The unstoppable John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has done another investigative piece in a long series, this time indicting researchers hired by Medtronic, who, Fauber reports, failed to disclose a potential cancer risk associated with a bone-growth agent in Medtronic’s spine-surgery produce, Infuse.

The Journal-Sentinel asked independent experts to review the research, and Fauber reports that they found problems with the way the researchers reported the cancer findings. Further, Fauber unearthed 1,000 pages of FDA documents in which the cancer question was discussed.

Fauber’s stories are, as I think I’ve said before, textbook examples of investigative science reporting. Indeed, I think I’m going to use of few of them in my science journalism class.

And if you or anyone in your family needs spine surgery, read Fauber’s archives first.

- Paul Raeburn

A pair of must-make phone calls this morning ate up a wad of time, so all I have other than the NYTimes Science Times habit, one post down,  to show from since the alarm went off at 4:48 is what I learned from the New Yorker’s Oct. 24 issue, which a lot of you out there will have read and this is too much on New York pubs but, as I say, it’s all I have left.

And it’s good. I hope you can get through to these. I have found that New Yorker articles tend to be openly accessible, but only with persistence on the web. As a subscriber a cookie and the occasional password gets me through. If these links rebel, and if this number is still on the stands, buy it.

• Elif Batuman: Letter from Turkey – A journey in the shadow of Ararat ; Ms Batuman, a regular at the magazine, is wondrous with wayward words – sort of scattered, as in text that frequently twitches and swivels while one thing reminds her of others but then blinkety wham she gets back on topic. This is a report of her visit with a true rara avis, an ornithologist of fixed determination and a motor mouth and who is to be found in Eastern Turkey. We learn of the body-to-penis ratios in some (maybe most) ducks, a yellow-headed vulture in which males display on their faces the capacity to eat enormous quantities of shit without getting sick and thus get the girls, and where Ian Fleming found the name James Bond. It’s not at all just about birds or the scientific context, but those excursions from the main stem are what give it muscle.  This is science writing from a generalist. It is a display of the power of the declarative sentence, one after the other. And here is a passage near its end (and of the non-declarative sort), as a sort of lagniappe:

…what went wrong: “the ozone layer, the nearby Cildir dam, global warming”? Meteorologically speaking, in any case, he has written “a historical novel”: “Much like the bourgeois who used to trade with Russia, who used to skate on the frozen Kars River, travel by sleigh, and stage plays at the theatres, the snow, too, has vanished.” Did the lack of Russians dry up the snow, or did the absence of snow drive away the Russians? Did the gilded church domes simply evaporate when there was no snow to weigh them down? What would survive here — the Armenians or cheese? The raven or the dove? Would we ever again see the nine-centimetre bird that looks almost identical to the eleven-centimetre bird, or the eleventh butterfly outwardly indistinguishable from the eighth, to which is it not related?

Early the next morning, we stopped at the banding station before heading back to the city…”

 

That is some fancy-flying wordsmithery.

Also, up front, by an old reliable:

• The Talk of the Town – Elizabeth Kolbert: Billions And Billions; Oh no. And just when I thought the global population really was going to level near the ten billion mark…

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Spain’s popular science magazine Muy Interesante has reached 1 million followers in twitter. It’s the only media outlet in the Spanish-speaking world that has amassed such numbers. So far, the newspaper El Pais has 820.000 followers and El Mundo 442.000. The remarkable success of Muy Interesante deserves a deep analysis. In a special report the magazine explains that its more retweeted items are links to short stories like “What’s the catchiest song in history?”, “why Apple’s logo is a bitten apple?” or “Why do we eat popcorn in the cinema?”. Of course the scientific content of these articles is minimal. But they attract lots of readers to its site, where one can find more serious scientific reporting. To be honest, the contents of the print edition of Muy Interesante are very different from its online site. The online articles rarely have more than a few paragraphs, and they are clearly selected by the attractiveness of their title. But the monthly magazine has long and detailed stories, like the excellent 9 pages dossier about nanotechnology or a 5 pages one about different aspects of the human voice that we can find in this October’s number.

Impresionante el hito que ha alcanzado la revista de divulgación científica Muy Interesante: alcanzar 1 millón de seguidores en su cuenta de twitter. Es el único medio de comunicación en español que sobrepasa esta cifra. A martes 25-Oct 2011 El País tiene 820.000 seguidores y El Mundo 442.000. Realmente impresionante. La pregunta obvia y de difícil respuesta: ¿dónde está el secreto? La propia Muy intenta responder en un “especial twitter 1 millón”. En un video producido para la ocasión se explica que los tweets más exitosos han sido enlaces a artículos como “¿Cuál es la canción más pegadiza de la historia?”, “¿Por qué el logo de Apple es una manzana mordida?”, o “¿Por qué comemos palomitas en el cine?”. La conclusión es obvia: despertar la curiosidad es clave para el éxito. Así lo establece otro artículo de la serie que apunta al sexo (¿Cuál es el mejor día para tener relaciones sexuales?), la “salud” (¿Qué alimentos producen flatulencias?), o aspectos prácticos (¿Cómo conviene secar un móvil?) como los temas cuyos artículos son más leídos online.

Está claro que algunos de estos artículos  no son propiamente de contenido científico. Pero el experimentado equipo de Muy se esfuerza en envolver todos sus temas de un aire científico. Eso a nivel divulgativo es bueno; pues transmite al lector la sensación de la que la ciencia es la gran fuente de conocimiento.

Realmente es un fenómeno para tener muy en cuenta. El contenido papel de la revista Muy Interesante es completamente diferente al de su web. En la revista impresa siempre encontramos algunos reportajes que tratan temas en profundidad, como en este Octubre 2011 el completísimo dossier de Elena Sanz sobre Nanotecnología, un reportaje sobre los poderes de la voz de Pablo Colado, una pieza donde Ángela Posada Swafford escribe sobre la búsqueda de exoplanetas por un astrofísico chileno, o un artículo crítico sobre la posibilidad de leer el pensamiento de Eugenio Manuel Fernández Aguilar. Todo diluido entre muchísimas notas cortas de toque curioso y fotografías impactantes. Pero estos contenidos más extensos no alcanzan la versión online.

La web de Muy no parece especialmente brillante. Noticias cortitas, en ocasiones muy superficiales, y con poco análisis crítico. Pero es imposible que ningún titular o foto logre llamar tu atención. Esto es lo que parece pretender el diseño online de Muy: conseguir muchos clics y dejar la lectura reposada para aquellos fieles de papel que sí quieran una información más completa. Evidentemente, si la web y la cuenta de twitter fuera diseñada pensando en este tipo de lector ni de cerca se llegaría al millón de seguidores.

Como ejemplo, en el festival “El ser creativo” celebrado en España hubo una mesa con 3 figuras como el paleontólogo Juan Luís Arsuaga, el astrofísico Juan Pérez Mercader, y el famosos divulgador Eduard Punset. Muy hizo un resumen de la mano de Javier Flores “¿De dónde venimos?“ de… escasos 6 parrafitos! Sin duda las aportaciones de estos tres ilustres dan para mucho más. Pero Javier resume a la perfección las principales ideas que aportaron, y cierra la nota. Seguro que tenía más información, pero es como si intuyera que el lector no quiere invertir más tiempo en ese tema. La atención se debe mantener alta en todo momento. Un texto no debe “hacerse largo”.

Otra estrategia la vemos por ejemplo en la nota “¿Por qué la marihuana coloca?” de Elena Sanz. En realidad el texto habla de la secuenciación del genoma de la planta de marihuana, pero el titular “Por qué coloca?” evidentemente resulta más atractivo.

En definitiva, que cuando en tanto encuentro de divulgación científica hablamos de cómo llegar a un público amplio, de que debemos despertar la curiosidad, de tratar temas cercanos a la gente, y escribir de manera dinámica… tenemos un ejemplo muy cerca: la revista muy interesante, que acaba de alcanzar un millón de seguidores en twitter a base de ofrecer respuestas a preguntas que todos nos hacemos. Felicidades.

- Pere Estupinyà

 Before we get to the heavy-weight items with lots of paragraphs and sources, here’s a salute to Times science writer Sindya N. Bhanoo, whose primary job for the last several months has been to write the shorties, aka the Observatory gathering of small items. I’m talking about one piece in particular, under the hed “Smooth Desert Boulders May Be Quakes’ Work.” Editors know, and writers often hate to acknowledge, that reader attention spans can be short, and for many of them the finest entertainments in journalism are the short pieces that rip past the eyeballs and into the cortex like flat cars on a fast freight. Clickity clack and how ’bout that. Big pieces win prizes. Little ones may win the readers. But they can be frustrating for reporters. One must leave out so much.

This salute also goes to a second person – perhaps the p.r. writer at the Geological Society of America, or maybe the researcher involved. Bhanoo in the on line version linked above also links forthrightly to this story’s grist for the mill. It’s quite a terrific tale – one that, in its deliciousness including a surfboard episode, could not possibly have been squashed down to The Observatory’s format. So thank you, Ms. Bhanoo, for sharing the portion of the story’s impetus. One must at this point note that the tale got a little mileage elsewhere, a week and a half ago or so. Examples include at Our Amazing Planet (affiliated with LiveScience), and another, pure rewrite job, at redOrbit.

   The section leader, on worries over the future of the chambered nautilus from William Broad is a departure of sorts for him. It’s not the only natural history story he’s written, but his fame is largely for reporting on big technology – military included. This is a gentle piece with hints of meditation on beauty, the long passage of time, and most important the frequent, coarse heedlessness of humanity when there is a dollar to be made. The fishing industry demands courage and stamina, as seen in the TV show The Deadliest Catch, but basically it comprises fleets of people who kill immense numbers of wild animals and, if not policed, will keep wiping them out till they’re gone or are too rare to be worth pursuit. In the Philippines, a prominent source tells us through Broad’s reporting, a horrendous slaughter is under way. Millions of the creatures, of several closely related species, have been killed and pried from their lovely shells in order that the latter become opalescent jewelry and other ornamentation. If you ever learn a companion is sporting Osmeña pearls, fix her (or him) with a hard, cold glare and explain what they are. This ranks right up there with rhinos slaughtered for their horns, tigers for their bones and paws, sharks for their fins. Broad’s disgust for the trade vibrates in nearly every sentence. He doesn’t address prospects for nautilus-friendly marine preserves, with cops on boats. One guesses that could, for at least awhile, prevent extermination of these ancient-lineaged beauties.

Other NYT Science Headllines to Note:

• Dennis Overbye: Particles Fast Than the Speed of Light? Not So Fast, Some Say ; Maybe not. It’s easy to think the results were spurious. But Overbye riffs on the cultural reverberations of the mere possibility that neutrinos do sometimes sneer at Albert.
• Cornelia Dean: Next for Newport Preservation:Gilded-Age Beeches ; Detailed story, lovely details. But  really. May one ask, humbly… who cares?
• John Markoff – How Revolutionary Tools Cracked a 1700s Code ; Confession – I expected a dull and dusty piece of irrelevance. But boy, this is interesting and topical.

- Charlie Petit

My high school Latin is a little rusty. All I have left is a few proverbs bouncing around in my head. But one of those turns out to be relevant to today’s topic: the much-debated value of breast-cancer screening.

The phrase that comes to mind is: Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Which, if I’m remembering correctly, means “after this, therefore because of this.” It’s a logical fallacy: one event comes after another, therefore it must have been caused by the other.

Or, to apply it to breast-cancer screening, a woman is successfully treated for breast cancer after having a mammogram–therefore, the success of the treatment must be due to the mammogram.

It seems hard to argue otherwise, and however careful we try to be, it’s difficult to really know whether, in any case, a mammogram saved somebody’s life (or extended it, or “cured” the cancer, whatever that might mean).

The trick, in sorting this out, is to ask the right question. Not: Do mammograms save lives? But this question, posed by Tara Parker-Pope in a smart post on her  Well blog for The New York Times: How is it possible that finding cancer early isn’t always better?

That gets us to the heart of the issue. Here’s the misconception that we find so beguiling: Cancer starts small, and kills when it grows and spreads. Find it when it’s small, treat it, and prevent the fatal consequences. How, as Parker-Pope asks, can that be wrong?

Parker notes that there are four kinds of breast cancer found by mammograms:

First, there are slow-growing cancers that would be found and successfully treated with or without screening. Then there are aggressive cancers, so-called bad cancers, that are deadly whether they are found early by screening, or late because of a lump or other symptoms. Women with cancers in either of these groups are not helped by screening.

Then, she notes, there are cancers that will never amount to anything, but are treated when they are found on a mammogram. These women are not helped by mammograms, and they are hurt by the unnecessary treatment they undergo as the result of screening. So far, the value of mammograms for these three kinds of cancer is zero, zero, and negative–it either doesn’t help, or it hurts.

Finally, Parker-Pope comes to the fourth set of circumstances, in which a cancer is found by a mammogram at a time when treatment can change the course of the cancer. These are the people we are thinking of when it seems so clear that finding cancer early must be better.

But how many women who get mammograms fall into this category? Half? A quarter? One in ten? Parker-Pope:

Clinical trial data suggests that 1 woman per 1,000 healthy women screened over 10 years falls into this category, although experts say that number is probably even smaller today because of advances in breast cancer treatments.

So, to return to Parker-Pope’s question, How is it possible that finding cancer early isn’t always better? It is better for 1 in 1,000 women. For the others, it’s worthless or harmful.

I suspect this is not the last word on the question, but it’s as clear an analysis of the subject as I can recall. Parker-Pope’s post is based on a new study by two Dartmouth researchers, Dr. H. Gilbert Welch and Brittney A. Frankel. Welch made a similar argument in the Times himself in an opinion piece on Oct. 10. “Even with screening,” he wrote, “most people destined to develop deadly, untreatable cancers will still do so.”

He compares breast-cancer screening to screening for prostate cancer, and finds that similar questions arise with both. Screening is a gamble. That’s not what we want, and it’s hard to accept. But until researchers can do a better job of screening for the cancers that can be treated–it’s a fact.

- Paul Raeburn

(Thanks to Stephen Hart for the heads-up.)

The Boston’s Globe’s Jenn Abelson and Beth Daley, recruiting labs to check the DNA of fish bought in the market, or sold at restaurants, discovered (suprise!) that a lot of the fish labeled as pricy delicacies are not at all as advertised. It is part of a series. The whole package, including stories co-written by Katie Johnston, is here.

The hefty and convincing investigative series pointedly reports that there are few if any regulations, and less enforcement, to compel truth in labeling of fish. The series also has its sympathetic side, profiling one restaurant chain’s dismay at learning its cod was fake. It was hake. Finding an honest fish broker to sell them the real deal is not easy.

The series will perhaps lead to some regulatory and industry reform. It is reminiscent of a series that ran in San Francisco Magazine in January this year, detailing the vast gaps to be found between the truth and in what local eateries and fish sellers was sustainably caught (see previous post). One imagines that the seafood industry (call it Big Fish) is already donating to libertarian-minded political candidates quite convinced that any such regulation of the free market is somehow un-American, not to mention a threat to profits and the pursuit of happiness, or whatever.

The Globe has a pay wall system, so don’t go surfing around too much. Suddenly up pops a page asking for a small payment to keep reading. Ergo, with the day fleeting and no inclination to take time to get a token – I could expense it, but y’know, one gets used to just clicking along free. Shame on me and good luck to the Globe in its search for solvency, but I was unable to read it all.

- Charlie Petit

Spooky time. If a journalist or editor on the environment and science beat learns of discovery of a new creature that, as a bonus, is creepy or eeries or just plain disturbing – such as single-celled squashy things as big as soft balls creeping around in a place called the Sirena Deep of the Marianas Trench, that’s a bait that is hard to resist.

The word comes from Scripps Inst. of Oceanography researchers, working with that publicity machine the National Geographic Society and its engineers. They threw the latter’s nifty devices called dropcams overboard into said Sirena Deep. The videos revealed creatures, some of species new to science, living at the bottom. Included were one type resembling microbes except they are not micro: one-celled protoplasmic, spongy-looking blobs called xenophyophores with a tolerance for high pressure, low temperature, and scant food supply. They can exceed four inches in diameter.

Unfortunately, nobody uncovered in a routine search did any reporting that is recognizable as such. All appear to have only information that is in the press release. Too bad. How can a reporter read such a news tip without surrendering to curiosity and the urge to get more? Actually I know why. Their employers don’t give them time to do much more than this. The result is that readers get little or no sense of how much is already known about xenophyophores, whether they are just oversized microbes or quite different – multiple nuclei, for instance, which they do have. Also easily found is that these things are fairly well described in a generic sense, and well known to be common on abyssal plains. They are a form of giant protozoans. Most stories circulating on this news calls them giant amoebas. The term is in the press release. Dunno if that’s the press agent trying to simplify things or comes from a source that might be contrived as expert. Protozoa yes, but one guesses they are not much like amoebas. The latter have multiple nuclei, too, but are  chiefly distinguished by their ability to form protoplasmic extensions, or pseudopods, that aid mobility. Do xenophyophores do that? No sign of it in a fast search. But we now have headlines proclaiming gigantic amoebas. Sic transit truth?

Stories:

• Our Amazing Planet (used by MSNBC, Christian Science Monitor): Deepest ocean trench home to race of giant amoebas.
• Fox News: Strange Form of Life Discovered in Ocean’s Blackest Depths ; See what happens. A press release if read literally, says only that this well-known if bizarre category of living mucus has now been found at the deepest place in the ocean, but was already known to throng other rather deep places. This hed and the first few grafs imply it has just been found down there, new to science, etc. If one wants to get deeply picky, one doubts that the Marianas Trench is any blacker than your average stretch of 10,000-foot-deep ocean floor.
• Daily Mail (UK) : Creatures of the very deep: Giant amoebas discovered 6.6 miles down in Pacific sea trench ;
• redOrbit: Giant Amoebas Found Deep in Mariana Trench ; This is an aggregator site (maybe it does some original reporting?), and this is amusing. It cites its sources as Our Amazing Planet, Fox News, and the Scripps Release. But as the first two seem entirely dependent on the release, it really has just one. But somebody took the time to rewrite them into the redOrbit offering while separately identifying what was rewritten. Honesty in ripping and reading.

Grist for the Mill: Scripps Inst. of Oceanography Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A shorty, with a usage question and suggestion for caption writers. For any kind of writer. What is the use of the word “situated?” It is not only useless in almost all instances, it is ugly. One chokes on it in the picture caption to the big story in the SF Chronicle this morning by the paper’s respected urban design reporter and critic, John King.

The caption says the village, already pretty much finished, “is a neighborhood for students, academics and university employees situated on 130 acres owned by UC Davis…” Look. If one is situated in a room, situated in a park, situated in an airplane, or situated anyplace else one is also just plain in a room, in a park, or in an airplane and that’s all one needs say (Same goes for “sited.” Nowhere is such dictum violated more than in the empty puffery of real estate ads, “Situated on a magnificent bluff overlooking the grand vista of West Pittsburgh, this magnificent palazzo, its great room radiating grace and charm as warm as a summer breeze beckoning discerning owners into the lush garden in the expansive compound off the soaring east wing highlighted by the soft gleam of pewter sconces….” Don’t be a real estate writer. Be a writer.) The “situated” adds zero. This village is on 130 acres.  If you see “situated” cross it out and see if the sentence means anything different or anything less. Seldom will the answer be yes. Embroidering the situation is like, to address a related case of empty words, those sportscasters who tell listeners such things as that “The Niners are facing a third and six situation.” A passing situation I understand; ditto a punting situation. But it is third and six, period.

In the first paragraph the tracker used the verb “use” a few times. Here’s another challenge. If you ever see a lawyerly  “utilize” in a sentence, imagine it as “use.” I’ve yet to find a case that diminishes meaning. It simply relaxes the reader’s brain. I could go on but gad, I feel like I’m Andy Rooney, recently retired from 60 Minutes, grousing about the waste in modern packaging or people who send useless gifts.

King’s story, by the way, is worth reading by all interested in energy conservation and modern architecture, building codes, things such as that. It says the community’s goal is to have a net energy use of zero. King salutes the idea, but rightly tells readers that it may not happen.

- Charlie Petit

I was going to write a post on three of the most common and important errors in medical reporting, but Gary Schwitzer of Health News Review has saved me the trouble. Schwitzer, as you know if you’ve been reading the Tracker, runs HealthNewsReview.org, which enlists a panel of experts to review medical stories based on accuracy, balance, and completeness. And he blogs on that and other topics related to medical reporting at his HealthNewsReview blog.

In a post last week, Schwitzer outlined what he sees as three recurring problems in health and medical news stories. The post appears on a blog run by Emmi Solutions, a company that, from what I can tell, works with hospitals, drug companies and physicians to develop programs that “use audio, text and images to help patients make sense of vital evidence-based medical information.”

Before you continue reading: What three problems would you highlight as among the most common and important in medical reporting?

Here’s Schwitzer’s list:

Favoring relative risk over absolute risk:

Many stories use relative risk reduction or benefit estimates without providing the absolute data.

So, in other words, a drug is said to reduce the risk of hip fracture by 50% (relative risk reduction), without ever explaining that it’s a reduction from 2 fractures in 100 untreated women down to 1 fracture in 100 treated women.  Yes, that’s 50%, but in order to understand the true scope of the potential benefit, people need to know that it’s only a 1% absolute risk reduction (and that all the other 99 who didn’t benefit still had to pay and still ran the risk of side effects).

Mistaking association for causation:

 …journalists often fail to explain the inherent limitations in observational studies – especially that they can not establish cause and effect.  They can point to a strong statistical association but they can’t prove that A causes B, or that if you do A you’ll be protected from B.

Schwitzer points to several examples, including this: “Eating chocolate may decrease heart disease by as much as 37 percent.” A study that finds that people who eat chocolate have a lower risk of heart disease has found an association. It might be worth following up with more research, but it does not mean that eating chocolate caused the drop in heart disease.

And misunderstanding screening tests:

 …all screening tests cause harm; some may also do good. That’s not the way we discuss screening, though, and certainly not in news stories where we have seen a consistent pro-screening bias that is an impediment to truly informed decision-making.

I found this to be a helpful reminder. Even those of us who’ve been warned about these kinds of mistakes before might still be stumbling into them from time to time, under the pressure of deadline, not enough coffee, or too much coffee. (And, no, let’s not look up all the stories about what coffee causes or doesn’t cause. We know what we’d find: Almost all of those studies are associations, and we’re the ones who made them sound like cause and effect.)

Thanks to Schwitzer for saying all of this so clearly and succinctly.

- Paul Raeburn

When it comes to perils to aquatic life, plastics and the industry behind them aren’t catching many breaks. There are some good reasons, too. Think Pacific garbage patch. And just when it’s staggering enough to know the obvious hazards of sixpack rings strangling seals and seabirds, plastic bags and similar films clogging sea turtle digestive systems, and styrofoam-type pellets and fragments doing other plausibly bad things as they course through fishy gullets, along comes….lint. Specifically, microscopic (or nearly-so)  polyester and acrylic fibers that go down the drains of washing machines from fleeces and other garments, survive wastewater treatment, and get into streams, lakes, and the big blue sea. Presumably dryer mung that evades the lint trap and floats into the outdoors adds to the burden. Hmm. Is it lint if it starts off wet, or is lint only dryer type lint? Moving on now. Hand-washing clothes, as on the banks of the Ganges, can’t be any better (your tracker thought of that one all by hisself).

In the Nov. 1 issue of Environmental Science and Technology a Univ. College Dublin researcher and colleagues report evidence from washing machines that lots of fibers depart garments, including those made of synthetic fibers, each time through the wash and rinse cycle. More telling, surveys of beach sand around the world find the same kinds of fibers in every sample – and the quantities are highest near sewage outfalls and population centers. Tests of sewage outflows confirm there are such fibers in it, too. The circle closes.

This has not yet gotten much attention. That may be for good reason too. The research article is about the geographic mobility of these fibers. They’re everywhere, although not perhaps in overwhelming quantities. Which if any organisms are suffering and in what manner is unknown. That’s for further research. Is this then a story? I’d say so, but the news has to be carefully couched.

At ScienceNOW, the daily news arm of the AAAS’s Science magazine, Elsa Youngsteadt filed an account on Friday. I dunno if it beat the press release out, but that (see Grist) is dated today, the 24th. It’s straightforward. Unchallenged by contrary opinion however is her quote, from the researcher, that the fibers are “guilty until proven innocent.” What does that mean? Guilty of what? This is of course the precautionary principle that has gotten great traction in Europe among other places but not so much in the US. I’m no raving or even closet libertarian. Regulation of the market and the businesses that provide its vitality is essential to encouraging capitalism as a tool for productivity and ingenuity – like cops and bad or delusional guys on the streets and highways – while trying to keep it from going to rot. Anyway, to get back to the matter,  I’d think a load of data on ecosystem harm from these fibers is in order. This fascinating account could have that small hole filled, I’d think, by citing an opinion along the lines that there are grounds only for suspicion, not conviction. One doesn’t even learn whether the environment also already contains equally insoluble fibers, naturally, that swamp the abundance of fibers washed from fleeces.

One wonders – could not some controlled tests be done in lakes? A sensible, first-order guess is that fresh and salt  water organisms seem unlikely to have profoundly different tolerances for this stuff. Maybe the fibers could be isotopically or fluorescently tagged for easy identification of them and their possibly digested molecules. One could easily track incorporation into tissues while monitoring health of such things as freshwater mussels and crayfish and real fish. Next lake over, maybe upstream, no laundry outwash. Somebody write a proposal.

Also covering it birefly, the only other outlet I found, is The Scientist, where Jef Akst has it. The hed, I don’t think he wrote it: Dryer Lint Reaches Oceans. Perhaps. But the report is primarily about the fibers sent down the drain by  washing machines. The piece names ScienceNOW as one of its info sources. One must suppose Akst also had the paper, and perhaps the press release, at hand.

Grist for the Mill: University College Dublin Press Release ; Journal article abstract ;

- Charlie Petit

Oh yes, I did already like Richard A. Muller. He’s a Berkeley physicist. Was an acolyte of the late, cantankerous Nobelist, Luis Alvarez, and shares with him a skeptical stripe. One can still get him talking about Nemesis, the imagined (who knows, maybe real) nearby dim star that periodically sends the Sun’s distant Oort Cloud comets showering into the inner solar system. He also wrote the clever book, “Physics for Future Presidents.” He won a MacArthur award for his ability to see angles and things others miss. In recent years he occasionally noted that he was not all that sold on the idea that anthropogenic global warming is a dire threat. He found quite plausible the skeptics’ arguments that urban heat islands or systematic errors could have misled many scientists into seeing a worse problem than actually exists. But not any more.

In the news today is release of an analysis he and a few colleagues ran, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature or BEST study. It got money from some conservative, climate change doubting groups. Its members tore into the records of rapid temperature rise (geologically rapid anyway) that such people as James Hansen at the NASA GISS and his colleagues assemble, or similar ones from NOAA and the Brits at the Met Office and elsewhere who got snared in ruckus during the height of “Climategate” regularly publish. The result: The latter bunch got it right. The gimlet-eyed BEST study, after adding and subtracting and aggregating and splicing and dicing the data every which way agrees that the warming is not only real, but has raised average temps an oonch more than most other studies say. Urban heat islands or other plausible ways by which records may have been spoofed don’t do so. Just like the National Academy of Sciences has said.

Best to read Muller’s sly way of explaining the thing himself today on the Op-Ed page of the Wall Street Journal. Its structure reflects his own arc from the entertainment of skepticism to oh never mind.

This gets plenty of other coverage, much of it focussing on the recalcitrance of doubt in defiance of what most researchers call darned good data. One must remark further, however, that many contrarians have dropped efforts to deny warming over the last century or so, ascribing it to natural factors that could peter out any time. It’s the cause, not the trend, that get their motors running. The BEST study addresses only the reality of the warming, not its cause. Plus, need one say, one glance at the word “Berkeley” in the study’s name will prompt some contrarians to blow snot out their noses in derision for anything from this iconic (if no longer valid if it ever was) capital of lefty socialist one-worlder trouble makers.

Other stories: (Late Addition – Note the Climate Central item below. This news’s essence is not new)

• Forbes (blog) Peter Gleick: Breaking News: The Earth Still Goes Around the Sun, and It’s Still Warming Up ;  Another piece written by a scientist, this one firmly in the main stream. Dr. Gleick, an admirable fellow, appears excessively huffy about the idea that anybody should still have doubted what every bigshot and brainiac review of the science has been saying all along. We’re in trouble. The argument is political and ideological, not scientific, one thinks. In that arena the BEST study may have significance.
• New Scientist – Michael Marshall: Sceptical climate scientists concede Earth has warmed ; Yes, but while Muller might be considered ‘sceptical’ as the Brits spell it, some others on the BEST team are not (including Art Rosenfeld, guru of energy efficiency and white roofs as weapons against greenhouse forcing).
• NatureNews – Jeff Tollefson: Different method, same result: global warming is real ; Sober assessment, and remarks correctly that the groups’ reports have not yet gone through peer review. Ergo, there may be another round to report.
• BBC – Richard Black: Global warming ‘confirmed’ by independent study;
• Washington Post (blog) Brad Plumer: A skeptical physicist ends up confirming climate data ;
• NYTimes (blog) Leslie Kaufman: Climate Study Does Not Placate Skeptics ;
• The Economist: The heat is on / A new analysis of the temperature record leaves little room for the doubters. The world is warming.
• LA Times (blog) Geoff Mohan: Climate skeptic admits he was wrong to doubt global-warming data ;
• Climate Central – Michael D. Lemonick: Global Warming: Still Not A Hoax! ; Lemonick, thank you very much, notes that this report’s contents had been foreshadowed by Muller himself in testimony to Congress, as seen in the next two bullets on reports filed last Spring.
• Slate (Apr 4, 2011)  Andrew Leonard: How to make climate skeptics angry ;
• LA Times (Apr 4, 2011) Margot Roosevelt: Critics’ review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming ;
• The Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Global warming study finds no grounds for climate sceptics’ concerns;
• The Telegraph (UK) Murray Waldrop: The Earth is getting warmer, study finds . .partly funded by climate change sceptics… ; We learn here of the distinction between mere deniers, who ignore science entirely even if they say they don’t, and the ‘properly sceptical” who believe researchers have been misled by or even concocted or skewed data. Also at the Telegraph, Tom Chivers: Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature results eem to vindicate ‘Climategate’ scientists. Will sceptics admit it? ; And if you’d like a piece of thoroughly arch and witty, um, idiocy,  larded with snark and scorn, try James Delingpole: Global warming is real ;
• … Could go on and on…

Plus, from a top site for contrarian thinking:

• Watts Up With That – Anthony Watt: The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review ; He makes a valid point. Funny, though – how’d I go this long not noticing that peer review and public relations are both “PR.”

Grist for the Mill: BEST Press Release ; Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature main site.

- Charlie Petit

Left: Steve Squyres ; Rt: Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi, practicing for aquanaut mission

For years the biggest name in Mars exploration has been Steve Squyres, the Cornell astronomer and planetary geologist. He is lead scientist of the Mars Rover Program that included the late Ms. Spirit and still has her sister, Ms. Opportunity, moseying around the Red Planet’s frigid desert (and now heading for a sunny spot to spend the winter). Biggest name does not mean particularly big – note the recent poll concluding that many Americans cannot name a single, living scientist – but to those who follow Mars news he’s pretty much da man.  This is an interesting character, skinny as a wrangler with the cowboy boots to match (despite being a New Jersey boy), hyperkinetic, ever-enthusiastic, expressive, and generous with his time when reporters call. He got a Carl Sagan medal for “outreach” to the public, and a Eugene Shoemaker Award for running the rovers.

Squyres has also been an outlier among academic planetary robotics experts scratching desperately for NASA money. He doesn’t grumble on or off the record about the agency’s budget-sucking astronaut wing. Rather, he endorses the notion that putting people into space suits and sending them far, far from Earth is scientifically defensible.

All this is worth noting because he’s a big part of a small news splash as the week ends,  and not in context of wheeled robots on a dry planet. NASA is getting more serious about some day sending people to an asteroid. Maybe they’ll learn something about solar system history and maybe even add to hope of staving of catastrophe if one gets on collision course with Earth. One preparatory step is to send a crew under the ocean off Florida to live in a sunken habitat called Aquarius Reef Base. The Nat’l Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration operates it 60 feet underwater and 3.5 miles from Key Largo. Squyres and others on board will be practicing the moves astronauts might someday make in the near weightless – a lot like near neutrally buoyant – environment of an asteroid while doing geological surveys. They started today. A few reporters covered it.

One, notably, is Keith Cowing, (*more on him below)  founder of the friendly gadfly site NASA Watch and a mainstay at the affiliated website for general astronautics info, SpaceRef. Cowing interviewed Squyres – more of a chat between old buddies than any kind of deeply-probing journalism – on the eve of the underwater asteroid faux-venture. It starts off with sensible background on the role of simulations and analog environments for preparation for trips off Earth, then gets into Q&A – in which the Q part is also a route for Cowing to mention that he’s done some exotic analog traveling himself. But he ignores exploring the Squyres-as-NASA-human-exploration maven angle much, and only gets a hint that Squyres at age 55 has no expectation of ever going to an asteroid himself. That age doesn’t seem to rule it out if the flight is within ten years or so. One wishes Cowing had been a bit more aggressive in finding whether the hero of Mars rovers did, or still does, harbor hopes of being a spaceman some day.

The crew on the 13-day mission includes a Japanese and Canadian aquanaut and several veteran NASA astronauts. The event is not a big headline maker, but appears to be off the radar for wire services or the three Florida newspapers I checked, Orlando Sentinel, Florida Today, and Miami Herald.

Other Stories:

• Space.com – Denise Chow: Astronauts Dive Deep on Undersea ‘Asteroid’ Mission;
• CBC: INTERVIEW – Zack Dubinsky: NASA takes asteroid mission underwater ; The astronaut in the hot seat is Canadian.
• National Geographic: Pictures: NASA Lands on Underwater “Asteroid” ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA Press Release, NASA NEEMO Mission ;

*More on Cowing:

• While nosing around to see what Keith Cowing had to say with Squyres, one discovers and is happy to share with space fans and space writers that a new magazine, with him on the masthead, has made its debut: Space Quarterly. The link leads to full-text downloads of the first issue.  It is inviting writers to contact it for possible assignment. Also see the related news release/story at SpaceRef. A look reveals a heavy focus on space entrepreneurship, a mix of writing by journalists and by various analysts or others in the space biz, and snazzy renderings of spaceships and related hardware.

- Charlie Petit