Ken Caldeira is a name that comes up fairly often in global warming news stories, but usually via his comments on the severity of climate change and its difficulty as a problem and the urgency of somehow getting world leaders to convince (or just lead) their citizenries to get serious about weaning themselves from carbon-emitting power. He’s often consulted for his opinion on this or that plan and its plausibility.

Now, thanks to my own local PBS station, KQED, and its radio and TV science unit Quest, I know that Dr. Caldeira – located at Stanford University where he is a Carnegie Institution professor – has a gadget. It is a real-life piece of hardware and it has a distinctly edgy, 21st-century look to it. He does not just talk, he makes stuff. He and his colleagues and grad students and post-docs hope its larger versions, lofted far higher than what they’re now testing at the former Alameda Naval Air Station, will soon start start shredding our present energy system and mending the holes with some big, green patches. It looks a little bit like one of those military spy drones, but on a leash. Here it is:

But First, CORRECTION: I got so excited watching Caldeira rhapsodize over this device, that – knowing he’s a hardcore wind energy proponent – did the unthinkable were it not so often thunk: assumed. I assumed he’s formally a part of the group that designed and built the prototype. Nope. He’s a supporter, but neither employee, nor boss, nor investor. Presumably, neither are any of his grad students or post-docs. Much embarrassment here for my leap to conclusion./ CP

•    QUEST – Chris Bauer producer: Airborne Wind Energy ; I tried letting it stream, but my bandwidth for this HD show was too narrow so it kept stopping to re-fill the buffer. I’d recommend downloading it first, which may take quite awhile. This airplane/kite, flying in circles while held against the wind, is a serious-looking prototype for what might deliver rivers of electricity from the jet streams of the world someday – if all sorts of difficulties such as reliability, hazards of cables rising through where jetliners and birds fly, control avionics, etc. can be solved and which are nicely laid out in this report.

I do have questions and suggestions. So, imagine we have this airplane-wingtip-turbine blade airfoil thing whipping around  50,000 feet up or so up there, flying a circle while the rope’s path defines a cone in the air. Through the tether cable comes electricity generated by ducted windturbines mounted along the wingblade’s spar. Great. What happens when the jetstream wanders to somewhere else? Can one then send power UP to the bird, turning those turbine generators into ducted fan propellers, and keep it aloft while the anchor ship gets back under the jetstream, or maybe just wait till it comes back overhead? Or do operators have to reel it in while awaiting the wind’s return aloft?  And would it take too much juice to sprinkle the cable with little LEDs, so birds and pilots can see it day or night? And where are the critics? Surely Bauer could have found somebody to throw cold water on this high altitude energy reaper. Caldeira says the globe’s jet streams have hundreds of time more power to tap than our civilization now consumes, so one presumes we’d never sap enough to, in an irony, alter climate very much while trying to keep it within familiar bounds. But to get, say, a quarter of our power from the sky: how many cables we talking about?

Also, I am sure Caldeira has the numbers but they are too wonky for TV, yet how does one temper the 100 mile per hour-plus speed of jetstreams in view of their low density? This is fast but thin air. If a wind is going 10,000 miles per hour but it takes two second between molecules, you won’t run a civilization off it. What is the power density of  a 150 mph jetstream compared to what’s in a normal 20-30 mph stiff breeze near the surface?

In any case, nifty experiment, cool stuff. There have been over recent years occasional stories mentioning Caldeira’s calculation of the power in high altitude winds, and some on an earlier notion of what a proper aerial wind turbine would look like (very goofy), but this new prototype is more satisfying to the eye. Hmm. Here’s another question. Have Chinese investors, maybe Indian ones too, come by yet, taking pictures? Are they already building the factories to leap ahead on this industry too?

- Charlie Petit

It’s already a big week for extra-solar planets, as seen in the coverage (previous post) of 50 new planets discovered by a European Southern Observatory team including one so-called Goldilocks candidate. Today finds many of the same reporters describing discovery of a real-life Tatooine world, a planet following a wide orbit roundabout two stars more or less like Luke Skywalker’s home in the original Star Wars movie.. This one’s evidence is in data from the Kepler space telescope, whose operators infer partners of stars by looking for things that block or enhance the star’s light – as when lined up like in that artist’s painting. Plus, this week saw news of a planet that is inferred only because other planets in its system are getting off-rhythm (shades of the discovery of Neptune in the mid-19th century), and another news quiver on implication of a planet so blasted by its star’s X-rays that it is losing  millions of tons of matter per second, ousted from its atmosphere.

1) Double-sun planet stories: Lots of these, thanks to a well-publicized NASA-Ames teleconference and publication in Science magazine. Planet Kepler 16b is Saturn-sized, so nobody is there driving around in levitating scooters. Most stories focus on the Tatooine, two-sun angle, naturally. Unreported in anything I saw is something else important – Kepler has now been going long enough to pick up planets with Earth-sized orbits. This one goes around its two hosts every 229 days. The first bunch of Kepler planets were hot worlds whizzing around their stars every few days or weeks.

• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Planet Like ‘Star Wars’ Tatooine Discovered Orbiting 2 Suns ;
• Nat’l Geographic News – Andrew Fazekas: New Saturn-like Planet Has Two Suns, NASA Says ;
• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: NASA Detects Planet Dancing With a Pair of Stars ; Leave it to Overbye to dive right in (after wading through Star Wars references) to some of the new science here. Such as the surprising stability of the orbit so close to two stars. And the payoff from such a triply-transiting system in the form of unpredented measurement of their orbital parameters, masses, sizes, etc. That, and the happenstance that such a three-way dance is visible to Kepler at all, right now.
  
• ABC – Ned Potter: Like Tatooine in ‘Star Wars,’ Planet Found With Two Suns ; Not a bad job at all, especially for a prime time network news operation.
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: ‘Star Wars’ planet discovered with two suns ; Explains the sequence of discovery that led to the conclusion.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle : Real-life ‘Star Wars’ planet seen ; Boyle brings up an intriguing idea – maybe this planet has moons, and they could really be a lot like Tatooine. Only a lot colder. For once we have an extrasolar gas giant that is outside the habitability zone, not inside in the realm of hot Jupiters.
• PostMedia News via Montreal Gazette – Bradley Bouzane: Star Wars-like planet discovered with two suns ;
• AFP – US Astronomers find planet with two Suns ;

*UPDATES – Plenty of outlets didn’t get their stories out till this morning, the Science issue’s date. Some I just missed:

• SF Chronicle – David Perlman: Real planet ‘Tatooine’ with two suns ; Perlman gets decent length for a review of how Kepler works, such details as the colors of these suns (orange and deep red), and a source’s nice quote: “Head-spinning carousel of a planetary system.”
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: From “Star Wars’ to reality: Astronomers discover Tatooine world with two suns.
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: Tatooine for real? Scientists confirm planet orbiting two suns ; One source ponders the possibility of planets a lot closer to us than this one – around the double star system Alpha Centauri.
• TIME Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Scientists Find a Star Wars World:One Planet, Two Suns ; Nicely put: “When two elephants are waltzing, it could be very difficult for mice to tiptoe safely under their feet.” Also a good capture of the sequence of surprises for the researchers as they studied the system.
• Bloomberg/Business Week – Robert Langreth: ‘Star Wars’ Gets Real as Scientists Find Planet With Two Suns ;
• Wall St. Journal – Robert Lee Hotz: Week Brings Hail of Planets /Seventy-Four Discoveries Include One with Two Suns; Global Team Vie for Finds ; Lee, as does this post, pulls recent planet news into one package, one he calls “a growing inventory of alien worlds in the curiosity shop of the cosmos.” But he bothered to tot up the numbers on the week’s haul, good on him for doing it. And he reached back farther than a week for examples of this bulging larder.
• USA Today – Dan Vergano: Kepler spots world with two suns ; Some other accounts hint there are more of these double-star worlds. Vergano relays word that sturdy Dutch reporter Govert Schilling filed from a meeting in Wyoming that the Kepler team is polishing up the data on three more.
• Sky & Telescope – Shweta Krishnan: A Planet Orbiting Two Suns : This is for you if you like your light curves explained in plain English. It’s technical, without being full geek. That diagram next to the first update is from this article.

Grist for the Mill: SETI Institute Press Release; Carnegie Institution Press Release ;NASA Ames Press Release ; UC Santa Barbara Press Release ;

2) Invisible Planet Stories: They’re all invisible, pretty much. This one however is inferred only because another (invisible in a literal sense) planet has back-and-forth variations in its orbit, a sure sign that another planet’s gravity is giving it a rhythmic tug.

• Astronomy Now Online – Keith Cooper: Kepler leaves unseen exoplanet nowhere to hide ;
• Time Mag – Michael D. Lemonick: Hidden Worlds: Astronomers Find Invisible Planet 650 Light-Years Away ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: ‘Invisible’ planet discovered with new technique ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA-Ames Press Release ;

3) X-ray Roasted Planet Stories: This from discovery with the French CoRoT transit mission, and followup with other instruments inlcuding the Chandra X-ray Observatory. .

• Universe Today – Tammy Plotner: Stellar X-Rays Strip Planet To Bare Bones ;
  
• The Weather Space.com – Richard McMillan: Study shows star beating the living tar out of nearby planet with x-rays ; This is a minor effort, sadly lacking in any useful detail. But worth listing if only for the enthusiastic headline.
• Nat’l Geographic News – Victoria Jaggard: NASA Finds “Death Star” Blasting Planet With X-Rays ; Ah, yet another Star Wars allusion.

Grist for the Mill: NASA/Chandra Press Release ;

By the way, I could have done the next post down based on these planet stories. For each of the legit outlets that did some semblance of reporting – that is, performed journalism – there were several from services that routinely swallow press releases with one orifice and excrete them from another, not always in a form of any use to anybody, not even as fertilizer.

- Charlie Petit

Yesterday, I was thinking wow, this ought to make the news. That came after a happenstance look at press releases from the American Chemical Society revealed one on cold-adapted woolly mammoth blood and discovery of its key mutations – as revealed from tissue from carcasses of the beasts in Arctic not-so-frozen-anymore permafrost. There is even an implication that the discovery could lead to life-saving medical applications.

So it did, but not in the way expected. Perhaps because this very news, lacking some detail, already circulated last year in several accounts (for instance at ABC-Australia, and New Scientist ) media of the sort where reporters try to check a  handout before regurgitating it did not file on it. After all, ordinarily a story saying that mammoth blood has not only been recreated in key ways, but might prove useful in making blood substitutes that work well at the low temperatures sometimes required during surgery, that’d be widely reported.

Rather, I find an instructive sampling of reports at small and rather mysterious outlets that in a variety of ways passed it on to their readers but, in many cases, with big holes in the accounts. From this one gets a tidy snapshot of the new way that has arisen, in just a few years, by which snippets on scientific progress reach the public. The old system, in which press agents tell media what’s new,  still exists. But its output flows through myriad new conduits. This is not to say the old gate keeper system of mainstream media was at all ideal. But there are just so many gates out there now. The skill of their keepers, if any exist, is variable. Here area few accounts on the latest rendition of woolly mammoth blood news that fall easily to hand.

Stories:

• PhysOrg.com – Woolly mammoth’s secrets for shrugging off cold points toward new artificial blood for humans ; Picked up straight off the ACS-provided info – inlcuding an embedded ACS house ad for a new journal. Doesn’t even bother to i.d. the affiliation of the lead scientist.
• International Business Times – Woolly Mammoth’s Blood May Help Reduce Human Body Temperature ; The hed makes no sense. It does sort of – mammoth blood could help lead to safer low-T surgery – but the hed is mostly random, maybe written by robotics? Most likely to surprise readers: The illus shows a woolly rhino. One wonders how, exactly, this outlet works – the web page includes a circus of oddly jumbled links to investment opportunities, tabloid-style sensation news, and a few genuine biz stories. It pops up on The Tracker’s searches regularly, and typically with a useless-to-me item rehashed from other sources. Maybe it’s making somebody money. Here is its “Our Vision” statement and description of its reach from its Wall St. hq.
• Daily News & Analysis : Scientists ‘turning to woolly mammoth to develop artificial human blood,” Another lazy rewrite of the ACS squib (which comes with links to more info), declaring that the lead researcher and his colleagues did…well you have to read it. It is almost a non-sequitur. The outlet, which goes by DNA and that’s a valuable website domain property in itself, appears to be based in Mumbai.
• SCOPE – Lia Steakley:  Mammoth effort: Scientists turn to ice age species to develop artificial blood for humans ; Another one picked up, with no effort to actually lead readers to anything useful, not even via the links, and extracted directly from the ACS release. The site id’s itself as an operation of the Stanford School of Medicine. That comes as a surprise.
• io9 : How a 43,000-Year-Old Wooly Mammoth Could One Day Save Your Life : io9 in May of last year reported, in a fashion, this basic story. The new post reflects that somebody tried to stitch together a coherent reason to say more about that. But it still leaves out such basics as where the researchers work. It alternates in calling the animals woolly or wooly mammoths. Yet it has considerable fine detail. This is an odd combo of lazy reporting (why not say that ACS is the American Chemical Society?) and newsy bits. Io9 is a part of the Gawker Media combine based, implies a wikipedia entry, in New York City and is focussed on science fiction.

What’s the point? That as illustrated by this small sampling,  information is transmutable, fungible, distortable, and liable to get ripped off and ripped apart like never before. Not before and this fast. Some people say they use the web because they can’t trust mainstream media. Well, they can’t. Never could, not entirely. But chaos and atomization of the news are hardly improvements. I believe one might term this a transitional phase in journalism. It is rather exciting. Dunno where we’re headed. As Donald Rumsfeld supposedly said: “I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.”

- Charlie Petit

It’s a harmless little experiment set to play out at an old and idle English airfield – fasten a hose to a helium balloon and use the combo to spray the countryside with a fine, watery mist from about 3000 feet up. But it’s making a splash even before anybody twists a spigot knob. That’s because terms like planetary engineering and climate modification are there to be tacked on. Reporters have the task of describing the nuts, bolts, and valves of the thing, along with putting it in context of the fractious field of the future: hacking the planet (to borrow the key term in Eli Kintisch’s recent book. )

Not that this balloon and fog trick will change the climate, but it could start its engineers down the path toward monster balloons rising  into the stratosphere to fuzz it up with water vapor or other aerosols (sulfates? clay? salts? oxidized metals? All are in play), altering what experts call the solar forcing on Earth’s temperature and climate. It’s led by a Cambridge man and  colleagues, including at Bristol University. They call their project SPICE for Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering, which is among the least strained acronymic titles scientists have concocted for awhile. The researchers, far as I can tell, did not call it an artificial volcano. But it is presented as such in several accounts.

Late Addition: As you’ll see, or just skip straight to the Guardian bullet below, this news had has a double bump.

Stories:

• BBC – Leila Battison: Giant balloon to be launched to test climate fix hope ;
  
• Independent – Steve Connor: High hopes for Norfolk’s artificial volcano in fight against climate change ; All the real thing might take, it says here, it 20 balloons the size of Wembley Stadium, spraying their greenhouse-stopping murks from 65,000 feet up or so (around 20 km).
• Irish Times – Dick Ahlstrom: Team floats idea of balloon spraying particles to reflect sun’s radiation;
• Telegraph: Scientists to create artificial volcano for climate change experiment ;
• Guardian – John Shepherd: Geoengineering: we need more evidence before we cast our vote ; Where we learn, in this general commentary, that the Guardian already had the SPICE balloon story from its reporter John Vidal on August 31.
• Financial Times – Clive Cookson: Trial aims to hose down warming climate ;
• Reuters – Nina Chestney: Hosepipe and balloon: think of it as a volcano ; Where we learn that there is a word, or acroynm, by which the climate change wonks discuss these things. SRM. For solar radiation management. Could be a common term some day. Hope not. But story is conveniently linked to a Reuters report by Ben Gruber that says, quite possibly, the coolest summers 30 years from now will be hotter than the hottest ones we ever have gotten to today. Today’s Texas could be everybody’s tomorrow.
• Daily Mail – Tamara Cohen: A balloon the size of Wembley and the world’s longest hose … can this stop global warming? ; What?!! Has the world as we know it has ended? The Mail fails to exaggerate? It will take a bunch of balloons that big.
• MIT Technology Review – Phil McKenna: British to Test Geoengineering Scheme ; Well, there I was cruising through an all-Brit case of herd journalism, lively writing at every turn, and discovery my own employer’s home institution magazine and website covers this too. Very soberly. Not a Wembley Stadium to be found.

Grist for the Mill: U. Cambridge Press Release ;U. Bristol Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Everybody knows that nifty science probes that take pictures of distant stars and planets, and drop robots on the latter, get out there on rockets. Media perked up this week on two signs of progress in the interminable discussion in Congress, within NASA and the White House, the aerospace industry, and among space fans generally over what if any new American government-ordered rockets are on the way.

The big news is that the NASA adminstrator, Charles Bolden, revealed today – with plenty of foreshadowing already in media in the last few weeks and even months – what honkin’ big kind of rocket might carry astronauts off to an asteroid in the next decade or two, maybe teaching our species a few advance lessons in avoiding the destruction of civilization, maybe even the extinction of most life on Earth bigger than a microbe. Plus, we learn that a NASA-industry combine might do a quickie revival of a NASA proposal for a skinny little lifter able to get people and supplies to the space station in the next few years. Besides that, says Bolden, the program will, praise be, create good-paying American jobs.

And guess what about the big one with the bo-o-o-o-oring name (interim one hopes) Space Launch System. It’s a patchwork of old pieces bolted together, plus with a few new ones. See that picture? The fat cylinder in the middle is a refashioned shuttle external tank with rocket motors on the bottom, those are modified shuttle solid boosters on the sides (but more powerful liquid-fueled boosters may come along later). On tippy top is the Aries capsule, sort of a souped-up, six-person Apollo capsule. A cargo container could go up there even more easily. The whole thing got good advance review in that savvy trade pub Aviation Week & Space Technology late last month in a story by Frank Morring, Jr. Another, mass media outlet that follows NASA hardware news closely, the Orlando Sentinel, had from Mark K. Matthews a pretty good look forward at this rocket, back in June. If memory serves, the rough idea has been around a lot longer than that, too.

But now it is about as official as is anything at NASA, where cross currents of screeching members of Congress, budget cuts, and overrun panics seem to bring a different road map for solar system exploration and space science every month or so. While one can’t expect every story to say everything. But some context – such as the nearly-as-heavy-lifting rocket, named Falcon Heavy, the start-up SpaceX says it’ll fly in a year or two, or a triple-barreled Atlas heavy lift that United Launch Alliance has entertained, and bigger Arianes, etc.

Stories on NASA’s new heavy lift plan:

• USA Today/Florida Today – Todd Halvorson: NASA to unveil heavy-lift rocket ; This one says it’ll be the most powerful American rocket since the Saturn V. The next bullet down says even stronger. Each is true.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: NASA unveils giant new rocket design ; He goes beyond Saturn V by looking to the day that bigger, liquid-hydrogen-fueled strap-on boosters take the jobs of the shuttle-style solids in the illus above.  Such a thing, he reports could be landing people on Mars in 20+ years.
• *UPDATE and LATE ADDITION / NYTimes – Kenneth Chang: NASA Unveils New Rocket Design ; Dunno how I missed this one first time through. And another one that looks at the full, proposed build-out of this rocket’s family and declares it (if built) the most powerful ever. But Chang notes it also reflects a contraction from recent, previous proposals and admission that no Apollo-like pace of construction is foreseeable. One source is confident these plans, like the Constellation program before it, will collapse. Nifty sardonic phrase here: It is better called the Senate Launch System.
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: NASA unveils plan for giant deep space rocket ;
• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor: NASA Unveils New Rocket Design ;
• Houston Chronicle – Stewart Powell (blog): NASA announces design of post-shuttle spacecraft to carry astronauts deep into space; This one has a Texas Senator lambasting NASA and more especially the White House for taking so long to endorse a design whose essence has been breezing around in technical and policy circles for a long time.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: NASA Unveils New Giant Rocket for Deep Space Missions ; Hmm, good enough story with some zesty bits on the political backbiting and, can we call it venom, in partisan discussion of what kind of rocket NASA should. But on another matter – when astronauts are involved one can assume ‘deep space’ as it says in that hed means beyond Earth orbit and someplace else in the solar system. But, fellow usage hawks, shouldn’t deep space be reserved for ventures outside the solar system? That’s what makes the Pioneer and Voyager missions that have penetrated the heliopause, out in Kuiper belt and beyond realms, so exciting. They are in deep space. Way out there. Carrying plaques for alien perusal. All that cool stuff. Back to this story – it includes a gallery of images showing how the tallest rockets in history stack up against one another.   Nice, but could use a line-drawing comparison of these rockets all in one image.
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: NASA Unveils Their New Launch System ; She asks the question: “Why did it take so long for NASA to come up with this plan, which, really, is nothing new under the sun?” Good question.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: NASA Unveils Space Launch System Vision ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release ;

There is more coverage of this mega-rocket plan. The stories promptly overshadowed a run of media reports on another, very tall but very slender and  more near-term rocket that NASA is helping to get built. This is pretty much a revival of a slender stick of a solid rocket booster, that would have been called Ares I and was modified from the shuttles’ strap-ons, that NASA once considered that then got canceled along with most of the G.W. Bush administration’s Constellation Project.  This could also carry NASA’s Aries capsule, or most anybody’s space taxi, but not much farther than the space station. It also might carry any of several privately-build space taxis or cargo containers the same distance. Its rebirth would turn over some of the development to private companies , Alliant Techsystems and Astrium. The result is to be called the Liberty Rocket. It couples a repurposed US shuttle solid booster with a European, Ariane-derived upper stage.

Stories on Liberty Rocket:

• USA Today / Florida Today – Todd Halvorson: NASA, Private firm may team up on Liberty rocket ;
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Defunct NASA rocket to be reborn as commercial offering ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Liberty rocket pushes ahead toward ISS launches ;

Grist for the Mill: ATK Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Those of us who have a compulsion to check the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s pages every day or three have suspected as much, and now Reuters brings almost-confirming word:

• Reuters – Gerard Wynne: Summer Arctic sea ice melt at or near record ; The Germans in Bremen  say it is an all-time low. The US NSIDC in Boulder says tied for #1 or maybe #2 on the lowest-first scale. Either way, it’ll freeze back up almost all the way – with a thin layer – in the next six months or so. Contrarians will, half way through, tell us the lying truth: Sea Ice growing at near record pace! I’ve seen it, some of them actually have said that. Well of course. Almost every year it has farther to go to ice up again.

More bits and pieces:

• Reuters- Nina Chestney: Europe’s oceans changing at unprecedented rate: report ; Not just ice, but temps, species, all kinds of things in flux.
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Too wacky? Moving water from flood to drought ; Lots of people get the brainstorm – why not spread the water around more evenly?  The story says the answer is pretty simple. It is hard, and expensive. But I still like the idea of filling a big rubber blivit with water at the mouth of a river – the Columbia will do – and towing it to a desert place such as Los Angeles. Put sailsor solar powered oars on it. Take all year. Nice glacier and snow-runnoff delivered still fresh to Artesia, Oxnard, Palm Springs, Simi Valley, Riverside, and other semi-arid towns.

- Charlie Petit

Great wobbling doppler shifts and shades of distant worlds, this is getting familiar. New planets are starting to seem about as newsy as the listings of homes that sold or police blotter summaries. Interesting, but rather routine. We’ve got hundreds of them so far.

To be sure the latest haul includes some weird ones. And by the way later this week, press advisories say, a second team is to announce yet another odd extrasolar world.

First up: On Monday the European Southern Observatory announced that one of its telescopes in Chile, equipped with an instrument called the HARPS spectrograph (for High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher), has added 50 new planets to the list. This includes 16 ‘super Earths,’ or worlds of a mass not too much greater than our own planet has and conceivably made largely of silicate rocks and just possibly an atmosphere like ours, maybe even water. Which is a lot of maybes. One in particular has an orbit around its feeble star that makes liquid water plausible, if not probable.That makes it a candidate for the Goldilocks Prize – a planet with just the right mass, right temperature, right atmosphere, right orbit, and right everything else to support life as we know it. Word of the planet haul came at a meeting in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. It will get formal publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Interesting if not significant on the scientific collegiality front is that the meeting co-chair is famed planet hunter Geoff Marcy of UC Berkeley, while the big newsmaker is the HARPS team where a prominent leader is Michel Mayor of Switzerland, his longtime rival in the doppler-method of finding planets.

Some reporters led with the size of the trove, 50 planets. Others first went straight for Super-Earth and Goldilocks. Pretty much all of them got around to both bites of information.

Stories:

• BBC – Paul Rincon: Fifty new exoplanets discovered ;
• AP – Seth Borenstein: Hot new planet could be in habitable zone – barely ; One of the few (maybe only) stories that looks closely at the meaning of “potentially habitable.”
• MSNBC/Cosmic Log – Alan Boyle: Fifty new alien worlds revealed ; And ‘pick of the litter,’ writes Boyle, is HD 85512b, just 36 light years away and the one that plausibly is in the habitable zone.
• Space.com – Denise Chow: ‘Super-Earth,’ 1 of 50 Newfound Alien Planets, Could Potentially Support Life ; Her story includes a fanciful gallery of extrasolar planets – all of them with colorful artist’s impressions of what they might look like but almost surely do not, plus a sidebar noting that this makes about 600 new planets that surveys have found so far.
• Guardian (UK) Hannah Godfrey: Super-earth exoplanet found that could support life ; This story at least carries a photo of a real planet. Ours. It looks, as it happens, a lot like one artist’s impression of the Goldilocks candidate 36 light years away. I cut and pasted them to prove it.  Earth, with Madagascar visible on close inspection, is on the right.
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Batch of 50 New Alien Worlds Discovered ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Nicky Phillips: Newly discovered planets include super-Earth ;
• New York Times – Dennis Overbye: 36 Light-Years From Here, New Hope for an Earth-Like Planet ; Dennis pointedly mentions both the new glamour puss in planet finding, the Kepler Telescope with its transit-seeking spectrometer, and the older Dopply-technique surveys including that of the HARPS team. This is among the stronger, more writerly reports on this news. It includes two conflicting opinions about the supposedly Earth-like super planet. One thing, however. Overbye writes that the Kepler telescope can’t help examine the HARPS team’s new super-Earth because it is staring at a different place in the sky. He didn’t have room for everything but the explanation might well also have mentioned that even if this were in Kepler’s field of view, it’s not lined up for transits visible from here. So the story’s passage is like saying some guy can’t see his house because he’s facing the wrong way…  but not mentioning that, anyway, he’s blind.
• Agence France Presse via Montreal Gazette: Astronomers claim biggest haul of other worlds ; Good for AFP. It relies on the press release – and says so.
• Voice of America – Jessica Berman: Scientists Discover Potentially Habitable Alien Planet ;
• Washington Post – Brian Vastag: New ‘super-Earth’ that is 36 light-years away might hold water, astronomers say ;
• Mail (UK) Scientists find fifty new planets … and one of them could have alien life ; Dont’cha just love that – not only life out there but to make this clear, alien life.
• The Australian – Leigh Dayton: 50 New Planets Discovered ; A shorty, but good for her. Dayton calls up a few other astronomers for opinion, even though they are not quite in the planet-finding game. Minor correction: She puts Seth Shostak of the SETI Institute in San Francisco, which is about 30 miles north of the institute’s actual home in Mountain View and just outside San Jose, a larger burg than San Fran. From Australia it all looks the same. She calls Paul Davies too. He is Australian but works at Arizona State. He’s also mostly a cosmologist. No matter. Calling almost anybody who at least follows the literature closely almost always adds a dimension lacking when calls, if any at all, go only to people on the paper’s author list or in the press release.

Grist for the Mill: ESO Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A guilty pleasure this morning reading Denise Grady‘s section-leader with the provocative hed, “An Immune System Trained to Kill Cancer.” First the pleasure part: It is about a routine Stage I trial of a new therapy, not expected to do much but show whether the treatment is tolerable to patients. Yet in two thirds of the test cases it wiped out an often-fatal leukemia – totally erased it, so far anyway. It has a vignette lede, and one feels warmed by learning of the victory or at least reprieve and the grateful and reinvigorated man whose case Grady profiles.

The guilt? Many veteran reporters, this one included, learned long ago to be careful about starting cancer stories with tales of one person’s deliverance from almost sure death. That’s a statistic of one. Such narrative structure is an effective way to capture readers but not easy to do without misleading them. More troubling, this trial is of just three people. Uh oh. The research papers were in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as in Science Translational Medicine, which counts for a lot. But the story should still say how unusual it is for such small sample size to cause such stir – or make it into leading medical journals.

Surely this story should have tip-toed much more carefully to its hopeful message: some docs in Philadelphia may be on to something important, a new way to selectively poison or otherwise kill cancer cells and, more important, drastically modify the  genomes of selected, proliferating cells in a patient and leave him or her better off.

Plus, another off-taste to this story. It carries an element of bait and switch. To explain why one must first back up. The news is that Penn’s medical scientists removed a hefty number of the patients’ T-cells, the cell-assassins of the immune system. They added fresh genes from various species, delivered to their genomes by HIV-1 viruses heavily modified to be unable to cause disease themselves, but still up to retroviral DNA-delivery magic. The new genes made the modified T-cells (somehow or other) more potent “serial killers”that take out cells they recognize as alien. Then, after training them to aim at B-cells that had gone leukemic, mutating and proliferating madly, they put the heavily armed sharpshooter T-cells back in. For two patients, after a crisis of fever, chills, and see-sawing blood pressure broke, all signs of leukemia had vanished. The third had a remission that lasted months and a drastic reduction, but not eradication. Happy day overall indeed.

The switch part: This treatment gets portrayed in the headline and the opening vignette as a swarm of guided missiles blowing up cancer cells. Yes, but so does a grenade. It turns out as one reads along that it also killed off every single healthy B-cell in the surviving two patients. The self-renewing population of altered T-cells will remain at a lower level in the patients presumably for the rest of their lives, able to rise up and destroy every B-cell that shows its face or its antigens. Nowhere in this story is it explained how a technique that cannot, in its current form, discriminate between a healthy and a cancerous form of a tumor’s characteristic cell may herald a general new anti-cancer strategy. One can with additional lifelong adminstration of immune globulin survive without B-cells, it says here. I’m unsure, but don’t believe that most cancers arise from cells that are as potentially expendable.  The real news is really new – an example of aggressive gene therapy that, in at least a few patients, did wonders. The Penn doctors have been at this for some time, and have delivered astounding if very preliminary results. It may open the door to more gene therapy trials, of which doctors have been leery in recent years due to disastrous results from some earlier efforts.  The story’s dek says as much, but the text itself makes it a simple but statistically suspect tale of triumph over cancer.

This news came out last month (Penn Medicine Press Release)  and  hit a few other outlets. Few (I saw none) tried to do it as fully – including the personal details of the people behind the stats and the dramatic twists that some of their case trajectories have taken – as Grady did. One hopes she sticks with the story, and that, in the end, this work does lead to a hefty new club with which to bludgeon cancern  and does open the way for more useful gene therapies for a wide range of illness.

Other Science Times headlines to note:

• Dennis Overbye: 36 Light-Years From Here, New Hope for an Earth-like Planet ; Separate post today on this and other extrasolar planet news.
• Abigail Zuger, MD: The Cough That Launched a Hit Movie ; The doctor writer seems here to be looking too severely askance at the Hollywood touches on the new “Contagion” medical thriller. After all and as Zuger writes, thanks to the power given to experts – notably, by the way, including science and medical reporter Laurie Garrett – the background technical jargon and graphical depiction of the dreadful disease agent won’t make the technically-savvy in the audience hoot and snort. Zuger’s quarrel is with the depiction of this epidemic’s enormously fast and near-universal spread. That’s like panning King Kong because, while it’s ape acts quite apelike, no ape could be THAT big.
• Jane Brody – Attacking the Obesity Epidemic by First Figuring Out Its Cause ; Our fit Ms. Brody starts off so distant and clinical here, telling readers that it’s not necessarily their fault if they’ve gotten fat, and that a big Lancet series takes an analytical look at the root causes. But the tone shifts (apologies to anybody offended by a missing-letter typo I just fixed in the word shifts/cp). She works up a controlled but righteous rage, recalling that as a girl in mid-20th century America “I had to walk or bike many blocks to buy and ice cream cone” and convenience foods “were canned fruits and vegetables, not frozen lasagna or Tater Tots.” And that’s before she fulminates on recalling a $1.99 fast-food joint, Texas-sized breakfast of eggs, fried potatoes, buttered croissant, and one choice of ham, bacon, or sausage. One can almost see the sneer on her face – and easily share it. Then she brushes herself off, resumes decorum, and gets back to the Lancet’s prescription for a long-term turnaround in the say that modern societies permit huge industries to shove stupidly fattened, oiled, salted, and sweetened food into our faces at every opportunity. They ought to be fixed good, she writes (actually, that they ought to be taxed good), their ads banned, their lard-bombs properly labeled, etc, and today’s obesogenic (wotta word) environment consigned to history. She phrases all that a bit more coolly.
• Carl Zimmer: Horwich Wins Lasker Award by Straddling Science and Medicine ; Prizewinners, unless they get a Nobel, a MacArthur, or a Pulitzer, don’t usually get much press attention. Nice to read this (and, of course while Zimmer doesn’t mention it, the Lasker is often a good tip-off to a future Nobelist). It is about discovery of a near-invisible skein of protoplasmic compartments in cells, vital to getting proteins into their proper shapes. Plus that photo, the mustachioed scientist next to a microscope and a desk under a mountain of almost-well-stacked papers, is as perfect as the most well-composed Renaissance portrait of a nobleman and his stuff. See also Anahad O’Connor‘s sidebar on the Laskers themselves and the full list of winners, including a doctor in China whose team confirmed that a traditional Chinese herbal remedy has genuine power.
• Anthony DePalma - Taking Advantage of a Destructive Insect’s Weakness for Purple; Skillful, almost playful use of an odd angle, about insect vision and instincts, to hit readers with a remarkable and serious fact: the emerald ash borer is a dreadful pest. We also learn about sacrificial ‘sink trees.’

As usual, lot more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Nothing gets a graying male editor’s attention more than a story about testosterone or male fertility. And that’s especially true if the story is about a decline in testosterone, which graying male editors are particularly unwilling to admit to.

So Pam Belluck‘s story in this morning’s New York Times–Fatherhood Leads to a Drop in Testosterone–was probably vetted by the full gray committee of editors. Perhaps that explains why she backed into it, as if she didn’t believe it herself.

The lede: “This is probably not the news most fathers want to hear.” (Read “most editors”; she knows who she’s writing for.) We then detour as testosterone “takes a dive” when fathers change diapers or read “Goodnight Moon.” Then we get to something that sounds like a news story:

So says the first large study measuring testosterone in men when they were single and childless and several years after they had children. Experts say the research has implications for understanding the biology of fatherhood, hormone roles in men and even health issues like prostate cancer.

The links in that graf, by the way, are in the Times. Let’s have a stand-up salute, or a shout-out, or a hat-tip to the Times for linking to the study it’s writing about! Let’s hope this is now the norm. (The “prostate cancer” link jumps to some other Times stories and to background on the disease.)

But before we get too excited, let’s see where the story goes next. Again, we see something odd. The graf above seems the perfect lead-in to a quote from one of the authors of the study explaining the findings and their significance. Something like this, from study author Lee Gettler of Northwestern: “…This should be viewed as, ‘Oh it’s great, women aren’t the only ones biologically adapted to be parents.’”

But we don’t get that. Instead, we get comments on the study from two researchers unconnected with it–as if  we needed independent validation of the findings before we were allowed to hear from the researchers. C’mon, gray heads: You didn’t really believe this story, and you sent Belluck out to try to find someone who would say it was flaky. And she failed.

First, we hear from Peter Ellison, a Harvard biologist, who says “The real take-home message…” Wait a minute. Shouldn’t it be the people who did the study who give us the take-home message? Then we hear from Carol Worthman, an Emory anthropologist, saying “This is part of the guy being invested in the marriage.” Again, shouldn’t it be the authors of the research who interpret it for us?

The Gettler quote, which should have followed the statement of the findings, doesn’t appear until almost halfway through the story. And a quote from another author is a few grafs lower than that.

Others handled this story in a more straightforward way. Elizabeth Norton of Science Now neatly provided context in the first graf and background in the second:

Humans are probably the only species on Earth who nurture their young for 20 years or more. For men in particular, the intensive demands of parenting can come as such a shock that a built-in biological mechanism has evolved to help cope with the change. A new study shows that becoming a father leads to a sharp decline in testosterone, suggesting that although high levels of the hormone may help men win a mate, testosterone-fueled traits such as aggression and competition are less useful when it comes to raising children.

Previous research had shown that among new fathers, testosterone levels were lower than in men of the same age who didn’t have children. But no study addressed whether parenthood itself was responsible, or whether men who became committed partners and fathers started out with lower levels of the hormone than did their single, footloose friends.

The futurist site io9 did a more conversational version of the story, but still unapologetically hit the highlights–and included the background about previous findings on fathers and testosterone. Unfortunately, it failed to get comment from others on the study’s validity and importance.

And here’s a neat little bit that I didn’t see in the stories I browsed through, but it makes a lovely kicker. It comes from the same researchers who did this study, so it shouldn’t have been hard to find–I stumbled across it in the first few minutes of searching. In April, 2010, the researchers reported that mothers have lower testosterone than non-mothers.

Nice symmetry.

- Paul Raeburn

Friday saw numerous outlets filing on a study, in Climatic Change Letters,  from well-known researcher Tom Wigley at the Nat’l Center for Atmospheric Research that for all the advertisements from ExxonMobil’s fracking department and the Natural Gas Council, there is not much to choose between coal and methane if one hopes to slow greenhouse forcings. Ironically, as most reports stress, the problem is that while coal has lots of carbon, burning it also releases aerosols (smoke, smog, and other unhealthy stuff) that, while they don’t linger nearly as long as heat-trapping CO2, do cool the climate in partial compensation. Plus, natural gas use means a lot more than happens at the burner. Pipeline leakage is not trivial, and adds a potent greenhouse gas to the atmosphere: raw methane.

The coverage- much of what major media do comes via blogsites by their reporters – implies this is something dramatically new in the climate policy arena. Better would be, in the course of reporting the study’s results, to tell (or remind) readers that when climate change went from back burner to front in the 1970s and 80s, the perceived villains were fossil fuels in general. The message was that natural gas emissions are lower, but not enough to change the game. From TV ad blitzes these days, it can almost seem that a switch from coal to gas pretty much does the trick.

The story, for all the holes in its memory, does merit the wide coverage it got. Also notable is that few outlets bother to check in with climate change nay-sayers – demonstrating that whatever dynamic it is that keeps the public guessing on where science stands on the carbon question, it is hard to pin much of the blame on mainstream, general-news media. Members of the gas industry do get a say, naturally enough. Not, so much, do the analysts at the Heartland Institute or the American Enterprise Institute. Nor should, for that matter, the good people at the Sierra Club or NRDC, who may be on the side of the angles but have similarly intense, partisan agendas.

Stories:

• Time Magazine – Bryan Walsh: Natural Gas Can Save the Climate? Not Exactly ; One sees here an example of how to lie in a lede and get away with it. By being sardonic. Walsh liberally salts the blog-style, conversational text with hyperlinks to supporting documents (several of them not quite the basic literature – ie press releases). If nat. gas is a bridge to a climate-neutral future, he writes, it better be a short one.
• Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Switch from coal to natural gas no boon to climate;
• Los Angeles Times – Geoff Mohan: Clean natural gas? Not so fast, study says ;
• Washington Post Wonkblog – Brad Plumer: Study: Replacing coal with natural gas would do little for climate change ;
• Boulder Daily Camera – Laura Snider: Boulder study: Switching from coal to natural gas may not curb global warming ; Not only a local story in its source, but local because of the Rocky Mountain region’s recent natural gas boom. She finds one local critic of the study with an unusual perspective on gas as superior in utility load management than coal. Dunno if Wigley thought of that one.
• USA Today- Wendy Koch: Study: Climate change little affected by shift from coal to natural gas ;
• Mother Jones – Kevin Drum: Natural Gas; Not That Great After All ; Particularly good on particulates in coal emission – specifically by (in an Update) listing the reasons that coal may lose its filth, which is unhealthy but also has a cooling effect, for those very same health reasons. That in turn would tip the scale back to natural gas.

There is more to the coverage. The stories were written against deadline, but the topic merits a deeper and more thoughtful examination, with a nod to the deep history of the issue, that can easily be expected in daily reporting.

Grist for the Mill: NCAR/UCAR Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

 One may get one or two sentences into New Scientist’s cover story on genetically modified versions of pests that wreak reproductive havoc on their wild cousins and think sheesh, this is not new. One may well remember years ago some kind of fruit fly withering when sterilized, lab-bred males were uncooped to keep the wild females plenty busy but with no eggs to show for it.

Then, whattayaknow London freelancer Henry Nicholls in his third graf writes “In essence, much the same method has already been successfully employed for more than half a century. In the so-called ‘sterile male technique…”. Oh. Alright then. And while the cover headline on millions of genetically modified animals is on the tabloid side of sanity (evoking Caesar the ape, and the new revenge-on-people movie), the story backs it up if one takes it literally. Furthermore, most rewarding reading are the passages on how a practical stumbling block to this ploy was found to have clever and elegant circumventions in mosquitoes and in carp. Now, to get the anti-genetic engineering movement under control.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Science reporters from Colombia, Uruguay, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Perú and Paraguay got together in a special issue of the magazine Tinta Electrónica to analyze how science journalism is doing in their countries. Your Spanish tracker read all the articles and infers from them that IT and today’s information society are very important topics for S&T journalists in the region. One example: Reporters use digital information tools to improve their reporting, they see them as a key for development in their societies, and they embrace new media as an alternative to traditional channels. Reading the articles one perceives optimism and a growing interest in the communication of science. The public interest in S&T is growing. A good group of young professional journalists is colonizing this niche. The offerings are quite subjective. We sould prefer to see more numbers and other more rigorous indicators of the state of science journalism. But they are inspirational and give a good idea what S&T writers think as they reflect, especially in an arena of technology that rarely arises here in the Tracker.      

Tinta electrónica es una publicación digital sobre comunicación y nuevas tecnologías que ha decidido dedicar su segundo número a la comunicación de la ciencia en América Latina. Los editores Sandro Medina y Emiliano Cosenza preguntaron a varios periodistas científicos latinoamericanos sus visiones sobre el estado de la comunicación científica en la región y qué hace falta para que cobre mayor notoriedad en las agendas de los medios. Aquí podéis descargar el pdf, y a continuación un resumen de dichas visiones:

Mauricio Jaramillo Marín (Colombia) “Periodismo tecnológico, en camino hacia la primera plana”. Centrado en periodismo de tecnología. Bonita clasificación entre las diferentes etapas del periodismo tecnológico: los pioneros que empezaron a abordar estos temas cuando casi no existían, los de segunda generación cuya misión fue colonizar espacios en medios, y los de tercera que deben relacionar ésta tecnología con los cambios sociales y vida de las personas. A este último respecto, la tecnología se ha hecho transversal en muchos aspectos de la sociedad. Posiblemente más que la ciencia. Las redes sociales y política es sólo un ejemplo de cómo el periodista de tecnología va a abordar temáticas generales desde la óptica de la sociedad de la información. Quizás por esto, Mauricio se muestra contrario a la hiperespecialización dentro del campo, y le asigna la misión de no sólo informar, sino también educar a la población en  unas herramientas que pueden transformar la vida de millones de personas. Augura más demanda de periodistas tecnológicos, y propone un interesante decálogo del perfil necesario.

Lucía Cuozzi y Diego Tarallo (Uruguay) “Entropía uruguaya”. Un artículo donde se habla más de inmersión tecnológica que de comunicación, y de una manera más bien descriptiva. No hay valoraciones y se percibe un poco aséptico, pero cuenta con muy buenos datos sobre la situación en Uruguay. A medida que avanza el texto describen su experiencia profesional particular, constatan que la divulgación ha dejado de ser unidireccional para convertirse en diálogo, y que el público ahora tiene mucho más poder para elegir. El título es muy bueno y atractivo, pero no queda claro el concepto que subyace en él.

Pablo Martín Fernández (Argentina) “Los temas de tecnología también exigen rigurosidad”. Relato personal sobre su evolución como periodista de tecnología. Pablo Martín termina dejando un mensaje claro: hacer bien el trabajo implica desconfiar de empresas, de agendas de medios, de intereses que abundan en el campo de la tecnología, y no dejarse llevar tanto por la inmediatez que a menudo esparce noticias falsas por redes sociales. Defiende también una visión transversal de la tecnología, y explica que Argentina parece estar realmente tomándose en serio la CyT. Buenos ejemplos.

Bernabé Soto Beltrán  (Puerto Rico) “Hacia una educación abierta a las TICs”. Gran texto sobre aprendizaje y educación en la sociedad en red. El contenido se encuentra muy distanciado de la temática del periodismo científico y tecnológico, pero interesantes reflexiones sobre la sociedad del conocimiento en un mundo cada vez más global e interconectado. La facilidad de acceso a una “educación abierta” y a un “aprendizaje informal” es uno de los paradigmas del cambio, que ya ha llegado a la sociedad, pero todavía está infrautilizado en los centros de enseñanza formal.

Antonio Mangione (Argentina) “Pienso qué divulgo. Luego existo”. Muchas ideas sobre divulgación científica desde la perspectiva de la universidad. Algunas ya debatidas en otros foros, pero visiones interesantes sobre inclusión de sectores de clase baja, la fina línea entre divulgación y autopromoción la universidad, y la escasa profundidad que aporta la “divulgación de hallazgos”. Muy inspiradora introducción sobre la motivación e ilusión inicial que llevó a Antonio a adentrarse en esta aventura en época de Carl Sagan,

Bruno Ortiz Bisso (Perú) “El periodista científico, una especie en creación”. Desde su posición como editor de una sección diaria de ciencia en el principal periódico de Perú, Bruno duda de la frase “la ciencia no vende”. Explica haberla oído en demasiadas ocasiones, y sin embargo constatar gracias a Internet que sí hay público suficiente interesado en ciencia. Establece que su regla de oro es sorprender, y habla de la necesaria evolución del comunicador desde la divulgación científica al periodismo de ciencia. Es un punto interesante: la profesionalización que sí existe en países como EEUU y falta en muchos otros lugares. “El reto está planteado, sólo resta que las instituciones adecuadas se animen a recoger el pañuelo” es su última frase con mensaje claro en busca de apoyo institucional.

Silvia Páez Monges Guanes (Paraguay) “Periodismo científico en Paraguay: En búsqueda de los porqués”. Silvia se muestra optimista al constatar que en los últimos dos años la situación en Paraguay mejoró considerablemente. Explica que dos años atrás las TIC y nuevos medios eran considerados como un medio de comunicación de segunda categoría, y que ahora (gracias a iniciativas privadas y apoyo del conacyt), se han realizado talleres y los periodistas del país ya conciben su importancia. Termina matizando las diferencias entre los conceptos de “periodismo científico” y “divulgación”, y sugiriendo una lista de ideas para afrontar ambos. Aprovechar al máximo las posibilidades de compartir digitalmente, y la importancia de la formación constante del profesional son dos de las más destacadas.

Dennis Dávila Picón (Perú) “Internet nos salvó la vida… y la ciencia también”. Bonito y casi emotivo reflejo de aquellos pioneros que se adentraron en la web 2.0 antes que nadie, cuando publicar contenido no era tan sencillo como ahora. Gran frase “Internet nos salvó de la sequía intelectual y la precariedad profesional”, que refleja la importancia que puede tener en ciertas sociedades la penetración de Internet.

En resumen, textos valorativos que en general reflejan un visión bastante particular, pero sí reflejan esta emergencia imparable de las nuevas tecnologías en la comunicación. Quizás en el tracker le deberíamos prestar más atención. Tomamos nota.

- Pere Estupinyà