One can only suppose that our recently laggard sun might still pull a Maunder Minimum or something similarly disconcertingly feeble on us, but right now it has a thoroughly muscular cluster of sunspots,   Region 1302,  and they’re aiming their eruptions into Earth’s sector. Supposedly, last night might have brought spectacular aurorae to the high latitudes. The Nat’l Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center says the geomagnetic ruckus is severe up there, but any aurorae were probably visible mainly over Europe’s and Asia’s far north. Judging by the solar cycle prediction plot, the service is sticking with expectation that sunspot ructions or not, the overall current cycle is a pipsqueak.

That did not stop heavy hoo-hah in some media in their dispatches on the supposed walloping underway and in the pipeline:

• International Business Times – Jamie Lewis: Sunspot’s Solar Flares Could Potentially Blow Every Electrical Circuit on Earth ; Really, IBT, really? Every one? Potentially is a big screen behind which to shield madness, but it’s not big enough. My electric watch has a circuit. I bet no solar storm ever in the history of Earth could blow it. The IBT appears to occupy a far fringe of media, not a bad place to start trackin’  (and leave as soon as possible). If you like to look in on lunacy once in awhile and this one doesn’t start your motors, I see that IBT disptaches are among cited sources for this rendition of reality: Space Weather Monitor: Solar Flares Could Unleash Nuclear Chaos on Planet Earth; Actually, that one harbors a shred of possible rational worry, maybe. If some day a solar storm did knock grids out widely and for days or weeks  — well, what would a nuclear operator do after the diesel fuel ran out without a tank truck in sight? Seems far-fetched. So did a 40-foot+ tsunami on Japan’s east coast.
• Daily Mail (UK) Ted Thornhill: The Day the Earth Went ‘Phut’? Earth in cross-hairs of gigantic solar storm that could blow circuits of ANYTHING from satellite TV to the electric power grid ; Yes, and unleash an egregious example of the false range in a newspaper headline.
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Huge sun storm may super-charge northern lights tonight ; Were back in the land of the sane, now.
• Los Angeles Times (blog) Deborah Netburn: Geomagnetic Storm may bring northern lights to you;
• USA Today (Science Fair blog) Dan Vergano: Sun delivers glancing solar storm blast at Earth;
• Universe Today – Adrian West: Massive Sunspot 1302 ; It’s a bit blurry, but this photo also gives reporter West credit. Along with intervening clouds, this sunset vista also clearly shows the spots. They look a little like the Hawaiian Islands.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA Goddard Press Release ; NOAA Space Weather Pred. Ctr. Geomagnetic Storm Update which, you will notice, is right off the agency’s Facebook page;

 

- Charlie Petit

And while searching for one thing – any story in the Anchorage Daily News reporting unusual northern lights due the solar storm Monday with chances of more from a giant sunspot complex (none) – The Tracker came across a diverting tale of surprise on Alaska’s Kodiak Island.

The Anchorage paper picked up from the smaller Kodiak Daily Mirror a story by reporter Wes Hanna. It says here that  the curator at the local Alutiq Museum and his colleagues got a surprise this summer. Hoping to find remains of  a permanent settlement by the early Alutiq culture that first occupied the region thousands of years ago (and has its  descendants still there), he found a field loaded with fully-manufactured tips of hunting tools – mostly the business ends of lances and spears. That’ll provide a different insight than what could have emerged from a year-around site, where presumably the debris of tool manufacture, middens, fishing and household gear, might be expected. It is the largest single trove of the game hunters’ kits ever found and dating so deep into Alutiq history. It’s a good tale of outdoor field science discovery, and it says here that the archeologists are eager to get back next season. Still to be uncovered are parts of the site hinting at yet-older, and permanent habitation, plus structures of a purpose yet to be figured out

Bonus Kodiak Island Science News for Rocketry Fans:

• Anchorage Daily News – Satellite launch set for Tuesday from Kodiak rocket complex ; Betcha forgot or never knew that Alaska has a space complex. This is about a Navy communications satellite called TacSat-4 with the Naval Research Lab a major architect. The story’s illus is of one that went up on the same sort of booster – a Minotaur from Orbital Sciences based largely on a modified Minuteman solid rocket ICBM – last year and carried seven as in 7 satellites which is enough to be a litter.  As I posted this, the specialty outlet SpaceflightNow carried a live feed (the pic to right is a screen shot) of the countdown, with reporter Stephen Clark tweeting and filing short updates. I expect the site will have updates later today on its fate. Yay – looked away for a moment and missed the launch – just see a white dot of hot engine nozzle on the screen. It worked, at least at first, leaving a twirled contrail in the pink early morning sky.

- Charlie Petit

Part way through a charming and worthy account at Reuters by reporter Alice Baghdjian in London, one encounters an indimidating proviso. Before I say what, I must say the story is a dandy even if it is no scoop. In brief, the Natural History Museum has asked the public to pitch in on the naming of five rather creepy – which means fascinating – worms that occupy themselves in the cold seabed off Antarctica with such tasks as consuming the corpses of whales.

Sounds like fun. Then one reads that the scientific names must not only be comprised of two parts, genus and species, but they must also have Greek or Latin origin. Oh gad, starts to sound like one needs some academic chops to tackle this task.

But, not to worry. And why write that requirement that way when bam, along comes an example of recently-named species: the spider Pachygnatha zappa, named for the American popular musician whose mustache somewhat resembles the arachnid’s markings. Another spider provided here as inspiration is Calponia harrisonfordi, another US celebrity immortalized in the encyclopedia of life. Latin shmatin. Clearly there are simple rules one can quickly learn by which any word can be rendered in a latinate form even if its cognates have no known connection to the ancient tongue.

That’s it, that’s the only complaint about this story registered here. Public campaigns of this sort are fun, make entertaining and illuminating reading, and stimulate a bit more interest in science, especially by the young, and that’s always good. This was all kicked off by a public event at the museum on Friday. It’s unclear here when the deadline for submission is up. Maybe it already is. If not, no reason science writers can’t enter. One must only enter the species word for the five worms that are in need of names. They already are in genus Ophryotrocha. As can be seen in Grist below, one may enter via Twitter. The entry material notes that a related kind of worm has the common name “bone-eating snotflower worm.”  My nomination, I believe but haven’t filed it yet, will be for whatever is the fastest-eater of the unnamed ones,  O. copyeditori. Just as these worms may render a grand bastion of muscle, gristle,  and heart but a flattened remnant of its once vital self, barely distinquishable from muck ……

Grist for the Mill: Natural History Museum Name a Worm;

(ps – just kidding!, whoever you copy editors might be and especially those named Beth who may yet wade into yours truly’s scrivenings)

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Very good and extensive coverage in Spain about the weird report of neutrinos seeming to move faster than light. The angles were not original: initial excitement followed by skepticism. But reporters are asking many Spanish scientists, doing infographics, glossaries to explain the physics behind the research, and combining very well the criticism with harmless digressions, and doing interesting follow-ups. The story was front page on Saturday’s El Mundo, and among the most read in digital editions.

No es lo mismo especular sobre si los neutrinos pueden viajar más rápido que la luz, que acerca de una posible cura definitiva para el cáncer. Lo primero no es pernicioso, e incluso resulta divertido. Está claro que decir “Einstein podría estar equivocado” es precipitadísimo, y mejor evitarlo en los titulares. Pero quizás no es tan grave utilizar este planteamiento para generar más interés en el lector. Al fin y al cabo; esto de la física teórica es una historia apasionante. Afín al tipo de análisis de este tracker, leer la reflexión de Pablo Jáuregui “La apoteosis de los neutrinos”, en El Mundo: se confirme la noticia o no, ”Una cosa sí ha quedado demostrada: la ciencia interesa, la ciencia fascina, la ciencia está más viva que nunca”

Quizás lo importante es hacer seguimiento; no quedarse simplemente con la noticia del viernes cuando científicos del CERN anunciaron que en un detector de neutrinos de Italia observaron algo extraño: parecía como si 15.000 neutrinos generados en el CERN de suiza 730 km más al norte hubieran llegado a su detector unas billonésimas de segundo antes que la luz. Los científicos explicaron que habían repetido sus cálculos en profundidad, pero que no encontraban error, y que por eso lo colgaban del Arxiv.org para que otros científicos colaborara en encontrar el fallo o confirmar lo que sería uno de los descubrimientos más importantes de la historia de la física. Seguro que si Einstein estuviera vivo, no perdería mucho tiempo diciendo que “no hay para tanto”, sino que se entusiasmaría en el resultado aunque sea para ver por dónde falla.

Como decíamos, lo interesante de un caso tan atractivo como éste es el seguimiento de la historia. Aprovechar el filón para sacar más y más notas desde diferentes ángulos. Si no, continuaremos transmitiendo una ciencia muy rigurosa pero aséptica. Fuera del ámbito de la ciencia, periodistas y comentaristas se están quedando con la copla de que la teoria de Einstein está amenazada y los neutrinos viajaron más rápido que la luz. No es malo que esto ocurra. Sería diferente escuchar falsas promesas sobre la curación del cáncer. Veamos algunas reacciones:

El Mundo (España) se tiró de cabeza a por la noticia. Nada más y nada menos que primera página en la edición del sábado (arriba). Y en la versión web, muy buenas notas. Gráficos, seguimiento de la presentación en el CERN para explicar el hallazgo, y consultas a expertos como el artículo de Miguel Corral “No haremos ninguna interpretación que ponga en duda las leyes de la física” (Qué conservadores sosales estos científicos…). Paréntesis aparte, el texto es una buena descripción de lo ocurrido.

El País cubre la historia con la experimentadísima Alicia Rivera “¿neutrinos más rápidos que la luz?” en un texto escéptico desde el principio que utiliza la expresión “controvertidos resultados” en el subtítulo. Utiliza el dato de que en la luz recibida de supernovas no hemos encontrado neutrinos que llegaran más pronto. Y después de la presentación del CERN escribe una nota cuyo título es esclarecedor: Alicia Rivera “presentan los resultados sin interpretación alguna a la velocidad de la luz”. El País añade también un artículo de opinión del físico Álvaro de Rújula “Más rápido que su sombra” que promete cortar su tiza si se confirmaran los resultados, y una gran recopilación de visiones de nuevo de Alicia Rivera “Revuelo a la velocidad de la luz”

En Público, Nuño Domínguez titula que “El neutrino desafía a Einstein”. Buena explicación del fenómeno, del escepticismo inicial con que se percibió, y muchas fuentes en su nota. El punto original que añade Nuño es la posibilidad de que sea una maniobra de publicidad del equipo de Opera en busca de financiación.

En ABC, Miguel Nieves es muy taxativo con “Hallan una partícula más rápida que la luz”, y un par de días después matiza con “Los físicos buscan un error que explique los neutrinos más rápidos que la luz” (M.Nieves). Un muy buen texto que también habla de las supernovas, de la posibilidad de otras dimensiones, e incluye un muy útil glosario “para no perderse” que ayuda al lector a situar estos esquivos neutrinos.

El La Vanguardia, Josep Corbella también utiliza interrogantes en su titular, pero sugiere la posibilidad de viajes en el tiempo ya desde el subtítulo. Busca también expertos no relacionados con la investigación que en este caso dicen no ver error alguno en el artículo publicado. Sí mantiene abierta la opción de que la relatividad de Einstein estuviera equivocada.

Por falta de tiempo no hemos revisado las notas en Latinoamérica. Ampliaremos en próximos posts.

- Pere Estupinyà

Pub. Aug 14, 1975

The AP‘s Charles J. Hanley undertakes to unsort a cause for the exasperation many – I should say the overwhelming majority  of – climate scientists feel about America’s policies on energy and climate change. He refers to an “American allergy” to it, and talks with several prominent analysts and head-scratchers in hope of an explanation.

The story takes on a genuine and profound issue. It may not describe it quite correctly, however. The allergy term seems right enough. but is it one expressed by the American public overall, or primarily by elected officials? That is, the enormous surge of conservative lawmakers in Congress last year, and the deepening freeze in place on climate laws including a push by the next conservative batch of candidates to undo the ones we have, seems mainly to be a reflection of voter anger over a continuing rotten economy. The bums that got tossed were mostly Dems, and the Republicans who went in were heavily of Tea Party persuasion. Scoffing at climate science, along with  even more securely bedrock science such as evolution, is a trait of that lot. The GOP’s primaries,  heavily dominated by determined activists, compel candidates to court the Tea Party faithful. So a tail wags the dog. Yet public polls find Americans tend to say climate change is real, and a problem. Some of us have this allergy, but not most.

Second, to what degree does the USA stand out? One’s impression is that Australian and Canadian governments have somewhat similarly scaled down their intentions to curb carbon emissions, and perhaps one can include the UK. Globally, for reasons beyond this allergy, no carbon regs with teeth seem to be on the immediate agenda. I can cite no specific study but do feel that while the US stands out, it does not do so by much.

On the whole, the piece holds up. Whether the extent of the allerg or its source is well deliniated, the question is broadly valid. The proposed explanations are thought provoking, if not groundbreaking.  It does not and could not fully answer the ‘why?’ in its headline. But it selects from its sources’ opinions a reasonable set of hypotheses.

But one other thing. The first source up is Wallace Broecker, the famed geologist and general climate authority of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. In 1975, as Hanley reports, Broecker wrote a paper forecasting that, right about now in the first decade of this century, the planet’s temperature should be hitting a record high for the past 1000 years due to additional CO2 in the air from fossil fuel burning.  He got that right. But Hanley’s story reports it got little reaction in media (even though it was in Science), and Broecker tells him – in the second paragraph – he recalls no newspaper coverage at all. That’s odd. It didn’t get much, perhaps. Hanley might well have noted (and could have as easily found out as I just did) that Broecker’s own “local” paper, the NYTimes, covered it, under the byline of the late and revered Walter Sullivan. Sully, one must say, wrote on two papers – he focussed first on one in Nature in which New Zealand authors described a Southern Hemisphere warming and proposed it signaled a global shift to warming. That tilt has since reversed, with the N.Hemisphere doing most of the heating up. But he gave Broecker’s piece in Science a good ride too, and as the illus shows, mentioned it first before looking at length at the Nature report.

- Charlie Petit

These are stunning times for study of how our species evolved and expanded its range around the world and pole to pole. The news flow has been correspondingly lively, with a big bolus today in media around the world. It puts a glamorous adventuring angle on the first people to reach Australia, and includes for a whiff of 19th century anthropology a lock of hair from a young Australian aboriginal man and that had been in a British museum until removed for DNA testing.

The latest spin is that the population by modern humans of the world, once thought to have radiated from a single small population that hit the road perhaps 70,000 or more years ago, had two distinct pulses of migration. The earliest explains arrival in Australia, and nearby areas of the ancestors,  to today’s Australian aborigines, but left little or no genetic remnant elsewhere. Later, perhaps by 10,000 or 20,000+ years, a second band of humans left Africa, or at least left camp somewhere near Africa, and expanded and persisted across a much broader landscape. This second expansion, it says here, explains most of the ancestry of today many Eurasian peoples as well as those that traveled to the America’s in the last 15,000 years or so. And because H. sapiens had been living and diversifying in Africa for as much as 100,000 years before the departures, and has continued evolving there ever since, it is consistent with Africa being home to the most genetically diverse and long-evolving native peoples on the planet.

This news is just the latest. In the least few years we’ve also learned that the old bi-polar view of H. sapiens either appearing in Africa and then migrating out, replacing without interbreeding such other more primitive species as Neanderthals and H. erectus, or evolving around the world in a ‘multi-regional’ way as various hominid species intermingled and genes flowed freely, has birthed a hybrid. That is, it was mostly expand-and-replace by Africa’s H. sapiens as they met their distant kin, but there was some interbreeding as well with Neanderthals in Europe, Denisovans in northern Asia, and perhaps others. This reminds one of the 19th century geological debate between gradualism, or slow steady change, as the sculptor of Earth’s geology, or catastrophism as in giant floods. Turns out it was mostly gradual. But the occasional asteroid or titanic volcano did play important roles.

The new, double-migration evidence comes from a team of dozens of researchers, led by two Danish geneticists and published in this week’s Science. A key piece of the argument is that traditional European populations carry have few of the genes that make Australian aborigines distinct in DNA studies. The implication is that they did not arise from recent common ancestors who were part of one, initial migration from Africa. Rather, different African populations, at different times and that had been isolated from each other since a much earlier time, were the forefathers of aborigines and of Europeans. Aboriginal hair, analyzed at a lab in China, provided the most persuasive clues.

Neither the old version nor the new clears up an enduring mystery. How did such early people get to Australia?  Boats? The water around the island continent is and was deep. Archeology reveals no sign of boats that long ago, just simple kits of stone tools.

Stories:

• NY times – Nicholas Wade: Australian Aborigine Hair Tells a Story of Human Migration ; Wade introduces another mystery – why did the Australian aboriginal people keep that continent to themselves until the arrival of modern explorers in recent centuries? If their ancestors reached the place, why did not Polynesians or other Southeast Asians many hundreds or thousands of years ago? And what – perhaps an abortive migration in my new people around 4,000 to 6,000 years ago – explains a shift toward more sophisticated tools and the arrival of dogs similar to those kept by Polynesians? While dwelling on that, Wade largely ignores – other than to say the exact migration sequences are unknown – the double-wave theme of most news stories.
• Telegraph (UK) Bonnie Malkin : Aboriginal genome rewrites history of human migration ; filed from Sydney. One is unsure what to make of the declaration: “The researchers believe this proves that Aborigines were the first group to separate from other modern humans.” They got isolated, true enough, perhaps 45,000 years ago. But their ancestors presumably took awhile to get from Africa to Australia, presumably picking up new evolutionary traits on the way. Which “separation” is the distinct one?  And in Africa, modern people had been separating and diversifying for a long time before any of them left. She gets a quote from a research leader, “Aboriginal Australians descend from the first human explorers.” If exploration hasn’t occurred until one undertakes intercontinental travel, that may make sense. But it seems loosely expressed. What is solid is that, as it says here, the aborigines have the longest association with one land mass of any distinct population known today, and that they have a singular genetic link to very early migrants from Africa.
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Hair DNA reveals 2 migration waves out of Africa, plus sidebar  Australian Aborigine’s lock of hair unlocks history ; Great narrative intro, focussed on the good fortune in the UK to find a hair sample taken long enough ago to assure its owner had no parentage outside the original aborigines of Australia, and a “bold race of early modern humans” whose story is becoming clearly. The strong sidebar relates the pains to which the researchers went to track down the donor’s (voluntary or not) living descendants a gold mining district of southwest Australia to be sure it would be okay to go through a part of their family genome. Perlman weaves in the resistance the double-migration story will get from many experts. One offers however that Perlman errs in lumping Neanderthals in Europe – in a passing reference – with the second migration of modern humans from Africa. Their ancestors, most sources say, left Africa as part of the general H. erectus radiation across the Old World and dating pack perhaps half a million years.
• Bloomberg – Frances Schwartzkopff: Hair Shows Aborigine Ancestors Were First to Explore World ; OK. One would prefer some mention that the data pertain only to modern, H. sapien people. Other near-humans, or stone age people, or whatever, had left Africa much earlier.
• New Scientist: Michael Marshall: Humans colonized Asia in two waves ; One of the better at exploring the guesswork behind saying here were two waves. One well known authority says that does not explain how or why it took 20,000 years to reach Australia, nor exactly why one migration could not have split and explained the distinct genetics of today’s aborigines. This source has a strong quote: One thing I’ve learned from being in anthropology for a long time is that data alone are never enough to settle an argument.”
• Cosmos (Australia) – Catherine de Lange: Aboriginal genome rewrites human dispersal story ;

*UPDATE: As often occurs, a claim in the news turns out not to be so new after all. Longtime tracker reader and environmental activist Steve Bloom tips us off to his hunch he’d read about a double-wave, out-of-Africa dispersal previously.  He tracked it down, via a BBC broadcast some years ago, to an analysis (complete with genetic sample) in 2002 by geneticist Spencer Wells, prominent for his work for the Nat’l Geographic Society. Bloom confirms it with a Wikipedia entry, and I turned up another posting, date uncertain, for Wells’s explanation of a two-wave African disperal – with the first wave moving along South Asia to Australia – leaving a few genetic fingerprints along its route but most of the world’s non-African peoples descended primarily from a second, more northerly wave. This all is derived from a book of Wells’s, The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey.

Even if the news is not wholly new (and to be purely new has never been a requirement of what makes a media splash), it still seems to advance the ball with better data and a more precise explanation.

Grist for the Mill:

University of Copenhagen Press Release ; UK Bioetechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Press Release;

 

- Charlie Petit

Quick, somebody summon Einstein from the great beyond. Maybe secular St. Albert would come up with a reason why neutrinos – particles that scoff at solid matter and fly through it almost like it’s vacuum – appear after double-checking to traverse our planet’s crust an oonch faster than what the books say is the speed of light,  which means light in a vacuum and the fastest it is supposed to be able to go.

Maybe some weird time-dilating gravitational red-shift or blue-shift distorts what we think is the right stop-watch, so that these things seem to be zipping past with a c+ grade of hypervelocity. After all, there are geometric reasons why so-called “superluminal” jets in cosmic settings aren’t really squirting along faster than light even though that’s what the eyes seem to see.

And what a feast for reporters, and what an opportunity to be reckless while knowing that exaggeration and hyperbole and outright fabrication on a question like this cannot possibly hurt anybody. It’s not like proclaiming, uh, resveratrol a fountain of youth. It’s just neutrinos.

Most reporters are giving it good play while trying earnestly to be sensible. The news, in case you’ve been without connection for the last day, is that neutrinos generated at the CERN laboratory on the border of France and Switzerland showed up at the Gran Sasso lab under a mountain in Italy ahead of schedule . That’s 730 km and they got there about 60 billionths of a second too soon. It’s so amazing, the researchers announced the finding promptly so that colleagues around the world can help them puzzle it out. Hmm. OK, here goes from the peanut gallery. Light goes exactly 299,792,458 meters per second. It’s exact because the definition of meter is welded on to the speed of light. So, we calculate the physical scale of this discrepancy by multiplying that 299,792,458 m/sec by 60 X 10^-9 seconds and we get, rounding a bit to keep this brain from locking up as it usually does when doing arithmetic without a net, just about 18 meters. The neutrinos, the amazed physicists say, typically were in our machine when they should have been just outside the door. This after going 730 km. You’d think that if a particle knew how to go faster than light it’d be miles ahead by then. Before we overturn relativity we ought to check the calipers. And that, of course, is being done and surely not for the first time. In the meantime we have an entertaining crisis in public physics.

• Reuters -  Robert Evans: “Faster than light” particles may be physics revolution ; First clause – this could force major rethink. Second clause – first it must be confirmed independently. Good thing, even if they’re in the wrong order, they both are in the lede. Evans got hold of big names to scratch their heads. The knighted cosmologist Martin Rees, and Stephen Hawking – uh, never mind the head scratching metaphor. Both said the same thing: just let’s hang on for verification.
• AP – Frank Jordans, Seth Borenstein: Roll over Einstein: Pillar of physics challenged ; Nice job explaining that even if the laws of physics are not entirely what we thought, it doesn’t affect most of us. The gadgets we depend on and that were engineered with relativity in mind won’t stop working. But physicists will have to work hard to find why this exception to the general run of particle behavior has been exploiting its loophole all along, or “have presumably been speed demons for billions of years.” Even I know that if neutrinos have the smidge of mass now assigned to them, even to go exactly the speed of light would endow them with, um, infinite mass. So something is screwy. The story nicely explains also that the finding is not so much disturbing to physicists as it is exhilarating.
• Forbes – Tim Worstall: Faster Than LIght? Using Money to Check Whether Einstein Was Wrong ; Amateur common sense by those without much experience in higher mathematics usually gets people in trouble when they try to interrupt a conversation about relativity theory among physicists (or science writers, as here). But it serves Worstall pretty well. His instinct is that this finding either will hold, but won’t really mean so much and that special and general relativity will remain intensely useful tools, or more likely it’s just a measurement error. I don’t understand his citation of time travel as the show stopper. Story has an admirably light tone without being overtly silly.
• ScienceNOW – Adrian Cho: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light, According to One Experiment ;If true, biggest discovery in physics in half a century. Maybe make that particle physics. One thinks the acceleration of the universe and dark energy is bigger. But the story finds nobody who believes the Gran Sasso results. Not yet. Not even the people who conducted the experiment.
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Tiny Neutrinos May Have Broken Cosmic Speed Limit ; He provides what, to me the first moment I heard about this, is the best argument against this result. Supernova in other galaxies emit lots of light, and also a burst of neutrinos at the outset as their exhausted parent stars’ cores collapse. Nobody has found any discrepancy in the arrival of neutrinos and light from such events. But he also gets one neutrino astronomer’s surmise (not a proclamation) that maybe neutrinos can take shortcuts, via extra dimensions. That’d be cool. If so.
• Cosmos (Australia) Phillip English: Tests needed for faster-than-light neutrino ;
• Wall St Journal – Gautam Naik: Particles Found Faster Than Light ; Here’s a question. Even with Mr. Murdoch’s team fiddling with the bearings, the Journal is a straight-shooting publication. So, how does one justify a headline like this, an unvarnished declaration of fact, for a result that partically nobody appears to believe? Naik’s story itself  is found to be fine.
• LA Times – Eryn Brown, Amina Khan: Faster than light? CERN findings bewilder scientists ;
• NatureNews – Geoff Brumfiel: Particles break light-speed limit ; Same question is posed to the Wall St. Journal. No shred of doubt to reflect in the hed. Scientific American picked this up, and put a similarly non-qualified hed on it (Particles Found to Travel Faster than Speed of Light). Seems to me that this is not ‘find’ as in ‘jury finds OJ not guilty,’ but find as in ‘Submarine finds Titanic.’ Story says most doubt it – but also does a nice job explaining why the team feels compelled to publish it. By standard statistics, this is a six-sigma result. That means the results look to be six standard deviations from being attributable to chance. It also has more on the supernova results mentioned by Overbye at the NYTimes.
• Wired – Duncan Geere: Cern detects particles appearing to break the speed of light ;
• New Scientist – Lisa Grossman: Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed ; And, she writes in this effort to explain that even if the detector and source are where they are supposed to be and the stop watch is perfect, this may not mean that Einstein was wrong, exactly, so much as he described rules for a universe without extra dimensions. As she writes, “Fish that physics textbook out of the wastebasket.” And she mentions the supernova result that saw nothing like what they got at Gran Sasso.
• Independent (UK)  Lewis Smith: Scientists ‘break’ speed of light – and Einsteins’s laws of physics ;
• BBC – Jason Palmer: Light speed: Flying into fantasy ; Nicely done, with an air of detached bemusement.
• Guardian (UK) Alok Jha, Ian Sample: Physicists urge caution over apparent speed of light violation ; These two have a good time entertaining thoughts of time travel. And wormholes.
• … scads more, and it’s a big news day.

*UPDATES:

• Inside Science News Service (Amer. Inst. Physics) Ben P. Stein: Physicists Report Evidence of a Quicker-Than-Light Particle / But hold the revolution: results need confirmation, may not radically alter physics ; Two notable things about this. First, if the AIP’s service writes on this and not as an overt quackery alert, the news is legit. Second, it writes that the departure from lights speed for this particular phenomena might be squeezed into standard physics without drastic rebuilding of its structure.
• AP: Frank Jordans, Seth Borenstein: Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture ; These two reporters called around. Of the more than a dozen physicists they had called at the time of this writing, every single one expects Einstein’s ghost to get the last laugh.
• EmbargoWatch – Ivan Oransky: Did Reuters and the BBC break the embargo on the neutrinos-speed of light story? ; Oransky put his nuance spectrometer into overdrive to sort this out. Read it to appreciate how flexible – and ambiguous – is the world of embargoes and the dance between sources who know they have a story, and reporters who smell it, and the agreements they make. In this case, there was no embargo. There were merely a few people with info telling a few curious reporters to please wait a bit. The term gentleman’s agreement comes up. Inspection of embargo breaks seemed to some of us (me) a dusty corner of journalism criticism to live when he started this site up, but it turns out to be an insightful, sharp, and entertaining way to observe the behavior of journalists and their quarry (and press agents and their prey too) in general.

OK, here’s my next ignorant guess. We can’t have physicists have all the fun. If there is no systematic error – ie no mistake – then I posit with neither knowledge nor data at all that at their moment of creation neutrinos get little extra-dimensional head starts. Test will show if they keep their barely superluminal pace up, or are even accelerating (!), or just do some little inflationary, flavor-changing, 13-dimensionally winking fan dance at birth and then obey the speed limit after that. It has to do with entanglement. Or strings. Yeh, tangled strings attached to Kaluza Klein M-brane yo-yos.  Why not?

Grist for the Mill: Announcement paper at arXiv prepublication service; CERN Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

It’s a classic response of some editors to assume that if the liberals are saying one thing, and the conservatives another, that the truth lies somewhere in between. Where this doctrine comes from is a mystery. Where is it written that liberals or conservatives cannot sometimes be right? Or mostly right? Or completely wrong?

This is one version of a problem that Chris Mooney, our most prominent and adept critic of the political abuse of science, addresses in a post on his newly transplanted blog. Mooney’s science and policy commentaries are now appear on a blog called Science Progress, part of the blog family of the liberal Center for American Progress. And he has a nice post up today.

Just as some editors assume that the truth always lies in the middle, some writers assume that conservatives and liberals are all the same, each as bad as the other. Mooney finds a prime example in a USA Today opinion piece, which he uses as the take-off point of his commentary. Here’s what Alex B. Berezow wrote in USA Today:

In short, for every anti-science Republican that exists, there is at least one anti-science Democrat. Neither party has a monopoly on scientific illiteracy. Indeed, ignorance has reached epidemic proportions inside the Beltway.

That’s a nice bit of writing; its only flaw is that it happens to be untrue, as Mooney points out. We don’t see anything in the story to back up this claim.

As Mooney notes, many Republicans reject evolution and climate science, and there is no example of Democrats correspondingly rejecting a theory or an entire field of science.

Mooney does not wonder who the USA Today writer is, but I was curious. The credit line on the story said Berezow was a Ph.D. microbiologist and the editor of RealClearScience.com. I jumped over to take a look. RealClearScience is an aggregator, posting links to 15-20 science stories daily, in the morning and again in the afternoon. The stories Berezow links to are mainstream science stories, many written by writers we know.

Berezow’s site links to several sister sites, including one called RealClearPolitics.com. I browsed through this site to see whether it had a point of view, and I found links to articles by writers from both sides of the political spectrum.

I made a little more progress when I did a quick Google search. Berezow wrote a piece for the conservative National Review Online with the headline Gender Discrimination in Science is a Myth. He’s also a contributor to the conservative publication The American Spectator.

You might wonder why I took a few minutes to run Berezow down. What I found doesn’t tell me much about him, but we can at least ask whether he himself is a conservative, based on where he’s published some of his writing. (He has also written for CNN’s website, in addition to USA Today.) If Berezow is a conservative, that might explain why he thought Democrats were just as bad as Republicans in their attitude toward science.

I don’t think that’s true, and I agree with Mooney that Berezow didn’t come close to making the case. I have no problem with Berezow publishing his opinions, wherever he might reside on the political spectrum. But I think USA Today‘s editors should have held him to a higher standard. If he was going to make a conservative’s claim about Democrats and science, the editors should have demanded that he back it up.

- Paul Raeburn

Holy moly. Can’t sit on this even though the news flow is just started. Tomorrow is time enough to wrap up what other outlets say about this. The AP‘s Malcolm Ritter got out on the wire, about as the tracker’s day closes, that a new neurological study wired up people’s brains, had the people watch video clips, and told their computers to reconstruct the scenes being watched based on the brain scans.

The pictures are not very good. But they have the feel of the real scenes. People are not recognizable as the person on the actual screen, an elephant walking is a ball of dark curved lines, none of the words are legible. It’s more as though the brain scan is picking the lock on the scanned brain’s library of things that the fresh image reminds them of, sort of like looking through a coke bottle at the platonic forms our synapses have stored away as guideposts to what’s in front of us. Or, more likely, the machine calibrated itself on what its brains did with a library of known images, and then matched as best it could the brainwaves from new scenes with what it had on file.  But still, spooky. It’s not mind reading. But it is eavesdropping on something visual dancing around inside the skulls of living people. The report, from researchers at UC Berkeley and colleagues, is in Current Biology.

I’ve always wondered if a movie could be made of a dream. This might mean maybe.

The AP’s posting of the YOUTube videos – as shown and as read from audience brains, is here.

* Friday Update:

• Wired – Duncan Gere: Brain scanner can recreate movie scenes you’ve watched ;
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas : Movie Clips Reconstructed From Brain Waves ; Walks reader through how the machine works and some of the research history that led to it. Very clever. Not much like my wild guessing in the paragraphs above.
• Time Magazine – Matt Peckham: Scientists Can (Almost) Read Your Mind, Turn Thoughts into Movies ;
  

Grist for the Mill: UC Berkeley Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

In Nature this week is a report that reveals quite a row underway among research teams, mainly US v. UK, over the idea that human longevity is moderated in large part by metabolic proteins, or enzymes, called sirtuins. These are the substances whose production the red wine component called resveratrol supposedly stimulates. So, it’s a big deal.

While well inside the front section, the NYTimes‘s Nicholas Wade writes it in good style. He finds the sharp edges in the argument and makes sure readers knowtwo sides have whetstones. While a pair of  researchers at University College London report in the prestigious journal that they have found significant holes in some of the earlier tests backing the new hypothesis, American colleagues are howling. They say yes there were holes in those early tests but that later experiments with far fewer leaks have built upon the basic idea that if we just get a few of the right molecules running around inside us we’ll live longer, fitter lives. This piece is well organized – thriftily laying out the hypothesis, the industrial and research investments that have followed, and now the purported feet of clay on which the edifice stands. Plus the rejoinder, mainly from the US about the solidity of the latest results. One of those counter-arguments is also reported in the current Nature, where a second paper concedes that better controls show the effect may be smaller than first reported, but is real.

Wotta fight. Naturally fights draw a crowd. When the stakes are as high as a shot at fitness and longevity in a few pills a day, it’s news.

Other stories:

• Boston Globe – Carolyn Y. Johnson: New research challenges work on a longevity gene; Says it’s uncertain the “juggernaut” launched by earlier reports will be affected. She cites  a “growing body of evidence (that) has established the effects of sirtuins in deseases of aging in mammals,” which is more important than the initial reports on flies and worms. She and Wade do best at giving each set of protagonists their due.
• New Scientist – Nic Fleming: Fountain-of-youth enzyme doesn’t extend life after all ; The story is not as emphatically black and white as the hed, but is close. This, Fleming reports, is a serious blow. He talks with a rep. of a US pharmaceutical company for balance, but has no reaction from those in the US who did the original research.
• Mirror (UK) Mike Swain: Anti-ageing creams don’t work say scientists ; Very short story. And why the hed restricts the argument to creams can be traced to Swain framing the issue specifically as pertinent to lotions marketed to slow age in human cells. That puts the news in far too small a box. He’s not alone (next bullet), and he has an excuse. The Wellcome Trust press release below in Grist brings up anti-ageing creams as an example, and some outlets took it for the whole set of potential applications.
• Daily Mail – Fiona Macrae: The anti-ageing con: How longevity gene targeted by creams don’t really exist ; It don’t? Somebody call the grammar cops. Besides, some opportunistic marketers are already bottling resveratrol pills to slow the fade of youth.
• AFP – ‘Longevity gene’ may be dead end: study.
• NPR blog – Jon Hamilton: What’s in That Wine Glass May Not Prevent Aging After All ;

Grist for the Mill: Wellcome Trust (UK) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Here are two stories already two weeks old, but on seeing the headline on a Reuters yarn, and anticipating a gusher of tributes and obits in media for the wonder that has been the Tevatron machine near Chicago as its solemn shutdown ceremony looms on September 30,  savor this:

• Reuters (Sept. 6) Robert Evans: Month-end target mooted for finding “no Higgs” ;

That’s cynical, and smart. The fact is that Tevatron’s management and armies of affiliated researchers there and in universities and at other labs intend to keep chewing on old data and whatever new ones that can get to decide whether or not a Higgs of the sort (and mass=energy) that theoretically looks most likely exists. The lede and body of Evans’s story make that clear. But still, to frame a nothin’-there result as final goal captures the appropriate spirit of the real news here. After being the world leader in the hardware for high energy physics since Ernest Lawrence and his boys started building atom smashing cyclotrons in the hills above Berkeley before WWII, the US has passed the baton (or, more aptly, dropped it). We now got butkus is what we got. We’re junior partners in the European lab. The hardware goal, post-Tevatron,  isn’t a better machine. It’s nothing. Maybe eventually we build a terrific linear collider knocking the bejeesus out of leptons, but nothing’s on the official timeline. Reuters’s headline also, without quite saying so and without any evidence, sort of implies a peevish, spoilers element to the final data runs at Tevatron: If we can’t find the Higgs, at least we showed  that you guys in Europe with your fancy HLC can’t do it either, hah! & so there. I don’t know such feelings exist but one couldn’t blame the Fermilab crew for harboring a few in some jealous corner of its collective soul. In any case CERN and its Large Hadron Collider are now and officially the uncontested capitol of the high energy particle physics game with a lot more physics to pursue than the Higgs hunt. The HLC is a triumph. And the narrative arc from the cancellation of the Superconducting Super Collider, its unfinished tunnels moldering in Texas’s parched earth, is now complete.

We’ll have lots more on this as the toast to Tevatron’s achievements approaches.

By the way, at PopSci reporter Clay Dillow – with a tagline and indirect nod to Reuters as his primary source (he links to the wire services report at MSNBC) – rewrites the basics. There the story gets a more accurate, if one gets fussy about things, headline on it. Fermilab Sets End-of-Month Deadline to Establish Whether or Not the Higgs Boson Exists.  More fairly put, but it lacks Reuters’s cheeky snap. Dillow also overdoes the nature of the “No” that might result. He says first, in the text, the question is whether it exists in what is imagined as its most likely form. He then declares that the answer will address whether it exists, period. Those are different questions. Some say that Fermilab’s last hurrah, or last laugh, will be to exclude the Higgs, period. But this story does not focus on that sharply enough for readers to know which of the two questions, or both, might be answered.

I got on all this by happening across a story on the close-down at a more specialized outlet, ISGTW, with its account based directly on Fermilab material.

For an uncheeky, non-cynical smart look at the upcoming shutdown:

NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Fermilab faces life after the Tevatron ;

Grist for the Mill:

Fermilab Tevatron Timeline; Tevatron Announcement and Schedule,  Celebrating the Tevatron ;

- Charlie Petit

A secondary or even third-order correction to a sensational but old theory, which remains intact in its essence, would not ordinarily get much attention. But probably because this one has to do with dinosaurs and with threats to civilization, it gets a reasonable splash.

The background is that, in seeking to explain the big impact crater off Yucutan that is about 65 million years old, and the enhancedof iridium and other oddities in a layer of sediment worldwide of about that age and that implies a cosmochemical source (ie, rocks from space), a few researchers looked for scenarios that would have done the job. But now it looks like one variant on that hypothesis has hit a snag. In question is a hypothesis that the intruding rock arose from a specific collision, involving the asteroid Babtistina, in the asteroid belt. That puts the rock’s pre-impact history in the dark. No surprise there – it can’t be easy to figure such things out.

Thus reporters are left with a challenge. The news is interesting, but it is also that a hypothesis that most readers (even the science-attentive ones) have never heard of, is now in doubt. So that must be explained, but while being careful not to suggest that the bigger, death-by-space-impact hypothesis is now in play. If done well, the resulting story may wind up a sort of shaggy dog tale, full of explosion and death but that also elicits a puzzled “so?…what’s new here?”.

Stories:

• BBC – Leila Battison: Doubt over dino-killer culprit ; Text is clear. That hed is inevitable, and implies more than it delivers.
• Mail (UK) Emily Allen: Wrong suspect: Asteroid charged with wiping out the dinosaurs is NOT to blame, say scientists ; Same problem. It was a different asteroid. That leaves things about, to the level at which the public follows such things, unchanged.
• Sydney Morning Herald (Austra) Bridie Smith: Don’t blame asteroid: NASA ;
• Space.com – Origin of Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Is Still a Mystery ; This one tells is straight, and sensibly.
• ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: Was the “Dinosaur Killer’ Unfairly Charged? NIcely done – ambiguous hed, explicit lede.

*UPDATE with other news, new-news, on life and death 65 million years ago :

• Phil. Inquirer – Tom Avril: Researchers trying to piece together a 65-million-year-old turtle ; Starts off as a somewhat routine visit to a lab where paleontologists are painstakingly assembling scattered fossil fragments into something that looks like something. Then wham, well after the story’s rhythm seems set, Avril slaps readers with what is exciting. The ancient turtle died, as he reminds readers, at an interesting time. 65 million years. That’s asteroid armageddon time. As one researcher tells him, “”This is about as good as it gets. A mass murder with evidence of asteroid ejects present.” Avril frankly here has buried the lede deep, probably deliberately. That’s risky, as many readers will yawn, will go on to other news. But this way it has the arc of a short story. There should, one must say, have been some vague foreshadowing, perhaps a hint of dread or awful carnage or something of that kind, just a hint. What we get is an opening suffused with the tedium of the paleontologist’s typical day. Then the lights come up. The background spectacle of K-T extinction Armageddon rivets the imagination. Act III:  a fade back to the dental picks and fragments on the lab table that by themselves look like nothing much at all. Readers who finish will have a rewarding, balanced view of science as it unfolds.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit