Gotta go for the weekend, but want to at least recognize the news from SpaceX, or Space Exploration Technologies Corp, and its CEO Elon Musk that it plans in the medium-future to build reusable rocket ships, many even reusable space ships for people. That’s the road shuttle started down. It saved no money. But Musk said yesterday at the National Press Club that the idea may yet be sound.

I’ll list the stories, but do have two observations. First, SpaceX has been tightroping for awhile now, and hasn’t fallen off yet. So this ambition is plausible. Second, the proposal would build rockets and capsules that, upon return to Earth for reuse, would land on their tails using remaining fuel to slow, hover at ground level, and land on legs. Stories treat this a little bit as revelatory. Somebody ought to mention other space start-ups, including Armadillo Space in Texas, and Blue Origin in Washington State – both founded by wealthy entrepreneurs in the same mold as Musk – are pursuing the same general idea. This was a news conference by a glamorous company riding high for the moment. But the topic deserves a trend-feature treatment. It is more than spot news.

Sample Stories:

• Aviation Week – Frank Morring, Jr: SpaceX To Try Reusable Launch ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: SpaceX Unveils Plan for World’s First Fully Reusable Rocket ;
• SpaceNews – Dan Leone: SpaceX Working on Falcon 9 Fly-back boosters ;
• AFP – Kerry Sheridan: SpaceX says ‘reusable rocket’ could help colonize Mars ;
• AP – John Antczak: SpaceX to attempt fully reusable orbital booster ;

One is sure there is a press kit out there somewhere. If a link is provided, we’ll add it. Have a good weekend.

 - Charlie Petit

Good news, or merely neutral news, never got as much coverage as bad news. Good thing, probably, as news is not a profile of society as it is warts and all. It tends to be exceptions to the rule. Ergo, pretty much warts and more warts. If good news becomes the exception, we’re in real trouble. But there is even less of it lately, and that’s not a good thing.

Somebody at National Geographic decided that to listen in on the director of the Dept. of Energy’s “ARPA-E” program describe its latest list of grants, and treat it as news, could work out. Reporter Josie Garthwaite got the assignment, which runs under the plain-jane head, Storage, Biofuel Lead $156 Million in Energy Research Grants.

Stories like this – beat stories that keep a citizenry somewhat aware of the dominant hum-drum but productive routine of life rather than only cockeyed celebrities and episodes of disaster and incompetence – are a tonic. Nat’l Geo News is not a major outlet, but it is not a pipsqueak either. Read this. You’ll learn a few things. Reporters might even see some clues to stories that’d have some excitement to them.

- Charlie Petit

Whew?

Long-shot chances of catastrophe are a slippery topic in news. Catastrophe gets people’s attention. Longshots do not, so much, unless it’s a lottery and you can convince people to pay you zillions of dollars to let them take a shot at misery (We hardly ever read abut people, years after a big jackpot, who are happily livin’ like Riley).One can run stories every day in earthquake country with good advice, and some people still won’t bolt their bookshelves and armoires and grandfather clocks to the wall. An asteroid?

Yesterday NASA revealed results of a telescopic survey of the inner solar system, looking for asteroids with orbits that, with minor perturbation, could lead to an impact on Earth. It trumpeted the press conference in advance. Many turned out or logged on. The news is that earlier, statistical projections suggested the number of them big enough to pose major peril were too high. Very few giant miles-wide, civilization-ending asteroids are there, we already knew that, and the number remains around 1000. But the middle sized ones in the 300 to 3300 feet range (makes more sense metrically – about 100 meters to 1 kilometer) come in at 19,500. Wow, roughly 20,000 rocks big enough to take out a city center, or maybe even devastate a whole province, quietly circling the sun, just a nudge away from hitting you on the head. But, that’s down from the previously projected 35,000 of them. The new number is by actual count, made possible by an orbiting NASA platform called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, that despite being nearly dry on coolant and ready for retirement, was kept soldiering on to finish the asteroid canvass.

In a media world that tends to seek neat categories such as good vs. bad, relax or buckle-up, spend or save, Godzilla or King Kong, buy or sell,  fight or flight, and left or right, this one gave a few headline writers as well as reporters a tough time. A few. Most rolled with it.

Stories:

• PC Magazine – Chloe Albanesius: Will Earth Be Struck By Massive Asteroid? Probably Not ; I listed this one first, as it got what’s left of my molars grinding the worst. Ms. Ablanesius writes the story ably, covering the basics and getting the right quote from a mission scientist: “…fewer does not mean none and there are still tens of thousands out there that we need to find.” It’s the headline and it uselessness that rankles. One supposes the editor who put it up figured that for most people, eternity is their own lifetimes and that’s what matters. But it was already true that one will probably not hit Earth before everybody alive now is gone. But surely nobody sensibly thinks that, after umpty hundreds of impacts since the Earth stopped forming, they have stopped. None forever, not in a billion years?!Thus, other than leaning in the correct direction, toward be less worried, this headline is, um, dumb.
• Voice of America – Suzanne Preso: NASA’s Asteroid Hunter Finds Fewere ‘Planet-Buster’ Asteroids Than Predicted ; Sober enough, except that the category found to be significantly smaller is not the planet-busters several or many km across, but the local busters less than a km-wide that are rarer. The hed is weak, but the body text is willing. Preso even tackles the physics – reflected light versus glow – behind using infrared to look for asteroids.
• AP – Alicia Chang: NASA IDs 90 pct. of largest near-Earth asteroids: No complaints from here about this one.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Astronomers downsize their estimate for risky asteroids ;
• LiveScience – Denise Chow: Earth Surrounded by Fewer Potentially Dangerous Asteroids Than Thought, NASA Finds ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

Sometimes one gets behind on genuinely fascinating news with marginal for now, but potentially sizeable, importance. A week or so ago came a small splash about Atlantic and Pacific bowhead whales that traverse the Arctic coast of North America and Greenland. Researchers from Greenland, the University of Washington, and Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game tracked a few and found something surprising. In Biology Letters, pub. by the UK’s Royal Society, they reported that in the summer of 2010 two male bowheads that had been affixed with radio tracking devices, and were from Atlantic and Pacific populations presumably isolated from one another in recent millenniums by unbroken Arctic Sea Ice, managed to follow the Northwest Passages from opposite ends and for awhile swim around in the same general area.

Upon happening on one of the news stories, it appeared to The Tracker a big mistake is visible right in the lede. It still seems off, but for reasons I did not first recognize in their confoundingly full ambiguity. Maybe you’ll see it too before I explain below. At least, it spurred me to a roundup on this rather diverting, perhaps epochal, event.

Stories (with hed and lede sentence);

• Edmonton Journal/PostMedia News – Randy Boswell: Bowhead whales in Far North sign of melting ice ; “In what may be an ecological first since the end of the last Ice Age some 10,000 years ago, bowhead whales from the separate Pacific and Atlantic populations have crossed paths in the Canadian Arctic…”
• IrishTimes – John Von Radowitz: Whales find Arctic path from Atlantic to Pacific ; “Whales are blazing a trail ahead of humans thrugh the melting ice floes of the Northwest Passage. Satellite tracking has confirmed that loss of Arctic sea is is opening up the waterway connecting the Pacific and Atlantic oceans to marine mammals.”
• Live Science – Wynne Perry: Northwest Passage ice melts ; “For the first time, scientists have documented bowhead whales traveling form opposite side of the the Canadian High Arctic and mingling in the Northwest Passage, a usually ice-clogged route connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.” ;

See it?  It’s in the first one. Reporter Boswell of PostMedia* News – who wrote a decent story and is not being picked on here for any reason but a broader point -  tells us this is perhaps a first since the end of the last Ice Age. That got my head spinning. You mean it was common during the last ice age? Surely an ice age is no time to find a lot of open water up there – implying at first naive thought that not since before the last ice has this happened. That’d be a long long time ago. But wait a minute – we’re still, some say, IN the last ice age that started maybe 100,000 years ago during the Pleistocene. So I looked at the paper – where it says (and a few news accounts related) that fossil and near-fossilized bones in the Canadian archipelago suggest bowheads were found along the entire stretch of the NW Passage during a warming spell 11,000 to 8500 years ago. Aha. But is that since the last ice age? Or was that during the last ice age? Are we still in it? What IS an ice age? And if it happened until 8,500 years ago and it says here in the story the ice age was done by 10,000, how can this be the first time since?  I looked around this morning to pin down the Ice Age. It’s vague is what it is. It is  whatever you want it to mean. Some say whether we’re in an Ice Age (Greenland’s ice cap says yes, geologically speaking) or not, one thing is clear. We’re far from the last glaciation high.

See where I’m going? The use of the term ‘ice age’ gives readers nothin’ substantial. It just means since the world was different, but that’s not very useful. If we pin things on the last glaciation that ended its dominance (thank you Wikipedia, and its footnotes back it up) about 12,500 years ago. the best phrasing that matches the intended meaning is that this may be the second (not first) time in the present interglacial.

Why not just say it could be for the first time in 8,500 years or so?  Then explain how that connects to how popular conception would interpret the term ‘ice age.’

Whew.

  *PostMedia News is not an outfit, incidentally, whose name is akin to such terms as post-Renaissance. The news agency is associated with the National Post newspaper, and includes much of the old CanWest confederation.

I have other questions, such as why or whether bowheads don’t also connect their Pacific and Atlantic populations via the Northeast Passage, along Siberia’s coast. And, whether the two groups seem particularly genetically or behaviorally distinct. A longer reporting visit to the topic could be revealing.

Other, including very local, Bowhead Whaling News:

• Alaska Dispatch (Sep 26) Eric Christopher Adams: Alaska Eskimo bowhead whale harvest quotas up for review ;
• Alaska Disptach / Arctic Sounder (Sep 29) Alaska whaling boats prepare for new season ; Including a rather amazing, poignant, distressing, reaffirming (you make the choice or add one of your own) video of scenes from the beach, after the hunt.

Grist for the Mill: Royal Society Press Release ; Biology Letters The Northwest Passage opens for bowhead whales, full text.

- Charlie Petit

One may have seen videos of birds dropping shelled prey onto rocks to break them open, technically a form of tool use. Now comes word of a similar maneuver by fish. A type of wrasse, the orange-dotted tuskfish that lives in the tropical Pacific, has learned to break open clams by smacking them against rocks. So reports researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Thus tool using, while not quite up to mastery of the iPad or even of a pair of pliers, is known in a diversity of animals – chimps pulling insects from nests with slender sticks, dolphins using sponges to wipe away sediments, octopuses that make shelters from cocoanuts, and so on.

Stories:

• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: Tool-Using Fish Caught for First Time on Video ; She includes a list of 10 animals that use tools.
• Scientific American – Kate Wong: Tool-Using Fish Caught on Tape ;
• San Jose Mercury News – Tovin Lapan: UCSF professor captures video of tool use by fish: Orange-dotted tuskfish cracks clams on rocks ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Fish know as wrasses are found to use tools ;

Grist for the Mill: UC Santa Cruz Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Maybe memory is playing tricks, but a way long time ago (seven years) those of us in the press trying to follow climate policy gave a lot of attention to the wedges of Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala at Princeton. They simplified the towering task of leveling – and eventually reducing – fossil carbon emissions. No single new technology or strategy could do it, they calmly said in declaring the obvious, but if one thinks of each component as an only somewhat towering “wedge” used to whittle the projected increase, and piled up enough wedges of which most seemed doable, things will look a lot better for the future of civilization and the rest of the biosphere.

It was oversimplified but for goodness’s sake, that’s what your typical members of Congress and White House senior staffers require. Wedges, for awhile, were the currency of climate mitigation conversation. Yet since then emissions have gone on shooting up. Some critics said the Princeton pair so simplified that task, however abstractly, that it got translated subconsciously as an easy job. And easy jobs don’t get emergency attention. Thus for mapping a route away from climate peril Socolow and co-author Pacala got pinned, by some, as a reason policy makers lost their fear and, without it, did hardly anything.

Socolow this week released his new version, call it Wedges II. And with the time lost, it’ll take 9 equal-sized wedges to rassle emissions flat over the next fifty years, rather than the 7 in W I. The article runs in two places where lots of serious-minded people, but few others, find things to read:

• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Wedges reaffirmed ;
• Climate Central – Wedges Reaffirmed ;

There is a difference. The first there is by Robert Socolow, the second is by Rob Socolow. Nicknames in bylines have interested me ever since one day in 1972, as a new SFChronicle reporter, I looked up to see the city room’s Madame Force Majeure, one Carolyn Ansbacher, elderly and formidable doyen of Chronicleness, standing at my desk. When she went on assignment, the desk would also assign some other cub reporter just to be her driver and fetchit man.  “Mr. Petit,” she said, tapping a finger on the paper where my meager output of the previous day sat. “Someday, you may write something important. Charlie is not a byline to be taken seriously.” Something like that. She walked off. Awed, which means terrified, I immediately asked to be Charles in bylines and have stuck with it ever since except of course here at cozy ksjtracker. Socolow gets to try both on a single story! Amazing.

Back to the topic.

Soclow’s is a serious story on an important matter. Very few outlets paid it any attention. But, again, it will circulate quickly to influential people who might incorporate it into their important thoughts. The nation’s political climate may shift enough to permit action.His brushed-up Wedges II is the same strategy, but packaged more deliberately in promotional language selected to give it penetrating power. He stresses that the situation has not gotten easy, it remains extremely difficult. He confesses to perhaps evading talk of doubt over the stakes and the predicament, for fear it would legitimize the contrarians.

At one time, this sort of thing had a wider circulation in popular media.

Stories:

• The Atlantic – James Fallows: Today’s Climate News: Two More Wedges Needed ;
• NYTimes DotEarth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: A Climate Analyst Analyzes His Own Approach to
  CO2, followed by Reactions to a New Plan for CO2 Progress ; Particularly rich not only for Revkin’s input, but the comments to his columns and his urging that readers look at the comments at ClimateCentral and at the Bulletin. This offers tremendous opportunity for those who mine deep into a websites hints and links. One good one: another paper by Socolow: High-consequence outcomes and internal disagreements, tell us more, please; in Climatic Change.

- Charlie Petit

One post down the KSJTracker’s Pere Estupinya, who covers Spanish language press, reports encouraging results from Spain itself in a Phase I trial of a new proposed HIV vaccine called MVA-B. As he writes, efficacy can’t be established until higher-dose Phase II tests on more people (this one has 24 subjects) are complete. But even the Phase I trial for safety stimulated significant immunity to the virus and has persisted for a year in most of the trial’s test subjects.

He also notes that much of the English-language press reporting, what there is of it so far, highlights somebody’s proclamation that the trial may mean HIV could be rendered into a minor infection. He says Spanish reporters have not exaggerated things that far.

So, dutiful upon having attention draw to it, your lead English language tracker checked. He’s right. The hopeful term “minor infection” is getting play. It is primarily in outlets not easily regarded as serious purveyors of sensibly-reported and important news, but that does not mean they’re entirely reckless all the time. Plus, one expects there will be more reporting on these results by reporters not easily buffaloed. The news is from the Spanish Superior Scientific Research Council in collaboration with hospitals in Madrid and Barcelona. It had a press conference. That agency, the nation’s leading gov’t research arm, formally sought worldwide attention. Its EurekAlert! press release is in Grist below.

And there, well down, is this heavily couched but nonetheless enticing passage with a non-attributed quote:

“According to CSIC’s researcher: “If this genetic cocktail passes Phase II and Phase III future clinic trials, and makes it into production, in the future HIV could be compared to herpes virus nowadays”. Virus would not cause a disease anymore and would become a minor chronic infection, which would only show its effects in a low defence scenario, with a much lower contagious profile. 

However selectively highlighted then, it’s not as though the press that’s covered this from outside Spain made up the phrase describing the best-case scenario for this material. The vaccine, it appears, is not expected to (again, at best) prevent or eliminate HIV infection, but to keep it at levels below the threshhold for profound health effects (AIDS) in most people. It’s intended as a therapeutic treatment. In any case, the press office of Spain’s version of NIH and NSF uses the ‘minor infection’ line too, if not prominently. Let’s hope the hype, in this case, turns out to have merit.

An aspect unreported thus far is – again taking the best-case scenario – that for a great many people with HIV, faithful use of anti-retroviral drugs also and already routinely reduces HIV to what might be called a minor infection. Presumably a vaccine that does the same would entail far lower expense and hazard of side effects. But is the clinical impact likely to be in the same league for both treatments?

Stories:

• Daily Mail (UK) – Emily Allen: New HIV vaccine could turn deadly condition into ‘minor infection like herpes.’ ; No hint of any enterprise (no outside opinion), but faithful to the press release.
• The Sun (UK) HIV ‘to become minor infection.’ ; Better, despite the flat declaration of the hed. The Sun finds a Brit health official to tell its readers this is a step in the right direction toward therapeutic vaccines.
• Fox News – New Vaccine Could Turn HIV Into Minor Infection ;
• Huffington Post / Gay Voices blog:  HIV MVA-B Vaccine May Reduce Virus to “Minor Chronic Infection.”
• The Guardian (UK) Will Harris: HIV vaccine is a small breakthrough, but not a cure ; Balanced and careful, by a reporter at a grown-up newspaper who clearly is thinking the story and its meaning through for himself.
• The Telegraph (UK) Stephen Adams: Vaccine could reduce HIV to ‘minor infection ; Appears to be mostly and perhaps all off the press release. And while the handout does not clearly attribute the ‘minor infection’ line to anybody but ‘CSIC’s researcher’, Adams constructs a sentence around it that implies the named, head researcher said it. Maybe he did. It seems likely. One hopes Adams checked to be sure.

Grist for the Mill: CSIC Press Release via EurekAlert; CSIC Press Release at home site.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post). Great news from Spain. The phase I trial of an HIV preventive vaccine developed by Spanish scientists has proved its safety, and also that 90% of the 30 healthy volunteers generated an immune response to HIV. These are promising results. A phase II trial is needed to check if this immune response is indeed protective. Researchers are optimistic because the immunization has been maintained for more than 1 year in 85% of the cases. There is no fixed date  yet to start the phase II but next month it will begin a phase I trial with 30 HIV infected patients to check its safety as a therapeutic vaccine. All health sections of the Spanish press have covered yesterday’s announcement, providing different angles from funding for phase II trials, comparison with other HIV vaccines that are being tested, and even interviews to the volunteers that have participated in the study.

We’d like to point out that after a quick search we’ve been some headlines in the US press like “HIV MVA-B Vaccine May Reduce Virus To ‘Minor Chronic Infection’!”. To our knowledge, no Spanish scientist or research institution has used this exaggerated expression. Spanish reporters have not used it either.

Esperanzadoras noticias en España. Un equipo del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) ha presentado los primeros resultados en humanos de una prometedora vacuna contra el VIH que ha conseguido inducir una respuesta inmune contra el virus en el 90 por ciento de los personas que la han recibido. Además, estos efectos se mantienen durante al menos un año en el 85 por ciento de los casos.

Es cierto que todavía se trata de un ensayo en fase I, cuyo objetivo es comprobar que no tenga efectos adversos. Pero además de demostrar su seguridad, se analizó la respuesta de los 30 voluntarios sanos que participaron en el ensayo, y la vacuna generó respuesta inmunológica en el 90% de ellos. Este es un resultado excelente. No estamos hablando de ratitas, ni cultivos celulares, ni resultados poco significativos. Son datos prometedores de verdad.

Falta comprobar si las defensas generadas por la vacuna generan protección. Esto todavía se desconoce, y es uno de los siguientes pasos a realizar con ensayos clínicos de fase II para evaluar su eficacia como vacuna preventiva. Otro paso es empezar un ensayo de fase I como vacuna terapéutica en individuos ya infectados. Esto último empezará ya en octubre. El ensayo preventivo en fase II está en busca de financiación y acuerdos con entidades. Merece la pena resaltar que las primeras investigaciones con esta vacuna empezaron hace 10 años.

Ayer el twitter de los periodistas de salud españoles iba transmitiendo los datos que la rueda de prensa del CSIC ofrecía. Los ánimos iniciales se iban transformando en cautela, pero volvían a sentirse eufóricos al constatar que realmente sí era una noticia de hondo calado. Quizás la fase II muestra que la inmunización de esta vacuna no genera protección. Podría ser; pero con un 90% de respuesta sí se espera que inmunice a un porcentaje alto de los voluntarios. Todas las secciones de salud han ofrecido excelentes notas, acompañados de contenidos extra.

-Público – Ainhoa Iriberri “La vacuna española del SIDA supera su primer examen”. Bonito titular, y ágil lectura destacando que los resultados superan al prototipo de Tailandia. Además, Ainhoa entrevista a uno de los 30 voluntarios sanos que se sometió al ensayo; un químico investigador predoctoral que relata su experiencia y motivaciones personales.

-ABC – R. Ibarra “La Vacuna española contra el VIH logra una respuesta inmune del 90%”. Una buena pieza que incluye los primeros pasos que se dieron en el desarrollo de la vacuna, y cuenta con la nota de Teresa Sánchez Vicente “Alrededor de 50.000 españoles están infectados con el VIH y no lo saben”; un texto que resume el estado de los fármacos, el declive en infecciones, la importancia del diagnóstico temprano, y otros datos de interés.

-El Mundo – Isabel F Lantigua “El CSIC busca apoyo para seguir investigando la primera vacuna española contra el sida” Interesante enfoque el de Isabel, quien parece saber que los resultados obtenidos de explican y entienden rápido, e incide ya en la importancia de seguir los estudios con nuevas fases.

- El País – Emilio de Benito “Un prototipo español de vacuna contra el VIH supera la primera fase de pruebas”. Texto básico pero muy bien estructurado con los principales datos del anuncio.

- El Servicio de Información y Noticias Científicas (SINC) “La vacuna española contra el VIH supera con éxito la primera fase” también da una información muy completa. Por lo detallado de su texto, las declaraciones en exclusiva del responsable de la investigación (acompañadas por un buen video), y por un despiece con preguntas clave a otros expertos: ¿Qué porcentaje de prevención se consideraría suficiente para decir que la vacuna ha sido un éxito? y ¿Esta investigación se realizará íntegramente en España o tendrá que salir cuando llegue a fases más avanzadas?, entre otras.

Interesante también el decálogo que ha preparado para Amazings el investigador Lucas Sánchez “Diez claves para entender los resultados y el futuro de la vacuna española contra el SIDA“, que si bien no aporta nada nuevo respecto lo que ya habían publicado los medios convencionales, presenta los puntos claves del asunto de manera muy clara y concisa. Excelente complemento divulgativo.

Probablemente no tendremos más noticias sobre esta vacuna hasta que anuncien que empieza el ensayo preventivo en fase II, o concluya el estudio en fase I de su valor terapéutico. Esperemos que cuando lleguen nuevas informaciones, sean tan positivas como la de ayer.

- Pere Estupinyà

Mtn Pine Beetle v. a Ponderosa's Pitch / Whitney Cranshaw, Col.St.Univ

Mari Jensen, of the University of Arizona news office where bark beetles have near-on erased the pinyon pine woodlands, tips us off to a gem running in Canada. It opens a writerly window on a slowly unfolding, epic transformation of North American landscape.

• Calgary Herald – Andrew Nikiforuk: Can the tree whisperer save our forests? ;

Nikiforuk is a book author in Alberta. This is an excerpt from his latest, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests.

I am definitely buying this book to read the rest of it. The excerpt is engrossing. It also goes to show that not all the good ideas in science start with scientists.

First thing I’ll do is see if the index includes a reference to a retired US Forest Service entomologist, Jesse Logan. Five years ago he told me that climate change had unleashed the greatest blight to ever hit the continent and it was heading for far worse. I accompanied him into the Wind River Range of Wyoming. The mountain pine beetles were then already moving north and to higher altitudes, killing the whitebark pines at treeline in the US Rockies. They had destroyed nearly all the lodgepoles in the once-frigid interior of British Columbia where they were the basis of its timber industry. He said they’d cross the Canadian Rockies into Alberta, which they promptly did. He said they probably would get into the Jack Pine of the boreal forest, which in the last year they did. He said they won’t stop till they reached the Atlantic. We’ll have to wait and see on that but the scenario is getting some ink:

• Calgary Herald, July 8, 2011, Bill Mah, Sean Myers: Pine beetles becoming national threat, Alberta says battle must stop here;

I did get a story out on the situation then, in ScienceTimes yet and thanks to NYT editors who put up with and fixed my way-over-large draft, but knew it could not accord the scale of the story its due. This book looks to be on the right track.

The excerpt concerns an acoustics artist who started fooling around with his gear to learn what sorts of noises are to be found in healthy pines compared to those that the beetles and their larvae are driving toward almost certain death. Nikiforuk reports that his artist source may be on to something that, in the pinyon country of Arizona and New Mexico, was also understood by Pueblo elders. They say, “the beetles come when the trees cry.” That’s nice. But, just to exercise the critic’s reflex, I can’t go along easily with Nikiforuk’s interpretation of that as that drought-stressed trees make a crying sound that brings the beetles. One suspects, rather, that the pitch that trees exude when under attack, and that can expel invaders, make them look like they are crying. Less poetic, less in tune with the acoustician’s discoveries, but more plausible from here.

However, the rest of this seems right – that the beetles live in an acoustic environment and use it as a guide. And that interfering or altering it could well upset their ability to mate efficiently. Whether it’s practical to wire whole forests into beetle-baffling noise-makers is something else. But it could provide some avenue to thwart the blight by not only mountain pine beetles that go after three-needle-pine, but their kin that attack all manner of conifers.

   – Charlie Petit

Your tracker has to confess to deliberately ignoring the day by day  coverage as NASA’s defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite tumbled lower and lower in orbit, out of control and just barely vaguely posing a chance of hurting somebody as its stouter bits crash to Earth. You’d have to be nuts to lose sleep over it – or dreadfully ignorant of this one corner of reality. One must be fair. Most people have more important things to do than to bone up on such things as odds of space debris hitting anybody. Public anxiety is understandable and no character flaw. But it was still baseless.

Anyway, it’s usable news now because of a lucky shot. Not only did the bird make its final flutter without damage to any human or human-crafted thing when it finally got deep enough into the atmosphere on Saturday to fall apart and fall down, it did so right where NASA’s engineers would have aimed it if they had any operating aiming gadgets with which to do it. Somewhere east of Samoa, and before reaching Seattle or Alaska, over the near-empty Pacific, its pieces splashed and now sleep with the abyssal fishes. So say folks at NASA. But you’d think they’d have released their map in a form not bordered by the International Dateline and neatly bisecting the final miles of trajectory.

As the AP‘s prolific and reliable  Seth Borenstein wrote of the immolation in fully convincing fashion, “That dead NASA satellite fell into what might be the ideal spot..:” His story reflects consultation with several people who know their reentry ballistics. Nice job. However. He puts the crash scene’s encounter with water, at least in the story version I just read, within “the southern Pacific Ocean.” Hmm. Barely. He also writes that serious, violent reentry probably began somewhere in the sky above Samoa and that ocean impact of the debris trail probably started not far from Christmas Island, continuing for 500 miles to the Northeast. It’s true that the satellite’s final scrape with the air began off southernmost Africa and looped south of Australia, but Christmas Island is just north of the equator. “South Pacific” in general usage means Polynesia and Melanesia and Mironesia, parts of which are north of the planet’s midsection. “Southern Pacific” to me means, uh, New Zealand or something like that. “Equatorial Pacific” for splashdown would be preferable.

This most-appropriate thud at the end of such frenzied news coverage gets due rendering at several outlets.

Other stories:

• PopSci – Clay Dillow: NASA’s Falling UARS Satellite Found in Remote South Pacific ; Hmm. The story, as suggested by a tagline credit, depends almost entirely on Borenstein’s AP account. How the headline writer decided anybody found it, as in really found it and said hey! lookie there, is hard to discern.
• Sky News (Australia) NASA – Satellite fell in south Pacific; This agrees it has been found.
• ABC (blog) Ned Potter: NASA UARS Satellite Crash Site Confirmed in Pacific ;
• NPR (blog) Mark Memmott: Satellite Fell Into South Pacific Far From Land, NASA Says;
  

Still other select stories from before the crash, or just cuckoo:

• The Telegraph (UK) Tom Chivers: NASA satellite plunging to Earth: how to avoid fiery death ; Deliciously arch.
• Mirror (UK) Lesley Yarranton: Satellite crash: ‘debris falls on remote farmland in Canada.” 
• International Business Times: Strange Object Found in India: Part of NASA’s Satellite? ; How else get that crater in the garden? Also see similar dispatch in India’s Nagaland Post.

Dept of Opportunistic Reporting in the Midst of Madness:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Meteoroid impacts may explain some satellite mysteries ; A roundup on related, pertinent news of space junk and micrometeor damage.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Re-Entry Overview bulletin.

- Charlie Petit

My. How things can get turned around, puffed up, or otherwise transmogrified on the way from press release to news story.

The other day, gazing at the river that is my inbox, I saw bobbing past a lengthy release about better batteries. It was from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (the place UC operates and DOE pays for, about half a mile from where I live and for which for additional reasons I harbor a fondness). It’s down there in Grist if you want to jump straight to it. It said – take a deep breath here – a new silicon-rich anode material for lithium ion batteries cushioned in a rubbery and electrically-conducting matrix can absorb far more lithium – eight times more it says – and then let it oxidize into cations and drain out (I think, my electrochemistry is vague)  and back and forth hundreds of times in charge-discharge cycles without breaking down like the usual kind would if you tried to give it such performance.  This, it said, seems to offer a way to significantly improve an important component in such batteries’ ability to store energy. Notably, it didn’t say by how much better things will get, but it helps things along. Also sweet: The material is, it says here, inherently scalable to heavy production and won’t cost much.

Who cares? I do. Right now, I’m working toward personal investment in Li-ion batteries. I have solar panels up the yazoo – actually upon the roof – that easily zero our electrical bill. We got juice to spare. I just hired our contractor to run a 240v line to the garage – not from the panels, but from the grid that buffers them – and to stop all the leaks in the garage so that when we get an electric car with a belly full of Li-ion batteries I or Mrs. Tracker don’t have to stand in a wintertime storm puddle while plugging it in. Going post-petroleum is hard enough without fear it’ll kill one of us. And I calculate we can drive several thousand miles a year before owing PG&E anything.

I’m aquiver for relevant news. For all the hedging in the release, the new little darling stuff being hatched at the  lab sounded cool. I watched for news stories. This isn’t exactly a new planet or human ancestor or a better tablet computer, so there has not been much media attention. But here’s one, at a longtime specialty outlet, that stands out:

• ZDNews – Chris Jablonski: Development boosts lithium-ion battery power by 8-fold ;

Sigh. First off, perhaps Mr. Jablonski did not write that headline, always a good bet with an error like this. Nothing in the release or the story says the battery might have more power (though, it could I suppose). Eventual, operating batteries with this material in them may have higher energy density. More ergs stuffed in them. Power measures how fast you can move the energy out. It’s like the difference between gallons per minute at a high pressure, which can have a lot of power, and gallons in the tank. More in the tank doesn’t mean you can get it out any faster. You need more pressure, or more volume per unit time, or both. ZDNews is not nobody. It’s been around 20 years, dates back to the old Ziff-Davis publishing empire, is now part of CNET, and its readership comprises a lot of the kind of people who talk tech all the time and some will be chattering about the good news on advanced batteries.

It also is not justified to interpret the eight-times-greater storage capacity of lithium in the anode part of the battery as eight times more energy for the whole battery, which Jablonski does imply. I had already checked with the man who wrote the release, a longtime news office pro who takes his job seriously, to ask why there is nothing in the handout regarding how much a finished battery’s energy capacity might be better than standard. He said the researchers were coy, for good reason. Alone, the new stuff might boost a battery’s energy by a sizable fraction, but not two or three or eight times. To exploit it fully will require a cathode material that matches it. Thus, nobody knows the practical potential and the ones who know a lot won’t guess in public.

By the way, if one reads the release carefully, the engrossing story is not the news itself. It lies in how the research team made and tested the polymer. With help from an accelerator’s X-rays to study its structure, and with computer processing to model its band gaps and valences and other electrical character traits, they were able to tailor it to the demands it would face in the battery.  These were no Thomas Edisons trying everything in the warehouse until they found one that worked in a lightbulb. Science has moved forward since Menlo Park. This is big-time modern materials science. The Berkeley team mapped the terrain of possibility and charted a course with eyes wide open. Could make a new product. Lots of national labs do this kind of thing. Tax dollars well spent.

This has gone on too long, but one more observation. At least Mr. Zablonski gave the story a try. Battery and solar cells and similar things work by processes that are devilishly hard to turn into plain English. Electrochemists have acccumulated through history a slippery jargon that defies easy digestion. For instance they call this stuff the anode material, but in rechargeable batteries where the oxidation and reduction reactions periodically go in reverse and thus swap category, sometimes one pole of the battery is the anode and sometimes the same pole is the cathode. One must suppose this anode in the Berkeley experiments is in anode mode during discharge, but criminy. And why in tarnation is current considered to be going one way through a wire, when the electrons carrying the current are going the other? And then there is the vagueness of positive versus negative ends in rechargeable batteries. If one is not an expert or has not recently studied-up, battery-talk fries the brain.

Grist for the Mill:

LBL Press Release ; Portal to paper in Advanced Materials.

- Charlie Petit

Wow. If ScienceTimes’s editors told me they had a special issue coming up on medical care in nation’s saddle by poverty and lack of infrastructure, I’d think how worthy and how very dull.

Worthy yes, dull no. The section is led and promoted by ace health writer Donald G. McNeil Jr. whose primary contribution on a dirt cheap test for precancerous lesions in cervical cancer is on the front page of the front section (with a large insert-plug for the whole section). It is a refreshing reminder how clever people can be when under the gun to find a better, cheaper way of business. We find astonishingly easy ways to nearly wipe out mosquitoes with sprayed fruit juice, to run diagnostic blood tests on postage stamp-sizes bits of paper, to get medicine distributed to remote farms and villages, powdered vitamins for small children, things called PeePoo bags, and more. If you thought distributing mosquito nets was the acme of resourcefulness in public health for poor people, this section will be bracing. It ought to be required reading at every health-related NGO.

Rather than list them separately, just look at the Health compartment of the ScienceTimes’s lineup. A super package with, by perhaps incomplete count six byline, several of them on two or more stories: McNeil plus Nicholas Bakalar, Celia W. Dugger, Pam Belluck (who provides one example of an easy fix that is not gaining fast traction), Sindya N. Bhanoo, Lawrence K. Altman , Abigail Zuger,  and Thomas Fuller.

(Late addition: I believe I shall update this post with separate listings of stories. There may be some value to having posts that don’t lose their links’s usefulness in a short time. The Health and Science section generic links go to continuously-updated pages, with old links dropping off. So today or tomorrow I’ll make lists with links to the specific stories).

- Charlie Petit