At The Scientist one finds a remarkable story about how one might kill a superbug by a remarkably straightforward means.  North Carolina freelancer Kelly Rae Chi describes a synthetic bacterium that, as she puts it, finds “a leading cause of hospital-acquired infections, and explodes, releasing antimicrobials that kill the invaders.” Her story is inspired by a paper in Molecular Systems Biology by two researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

The hed is “Bacteria Kamikazes.” Another metaphor could be suicide bombers, which is such a vicious phenomenon in modern (asymmetrical) warfare that, first, the association is hard not to make and, second, is such a powerful image one ought not use it. It would overwhelm the news. Most people don’t want to read, in any context, anything of positive connotation regarded that tactic. (Late Amendment – as the morning went on, I discover and post below proof my compunctions about this metaphor are not universally shared).

The story is clearly written. The researchers say they modified E. coli to selectively sense proximity to aggregations of  Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a well-known and usually mild pathogen but a common cause of  hospital-acquired infection, and to synthesize a powerful, protein antibiotic. The E. coli burst, and the antibiotic takes out the P. aeruginosa.

There already are many ways for nefarious people to synthesize toxins and other agents of chemical or bacterial warfare. One is unsure whether this paper reflects a significantly more alluring avenue for deadly mischief. But an ominous drumming occurs in the back of the mind when reading the quote from one of the engineer authors of the paper, “We can easily develop another type of engineered bacteria to target other infectious pathogens.” Nothing wrong with that – but is there significant potential to thus hone the skills for re-engineering bacteria to deliberately pose a hazard to healthy people? Maybe even selected healthy people?

Perhaps I’m just in a techno-paranoid mood. The paper does say that just turning this lab exercise into a clinically useful treatment faces hurdles. Among them is uncertainty that the kamikaze E. coli can efficiently find the locales of infection. The story refers to quorum sensing molecules, a term that most readers of The Scientist – a trade mag for life science professions – likely understand or know how to look up quickly. It would need definition for more general audiences.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Tan Ee Lyn: Experts redesign common microbe to fight drug-resistant bacteria ;
• ScienceNOW – Sara Reardon: Suicide-Bombing Bacteria Could Fight Infections ; So much for my remarks, above, written before this came in and suggesting suicide bomber is too strong a medicine for mere metaphore.
• Discover/Not Exactly Rocket Science – Ed Yong: Scientists engineer suicide bomber bacteria to kill other bacteria ; Clear explanation of the origin of the antibacterial agent, an ironic one. And we learn these “bombers” can even reduce a biofilm to dying pulp. That’s in a lab environment. Yong also lards the story with caveats. Nobody has even tested the idea in lab animals, much less people.

- Charlie Petit

This post has nothing to do with science reporting–so you can stop reading now if you like. But sometimes I can’t resist commenting on journalism issues that arise outside of our little corner, because they can come up in our work, too.

A week ago, Newsweek published a cover picture of Michele Bachmann that was widely criticized as unflattering. The criticism was valid: She looked like a deer in the headlights. In my view, this constituted a non-verbal editorial comment on Bachmann, to wit: She’s nuts. Whether or not she is nuts is not a journalism issue, so I will delicately sidestep that one. But Newsweek’s photo clearly implied that she was, and it was a poor choice.

Newsweek’s editor-in-chief, Tina Brown, said in a statement, “Michele Bachmann’s intensity is galvanizing voters in Iowa right now and Newsweek’s cover captures that.” And the magazine released outtakes from the Bachmann photo shoot, with the idea, I suppose, that we would see that this is just the way Bachmann looks. But it’s not. One of the outtakes is a very warm portrait of Bachmann, with her hands folded in prayer, that seems to me to capture something important about Bachmann–and would not have produced the outrage that the other image did. Here are the two images, so you can judge for yourself. First, the cover:

And here’s one of the outtakes:

The moral of the story, for all journalists, including science journalists: Be very careful about how you treat people you don’t like.

* * *

A second issue arose in this morning’s New York Times. The sports section includes an unusual feature story by Richard Sandomir about Ralph Branca, the Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher who gave up a pennant-winning home run to Bobby Thomson of the New York Giants on Oct. 3, 1951. The game became notorious because of allegations that the Giants had stolen the pitcher’s signs, allegations confirmed by Joshua Prager in the Wall Street Journal in 2001. The home run is known as “the shot heard ’round the world.”

This is great baseball lore, and I encourage you to dig into it. But here’s the issue for us: Sandomir’s story is about the revelation that Branca, a life-long practicing Catholic, is Jewish, and whether Branca should now be counted among baseball’s Jewish players. Sandomir wrote that the issue had come up because “it had been revealed that Branca’s mother was Jewish.” Sandomir called it a “startling late-life revelation.”

But how did this revelation occur? Sandomir’s story was pegged to the revelation. How did Branca learn about his roots? When did it happen? Where?

Sandomir doesn’t say. But it’s easy to find: the revelation was detailed yesterday in–brace yourself–the New York Times. The same Joshua Prager who wrote about the shot heard ’round the world in the Wall Street Journal uncovered Branca’s roots and told the 85-year-old Branca about his past. (Prager is a friend of mine, which is partly why I noticed this.)

Perhaps Sandomir didn’t read Monday’s Times. How else can one explain the omission? Sandomir should have explained the circumstances of the “late-life revelation,” beyond his dismissive observation that “a reporter did research proving it this year.” It’s not because Prager deserved credit, although Prager did deserve credit. Sandomir should have explained it for the benefit of his readers. Was Sandomir irked because Prager broke the story and he’d been assigned to follow it up? Unless Sandomir tells us, we have no way of knowing. But whatever his agenda, he did his readers a disservice.

And the moral of this story: Don’t keep secrets from your readers.

Have you seen examples of similar errors in science journalism? Please let us know in the comments.

- Paul Raeburn

The last week or two saw heavy initial coverage of NASA’s Dawn mission to the asteroid Vesta. Fewer reporters are covering the incremental science – with a few major and notable exceptions. At NatureNews one is able to grasp the befuddlement and wonder of the project’s researchers. Ron Cowen puts a strong effort into explaining how a few expectations have been dashed, and the general satisfaction at finding features that defy easy explanation.

If that image loads correctly and bandwidth permitting, it should show the rock rotating steadily. Cowens’s stories bring to life some of the features anybody might notice – the immense network of near0parallel striations, a  giant partial crater, and a spin rate that, while exaggerated in the time lapse video, gives the right impression. Vesta twists quickly. Stills from the mission are astoundingly sharp (See Grist below).

Other recent Dawn+Vesta dispatches:

• Space.com : Dawn Spacecraft Begins Science Mission at Asteroid Vesta ;

Grist for the Mill: DAWN Mission homepage ; Cratered Terrain image ;

- Charlie Petit

The New Yorker, not so long ago, let anybody read its stuff on line free with no hassle involved. And no income to speak of either. Not so anymore. But it is worth chasing down Elizabeth Kolbert’s probing profile of paleogeneticist Svante Pääbo and of the science he does. Kolbert is an established, general feature writer. In the science field, she may have – just speculating -  burned out for now her fascination with the beat that has brought her recent awards and attention, the science of global warming and the frailties of humans confronting it. One hopes she does get back to climate. But it is good to see her displaying her skill as a science journalist in covering other fields of research.

The story shows off the power of long-form feature writing , not that anybody doubted that a good long story typically has more information and context than a good short one. It provides space to dwell on topics. For one, it is good to read that Pääbo owes much to interaction with famed Berkeley geneticist and biochemist Allan Wilson. Even better is a deft explanation how Wilson’s “out of Africa” and African-eve paradigm of H. sapiens evolution and dispersion can be prized apart just enough to accomodate interbreeding of early yet modern humans in Europe with Neanderthals. It has much more, including the terrible problems Pääbo’s team had in sequencing Neanderthal DNA, the kinship and profound differences among people and other apes (so to speak), art appreciation, a strong sense of just who this famed scientists is, and humanity’s irrepressible and apparently unique knack for adventuring.

- Charlie Petit

The AP’s Charles Hanley, credited as a special correspondent – which usually means freelancer given frequent jobs but in this case, I was just reminded, it means senior staffer (w/Pulitzer too) – has a classic piece of science reporting from an exotic locale. It is classic in that, like most such dispatches, it provides vivid detail on smart people with government grants working very very hard in harsh conditions. But it is not a report on a run of dramatic scientific results – but a snapshot of the process. Tax dollars at work on arcanely scholarly topics – but some readers (me, me!) might appreciate that those eggheads are sweating.

Rarely does a reporter set up his or her feature assignment, going out in the field for days or weeks on end, and happen to be standing there when a new paradigm erupts or an old one collapses (*See end of post) . But this account is, as such things can be when done well, a vivid reminder to readers that what drives science is the lure of the unknown. Questions precede answers after all. And sure enough, people that Hanley visits, helicoptering about on Greenland’s icy masses, do not yet know if the glaciers are entering a vastly accelerated phase, or will keep sending ice and meltwater into the sea at the disturbing but not immediately catastrophic rate as now. They have lots of unknowns but, for all the ominous signs, not so much new known.

Grist for the Mill: NYU website of project scientist David Holland. Interesting guy – from Newfoundland, hockey player, professor of mathematics, glacier and oceanography modeling ace.

Other, recent Greenland ice news:

• Another ambitious effort from Greenland ; Climate Wire via NYTimes (Aug 4) Lauren Morello: Science at the Summit three part series. Best to my eye -  Part II, A High, Icy Lab for Learning the Past and Future Impacts of Climate Change ;  Pt. I:  Polar Researchers harness robots that thrive in the midnight sun , and Pt. III: Probing a glacier as it thaws ; I don’t know why this is all free, but good on managers of Environment and Energy Daily’s constellation of subscription newsletters for putting it out there. Usually I link to them all at NYTimes (where Part II is linked).

Arctic Sea Ice News: Two kinds of stories. For the intermediate term, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research say natural variations could for awhile overwhelm the long term trend toward less sea ice – ergo, a few seasons may go by with growing ice. On the immediate front, an MIT group reports that the loss of sea ice in the past ten years is so far beyond expectation that the IPCC should revise its forecasts for further loss, and urges deeper study of the processes by which sea ice thins, breaks up, refreezes, and feeds back on itself. Plus, this season’s melt is running neck and neck with 2007′s pace, the year of the lowest end-of-summer sea ice extent in the instrumented record.

• McClatchy Newspapers (via Sydney Morning Herald) : Humans to blame for half of Arctic sea ice melt, says study ;
• LiveScience – Wynne Parry: Melting Sea Ice Leads to Walrus Stampedes, Scientists Warn ; Rings true but it seems one has read this before. Another thing:  on the copy that popped up on line this morning, the story is marred – via links that interrupt the text -  by google ads roughly keyed to the topic. They include one from the Heartland Institute patiently explaining to those who haven’t been paying attention to its deeper truth that climate change is a fraud. So it goes.
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: Arctic Ice might win short reprieve ;
• PostMedia News via Vancouver Sun (picked initially up from Nunutsiaq News, in Nunavut, Canadian Arctic) : Arctic Ocean to lose ice faster than predicted:MIT ;
• Canadian Press (via Winnipeg Free Press) Bob Weber: Arctic sea ice will go up, go down over short term: scientist ;

And Finally: An Antarctic angle to the Japan tsunami in March. A floating ice shelf felt its power. Some reports made much of the shelf’s stability, but the images clearly show that the big bergs were already well-demarcated by pronounced fractures even before they did the tsunami jig.

• USA Today – Michael Winter: Japan tsunami tore off icebergs from Antarctica ; A shorty. Winter quickly followed ith news of another manifestation of the tsunami: Japan tsunami also shook up Earth’s atmosphere , another shorty, and with credit to his primary ‘source,’ a piece at LiveScience by Charles Q. Choi.
• The Antarctic Sun: Wave action: Japan tsunami linked to iceberg calving in Antarctica ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release (with video of splintering ice tongue).

*One example of a long-planned field visit that happened to put a reporter on the scene of a revolution comes to mind because he’s an old pal. David Perlman booked himself aboard a Scripps vessel called the Knorr way back in 1977 to the Galapagos Rift volcanic zone  in the eastern Pacific off South America. He had anxiety attacks on the way down, as all reporters do with an empty notebook and after talking their bosses into spending big money. Then wham bam so lucky I am, the submersible Alvin and its crews discovered the unsuspected worlds now called simply hydrothermal vent communities -  and the SF Chronicle got it first.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Quo is a popular science magazine that has been published for more than 15 years in Spain. It looks frivolous, but among eccentric covers and anecdotal reports one can find impressive scientific stories and essays. One of its characteristics is lots of stories about the science of sex. Again; sometimes the type of pictures used seems meant mainly to attract typical male readers’ instant attention. But one often finds with them  very interesting articles. For example, in this number there is a story interviewing neuroendocrinologists who study sexual arousal. The story has 5 different sources from Canada, US and Spain, and it discusses the latest research on the field. Quo’s website has also a good blog platform where a few scientific reporters reflect on the latest scientific debates.

Quo se presenta a si misma como una revista de divulgación científica para mentes inquietas. Lleva más de 15 años asentada en los quioscos españoles y cuenta con un surtido número de seguidores. Su página web está muy bien cuidada, y diseñada para atrapar rápidamente al visitante. Cuando abres la web de Quo lo primero que ves son curiosidades y anécdotas con la palabra ciencia diluida entre sus titulares. Nada que objetar, faltaría más. Como estrategia para captar nuevos adeptos las anecdotillas son una buena herramienta. Lo segundo que te encuentras en la web es menos sutil: Sexo. Además de tener un apartado específico, estratégicamente situadas en su portal siempre aparece la palabra sexo y alguna foto de mujeres atractivas a la que inevitable diriges tu atención. Si clicas en ellas, entras directamente al submundo del sexo de Quo, con varias galerías fotográficas eróticas de aparente buen gusto, y artículos que utilizan la ciencia para hablar de sexo. O el sexo para hablar de ciencia. No se distingue muy bien. Quizás éste sea el secreto.

No negaremos una apariencia frívola, y enfoques en la frontera del sensacionalismo. Pero es justo reconocer lo bueno del contenido que podemos encontrar bajo este vestido. Fijémonos por ejemplo en el texto de Lorena Sánchez “¿Qué excita a las mujeres?”. No saquéis conclusiones del título, porque al igual que el pie de foto y la propia imagen de una tía buena, muy poco tiene a ver con el contenido que aborda Lorena. Foto y titular sólo tienen la función de pescarte. Luego el artículo te explica en detalle las investigaciones de una neurocientífica en la Concordia University de Montreal que da diferentes cócteles de hormonas a ratas y les estimula el clítoris para ver si les gusta. Así estudia qué hormonas son clave o no en la excitación sexual (ratas hembras sólo quieren copular cuando están fértiles, y progesterona y estrógenos son las hormonas que regulan su ciclo y comportamiento). No es la única fuente del artículo. Hasta 4 científicos más cita Lorena en su detallada pieza de muy recomendable lectura.

Como reflexión, nos entra la duda de si el mediocre titular y las palabras “fantasía, orgasmo, coito…” del pie de foto atraen más lectores de lo que hubiera hecho un mensaje más científico. Al fin y al cabo, “coito y orgasmo” lo oímos por todos lados. La verdadera ciencia del sexo es lo más novedoso y original. Todo depende a qué tipo de lector te quieres dirigir.

Hay muchos más ejemplos en Quo de esta intersección entre ciencia y sexo. Uno curioso es el reportaje gráfico “¿Y tú qué miras?” explicando los resultados de una investigación neozelandesa que registraba los movimientos de los ojos de voluntarios mientras se les mostraban imágenes de mujeres desnudas. El resultado no fue muy sorprendente: los pechos se llevan las primeras miradas y por más tiempo. ¿interesante? Pues sí, para qué negarlo. El sexo atrae. Pero quizás nos hubiera gustado más detalle del estudio y las justificaciones de los investigadores. Seguro que hay mucho más meollo, pero Quo parece no interesado en profundizar.

De nuevo, para felicitar a Quo nos acogemos a estos semi-escondidas grandes piezas de periodismo científico que diluyen entre fotografías y titulares llamativos. Por ejemplo, si en el post anterior hablábamos de la historia de los transplantes, aquí Francisco Cañizares nos ofrece un espectacular recorrido fotográfico por la historia de la cirugía estética. Desde una reconstrucción de cara a principios de siglo XX, pasando por los casos más notables de famosas, el uso del botox, o la promesa de la piel artificial.

También vemos secciones especiales como “La Ciencia del Verano”, donde Juan Scaliter e Iñaki de la Torre aglutinan muy buenas infografías de la revista sobre la distribución de calor en los océanos, el contenido de un metro cúbico de agua de mar, o cómo funciona un barril de cerveza.

Y no podemos olvidarnos de las bitácoras de Quo. Espacios de reflexión que añaden un grado de calidad a la web. En ellas encontramos por ejemplo al perspicaz Juan Scaliter con su último post “Es la ciencia, estúpido”. En él denuncia la idea de que en EEUU se hace más y mejor ciencia que en el resto del mundo. Expone datos para argumentar que no es así, y que la clave está en que la difunden mejor. No como en España. Juan critica que los científicos e instituciones españolas no presten mayor atención a la divulgación, y que los comunicadores no hagan piña y se citen entre ellos en lugar de mantener las distancias por ciertos egos injustificados. Otra buen post de Scaliter -cuyo blog La cienciabilidad merece la pena seguir- es “Punset debería aprender de Belén Esteban”. En él reclama incorporar las estrategias de los programas de cotilleo a la divulgación científica. Absolutamente de acuerdo, con cuidado de no pervertir demasiado el mensaje. En las bitácoras de Quo también encontramos a la prolífica y polivalente América Valenzuela con su blog “Cóctel de ciencias”, donde nos va sorprendiendo con curiosidades procedentes del mundo de la ciencia. Con desparpajo, amplio conocimiento, y sabiendo utilizar muy bien las redes sociales, América representa el modelo de comunicador/a del futuro.

Quo tiene mucho más que ofrecer. Merece la pena no juzgar prematuramente a tenor de su prioridad en la búsqueda de impacto. Decimos a menudo que el verdadero reto de la comunicación científica no es contentar a los investigadores sino llegar al público llano que vive a espaldas de la ciencia. No es fácil, y Quo lo consigue.

- Pere Estupinyà

Some things just are so amazing, one can’t even quite put one’s finger on why it’s amazing other than pure intuition that it’s impossible, yet there it is.

The news, from the good people at NASA’s Kepler Telescope program who are looking for the shadow blips of planets crossing in front of their stars,  is that 750 light years away is an entirely weird one. Kepler didn’t find it – another program called the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey did. But Kepler has the photometry to figure it out. The star is TrES-2, the planet is TrES-2b, and the latter is black. Blacker than coal. A black rocky planet seems fully plausible. Some experts say a few carbon planets, really like coal, could exist.  But this one is a gas giant. What kind of smoke or soot or tarry goop or black plastic garbage bag of spontaneously linked carbonaceous polymer could absorb light so thoroughly while afloat high in a gaseous envelope? AND, the planet is close to its star and very hot. So it’s a black body, glowing a dull red while at the same time reflecting hardly any light that hits it.

This can mean only one thing: buoyant aliens with black parasols. Zillions of them.

A word about that illus up there. Reporters had a good time with this.  But I didn’t like the handout’s artist’s impression. None of the reporters covering the news included that some people are quite familiar with black planets. They are gamers who play Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet. I could not play a video game if my life depended on it. I found out about this one while looking for news stories on the real insane planet. If one has time to glimpse some astounding animated graphics, check this review at Time Magazine’s Techland site, by Evan Narcisse, and click on the embedded video. That above is a screenshot.

So far this morning, the major wires have not touched the news from Kepler about  TrES-2b. But a swarm of other outlets are on it. The basic news apparently has been in public for quite awhile -a paper linked  in Grist below has been on arXiv since March. Maybe somebody saw it and covered this already. Unlikely – one would have to be pretty sharp to grasp the news from a scan of the paper. As formally published, with somewhat different authorship, the news is quite clear. And there were press releases. Hard to miss.

Stories on the Real Shadow Planet:

• National Geographic – Andrew Fazekas: Darkest Planet Found: Coal-Black, It Reflects Almost No Light ; Good stab at concisely explaining how Kepler’s algorithms infer the albedo of a transiting planet (hint: key data don’t come during the transit).
• LiveScience/Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Coal-Black Alien Planet Is Darkest Ever Seen ;
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Darkest exoplanet spotted by astronomers ;
• Popular Science – Clay Dillow: Blackest Planet Ever Found, Absorbs Nearly 100% of Light That Reaches It ;
• UniverseToday – Jason Major: Astronomers Discover a Dark Alien World ;

Grist for the Mill:

Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr for Astrophysics Press Release ; Royal Astronomical Soc’y Press Release ; arXiv preprint of draft paper ; Monthly Notices of RAS paper ;

- Charlie Petit

North American Vegetation Anomaly Map - July, 2011.

A confession off the top about the agenda for looking for a story on Texas drought. That did by the way yield a good one at the Houston Chronicle by Cindy Horswell, and maybe the horses are swell but she reports the cowboys are desperate. They’re taking their livestock to market rather than watch it die on the hoof at home. Corn farmers, cotton ranchers, and soybean growers are similarly frantic with crop forecast to be down by about half for the year.

But motivation to get a news story hook was to share that image top right. I downloaded and drastically reduced the resolution to post this glimpse without making the MIT server squeak. For better impact and caption info look at the source, NASA’s Earth Observatory ; but best of all I urge a look at the full-hemisphere hi-def – either click on the one at previous link, or go straight to it here. That such mapping is provided at no fee from the guv’mint tells me one thing: at least some of my taxes have been well spent on sub-agencies whose mere names probably make more than a few in the Tea Party army turn gray with disgust. The brown means less veg, and green more. It’s a one-glance look at the wildly see-sawing weather that has hit much of North America ‘s midsection this year, with Texas drying up and blowing away while the Northern Plains are lush with verdant growth powered by rains that also rammed floods through the plains states.

Even from space, in this rendition, the Texas drought looks ugly. We’re not reading much in the US about Mexico, but from its looks things are as bad for many of our southern neighbors as it is in Texas. The credit lines at NASA’s site give some hint what it takes to make pics like this:

NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided by the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service and processed by Jennifer Small and Assaf Anyamba, NASA GIMMS Group at Goddard Space Flight Center. Caption by Holli Riebeek.

Other Texas drought stories:

• Alpine Avalanche (Big Bend country, and not too many alpine avalanches there. This, I figure out in mid-post, is a Texas government handout: Ranchers devastated by drought helped by waiver extension;
• eSTOCKSdaily – Cameron White: 61 percent of Texas cotton in very poor condition as drought hits the state .

- Charlie Petit

A study in which researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used genetically-altered T cells to treat chronic lymphocytic leukemia has drawn attention all over the web, but I’m pleasantly surprised to report that most reporters avoided the “B” word: Breakthrough! (Surprised not because I have a low opinion of the nation’s science and medical writers, but because I fell into this trap too many times myself before I learned my lesson. Many of you are wiser than I.)

A breakthrough this might indeed be, but we won’t know that for a year, or five or 10. (The findings appeared in two publications, one in the New England Journal of Medicine, and another in Science Translational Medicine.)

Stephanie Nano at the AP (she’s a former colleague of mine) was excited about this study, and her story reflects that excitement. She begins:

Scientists are reporting the first clear success with a new approach for treating leukemia – turning the patients’ own blood cells into assassins that hunt and destroy their cancer cells.

They’ve only done it in three patients so far, but the results were striking: Two appear cancer-free up to a year after treatment, and the third patient is improved but still has some cancer….”It worked great. We were surprised it worked as well as it did,” said Dr. Carl June, a gene therapy expert at the University of Pennsylvania [and one of the study's authors]. “We’re just a year out now. We need to find out how long these remissions last.”

Another researcher told Nano that this is “an amazing, amazing kind of achievement.” She also quoted a researcher who expressed caution, noting that the researchers reported on only three patients, and that more long-term follow-up will be required to confirm the results.

The “amazing, amazing” quote is a strong one–and maybe a little over the top? I’m not sure whether I would have used it, although it’s obviously tempting. Here’s the question: When should science reporters–and especially medical reporters, whose stories will likely prompt patients’ demands for the new treatment–decide not to use a quote? It can be a tough call; we want our stories to reflect genuine excitement, and there is genuine excitement about this research. But we don’t want a quote to reflect too much excitement, or unwarranted excitement. This research might turn out to be amazing–or it might not.

Katherine Hobson, in a brief note on the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, noted that the treatment “holds promise” but that it “has harsh side effects, however, and much larger studies are needed to prove that it works.” She linked to the Journal’s full story by Ron Winslow. His lede:

A new strategy for genetically bolstering the immune system proved surprisingly powerful against an advanced form of leukemia in a small study that could have broader implications for fighting cancer.

“Surprise” seems to be a key factor in this story, as noted by Winslow and other writers. Nobody expected this treatment to work as well as it did, apparently. Winslow quotes another researcher who said the study supports the value of this kind of genetic alteration to fight other kinds of cancer as well.

Charles Bankhead at MedPage Today emailed other cancer researchers to ask them what they thought of the study, and he got a nice quote from Dr. David Steensma of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston:

Although declining to call the results “the biggest advance in decades,” Steensma said the strategy “could turn out to be really fantastic. The results are much better than the investigators could have expected. We have not seen dramatic, rapid tumor responses like this with immunological therapies before.”

Dr. Douglas V. Faller of Boston University told Bankhead that the results “are ‘exciting and promising’ and could lead to use of similar strategies to treat a variety of cancers.”

An interesting takedown of the research was put together in bullet form by Veronique Greenwood of Discover. She begins with a swift account of the study, under the heading “How the heck,” and immediately proceeds to another set of bullets headlined, “Not so fast.” Here is most of what she said:

• …With this treatment, nearly all of the patients’ B cells, healthy and otherwise, were destroyed, and even months afterwards the B cells had not recovered. Since this is the class of immune cells that produces antibodies, this loss could be quite serious in the long term, though all the rest of the patients’ cells were unharmed.
• The team also notes that the mass murder of cancer cells provoked a serious response: the patients’ bodies were flooded with detritus from the bursting cells and inflammatory molecules produced by the immune system, some at 160 times the normal levels. Their kidneys were in acute distress, and at least one had to be hospitalized because of it.
• Additionally, one of the most exciting things about this study—that the T cells stay in circulation and may keep destroying any cancer that crops up for years…That means that the follow-up work to figure out what the T cells are doing, and whether they might be somehow dangerous in the long term, will be substantial. What, for instance, will the indefinite lack of B cells mean?

This is good stuff. None of the other stories I read was as explicit and thorough at pointing out the potential harmful consequences of the treatment.

We don’t yet know whether this treatment is “amazing,” or, as Greenwood wonders, “dangerous in the long term.”

The coverage I saw was reasonably accurate and avoided promising too much, too soon. But that failed to deter one reader who left this comment on Greenwood’s skeptical post: “A cousin of mine has been diagnosed in the first stage of Leukemia. I wonder if you will be able to give him your amazing treatment?… What could I do about it?… Please, contact me as soon as possible…”

- Paul Raeburn

Source: See Grist below

The Fukushima meltdowns are, for all I know, still molten in spots. The hazards to the citizenry will linger for a long time, the capital cost just of cleaning up the tsunami-wrecked power stations are staggering, and Japan, iwth the crookedness and mutual back-scratching of its oversight agencies coming to light, has sworn it’s done with further harnessing of the atom for electricity. Germany is bailing out. France is scratching its chin.

A valuable perspective, with China its focus, is to be found at Yale’s e360 non-profit news operation from David Biello whose byline is most often seen at Scientific American’s news operation. We’ve read that China is busy building reactors, but this is the most detailed media account that’s come to my attention. It has enough color to imply Biello got to stand around with the engineers and supervisors in hard hats and watch a Generation III Westinghouse/Toshiba reactor noisily getting welded, bolted, and riveted together from mostly foreign parts in China. Am checking to see if this was remote viewing reporting, or on scene. (Late Addition: David reports he did tour some of the facilities there last fall as part of a travel fellowship from Honolulu’s East-West Center. But he relied on Westinghouse to provide pics and descriptions of the construction of its new model in China).

The story has an arresting angle. It not merely that China – while slowing slightly for reinspection of all its facilities – is still going gangbusters on new nuke construction. That is generating  dust, noise, and lots of worry that first-rate safety measures are not in place. But beyond that they seem, judging by Biello’s dispatch, to be signing up for almost any reactor technology that has fans in the nuclear wonk community.

Pebble beds, breeders, Candu-style heavy water, even thorium-cycle installations, it says here, are to be found. Mostly it’s imported technology including the major hardware, but with local industry and design teams taking lots of notes. That’s remarkable. China ought to host a comprehensive tour of its facilities for foreign science and energy writers. One is unsure how many US reporters would have the means to go, but with others from Europe, Japan, South Korea, India, Brazil, etc. there would probably be a long line of applicants. If Beijing’s energy ministries think they’re world class enough to pull off such a bold leap into advanced nuclear power technology, they should have the confidence to show it off. I once got a tour on assignment, about six years ago, of such facilities in India – and was stupefied by that nation’s diverse efforts. China seems to be out-pacing India.

Not that this piece is at all giddy about prospects. For one thing – at best, in the foreseeable future, it says here that China will be able to displace only 5 or 10 percent of its electricity generation from CO2-spewing coal to nuclear.

Grist for the Mill: World Nuclear Association China status.  (highly details, and source of image to right).

- Charlie Petit

A paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters attracted wide, if thin, media attention the last few days. That happens when one reveals that our planet is wrapped in a layer of antimatter. It is a thin layer, it is in space, and only by stretch of imagination can one imagine any use for it. But strangeness alone is enough to make news. And when one of those stretches of imagination reaches the remarkable conclusion that rocketships might be able to tank up on fuel with these scattered anti-protons, it’s a sure bet.

Among the first out was the BBC, which provides as a source a paper entitled “The discovery of geomagnetically trapped cosmic ray antiprotons” (linked in Grist below) and in turn linked through the website of an Italian-headquartered,  European research instrument called Pamela (Payload for Antimatter Matter Exploration and Light-nuclei Astrophysics). It has been in orbit since 2006, bolted to a Russian satellite, Resurs-DK1, with a launch from Baikonur Cosmodrome. In the illus, it is the keg of beer thing on the side of the sat’s main body. The last line of the BBC’s story quotes a project science’s reference to a NASA blue-sky study of possibly scooping up anti-protons in space and letting it burst into oblivion in a rocket motor. Now, there’s something not to invest in – antimatter futures.

Other stories:

• ScienceNOW- Ron Cowen: Antimatter Belt Found Circling Earth ; Cowen puts the motor fuel angle in his lede. But quickly finds a knowledgeable source to say this belt may have antiprotons, but not enough for an energy rush in themselves. But, in a switch in tone, the same source says… maybe they could be catalysts for other forms of nuclear propulsion.
• National Geographic News – Ker Than: Antimatter Found Orbiting Earth – A First ; Another one that ends with reference to antimatter propulsion – but with a clear tone of caution.
• Ars Technica – Kyle Niemeyer: antimatter particles found in orbit held by Earth’s magnetic field ;
• Wired – Mark Brown: Satellite Finds Evidence of Antimatter Belt Around Earth;

Grist for the Mill: Journal paper via arXiv ; PaMeLa website

- Charlie Petit

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Your tracker is, as journalists go, a skylark at heart. Happiness is in sharing discoveries, explaining how somebody smart did something right. Fortunately science journalism includes many – not as many as other beats, but many – with the hearts of the cops working for internal affairs. Blood in the water, perps with heads hung low, and trust in nobody until all doubt is removed are their goads and maxims.

Ergo, I’ve always found stories of scientific fraud, and even of mere error,  fairly interesting reading, but deadly dull and disheartening to write. Who cares that some dope falsified his plots when, right down the hall, some other researcher just finished mapping a whole genome, or whole galactic cluster, with impressive implications? Sucker that I am, I’ll go for the encouraging news every time.

Thus it is interesting to read, at the Wall Street Journal, Gautam Naik‘s review of recent trends in scientific error and  fraud, as indicated by retractions at major journals. That barometer indicates that a rising share of scientific activity is drifting to the shady side. The link may take non-subscribers to a pay wall. I filched the illus, which provides a sense of the story’s scope.

Naik doesn’t get into it, but the data suggest an outsized share of faulty or ethically bankrupt scientific research is in biological and medical sciences. One doubts they attract more crooks and incompetents. But such work does tend to swim in more commercially competitive waters than does labor in pure physics, ecology, etc. – meaning that personal economic rewards for results are higher. That could be a factor.

As it happens, here’s a for-instance that just popped up:

• The Scientist Daily – Jessica P. Johnson: Cancer Researcher Fabricated Data ;

- Charlie Petit