A science story that might not gain much attention on its own got a big publicity boost last week from an unusual source: pirates. Thus readers who might never get any sense how hard research agencies have to work to put together weather forecasts and to monitor climate baselines know a little more about where their taxes and fees are going.

The news stems from the withering of commercial maritime traffic in the Indian Ocean where Somali brigands routinely hijack yachts, freighters, and most any other unarmed vessel. With the shipping lanes empty, services that routinely rely on private shippers to drop data-gathering buoys into the sea to aid forecasts of the tracks of monsoon fronts and other storm faced a hole in their observational skein. Last week CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, announced that the US and Australian navies would add their deployment of  to their patrol routines.

That got editors’ and reporters’ attention. The science of weather forecasting and the amazing gadgetry that must be employed  is interesting, sort of, but doesn’t compete well with celebrities, national financial defaults, and fad diets. However, in the context of pirates and the sailors who try to thwart them, it jumps right up the list of candidates for the news budget.

Few if any agencies went beyond the press release – either rewrite, or to get in touch with the CSIRO woman that the release quotes. But now Project Argo has gotten publicity that must dwarf anything it’s ever gotten before.

Stories:

• AP – Vijay Joshi: Driven out by pirates, scientists get US, Australian anveis ot float climate-testing robots ; Joshi did phone a woman at CSIRO to get more – the same source as featured in the press release.
• Reuters – David Fogarty : Navy to help climate scientists in pirate-infested waters ; also contacted same source, per press release.
• ABC (Radio Australia) Sarah Clarke:  Scientists call in the Navy ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Ben Cubby: SOS to naval ships as pirates bother buoys;
• International Business Times – Gabriel Perna: Scientists Align With the Navy to Fight Off Pirates ; Quotes are lifted off the release.

*UPDATE : See comments, where the author of this article modestly suggests he enerprised this news a few days before everybody else. An article on the issue was in the journal Eos, pub’d by the AGU. So many reporters see that journal, which comes with AGU membership (and with the low-cost membershi comes access to the membership directory, so it’s a good deal) that it’s a minor mystery it took a press release to really kick this news around the world.

• LiveScience – Charles Q. Choi: (July 5) Somali P:irates Thwart … Climate Research? I wonder, by the by, if this is the story that set off a snarky head at the Fox News blog, next bullet down. After all, Choi refers to it simply as climate research, not also weather prediction, and that’s enough to let the dogs out.

Department of What Are They Thinking?:

• The World Today via and that’s a BIG via Fox News – Sarah Clarke: first, before letting you see the headline, gotta just say for criminy’s sake this is ridiculous. These instruments are for near-term climate and weather forecasts. But here’s what somebody at the FOXNation blog thought : Pirates Swashbuckle Global Warming Alarmists.

Grist for the Mill: CSIRO Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

As promised in a flurry of terse articles last week (previous post Fri), NASA’s paripatetic spacecraft Dawn has eased into a big, gentle embrace by the slight gravity of a literally groovy and hefty member of the asteroid belt beyond Mars and before Jupiter. Not until is maneuvers to a tighter orbit will its high-res cameras seriously go to work. But a number of outlets are keeping readers up to date with the fact that it’s approaching its operating altitude, gradually.

Sample Stories:

• Time Mag. – Jeffrey Kluger: A  Very Cool Spacecraft Visits a Very Cool Asteroid ; Oh – didn’t realize it made its orbital burn in a fashion more subtle than necessary around larger bodies. A little xenon ion thruster, gentler than a breeze,  did the job. Nice writing, such as describing Dawn’s eventual exit from Vesta’s thrall this way, “Dawn wll fire up its ion engines, puff its way out of orbit and point its prow toward Ceres, a spherical asteroid that is the largest in the solar system…”  That’s a few years off.
• Telegraph (UK) : Nasa probe enters orbit around ‘potato’ asteroid Vesta after four year journey ; Written just before the spacecraft radioed that it had actually done so. Risky headline then. But vindicated by later developments.
• Wired / Geekdad Blog – Brian McLaughlin: A New Dawn at Vesta ; Writer’s a NASA man, writing on his own time. I learned something. I thought Vesta is already a dwarf planet. Turns out that the designation is in the works, but not done yet.
• Register (UK) Lester Haines: Asteroid hunter achieves Vesta orbit ;

Department of Background Information:

• Nature News- Ron Cowen : Dawn Nears Vesta ; One of the better advancers that ran last week. This is a wordfile of the piece, which ran at a site off limits to non-subscribers. Cowen has unusual detail on why a close study is interesting, relative ratios of Aluminum-26 among them. Cowen, formerly of Science News and now a freelancer for several agencies, is a scoop machine, which is why he’s been in tracker posts so often. This one is no scoop but it is good, diligent reporting and reflects a hunger for angles and info hardly anybody else many anybody at all, managed to get,

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

As this site has recognized, several vociferous writers have argued that a front-page installment in the New York Times‘s series on hydrofracturing, or fracking, in shale country did not back up its theme. Yesterday, the Times’s public editor, or ombudsman, Arthur S. Brisbane essentially agreed with the critics. His account yesterday says not only that the story’s sourcing is thin and some of it not adequately portrayed, but also that it conflates two issues – whether the overall shale oil and gas boom could be a speculative bubble that endangers the whole industry, or only that smaller, independent operators may be over-claiming to investors what they can deliver.

The Times and Brisbane did well by posting on line a full-throated response from two of the editors  involved.

The Times ran two stories by  reporter Ian Urbina on Sunday June 25, and on Monday June 26. The latter story, with its hints of possible Ponzi Schemes and parallels to the Enron meltdown, got most of the criticism. A post here mentioning them and the blowback the first was getting ran as an add-on to a post I filed  on June 28th.  It included links to several responses by critics, including a telling one at the Council on Foreign Relations site by Michael Levi. I wrote that I rather liked the Urbina story. I still do, on the grounds that it is among the few to raise a flag of possible hazard – not just to water supplies but to the economy – in the tremendous shift of investment into shale-locked fossil fuels.  But others did not like the story at all. Their objections are now seen largely to be shared the Times’s in-house watchdog.

The growing backlash led to a second post here at the tracker July 1. Its goad was a sharply-worded critique from Jon Entine at Real Clear Politics that called for the Times’s public editor to do what he now has done, which by that time I could see as a good idea too. But I also have to concede I was hardly sold at that point on the notion that the Urbina article significantly breached the standards of good journalism, even if the suspicion of such merited an ombudsman’s inspection. Such breach can be a hard thing to prove one way or the other. It does look like I could use better b.s. antennae. Entine for his part says the result is “pretty extraordinary. I’ve never seen such a direct criticism, ever, on an entire article on the Times in the 10 years of the existence of an ombudsman.”

More from Entine at a blog post on STATS: NYTimes Ombudsman Rebukes his Own Paper for Reporting Lapses on Natural Gas..

One wonders what further repercussions will transpire inside the walls at NYTimes, or outside them too for that matter.

- Charlie Petit

from Detroit Free Press

Ooops. A promising new herbicide from DuPont, one that poses little threat to pets or wildlife but is hell on weeds, turns out to be a tree murderer. Well, all the facts are not in, but that’s the implication of reports circulating among horticulturalists for awhile, among a drumbeat of smaller news outlets for weeks, and today blossomed on the front page of the New York Times in a dramatic tale of SNAFU by reporter Jim Robbins.

Well! Could be worse. At least the US Forest Service didn’t decide this stuff, called Imprelis, is just the thing to eradicate Russian thistle, Scotch broom, and Pampas grass, sprayed it all over and wiped out every loblolly pine and Norway spruce from Oregon to Florida. But this is bad enough. Hmmm. Let’s check the DuPont stock price …. gad, it’s up. Son of a gun.

Robbins’s tale is well told,with plenty of anecdote to go with underlying information. Just now, Reuters’s Jonathan Stempel filed on a lawsuit against DuPont filed by a Michigan country club. But the news of problems with the product has been spreading like oxalis in the turf for awhile.

Unless somehow it is discovered that the herbicide is innnocent, a deeper layer of reporting – or perhaps discovery during trial preparation – should reveal how a broad toxicity of this kind managed to elude DuPont’s R&D team.

Other stories:

• Columbus Dispatch (Jul 14) Jim Weiker: Is weedkiller killing trees?
• Eu Claire  Leader-Telegram (Wisconsin, Jul 13) Jon Swedien: Chemical tied to evergreen tree sickness ;
• Detroit Free-Press (July 9) Cecil Angel: New lawn chemical suspect in mysterious deaths of trees ;
• Mother Earth News (July 12)  Barbara Pleasant, Cheryl Long : Imprelis: Another Deadly Herbicide, This Time From Dupont ; Kudos. An activist broadside against a large class of herbicides, but terrific reporting too including links to state ag agencies that have been issuing warnings for a month or more. A few I filched and put in Grist below.
• WKRC Cincinnati (June 24) Larry Davis:  Weed Killer May Be Linked to Tree Damage ; Nice job, and out of the gate early.

Grist for the Mill :

DuPont, no press release I can find, but here’s a letter (thanks to Mother Earth News, above) it sent to nurseries and other lawn pros ; Indiana ag alert letter ;  Michigan State ag extension alert  ; Penn State cooperative extension alert ;

 

- Charlie Petit

Simple eh? (You won't see this in many media stories)

It looks as though genetic engineering, long heralded but not realized as a deft and ingenious tool for modifying organisms by swapping pieces of DNA in and out, has in effect gone from carpet bombing and machine guns to laser-guided missiles, sniper rifles, and cyber-attacks. Until now, unless one took the time to synthesize a whole long stretch of bespoke DNA and insert it like a new plasmid (or synthesize a whole genome, like Craig Venter’s team did), the primary way to get a new or modified gene into a living cell was to just shoot it into the nucleus and hope it sticks somewhere, anywhere, and goes to work. A new report from MIT, Yale, and Harvard describes in Science a way to edit specific stretches of genome and put new instructions, via a sort of “find and replace” system, right where they should work most effectively. And it can do this in different ways at many sites  nearly simultaneously. While the MIT press release (see Grist) describes it as “rewriting the code of life,” lots of copy editors use another simile: hacking.

This is an important advance. It sounds like the new system not only can introduce new functions, but re-format a genome so it works on a novel operating system. They’ve liberated one, redundant kind of codon from its usual duty, freeing it to tell a cell to manufacture an amino acid evolution never before included in its armory. The reprogramming possibilities are so deep, it offer ability like turning fortran into cobol, or something like that. Old pal Vic McElheny, former NYTimes man, e founder of the Knight Fellowships at MIT and still a fixture on the biotech scene in Cambridge, calls it in an email a “significant synthetic biology advance” that amounts to “supervised introduction of mutations into an existing microbe.”

It also is a bit arcane. There is reasonable coverage, but not much of the screaming headline p.1 variety. That will likely come when such teams, aside from showing that they can customize an E. coli genome molecule by molecule, use the method for something dramatically useful.

  Stories:

• NYTimes -  Nicholas Wade: Genetic Code of E. Coli Is Hijacked by Biologists ; In the print edition, two tall columns but tucked with a small hed way back on p. 14 with no illus.  Wade calls it “massively parallel intervention” with the capacity to rewrite myriad sequences in fast order. Pretty good explanation of stop codons, and a strategy to introduce new amino acids into the coding of life. And he brings up the possibility, which Harvard Medical School’s famed wizard George Church, a lead author, apparently entertains of rewriting an elephant embryo’s DNA in situ to conform closely as possible with what is known of mammoth DNA …. and see what happens. This is getting weird. Plus, Wade provides a hint of another case of Venter bristlng at rivals.
•  Hartford Courant - William Weir: Rewriting The Genome . Researchers’ New Method For Wholesale Altering Could Prevent Biotech Contamination, Lead To New Cures.    Here we get the technique’s formal name. It’s not hacking. It is “multiplex automated genome engineering.” Or MAGE. We also learn that the method may lead to new, modified organisms with their genomic architecture and its punctuation standards so rejiggered that they cannot cross-breed with natural ones.
• Discover / Not Exactly Rocket Science – Ed Yong: Hacking the genome with a MAGE and a CAGE.
• New Scientist – Ferris Jabr : E. coli’s genetic code has been hacked;   Summary sentence: “could make drug-producing bacteria immune to viruses, prevent laboratory engineered organisms from genetically contaminating wildlife and enable scientists to construct proteins that do not exist in nature.”  And one learns there is a CAGE to go with the WAGE we already learned about. That’s for Conjugative Assembly Genome Engineering.” The mind staggers.
• New Scientist – Jo Marchant: (June 27) Evolution machine : Genetic engineering on fast forward ; Marchant visited some of the researchers a few weeks ago, saw the set-up with her own eyeballs. Read this for the back story on the new publication. (Ed Yong, his article up a few bullets, points Marchant’s article out). This story also tip-toes into fraught terrain – mods to human germ cells.
• Ars Technica – John Timmer: Genome-wide DNA editing performed in live bacteria.
• Wired (UK) Mark Brown: Geneticists hack the E. coli genome with new DNA editing technique ;
• Nature.com – Gwyneth Dickey Zakaib: Genomes edited for free up codons ; Nice description – re-coded genomes could be made unable to cross-breed with normal ones because they’d be speaking mutual “gibberish” to one another.

Grist for the Mill:

Harvard Med. Sch. Press Release ; MIT Press Release ;

 

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Several good stories  from Latin America today: The new president of Perú, Ollanta Humala, told SciDev that he’s planning to increase sevenfold the proportion of Peruvian GPD devoted to S&T. In Mexico, the nation’s space agency vows to design and build its own satellites. From Costa Rica a story about a 21 year-old researcher who has discovered an enzyme with a key role in  development of leishmaniasis. She will continue her research in the US-lab of a Costa Rican researcher who recruits talented young scientists from his country. From Argentina we read about research on dopaminergic neurons, and about an antifungal medication that can fight the parasite that causes Chagas disease. And fwe acknowledge today the good work of a reporter Uruguay we’ve not trakced before. Ana País (El Observador) writes with very original angles about Uruguayan researchers using Sherlock Holmes books to study schizophrenia, how publicity can affect decisions in monkeys, and the biology of the only species of vampire bat that lives in Uruguay.

Empezamos con la nota en SciDev de Zoraida Portillo “Nuevo presidente peruano impulsará la ciencia”. Felicitaciones a Zoraida por haber conseguido una entrevista con Ollanta Humala para hablar de ciencia. Buen periodismo científico. Además, el nuevo presidente anuncia multiplicar por 7 la inversión en CyT durante los próximos 5 años (actualmente es una de las más bajas de la región). Interesante discusión también sobre la necesidad de crear un ministerio específico o no. Humala lo anunció en su campaña, hay expertos que le dicen que esto sólo significaría más burocracia, y reconoce estar valorando cambiar de opinión.

También en SciDev y desde Perú, excelente columna de opinión (en inglés) de Francisco Sagasti “América Latina necesita un impulso fuerte en inversión en CyT”. Buenos datos, buen contexto histórico, y buena argumentación de porqué AL  debería alcanzar el 1.8% de inversión en CyT en una década.

Siguiendo con la política científica local, en México El Universal presenta dos buenas notas de Renata Sánchez sobre la política aerospacial mexicana. Lo más destacable en cuanto a noticia, la decisión de crear y poner en órbita satélites propios. Informativa nota que se complementa con un muy buen texto con declaraciones de expertos mexicanos (R. Sánchez) urgiendo ponerse manos a la obra cuanto antes. Muy buena cobertura del asunto por parte de Renata.

Yendo hacia Costa Rica, en La Nación – Aldea Global encontramos una de esas notas que reclamamos para dar a conocer jóvenes talentos del país. Irene Rodríguez explica la historia de una joven investigadora costarricense que ha identificado una proteína clave en el desarrollo de la leishmaniasis, y que en caso inhibirse puede detener la enfermedad. El resultado de ciencia básica todavía debe pasar muchos filtros, pero es tremendamente meritorio que una joven de 21 años publique un artículo como éste, que además le ha servido para conseguir una beca con la que investigar en EEUU. Irene completa la información anunciando que más ticos irán a investigar a EEUU (I. R.), gracias al compromiso de un investigador afincado allí que quiere reclutar y entrenar a jóvenes voluntariosos de su país.

También sobre el lado más de ciencia básica de la biomedicina, en La Nación (Arg) Nora Bar nos habla de estudios sobre el metabolismo y recaptación neuronal de la dopamina; el neurotransmisor implicado en procesos tan dispares como el control de los movimientos del cuerpo (de aquí que su exceso en algunas zonas del cerebro provoque Parkinson), la aparición de esquizofrenia por niveles anormales, o ser la hormona del placer que se libera en el nuccleus accumbens cuando realizamos alguna actividad que debemos recordar como satisfactoria. Los mecanismos detrás del comportamiento de neuronas dopaminérgicas son comunes a todas estas alteraciones, como explica un investigador en el texto, quien se muestra orgulloso de haber desarrollado el primer ratón mutante de Argentina para fines de investigación. Muy buen texto también el de Sebastián Ríos, sobre un posible nuevo tratamiento para el Chagas basado en un antifúnguico.

Y para terminar, queríamos reconocer el buen trabajo de una periodista científica que no habíamos rastreado todavía. Publica en El Observador (Uruguay) y presenta los temas de una manera muy original y divulgativa. Por ejemplo en “Las pistas del lenguaje” Ana País nos habla de investigadores uruguayos que estudian trastornos del lenguaje utilizando fragmentos de obras de Sherlock Colmes. En “venderle gelatina a los monos capuchinos” A. País empieza con estudios mostrando que los monos entienden el concepto dinero para luego explicar investigaciones sobre cómo se pueden dejar llevar por algo parecido a la publicidad. Y habla de la única especie de murciélago vampiro presente en Uruguay en “La belleza del terror de la noche “(A. País). Seguiremos a la caza de más historias.

- Pere Estupinyà

A few reporters have been paying attention, but not many, to the upcoming visit to the asteroid Vesta by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. That number may pick up a bit now. At AAAS-Science Mag’s ScienceNOW site,  in the ScienceShots category ( and that’s a lot of employment of the word science)  resolute space and planet writer Richard A. Kerr has a big picture and a small story that passes as a fat caption. It’s a good appetizer for the main event, starting later today with a maneuver into orbit.

He has a few things to say about the swirly ridges and the near lack of craters. the machine’s full-bore high-res imaging will take a month or so to get going, one learns at AP from another resolute space and planet writer,  Alicia Chang.

There’s a fair amount of such advance coverage. No sense of a long roundup until the data flow is a flood. I for one am grateful for the curtainraisers – I try to keep up on such things but I still had tucked away the Dawn mission in the category of things that will happen at some distant date. Vesta is a big asteroid, but Dawn’s next date is with a giant of the type, Ceres, a sphere so big (950 km wide, nearly twice Vesta) it sits with suchlike as Pluto on the list of dwarf planets.

Grist for the Mill: NASA-JPL Dawn Mission ; Press Release ;

  – Charlie Petit

Christakis (left) and Fowler

Four years ago, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that obesity could be contagious, like a virus or a Lady Gaga video. I took the finding to heart, and immediately unfriended everyone on Facebook with a body-mass index over 25, just in case it was contagious through social media, too. (Gaga made the cut.)

Now I find that, perhaps, I was too quick to turn on my Facebook friends, who are probably friends no longer. In an interesting piece on Slate, David Johns writes that the idea of social contagion–which also includes a claim that divorce can spread through personal networks–is not as solidly established as we might have thought.

Johns says some researchers now question how social contagion got past peer review in the New England Journal. And some have gone further, examining the evidence and finding holes.

The research in question was done by James H. Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard, and their colleagues. In the New England Journal article, they examined data from the famous Framingham Heart Study, which tracked residents of a small town not far from Boston for decades. The data included the body-mass index (a measure of obesity) for the study’s participants. Fowler and Christakis looked at whether “weight gain in one person was associated with weight gain in his or her friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbors.” They concluded that “obesity appears to spread through social ties.”

In a nice turn of phrase, Johns writes, “It’s a surprising, quirky, and seemingly plausible finding, which explains why so many news outlets caught the bug.” He’s right about that: A finding that is both surprising and plausible is sure to attract attention. Anybody could see that this was almost surely right.

But, of course, science doesn’t always work that way. Often that which seems to be highly implausible is what turns out to be right (light is both a particle and a wave).

Last year, Fowler and Christakis followed up with another paper, entitled Breaking Up is Hard To Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too, in which they concluded “that divorce can spread between friends, siblings, and coworkers.”

Johns notes an earlier piece of his in Slate in which he reported on a study that challenged the statistics used by Fowler and Christakis, charging that they were in error. Johns takes a shot at Fowler and Christakis for promoting their work in popular venues, including on the Stephen Colbert show and in TED videos, which is a little unfair; the argument turns on the strength of the data here, not the publicity.

But Johns makes an important related point. The divorce paper has not been subject to peer review; it was posted as a preprint, and is still awaiting publication. Johns is right to argue that publicity before peer review is a risky business. Johns walks a line, being careful not to discard social contagion–but to suggest only that it’s less well established than it seems.

That’s a fair point. I went into this story a little dubious that Johns could come to a reasonable position on all of this, without coming down for or against Fowler and Christakis. They might be right; what seemed plausible before the criticism still seems plausible. But Johns tied up his story very neatly–it’s a nice job. The point is that we need to know a lot more before we start unfriending our friends.

- Paul Raeburn

SpaceX, the start-up company at 1 Rocket Road  in Hawthorne near LA, has moved rapidly up the space-biz chatter-ladder by getting several smallish Falcon boosters into space. It ceremonially broke ground yesterday at Vandenberg Air Force Base for a renovated pad from which it plans to dispatch the first test model of most powerful rocket since the Saturn V – the Falcon Heavy.

That’s news enough. Several outlets ran it pretty much alone, gathered below.

But first, for fuller context and published smartly to coincide with this otherwise minor  item:

• MSNBC / Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: SpaceX chief sets his sights on Mars; A piece that looks at the bright side of the shuttle program’s closure. Boyle spoke with the president and founder of the company, Elon Musk, before the Atlantis’s shuttle-concluding launch last week. INcludes a summary on top, then Q&A. One learns that CEO Musk has more than passengers and ISS cargo – but science too – on the agenda.

Other stories, on groundbreaking:

• LA Times biz section – W. J. Hennigan: SpaceX is making $30-million bet on rocket at Vandenberg ;
• KSBY TV – Ariel Wesler: SpaceX breaks ground at Vandenbergt for world’s most powerful rocket ; Boosterish on economic side, but a decent job and long by TV standards. Includes a quick cut of Musk talking Mars, but nothing more on that.
• Daily Breeze biz sec. – Muhammed El-Hasan: SpaceX breaks ground for Vandenberg AFB launchpad .
• Space.com – SpaceX  Breaks Ground on Launch Pad for Huge Private Rocket ;
• Santa Maria Times/ Lompoc Record  – Janene Scully: Ceremony kicks off new era at Vandenberg; Here’s a keeper of a quote, from Musk regarding the eventual launch in 2013. “Please come back for that …It’s guaranteed to be exciting, now matter what happens.’
• PC Magazine – Chloe Albanesius: SpaceX Breaks Ground on Vandenberg Rocket Launch Site ;

Grist for the Mill: SpaceX Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Cellulose microfibril wrapped in lignin

At least it’s easier than fusion energy.  The NYTimes’s website liberates one of Greenwire‘s long features (the service is part of Energy & Environment Daily’s pricy but essential-to-insiders newsletter service). There one finds Paul Voosen‘s 4500-word summary of the state of play in cellulosic ethanol. It is a biofuel that is inherently seductive. The world’s vegetation makes a whopping load of the sugary stuff, constantly, on non-ag land and it’s not edible. Which is a hint to why it’s hard to ferment it at industrial scale and competitive cost into fuel.

Read this to see what happens when a science and energy journalist gets to visit a lot of labs, talk at length to a lot of people, and empty the notebook while throwing in mood-lightening and writerly asides. It is balanced, thorough, convincing, and cautious. It is a story that leaves one, even if a chemical ignoramus, feeling something like confidence in understanding what challenges biochemists have when it comes to things like dissolving lignin and straightening out the weirdly-woven sugars of cellulose. It also is hopeful ,as fusion stories almost always are too, but one hopes the cellulose solution comes faster.

While it doesn’t do so explicitly, it tells one why insect larvae can thrive eating a closet’s woolens while cotton shirts last for decades with no help from moth balls.

- Charlie Petit

© Harry Martin cartoons, source info at post bottom

When starting to read a short account from Reuters by Jennifer Martin about a new study estimating 133 billion insect mortalities per month due to splatterings on Hollanders’ vehicles, just about the first thing that came to this mind is bats. That’s how it works sometimes – one hears something that seems true enough and is supposed to be bad, but gets immediate cognitive dissonance because something else that does the same thing is supposed to be good.

The lede says the slaughter of low-level road-crossing moths, mosquitoes, flies, etc, ( with their numbers estimated with the help of volunteers who counted the dead ones on their license plates after some driving and which the scientists then hit with a pile of statistical multipliers)  means that important members of the food chain were thus eliminated.

I thought this is nuts. First of all, most bugs get across the road, and anyway, most bugs are flying around in fields where they don’t cross the road very often. As a percentage, what are we talking about? Second,  I thought how come when bats get white nosed or for other reasons rarer, population biologists and environmentalists wring their hands because, aside from the value of bats on general principles, this eliminates a natural brake on the numbers of pesky and crop-eating, biting  bugs. And now when windshields and radiators and bumpers do the same thing, that’s supposed to be bad?

Gesplasht insect

That seemed pretty insightful till I read further that the important members of the food chain that the insect carnage threatens are not the bugs, it is the bats and birds that are thus deprived of some of their food. Oh. That’s why it  is useful to keep reading past the first graf.

There remain conundra whose disentanglement is beyond my cranial rating. Such as: if we need a certain number of birds and bats to control insects, and if one presumes that the populations of those predators are largely modulated by the available food ( right?), then if we intercept some of those insects with our cars and motorcycle goggles etc., the remaining aerial bug biomass ought to support just about the right number of birds and bats to keep it in proportionately normal check. Other than worries over actual extinctions, is something wrong in my logic that this looks like a phenomenon non-impactful to anything but the bugs? That’s very likely. But an exploration of such things would make meatier reading than a short rewrite of some research with no challenging questions asked of the good people at Wageningen University who organized a Splashteller website to get help in data gathering. And besides, even in Holland, one bets that pesticides are doing far worse to bat and bird food supply than are motorists.

Let’s see if anybody else moved the ball forward in the manner I have just cooked up, or in any other fashion.

Other stories:

• Telegraph (UK) Bruno Waterfield: Two trillion insects killed on Dutch cars every year; Nice job with the arithmetic, but no exploration whether this matters much.
• Car Advice – Tim Beissmann: Cars kill trillions of bug in Australia every year ; If it happens in Holland it must elsewhere too. Except Antarctica.
• Wired (UK) Katie Scott: SplashTeller tallies drivers’ bug-killing quota ; ( I think the right word is quotient, not quota).
• Treehugger (Discovery) Stephen Messenger: Trillions of Insects Killed by Cars Every Years, Says Study ; Messenger has even written about this earlier, before the results were in.

Nope. Nobody I saw took the amusing little numbers on dead bugs and asked anything particularly penetrating on what it all means. Too bad.

Grist for the Mill: SplashTeller site (in Dutch) and a version translated by Google (and it’s a gelaffer) into Englishesque language.

Top Illus Source: Harry Martin Cartoons .

- Charlie Petit

I’ve been prattling along in the last few days urging readers not to confuse the human spaceflight program at NASA with the real, productive, and still-dynamic space science program that is delivering the solar system and the universe beyond to curious minds everywhere.

But maybe that real space program is about to get a titanic blow. The House Appropriations Committee has proposed – last week – a new budget that terminates the James Webb Space Telescope, a device on which billions already have been spent, that has been partly bolted together, and that would extend our view of distant places and distant times back from where the Hubble peters out. It is the hightest ranked project that American astronomers put on their respected, year-2000 Decadal Survey wish list. Current sked is for launch in 2018.

Stories:

• Space.com – Denise Chow: Scientists Condemn Plans to Scrap Hubble Telescope Successor ;
• Space News – Dan Leone: House Budget Bill Would Leave it to NASA To Aportion Bulk of Cuts ; More detail. But the house bill is explicit about the Webb.
• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: After Hubble: Will Budget Woes Kill NASA;s Next Great Telescope? ; A well-calibrated story. It says too bad if it happens, but pointedly reports the Webb’s shrinking capacity, receding launch date,  and bloating budget over the years as it has gone from idea to hardware. But the crescendo make clear that loss of this instrument is a historic retreat by the US from its position as scientific leader.
• Guardian (UK) op-ed – Sarah Kendrew: To scrap the James Webb Space Telescope would be short-sighted / No one now debates whether Hubble was worth its delays and budget overruns, and yet its successor the James Webb Space Telescope now faces the axe for similar reasons ;

Grist for the Mill:

NASA James Webb Space Telescope site. Most recent Press Release ; Amer. Astron. Soc’y Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit