Looks like the little San Francisco Examiner – once a pub owned by Hearst, which sold the name and took over the SF Chronicle – got a scoop that’s going around the world. Its Sarah Gantz reported yesterday that would-be bird rescuers are trying to catch a red tailed hawk photographed with a nail through its heat, sideways through the base of its beak. Best speculation is that it was done with a nail gun that could do such a thing only if fired from a few feet away. A day earlier she reported the plans to catch it.

Guessing is that the young bird was born in or near the park. It is eating. That gopher in the pic proves it. But, one supposes, a wound like this can’t be survivable for too long, what with risk of infection and perhaps mechanical interference too.

The news got quickly around:

• ABC – Ellen Tumposky: It’s Good News that Hawk with Nail in Head Is Eating, Rescue Group Says ;
• SF Chronicle – Vivan Ho: Hawk with nail in head is eating well ; The hawk has gotten a squirrel and a gopher just this week, says here. Maybe they were so surprised to see a bird heading their way with a nail stuck in its head they froze in their tracks.
• AP: Hawk with nail in head still free in San Francisco;

*UPDATE (Oct. 23): Maybe the nail would have fallen out by itself?  Yes or no, it’s out now…

• SF Chronicle – Will Kane: S.F.’s nail-in-head hawk eating rats, doing well ;
  
• AP: Hawk found with nail in its head recovering in Calif.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) A European Union court has banned patenting any stem-cell process that involves destroying a human embryo. Some Christian groups applauded the decision. Some scientists said it will be devastating to medical research. We’ve seen quiet different angles in the Spanish speaking press. Some stories portray it as a poor decision that will slow down therapies. Others suggest it is an important step to prevent “patenting human life”. We haven’t found a single story that talks about the alternative routes to patenting, and how EU is planning to provide incentives for additional research in this field.

Elsewhere: Pedro Alonso is an important Spanish scientist who has been leading from the beginning research on the experimental malaria vaccine that has been in the news for providing a 47% protection in children. No doubt he deserved lots of credit about it. But some newspapers went too far saying that “he” presented a “Spanish” malaria vaccine. Apart from this aspect, very good and balanced reporting about it.

The other big topic in Spain is the sub-aquatic eruption of a volcano in Canary Islands last week. We tracked about it, but we now do a follow up because El Pais published a great story explaining that there is a kind of quarrel between scientific institutions from the island that feel excluded. The story makes also an important criticism asking why  an oceanographic boat hasn’t arrived to the area yet. “A volcano is not like an earthquake; it warns you” is the first sentence of the story.

Finally, good reporting in El Mundo from the French Guiana about the launching of Galileo, the European satellite-navigation system that will give EU independence from US Global Positioning System (GPS) 

El periodismo científico serio no debe limitarse a informar de que un buque oceanográfico llegará a la zona de la erupción submarina de El Hierro dentro de 5 días; también debe preguntarse en tono crítico porqué no está ya allí si desde julio había indicios de que la erupción estaba al caer, y aparte de poder precisar mejor las medidas a tomar, podría ser una ocasión magnífica para estudiar una erupción submarina. Este enfoque ácido es el que refleja El País en el magnífico reportaje de Bernardo Marín “Desconcierto volcánico”. En él Bernardo habla de lo confusas que han sido las evacuaciones, pero también del malestar interno entre algunos organismos científicos de la isla que se sienten ignorados, y de las quejas de investigadores diciendo que el buque les habría permitido estudiar un fenómeno único. “Un volcán avisa, no es comoun tiburón” dice un investigador. Pero quejarnos sabemos todos. Bernardo contrasta la información y cita a un miembro del CSIC diciendo que el buque en realidad no es imprescindible, y otro explicando que las expediciones se planean con mucho tiempo, y no es tan fácil mover un barco así como así. Muy buen balance de información, que no hemos visto en otro tema fundamental de la semana: la decisión de un tribunal europeo de prohibir las patentes de tratamientos células madre embrionarias.

La decisión de la UE de prohibir las patentes de tratamientos de células madre (Daniel Basteiro – Público) es por causas éticas y morales. Varios científicos han criticado la decisión diciendo que esto frenará las investigaciones y provocará que los tratamientos y rédito económico se lo lleven EEUU o Asia. En un buen artículo en El Pais, Jaime Prats explica que la legislación en EEUU es mucho más laxa. En general hemos visto dos posicionamientos muy diferenciados. Por una parte BBC Mundo titula “Europa a la derecha de EEUU en la discusión sobre células madre” un artículo absolutamente crítico con la decisión, que refleja con palabras como “ridículo” la oposición frontal de este grupo de científicos a la prohibición de patentar. (¡cómo si las patentes fueran la única opción de incentivo!). Por otro en algunos medios se ha celebrado la noticia con posiciones de conservadurismo religioso diciendo que así “se protege la vida” (anda ya!). Ejemplo: Milenio “festejan investigadores prohibición de medicamentos con células madre”. Pocas notas hacen un buen balance, y sobre todo abordan el tema fundamental: ¿qué alternativa propone la UE para que esto no perjudique las futuras terapias con células madre embrionarias? Seguro que lo deben haber contemplado… no sería ético impedir la curación de enfermedades…

Más prometedor en el campo de la medicina ha sido el anuncio esta semana de que la vacuna contra la malaria financiada por la fundación Gates ha mostrado buena eficacia en los estudios de fase III. Quizás una de las notas más completas es la de Ainhoa Iriberri “El primer ensayo masivo prueba que la vacuna “española” antimalaria es eficaz” (Público). El español Pedro Alonso ha sido líder en los primeros procesos de la gestación de esta vacuna, pero en general hemos visto un abuso del término “español” en algunos titulares como Qué –N. Carretero “Un investigador español, a punto de anunciar la vacuna contra la malaria” o La Nueva España “El asturiano Pedro Alonso logra una vacuna que evita la mitad de los casos de malaria”. Es extraño que Público haya sucumbido a la tentación, cuando la propia Ainhoa en una entrevista a Alonso le saca la frase “la gente dice que esta es la vacuna de Pedro Alonso y no, no es de nadie”

Información científica de la semana también es el lanzamiento (pospuesto de momento) del satélite Galileo que rivalizará con las medidas de navegación GPS estadounidenses. Aquí querríamos destacar la buena información que está aportando la sección de ciencia de El Mundo, con un buen gráfico de Juan Sánchez, y una completísima nota desde la Guayana Francesa de Pablo Jáuregui “Aplazado el lanzamiento del sistema de navegación Galileo”, que más allá de explicar el retraso de financiación, compatibilidad con GPS, estado de ánimo, y muchos otros detalles relacionados con la operación. Nos gustaría ver también un periodismo crítico sobre costes y razones políticas de lanzar este nuevo satélite.

- Pere Estupinyà

A Scenario of Future Thunderstorms Deduced From Ruckus Around Eta Corvi

On the preprint service arXiv astro-ph a remarkable 60-page paper (see Grist below), based on data from the infrared-gathering Spitzer Space Telescope and another instrument on Mauna Kea, just popped up. It sums up signs of a life-sparking cataclysm unfolding around a star so close one can see it with the naked eye. A donut of dust is so chock full of water (ice and vapor) and other materials common in comets that the best explanation offered is that one, or several, of those mountain-sized ice balls have recently gone to smithereens on something big and hard. A planet would do. A NASA Jet Propulsion Lab press release and a teleconference from a meeting at Goddard Space Flight Center propelled a small swarm of news stories in the last day or so.

A good number of astronomers and planetary specialists, but few news reporters, already got the word two weeks ago at a joint meeting of the American Astronomical (not -autical, as first said here while writing fast, thinking slow)  Society’s Division of Planetary Sciences and the European Planetary Science Congress in Nantes, France.

Thus there has been a one-two punch of coverage, the second one bigger. Reporters are describing an intriguing hypothesis.  Perhaps, in a budding system of planets around a fairly young, hot star 60 light years away named Eta Corvi and a bit more massive than the sun, is an Earthlike planet in the Goldilocks zone where life is plausible. Perhaps it is right now getting its delivery of water. The inferred carriers are comets from a distant realm comparable to our sun’s comet-storehouse, the Kuiper Belt. Seeing it happen yonder bolsters the idea that Earth got much or most of its water the same way during an era known as the Late Heavy Bombardment 4 billion years ago or so.

First Story:

•  NatureNews: Ron Cowen (Oct. 5): Comets take pole position as water bearers: First out, from the scene in France two weeks ago, and perhaps the best of the bunch. Cowen puts this news well down in a summary from two presentations, one pertaining to new evidence for comet-delivery of Earth’s water, and then the signs of the same story unfolding before our eyes near another star. Plus, the yarn has from one prime source explicitly that a targeted search is in order for the planet supposedly receiving its water.
• … Please let us know if other reporters – several were there – got it from the meeting in France.

Today’s Batch of Stories:

• TIME Magazine – Michael D. Lemonick: 400 Trillion Miles Away, a Comet Storm Waters a World ; Fine hed, and Lemonick refers to the other evidence, that surfaced in Nantes and again in Nature last week, in our solar system and supporting the Late Heavy Bombardment scenario.
• New Scientist – Lisa Grossman: Comets may be creating oceans on alien planet ;
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: Evidence of a Late Heavy Bombardment Occurring in Another Solar System ; Nice selection of quote for a tagline: “This system was shouting, ‘I’m something extraordinary, come figure out my mystery!’”
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Comet Armageddon Detected In Nearby Star System ;
• ISNS (Inside Science News Service, Amer. Inst. of Physics) Michael Schirber: Striking Evidence of Comet Delivering Water, Molecules to Earth-Like Planet: With an outsider’s expert opinion of the work (he says it’s just fine).
• Space.com: Comet Storm Rages in Alien Star System, Study Finds ;

I have a question that many readers of these stories may also have. If there is from this dust-up a suspicion of a Neptune-size or even a smaller rocky planet in the habitable zone of a star so close, what independent evidence might there be for it? One might suspect that radial-velocity (doppler shift) surveys could have seen the  star’s wobble. Or perhaps the orbital periods at 3 AU make that impossible to detect without years’ more data. Or perhaps the system is face-on to Earth, giving a bright signal from the tori of dust and other debris, but no Doppler shift from our perspective. A better question is why nobody appears to have given any hint of this second shoe to the story, other than Cowen’s relay of one scientist’s plea that a search be attempted. Again, is there a way to directly  deduce the planets themselves? The paper itself gives clues. One wonders how many reporters read closely or even scanned through it, and how many relied entirely on press releases, the teleconference for reporters, and perhaps largely (and lazily but I don’t know enough to even whisper any names, and who knows they may have had editors screeching for copy now and please cover a few other stories today too) rewrote what colleagues had already written. The paper is below in Grist. Follow the link to see the opportunity to download full text. The section on the nature of both the impacted planet and a Jupiter-sized world much farther out, in the Kuiper belt, scattering comets every which way, starts at about page 34. It’s a stimulating, if somewhat technical, discussion. A longer, feature-sized story would need to include this future-oriented angle.

Grist for the Mill:

NASA JPL Press Release,  arXiv  Spitzer Evidence for a Late Heavy Bombardment and the Formation of Urelites in η Corvi at ~1 Gyr ; Abstract of report at EPSC-DPS meeting two weeks ago;

More Exoplanet News: Also this week and also from the same meeting at NASA’s  Goddard Space Flight Center, a University of Hawaii astronomer and an Australian colleague report rare, direct imagery of a warm thing near a star that appears to be a newborn planet’s dusty glow.

• AP – Audrey McAvoy: Hawaii astronomer captures image of forming planet ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: How are planets born? LkCa 15 could give scientists first-ever peek ; Well-done setting of the scene before getting into the new findings, plus an outside opinion on their worth.
• ABC (US) Ned Potter: Birth of a Planet: First Pictures of Youngest Planet Yet Seen ;
• Wired – Mark Brown: Keck telescope finds youngest known planet ;
• Sydney Morning Herald – Charles Purcell: Birth of a planet caught on camera ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Planet for First Time ;
• Nature News (blog) Ron Cowen : Astronomers spot the birth of a planet ; Cowen also reports to ksjtracker that he recently learned that this whole piece of news has been laid out in a video archive on the web, unnoticed by reporters, since March. Further, that he had noticed it on the program last January at the American Astronomical Soc’y meeting in January but hadn’t time to get to the session. Ah well. They say news is news when reporters hear about it (and publish).

Grist for the Mill:

Macquarie University Press Release ; University of Hawaii Press Release; arXiv astro-ph paper LkCa 15: A Young Exoplanet Caught at Formation? ;

- Charlie Petit

Malaria parasite's life cycle--It's complexity is one reason developing a vaccine has proven so difficult

A malaria vaccine first developed some 25 years ago for the U.S. military has been tested in some 6,000 African babies (aged 5 months to 17 months) and found to protect 47 percent of them from severe bouts of malaria. Most vaccines are not considered good enough for widespread use until they can protect at least 90 percent of those immunized.

The results were announced Tuesday at the malaria conference being held in Seattle by the Gates Foundation, which has been pushing for total malaria eradication and is funding further research to make the vaccine more effective.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. writes in the New York Times that the chief executive of the developer, GlaxoSmithKline, estimates that the current vaccine could, if used everywhere at even its limited efficacy save millions of lives over a decade.

That point became the lede of Sarah Boseley‘s story as published in the Sydney Morning Herald. She quotes the Glaxo exec as saying, ”When the team was first shown the data, quite a number of them broke down in tears” of happiness because this was the first vaccine against a parasitic disease that showed even a modicum of effectiveness.

The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s David Sell chose a curious word to describe what the vaccine promised in this start to his lede, “Malaria seemed closer to being thwarted as a world menace…” Thwarted? What does that mean?

Carol M. Ostrom of the Seattle Times reflected the general view that the end of malaria as a threat anywhere remained a long way off. “There was much gray hair in the audience” she began her story and went on to say that everyone there knew that many of them would not be around “when — this crowd would say when, not if — malaria is scrubbed from Earth.” That was a sensitive way of reflecting that some experts believe the goal of eradication is probably impossible.

The African trial is scheduled to continue through 2014 with thousands more children to be immunized. One concern is early evidence that protection fades over the years, as it does with natural malaria immunity. But if the results look good enough by 2014, Boseley writes, actual immunization campaigns may begin in 2015.

-Boyce Rensberger

Cerenkov radiation in the core of a nuclear reactor

This blog probably shouldn’t note every zig nor zag in the saga of the superluminal neutrino hypothesis. (No, that’s not the name of a new episode of “The Big Bang Theory.”) But this is a zag from a well known figure who is hard to ignore, Nobelist Sheldon Glashow.

The problem he sees with the neutrino experiment is that the particles fired from CERN to a detector in Italy did not give off something called Cerenkov radiation. That’s what other particles do when they outpace light in a medium that slows photons below lightspeed. Light, as not everyone knows, travels at lightspeed only in a vacuum, but something as simple as water can slow it down, even as other particles pass the photons by. When those particles go faster than light, they give off flashes of energy, the Cerenkov radiation. That may be what led to the popular misconception that radioactivity makes things glow.

Devin Powell explains at Science News with a nice quote from Glashow’s co-author, Andrew Cohen, writing in Physical Review Letters: “I would be ecstatic to see some kind of new physics coming from this experiment. It’s just hard to accommodate that, given this [lack of] radiation.”

-Boyce Rensberger

Best image in the section. See the site to learn what it is.

If this is Tuesday, it must be the New York Times‘s science smorgasbord.

The main course is a long piece by Donald G. McNeil, Jr. that, in the Tracker’s mind, raises the question of what genre of journalism it fits, if any. It’s written mostly as a feature drawn entirely out of one new book, but it’s not a book review. By the end it seems to commit news, but the lede decidedly is featurey with no hint of news.

If it were written as a news story, here’s how it might start: The AIDS epidemic of the last 30 years may well have been caused by careless medical procedures by well-intentioned doctors and other health care workers in Africa. That is the conclusion of one of those doctors who has completed a major study of the culprit virus in the 60 years before the disease was recognized.

You have to read more than 300 words into the story to get that gist, though nowhere in the article is it stated as clearly. At the end of the three-column jump there is welcome comment from two outside experts, both praising the book and its conclusions. The discredited polio vaccine allegation, by the way, is not supported.

A clearer statement of the book’s conclusions might have motivated readers to struggle with the complex taxonomy of the many types and subtypes of HIV that figure in the story.

Below the fold Kenneth Chang has a fun piece out of a conference convened by the visionary agency Darpa and devoted to a 100-year plan for spaceships to reach stars beyond the Sun. One proposal: Machines that wait out a ride of decades, if not centuries, and then construct human beings upon reaching their destination. Right. And the instructions for what they should do will be programmed into their synapses.

Also fronted is Gina Kolata‘s intriguing piece on a fairly new finding that among the bacteria in the human gut are species that prefer to live in colon cancer cells.

The rest of the section is on a menu here. Click and then scroll to the bottom.

-Boyce Rensberger

Artist's conception of one of South America's earliest rodents

Paleontologists are always announcing that they have found the oldest this or earliest known that. Unless its a dinosaur or a human, those stories usually never appear in a general interest news outlet … unless that outlet happens to have a well educated science writer skilled in her (or his) craft.

Witness a fascinating story in Saturday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer by John Mangels. Here’s a case, in contrast to that of the AIDS virus story in the New York Times today (see post just above), where a feature approach makes good sense. For Mangels’s story, the straight news lede would have to be something like: Scientists have found the oldest known rodent teeth in South America. Not too many readers would continue past that.

Here is Mangels’s lede: “Forty-five million years ago or thereabouts, a bedraggled band of small African rodents resembling mice found themselves clinging to a tangle of trees and brush, adrift in the vast Atlantic Ocean.”

You don’t turn a potentially hum-drum story into an engaging saga without reporting, and lots of it. (“Reporting,” for the non journalists reading this, is what most people call researching.)

The story is moderately long, rich with background and color, and complete with a photo gallery, illustrations, maps and even an audio recording of a scientist pronouncing the names, derived from South American Indian terms, of three newly discovered rodent species.

This is the kind of science journalism that gets people interested in science. It’s the kind of package that used to appear every week or so in most major dailies. And it’s a reminder of what we have largely lost in general interest print media.

-Boyce Rensberger

Countries where malaria remains

At a Gates Foundation conference on malaria, the WHO reported on Monday that deaths from the disease declined by about 20 percent over the past ten years and that if similar progress continues,  in another ten years the disease may be eradicated from one third of the countries where it exists. By 2015, the agency said, some three million lives could be saved if gains are maintained.

That’s pretty dramatic news, but few mainstream journalistic organizations seem to have covered it. Did we already have that in the recent past? Malaria killed an estimated 781,000 people in 2009, according to WHO.

One of the few to pay attention was BBC News, albeit in an unbylined piece, which earlier had mistakenly reported the reduction as 40 percent.

Kate Kelland, writing for Reuters, notes that many countries were on track to eradicate the scourge as late as 1972, thanks to an earlier campaign, but that efforts faded and the disease spread again.

No sign of coverage by AP.

The Seattle Times, in whose back yard the conference is being held, published a fine curtain-raiser on the meeting on Saturday, written by Carol M. Ostrom. But as of Tuesday had not published anything out of the meeting. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has ignored it so far.

Maybe I’m making too much of this. Maybe this is old news that I missed. Let me know.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Cuba has sent a report to the United Nations explaining that the US commercial blockade against Cuba jeopardizes several health programs in the island. Two Cuban newspapers give specific examples about the lack of a reagent needed to kidney transplants, some drugs that Cuba need to buy at twice its prize via third parties, and bureaucratic barriers to buy equipment for hospitals. In Mexico, researchers have documented for the first time transgenes from GM cotton in wild populations. We read the story in SciDev, but we didn’t find it in the Mexican press. We found another interesting one about a new natural compound that could act as an antiretroviral against HIV. The story avoids saying that the current synthetic treatments are working quiet well.

Is there a scientific explanation why people normally say they liked the book more than the movie? This tracker once tried to answer this question through the behavioral economics approach, but now in Chile a reporter has asked neuroscientists and different sources to write a really nice story. Great reporting also in Brazil about the rescue of a baby dolphin missed in Uruguayan waters, in Colombia about a new species of millipede that carries 10 species of fungus in its back to provide camouflage, and an experimental research by Argentinean scientists on the learning capacities of ticks that carry the Chagas’ parasite.

Muchas notas interesantes para comentar hoy. Empecemos por Cuba, donde diferentes medios reportan sobre un informe de la ONU analizando las consecuencias negativas para el sistema de salud cubano que conlleva el lamentable embargo de EEUU. Juventud Revelde da ejemplos concretos como el programa de transplantes renales, que requiere un producto que con dificultades Cuba está adquiriendo de EEUU a través de terceros países. O las trabas burocráticas desde Washington a que Cuba compre equipos sanitarios de firmas estadounidenses. En CubaAhora, Ana María Domínguez Cruz “Consecuencias del bloqueo palpables en la salud pública cubana” tiene una postura más agresiva clasificando como “política genocida” las restricciones de EUU que fuerzan a Cuba a adquirir material – por ejemplo para operaciones cardiovasculares- a precios casi el doble de la compra directa.

Vamos a México donde encontramos dos notas también controvertidas. Para SciDev y desde Chile Maria Elena Hurtado explica que en México “Detectan genes transgénicos en algodón silvestre”. Nos sorprende no haber encontrado ninguna referencia al estudio en la prensa mexicana, siendo un tema tan (demasiado) sensible en el país. Además, según el artículo es la primera ocasión que esta fuga de genes se detecta en el algodón, y sería la tercera especie en la que se detecta contaminación genética. Debería ser un tema que recibiera más atención. Por lo menos si los resultados fueran tan claros como establece Mª Elena: un cuarto de todas las semillas silvestres analizadas contenían transgenes y algunos provenientes de más de 700 km de distancia. No es función nuestra investigar más. Pero alguien debería ampliar información desde una perspectiva crítica.

La crítica no suele estar demasiado presente en nuestras informaciones. El Universal presenta un buen reportaje “Compuesto de planta mexicana efectivo contra VIH”, dando mucho detalle de las investigaciones de un científico mexicano en busca de principios activos de origen natural que puedan tener efectos contra el SIDA. La investigación merece todos los aplausos, y ser reconocida en los medios del país, pero contiene un punto oscuro que no podemos obviar: los fármacos sintéticos tienen una efectividad abrumadora disminuyendo la presencia de VIH en infectados. Los resultados conseguidos son excelentes, y difícilmente superados por un producto de origen natural. Además, por lo que se lee en el cuerpo de la nota, la efectividad que afirma el titular es una suposición indirecta de las –prometedoras sin duda- investigaciones. El trabajo es importantísimo, y en ciencia nunca se sabe desde dónde aparecerán los grandes progresos, pero de momento no se debería presentar como una alternativa.

Si relajamos un poco, en el suplemento Tendencias de La Tercera encontramos un original artículo de Jennifer Abate sobre “Por qué (casi) siempre nos gusta más el libro que la película”. Este tracker escribió hace unas semanas un post en su blog –que Jennifer cita- donde sin datos científicos y sólo la lógica del behavioral economics proponía que el simple hecho de normalmente leer primero el libro y luego ver la película podría estar detrás de la explicación. Jennifer hace un mucho mejor trabajo periodístico consultando diferentes fuentes para explorar diferentes razones a esta pregunta sin clara respuesta. La actividad de más zonas cerebrales relacionadas con la imaginación es una de las propuestas más interesantes.

Aquí nos encanta el estilo desenfadado de La Tercera – Tendencias. Aunque a veces se exceden. Por ejemplo con el artículo de Sonia Lira “32 años: la edad en que las mujeres empiezan a parecerse a sus madres”. Como artículo de curiosidad está muy bien, pero no se le debería dar el estatus de científico y supuesta veracidad con la coletilla “según una investigación británica”. Sobre todo porque es una soberana tontería. Pero también porque menosprecia al resto de ciencia que lo acompaña. Y si algo así lo queremos vestir de ciencia, entonces debemos centrarnos bien en el estudio y su metodología.

También curioso el artículo en La Nación de Nora Bar “Las vichuncas pueden aprender”, sobre los experimentos en laboratorio de un investigador argentino afincado en Francia indicando que el insecto portador del chagas asocian olores o factores físicos como el viento a cuál es el mejor animal para infectar. Aunque el aprendizaje les dura sólo 3 días. Se presenta como un avance importante, pero no nos queda claro en qué sentido.

Y algunas historias finales sobre animales: En Colombia se ha descubierto una especie nueva de lo más peculiar: un milpiés con musgo en su dorso actuando como camuflaje, tal y como explica Ramiro Velásquez Gómez en El Colombiano. Con su inconfundible estilo dinámico y jovial, Ramiro da una enorme cantidad de detalles sobre esta nueva especie descubierta por estudiantes de biología. Además, a la nota le acompaña otra donde Ramiro Velásquez nos habla de plantas que se agachan para plantar sus semillas. Bravo por la originalidad.

En el brasileño Folha vemos otro magnífico ejemplo de cómo construir una historia interesante, en este caso a partir del rescate de una cría de delfín que fue encontrada extraviada a la deriva en un río Uruguayo todavía con el cordón umbilical. No es una noticia tan trascendente, a pesar de ser una especie vulnerable en la lista de peligro de extinción, pero Giulana Miranda “Projeto tenta salvar golfinho brasileiro ‘tímido’ ” le extrae todo el jugo posible en una nota donde explica el proceso de salvación, aspectos fisiológicos del delfín, y todo el desenlace de la operación. Bonita historia.

- Pere Estupinyà

Lotsa workshopping going on up here, lotsa notetaking as researchers go over their findings and hypotheses. Good hallway confabs, excellent scenery, fab members of the tribe.

In more data-driven words:

ScienceWriters2011,  latest of the annual joint meetings of the National Association of Science Writers, with its Workshops, and the Council for the Advancement of Science Writers and its New Horizons in Science briefings, is winding up in fine style on this rolling landscape ~7000  feet  up on the Colorado Plateau. That is, in Flagstaff, Arizona, pierced by historical Route 66 and site of the New Horizons sponsor, the quite impressive, if not nationally well-known (sports mascot: the Lumberjacks), Northern Arizona University.

Well over 300 people, not including speakers, made it. The map up there has a recent update on the numbers, and a less updated distribution of where we all came from and a hint how we breakdown between regulars and ones new to the party. Tomorrow, several dozen of us will be punctuating the week with a raft ride down the Colorado below Glen Canyon Dam, and into the Grand Canyon. I’ll try to get a picture of that armada and update this missive (DONE!) . I did try to get a shot of the meeting crowd Sat. night at nearby Lowell Observatory. Dang. The camera battery went flat.

While yours truly composed nary a tweet, of which I am a tad ashamed, plenty of others had no such compunctions. The twitter tag is #sciwri11 , and if you don’t want to pull’em together yourself, a website at Purdue, put together by NASW member and attendee Steve Tally, has them lined up handsomely.

A few notes off the top of my head, and then more on the attendance breakthrough. This is random and entirely from spontaneous recall of things that are easy to recall:

•   At a Workshop on covering controversial science, book and expozay writer Gary Taubes expressed continuing conviction that the Nobel Prize Committee blew it years ago when it awarded the big one in physics (correction to previous error on the field, see comments)  to a man that Taubes had already written up as, well, he didn’t say fraud, but he did write him up as very wrong.  Then he threw in that, as with his recent doubts on standard nutrition advice, he harbors doubts about climate change science too. Hmm. Really? Uh oh. But no Taubes-bomb seems to be likely in that arena. After, several of us walked briskly up and asked him if he’s planning to write on it. No, not at all, he said, not his field. Whew. “But I can easily imagine how that could all fall apart.,” he said. Unwhew.
• At New Horizons Monday, Theoretical physicist and Astrophysicist Sean Carroll‘s explanation that just because the laws of physics mean life after death, spoon bending with one’s mind, and homeopathy are outlawed by quantum field theory and that is a dead cold fact, and that free will also violates physics, it does not mean that we can’t talk as though we have choices. That has to do with  dysteleology (and Ernst Haeckel), and about supervenience, and about the annoying kid who says “I knew you were going to do that.” He gave me a copy of his powerpoint from which I filched this pic. Maybe we can get the whole edifying slide show up on the CASW or ScienceWriters2011 website.
• A personal fave, and not involving anybody famous as in the first two bullets, was a presentation by NAU restoration ecologist and ass’t prof. of biology Jane Marks. She described the recovery and repopulation of Fossil Creek here in Arizona after a century-old dam, built largely with Apache labor and still feeding a flume that still made money for the local utility, was knocked down a few years back with the utility’s apparently uncoerced agreement. Full stream flow restored. Good news for native chub fish things (my notes are mute) that are back at the top of the food chain after invasive perch and sunfish (I think) got chemically carpet bombed. A big deal for understanding the consequences of taking down dams (in US, 200 of them in the last 20 years). One result, she said, however, is an invasive species hard to hit with chemical pesticides, one that is “really really inexcusable.” You got it. “People are messing it up.” So many tourists and locals alike so love the restored stream that they are sort of trashing it, falling in, leaving stuff, parking RVs all over the place, etc etc at what is supposed to be a wild and scenic river. They aren’t bad people (as Caltech’s Sean Carroll would say, they had no free choice. It has to do with determinism and laws of physics), there are just way too many of them. Perfect example of uninentended or unexpected consequences. She thinks something will be done – rationing of tourism permits, something.
• I missed hearing Steven Pinker, here as part of his book tour on the supposed decline of violence in many nations. But most (no data) of those who did were impressed, no matter what the NY Review of Books said. I’d have been there but a medical urgency intervened (not mine, an old pal’s, all looking good now).

More on the meeting’s demographics. By one unofficial count of registrations, the turnout of journalists, either freelance (133) or staffers at independent pubs (50) is solid, about half the total. There also were many PIOs from universities, about 65, some of whom may be scouting it with a possible bid for hosting the New Horizons half of the meeting, plus many writers and editors for university or research lab-associated publications. Plus J-school profs. A good crowd.

Me, I’m ready for that raft on the river.

- Charlie Petit

A Malaysian frog collected in 1980s (l.) and one from 2008. Part of the evidence cited by authors of the paper

This one is sure to spawn controversy. The journal Nature Climate Change has a scientific paper saying that a wide range of plants and animals–from cotton to scallops to salmon to polar bears (oh, my!)–are not growing as large as they used to. Or, as many news reports put it, they are “shrinking.”

There is evidence for that conclusion, but get this, the cause is said to be global warming.

To be sure, there is something in biology called “Bergmann’s rule,” a 19th century observation that says within a given widely distributed genus, species living in colder climates tend to be larger or bulkier than species in warm climates. It is based on the idea that the ratio of a body’s surface area per unit of volume affects how easily it can shed or retain heat, depending on what suits the animal. Many genera follow the rule, but there are numerous exceptions.

Here’s the difficulty: Bergmann and his followers were looking at differences between very different climatic regimes–for example polar vs. temperate vs. tropical. Most of the evidence adduced in the journal article involves differences between individuals within a species over a span of just a few decades in the same locale. Global warming has raised Earth’s average temperature about 1.4 degrees F over the last hundred years. Granted, at high latitudes warming has been running at twice the global average. But still, the amount of change is tiny compared to that between polar regions and the temperate zones.

Nick Collins of The Telegraph in Britain buys it wholesale, writing in his lede that global warming is “already stunting” the growth of many species. Not a caveat in sight. He forecasts great peril for humanity as edible animals become smaller. With no hint of irony, he throws in observations that some species are moving northward as Earth warms. True enough, but they are doing so to stay within the temperature regime that suits them–thus not subjecting themselves to warming.

AFP‘s Marlowe Hood is almost as categorical but does note high up that the shrinkage finding applied to only 45 percent of the species studied.

Seth Borenstein‘s AP story has a second graf that rebuts the overall claim of the study, citing experts who say it goes too far. He concludes with a Stanford expert on climate change saying the conclusion seems “kind of far-fetched.” But the Tracker must deliver a rap on the knuckles for an odd simile in his lede to describe the shrinkage. He says it’s “a little like wool sweaters that shrink when washed in hot water.” Uh, no, not like that at all. At first I thought this had to have been some client paper’s editor inserting his or her own misunderstanding, but when the same simile showed up in versions published by several different clients, I had to get out the ruler.

Both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian deserve kudos for cutting that phrase from their versions of Borenstein’s story. Are Aussie editors more science savvy? Or did someone at AP other than Borenstein insert the simile after an earlier version went Down Under? Watch the comment box below for Seth’s response.

Susan Young, writing on Nature newsblog notes that the paper says the size reduction is not occurring among some species at high latitudes, which, of course, is where warming has been greatest.

Rachel Nuwer, writing on the NY Times‘s Green blog, which used the photo above, felt it necessary to reassure readers in her third graf that the new study does not mean people are going to shrink. Hm. Maybe air conditioning is to blame for the bulking up of Americans.

-Boyce Rensberger

Born at 15 oz. Photo published by parents "for everyone"

A study published today in the journal Pediatrics reports finding that babies born weighing less than 4.5 pounds are five times as likely to develop some form of autism as are babies of normal birth weight. Babies born even smaller–less than 3 pounds 5 ounces–are 11 times more likely to become autistic.

That’s a whopping increase in risk, but what’s the absolute risk? Those numbers–essential to forming a reasonable opinion of the situation–are not obvious in some stories. Turns out that 95 percent of preemies under 4.5 pounds grow up without becoming autistic. Does that seem a little more reassuring to parents?

One of the writers who made this clearest was Angela Haupt at US News‘s Health Buzz blog, but she gave the inverse number: 5 percent develop autism. She did contrast that with the 1 percent risk for the population overall. No story I could find used the 95 percent perspective.

Many stories did nothing to dispel the possible conclusion that prematurity was a major cause of autism. It’s not. Don Sapatkin, writing on Philly.com (joint site of the Inquirer and Daily News) does say, “Most autistic children were normal size at birth.” That’s a key point, indicating that prematurity is not the chief cause of autism, that other causes account for the majority of cases.

Other takes:

Amanda Gardner at CNN.com.

Lois M. Collins, writing for Deseret News, curiously attributes some of her information to CNN. Why didn’t she do all the reporting herself?

Ryan Jaslow at CBSNews.com has a compact yet comprehensive account.

Few stories noted one of the most remarkable aspects of this study, done at the University of Pennsylvania nursing school–that the children it studied were followed for up to 21 years after birth before reaching a conclusion about the child’s problems.

-Boyce Rensberger