The regional metros in the US, some of them, still have science writers on staff. I’ve stopped a procedure at this tracking business that was a mainstay when it started up five ago, plowing through the headlines of 100 or so newspapers on my feed reader. The yield dropped. So did my ability to keep up such a pace. Among the regulars I frequently featured along with the rest of the crew at the Philadelphia Inquirer is Tom Avril, and this time I got him again. He has a welcome yarn of pure paleontology, piscine division, via a team based in large part at his city’s Academy of Natural Sciences. No diligence credit for ksjtracker -  ‘learned of it via most occult and devious means: he emailed a tip. That in turn is another of a recent series of cues to readers to use the suggestion box at this site’s home page when somebody impresses you, including if that person who reported so notably is commonly seen wearing your own britches.

The news, incidentally, is that the multi-institute group of scientists has spent years on arctic Ellesmere Island amassing Devonian-age fossils (which is as long before dinosaurs as they are before us). They date from a time that some of its rocks were forming from sediments in far more temperate latitudes. A prime quarry has been a six-foot-long freshwater beast that, like an angler fish and just as unsettling to the eye, lurked in stream bottoms waiting to slurp up anything digestible in range. The researchers call it  Laccognathus embryi. Accompanying the story is a short video where one of the team leaders explains, as he picked up fossil bones and came across a shoulder bone or two, “We are all lobe-finned fish.”  Rather a nice slice of evolution’s ability to conserve and reuse a useful accident.

Here’s a slice of the wrenching moments of the daily news writing life. After reading it and seeing no reference to a journal or meeting I asked Avril why the team announced its findings now. Fast as a rocket came his reply. “Oh my god.” It had been in there, he said. Maybe it was the work of that fiend of the news biz, the great goblin of vanished verbiage. Missing was the part about a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology on Friday. He was setting up to repair it on line. Maybe the story, by the time you get to it, will have been amended.

It has not escaped notice that as the big metros cut staff, a good number of non-profit and other on line news organizations have sprung up to provide coverage of events at the community level. Most say they cover science and health. Most probably do, but not much of this sort of non-investigative tale that merely recognizes that every town has its share of scholars and a lot of what they do is damned interesting. The Inquirer is among the few that continue to cover that beat.

While I’m at it, here are some other recent worthy pieces in the Inquirer. They’re right there in my Ph.Inq feed. I really should check these lists more often.

• Faye Flam: Science, faith, and life’s origin ; Wherein Faye, always genteel, takes a deep breath and politely explains to readers that religious myths of origins due to divine intervention, and scientific exploration of the rise of life from inanimate matter, are not equivalent examples of faith. She quotes well-known biologist Jerry Coyne, a regular campaigner against credulous embrace of religious myth (ie, he’s an atheist). One wonders and cannot discover easily if he is any relation to George Coyne, a Jesuit priest and former director of the Vatican Observatory. He too was always in conversations about science and faith, and managed somehow to reconcile a universe billions of years old with scripture that says no such thing. I’m unsure that her kicker intended to underline the advantage of real-life experience over faith, provided by a source, works: “If you see a big cat coming at you, you’d better run.” In that case better pray it’s an awful slow cat. Even better to pick up and wave the biggest stick you can or throw rocks in hope you can bluff your way through. Or, best, slam the front door and throw the bolt.
• Sandy Bauers: N. J. Audubon’s novel market approach helps local farmers ; Or, why a farmer’s fields are stage for watching flocks of songbirds. It has to do with locavore instincts, a burgeoning sunflower growing enterprise, and the extension of native grassland.
• Sandy Bauers: Protesters rally at gas-drilling conference in Center City ; The Inquirer’s readership lives largely atop the Marcellus Shale where it underlies the Delaware River Basin, we learn here. Ms. Bauers, enviro writer of long standing, has the fracking beat.

Grist for the Mill: Phil. Acad. of Natural Sciences Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

For the second week in a row the journal Science has big news in paleanthropology that sent the platoons of reporters who write about our apish ancestors scrambling. Last week it was the evidence for canoodling long ago (one press release’s term) among our H. sapiens sort and now-vanished members of our genus. This week even bigger news, it seems: Discovery that a line of hominins that lived in southernmost Africa close to 2 million years ago and seemed on first discovery so chimplike, so likely to be members of the dead-end Australopithecine bramble in humanity’s ancestry bush, also had limb extremities reminiscent of our Homo clan. The ends of those bowed legs and long arms on these Au. sediba creatures held held hands and ankles  that appear to mean they were on the way toward … us. Plus, it’s teeny brain left cranial imprints suggestive of a reorganization from ape-hood and to something more suited for growth and reasoning. (See earlier post on first reports of this species, where coverage included some of the confusing elements seen in this round)

The story from the root of our immediate lineage also comes with a good dollop of colorful, cantankerous paleontologist. The outsized scientist on the prowl for mankind’s birth has been a fixture in public perception of that field since the days when ‘missing link’ was a term that actual scientists said with a straight face. In this case, the role is played by the prime author of the lead paper in Science’s package of five on this topic this week, Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand. Alas, to pivot to a different but pertinent topic, a lot of reporters, or at least headline wriers, still think saying “the” missing link means something significant. The march of evolution has not been fully mapped. Never will be. Experts tell us it is lousy with missing links. Always will be. There’s a zillion of them. To say “the” missing link is so …. Darwinian, in the original manner of the days when Bishop Wilberforce and Thomas ‘Bulldog’ Huxley squared off.  Oh no .. wait! – a lot of people really ARE stuck in that intellectual timewarp, like paleo-insects in amber.

If you wish to dive deeply into the cantankerous protagonist angle, look no further than the News sections of the journal:

•  Science Magazine – Michael Balter: Paleoanthropologist Now Rides High on a New Fossil Tide ; A deep profile, datelined S. Africa, that captures without blinking the unusual character of the man with custody of the key fossils  (he was a big interceder in the fight over reality of the so-called hobbits of Indonesia).

The news itself gets wide play:

• AP – Randolph E. Schmid: “Game-changer’ in evolution from S. African bones ; Nice – first quote, from somebody not involved, sets the stage and makes the rest more convincing (the source is an enthusiast). One small quibble – Schmid writes that some of the Au. sediba specimens “show a novel combination of features, almost as though nature were experimenting. Some resemble pre-human creatures while others suggest the genus Homo, which includes Homo sapiens, modern people.” First and of course nature does not experiment in any sentient way, so why bring it up even with the “almost as though” caveat. More important, the sentence implies that “pre-human” stands in contrast with the entire Homo line. The line draws a false classification boundary. One doubts that one would call Homo habilis ‘human’ without a lot of accompanying arm waving. No biggie but I’m feeling pissy today.
• Reuters – Jon Herskovitz: Two million-year-old fossils show links to man ;
• Cosmic Log / MSNBC – Alan Boyle: Was there a fork in our family tree? ; Ah, we got a missing fork. A much better term than link. Boyle talks with another man who knows his forks and links, Don Johansen of Lucy fame. She was well up the Australipithecine line, before Homo budded off. He thinks the S. African speciment is great – but that it probably had a lot of others with proto-Homo features living with it at the same time and well distributed in Africa. Some might even be older than Au.  That is, just one link here, maybe a key one, maybe not.
• NYTimes – Nicholas Wade: New Fossils May Redraw Human Ancestry - Wade, an old pro at such topics as this, takes control of the story. Via his sources he builds the theme that, as one says in so many words, this is exceedingly important, but not for many of the reasons argued by the lead author and his team. Whether this species is the exact one that exited the Australopithecine line  is undemonstrable, it says here. But it is clear that it is close kin to whatever did, and implies that the family bush had a whole lotta shakin’ going on 2 million years ago. (Note – this bullet on this story was inadvertently zapped from the post as it was first filed today.)
• Science News – Bruce Bower: Fossil finds offer close look at a contested ancestor ; Bower finds a softer way to discuss its significance and without the missing L word: “..a species that served as an evolutionary bridge from relatively apelike ancestors to the Homo genus, which inlcudes modern people.” And he gets hold of an outside expert who is impressed, but warns not to declare this the specific species that is ‘squarely at the root of the Homo genus.”
• Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger: Rethinking Human Origins: Fossils Reveal a New Ancestor on the Family Tree ; I got excited when seeing the news feed’s summary hed: A New Missing Link for Humans, which is kind of clever. No “the” to it, just a gentle ‘a link”,  and once something is found but hadn’t been sought, was it ever ‘missing.’ Is the feed’s hed somehow self-nullifying? The story starts off by recounting the species’s fossile discovery moment a few years ago, and then zooms along to these new reports on the Homo affinities.
• *UPDATE: Science Magazine – Ann Gibbons: Skeletons Present an Exquisite Paleo-Puzzle ; Finally got a copy of this in the clear at Science – and it hooks the reader from the first sentence and the stymied researcher staring at a table full of casts of fossils. Lots of history, lots of illus, lots on the confusion among experts.
• The Australian: Found! Mankind’s missing link ; Attributed to a service called NewsCore. Hmmm .. yes, the Murdoch empire. The unnamed writer explains that the find “puts forward a strong case for the hominids being the missing link between man and ape” and what the heck or should I say the hack does that mean? The sentence is vapid. It reeks. I cannot break it down to make it mean anything that is new or informative.
• ANI (Asian News Int’l) : Our oldest human ancestor lived 1.98 million years ago ; This India-based service puts on it  a Washington DC dateline, where apparently it has a substantial rewrite bureau. We’ve picked on it before, for a tendency to haphazardly rewrite press releases. It has large reach, its material running in many Indian, English-language publications. Surely it has the revenue to hire serious journalists. What possesses a rewrite person to file such a brief item, and yet casually refer to “Uranium lead dating of the flowstone” as though a significant share of readers, meaning not me, knows that that means?
• Mail Online (UK) Ted Thornhill: Hand in hand with the missing linke across two million years: Man’s earliest ancestor found in South Africa ; Right, or as Doc Martin would mutter, roight. As usual with the Mail, the  reporting is second fiddle to the handsome set of pictures.
• USA Today - Dan Vergano: 2-million-year-old-fossils raise hope over ‘missing link’ ; Well reported, outside opinion, a nice recitation of the characteristics that make the fossils intriguing.  Then there is the headline. I wager Mr. Vergano was not around when that got written. The funny thing is it puts little quote marks around its missing link. As though somebody said the so-called in the story. It never comes up there. Is the headline writer trying to hide behind them, as though they arise from somebody’s else’s imagination? And that’s it for this for today.

Grist for the Mill:

Univ. Witwatersrand Press Release ; Univ. Melbourne Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

An old puzzle – why so many valuable heavy metal ores near Earth’s surface didn’t fall to the middle as did most of the iron – is getting an attractive explanation. A British team reports in Nature this week that the Late Heavy Bombardment, a crescendo of meteor and asteroid strikes a few hundred million years after Earth formed and after its interior had largely segregated, pasted heavy stuff to the crust and it seems to have largely stayed there ever since. This is just sensational enough – giant killer asteroids whamming Earth again and again back before there was much if anything to kill – to get broad attention in popular media. That, and the gold part. Gold always makes eyes light up with interest.

At issue are the so-called iron-loving or siderophile metals, including tungsten and gold, that with little taste for oxygen and other elements abundant in the crust, ought to have easily  joined up with iron during Earth’s molten years and headed for Hades. Others include nickel, lead, platinum, and molybdenum. The new work reveals that ratios of siderophiles, specifically of tungsten as a marker for the rest, are distinctly lower in the world’s most ancient crust, left over from before the late bombardment, than they are in younger ones.

By the way, in another post today The Tracker looks askance at so much coverage of discovery of a Roman gladiator school by radar-toting archeologists in Austria. Few reporters (none that I found) checked its importance with scientists not involved in the work. Hmmm. Not too many do with this bombardment-gold news either. It seems different – the topic’s general importance seems clearer in terms of being new, and it’s in a big time journal. But I have no easy explanation why taking this post’s news at face value seems to me so less egregious than doing so with that interesting news from gladiator days.

Stories:

• BBC – Leila Battison: Meteorites delivered gold to Earth ; OK, usage. A meteorite is the rock that is left on the ground after it stops bouncing around. What brought stuff in was meteoroids, or maybe one could say just plain meteors because those are what the glowing trails are. Second a metaphor suggestion. One knows Ms. Battison sought only to explain Earth grew by agglomeration of smaller bits when she calls the process a “snowball effect.” But something occurring with almost the whole stirmash red-hot and melted does not work well with wintry imagery. Rest of the story is fine.
• Register (UK) Richard Chirgwin: Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’ ; A lot picked up here from other outlets, with acknowledgment one must add. And am I the only one who has encountered that golden shower term in other, rather depraved meanings? It throws off the brain just to read it.
• Discovery News – Jessica Marshall: Meteorites Pummeled Earth, Delivering Gold ;
• Science News – Devin Powell: Earthly riches heaven sent ; I had a feeling Science News’s editors would demand reporters call around. Powell gets an outside opinion. It is that this work is great and “pushes the boundaries for isotope testing.” Gives the story more heft to have this, even if it is a hurrah.
• Mirror – Mike Swain: Gold came from outer space ; A shorty, but the headline is the only part that seems sensible. The first graf says most of our gold arrived in a huge bombardment around 4.3 billion years ago. Okay, true, but that’s the first main round of things that made Earth – which entirely misses the point of the report which is the late heavy at about 3.7 billion years ago. It makes much of the huge gold load in the Earth’s core, when the paper’s focus is on what is in the crust.  The third graf, a quote, then mentions a coincidence as key. Doesn’t say what the coincidence is. There is no fourth graf. This is a sort of trifecta of how to make a story short and, uh, totally distinctive. One suspects the reporter knew better. Then an editor, with a little hole to fill, trimmed things to size. Just suspecting, here.

Grist for the Mill: Bristol University Press Release ;

And Finally, some hardly related at all news, with kudos:

Last week’s Nature – the main reason to throw this into this post – had a nifty story on discovery of an ancient star so bereft of elements other than Hydrogen, Helium, and Lithium that it defies theory about how small-mass stars could form. It should not exist. Many outlets gave it good coverage. I’ll make hardly any amends here, but do salute an account of it that came out this week, and is commendably clear. It’s like the writer, an old familiar, give it time to digest. So here’s that one, and one from a site we don’t recognize enough because it only publishes on Fridays after this tracking job is over for the day.

• Time Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: Cosmic Anomaly: The Star That Shouldn’t Exist ;
• Science Friday – Ira Flatow: Newly Discovered Star Shouldn’t Exist ; Check out the video with this that shows, emphatically, how obscure this star really is in the context of all the other ones.

- Charlie Petit

Reuters‘s Irene Klotz has a source with an idea. If getting astronauts back and forth from the station is such a problem without shuttles any more and with Russian partners the only ones with the hardware to fill in, how about a new partner? China, to be specific. I’ve sometimes thought NASA ought to just sell its share in the station to China, or India. But that’d be a long range proposition. A Chinese-American former astronaut, Leroy Chiao, tells her that as China has flown several of its people to space and back using a capsule derived from Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft design, it might provide a second way to change crews on the station. The story suggests that perhaps China could move fast enough to be sure that the station does not go without any crew on board in coming months. Russia’s investigation of the recent crash of a launcher – carrying an unmanned cargo ship – is threatening to force temporary suspension of its taxi service. There is a chance the station may go without a crew for a spell.

This merits a salute for enterprising reporting. The story includes opinion from skeptics who say it would not be fast or easy for China, even if it wanted, to build such a regular-service ability including modification of its Shenzhou  vessel for docking with the station. That alone, enterprise or not, makes one wonder if this news is of much use. Some say the fastest and best bet for redundant access is through development of private delivery services of which Klotz lists several examples. None is likely to be ready for a few years.

One thinks further that China’s capacity to even get a launcher on the pad this fast is not the half of it. Is it even imaginable that NASA would put its astronauts in a Chinese capsule without at least a year or two of safety reviews and facility inspections to be sure it meets the agnecy’s man-rating standards? Russia has been doing this kind of thing even longer than NASA, and is rather good at it. Adding a newcomer to the space game to provide such a vital service could surely not be routine.

Related News:

• USA Today – Dan Vergano (Aug 14): Chinese space lab set to soar ; This suggests China’s spacecraft are booked for the time being.

- Charlie Petit

Sometimes the news needs some dissection and here’s one example  about discovery of a Roman Empire  gladiator school lying under more recent sediments in what is now Austria. It gets taken entirely at face value. One is surprised that so few reporters seem to have had a whole lot of curiosity about the news’s history – or had editors with no great curiosity and thus were given no room to display interest in the back story.

The basics, picked up in recent days by media around the world, are that researchers at the Ludwig-Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospecting and Virtual Archaeology in Austria used ground penetrating radars carried about by tractors to inspect what’s buried at the well-known site of the vanished Roman city of Carnantum. A regional trading and garrison center east of today’s Vienna, it was once home, they say, to about 50,000 people. Near where an amphitheatre (think Colosseum) once stood for games, including gladiator fights, they detected the remains of a network of rooms  around a large yard. Conclusion: it was a school for training gladiators and perhaps the wild animals and horses that helped to make watching dismemberments and other cleverly staged  deaths such a fun thing for working stiffs in Roman territory to do on a day off.

First story I read, as usual when a mass of reporters cover the same news, was the AP. There George Jahn filed a vivid yarn. It is intriguing and from the looks of it completely credulous. Credulity doesn’t mean Jahn passed on somebody’s else’s fabulations, only that one would like to see some sign of suspicion on his part that fabulations were afoot. Maybe they are, maybe not. One would like to know the reporter as the public’s agent cocked an eyebrow to find out. And this is just to ask why not more digging into the story as presented. I’ll not even dwell much on the absence, in reporting by agencies I saw, of opinion of outside archeologists whether the discovery of a well-preserved gladiator school is a major event in the field or not.

Jahn  describes – along with reminder how brutal life was for gladiators- video and computer-enhanced, special effects recreation of the complex. The story I first read at the AP’s own site carried no link to the animation. But as the story mentions the full name of the multi-university institute sponsoring the work, the magic of search engines found its website in the always-stupefying flash. It’s down there in Grist. Here is the video it includes. That institute, founded only in 2010 as a wing of the Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, has real money. This is a polished production with portentious drum-beating music of an authoritarian air and a lot of zooming around the recreated scene sort of like one can do with the photos of one’s house and town on Google Earth.

Well, as seen in that still, either that ground penetrating radar is really good and the bloody facility is in phenomenal condition (the archeologists say it is, but by usual archeology standards phenomenal means nobody has looted it yet), or the animation mavens  filled in a lot of detail. That includes the tile roofs, the buttressing of walls, the windows patterns and arches, and most everything that makes it so eye-popping. Readers will know there’s some such imagineering involved, to use a Disneyworld word. But they also deserve to know how much. Can they really see individual rooms? Divine the massive stone arch at the entry? Tell that, as Jahn reports, the gladiators at the end of a working day spent practicing how to kill people and beasts “could pamper their bodies with hot, cold, and lukewarm water” before repairing to one of the 40 tiny sleeping cells for the night?

Such reporting would take length and time, so one cannot be too surprised that the technology behind this news does not get deep investigation (it’s been in the news before, having uncovered other henges near stonehenge, and revealed similarly now-buried Viking settlements). But one would like some explicit hint of the distance that lies between the actual data the radar turned up, and that video rendering. In the meantime, even before excavations begin, there already is an app for iphones and androids and the like to play the video and other recreations as one walks around the site, glimpsing what lies beneath.

The AP did do a video  with some excerpts from the institute’s longer one, by the way, narrated by Matt Friedman (sp?)/. It may be seen embedded at the Sydney Morning Herald with the story by Jahn.

Other stories: Not one of which pause to hint how much guessing went into the recreation. Many take as gospel the Austrians’ declaration that this is a massively significant discovery. It seems to be a very impressive piece of archeology, technically. How about some outside opinion whether it changes anything much about our understanding of the Roman Empire’s nature or extent? This is news that, while general assignment reporters are astounding in their ability to get up to speed from a dead stop, could have used a few experienced people from the science beat and who had some idea who else to call. Plus, is a journal article or other formal publication involved, or is this purely a publicity machine at work?

• Al Jazeeera ; Gladiator-school ruins unveiled in Austria ; A solid TV account.
• BBC News : Ruins of Roman gladiator school found in Austria ;
• Scotsman – Allan Hall: Massive gladiator school is found under Austrian town ; Another lively one. Several quotes are identical to those in the AP account.
• Independent (UK) Tony Paterson: Ruins reveal how Roman gladiators won their spurs ;
• Daily Mail (UK) : Archaeologists discover remains of a Roman gladiator school in Austria ;  This is the place to go to see pictures, a Mail specialty. That includes Kirk Douglas in his loin-cloth briefs and chain mail arm armor, Russell Crowe in a pile of vanquished foes, and what looks like a lineup of action figures. Effort to get any facts on the archeology of the site not on the wires or press release? No sign of it. It does mention that Brits are on the research team. It does not indicate they have any opinions worth sharing or even mention who any of them are. (They are, should you care, at the Visual & Spatial Technology Centre of the University of Birmingham. The phone number is not hard to find.
• Time Magazine – Kai Ma: “Sensational” discovery: ancient Gladiator School Found East of Vienna ;
• Spiegel : Radar Helps Locate a Roman Gladiator School ;

Grist for the Mill: Ludwig-Boltzmann Inst. Press Release  ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) During the opening of a conference on bioethics the Mexican Secretariat of Health has proposed to avoid cryopreservation of embryos arguing that it increases the risk of autism and dead for different causes. According to the press, he has also said that ovarian hyperstimulation in women prior IVF increases the risk of ovarian and breast cancer. These are really serious claims, which are not well supported by scientific literature. Mexican reporters have not referred to any study, or even searched for second opinions. They have simply written stories taking the most alarmist words of the secretariat, whose principal message seemed to be that Mexico needs a better IVF regulation and that private hospitals use caesarean section too often (80% of cases compared to 20% in other developed countries).

Tema controvertido en México y que debe ser tratado con mayor profundidad por los periodistas de salud mexicanos. El Secretario de Salud José Ángel Villalobos inauguró una reunión nacional de comisiones de bioética, y según El Universal, dijo nada más y nada menos que los bebés nacidos de embriones congelados presentan mayor riesgo de Alzheimer (Ruth Rodríguez “Ssa rechaza ley para reproducción asistida”). Esta es una afirmación muy seria. Y no debería transmitirse sin referencias a publicaciones científicas que así lo indiquen, o como mínimo segundas y terceras opiniones. Actualmente, muchísimas parejas con problemas de infertilidad recurren a la fecundación invitro: se hiperestimulan los ovarios de la mujer para obtener varios óvulos, se fecundan, se implantan dos o tres, y se congelan el resto por si el primer intento fracasa poder intentarlo de nuevo si tener que empezar de cero. Según la bibliografía científica consultada muy por encima por el tracker (y que debería haber exigido la periodista de Universal), este vínculo entre autismo y embriones congelados no aparece por ningún sitio. Según El Universal el secretario de salud dice que “incluso el riesgo de muerte puede ser más alto”. Expresiones todavía más alarmantes: “el abuso en la hiperestimulación ovárica le puede provocar cambios metabólicos ‘gravísimos’, e incluso la muerte”.

Esto es muy fuerte. Leyendo con atención y dejando de lado estas palabras, vemos un mensaje del secretario que puede tener gran lógica: nos dice que se está abusando de la hiperestimulación ovárica, y que es más seguro congelar óvulos y luego fertilizarlos en caso de necesidad que criogenizar embriones. Y que esto debería estar bien regulado. Nos suena bien; aquí no sabemos. También puede ser acertadísimo el toque de atención a los hospitales privados diciéndoles que abusan de las cesáreas hasta el punto que el 80% de las cesareas que realizan son innecesarias (Blanca Valadez en Milenio). El dato de que en otros países desarrollados los nacimientos por cesárea son el 20%, y que la OMS recomienda utilizarla sólo en casos imperiosos, avala este mensaje de alerta.

Pero lo de las muertes y riesgos fatales de la congelación de óvulos e hiperestimulación creemos que se ha presentado de manera demasiado alarmista, y posiblemente sin fundamento sólido. En Terra leemos un texto desorbitado de Emanuel Mendoza Cancino “Ley de fecundación in vitro promueve tráfico de embriones”. Esto no es serio, como tampoco las palabras dentro del texto de un responsable de salud “la mujer que se somete a sesiones de hiperestimulación ovárica, se eleva considerablemente el riesgo de cáncer ovárico y de senos”. Esto no está demostrado. No se puede alarmar de esta manera. Quizás el texto más moderado, en el Blanca Valadez “A favor SSA, de una legislación “imperfecta” en materia de reproducción asistida” en Milenio. Y uno que critica la premura con que se limita a 3 el número de embriones generados, obligando a las mujeres a pasar de nuevo por los costosos y desgastantes tratamientos en caso de no funcionar, el de Ángeles Cruz Martínez “Cárcel a quien conservee embriones“, en La Jornada. Necesario contrapunto.

En definitiva; que quizá sí hace falta regular mejor la reproducción humana asistida en México. Pero este mensaje ha llegado acompañado de afirmaciones muy delicadas que pueden generar temor en muchísimas mujeres. Leyendo las notas no sabemos si el secretario de salud se ha excedido, o los periodistas han abusado de búsqueda de impacto (más bien intuimos lo segundo). Lo que no han hecho es algo tan importante como buscar en la literatura científica. Es un caso que lo exige. Actualizaremos si aparecen notas al respecto.

- Pere Estupinyà 

This isn’t so much science journalism as a broadcast that almost anybody who enjoys news of science will also find absorbing, and disturbing. A happenstance decision to check what MPR has on its midmorning broadcast found a gem. Put it on your ipod, or just listen. The host – Kerri Miller? I think so -  talks with Wade Goodwin about the fires in Texas. “Apocalypse..the trees are like matchsticks … the pine trees are exploding … not enough firefighters to go around …worst fire we’ve ever had … like a nuclear explosion …it’s jumped across rivers, it’s jumped across highways back and forth…we pulled the ground forces out, it is just too dangerous…”  and with Paul Huttner, the station’s meteorologist. He’s good, too – and provides backup detail on his blog Updraft. This is, he reports, the most catastrophic weather year in US history. One topic: are we seeing a phase in the desertification of parts of the southwest that, as it is, are barely on the edge of keeping the vegetative cover they have?  A little more heat and aridity in some parts of the nation, and “it’s a desert.” This end of the broadcast is clearly in the science journalism class – citation of big shot scientists, some data, some detailed explanations. He gets into Arctic ice, temperature extremes, hurricane wind shear, straight line winds, lots more. Keep listening through the newscast that interrupts the program. Speaking of arctic sea ice, Hutton mentions we may have a record summer low coming up in a week or two. Take a look for yourself. It’s right on pace to undershoot the 2007 record low.

In the meantime, Minnesota itself – pleasant, temps in the 70s, no droughts or floods to speak of.

Related:

• NYTimes DotEarth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: A Hidden Factor Behind Losses in Texas Fires ;

*Update 

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Disaster in US: An Extreme and Exhausting Year ; My apologies. I set out to find disaster reporting that complements this report filed over the weekend – and forgot to include it. Borenstein adds the diddly little East Coast earthquake (I write from my office within maybe 100 yards of Hayward fault), but mostly it’s about weather-related disruptions. And these, he writes, are mostly random chance or bad luck. But “man-made global warming is increasing the odds of getting a bad roll of the dice.”

- Charlie Petit

Two specialty outlets have a story that seems appropriate for media of broader audience to tackle. It concerns the Kepler space telescope, a darling among NASA’s projects. Its exquisite optics and immense data stream capture hundreds of thousands of stars, revealing periodic dimmings that mean a planet has just crossed its sun’s face. But Kepler is now found unable to perceive its main quarry – Earth-sized worlds in Earth-type orbits – as easily as hoped. The stars are so variable that planet shadings are often harder to spot than hoped. It needs money for a few extra years’ data processing to do the job. That costs money. Not much, but any budgetary augmentation is hard to get, even for a program as glamorous and Kepler. It makes vivid what mere generalities about tough choices do not.

Two news organizations that largely serve narrow audiences have gotten the news out, with commendably clear explanation from veteran reporters.  One was more than a month ago, another this week :

• Sky & Telescope – Kelly Beatty: Kepler’s Dilemma: Not Enough time (July 27) ; A column, with its lede buried for narrative build. Hence it easily sank without other news outlets noticing Beatty had a scoop.  It begins with an encomium to Kepler’s achievements and then works toward the pickle its leaders are in – nature made stars more crackly than they expected. That’s a surprise but not a shock. Nobody had looked so closely at so many stellar light curves until Kepler came along. But it means it will take a few years longer than the nominal mission’s 3+ year duration to pick out the precise rhythms of planet-passages from the more random eruptions and sloshings of their stars’ atmospheres.
• NatureNews – Ron Cowen:Jumpy stars slow hunt for other Earths / NASA mission looks for extra time to battle stellar noise (Sept 6). The illus up there is from this article. It gets right to the point. Kepler conceivably could have to shut down before its big job is done. Cowen has been covering NASA’s budget woes, particularly stemming from overruns by the nearly-ready James Webb Space Telescope project and costs of the human exploration effort. He also links to a paper in press with a detailed analysis of the surprisingly noisy behavior of stars. Also, a doff of the hat to Cowen for the tip – one that acknowledged Beatty was there first.

The initiative by Cowen and Beatty to dig this news up at all, without press releases or other easy feeding, is welcome. One angle could bear further inquiry from reporters. Is the unexpected atmospheric agitation among solar-type stars  good news or bad for the basic processes by which solar systems like our own form, including stable orbits of rocky, watery worlds at comfortable distance from their planets?  That is, does it imply that our Earth is of a type even rarer than commonly assumed?

The news, by the way, is a particular surprise and cause of chagrin for yours truly. I’ve  written about the exquisite Kepler photometer’s amazing trove of stars – whether they have planets or not – including richly odd behaviors never before documented in such detail. It didn’t occur to me to press Kepler’s handlers for any indication that such marvels also crimp the main goal to find how common Earth-like planets are.

Related News:

Considerable other coverage as NASA’s projected costs for manned exploration keep going up and other programs feel the heat. Three examples:

• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor: White House Experiences Sticker Shock Over NASA’s Plans ;
• AP: Marcia Dunn: Report: NASA needs to keep more astronauts on hand ;
• Los Angeles Times (Op-Ed) James Bullock: Reaching for the Stars ; One astronomer’s argument why, overruns or not, NASA should finish the Webb telescope and get it working. It’s true, what he says: Scientists work cheap, especially post-docs and grad students. They are not hedge fund managers with only one rule: make money (Plus, rule #2, feel smugly indignant if asked to work cheaper or pay more tax). That’s why it is pathetically ignorant to imagine that, en masse, scientists fudge data for the grant money. It’s the data they crave, seldom the moneyl Anyway and still, some things need hordes of these people and hordes are not cheap and the equipment plus the hard hats to build it can be over the moon pricy.

- Charlie Petit

Okay, I ran out of time yesterday and paid Science Times no attention. It won’t take much time today either. Not that it lacks merit, but yesterday’s news can be a little like yesterday’s fish.

Going entirely by self-interest, the most eye-catching is Rony Caryn Rabin‘s column on consumer health care, and on wisdom teeth in particular. It strikes a nerve (ouch, wrong metaphor when dental work is the topic). I am 65, was born with four of these things, was told by the National goddam Science Foundation I shouldn’t go on a press tour to Antarctica with them in my mouth because a dental emergency is a real pain down there and I’d probably need an emergency medevac or something which they’d hate like the dickens, and managed to take the trip anyway. I’ve lost four teeth since then (chronic gum disease but it has ebbed due, I suspect, to the hormonal decline of aging), only one a wisdom tooth, and it was the LAST molar on that side of my maxilla to go. I called him lonesome George, flossed him like crazy, but eventually Dr. Hites had to pluck him too. So on the basis on my own personal anecdote I completely believe Rabin’s sources who say the dental establishment has no justifying data, ergo is fomenting a myth, when it told her daughter to have all four of these rearmost ivories yanked before she went off to school because she might flunk out after a tooth emergency derails her studies and delivers her to a dullard’s career of shame and regret. Something like that. What she actually wrote is good public service reporting.

I explained yesterday I am not the one to say anything about the lead story, by old timer Guy Gugliotta, on acoustics and wonderful music, because even before I started going deaf I couldn’t tell a sharp from a flat tire, a chord from a stack of wood.

Also highly readable, and among the most reader-popular: Jacqueline Mroz on the failure of lawmakers to regulate fertility clinics in one important, gene-pool-protecting way: to limit how many children might be born to the same biological fathers. Right now, she reports, the results include communities seeded with scores if not 100+ offspring who can easily wind up unknowingly entwined with their half brothers or sisters. She left out one thing – mention of a scandal that I seem to recall, in which a man doctor of hefty ego at such a clinic was also the anonymous provisioner of the key germ cells. Boy is that icky.

As usual, lots more: Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

Yes, there is a New York Times  ScienceTimes today, but no roundup. I’ve not missed one before. Read nothing into that omission even if I do have a tin ear and the lead story is about balancing the acoustics of orchestras for perfect listening that I would never fully understand. I intend to continue tracking the nation’s leading newspaper science section. It seems odd to imagine a science journalism tracker that failed to pay attention to it, even if a lot of this site’s regulars read the section anyway. I’ll do some sort of  catch-up tomorrow, I expect. What happened is that the post on climate change journalism and journal internal affairs ate up a big part of the morning.

- Charlie Petit

Interesting synchronicity in human sex news over the last few days and also about a week and a half ago. First came a flurry of reports, from a Stanford group’s paper in Science, that interbreeding by our H. sapiens ancestors with Neanderthals may have left a good many of us with stronger immune systems. That detail adds to a stream of news in the last year or two that not only Neanderthals are in the human ancestry mix, but that in Siberia a group dubbed the Denisovans, also of near-human nature, seem to have been intimate with some of the first humans to enter their territory.

Then over the weekend came news that cannot be shocking given the Neanderthal and Denisovan thing: Even earlier, as our kind emerged in Africa, there were yet other hominid (or hominin, I really can’t keep track of the difference) species around. From the looks of one line of evidence intra-genus sex was just part of being human back when the cradle of mankind had a large kinship group in it. Nobody seems to have much clue whether it was H. ergaster, or H. erectus, or H. younameit, but somebody left a few suspicious fragments of non-gene DNA in the chromosomes of a few extant people living still in Africa.

A they are  newest, we’ll start with the latest stories. The news, in brief, is that a University of Arizona population geneticist and colleagues reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that some African groupings contain genetic variations consistent with what a few cross-species encounters hundreds of thousands of years ago might have left in human descendents today.

Stories on Interspecies breeding in Africa:

• LiveScience – Charles Q. Choi: Humans had sex with now-extinct relatives ; A good piece to read if you’re to read only one, as Choi puts both spots of news together.
• Arizona Daily Star – Tom Beal: US-led study: More clues early man, like species, bred ;
• NatureNews – Matt Kaplan: Human ancestors interbred with related species ; Story is also picked up for wider circ. at Scientific American’s site.

Grist for the Mill: Univ. Arizona Press Release ;

Stories on Interbreeding with Neanderthals & Denisovans, immune system inference:

• USA Today – Douglas Stanglin: Study: Humans inherited some immune genes in dalliances with Neanderthals; Not just the hed, but in the lede “dallying” comes up. Harmless, one supposes. But also a deep stretch to suppose that sex in 40,000 BC was probably a  dalliance, maybe complete with gifts of Mammoth Steppe wildflowers and fermented musk ox milk. Or, perhaps clubs and assaults were involved.
• BBC – Matt McGrath : Neanderthal sex boosted immunity in modern humans ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: Neanderthal genome inherited by humans,study says ; Again with the dalliances. But Perlman hints things weren’t all friendly, noting that humans overran both Neanderthals and Denisovans, a term with no cozy hugs implied.
• Los Angeles Times : Humans got immunity boost from Neanderthals, study finds ;

*UPDATE:

• Science – Ann Gibbons: Who Were the Denisovans?;  Gibbons, on the journalism wing of this science journal, a paleanthropology maven and nut (she wrote a whole book) traveled to the cave itself for a vivid narrative with mystery, discovery, new theory, ambition … the whole scientific method arc. Plus pictures. It is too bad such stories as this do not get wider circulation on ScienceNOW or other services. One can imagine there are good business arguments why not. But still, too bad.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford School of Medicine Press Release ; Wherein ‘canoodling’ is in the hed.

- Charlie Petit

On Friday as the long US Labor Day (remember labor? Unions?) weekend began a storm brewed over the resignation of the top editor at the small open -access journal Remote Sensing. He thereby protested his own, or his staff’s, use of a paper one month earlier and authored mostly by the US climate researcher Roy Spencer, at the University of Alabama. I first learned of the resignation via a blogpost by hydrologist and climate change activist Peter Gleick. There was no media reaction at the time. So all I did was pass word via a medium I only occasionally use, Twitter.

The paper that triggered the self-firing asserted discovery of a flaw in standard ways to measure the planet’s heat gain due to greenhouse gases. It found reason to think much more of that heat is escaping right back into space, largely over the oceans.  KSJtracker posted on it at the time. The post, meaning I, pretty much shrugged. It focussed mostly on the prompt rejection among other scientists of the paper’s thesis – as reported in the majority of immediate dispatches by people I would regard as diligent science journalists – and on the excitement that it met at such greenhouse warming doubt-friendly outlets as Forbes and Fox News. (One must note, however, that doubt-friendly does not mean absolutist about being contrarian. Forbes hosted Gleick’s post on the resignation).

The resignation received a good deal of attention in media, even more in blogs, later Friday and over the weekend. Among the first outlets to hit the webwaves was The Guardian in the UK, where Leo Hickman hurried it out  with commendable detail and sourcing. He reports, and links to, the reports at Fox News and Forbes that got the disgraced editor’s blood up, in retrospect.   Most focus on the apology by the editor of the journal Remote Sensing, see Grist below. and on his declaration that also culpable were the media that took the paper seriously and, more telling, the excessive pumping it got from the university’s press release.

Perhaps he should have only pointed his finger at himself. I’ll stick with the tone that The Tracker took the first time around. Most media that responded at all responded well. Those outlets that did not do so failed to balance their reports by including reactions from other mainline researchers. Reporters who get a story of this sort – its thesis is obviously extraordinary – and who parrot a university’s press release have failed to report professionally. Don’t go pinning it on the host university when reporters fail to think things through for themselves or who don’t find other experts to help them do it. Sometimes deadline pressure forces even the best reporters to file before they’d rather, but even then the dispatch should be carefully couched as provisional. Such terms as “unconfirmed” or simply declaring that other experts have not been heard from are useful hedges. Not that the university is off the hook in a larger context, now that it is the norm for university press releases to get wide public circulation via numerous aggregation sites. Most of the time they provide decent information if not journalism. But caveat emptor, caveat lector, caveat reportor, and caveat everybody else-or. As for media getting a passing grade, that goes primarily for the elements of media that are this site’s focus, science journalists and their editors. Major outlets that have laid off or never had such staffers, they probably didn’t cover it at all. Most likely, nobody on hand understood the news one way or the other.

* UPDATE 1: An exchange at NASW-Talk, the email discussion site sponsored by the Nat’l Association of Science Writers, has an interesting string on the topic. Here is a Wordfile edited version, with names retained but email addresses and phone numbers removed along with extraneouos coding. It would appear that not many in the biz share my opinion that the university’s public affairs team is not much to blame, on the ethics front,  for misleading reporters or the public.

More News Stories:

• Telegraph – James Delingpole : Obscure editor resigns form minor journal: why you should care ; Delingpole is so contrarian in stance that he probably thinks the Heartland Institute is a moderate voice of dispassionate reason. All that, yet he writes so very entertainingly, wittily, smoothly, and well.
• ABC (Australia) Stephan Lewandowsky: Climate sceptic science: read with caution ;
• ScienceNOW – Richard A. Kerr: Journal Editor Resigns Over Contrarian Climate Paper ; Kerr raises succinctly a key point – the journal where the Spencer paper appeared has a readership and editorial board largely comprising specialists in the technical challenges of remote sensing – but not many authorities on climate change as a science.
• BBC – Richard Black: Journal editor resigns over ‘problematic’ climate paper ; Works his way through the issues nicely – and ends with a topic so dicey most reporters would cringe and turn away. He lists forthrightly Spencer’s affiliations with the George C. Marshall institute – a right-wing think-tank,and that’s simple enough. But more daringly he includes Spencer’s association with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, “an evangelical Christian organization” that also happens to oppose strong legislation to curb climate change because it would expand gov’t and cost jobs. Most reporters avoid bringing up a person’s religion as a caveat to their secular behavior. Black handles it pretty well.
• Ars Technica- John Timmer: Editor who published controversial climate paper resigns, blasts media ;
• Huffington Post – Bob Ward: Climate Change ‘Sceptics’ Exploit Weaknesses in Journal Review Processes ; Is HP at news outlet, or blog sitet?  Dunno. For-sure blog posts are next…

Blog Posts:

• Yale Forum on Climate, Media – Keith Kloor: Editor’s Apologetic Resignation Blows Gaing Hole in Over-Hyped Media Story ; Nice touch – inclusion, with link – of a formal rebuttal of the offending paper, now in press.
• Real Climate – Gavin Schmidt: Resignations, retractions and the process of science ;
• Climate Science – Roger Pielke Sr: Comments on the Dessler 2011 GRL Paper …: Pielke Sr. as is his habit takes potshots at all involved. He favors the publication of the original Spencer paper, thinks the journal editor needn’t have resigned, and that the counter-paper now in press at Geophysical Research Letters ought to have been in Remote Sensing where this all started.
• Roger Pielke Jr.: Retraction, Remote Sensing and Due Process ;
• Nature Newsblog – Richard Monastersky: Cool climate paper sinks journal editor ;
• Retraction Watch – Ivan Oransky: Editor of Remote Sensng resigns over controversial climate paper, co-author stands by it ;  This is not the only, but is the most apt place, to ask “If Wagner (the editor who fired himself) feels he published the article in error, why not simply retract it? Was it really necessary to fall on his sword…?”
• *UPDATE 2 - Dot Earth/NYT – Andrew C. Revkin: A Reality Check on Clouds and Climate ;

Grist for the Mill: Original paper ; Editor’s resignation editorial ;

- Charlie Petit