In August Mr. and Mrs. Tracker took a side trip to Calaveras Big Trees Sate Park, north of Yosemite, and walked a wonderful trail through some wonderful big sequoia trees so big one can only gape. A lot, and I mean a lot, of trees and their rotting remains were scattered around, lying on their sides. The trail map we followed had the standing trees as blobs, and long matchsticks shapes for fallen. They were about equally common. What if one fell over right now?, I thought. That’d be something to see.

Now, in a cute shorty, the Los Angeles Times‘s Bettina Boxall reports that about a month ago, in Sequoia National Park to the south of Yosemite, a twinned big tree (one tree at the bottom that split into two part way up) went down, plopping a trunk roughly 300 feet long and thicker than a small house is high right across a tourist path. Better yet, tourists were on it at the time and nobody got hurt. One quick-thinking visitor from Germany got his video on it before the toppling was done. That’s the best part of this story, jerky and brief as it it. The video link is in the story.

- Charlie Petit

The journal Nature Bioetchnology is generating a news ripple. A company that Oxford University researcher foundedhas field tested male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that have been given a few deranged genes. They mate and impregnated females lay fertile eggs – but the offspring die before reaching adulthood. The article concerns only a field test two years ago, but a few news accounts note that, in a meeting last year, reps of the company, Oxitech (Oxford Insect Technlogies), triggered a near collapse of the mosquito’s population.

To get a full rundown on how it works read the BBC’s account by Richard Black. Most important, it sketched enough of the workings of the genes involved to give readers a sense of the method’s power. And while Black mentions that genetically engineered organisms intended for use in the wild are subject to regulation, he does not explore how this particular method might do harm.

   Compare that to a tabloid version of this news, at the UK’s Daily Mail. There Simon Tomlinson has it under the hed Fears grow over genetically engineered mosquitoes which kill their own offspring. Perhaps they will grow – after readers swallow this account’s assertions. The lede particularly promises meat behind the hed, it’s first words being “Serious concerns have been raised..” But jeez marie and Elvis is still dead, this piece just peters out. I can not find a single serious concern that ought to raise fear. One that parades as such is that the method may not work. That’s not a reason for fear, unless one is talking about fear of wasting money. Another is that a few female mosquitoes may get accidentally mixed in with the gene-frazzled males, raising slightly the number of vectors out there that might pick up the virus and pass it on to people (only females mosquitoes bite). That’s pretty marginal. Gad.

Other stories:

• NY Times – Andrew Pollack: Concerns Are Raised About Genetically Engineered Mosquitoes ; First, while this runs on line under the Science section’s collection, on paper it is in the Business section. Dunno why that is. It’s not much a biz story. Pollack explains one ‘concern’ this way: once genetically modified insects are released, they cannot be recalled.” Since these are almost all males that will leave females having few or zero viable hatchlings, one wonders why anybody should care. There may be reason to do so, in the abstract, but nothing specifically is offered to say why. Another concern is that the public won’t accept genetically altered pests. Some people may be creeped out by some manmade freak buzzing their ears at night, but whether that is rational is unaddressed. Another concern is that the primary company behind the tests has a track record of rushing field tests in remote areas before passing muser with enough regulatory agencies. That is a problem – but whether these insects pose plausible threat is not explained either. This story, while not overtly sensationalized, is clearly what got the Daily Mail hot and bothered.
• Scientific American – Michael Moyer: Genetically Modified Mosquitos Mate with the Locals; A blog shorty, but it provides succinct, believable reason this news may disconcert rational people. The company has done the work largely in secret. Ergo, it’s not this particular research instance that triggers targeted worry, but the lack of regulatory oversight that could lead to big problems in the general arena of genetic engineering.
• Business Week/ Bloomberg – Reg Gale:Mosquito Bred to Fight Dengue Fever Shows Promise in Study ;
• Medical News Today – Catherine Paddock: Sterile Mosquito Bred To Fight Dengue Fever Shows Promise in Field Trial ; A serious if flat account. It lays out a few potential problems for the method, ones that regulators should think about, but does not suggest they are clear or immediate threats to the public. One for instance is speculation that eliminating this mosquito species will open a niche, maybe for something worse. Something to consider for sure. After all, if somehow maybe I figure out how (without animal cruelty of course) to expel raccoons from the yard I’ll get coyotes instead, or pumas. That couldn’t be good for the cat.

Closely Related News and other items that make the new news, old news:

• New Scientist (Sept. 11) Henry Nicholls:  Swarm troopers: Mutant armies waging war in the wild ; A feature, rambunctiously written, on the company’s wider strategies in controlling insect pests and disease vectors.
• AAAS ScienceInsider (Nov. 16, 2010) Martin Enserink: GM Mosquito Trial Strains Ties in Gates-Funded Project ; and (Jan 27, 2011) GM Mosquito Release in Malaysia Surprises Opponents and Scientists – Again;

Grist for the Mill: Univ. of Oxford Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Could the neutrino be its own antiparticle? If this was the case, it might explain why the Universe is made of matter instead of antimatter. The hypothesis comes from a phenomenon named “neutrinoless double beta decay” suggested decades ago by Italian physicist Ettore Majorana. Now a group of international researchers gathered in Valencia (Spain) are planning to build a detector to test if neutrinoless double beta decay indeed exists. If it does exist, they say neutrino would be its own antiparticle and could explain the mystery of the matter-antimatter asymmetry.

A curiosity regarding the changing of the clocks, that in Spain and other European countries happened last Saturday night: Every time this moment arrive, we can see the same kind of stories repeating data about energy savings, or controversies about its usefulness. This time a news agency sent a story empathizing that Daylight Saving Time really has an impact on reducing energy consumption while another news agency sent a different story with different sources saying that the benefits are minimal. The funny thing is that some newspapers have published both versions at their  sites.

¿Es positivo el cambio horario o en realidad no sirve para nada? Fiaros qué curioso: El Mundo recoge una muy buena nota de EFE “El cambio de hora afecta poco al organismo y al ahorro de energía”, y ABC publicó también con información de Agencias que EP “El cambio de hora permite ahorrar 250 millones a los hogares españoles”. La polémica sobre los beneficios o no del cambio horario es la típica noticia comodín que se repite cada año. Por poner un ejemplo, Público hizo un balance el año pasado por medio de Francisco Doménech “Polémico cambio horario”.

En definitiva, tres tipos de notas: las que dicen que sí tiene efectos positivos, las que dicen que es una medida absurda, y las que enfatizan la controversia. Quizás deberíamos empezar a exigir y transmitir datos más consensuados.

En la nota de El Mundo (EFE) un investigador del sueño desmonta las habladurías sobre trastornos del sueño diciendo que una hora no afecta prácticamente en nada, y según el Instituto para Diversificación de energía se ahorra un máximo de 5% en iluminación total (contando industria y hogares. En estos últimos a diferencia de los 250 que dice ABC el ahorro sería de 90 millones de euros). La de ABC (Europa Press) entrevista al presidente de la Asociación de fabricantes de Iluminación asegurando que el ahorro energético en iluminación en hogares fue del 10%. Y que esto equivale a dejar de emitir 1 millón de toneladas de CO2 a la atmósfera (que sin ninguna referencia, no sabemos si es mucho o poco).

Es decir; un baile de cifras, que para una decisión así, debería tener datos más claros. Pero lo más gracioso de todo, es que la nota de El Mundo diciendo que el cambio horario afecta poco al ahorro de energía coexiste en el mismo medio con otra de Javier González diciendo que entre las ventajas sí hay un claro ahorro de energía. Y al mismo tiempo que ABC publica en tono positivo el ahorro en hogares españoles, también pone la nota de EFE “El cambio horario afecta mínimamente al organismo y al ahorro de energía”.

En otro orden de cosas completamente diferente, cuando un tema esté de moda, merece la pena que lo explotemos. La reunión para hablar de neutrinos que está teniendo lugar en Valencia en estos momentos nunca hubiera llegado a la prensa sin la polémica generada por la supuesta superación de la velocidad de la luz. Para los críticos de que fuera anunciado a los medios, este efecto indirecto de generación de interés debería ser contemplado como algo positivo.

Ningún reportero ha comprado el tema todavía, pero con información de agencias algunos medios como El Mundo, La Vanguardia o ABC “¿Pueden los neutrinos darnos otra sorpresa?” ya nos hacen saber que hace varias décadas un físico italiano creó la hipótesis de que en los neutrinos se produciría un extraño fenómeno llamado “doble desintegración beta sin neutrinos”, que provocaría que el neutrino fuera de alguna manera su propia antipartícula. En última instancia este fenómeno sería responsable de que el universo estuviera formado de materia en lugar de antimateria. Suena estimulante. La reunión que está teniendo lugar en Valencia para entre otras cosas diseñar el detector que se instalará en Huesca es todavía muy preliminar. Quizás “no merece” ser noticia todavía. Pero después del jolgorio que nos dieron los neutrinos, estamos más predispuestos a fantasear con temas de física fundamental. Eso es bueno.

- Pere Estupinyà

One wonders how many (if any) reporters will be covering the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate Change. It just got underway and goes for four days. It is in a scenic town with pleasant places to go and eat, or drink, or just gad about between and after sessions. It has a lot of speakers in the climate field that those who follow greenhouse warming policy will recognize: Lindzen, Curry, Monckton, von Storch, even good old, courtly Fred Singer, murmuring demurrals.

Right. Those names belong to skeptics and gadflies on the hide of mainstream climate science (that is, on the version most embraced by the world’s leading academies of science). Also there will be the mischievous and imaginative Berkeley physicist and  iconoclast, Richard A. Muller. He is recently in the news for heading a review of global temperature change to see if the mainstream bunch had flunked basic statistics, a quest backed by the Koch brothers and other staunch political skeptics of global warming. The news was that Muller’s team concluded emphatically that whatever the abstract merits of seeing flaws in how most in the field measured Earth’s warming, it turns out that said warming has had exactly the pace and magnitude for the last half century or so as has been proclaimed by the likes of James Hansen and the right wing’s favorite green piñata, Al Gore.

I bring all this up because the AP‘s Seth Borenstein just now, a week and a half after Muller’s study already made a huge news splash, has filed a long featurish story on it. Borenstein is a veteran science reporter – serious, diligent, imaginative, and cheerful. But he may have buried the lede this time. The story starts off reviewing, in good style, Muller’s effort to find holes in global warming evidence and his upfront admission afterward that his team found that   the evidence is just as good as the IPCC says it is. The problem is that readers who would ordinarily get through such a story would already have heard the gist of it. And perhaps not get to the end where this Santa Fe conference comes up.

The program is listed below in Grist. That this conference exists seems more newsy than a revisit to Muller’s contribution. It has the look of a real scientific forum. If my hostility is showing through that’s because I admit to a bias that I believe is justified by reality, but maybe not, but it is that for a scientist to doubt the seriousness of climate change or that we are its cause has delivered him or her into the province of cranks and fruitcakes. And the program in Santa Fe reminds me, even though I’ve never attended one as I am too much the layman to identify exactly what’s wrong  hence would just stand there sputtering, but it reminds me of a conference on cold fusion where paper after paper talks of low energy nuclear reactions and darned-near-free energy as though they would be common sense if it weren’t for the coverup. That’s the science writer’s bane sometimes – while the B.S. alarm is ringing,  ability to identify exactly what’s wrong is elusive. Well, all reporters have that problem sometimes, but we have to do it while confounded by people who sport statistics by the page while talking differential equations and chemical reactions.

But still. The meeting is co-sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. That is not the Heartland Institute. Again, anybody covering this from the mainstream (ie non-crank) media? Should it be? I don’t know. But it is interesting,  and even refreshing evidence of human mental flexibility, to learn that it exists.

LATE ADDITION: Borenstein has anothr nugget will down in his story. He defuses a Daily Mail story (a lot of that going around today) by David Rose. That DM story asserts that climate change gadfly Judith Curry has trashed the analysis by Muller’s team. Curry is quite devoted to nitpicking at those who believe climate change is happening – but this does not mean she herself is a contrarian. Anyway, Borenstein contacted her about the story Rose wrote. It’s wrong, she says. Muller got the numbers right and did nothing untoward in the analysis.

Grist for the Mill: Santa Fe Conference ; Conference Schedule ;

Speaking of cranks and fruitcakes dept:

• Live Science – Andrea Mustain: Sticking it to Mann: Climate Science Sparks Protest ; Great job painting a picture with words, complete with little hockey sticks. Behind the sly little jabs, a quite serious bit of reporting.
• And just to engage in some false balance here at ksjtracker.. Enter Stage Right blog – Paul Driessen: it’s libel – except when Mike does it.

- Charlie Petit

Asteroid 21 Lutetia has the sort of name that belongs deep in a catalog, just a stone among many. But a close looks shows it may be a rock for the ages. Three papers in this week’s Science from researchers pondering data from the European Space Agency’s Rosetta space probe report this is no beat-up rubble pile. It is a solid and primitive leftover of the early solar system. It satisfies the spec sheet for what experts call planetesimals – the concretions of the young solar system’s initial dust that went on to agglomerate into planets. This relic is so dense, researchers suspect it has a metal-rich core that may once have been molten from the decay heat of radioactive isotopes more common in the early solar system. It is fairly big too : about 75 miles long with a cross section on that axis ranging up to 63 by 47 miles wide.

Stories:

• Astronomy Now: Emily Baldwin: Cold asteroid with a warm heart ;
• Space.com – Charles Q. Choi: Asteroid Lutetia may have core of hot melted metal ;
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Spacecraft casts new light on asteroid’s history . New findings suggest the giant rock may be a remnant of the early solar system;
• Science News – Nadia Drake: Chronicles of Lutetia ; Here’s a lively lede: Asteroid 21 Lutetia isn’t just another pebble in a big pile of space rocks. Scientists now think it is a leftover planetary seed, booted into the main belt by the planetary bullies growing around it. That captures a lot, and without any wonky words such as planetesimals, or cliches like rubble pile (those come later in the story along with big terms such as enstatite chondrite).
• AFP: Fly-by reveals Lutetia’s primitive side ; says here it has “shafts, crests, and escarpments..”  Shafts? Maybe it’s translated from French, from something that doesn’t quite mean shafts.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Asteroid Fails To Make It Big ;
• New Scientiust – Lisa Grossman: Most pristine known asteroid is denser than granite ;

The flyby itself was more than a year ago, so the images are not new – although they do look sharper then those originally released. And some of the story came out immediately, but not the firm conclusion that this is a near-pristine relic of the times when our Sun’s planets including Earth formed. It got a little ink at the time, not much.

• AP via USA Today (July 12, 2010)  European Space Agency looks closely at asteroid Lutetia ;
• The Atlantic (Jul 12, ’10) Alexis Madrigal: Asteroid Close-UP Could Foreshadow NASA’s Future ;
• for more, see Previous ksjtracker Post ;

Grist for the Mill: ESA Press Release ; Academy of Finland Press Release ; MIT Press Release ;

A Norwegian researcher, gathering data from a worldwide network, reports at the on line site of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics that the multiple-meltdown nuclear plant disaster at the tsunami-flooded Fukishimp power planet last March released more than twice as much radioactive Cesium-137 as Japanese authorities have said it did. The AP’s Malcolm Ritter, filing from New York, called the lead author and got instant perspective on the numbers. The researcher  – whose paper has not, it says here, yet finished peer review – told Ritter that while higher than the official figures, his calculations are estimates so inherently imprecise that a factor of two difference does not mean much. As we shall see, the meaning of the events behind the news has yet to be discovered. Few news accounts give readers any idea how uncertain scientific information is concerning the scale of radioiactive release and what it means for human health. But a few tried to boil it down to something simple – and simply did nobody any good in the process.

If the latest calculation is correct, the cesium release is, Ritter reports, roughly 40 percent as large as that of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. One thinks Ritter might have gone a bit further, however, in comparing Fukushima and Chernobyl. While Fukishima’s fuel rods largely melted and emitted many radioactive gases, Chernobyl with its graphite core did not merely melt, they were spectacularly on fire. The huge blaze and its plume pumped a lot more than Cesium into the air – by one estimate its escaped radionuclides were emitting 100 megaCuries of radiation, including 2.5 from Cesium 137. The latter is among the most dangerous of waste products from reactors, to be sure.  I am no expert, but Cs is not the only metric for measuring these disastrs. I do wonder how, in the end, the Japanese disaster will compare with that in Ukraine. I wonder about a lot that’s not addressed in this and other accounts of the new estimate.

Coverage of this spot news may leave readers believing that overall releases from Fukishima were twice what officials in Japan have told their people. The study’s prime topic however appears to be one specific isotope’s contribution, not the whole nasty stew that went into the air and the sea. One is left wondering how this information, while sure to raise anxiety and while certainly something that needs to be reported, provides readers with any greater understanding of what happened and whether they need to be a little, a lot, or a ton more worried.

Other stories:

• The Guardian (UK) Ian McCurry: Fukushima released ‘twice as much’ radioactive material as first thought/ Far more radioactive caesium was released into the atmosphere than previoiusly estimated ;
• The Telegraph (UK) Danielle Demetriou : Fukushima disaster released twice as much radiation as initially estimated ; Am quite sure that headline implies and rather unambiguously that total radiation was twice the official figure. The story deals only with Caesium, as they spell it in Britain. Isotopes of iodine and strontium, surely were doing their share too.
• Voice of America (blog) Fukishima Fallout May be Much Higher Than Thought ; Better head, but the lede too declares flatly “twice as much radiation” while the story deals only with the one isotope.
• Tokyo Reporter: TEPCO plant at Fukushima released double radiation of earlier estimate, AP says ; Shows how the conflation of Cs-137 with all radioisotopes gets further distorted as a piece of news gets rewritten and cut down. This one contains the sentence, “The Norwegian study estimates the disaster in Fukushima released about 42 percent of the total radioactive material released by the Solviet Union’s 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident.” I dunno what that means. Total Radioactive Material? Is that about tons of stuff, or the radiation load is delivers per unit time, the total during all its half-lives integrated forever, what? The unit terabecquerel comes up. It seems to be treated as a sum total. Far as I can tell it’s a rate of decay. How can Caesium alone be a proxy for all the hot fuel waste and such that escaped?

I looked around for a more careful assessment. Here’s one:

• NatureNews – Geoff Brumfiel: Fallout forensics hike radiation toll ; Finally we here here a story, while hardly crystal clear, that at least sorts through several lines of evidence and their pertinence to more than one isotope. Brumfiel clearly distinguishes Cs-137 as among the most dangerous to humans due to its half life and, presumably, chemical properties and behavior in the human body. But other isotopes released carry even more radiation, it says here. It remains confusing, even to experts, how much came out and what the hazards are. But it was a lot, and it is significant. ONe thing for sure. It does not boil down to a flat 40 percent of a Chernobyl, nor to twice the radiation  earlier declared by officials in Japan. It’s much more complicated than that. For one thing, the study concluded that the Xenon-133 radioisotope load released from the plant, while not a major human health peril, was larger than that from Chernobyle (the paper, down below in Grist, calls it the largest radioactive noble gas release in history not associated with a nuclear bomb test.)

Grist for the Mill: Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics article ;

- Charlie Petit

(See Updates below to see how many times a single bit of news can surface and resurface, buffed up as though shiny new each time/cp)

Two weeks ago word circulated in several news outlets from a joint meeting in France of European planetary experts with the American Astronomical Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences about results of a meticulously planned observation of the Kuiper Belt heavweight orb named Eris. They came as it eclipsed a distant star. The duration and depth of the blink, as seen from several locations on Earth, provided info on Eris’s radius of curvature and hence its size (I think radius of curvature – the paper loses me at “..oblate Maclaurin spheroid..”). Now, rather than larger than Pluto, it’s a dead heat. Also confirmed is that Eris has a terrifically reflective coating of frozen atmosphere, even brighter than a fresh snowfall on Earth (not really, the sun being so dim out there, but per photon it’s impressive). Still, Eris has one leg up on Pluto in the mass and density department. Like Pluto and its partner Charon, Eris has a comparatively large moon, Dysmonia. Its orbital parameters allow inference of mass.

That got some news then, and again now that it’s published in Nature.

First News Impact:

• MSNBC Cosmic Log Oct 12) Alan Boyle : Dwarf planet’s downsizing confirmed ; As Boyle wrote a little big book on Pluto, he gets first place on the list. He’s a Pluto fan, needless to say. He writes “Pluto just might be the largest dwarf planet after all…” which is the same as saying it might be the second largest of the known dwarves. One also gets here a pocket lesson in the myths and realities of Nature’s embargo policy and the punishments inflicted (or not) on its authors who spill their beans before Nature does it for them.
• Universe Today – Ray Sanders: Pluto or Eris: Which is Bigger? ; Including a handy link to an explainer at well-known planetary astronomer Michael Browns’ blog spot.
• New Scientist – Lisa Grossman: Pluto’s rival is tinier but shinier than thought.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Pluto Might Be the Largest Dwarf Planet, after All ; Interesting that Sci Am is part of Nature’s publishing group, and thus knows well Nature’s embargo policy and felt free to write this up anyway.
• … a few more…

Second Bunch Today:

• Los Angeles Times – Amina Khan: Dwarf planet Eris surprises astronomers ;
• Wired – Mark Brown: Dwarf Planet Eris Is Icy Double of Pluto;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Dwarf Planet Eris is “Almost Perfect” Pluto Twin;
• Cosmos (Australia Mag) Laura Greenhaigh: Dwarf planet Eris is Pluto’s equal;
• Ars Technica – Christopher Dombrowski: Dwarf planet Eris is bereft of atmosphere, about the size of Pluto ; Check it for a backlit, ethereal pic of one of the telescopes astronomers used for the job. Hard to say why the hed says bereft of air. Bereft means total abandonment, as in flat out. Even if most of it froze out and into its shiny veneer, a few zillion molecules surely have gone into sublimated equilibrium, one thinks, and be frolicking about.
• PhysicsWorld – Hamish Johnston: Dwarf planet brought into focus ; Clean write up, but … when one is the editor of the pub, as HJ is, who does the editing? (And don’t go picking on my flubs – I ain’t got no editor neither). As in, and to be dreadfully picky but still, somebody should have quietly turned the lede’s “further” into “farther,” as it is no mere reference to greater extent, but to distance. If it’s more far, it’s farther. If it’s just more, further will do. That’s how I learned it.
• ABC (Australia) Stuart Gary: Pluto and Eris found to be of equal measure ;
• … a few more this time, too.

One cannot help noting that, for all the early ink, Nature still got the bigger news bump from the official appearance of this Letter to Nature.

*UPDATE: See Comments. The Nature article does advance the ball in detail, but the story is the same as what two national newspapers had early this year.. Sharp-eyed reader Dan Vergano, who remembers what he wrote back in January, notes that these last two rounds make at least three instances in which this news has circulated – and at significant length in his article and also at the NYTimes:

• USA Today (Jan 12) Dan Vergano: Dwarf planets Pluto, Eris battle for a spot in a vast universe ;
• NYTimes (Jan 10) Kenneth Chang: The War of the Worlds, Round 2 ;

But that’s not all of it. Stirred  to sift the ashes further bythis  exposure of a failure of diligence the first time around , The Tracker discovers yet ANOTHER EVEN EARLIER BUMP! :

• National Geographic (Nov 22, 2010) Rachel Kaufman: Pluto Is the Biggest Dwarf Planet, After All? 
• Space.com (Nov. 9, 2010) Mike Wall: Dwarf Planet Eris May Be Smaller Than Pluto After All ;
• Duluth News Tribune “Astro Bob blog” (Nov. 9, 2010) Bob King: Pluto’s back in first place … for now ;
• MSNBC Cosmic Log (Nov. 7, 2010)  Alan Boyle: Pluto’s Rival Gets Downsized ; Even Alan, who wrote it up again this week, had already gotten the gist almost as soon as the occultation was done.
• Sky and Telescope, via New Scientist (Nov 8, 2010) Kelly Betty: Former ‘tenth planet” may be smaller than Pluto ;

Grist for the Mill: European Southern Observatory Press Release ; Nature abstract ;

Speaking of Celestial Ice Balls Dept:

• ScienceInsider – Adrian Cho: In Announcing Comet Crack-UP NASA Displays the Write Stuff ; What ho, Mr. Cho not only reveals the press release behind his story, but makes the story to be about the press release and its clever wit. (Note: earlier post blindly assumed, blind assumptions being a specialty of mine, that Adrian means a different gender for Cho).  The angle is the idiocy of internet bloggers and others who painted a looming comet as the deliverer of doom upon our Earth. One should, at his point, mention the public relations whiz behind the release, the Jet Propulsion Lab’s DC Agle. Dunno why he or she goes by just initials. Maybe the first name is Dorkus and the second even sillier. My step grandmother in law was named Dorkus, or maybe it was spelled Dorcas. I always wondered at this name that doesn’t even have a sex-or-pottyhumor connotation but is yet so funny on the ear.

- Charlie Petit

Rare Bullish Part of Spain's Wind Energy Sector these days

I just raced through yesterday’s big NYTimes Special Section on Energy, both what hit the front stairs and the enhanced version on line. Did so after the wrecking ball that, at ClimateProgress,  influential climate change blogger, Joe Romm, aimed at the Times and its section. Romm says that’s it, nobody should ever read the NYTimes again. He says so because the section is full of news on fossil fuel industry expansion but not enough, not much at all actually, on why it’d be much better to look forward to a future with no fossils fuels at all and a stabilized atmospheric concentration of CO2.

Romm’s energy sensibilities are on the side of the angels. We got an emergency unfolding and governments and their populaces are, most of them, pulling pillows over their heads so they can sleep. But his understanding of journalism and its job is, judging by this instance, nil. So please, don’t cancel the NYTimes. Like THAT would make for a better world, no more of the paper that has in the last five years relentlessly covered the facts about energy and geochemistry and climate more than any other major publication in the US.

Would the section have been better to have run a significant feature on the consequences to the planet if the growth curves of fossil fuel use implied by what industry and policy experts expect were to occur (not the same as what’s best)? Sure, why not. It is gut-wrenching to read, amid a few pieces on the struggles of the clean-energy business, how bullish analysts are on petroleum and natural gas. But cancel the paper?  (*Retraction: A passage here mentioning police state mentality and censorship, in context with Romm’s recommendation, has been deleted. His call for everybody to stop subscribing to the NYTimes may be excessive, but so was my response. He did not call for a forced shutdown, by cops or mobs. I apologize for going overboard).  To demand only one angle on news stories, an angle that has been given extensive coverage and is therefore not news anymore except when things come along to advance the ball, is to be wrong about what a news medium’s job is and the nature of the business.

Barely hardly at all related – except for being the flip side of the coin, sort’a news:

Energy & Environment Daily TV: Energy Policy: Rocky Mountain Institute’s Lovins says US can be off oil by 2050 ; E&E TV is must-see for energy wonks. Lovins has said things like this before, but interesting is his self-described circulation among the very fossil fuel execs whose jobs he’d like to see evaporate. He’s on a book tour. I dunno why he’s such a hard-ass on nuclear power, but he always has been. DC energy writers should follow the link for another reason – to see an ad on the page for a meeting in DC about, in part,  sequestering carbon from natural gas plants. That’s another ought’a be.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) We have little good to say about an article in Spain about the potential hazards of electromagnetic waves in certain, susceptible people. The reporter does it with seeming balance – contrasting the opinion of a medical doctor that they are totally safe with another medical doctor declaring that they are harmful in certain cases. But there is not a  single reference to any scientific study. That’s disappointing. The difference between reporting on science or the ethics of bullfighting is that we have experimental data apart from opinions. We are also critics of La Vanguardia in Spain for having published a short online piece saying that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, according to footprints found in China.

In Latin America, plenty of interesting stories: Argentine researchers found an area in the thalamus of rats where neurons die dramatically after consumption of cocaine. Uruguayan scientists published in PNAS a new kind of brain cell that accelerates neurodegenerative disorders like ALS. In Guatemala, a beautiful story in which five young local mathematicians explain their research and personalities. Good stories about material sciences in Puerto Rico, about graphene in Cuba, and an inspiring one on natural preservation in Colombia. Tracking SciDev we read that Peru’s economy is getting better but S&T investment is stuck, that Brazilian universities are by far the most scientifically productive of Latin America, and that the amount of radiation received in the Andes could make them suitable for solar energy production. In Paraguay, a story about local strategies to fight against Chagas disease won the first prize in the second edition of the scientific journalism award.

En información de política, fútbol, o el debate sobre los toros, las opiniones cuentan. En ciencia un poco menos. Tú puedes escribir una nota ponderando las ideas de un defensor de los toros con las de uno que quiere abolirlos. Pero si los humanos coexistieron con los dinosaurios no se resuelve contrastando a un “científico” que lo afirme con otro que lo niegue. Por suerte tienes unas evidencias empíricas que invalidan una de las dos opiniones bajo cualquier discusión. Por eso al informar de ciencia nunca debemos priorizar las palabras a los datos.

El caso de los dinosaurios es muy obvio, y sólo viene a cuento para denunciar la mediocridad que muestra La Vanguardia al publicar “humanos y dinosaurios habitaron juntos”; una nota de agencias que simplemente debería haber sido ignorada, como haría cualquier medio serio. Un caso más peliagudo es la incertidumbre sobre si las ondas electromagnéticas podrían afectar a algún sector de población especialmente sensible. Aquí existe más controversia, y la tendencia periodística es a tratarlo como si del debate de los toros se tratara: escuchar a un experto que alerte del peligro, y a otro que niegue la relación. Esto es lo que hace ABC en una trabajada nota de Inma Zamora “Electrosensibilidad ¿alarma injustificada o problema real?”. La pieza está francamente bien, e Inma alterna perfectamente los argumentos de un médico epidemiólogo negando los efectos dañinos y un médico experto en electrosensibilidad diciendo que sí hay motivos de preocupación. Ambos tienen buenas credenciales para ser calificados con el vocablo comodín “expertos”. Pero en el artículo falta algo fundamental: referencias a estudios científicos. Ya se que puede resultar engorroso, y que los que existen no son plenamente concluyentes. Pero los datos son la mejor baza que tenemos. Mucho más que las opiniones. No podemos dejarlos de lado. Es la gran diferencia entre el debate sobre la ética de las corridas de toros y el debate sobre los efectos de las ondas electromagnéticas. Está claro que cada “experto” citará la existencia de estudios que refuerzan su posición, obviando los que la contradicen. Nuestro valioso papel como periodistas científicos es ser capaces de discernir entre un estudio bien hecho de uno malo. Y tenemos herramientas para hacerlo. No podemos posicionarnos a favor de la opinión de un “experto” y en contra del otro, pero sí aferrarnos a unos datos más sólidos que otros. Es lo que hacemos por ejemplo con el cambio climático. En el caso de la electrosensibilidad, si nos limitamos a preguntar a uno y a otro, estamos desaprovechando el gran atributo que nos ofrece la ciencia: los datos experimentales como una manera más objetiva de acercarse a la realidad. Con ellos, el artículo de Inma podría pasar de notable a excelente. E incluso quizás cerraría el debate.

Ampliamos con algunas notas interesantes en los periódicos de América Latina. Y empezamos por La Nación (Argentina), donde Nora Bar explica que la comunidad internacional está deslumbrada por el primer satélite argentino lanzado hace unos meses, y Susana Gallardo que “un solo día de abuso de cocaína mata neuronas”. Muchas veces hemos oído que el alcohol mata neuronas y una comparación hubiera sido interesante, pero el buen texto de Susana da gran grado de detalle, y explica la investigación (con ratas) de investigadores locales que localizan en la unión entre cortex y tálamo un lugar donde el consumo de cocaína provoca lesiones.

Comentar que Susana no es periodista independiente, sino que firma como miembro del centro de divulgación científica de la UBA. Esto tiene su punto peligroso por la predisposición a ensalzar lo propio y esconder la crítica. Pero nos fiamos del filtro de los editores, y lo valoramos como una opción positiva. Es lo que frecuentemente hace también El Universal (México), con textos como el de la UNAM “Ajolote podría extinguirse en cinco años”. A otra escala parecida, El Nuevo Día de Puerto Rico también invita a científicos a escribir sin filtro, pero con gran criterio como se ve en este resumen de la historia de los materiales por Lynn Hogue. Y hablando de materiales, detallado texto de Octavio Lavastida sobre el grafeno en el cubano Juventud Rebelde, un medio que siempre ofrece trabajadas notas de ciencia.

Prolíficos reporteros en Uruguay y Colombia. Por partida doble en El País (Uruguay) Leticia Costa Delgado explica que investigadores uruguayos han descubierto un nuevo tipo de célula que acelera el desarrollo de la enfermedad neurodegenerativa esclerosis lateral (ELA). Los resultados fueron publicados en PNAS, y pueden abrir una nueva vía de investigación. Completísima información de Leticia, que nos ofreció también un artículo criticando la falta de atención de los médicos uruguayos a las enfermedades autoinmunes (Leticia C.), y las diferencias de costes de medicamentos entre países. En El Espectador (Colombia), con toque casi poético Juan David Torres Duarte nos presenta un bonito proyecto para proteger una quebrada, y otro para educar a jóvenes en aspectos medioambientales (Juan David T D). Desde Colombia pero para SciDev y en perspectiva más global, Lisbeth Fog recoge un interesante estudio diciendo que los Andes podrían ser fuente de energía solar, por la cantidad e intensidad de luz que reciben. También en SciDev Zoraida Portillo denuncia que el desarrollo de la CyT en Perú no está acorde con el buen crecimiento económico del país, y que un informe propone áreas clave. Otro informe en este caso de ranking de universidades establece según Maria Elena Hurtado que Brasil supera ampliamente al resto de países latinoamericanos en producción científica de sus universidades.

Para finalizar, destacar el bonito texto de Sebastián Escalón “Las matemáticas, un juguete para amar y desamar” en Siglo XXI (Guatemala), en el que Sebastián sigue a jóvenes apasionados de las matemáticas hablando de su trabajo, pero también de su personalidad (uno medio se califica de bipolar, otro se enamora de las mates, y otro explica que resuelve problemas después del sueño). Inspirador artículo. Como lo es también el 2º premio de periodismo científico organizado por el Conacyt de Paraguay, cuyo primer premio ha sido concedido a Patricia Lima Pereira por un artículo inédito sobre la química utilizada para luchar contra el Chagas, en forma de feromonas y moléculas que atraen a las vinchucas hacia las trampas. Felicitar a Patricia y a Ana Velázquez, ganadora del apartado de fotografía cuya imagen tenemos arriba en este post.

- Pere Estupinyà

A private company, JP Aerospace and the initials belong to its president, has probably made no secret of a project to sling a lightweight truss between two helium balloons, put electric motors and propellers on it, and float it way, way up. But I’d never heard about that. But now we all can hear that it rose just past 95,000 feet, one balloon burst, handlers ordered the other released, and the remaining hardware came back down under a parachute. That’s sort of remarkable. This prototype craft, assertedly the highest-flying steerable airship ever, but not higher than some plain balloons, weighed just 80 pounds. The asserted cost is $30,000. Volunteer labor included. Not that it wouldn’t do it better, but one imagines the invoice from NASA for such a feat would be, oh, for 1000 times as much.

The news is just out. Among sites with quick reflexes that got it up right away is MSNBC‘s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle zipped it out. The company is based in Rancho Cordova, CA, and launched its invention from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. You’d think they’d do one again, during the next Burning Man. That’d really get publicity.

Also carrying the news is the UK’s Daily Mail – mainly by a large selection of photos accompanying a press release rewrite by Ted Thornhill.

Grist for the Mill: JP Aerospace Press Release via PR Newswire ; The company calls itself an “all volunteer, independent space program”. The longterm goals include cities at the edge of space. Wow. Really. It is some goal. Check out the video at the company website. Also the pdf there explaining how one might get to space on a balloon-borne series of steps. Sounds eminently reasonable, even the ion-powered orbital vehicle more than a mile long. I have fallen for any number of ideas that sounded equally eminently reasonable.

- Charlie Petit

Can this really be a pic from Ozark, Arkansas?  The Associated Press ran it. It’s true. The services’s Seth Borenstein wrote it up after, he tells us, sitting on the news for a few hours to confirm it via first-hand witnesses (and thus refute a NOAA contact’s assertion it should not have been visible that far south). Borenstain, after clarifying the truth of the matter, elected to call it baffling in his lede. It appears that while the solar storm, and the CME or Coronal Mass Ejection that delivered its ions to us,  were not particularly large, the blob in the solar wind moved unusually fast. Exactly why the managed to tip the aurora well across the US – Canada border appears to have no simple explanation.

  There are lots of interesting pics to go with this news. One is the time-lapse satellite pic of the CME itself, departing Old Sol (click on it and, depending on your browser, you might see it larger and animated).  A second, from a Spaceweather.com gallery, is from a military Earth observing satellite that monitors the circumglobal auroral oval, and caught it as it dipped into the states from Canada.

All so cool. Not many other outlets aside from the mighty AP paid a lot of attention. At the LA Times a lady with the right name for the job got it up as a blogpost: Deborah Netburn -Northern lights visible as far south as Arkansas. Actually, as far south as Alabama.

The show reminds one to wonder what is going on with the Sun. A year ago the news was that it had lost its spots and didn’t seem inclined to grow any new ones. There was talk of a new Maunder Minimum, like that time of tepid solar activity spanning the 17th and 18th centuriesis credited with cooling the globe’s weather for a spell. Is the Sun back on track, or still looking to be entering a relatively placid temperament? Late this last spring, Nat’l Geo‘s news service (among others) ran with that angle, via reporting by Victoria Jaggard. Maybe it’s time for an update.

Other Stories:

• Reuters – David Bailey, Greg McCune: “Northern Lights” show as far south as Atlanta ;
  
• Detroit News – Jim Lynch: Aurora borialis gives rare southern show ; I’ve already stuck a lot of pics on this, but at the News here’s a really spectacular one.
• Huffington Post – Timothy Stenovec: Northern Lights Travel South: Aurora Borealis Seen In Over 20 States; Lots of photos. The post is largely a mashup of material from other (credited sources), including a link to a physics explainer from the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute.
• Indian Country Today Media Network: Aurora Borealis Appears as Far South as New Mexico  ; Interesting mainly for its linked sidebar on traditional beliefs about the aurora. An additional reason to cite this brief story – looking at the site reveals another interesting one having nothing to do with northern lights: Carol Berry – For Inuits Dealing With Climate Change, Science Can Be Slow and Bumbling ; One might remark it’s not the science that is slow and bumbling, but its expression in government regulations. The real theme is the sense within some northern communities that their accumulated knowledge gets little respect from outsiders. This is a sort of story one won’t read in many other outlets.
• National Geographic: Aurora Pictures: Rare Northern Lights Seen in US South ;

Barely Related News:

• Space.com via Scientific American – Leonard David: Chinese Moon Probe Tackling New Deep Space Mission; Other than using the awkward word “repurposed,” this is a deft and professional,  intriguing, granular account that reveals larger issues about the relative vigor of various national space programs. It is pertinent to this post too. China has not only directed a lunar orbiter out to the L2 Lagrange Point, a knot in the intersecting gravity fields of Earth and Sun where objects tend to hover in relative position to Earth, but among its new jobs is to help chart solar storms.

- Charlie Petit

Last week a string of nine earthquakes – the first a modest magnitude 4.0 on Thursday, followed through Saturday by nine aftershocks – shook Berkeley, CA, on the other side of town from us. We’re on the northside. These were on the Hayward fault, several miles down and in the vicinity of a former school for the blind, UC Berkeley’s Clark Kerr Campus, and the Claremont District up against the Oakland border. Most of the later shakers were too small to feel, but a few snapped the ground hard enough, and made enough noise, to be hard to miss. I wasn’t even sure what the first one was – it was just a loud wham you could feel in your belly. I was in the kitchen and looked around. Nothing had moved. Not even the two lights over the kitchen island, suspended on slender wires, were swaying. Pictures on the walls weren’t askew. I feverishly thought maybe a good sized meteor had exploded in the sky, hitting us with a blast wave, and stepped out on the kitchen balcony to look around.

We learned soon enough what it was.  Bay Area media perked up soon with magnitudes and rupture locales and epicenter reports, with no damage worth a whit. Most cited the US Geological Survey, with its big pocket of quake experts in Menlo Park on the peninsula and between S.F. and San Jose. Few took it as what educators, inventing an instant cliche, call a teachable moment.

This morning I tardily decided to post after finding a most illuminating report in a tiny on line, hyperlocal news site, the San Leandro Patch, a Q & A by Catherine (Kate) Rauch. She talked with a Robert Uhrhammer, a retired seismologist at the UC Berkeley Seismological Lab, which she slightly misnames as the seismology lab. Like many academics he still goes to the office even though he’s retired – and was for years a sort of minor Bay Area celebrity because he was the designated press contact after earthquakes. The story, to these eyes, gets exactly right the significance of the little temblors (which is, for all the easy speculation in idle or worried chatter, not much. They won’t make the next big one much more or less likely, and there’s nothing odd about it at all).

I’d never heard of the San Leandro Patch or any other Patches, but learned quickly that there are a bunch of them here in the Bay Area. The San Leandro one is edited by an old acquaintance I always like to encounter, former SF Chronicle technology and occasional science writer Tom Abate. Precious little info on its history or backers is to be found at its local ‘about’ page. Also opaque about financing and corporate links is the “about” page for Patch central, in NYCity.  But it didn’t take long to learn it is an experiment by the struggling and once-mighty America On Line, or AOL. This thanks to a NYTimes biz story from early this year, datelined San Francisco, by Verne G. Kopytoff. Many hundreds of local Patch franchises are in operation across the land, “patching” the holes in the deteriorating skein of traditional newspaper coverage of community and neighborhood doings. And also, from the looks of this NYT article, generating not much money and getting even less readership.

But the San Leandro iteration scored a bullseye with its Berkeley quake story, the only one that put the shakers in decent, expert context. Few other outlets (none, actually) did it as well. Remarkably, even other hyperlocal print, non broadcast outlets based here in Berkeley stubbed their toes. They rewrote major outlets or wire stories all with  magnitude and locale analyses from the USGS. They ignored the Seismological Station right on campus. A few radio stations and TV stations got hold of the station’s usual spokesperson, research seismologist Peggy Hellweg (a friend of ours, and married to science writer and geophysicist Horst Rademacher, a freelancer and correspondent for the German paper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.)

Even the venerable campus newspaper, the Daily Californian, relied on recycled USGS info put together by Soumya Karlamangla rather than send her (the ass’t city editor) or another reporter a few hundred yards to McCone Hall to query the smart folks at the internationally-respected Cal Berkeley seismo lab who had felt the quake along with everybody else in town. (She, by the way, does some science writing at the Daily Cal – here’s a good one  from earlier this year on the mass extinction to come).

Other hyper locals didn’t show any more initiative:

• Bay City News Service via Berkeley Daily Planet – More Aftershocks Today ; and Earthquake in Berkeley Now Estimated to be 3.9 Magnitude ;
• Danville Express – Two more earthquakes strike the East Bay Saturday Morning ;
• Berkeleyside – Tracey Taylor: Trio of earthquakes gently shake Berkeley early Saturday ; which followed Thursday post by Lance Knobel, updated by Lisa Carlson: Berkeley’s 4th Quake of day a 3.8 at 2307 Piedmont Ave. You can’t get more hyperlocal than that. We also learn that, up the street, Paul Simon was back stage at the Greek Theatre, ready to go, when the aftershock shook.

The lesson? The Patch account happened to talk to one man and got a good story. But overall, the little locals seemed not to have a clue to the best technical source in the affected area – so much for being tightly tied to their own communities. To be a wearisome old goat, 15 years ago or so the metros in the region would all have had experienced reporters with the wit to call the seismologists who live atop the fault that creaked and felt it in their feet. The mass media fraying has yet to be patched.

The remnant big dailies didn’t do much either. The SF Chronicle had practically nothing of substance – but, maybe, with stalwart science editor David Perlman off for the week, somebody decided that little earthquakes in the middle of earthquake country are not much of a story.The angle was irony – the first quake struck on the day of scheduled drills for the annual Great California Shakeout earthquake preparedness exercise.

• SF Chronicle – Vivian Ho: 2nd earthquake, aftershock, rattles Bay Area.
• SF Chronicle – Will Kane, Nanette Azimov: 4.0 quake hits East Bay ;
• Contra Costa Times – Mike Taugher: Moderate quake and aftershock near Berkeley rattle nerves ; Yay. Taugher thought to call the Berkeley Seismo Lab.

By the Way – The Seismo Lab has its own writeup at its Seismoblog, no byline, just some initials in the tag, but it’s by old pal Horst Rademacher. He also has a subsequent, expert review of the big quake in Turkey.

- Charlie Petit