Slap shot hat trick trifecta for Hockey Stick Man

The tentacles of the climate change fraud, the current poster boy in the department of socialist stalking horses, are long. Even the National Science Foundation declares that Mr. Hockey Stick, Penn State’s Michael Mann, has violated no standards of scientific conduct – none – while publishing papers that see a worsening warming of Earth due to CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

Either that or Mann, a scientist of high standing, really has been an honorable and sensible scientist all along. Bingo. When the Virginia Attorney General ordered up all his files so he could check for fraud, looks like he was wasting his time and his taxpayer’s money.

The news this week is that the NSF’s inspector general released the conclusion of its inquiry into allegations against Mann regarding research misconduct. The five page summary is below in Grist. It says it could find, on its own and in files of a university-based team that did a previous inspection, nothing that constitutes research misconduct. It also said subsidiary allegations of failure at proper data sharing have no discernible merit. That makes it a clean sweep for Mann – a series of investigations found nothing worth a hoot. Strangely, investigations in the UK into the behavior of researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University found the same thing. That’s a pattern, I think. The Himalaya glacier melting thing, however  – for that IPCC will twist in the wind a while.

Stories:

• Atlantic Monthly – James Fallows: Michael Mann Cleared (Again) ;
• Bloomberg – Jim Efstathiou Jr. : Climate-Change Scientist Cleared in Closing of US Data-Altering Inquiry ;
• NYTimes DotEarth blog- Andrew C. Revkin: Federal Inquiry is Latest to Clear Assailed Climate Scientist ;
• USA Today – Michael Winter : Feds clear Penn State researcher in ‘Climategate’ flap ; That’s what it was? A flap? A flap that damned near derailed climate policy action worldwide? One could only wish. The only organized, colossal scam in greenhouse research lately was the concoction of Climategate itself, no flap.
• Grist – Joseph Romm: “Hockey stick” climate scientist quietly vindicated for the umpteenth time ; More rant (surprise) than news account from this prominent blogger and agitator for stiff anti-global warming actions right now. He gets a swell angle – after an earlier vindication, Fox News declared that the “final say” would be the NSF’s report.

Grist for the Mill: NSF AG Closeout Memorandum ;

- Charlie Petit

Wall-to-wall coverage of governmental hearings is usually – in the US for sure – okay for C-SPAN but seldom a menu item for daily TV and print news and popular tweetmeisters unless political peccadilloes with a sex angle are the topic. Ditto for Canada one presumes, but this week a body called the Cohen Commission – which the prime minister appointed – is in the media bullseye. It is sitting in Vancouver, BC. That is not so very far from the mighty Fraser River. Its sockeye salmon run has been in dreadful decline lately – with some exceptions (Last year a Seattle Times report by Hal Bernton called one of that year’s runs of these  fish – of striking coloration when spawning – a surprising whopper that confounded the trend). The commission has been at work most of this year, and just resumed its hearings after a recess.

It’s just one river’s population of one species of fish, but it touches on vital issues in Canada: fish farming, aboriginal or First Nation rights, and environmental stewardship generally. The science issues are deep – why is the run so sporadic with a dismal trend? Is it the river itself, a virus picked up at sea, overfishing….? Are farmed fish making the wild ones sick? Activists have made themselves colorful fixtures at the hearings.

One big issue is whether, as one Canadian researcher suggested in a Science paper, a virus is the reason. Somehow or other, anti-aquaculture forces have seized on that possibility despite no strong reason to blame any such virus on the salmon pens that squat in the inland passage threading its way through the archipelago along Canada’s western shore from Puget Sound to Alaska. The scientist told the commision the virus is only hypothetical, so far. But the government put a gag on her anyway until she told the commission her ideas first. A gag! They can do that up there? The Bush administration down here, with notably scant impact other than to make gov’t researchers depressed, angry, or alternately back and forth,  tried that with climate change.

Stories:

• Globe and Mail – Sunny Dhillon: Privy Council blocked scientist’s access to media, Cohen probe told ; What a monarchic term that is, privy council. Remember, Canada does have a queen. She lives in London.
• National Post – Brian Hutchison: Scientist’s fish-farm ties at issue ; should read this with the preceding It’s Miller Time at inquiry into disappearing fish. Very effective piece of analytic and opinion reporting. More column than news story. Takes a rather dim view of the riff raff (my interpretation of the reporter’s stance) who are there to demonstrate against fish farms.
• Vancouver Sun – Gordon Hoekstra: Fisheries biologist ends tesimony but still cannot speak freely in public ;
• The Province (Vancouver) – Sam Cooper: Sockeye deaths blamed on virus / Cohen inquiry told that salmon are entering river in weakened state ;  Story stands in contrast to the report in the Nat’l Post. That one says the researcher concedes the evidence for the virus is still thin. This one implies she finds the evidence for a virus strong.
• Common Sense Canadian (also picked up at the Pacific Free Press, a progressive pub) Damien Gillis: Miller Takes Stand at Cohen: More Clues and Questions in Salmon Virus “Detective Story” ;  Gillis takes a stab at weaving, into the political main thread, a parallel strand of some detail on the nature of the virus hypothesis and its history.
• Kitimat Northern Sentinel – Lauren Behn: A fishy little mystery ; An effort to put the contenious hearing into context. Its conclusion: the predicament for sockeye is very complicated, with no single cause to blame for its decline Would have had more heft if the writer had interviewed an authority or two and thus had somebody else to cite. As it ran,  it is a personal sermon.
• Montreal Gazette – Gordon Hoekstra: Virus could be ‘smoking gun’ that caused decline in salmon fishery, scientist claims. Not really. The hed and lede mislead. The scientist did not forthrightly assert as much, but merely agreed, mildly, to that hedged proclamation and figure of speech when it was offered by an examining anti fish-farming lawyer.
• PostMedia News – Margaret Munro: Funding uncertain for lab of muzzle salmon biologist ; Munro digs up some detail of the muzzling effort, and further possible repercussions to the scientist and her lab in the Vancouver Island town of Nanaimo. Story ran a few days before the more recent hearing sessions.

Tip of the Hat to Brandon Keim for suggesting a roundup on these stories. He is not covering them but is following the hearings avidly. He also whispers that he has done some enterprising Canada salmon reporting before. Two years ago, all on his own, he set out at the blog site Hive Mind (E Pluribus Hmmm)  to estima-guess the monetary value of one salmon run. Clever way to tackle it – calculate the biomass of the fish coming into the river, convert that into fertilizer and nutrient equivalent, and look up their market values. He got a little hyperbolic to make the point with this thumper of a closing line: “The Pacific northwest grew in part on a $30 trillion line of credit, and we’ve nearly cut it off.”

Grist for the Mill: Cohen Commission website.

- Charlie Petit

Rare earth metals, their industrial importance and China’s near-monopoly on several of them, are in the news a lot. Usually it is in business pages, trade journals,  and technical, bloggy sites.  This week’s Science News magazine, the biweekly that the Society for Science and the Public puts out from Washington DC, gives to the curious a full explanation in plain English how they work and why it matters. More important, writer Devin Powell touches base with some of the world’s foremost researchers on the prowl for alternatives to these pricey, talented metals occupying what Powell calls “an appendage to the periodic table.” If you’ve been interested and perplexed by the issue while vague on the details, take heart. This article with its many example proves that a lot of smart and well-financed technical teams around the world are working hard on it.

Rare earths – they are not really rare, but are seldom found in ores at decent concentration – are choke points in general prosperity, including production of electric cars and nifty consumer electronics. Mining and smelting them can, apparently, be vile activities. More basically, I (and, I’d bet, a lot of people curious about technology)  didn’t know much about  why their magnetic behavior is so distinctive. This story covers that in good style and comes with a large list of references for further reading.

Disclosure:  I write often for Science News and am on the masthead as a contributor. I get paid by this pub regularly. I have one in the queue and the editor is suggesting another – but smoothing their passage has, to my conscious mind, nothing to do with my salute to this article. Except that I saw it while visiting the site for non-tracker reasons.

 

See Earlier Post July 6, 2011:  “Japanese team says ocean floor has lots of rare earths…”

- Charlie Petit

Yesterday the Tracker’s founding father and ace backup for daily minding, Boyce Rensberger, reminded readers that the “suggest stories” button on the website does not get much use. We  hunger for more such pointers.

Presto, a bouquet of suggestions festoons the in-box. To celebrate the response here they are in one lump, a disparate bunch. We’d have missed them all, most likely and with one exception, without such whispers in our ear. We’re ordinarily potentially a wee bit picky about whether to use such tips. None of these is mere flotsam. In another break from the usual, I haven’t used the tipped articles as leads to other stories on the same news.

Suggested Stories, and Thank you very much, a tip of the hat, a TOTH, to the tipsters named at end of each sampling:

• Sci Dev.net – Lucina Melesio Friedman: Anti-nanotech group behind Mexican scientist bombings ; Serious topic here – the extremes to which some take their outrage over certain lines of work. Somehow anti-vivisection violence is at least comprehensible. But planting bombs because somebody might have put nano-particles in a cosmetic? For fear of the planet-destroying grey goo so in the news a decade ago? (TOTH: Mico Tatolovich).
• InsideScience News Service – Ben P. Stein: Like No Other View On Earth. NASA’s landmark photo providing the first glimpes of our home planet from deep space occurred 45 years ago today ; No, not the Earthrise one that the Apollo astronauts later took. This is from an automated probe. (TOTH – Chris Nicolini).
• NatureNews – Alison Motluck: Growth of egg freezing blurs ‘experimental’ label ; There is a difference between what some women do with their eggs, and what science can say is a smart way to get healthy babies ; (TOTH: Ivan Simeniuk, who edited the story).
• Ventura County Reporter – Kit Stolz: Our ocean / As healthy as it looks? ; Good job at analyzing the difference between dire, global forecasts for the oceans and what people see from the beach – in this case, from the coast of a developed nation with fairly stout environmental policies in place. And sometimes, even when things seem good, they’re not. This has a passage on locals happy about the mackerel fishing – and an old-timer’s reminder that mackerel were once sneered at as bait fish used to catch big tuna , sword fish and marlin once common. (TOTH: the author).
• The Tyee (British Columbia)  Jude Isabella: Part I The Salmon Doctors; Part II Sockeye Feel the Heat ; This tip may have come in independently of Rensberger’s plea, but worth tracking on any account. Excerpts from Isabella’s upcoming book, Salmon: A Scientific Memoir. (TOTH, the author, but for these we did happen to have a separate lead.)

Plus, reader and science writer Brandon Keim sends a general tip to the spurt of coverage in Canadian media, mentioned in the last item above, re hearings of an agency called the Cohen Commission. It is investigating the condition and fate of Canada’s flavorful sockeye salmon. That’s for tomorrow. Also up for tomorrow, which I’d intended to get to today, will be a roundup of story’s on the outcome of the National Science Foundation review of climate researcher Michael Mann’s scientific output and integrity. This is the man that certain certifiable people are completely certain is a fraud and a liar for saying the planet is hotter now than in a long, long time. The outcome is … well, do you suppose the NSF is in on the scam too?

- Charlie Petit

There are trees, and then there are TREES!  We have some news to dissect but first allow a longish digression.

Among the glories of California conservationism has been the protection of the state’s remaining old-growth redwoods – many of them two thirds as big around at the base as the Washington Monument and taller than a 30-story building.  The wood is not only beautiful and dense (as conifers go) but insect and rot resistant. Plus, mills could transform these monsters into planks and beams of absurd size. I am a beneficiary. Our house, built in the 30s on a hill overlooking SF Bay, is framed and under girded from dark redwood so stout, heavy, and straight-grained that contractors stop and sigh when they open the walls and see what their roaring Sawzalls must rip asunder.

Not much, proportionately, is left of the old growth. But it is significant. One can walk through it for many miles. Loggers would have happily taken most of these remainders too had not public protest, backed by private and gov’t acquisition of preserves, stopped them. Mostly the topic here is coast redwood, but the stupefyingly massive giant sequoia of the mid-elevation western Sierra went through a similar history of rank destruction. Ever ever see the ghastly corpse of the Mother of the Forest north of Yosemite, standing in the north grove of  Calaveras Big Trees State Park? Naked, its lower 116 feet stripped of bark  a century and a half ago and the whole left to slowly die, eventually killed for good by fire in 1908. All that for a traveling show back East where men nailed her robes back together like the skin of a beast. During my few recent days off I visited the park  and dutifully cringed. Fabulous preserve, though – and most of the trees remain there and in their other groves. Here is a good review of logging of monster trees in CA.

A whiff of those struggles is to be found in the Los Angeles Times. A report datelined Annapolis, up in Sonoma County,  by Louis Sahagun and P. J. Huffstutter runs under the hed, Redwoods versus red wine. The general dynamics of business interests conflicting with the conservationist ethic are in play now just as they were through much of the last century. A twist, well-exploited, is that the people who want the redwoods and Douglas fir gone from a sloping property don’t want the wood so much as they want a clearing for growing pinot noir wine grapes. Thus it is a bucolic California agrarian  icon versus a glorious California wilderness icon.

*UPDATE:

Fri Aug 26: NY Times/the Bay Citizen – Jacob Charles: Water Use by Vineyards Is Challenged: A perfect and meatier complement to the wine vs. redwoods theme – and in the same Sonoma County. Charles reports another set of environmentalists seething about vineyard expansion: those worried that grape growers’ withdrawals from streams and creeks are so shrinking the waterways that salmon, already on the wane for many reasons, are struggling to spawn and complete their life cycles.  Plus, in contrast to the narrowly-framed worry that the vines compete with redwood and fir forests, this story’s sources fear that extensive, badly-placed clearings block wildlife corridors.

Back to the original post….

But here’s the problem. The story comes with that picture up right, showing two of the conservationists opposing the expansionist vintners. The redwoods in the background are big trees. But they are not BIG trees. A good ponderosa pine is bigger than those. One guesses they are second or third growth. The term ‘old growth redwood’  that is the usual battle cry of such struggles is missing from this yarn. One does see a ref. to “second growth,” but more should be made of the distinction.

I’m for the trees staying there, as the world has plenty of wine.  But readers – like me – might appreciate a dollop of further information about the area’s logging history before deciding how much to care. The report ought to tell us how long since this area was logged, how much of it is redwood and how much the more common Doug fir – and how much second growth is at stake here compared to the region’s total? Is second and third growth etc. redwood – mainstays still of a renewable logging industry – at risk?

Finally, how about a fact-check on this declaration from one of those opposing the clearing of the land: “We are not going to let them rip these trees out by their roots … change the soil chemistry with amendments..so that these forests will never grow back.”

That might be a legitimate worry. If in 100 years or something the vineyard is abandoned, it’d be nice if forest including redwoods could spring back up. In 500 years, climate and population growth permitting, maybe giants could be there again. But really – “never grow back?”  That rings false. Anybody in or near redwood country who has stuck a seedling in the back yard and watched its amazingly rapid growth – and who has visited any of  the sizable redwood groves in arboretums around the world, far from their native range – might wonder that a mere vineyard would render the soil redwood-proof. (Check this info about redwood plantations in New Zealand).  This concern does not affect the underlying merits of the story. But I would be mighty surprised if a rising redwood canopy wouldn’t shade the vines to death if one merely planted little ones between the rows – and everybody stood back for 20 or 30 years.

Other stories:

• Santa Rosa Press Democrat (July 31)  Brett Wilkison: Forest lands eyed for vineyards ; I just raced through this one. It’s better in its reporting and includes more context with regional logging. The implication is that the lumber company that used to log it, presumably renewably, was not making much money. Ergo it sold the acreage to the vintners. This may put the issue more squarely – its future is probably not as unbroken forest anyway. It is not, after all, 2000 acres of primeval old growth. The question is, what kind of development will occur? A vineyard, or residential estates, or nothing, or …. what?

- Charlie Petit

When I created the Knight Science Journalism Tracker five years ago, I imagined that science, medical and environment reporters would be tipping us off to stories they saw in their local media and even submitting their own stories. I now know that that doesn’t happen nearly often enough, and I’m sure we miss a lot of good work. And bad stuff that should have its knuckles rapped.

That’s why we put a button at the top of the page that says “Suggest Stories.” Click on that, and you’ll get a form to fill out with your name and e-address and a link to the story.

It hardly ever gets used.

So, please, if you see journalism that we ought to know about, that deserves to be seen beyond its local distribution, tell us. Push that “Suggest Stories” button. Don’t be shy.

-Boyce Rensberger

The headline was ominous.

“Survey: Employers Consider Ending Health Coverage,” said the AP. The story appeared around the web, in various newspapers and websites.

Not many others covered the story, which was based on an employer survey by the consulting group Towers Watson. But I did find a similarly frightening headline at International Business Times: “Employers Look Towards Ending Health Coverage, Survey.”

Boise Weekly offered its own bad news: “Study: Companies Will Pay Fines Rather Than Participate in Health Insurance Exchanges.”

The stories were about what companies plan to do in 2014, when substantial provisions of the nation’s health care reform law kick into action. And if you read only the headlines, you’d be worried.

So what do companies plan to do? According to the perfectly fine story by the AP, “Nearly one of every 10 midsized or big employers expects to stop offering health coverage to workers once federal insurance exchanges start in 2014.”

Or, to put it another way, more than 90 percent of these employers do not expect to stop offering health coverage. How does that rate the headline “Employers Consider Ending Health Coverage?” The hed and the lede are locked in a bloody battle for the truth, and readers are the victims.

Here’s how Towers Watson headlined its press release on the survey: “Employers Committed to Offering Health Care Benefits Today.”

Did any of the headline writers look at the release, or at the stories to which they were attaching the alarming headlines?

Towers Watson did go on to say that the employers it surveyed were “concerned about viability of insurance exchanges” that will be created in 2014. But it did not say employers would “consider” or “look towards” ending coverage, or “pay fines rather than participate.”

Maybe yesterday’s earthquake splintered the nation’s headline machine. Let’s hope it’s repaired quickly.

- Paul Raeburn

An oat and nut granola bar

Studies of the health benefits of various diets are difficult to do on free-range human beings. For one thing, the people most likely to follow good dietary advice are those who already do other things to improve their health, so they automatically look better than those who don’t take the advice. So one always should take such studies with a grain of … um, with a grain or more of high-fiber oats.

The current JAMA has a report by a Toronto group that found dietary counseling led a group of 345 volunteers to shop better and eat better, thus lowering their level of LDL cholesterol (that’s the “bad” one) by an average of 14 percent after six months. The researchers say that beats statins, although the drug manufacturers might dispute that.

A lot depends on how rigorously a person sticks to the statin regimen or the diet regimen. In an earlier study, the researchers found that people who stuck most closely to the recommended diet lowered their LDL by 30 percent.

That brings up another caveat about nutrition studies. Cholesterol level is only a surrogate measure for heart disease. What we care most about is dying from a heart attack. High cholesterol is roughly correlated with having heart attacks, but not that closely. Plenty of people with high cholesterol never have heart attacks and plenty with low levels do have them.  Statins lower cholesterol, but it has not been shown conclusively that they reduce the death rate from one’s first heart attack, only from a subsequent heart attack.

But, back to today’s report. The study’s chief advice was to try to increase the intake of four groups of foods–nuts, soy, plant oils or margerines with plant sterols added and viscous fiber such as in oats.

Alice Park of Time notes that the same study had another group that was counseled in how to eat a low-fat diet. Their LDL levels dropped only one third as much as did the group advised to eat from the four groups.

The Los Angeles Times‘s Melissa Healy works the comparison with statins pretty hard, writing that the dietary approach can drop one’s LDL levels to half that achieved with drugs alone. She quotes Walt Willett, the Harvard School of Public Health’s esteemed nutrition guru, as calling the study “nicely done.”

Mikaela Conley, writing at ABCNews.com, got a number of good outside comments, including some who felt it would be difficult for most people to stick to the recommended diet.

-Boyce Rensberger

Did the Virginia quake result from a reverse dip slip?

Wouldn’t you know it. The California-based Tracker, who lives just a few miles from the San Andreas Fault and several other quake-prone features, takes a few days off, so an earthquake visits the East Coast substitute Tracker.

Since seismic events of this magnitude–5.8–are very rare here, this is a great time for science writers to write some explanatory geology. West Coast science journalists, no doubt, are pretty tired of doing that.

The best we could find was a piece by Steven Mufson, who usually covers energy, and Brian Vastag, the latter a science writer, at the Washington Post, about 100 miles from the epicenter. But it states flatly, “No one understands the underlying geologic reasons for East Coast quakes.”

They do go on, however, to explain that our area–unlike California–is nowhere near the edge of a tectonic plate, which is where the really big ones happen. The two also found a geologist to say that the shock wave traveled outward at “a few miles per second.” Another tells the Post that the energy traveled “along the grain” of the Appalachian Mountains, which run roughly northeast-southwest. The energy propagated so far because the crust here is older, colder and more dense than the stuff out west.

They also wrote that geologists call this event a “reverse” earthquake. They have geologists speculating that the fault is like a ramp in which the upper slab slipped upward and the lower one downward, moving “a few inches” over an area three to ten miles wide along the fault. That should be measurable, and we should look for results in coming days.

Alas, the two don’t explain the reverse thing well enough. It’s a reverse dip slip, one in which the block above slides up the ramp and projects over the block below. In a so-called normal dip slip, the block above effectively slides down the ramp. There are, of course, still other kinds of quake mechanics.

But what’s pushing or pulling the slabs? Mufson and Vastag cite two hypotheses. One is that the crust in these parts is still bent out of shape from the time Europe and Africa broke with North America 250 million years ago. The slabs, some think, just take a long time to settle down. The other guess is that it’s just the continual but slow flowing and scraping of the mantle just under the crust.

Kudos to Mufson and Vastag for going beyond “no one understands” and getting readers to think about the mysteries beneath our feet.

-Boyce Rensberger

A garden in Jordan

It’s an exercise that has engaged biologists many times over the centuries, at least since Linnaeus: estimating how many species of living things share this planet with us. To start with, there are about 1.2 million named and classified species in museum collections. But we know that dozens of previously unknown species are recognized every day. So, how long could this go on?

Estimates of the total number of species have ranged from 3 million to 100 million, depending on a wide variety of methods and little more than guesswork. And that’s just for the species that are not bacteria or archaea.

The latest attempt to pick a number comes from a group at Dalhousie University that looked at numerical relationships between the number of species in broader taxa among mammals, which are thought to be the most completely known group and applied the same ratio to other groups. Presto: 8.7 million, with an error of +/- 1.3 million.

The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin calls it “the most rigorous mathematical analysis yet of what we know — and don’t know — about life on land and in the sea.” Um, not everybody shares that view. Keep reading.

Carl Zimmer, writing in the New York Times‘s Web site with an advance look at what will be in next week’s science section (<– That corrects a mistake in the original post. For more, see his comment below.) , ledes with two fascinating newly discovered species before getting to the news (ah, the luxury of the blog). But he goes on with a nice rundown of attempts over the centuries to pick a number. And, perhaps most importantly, he finds scientists willing to denounce the Dalhousie method. One is quoted calling it “an incredibly ill-founded approach.” Bottom line: It’s an unfounded assumption that plants, fungi or even other animal taxa will have the same numerical ratios as mammals.

Seth Borenstein, of the AP, unaccountably puts the estimate of total species as “nearly 8.8 million” when the published paper (in PLoS Biology) gives it as “~8.7 million.” And he says there are 1.9 million known species, higher than the number the scientific authors give of “~1.2 million.” Likely that the usually careful Borenstein will comment as to where he got his numbers. {Note added later: Indeed Seth has explained himself. Be sure to click to see his comment below.}

See also Nick Collins in the Telegraph, who pulls a quote from the PLoS commentary to the effect that it will take another hundred years to complete the inventory of life. By then, no doubt, there will be fewer species left alive than are in the count.

-Boyce Rensberger

NPR reporter Nell GreenfieldBoyce did a nice job today on Morning Edition knocking down claims by Sen. Tom Coburn and, separately, the Traditional Values Coalition, that the government is wasting taxpayers’ money putting shrimp on a treadmill and studying men’s penis size.

Coburn, she reports, put out a report saying the National Science Foundation “squandered taxpayer money on questionable science projects, including one pursued by Burnett and his colleagues that involved putting shrimp on a tiny treadmill.” The researcher, Lou Burnett of the College of Charleston in South Carolina, said the treadmill experiment used only a small part of a $500,000 grant, not the entire half million as Coburn’s report claimed.

In a second example, GreenfieldBoyce noted that the Traditional Values Coalition criticized Jeffrey Parsons of Hunter College in New York for spending $9.4 of taxpayer money on a study of penis size. Wrong on two counts, Parsons told GreenfieldBoyce. The study of penis size and its relation to the risk of sexually transmitted diseases cost far less than that–and no taxpayer money was spent on it. The $9.4 million went to a training for scientists.

But a spokeswoman for the Traditional Values Coalition told GreenfieldBoyce that “a part of it [the money] was used to do this study. We stand by that.”

The story did a good job of showing that these criticisms are sometimes uninformed and misguided.

But GreenfieldBoyce might have gone a step further.

When she asked a Coburn spokesman about the shrimp study, he said, “our report never claimed all the money”–the half-million dollars–”was spent on shrimp on a treadmill.”

Was he right?

Here’s what the report said:

How long can a shrimp run on a treadmill?  Scientist [sic] put shrimp on a tiny treadmill to determine if sickness impaired the mobility of the crustaceans. Researchers at the Grice Marine Laboratory at the College of Charleston, South Carolina have received at least 12 NSF grants totaling over $3 million over the last decade for their work, including a $559,681 award “Impaired Metabolism and Performance in Crustaceans Exposed to Bacteria.” [sic]

There is wiggle room there, but this, in my reading, clearly implies that $559,681 of the $3 million in grants went to the shrimp-on-a-treadmill research. Judge for yourself, and let me know what you think in the comments.

GreenfieldBoyce didn’t challenge the spokesman on this, but she should have. Also, note the typo and the dropped “for” before the title of the project. How much care did Coburn take with this report? (For what it’s worth, Coburn shouldn’t be confused about metabolism or bacteria; he has an M.D.)

GreenfieldBoyce also let the Traditional Values Coalition say that it stands by its assertion that only part of the money was spent to study penis size. In this case, there is no wiggle room: That is not what the coalition said.

From its July 18th press release:

NIH-funded projects include:

• At least $9.4 million for a 10-year study that included a survey of gay men to determine average penis sizes, “…to better understand the real individual-level consequences of living in a penis-centered society.”

GreenfieldBoyce should have challenged that one, too.

Don’t get me wrong; I liked her story. And I’m sure most listeners got the point, that the scientists had reasonable responses to unreasonable and uninformed criticisms.

Still, I wish she hadn’t let Coburn’s spokesman and the Traditional Values Coalition say things that were not right–without pointing that out.

- Paul Raeburn

Minutes matter: Steps in balloon angioplasty

“In a spectacular turnabout, hospitals are treating almost all major heart attack patients within the recommended 90 minutes of arrival, a new study finds.” That’s Marilynn Marchione‘s lede for the AP, as picked up by many newspapers and Web sites, and it couldn’t be said more succinctly. Five years ago, less than half of patients got the recommended best practice.

She quotes the Yale cardiologist who led the study as saying, “Americans who have heart attacks can now be confident that they’re going to be treated rapidly in virtually every hospital of the country.’’

Katherine Hobson at the Wall Street Journal gives more of the actual numbers.  Five years ago 44 percent of patients were being treated, usually by balloon angioplasty, within the recommended 90 minutes. By 2010 that number had risen to 91 percent. The median door-to-balloon time, as the parameter is called, dropped from 96 minutes to 64 minutes.

The change was attributed to efforts by the D2B Alliance, a consortium of federal agencies and medical groups to urge and educate hospitals.

Kudos to Sherry Slater, who nicely localized her story for the Fort Wayne, Indiana, Journal Gazette, by getting the data for her local hospitals.

Angela Haupt went beyond the immediate news to give her readers at U.S. News some personal-health advice about when to seek treatment for a suspected heart attack.

Other takes: Amina Khan in the Los Angeles Times; Carrie Gann at ABCNews.com.

-Boyce Rensberger