Science Times's lead image

What color is a flamingo? Natalie Angier answers that question six ways in her lead piece in today’s Science Times: orangesicle, Necco-pink, “Miami Vice” bright, fiery, pink-orange and baseline blush. (At least I think that last one’s a color.) And the wonderful stock photo close-up of flamingo plumage that takes up almost all the acreage above the fold adds its own visual statement of color which, as anyone can see in the picture here, includes white.

Though replete with Angier’s usual writerly flourishes, the piece is thin on science. What science there is amounts to raising questions that can be raised about almost any other bird species. Take this example: “Researchers are not sure why flamingos became such deeply gregarious birds to begin with.” That could be said of penguins, starlings and you-name-it.

But hey, in a weekly feature section, it’s nice to have some easy-going natural history–good for casual readers’ eyes captured by that striking opening image, whatever color it is.

Also fronted is David Tuller‘s report on a study that finds there are bisexual men. Apparently this was in doubt, owing to an earlier study that recruited subjects with ads in gay publications and then asked the men to label themselves as gay, straight or bi. The new study recruited 100 men through ads in bi media and then used sensors to gauge penile arousal as they watched videos of various kinds of sex. No word on what proportion of men are bi, and no evidence of any kind on bisexual women.

On the same page Cornelia Dean, the Times’s seashore and fishery specialist, says that efforts by conservationists to prevent the unintended killing of marine life are finally winning acceptance by the commercial fishing industry.

Inside: Claudia Dreifus interviews Daniel Lieberman, Harvard’s expert on the evolution of the human head and feet; Wallace Ravven (nice to see his byline again) on the fascinating survival strategy of a parasite; Cory Dean again on Maine’s soaring lobster catch and its potential problems.

The whole shebang is here.

-Boyce Rensberger

Inside the Large Hadron Collider

The excitement a few weeks ago about possible signs of the Higgs boson having been found at the Large Hadron Collider has dimmed considerably. That’s exactly what many experts warned about back then.

BBC News‘s authoritative Pallab Ghosh writes that new data to be presented later this week at a conference in Mumbai “all but eliminate” the possibility that the ultra-fundamental particle will be found in the energy range where the earlier evidence looked so promising. He goes on with a fair bit of added detail and background.

John Butterworth of the UK Guardian offers this helpful precis to his take: “If you like your science neatly packaged as near-certain, fully-understood results, look away now.”

Kerry Sheridan of AFP calls the Higgs “the greatest riddle in all of physics.” That might be going too far. How about the origin of the singularity that became the Big Bang, Higgses and all?

Graham Smith of the Daily Mail in the UK says the Higgs “if it exists, is running out of places to hide.”

The Tracker couldn’t find any U.S. accounts of this as of mid-day Tuesday. Are the Yanks averse to downer stories?

-Boyce Rensberger

"I think it needs salt."

One great thing about paleoanthropology is that the paucity of evidence on many points gives free rein to fascinating speculation. Take, for example, the reports today in which it is hypothesized that because Homo erectus teeth show a reduction in size from teeth of older hominin species, that means that H. erectus cooked its food. That was nearly two million years ago.

The long-time guru of cooking-as-key-evoloutionary-step is Richard Wrangham, at Harvard. He and colleague Chris Organ write in the current PNAS.  Their research consisted of calculating the amount of time it takes a primate to chew its food and comparing it to the animal’s body size. They found that if humans had to chew raw food, it would take 48 percent of their day, which is about what it takes similarly sized apes. But, in fact, we devote only about 4.7 percent of our time to chowing down.

So cooking saved time and allowed us to get by with smaller teeth that don’t have to stand up to so much grinding. And the spare time, the authors suggest, gave us time to think, invent tools and get smarter, eventually to invent more ways to spend time on the cooking rather than the eating. Actually, the authors didn’t suggest that last part.

Jennifer Welsh of LiveScience, as picked up by MSNBC.com, offered the only account we could find of a weakness in the claim, namely that nobody has found evidence of fire pits or hearths as old as the claimed antiquity of cooking

A sampling of other stories: Rachel Ehrenberg in Science News; Cynthia Graber has a Scientific American podcast; Carl Bagh of the International Business Times, which seems to have a version of almost every science story, goes overboard in writing that the new study “confirms” that H. erectus was cooking food but he includes a goodly amount of background material.

-Boyce Rensberger

Robonaut 2, left, and unidentified person who probably feels silly

It ain’t science, but it is interesting engineering. Robonaut 2, a humanoid “robot”  flown up to the International Space Station in February, has been powered up and is being checked out. Why it even sends tweets. (@astrorobonaut)

One said, ”Those electrons feel GOOD! One small step for man, one giant leap for tinman kind.”

So far the gizmo, developed jointly by NASA and GM, has nothing below the belt, but NASA says legs are planned to help it get around the station. They’ll go up in 2013. Wouldn’t two arms be enough? Or are they taking the humanoid part too seriously?

And can we really call it a robot? That term, which originally referred to devices that operated autonomously, is being applied to anything that is merely remote controlled. R2 (yes, NASA calls it that) is operated by a guy in Houston. For eyes, it has cameras that give him a view.

Marcia Dunn of the AP as picked up by Australia’s Herald Sun. In about a week, she writes, Houston will fire up R2′s fingers. Either NASA doesn’t want to rush things, or the station crew has better things to do than mess with the contraption.

Another take: Leslie Horn at PC Magazine.

-Boyce Rensberger

The other day I was watching CBS Sunday Morning with my (almost) five-year-old, delighted that he was willing to click away from Cartoon Network for a few minutes to watch the news. We hadn’t been watching five minutes when Charles Osgood introduced a segment on pole dancing. I dove for the clicker as we watched a sinewy blonde corkscrew down a silver pole for several agonizing seconds before the cable box lurched back to Quick Draw McGraw. Henry didn’t ask what that was, or why I’d changed the channel. And I didn’t volunteer an explanation.

We’ve had similar experiences while watching the Science Channel’s How It’s Made, one of Henry’s favorite shows. (Henry knows what’s at the center of a bowling ball. Do you?) Interesting shows about the manufacture of bowling balls, surfboards, and grandfather clocks (more accurately known as longcase clocks, we learned) were frequently interrupted by commercials for violent, late-night fare–leaving me cringing, and Henry perplexed.

Which led me to wonder: What exactly are the science channels showing these days?

Here’s what you’ll find on The Science Channel today, according to its program guide:

Countless half-hours of How It’s Made. And Curiosity: Alien Invasion: Are We Ready? Here’s the program description:

Aliens attacking Earth — it’s the stuff of sci-fi stories, but what if it really happened? Host Michelle Rodriguez (Avatar, Battle: LA) brings together top scientists and military strategists to dramatize what would happen if and when aliens attack.

You’ll also find countless hours of Survivorman. This is the kind of science you’ll encounter there: ”‘Survivorman’ Les Stroud is stranded and left to survive in the jungles of Papua New Guinea.” Or “Stranded on northern Baffin Island, ‘Survivorman’ Les Stroud learns harsh lessons in solo arctic survival in 24hour daylight.” It might not sound harsh, but some of the promos, shown during How It’s Made, are brutal. The Science Channel also shows countless episodes of How Do They Do It, and Factory Made, both of which, like How It’s Made, are about production engineering, not science. In today’s 24-hour schedule, the science consists of one episode of Morgan Freeman’s Through the Wormhole, and a few episodes of Mammals vs. Dinos, and Monster Bug Wars, which are all respectable. But they are only interruptions in a schedule blanketed with shows that have little to do with science.

What about the Discovery Channel?

Today’s program guide shows multiple episodes of Dual Survival, in which “Dave” and “Cody” battle for survival. The description of one show reads, “With few supplies, they each demonstrate how to make use of an unlikely resource–urine.” Another says, “To demonstrate how to survive an extreme injury, Dave self-inflicts a laceration and uses black powder to cauterize the wound.” Cool! But not science–or discovery. Other shows include Did the Mob Kill JFK? and Ten Commandments of the Mafia, American Chopper, Cash Cab (“Unsuspecting New York City taxi passengers hail a cab and suddenly find themselves on a TV game show”) Auction Kings, and Dirty Money. I couldn’t find a science show–or one about discovery. Except, of course, the taxi passengers who discover they are on a game show.

And from the National Geographic Channel‘s program guide?

Here we find Border Wars: Checkpoint Texas, Hard Time: The Convict Cycle, Alaska State Troopers: Anchorage Undercover, and Taboo: Strange Love, including an episode in which”a man in the United States falls in love with a sex doll.” For good measure, you’ll also find wrestling. Somewhere in there I think I saw a couple of space shows.

If you’re looking for science on television, don’t waste your time on The Science Channel, the Discovery Channel, or the National Geographic Channel. If you want to know what’s inside a bowling ball, go for The Science Channel. For sex dolls, urine, and self-inflicted wounds, see the others.

- Paul Raeburn

(English intro to Spanish lang post) It was well established that the yeast used to brew lager beer is a hybrid from two species of Saccharomyces. One is the well-known S. cerevisiae. But the other was a “mystery” (in the own exaggerated words of the researchers). Now Argentinean, Portuguese and US researchers have found in the Argentinean Patagonia a yeast specie which genome correlates 99.5% with the one present in the lager-beer brewing yeast. They speculate that the yeast arrived accidentally to Europe five centuries ago, it hybridized with the yeast used to produce ale-beer, and lager-beer was born. An Argentinean newspaper titles its story “beer: another Argentinean invention”.

Other stories in Latin America are: a way to capture and to store energy from storms in Colombia, cellular effects of stress in Chile, a great story in Brazil about drugs for memory reconsolidation and extinction, and the announcement in Mexico of its plan to fight climate change. A plan that apparently talks a lot about mitigation, but none adaptation measures are considered.     

Nadie duda que los argentinos son “lo más” en todo. Ahora, ¡hasta la cerveza la inventaron ellos! Esto es lo que clama el titular de La Razón “La cerveza, otro invento argentino”. El origen de dicha atrevida aseveración es un estudio publicado en PNAS por científicos Argentinos, estadounidenses y portugueses, sobre el origen de la levadura utilizada para fabricar la cerveza rubia (lager).

Ya se conocía que esta levadura era un híbrido de una especia ya conocida (“Saccharomyces cerevisiae”), y otra de la que no se sabía su procedencia. El estudio liderado por el argentino Diego Libkind demostró que esta otra levadura es el 99.5% genéticamente idéntica a la “Saccharomyces eubayanus” presente en los bosques de la Patagonia Argentina. Todo apunta a que hace cinco siglos el hongo argentino llegó a Europa en los barcos que transportaban mercancías, se hibridó en Alemania con el hongo utilizado en la fermentación de cervezas (que entonces eran “ale” –más alcohólicas y de sabor más intenso-), y nació la nueva especie que permitía un nuevo tipo de fermentación que daría lugar a las cervezas rubias o lager (más suaves).

Los autores del estudio catalogan el hallazgo como “resolución de un misterio” (rebajando así la fuerza de la palabra misterio), pero reconocen que la S. eubayanus podría haber existido en muchos otros sitios sin haber sido observada todavía. Da igual… la cerveza rubia es argentina!

Más moderadas son otras notas, como el buen texto en la Agencia de Noticias de Bariloche (ANB) “Descubren en Patagonia la levadura que contiene la cerveza Lager”; uno de los pocos que habla de las técnicas de biología molecular seguidas por el equipo. También lo hacen en La Nación “Hallan la clave de la cerveza rubia”, con amplia información del centro de divulgación de la ciencia de la UBA, y un más riguroso subtítulo “Sería una levadura que crece en los bosques patagónicos y que habría llegado por casualidad a Europa”. Fuera de Argentina, buenas notas pero que también visten de “resolución de un gran misterio” el hallazgo de la levadura, como Teguayco Pinto “El origen de la cerveza germana está en Argentina” (Público) o Elisa Piñeiro Kruik “El secreto de la cerveza rubia” (El Mundo). La verdad, los investigadores prometen que esto ayudará a la generación de biocombustibles y permitirá mejorar levaduras. Puede ser. O no. Pero más allá de la curiosidad, nos continúa pareciendo exagerado utilizar la palabra misterio.

Revisión rápida a otras notas de reporteros en América Latina: yendo a Colombia, El Tiempo nos explica que “Colombianos consiguen almacenar energía de las nubes”. Es un trabajo a pequeña escala, fruto de una tesis de maestría y una buena idea del director, que difícilmente será rentable como aplicación práctica, pero el poder aprovechar el campo eléctrico entre la superficie del suelo y la base de las nubes para almacenar energía es un trabajo muy original y loable. Además, la nota de El Tiempo está redactada de manera excelente, y con muy buena infografía. En Chile, El Mercurio ofrece una interesante nota de Gabriela Bade sobre el chileno que ha ganado un premio internacional por su programa informático para detectar plagios. Y La Tercera publica el texto de Cecilia Yánez “Comprueban que el estrés daña el ADN y nos expone a enfermedades”, donde aborda los efectos moleculares del estrés y asegura que está relacionado con la pronta aparición de canas; algo que parece lógico pero no está tan claro.

En Folha (Brasil), un excelentísimo trabajo de Salvador Nogueira sobre fármacos que pueden borrar recuerdos. Es un tema espinoso y el típico en que el salto de estudios en ratas a aplicaciones en humanos puede tardar décadas. Pero muy completo análisis y destacable infografía. En México y ya en el ámbito ambiental, El Universal presenta el “Plan de México contra el cambio climático” (Renata Sánchez). Se habla de reducir emisiones del transporte, de diseños bioclimáticos, y de almacenar gases para producir biocombustibles (¿?). todo mitigación. Curiosamente no hay referencia alguna a medidas de adaptación a los efectos del cambio climático, que siendo algo global y sin intención política de frenar, afectarán a México por mucho que sus coches emitan menos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Art cropped from the opening spread

Behavioral science doesn’t often make it into this blog because, well, because the methods are not convincing or the results are so obvious. But once in a while we come across a body of behavioral science research that looks to have solid methodology and offers results that have broad explanatory power. That’s the case with a piece in the Sunday Magazine by the New York Times‘s cunningly contrarian columnist John Tierney, who usually appears in Science Times.

It’s about something called decision fatigue, which sets in after a person has been called on to make a series of choices in a relatively short time–a  list of options you want on your new car or new computer, a series of cases a judge must decide in a day or a menu of food choices a dieter faces in a restaurant. What Tierney’s article shows is that decision fatigues saps willpower, after which people just don’t care what choices they make. They either skip the process or wanly accept recommendations of others.

The piece was adapted from a new book, not yet published, co-authored by Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister, a social psychologist who is the author of much of the research on which the book is based. Therein lies a caveat. Authors normally make the decisions about what to write, but co-authors must accommodate one another’s prior decisions. How much did Tierney apply his own willpower to say something Baumeister didn’t like? No way to tell without interviewing each.

But read the piece anyway. Decision fatigue and the related term, ego depletion, make good sense when interpreting situations we all face quite often.

-Boyce Rensberger

Two weeks ago, I posted an item calling out Ezekiel Emanuel, the noted oncologist, biologist, and former White House adviser, for an Op-Ed he wrote in The New York Times. I said the story, about a pressing shortage of cancer drugs, was poorly done. And I arrogantly noted that almost any journeyman science writer, with far less credentials and public esteem than Emanuel, could do a better job. “Never send a man to do a journalist’s job,” I wrote.

Now, it’s time to do a little ground-truthing on that. A number of science writers have now written stories about the shortage of cancer drugs. Let’s see what kind of job they did.

The first story I found was by Gardiner Harris, a journeyman at the New York Times. For starters, the Aug. 19 story, headlined “U.S. Scrambling to Ease Shortage of Vital Medicine,” is far broader than Emanuel’s. It talks about shortages of antibacterial agents, as well as cancer drugs.

Harris lays out the case nicely, he interviews patients, he talks about efforts in Congress to give the FDA more power to fight shortages, and he hits a key point head on: Why are these shortages occurring?

More than half the recent shortages have resulted because government or company inspectors found problems like microbial contamination that can be lethal on injection. Others have occurred because of capacity problems at drug plants or lack of interest because of low profits, according to the F.D.A.

One quibble: He says that “at least 180″ drugs are in short supply, but doesn’t attribute that. We can guess that the figure comes from the FDA, but we don’t buy the Times to play guessing games. Nevertheless, Harris did a far better job than Emanuel in making the case that this is a crisis with serious consequences, and that it could have been avoided.

Over the weekend, others weighed in on the story. Victoria Colliver of the San Francisco Chronicle does a nice job, reporting that some 190 drugs are in short supply, “according to the University of Utah Drug Information Service, which tracks prescription drug shortages.” (Thanks for the attribution.)

In a story last week, Liz Szabo of USA Today focuses on price-gouging by drug makers seeking to take advantage of the shortage. Others mentioned this angle, too, but she leads with it:

With the nation in the midst of a record shortage of prescription drugs — including vital medications used in everything from surgery to chemotherapy — unscrupulous marketers are stockpiling hard-to-find drugs and attempting to sell them back to hospitals at up to 50 times their normal prices, a new report says.

The report comes from Premier health care alliance, a “Charlotte-based quality improvement group,” she writes.

The Colorodoan does a nice job, doing the story as a feature emphasizing local patients and hospitals, but including a good bit of national reporting.

Newser says it can tell any story in two grafs or less. It can’t. Its story, cribbed from the New York Times, doesn’t attribute anything, except one quote from a drug company president–and it doesn’t tell us her name. “Read Less, Know More,” is Newser’s slogan.

My slogan: “Read Less, Know Less.”

The journalists did a better job than Emanuel; I don’t think there’s any question about that. But only a few journalists covered this story, which should have been front-page news everywhere. When we’re trying to control medical costs and save lives, we’re getting a shortage of the cheap drugs, and price gouging. Lives in the balance, possibly criminal price gouging, manipulation of the market: Why wasn’t that bigger news?

I suspect we have a more than adequate supply of the expensive, high-tech, brand-name drugs–costing tens of thousands of dollars per year. Indeed Emanuel says so, and we’ll give him credit for that. But not too much. He says it, but doesn’t attribute it.

- Paul Raeburn

A survey of data collected by the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System finds that each year more than 5,000 children are treated in hospital emergency departments because they fell out of a window. Since 1990, the data show, nearly 100,000 children were injured in falls and some 2,000 of them died in the E.R.

The data were extracted and analyzed by public health researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, and their report published in the current issue of Pediatrics.

As Ellin Holohan of Health Day News writes (and as picked up by U.S. News & World Report), every one of those injuries and deaths could have been prevented by the installation of window guards. Hardware to do this is available at most home centers.

Twenty years ago, as some of us will remember, Eric Clapton’s four-year-old son fell to his death from a 53rd floor window. Grief and guilt shattered the parents and moved the legendary guitarist to compose the tribute song, “Tears in Heaven,” with the lyrics, “Would you know my name if I saw you in heaven? Would you feel the same if I saw you in heaven?” There were no guards on the window.

Tara Parker-Pope, in the New York Times, notes that the vast majority of falls were not from high-rise buildings but from first and second story windows, mainly because that’s where most kids live and relatively few homes have window guards.

Other takes: Bonnie Rochman in Time, unbylined on CNN online.

-Boyce Rensberger

Micrograph of newly claimed fossils of life. Credit: David Wacey

How we love the superlatives in science writing and, of course, in science itself. The biggest, the smallest. The fastest, the slowest. The newest and, in paleontology and astronomy, the oldest. So it is that a team of Australian and British geologists is claiming to have found the oldest evidence of life–fossils of what look like rod-shaped and spherical bacteria that lived 3.4 billion years ago. Cool.

Except that the previous record, set in 1993, was for bacteria-like cells said to be 3.465 billion years old–65 million years older than the newly claimed oldest fossils.

Nicholas Wade, writing in the New York Times, explains the situation well. He notes that the 1993 claim–by now widely featured in textbooks–was thrown into doubt a few years ago when a British geologist claimed that the evidence was misinterpreted, that the things that looked like bacteria were mere geological artifacts. He says this even though his own, newer find was in the same ancient deposits just 20 miles from where the previous evidence was found in Australia.

It just so happens that the 1993 challenge was by one of the same researchers who is pushing his own newer find as the real thing. He would like to disqualify the older oldest and substitute his newer oldest, which is not quite as old. Still with me?

Certainly the evidence for the latest find is compelling. Inside the presumed cell walls of the fossils are said to be carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and phosphorus–all normal constituents of living cells.

Wade takes care to note that the new paper, in Nature Geoscience, does not claim the superlative title. The claim was made in a news release by the University of Oxford, where the chief geologist works.

The Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag either overlooks the older oldest claim or rejects it without even mentioning it, and emphasizes that this one gives hope for finding life on Mars. Vastag does have a grabber lede: “The hunt for the most ancient example of life on Earth has a pungent new contender: Sulfur-belching microbes fossilized …. ” As do other accounts, this one explains that the putative bacteria relied on sulfur instead of oxygen because at that time there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Earth had to wait for plants to get free oxygen. Vastag quotes a NASA astrobiologist saying that Mars has water and sulfur.

The Boston Globe and San Francisco Chronicle, both depleted in science writers, both picked up Wade’s story.

The Sydney Morning Herald‘s Deborah Smith goes with the dispute over which fossil find is really the oldest of genuine life and describes the Earth of the time: “Volcanoes dominated the planet, the skies were cloudy and grey, and the oceans were the temperature of a hot bath.”

-Boyce Rensberger

Quack doctors (an antique term for the people now often called practitioners of alternative therapy) thrive on this kind of stuff. They get a famous patient, and suddenly lots of people want the same treatment, never mind whether there is good evidence for it.

Rick Perry, the Republican presidential candidate some call “Bush lite,” got stem cell therapy for a bad back, and he says he feels a lot better. Oh, great.

Perry’s treatment, first reported in early August by by the Texas Tribune‘s Emily Ramshaw, did not involve embryonic stem cells. And it did not even involve adult stem cells from another person. The cells were from his own fat, grown in a lab and then injected into his back, apparently during surgery to fuse vertebrae and decompress nerves. Moreover, Ramshaw wrote, this was the first time the doctor had tried such a procedure.

Anybody who knows the slightest bit about experimental design will see that Perry’s improvement could be due to one of four things: the spinal fusion, the nerve decompression, the stem cells or the placebo effect, which accompanies all forms of treatment, effective or not.

Perry’s doctor, who runs his own for-profit “medical day spa” in Houston, says he became a believer in autologous adult stem cell therapy last year when he went to Japan and got the treatment for arthritis.

In more recent takes, the AP‘s excellent Marilynn Marchione, picked up by the Washington Post and other major outlets, quotes stem cell experts emphasizing the risks of such unproven therapy.

Does this tell us something about how Perry makes decisions?

-Boyce Rensberger

Maeve Reston in the Los Angeles Times;

Yesterday morning, I caught a great bit on NPR’s On the Media concerning the novelist Audrey Braun (the pen name of the author Deborah Read) and the stunning success she’s had publishing her work with Amazon. She’s not just selling it on Amazon; she chose Amazon as her publisher, in an end-run around the old-media publishers in New York City. On the Media pretends to be critiquing the journalism of others, but I know better: It’s actually practicing great journalism of its own.

When I got a chance to sit down, it occurred to me to look at what OTM has done on science journalism. I was eager to see how they handle science, figuring I could learn something from hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. (You can tell one from the other because Gladstone is the gracious, charming one, and Garfield is the irreverant, funny one. Actually, charm, humor and irreverance are hallmarks of both hosts, so maybe you’ll need to find some other way to tell them apart.)

By chance, it’s been 10 years since On the Media was “re-launched,” (not sure what that means), so we can practice a little anniversary journalism if we look at the show now.

So I did a Google date-range search of stories containing the word “science” from 2010 until now. And I was amazed by what I found:

Not much.

Many of the items referred to political science, or science fiction. Science, it seems, doesn’t often make the cut at OTM.

Gladstone did a piece in May, 2010 on the Interphone study on the relationship between cell phones and cancer. She interviewed one of the study’s authors; a very controversial researcher who has examined and written about the issue; and a reporter who covered the study. She did a useful job of exploring the issues, but the segment was directed more at the study than at the coverage of the study–presumably OTM’s mandate.

Garfield did a nice piece in January, 2011 on the discrediting of the article in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues claiming a link between vaccines and autism. Garfield relied heavily on Seth Mnookin, a first-rate reporter who knows the story and knows his science. That segment addressed the coverage and the reaction–as well as the substance of the story.

I spotted a few other things in the past year-and-a-half or so, but not many. Going back a little further, OTM had a piece in 2009 on Paul Ekman and a television series based on his research and including a character  based on him; a 2006 piece taking a critical look at a book on alternative medicine; a 2006 piece on Gary Schwitzer, the dean of health-reporting critics, whose name comes up regularly on the Tracker; and various other pieces.

A search on the site of OTM segments tagged “health-science” on the OTM website was a little more productive. It found 13 such segments in 2009 and 10 in 2008. This led me to reconsider. OTM does five or six segments per show, it seems, which adds up to about 20-25 a month. If it does one science story a month, that’s not too bad. Or is it? If one segment out of 25 is a “health-science” segment, is that enough?

The math here is some of my fuzziest, and I fear OTM will bury me in statistics showing that my math is not only fuzzy, it’s phony.

So, my verdict, based, as it is, on my questionable numbers: OTM could, and should, be doing a little more with science, medicine, and the environment. Newsrooms have long given far more value to political reporting, disaster coverage, and business reporting than to science. So you could argue that OTM is only following the honorable tradition.

But Garfield and Gladstone clearly get it; when they do address science, they generally do it well–not something that can be said of many general-assignment reporters. This is a very good show, and my parochial view is that they should do more coverage of science coverage. If you agree, send them a note.

- Paul Raeburn