sabíamos. Tampoco pregunta a ninguno de los muchos buenos paleontropólogos españoles que hay. Todos sabemos que en paleontología cada autor adapta los equívocos datos a su teoría preferida. Y que constantemente se van alternando hipótesis para mantener viva la ciencia y su financiación. Aquí no hacemos valoraciones de la parte científica. Sólo las solicitamos. Y hoy nos quedamos con las ganas de saber qué piensan otros expertos sobre los datos propuestos en Science. Todos los medios importantes anglosajones lo hacen. Si sacan la noticia, debe estar contrastada. Es impensable de otra manera. Hasta Newscientist plantea las dudas de un investigador de la Univ. de Barcelona.

- Pere Estupinyà

Gotta go for today but cannot miss mentioning the page one story in today’s NYTimes by Dennis Overbye, running under the hed It’s Alive! It’s Alive! Maybe Right Here on Earth. It’s an enterprising story, even if it has no big scoops. Overbye does a fine job surveying a little-appreciated wing of frontier science, one where bands of researchers are trying to concoct chemical systems that reproduce molecular complexes whose parts can be labeled cell wall, genome, and such as that. They mutate. They change generation by generation. They might be considered alive. Their DNA is not DNA, it’s only something like DNA.  Once they get going, we do not know what will arise in their soups.

Some exist, some seem near to existing, but when they do start evolving robustly it will be a huge story. Bigger than those instances of creation of “synthetic life” that are essentially a machine-copied versions of life as it has already evolved – which is what Craig Venter did in a triumph of organic chemistry and gene sequencing a couple of years ago. These systems Overbye looks at are primitive and alien to life as we know it. Overbye contacted most of the groups doing the best work and got an authoritative, compact review of what they are up to.

- Charlie Petit

Boy you go off on vacation hoping for an easy slide back into the desk chair and bang, Nature unleashes a barrage of stuff that got the world’s science press twitching. By the way thank you trackers Boyce Rensberger (aka mr. prolific) in particular and Paul Raeburn and Pere Estupinya for not only keeping the lights on the last three days, but turning them up a bit.

Rather than do separate posts, here’s a long one to illustrate that when it comes to herd journalism, Nature (as is Science to be sure) is a drover of the first class. When those embargoes come off it can be like some two-legged varmint sneaked in and opened a gate in the wild mustang corral.

A few outlets covered several of these stories. That can be interpreted two ways. The one I prefer is that they aggressively cover the big stories. One might also say they wait for the stories that are handed to them rather than displaying enterprise. Maybe it’s a bit of both. BBC did’em all. That recent internal report on the Beeb (previous post) noted that half or more of its stories are associated with press release, and that it particularly dwells on Nature‘s offerings. Here’s a dash more for that stat sheet.

1) TROJAN ASTEROID: Out in L4,  one of Earth’s libration points, aka Lagrangians and by any name they are a challenge for a reporter to explain except by calling them kinks in gravity or something like that and moving on fast before anybody asks a tough question, is a small asteroid. Jupiter is known to have its own versions, called Trojans. So this newly found occupant of L4 is called Earth’s first known Trojan.  It doesn’t sit fixed compared to Earth’s locale, but orbits this little free-floating gravity well, hence the image of its path’s tracery as it dances a solo do-si-do ahead of Earth in its orbit. It has even jumped from one such hidey hole to another – from L5, it says here, about 1500 years ago. The paper’s authors, at Athabasca, UCLA, and Western Ontario universities, call it a tadpole orbit. An infrared telescpe in space, called WISE, first spotted it.  This is a little guy, perhaps 300 meters wide, but one wonders whether NASA might consider it a fitting target for that proposed human asteroid expedition in the news lately. Amend that last – stories below report it’s not such a good candidate after all.

Stories:

• BBC -Jonathan Amos: Trojan asteroid seen in Earth’s orbit by Wist telescope ; Amos calls L4 a ‘gravitational sweet spot’ which is okay as metaphors go – except for being inverted. A sweet spot on a bat or racket is the place that on contact sends balls flying, as in out of the park. He also provides reason that this may not be the most convenient asteroid to reach, currently well off the plane of Earth’s orbit.
• AP – Malcolm Ritter : Earth Shares Its Orbit With Tiny Asteroid: And it’s “like a poodle on a leash,” Ritter writes. He also points out that L4 is so far off that, at times, the asteroid can be on the opposite side of the sun. But not right now.
• Discover Mag / Bad Astronomy blog – Phil Plait: WISE finds the very first Earth Trojan asteroid ; Plait explains why it took a space telescope to detect it – it’s in the part of the sky that is day time. Astronomer Plait includes several graphics to make things clearer, some of the links in grist below, and an explanation why they are called Trojans. He proposes names, too.
• London Free Press (Can.) Dale Carruthers: Asteroid found in Earth’s orbit ; A shorty.
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gray : Trojan asteroid discovered in Earth orbit ; Addresses the astronaut question well.
• Los Angeles Times – Amina Khan: Trojan asteroid tags along Earth’s orbit ;
• Space.com via MSNBC – Charles Q. Choi: Found at last: Earth’s firt companion asteroid ; \Sydney Morning Herald – Deborah Smith: Found: Earth’s orbital sidekick ;
• … there are more but must move on.

Grist for the Mill:

Athabasca University Press Release ; Article abstract ; preprint of whole paper  ; lead author’s website ;

2) Archaeopteryx’s Precarious Perch – Feathers all over but that ain’t the first bird and maybe not a bird at all, report Chinese paleontologists. It’s not merely that the famed specimen, unearthed 150 years ago, has teeth. The problem, it appears, is that discovery of other feathered dinosaurs is making it harder all the time to continue assigning Archaeopteryx a special place right at the point where birds budded from the rest of the theropod dino clade. It may be nearer the branching point for distinctly non-avian little theropods with switchblades on their front limbs, but with birds traceable to a separate if yet undocumented split. The image is of another well-plumed creature, as imagined by an artist, equally avianesque yet also considered a dinosaur. The proper, proffered name for them all is Deinonychosaurs. But Dinobirds is easier.

Stories:

• AP – Malcolm Ritter: Famed Fossil Isn’t a Bird After All, Analysis Says ; And the story says the argument may be plausible but the hard evidence is not yet persuasive ;
• BBC – Matt McGrath: Feather fly in first-bird debate ;
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Famous First Bird Archaeopteryx Wasn’t a Bird, Chinese Researchers Find ;
• Independent – Steve Connor: Chinese fossil knocks oldest bird off perch ; Connor heads off any crowing that might emerge from the creationist flock. He may overdo however the degree to which this one paper’s conclusions are now embraced as official stance in paleontology. The story next down is rightly more cautious.
• Cosmos (Australia) Anthony King: New find may knock Archaeopteryx off its perch ; He says old Archeopteryx is more likely ancestral to velociraptors. He finds a well-known authority who considers the debate silly – the bird line’s origin being so fuzzy as to be exceedingly ambiguous with the evidence at hand.
• and back again with the perch…New Scientist – James O’Donoghue: Archaeopteryz knocked off its perch as first bird ; the story does have caveats, contrary to the declarative hed.
• Telegraph (UK) Nick Collins: Newly discovered dinosaur could disprove ‘earliest bird’ theory ;
• Los Angeles Times – Daniela Hernandez: China discovery knocks ‘early bird’ off its perch, study says. There’s a hed that clips the wings of two metaphors (and this remark makes three).
• ABC (Australia) Steve Salisbury: Move over Archaeopteryx ; That hed makes me wish Pixar would redo its iconic For the Birds video with a bunch of paleo first bird posers
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: ‘Oldest bird’ Archaeopteryz knocked off its perch in controversial new study ;
• …again, lots more

3) Big Tundra Fire Loosed a Pole’s Worth of Stored Carbon ; In 2007 about 400 square miles of Alaskan tundra burned. The place had not burned in thousands of years. A new analysis concludes that just this one fire – a very large one to be sure – released as much carbon from the erst-permafrost as is stored in a whole year by all the tundra in the Arctic. And with climate being what it wasn’t, more fires seem in the offing. Study is from University of Alaska, Fairbanks researchers and colleagues elsewhere.

Stories:

• BBC – Richard Black: Huge Arctic fire hints at new climate cue ;
• ABC (Australia) – Sarah Clarke: Arctic fires may accelerate global warming ;
• New Scientist – Andrew Purcell: Baked Alaska: Arctic tundra fires set to increase ;
• Alaska Dispatch – Doug O’Harra: Arctic wildfire spews vast amount of carbon into the air ; A long story, with heavy insertion of links to other media stories that O’Harra consulted. That includes one that ran in 2008 at Yale’s e360 site.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Florida – Gainesville Press Release ; Univ. Alaska-Fairbanks Press Release ;

4) Canada Has Lots of Cods Again ; It’s not the good old days yet however. For years the Atlantic cod fishery has been shut down. Once-vast stocks including those that thronged the Grand Banks and other shoals off Newfoundland were all but gone, overfished, and some feared kaput forever. Other populations of smaller fish exploded – some saw it as a one-way ecosystem flip. Now, however, Canadian researchers report that cod seem to be shouldering their way back in.

Stories:

• Globe and Mail – Ingrid Peritz: Signs of Atlantic cod comeback bode well for other collapsed fisheries ;
• BBC – Richard Black: Nature’s spring: Cod bounce back ;
• PostMedia News via Vancouver Sun – Margaret Munro: Cod stocks show signs of a rebound / Numbers of groundfish species reach levels scientists have not seen since early 1990s ; Comprehensive piece, and at modest size. Cod, plus haddock and pollack, are up, it says. Redfish too. I wouldn’t know a haddock from a padlock, but that all sounds encouraging. Interesting angle here – the fish are small for their ages, implying that selective fishing for big’uns left the genomes weighted toward less growth. Evolution by seine. Munro even gets “trophic cascade” into print. Predator-prey reversal, too.
• New Scientist – Andy Coghlan: Canadian cod make a comeback ;
• QMI via Toronto Sun: Sheena Goodyear: Atlantic cod stocks recovering: study ;

Grist for the Mill: Queen’s University – Kingston Press Release ;

Whew! And this does not even count the coverage for flood basalts and their ancient mantle origins (example – Discovery News by Jessica Marshall) .

- Charlie Petit

Three years ago New York City required chain fast-food restaurants to post calorie counts for items on their menu. Now a study by the city’s health department shows that only 15 percent New Yorkers actually read the calorie ratings. But the report says that those who do read the listings tend to favor lower-calorie dishes.

The researchers, who checked the cash register receipts of more than 7,000 adult customers before the law went into effect and some 8,500 two years afterward, found no overall decline in calories consumed. But when they looked at only those who said they consulted the calorie listings, those customers ate about 100 fewer calories per meal–757 vs. 863. Results were published in the British Medical Journal, BMJ, with the conclusion that reading the calorie counts caused the lower calorie intake.

CBS News‘s Ryan Jaslow paraphrases the usually dependable nutrition authority Marian Nestle as saying that it confirms that once people pay attention to the calorie counts, they make dietary changes.

What isn’t explained in his account or any others read by the Tracker is that people who are inclined to read calorie counts probably already were health conscious and had always chosen smaller portions or less calorie-rich items. The posted calorie lists may not have changed anyone’s eating choices at all.

Sarah Boseley, at the UK’s Guardian, drew the unsubstantiated conclusion as well, writing that customers “are put off the more fattening options when the menu shows the calories of each meal.” She says the British Heart Foundation is calling on British restaurants to display calorie counts as well.

HealthDay News, picked up by USNews & World Report among others.

Even the usually astute Consumer Reports fell for the unwarranted claim. Ginger Skinner led this way: “Calorie counts on menus seem to be having an effect on what some people are ordering…”

This is the kind of story that gets lots of attention by consumer health reporters, especially on television. Let’s see if any of them get it right.

Grist: The BMJ article.

-Boyce Rensberger

Beginning a necropsy of the Connecticut cougar

Claimed sightings of cougars have come from several Midwestern and Eastern states in recent years, but often are dismissed as erroneous or implausible. Now there is irrefutable evidence that at least one of the wild American lions has been roaming leafy Connecticut towns from tony Greenwich eastward to Milford. Peter Applebome writes in today’s New York Times that an S.U.V. killed one in Milford and that its DNA matches samples taken from droppings, blood and hair found in Minnesota and Wisconsin. It’s pattern of certain genetic markers matches those of a cougar population in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

The animal–also known as mountain lion, panther and painter–was a young, 140-pound male doing what young male cougars usually do as they approach maturity–roam away from the birth territory to find a mate and a range of its own. Except that this one traveled at least 1,500 miles, twice as far, Applebome says, as the longest recorded dispersal route known for a mountain lion.

What emerges from his story but, unfortunately, is not explained, is that there must be some kind of cougar DNA registry for looking up matches. And there are people who collect wild animal droppings and sequence their DNA.

The Connecticut cougar lends powerful support to claims that cougars, like several other wild species (coyotes and moose, for example), are adapting to human settlements and spreading to regions from which they disappeared a century ago or more ago.

-Boyce Rensberger

Nearly ten years after New York’s World Trade Center towers collapsed, sending billows of dust and smoke into the city and into the lungs of hundreds of survivors as well as fire, police and rescue workers, there is no good evidence that it caused any to get cancer. That’s the conclusion of a study by NIOSH, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, a component of the Centers for Disease Control.

Anemona Hartocollis wrote in today’s New York Times that the report disappointed many New Yorkers because they were hoping to attribute their cancer to the attacks and, thus, qualify for special government benefits, namely free health care and added money.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Devlin Barrett put it succinctly in his lede: “Medical research cannot yet prove” the link.

NBC News‘s New York Web site focuses rather heavily on reactions of local pols and health activists who say they believe future studies will establish a link.

The NIOSH report was a review of published studies of health effects of the attacks. There were only 18 that even mentioned cancer. Only five were peer reviewed, and their results were mixed. NIOSH says it will look again next year to see if any new evidence emerges. Most cancers, of course, are slow to arise, taking anywhere from five to 20 years, sometimes longer, to show up after their causes have their initial impact. Many of the cancers reported by 9/11-affected people showed up within the first year or two, suggesting that they started well before the attacks. If, however, the attacks caused quick-developing tumors, then many more should have shown up by now.

-Boyce Rensberger

 Grist: The NIOSH report

SpaceX's Dragon cargo module

The Russian space agency said Wednesday, according to AFP, that the International Space Station would be scrapped in 2020 and plunged into the ocean to avoid its becoming a source of orbital debris. So, after 12 years under construction and recent assurance from the American space agency that ISS was about to enter a period of doing significant science, the $100 billion-to-$150 billion facility will be fully functional for about nine years. So much for long-term science in low Earth orbit.

The Russian space agency also said that it is engaged in a space race with the United States to develop a new vehicle for flying people into Earth orbit. It is to be a re-usable replacement for the one-shot Soyuz vehicle, and is to have its first test flights in 2015. “We’ll race each other,” AFP quotes the deputy head of the Russian agency.

Meanwhile in America, privatization of part of the ISS program seems to be moving along. NASA has given preliminary approval to SpaceX, the corporation that has developed an unmanned rocket and cargo-carrier, to launch its Dragon capsule into orbit and then to rendezvous and dock with the Station. If all goes well, SpaceX can fulfill its contract with NASA to be a regular cargo supplier to ISS. According to Space News, this could happen in late November and early December.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to Spanish lang post) The communications department of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) has sent a press release saying that the lack of sunspots influences the global distribution of hurricanes, and favor big hurricanes formed in Africa arriving to Mexico. It is based only on a dubious correlation observed by a climatologist, there are some weird glitches in the explanations, and there is no reference to any study published in a peer review journal. In spite of this, some of the main Mexican newspapers have literally copied the press release and presented it without contrasting with other sources. The information doesn’t even come from wires. It’s taken directly from the original source and copied word by word into the newspaper. The Spanish Knight Tracker has sent the link to two Spanish speaking solar physicists, and they both have shown serious skepticism with the conclusions and methodology used. None other Mexican reporter has looked for other sources. It’s not the first time we detect reporters trusting blindly in the information coming from UNAM.

No es lo mismo copiar literalmente notas de agencias que boletines de prensa de Universidades. Las primeras a veces suelen ser más sensacionalistas, pero por lo menos están escritas por periodistas independientes de la fuente original. En cambio los notas de prensa de una Universidad, por muy grande, poderosa y respetable que sea, no es neutra con el papel de sus investigadores. Hay intento de promoción detrás. Y no necesariamente neutralidad. Eso lo sabemos, lo asumimos, pero a veces lo le hacemos ni puñetero caso.

La UNAM de México será todo lo venerable y prestigiosa que queráis. Y está bien que los periodistas de los principales medios mexicanos comuniquen a la población todos sus hallazgos. Pero al tracker le da la sensación de que nos estamos pasando. Que no se está filtrando suficiente y todo cuela con demasiada facilidad.

El caso que nos lleva a esta reflexión es la supuesta relación entre la escasez de manchas solares y la mayor llegada a México de huracanes procedentes de África. Podéis leer el boletín de prensa de la UNAM “Influyen las manchas solares en el desplazamiento de huracanes”, porque es el texto que han copiado literalmente –salvo típicos ligeros retoques en entradilla y primer párrafo-  El Universal “Menos manchas solares atraen a México huracanes de África” o Milenio “Influyen las manchas solares en el desplazamiento de huracanes”, y más corta en Diario de Yucatán, La Crónica y bastantes otros sitios de noticias. No vemos que La Jornada, Reforma o Crónica de Hoy saquen la historia. Quizás no han sucumbido a la tentación.

Y es que aquí no vamos a valorar si la información suministrada por la UNAM es cierta o no. Pero todo científico acepta que su hipótesis es aceptada como válida cuando sus compañeros confirman independientemente los resultados. Y un paso previo a esto es publicarlos en una revista científica de referencia revisada por pares. Hasta ese momento, todo lo que vemos en el boletín de prensa de la UNAM son especulaciones no avaladas por ningún artículo científico donde se haya publicado la investigación. Esto por sí sólo ya debería poner en alerta a los periodistas. Es muy diferente a otra nota de la UNAM que está hoy mismo en varios medios, sobre un interesante estudio sobre el origen de la narcolepsia (El Universal), sí publicado por científicos mexicanos en la revista científica Frontiers of Neurology. Este detalle representa un cambio enorme en ciencia. En este punto, las correlaciones entre falta de manchas solares y huracanes deben ser tratadas como opiniones, como hipótesis. Pero no como certezas. Y menos, copiando directamente de la fuente interesada. Un poco de espíritu crítico también ante la ciencia, por favor. Pero es que además, las explicaciones dadas en el boletín son flojísimas. Primero porque no define correctamente qué son las manchas solares. Y luego porque sólo se habla de una débil correlación, que en ningún caso implica causalidad. Como hipótesis puede ser válida, pero parece distar mucho de poder darse en los medios como la categórica sentencia de que “Menos manchas solares atraen a México huracanes de África”.

Es que es de cajón: si quieres utilizar la información del boletín de prensa de la UNAM, adelante. Para eso está. Mucho mejor que esperar a que una agencia haga un refrito rápido. Pero debes trabajártelo un poco. Como mínimo ir a buscar una fuente experta no relacionada con la investigación, A este tracker le ha costado tres minutos enviar un mail a dos físicos solares de entre sus fuentes y que le respondan:

a) “valoración hyper rápida: Apostaría que su señal está MUY por debajo de su ruido. Pone como “prueba” el caso de 3 mínimos (que duran años) y 4 huracanes (de 30? que puede haber cada año). El tiempo de relajación de la magnetosferea incluso con tormentas que nos peguen de lleno es de sólo horas o días. el efecto sería puntual y no por falta de manchas sino por eyecciones de masa coronal, que están inversamente correlacionadas”.

b) “Me he tomado unos minutos para intentar encontrar la fuente y sólo me he topado con una nota de un boletín interno de la Universidad (Tracker: el mismo que citamos en el post).Con esta información es difícil de valorar porque no indica el proceso exacto por el que esa influencia podría ocurrir. Necesitaría leer el artículo, si es que lo hay (Tracker: como hemos dicho, no parece que exista. Por lo menos el boletín no lo indica). De todas formas, soy escéptico de la componente solar de la noticia, teniendo en cuenta que define las manchas solares como un residuo de las explosiones, cosa que no es cierta. Las manchas solares no son el resultado de una erupción, al contrario, suelen ser la causa. No son más que una manifestación de concentraciones de fuerzas mágneticas en la superficie del Sol. Cuando forman concentraciones complejas, crean tensiones tales que pueden llegar a relajarse de manera explosiva. Pero también pueden disolverse sin ningún drama”.

De ninguna manera vamos a dar más credibilidad a estos astrofísicos que al autor del estudio de la UNAM. Pero nos indican duda. Una duda que siempre debemos mantener y fomentar. No nos podemos creer a los científicos porque sí, por muy prestigiosa que sea la Universidad de la que proceden. Y si nos interesa la noticia pero no tenemos tiempo ni ganas de contrastarla, por lo menos utilicemos el típico “según dice…”, o algo que muestre al lector que eso no es necesariamente un hecho comprobado sino una hipótesis a medio camino.

- Pere Estupinyà

Trapping mice in the wilds of Manhattan

Evolution, as many of us know, is happening all the time everywhere. Phenotypes are always being tested by changes in environment. But it’s nice to be reminded that it can happen in the midst of the country’s largest city, as Carl Zimmer writes in this week’s Science Times. Even the ivy-choked islands in the middle of Broadway can harbor distinct insect populations and may act much as do the Galapagos Islands.

The story is a good example of how much literary color and sense of immediacy comes from having the reporter out in the field, tagging along with the scientists, even if it is only a subway ride to join the expedition. In these days of stringent newsroom budgets, reporters get out of the office far less frequently than was the case a decade and more ago. In a sad sign of the times, Google Ads puts one for a creationist Web site on the page with Zimmer’s story.

Pam Belluck shows admirable skepticism in a news analysis of a claim by UCSF researchers who tried to estimate how much Alzheimer’s disease could be prevented by changing seven behaviors that they said could increase the risk. That claim led to articles in various publications–none apparently edited by professional science journalists–with headlines like “7 Steps to Prevent Alzheimer’s.” Truth is, Belluck details, there is no solid evidence that any behavior increases the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease.

Also fronted in the section is Natalie Angier‘s piece about field research a bit beyond New York–yet another search for the elusive snow leopard, this one using 16 motion-triggered cameras placed in the mountains of Afghanistan. They got some nice shots.

These and the rest of the stories are here. Dennis Overbye reviews a movie with cosmological connections. John Markoff looks at cryptography in the age of the telegraph. Tara Parker-Pope discusses migraines, pegged to Michelle Bachman’s disease. And more.

-Boyce Rensberger