arXiv's illustration of the experiment and relativistic motion of satellites

As almost everyone suspected it surely would be, the bizarre claim that neutrinos had been clocked traveling faster than the speed of light has been knocked down. Or at least knocked.

Technology Review (disclosure: owned by MIT, the owner of KSJ Tracker) has an unbylined article covering what it calls “the best new ideas” from the pre-publication site Physics arXiv. It reports that a Dutch physicist believes he has found an error in the neutrino measurements at CERN. He says they failed to take into account a difference between the two frames of reference for moving objects–the atomic clocks in orbit and the equipment on the a moving Earth. When the Dutch scientist factored in those differences, they neatly removed the 60 nanoseconds by which the neutrinos seemed to beat lightspeed.

It’s all very complicated, of course, and few are saying the CERN measurements have been knocked flat. The new report is not peer reviewed. Few will buy it until a good, solid review is complete. Maybe that’s why the general interest publications don’t seem to have picked up on this yet. Or maybe there are too few science journalists with the education to judge this. Too bad; it would make a good mystery-solving yarn. Several online specialized sites are not similarly disadvantaged.

Tammy Plotner has an excellent summary, good for the relativity-challenged, at Universe Today.

Phil Plait‘s Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine’s site also had a good rundown.

John Farrell, writing in Forbes online, has a tidy account.

If the new challenge is upheld, will it happen so late that traditional news editors deem it “old news” and pass?

-Boyce Rensberger

Photoillustration of Cassini and Saturn

It’s a small story that got almost no attention, but Nadia Drake, writing in Science News, found a way to tell it engagingly–linking a distant era in human history to a cataclysmic event far away in our solar system.

The Tracker missed it when her story appeared ten days ago, but Drake tipped us off (we love it when that happens), calling her piece “a novelty story.”

The gist is that astronomers have found ripples in Saturn’s rings and deduced that they were caused in the late 1300s when a comet sailed close enough to break up and drop debris into the rings. Drake cites a speculation that the comet was pulled into orbit around Saturn and, some 50 years later, swung close enough to disintegrate completely, creating another set of ripples.

The data came from the Cassini spacecraft and were reported at an astronomy conference in France.

-Boyce Rensberger

A grindstone lifted from an abalone shell bowl

Gosh! They were so much like us.

That may be the most common response to archaeological finds that reach the popular media. It seems like a trivial reaction, but maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s akin to what we might feel upon learning of life on another planet. We’re not alone; we are part of something more widespread, something vastly older. Our ways are ancient.

An international team of archaeologists has discovered what they report to be a 100,000-year-old workshop in a South African cave on the Indian Ocean coast where anatomically modern–and maybe even intellectually modern–people manufactured red paint. There were tools for grinding red ochre, mixing it with fat from animal bones (a binder that would be used for tens of thousands of years) and other substances in an abalone shell bowl. There were firepits for cooking the bones, apparently from seals harvested close by and hammerstones for crushing them to extract marrow.

The AP, in an unbylined story picked up by many outlets, says it “may have been the world’s earliest artist’s studio.”

The oldest cave paintings in Europe would not be created for another 70,000 or so years. It is generally thought that the first anatomically modern human beings evolved nearly 200,000 years ago.

Brian Vastag of the Washington Post paints the picture in his lede: “A hundred thousand years ago, not long after Homo sapiens emerged as a species, a craftsman — or woman — sat in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean, crushed a soft rusty red rock, mixed it inside a shell with charcoal and animal marrow, and dabbed it on something — maybe a face, maybe a wall.”

At the Christian Science Monitor, Pete Spotts ledes this way: “Cosmetic giants Mabelline-Garnier or Helene Curtis standing on the shoulders of Stone Age artisans?”

The venerable John Noble Wilford writes in the New York Times that the workshop is evidence of not only of a nascent knowledge of chemistry but of long-term planning since the materials (the ochre may have come from a site 12 miles away) and tools had to be assembled in advance.

Amina Khan reported the story for the Los Angeles Times and noted something most others missed–that below the red paint still hardened into the bowl, there was yellow paint, perhaps from an earlier job.

At Science News, Bruce Bower referred to the ancient paint as a “colorful pigment of their imagination.”

Andy Coghlan writes in New Scientist that one ingredient probably used to make the paint was urine.

-Boyce Rensberger

Science News‘s Tina Hesman Saey appears to have an exclusive on this. Of course, she’s a Ph.D. in molecular genetics and probably one of only a handful of journalists attending the International Congress of Human Genetics in Montreal this week.

She writes that Seattle researchers have discovered a mutation–a duplication of a gene that helps brain cells move around–that occurred 2.4 million years ago, long after our separation from the ape lineages. Today every human has that duplicated gene, indicating quite strongly that it confers an evolutionary advantage. Brain cells that can move better might have led to the building of extra layers of the cortex, the part of the brain where higher functions reside, Saey writes.

Yes, it’s a big leap in interpretation but, she cites an outside expert as saying that the finding represents more work than has ever been done to link a genetic difference between humans and apes to higher brain function.

-Boyce Rensberger

Reports a few weeks ago that CERN researchers had measured neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light have been exaggerated in many outlets. One columnist in the small-town daily where I live even stated it as fact that the old light-speed limit had been debunked. She was arguing how you shouldn’t believe everything scientists say is true, especially global warming.

As responsible articles made clear back then, even the CERN researchers were doubtful of their finding and were not prepared to believe they had made no errors.

Interestingly at least two college dailies have interviewed their local scientists on the speedy neutrino matter.

The MIT student paper, The Tech, has a piece by Stephanie Holden, a brain and cognitive science student, giving some strong evidence to doubt the finding. She quotes MIT Nobelist Frank Wilczek saying that the main evidence contradicting the neutrino finding is what happened when astronomers spotted a 1987 supernova. Its neutrinos, which supernovae emit before flaring brightly, arrived just hours before the light. Had they traveled at the speed observed in the CERN experiment, they should have arrived years earlier.

At the Cornell Daily Sun student Nicholas St.Fleur appears to have conducted a Q&A by e-mail with several members of the faculty. They discuss the implications and, like Wilczek, bring up the 1987 supernova as powerful evidence against the CERN result. One Cornell prof says that if the new findings are right, the neutrinos should have been detected in 1983. Alas, St.Fleur queries a plant biologist who takes the opportunity to tout his personal theory of relativity.

-Boyce Rensberger

In Nature this week a Germany-Canada-US team of 16 science sleuths reported they have sequenced the genome of Yersinia pestis, or plague – the big one called the Black Death – as the bacterium existed during the 14th century. That’s when it burst across Europe and in just a few years killed an estimated, and astonishing, one-third and perhaps even half the population. The team reports the contagion’s descendants today, still causing illness but no plagues as antibiotics flatten it and perhaps people are more naturally resistant, are almost unchanged. This may mean that – back to natural resistance – humanity underwent some quick evolutionary and selection pressure the first time around, with an imprint that remains the genes of many of us. News accounts vary on that as a likely reason we tolerate it better these days.

As story, this research has a natural and spectral hook. Under the Royal Mint in London is an old graveyard called East Smithwood (correction – Smithfield, thx to Mr. Choi’s comment). London officials in 1349 opened the mass burial ground explicitly to take bodies of plague victims. Reopened for this study – image at left – it provided 46 teeth and 53 bones. From them came enough bits of plague DNA to assemble a representative map of its genome. However it arose from an ancestral soil-dwelling bacillus, the plague that hit Europe was newborn and appears ancestral to all the plague microbes that now exist around the world, living in dirt and sickening rodents and occasionally people.

It is getting wide play, in part because Nature provided a press briefing with lead authors and posted at its site videos of the event for reporters who couldn’t be there or listen to it live. Some of the researchers host institutions also put out press releases (see Grist). Incidentally and playing no rightful role in this news, but interesting, is that one of the lead authors, McMaster U’s Hendrik Poinar, is son of famed amber-and-insect fossil researcher George Poinar, Jr., whose search for DNA in resin-preserved bugs revved up some saurian fever dreams in sci-fi writer Michael Crichton’s imaginative brain.

Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Deadly Black Death bug hasn’t changed, but we have ; As did most reporters, Borenstein relied heavily on what the researchers said about their own work. Unlike most reporters, he also got an outsider to comment. The outside source is just as excited as the authors. One needn’t keep calling and calling until a naysayer shows up. That’s a bonus. What’s important for reporters is the habit of calling around, even on stories such as this that do not appear particularly ambiguous or innately controversial.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: Scientists crack Black Death’s genetic code ; Covers the basics, no sign of outside assessment.
• Telegraph (UK) Black death DNA unraveled ; No signer, right off wires or releases or both.
• CBS News – David W. Freeman: Scientists crack genetic code of black Death germ, Yersinia pestis ; Covers the basics, but much of it apparently taken from AP (including the outsider quote), and with an AP credit at the bottom.
• BBC – Matt McGrath : Black Death genetic code ‘built’ ;
• Deutsche Welle – Cyrus Farivar: Black death-causing bacterium’s DNA sequenced ; Story’s a bit confused. Says the contagion has hardly changed, but lets stand an outside sources declaration that the old Black Death bug is not the one that’s around today. Misses the supposition that humans were left a little bit changed, but more than the bacillus was, by the deadly encounter.
• TIME Mag – Alice Park: The Black Death Bacterium Decoded ; Hmmm. Reads convincingly. Has a distinctly different stance than AP’s version, for one prominent example. Stresses the poverty, urban squalor, and other stresses of 14th century Europe as a prime reason for the mass deaths then, with no similar suffering in later upsurges of the disease. No way to tell from here which is the better take, but to have variety is one reason its good to have (and to read) more than one competent reporter on a story. Perhaps Park called outside sources, but no evidence here of it.
• NPR – Nell Greenfieldboyce: Decoded DNA Reveals Details of Black Death Germ ; This too stresses (citing a lead author) the environmental differences, not genetic ones, that made the Black Death so virulent. She also gets a telling remark by an outsider who has done plague work himself.
• Bloomberg/Business Week: Michelle Fay Cortez: Black Death Bacteria Little Changed as Advances Stave Off Plague ;
  
• National Geographic – Anne Minard: Spawn of Medieval ‘Black Death’ Bug Still Roam the Earth ;
• Scientific American – Katherine Harmon: How Black Death Kept Its Genes but Lost Its Killing Power ;

Grist for the Mill: McMaster University Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The prominent non-profit ProPublica investigative news site is a clear success, garnering prizes, circulation, and influence. This morning I read, while straying far from ksjtracker’s approved purview, a convincing and lively analysis of the public’s distrust of major banks and other operations that,in my words and not the article’s,  so much more  resemble gambling dens than investment houses. It started on the NYTimes’s biz section page 1. Only after reaching to the end did I realize it was from ProPublica and its newly Pulitzer-toting reporter Jesse Eisinger.

Which led to a check of ProPublica’s own site for anything that fits the tracker’s commissioning writ. First, one little one popped up, purely political but also sort of on science – a handy video clip of Texas Gov. Rick Perry explaining one reason he’s skeptical that human activity is changing climate. It’s the scientists who concoct phony data so their projects will continue to get gov’t grants. Wotta genius. The would-be President hedges by saying that only some  of them do that. What?! So (even if you accept that a substantial few are liars) the remaining honest majority of researchers including National Academy members who see global warming with human fingerprints on it, with data they DON’T fudge , can be dismissed too? This from a guy in the running to make the tough calls for us?

Moving on, it is the service’s continuing and diligent look at natural gas drilling, particularly at hydraulic fracturing or fracking of tight, deep formations such as shale, that well represents the few science and energy-related topics in which ProPublica is heavily invested. (Another is its deep look at the case against alleged anthrax terrorist, the late Dr. Bruce Ivins.)  Specifically, two fracking stories’ headlines merit examination. One stands up very well. The other has a questionable structure.

• Nicholas Kusnetz (Oct. 6) : Doctors Ask New York to Study Health Impacts Before Allowing Fracking ; This is good news reporting. The underlying theme of this crisp, modest-sized article is that public health authorities find it worrying that health effects of fracking, particularly on residents near drill operations, are not known. The news is in the headline and gets expansion in the text, with description of programs to get good epidemiological data and on calls for more such efforts.
• Abrahm Lustgarten, Nicholas Kusnetz (Sept 16): Science Lags as Health Problems Emerge Near Gas Fields ;  Running three weeks before the first story, this is the investigative story that makes the newsier piece pertinent, and shows ProPublica to be ahead of the game. The hed looks true. Science (particularly public health info) usually lags behind a new industry or technology’s fast growth. And how could health problems not emerge near gas fields? They emerge everywhere there are people. Gas fields provide no immunity.

The two headlines emphasize one of the things that ProPublica’s series apparently and justly aims to demonstrate. The public is entitled to vigorous monitoring of this new industry, by regulators or by health investigations funded by government, to learn what the downside is to all those jobs and the hope for a more secure, domestic supply of energy we can afford. Personally, I find any celebration of an expansion of fossil fuel use to be stupid, which is spelt sto-o-o-o-o-PID!, and Governor Perry’s remark above provides one example why it needs to be pronounced that way. But never mind – if there are health problems too we need to know what they are.

So put these together. 1) These two pieces’ ostensible theme is that we cannot say scientifically, which means data-plus-logic which means any opinion is for now just a hunch, whether fracking makes people sick at a rate high enough or severe enough to force major change on the industry. 2) The very first paragraph of that investigative story, the one saying science lags but that health problems do occur near gas fields, is the following:

On a summer evening in June 2005, Susan Wallace-Babb went out into a neighbor’s field near her ranch in Western Colorado to close an irrigation ditch. She parked down the rutted double-track, stepped out of her truck into the low-slung sun, took a deep breath and collapsed, unconscious.

Good gripping writing for sure. Near the spot was, presumably still is, a natural gas well and some storage tanks. Dunno if there was fracking, but we are led to think so. Now this woman, who surely demonstrates a health problem emerging near fracking or something like it, wears an oxygen mask a lot of the time. This vignette is the most dramatic in the whole story. Her symptoms, one learns, are far more serious than one fainting spell.

It is common practice in investigative journalism to grab readers with a dramatic example why the topic, whatever it is, is one of consequence. It says here further that this one set of symptoms mirrors those of others near fracking “and other processes used to drill wells” in communities across the country. So one suspects this case was not even relatable to fracking per se. More important, one ought not tilt readers’ sentiment severely with such example as this without persuasive, solid evidence that it represents a broad truth. If the story’s declared theme is that nobody is in position to conclude with high confidence what the truth is and that’s why the feds or somebody ought to get some experts cracking to find out what it is, such doubt needs to be implicit at the top. One should not say, in effect, something horrible is happening and then turn around and qualify it by saying nobody knows what is happening.

To be sure, this vignette is probably true. The woman and others are sick, and they honestly name gas wells as their favorite explanation. But there’s another episode deeper in the story. An industry mouthpiece says, from a similar case, that research proved that foul water near a gas well got somebody else sick. But that, unfortunately for any  lawsuit’s prospects, it also became clear that the water was bad long before anybody went after gas in underlying rock. If this story led with a sampling like that some would suspect it to be a whitewash puff piece unduly favorable to industry.

Lesson: If the facts support only suspicion of a serious problem, and the reason for reporting such suspicions is to get experts looking into them, don’t numb readers’ thinking by starting them off with the scariest episode possible. Get more clever than that – write it so that it is crystal clear that cause and effect are unknown. Public fears are fodder for news. But don’t fan them before marshalling a lot of evidence to justify it. This story does not have that evidence.

It is not easy to turn away from sensational ledes that please editors and produce stories on the day’s most-emailed list. And all in all, this service’s and these reporters’ output is serving the public well, living up to the name ProPublica. But sometimes, a reporter’s gotta step back and find another entry than the easy one.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to spanish lang post) El Hierro is the smallest and more remote of Spain’s Canary Islands. Last Monday an underwater volcanic eruption took place only 1.5-2.5 miles off its southwest coast. There was a second eruption, 600 people were evacuated, and two large green stains appeared on the surface of the sea. Since Tuesday volcanologists have been trying to evaluate the situation and make predictions. It seems that fisheries, ecosystem, tourism, and life of locals won’t be significantly affected. Things are much more calm now, but there is still uncertainty about the possibility of new eruptions, which could happen closer to the coast. Scientific reporters are doing a great job being very close to experts, preparing infographics, and looking for different angles to cover the story.

El Hierro es una pequeña isla de origen volcánico en el sur del archipiélago de las islas canarias. Alberga 11000 habitantes, es la que tiene mayor espacio protegido, y desde el pasado lunes está presente en todos los noticiarios debido a la erupción de un volcán submarino a 900 metros de profundidad y escasos 3 km de su costa. Tras la incertidumbre inicial, especulaciones, desalojo de pueblos del litoral (La Restinga), aparición de manchas de 11 km de restos de magma en superficie (ver linea verdosa dentro de círculo), pronósticos sobre consecuencias en el ecosistema marino, y llegada de investigadores, la situación parece que se ha estabilizado. Aunque el magma sigue fluyendo y podría haber más erupciones en diferentes focos. Las informaciones se han estado actualizando varias veces al día, pero por lo que aquí en este espacio respecta, debemos decir que la presencia de científicos y valoraciones científicas en los medios de comunicación ha sido remarcadamente notable. En todas las secciones de ciencia –y que ahora comentaremos- se ha estado siguiendo la noticia. Pero además la búsqueda de expertos para valorar la situación ha estado muy presente en la información más generalista. Más allá del seguimiento de los hechos, algunas de las notas más destacadas de los reporteros de ciencia son:

El País – Bernardo Marín informa hoy que las manchas se están acercando a una zona única de gran biodiversidad, pero que no hay motivos de alarma según los científicos. La mancha es calificada como “anécdota” por uno de ellos. Bernardo ha sido muy prolífico con buenas historias de carácter más social (1) (2), un artículo general el martes, y extensa nota en edición impresa sobre el temor a erupciones mayores (B. Marin). Su compañero Rafael Méndez ha ofrecido el aspecto más crítico al quejarse de que no había ningún barco en la zona, a pesar de los indicios claros ya desde hace tres meses de que habría erupciones. Y que paradójicamente las Islas Canarias son oficialmente zona libre de seísmos (R. Méndez), y no hay obligaciones específicas en materia de construcción. Según estudios anteriores que ha recopilado Rafael el riesgo en las canarias está infravalorado. Destacar también el detallado gráfico explicativo de Heber Longás en El País.

Público – Desde El Hierro Juanjo Martín transmitía el martes los temores e incertidumbres que envolvían a la situación. Nota con gran número de fuentes. El propio J. Martín confirmaba el martes dos erupciones y empezaba a mostrar metodología en manos de científicos. Y hoy, según datos científicos que dice haber obtenido Público, J Martín informa que son de esperar nuevas erupciones. Las concentraciones anómalas de gases en agua serían el indicador.

ABC- La enviada especial M. A. Montero nos cuenta que “No descartan una erupción en el interior de El Hierro”. Plantea tres posibilidades sobre evolución de la fisura: ir al sur, acercarse a la costa, o incluso penetrar en la isla. El científico consultado muestra incertidumbre en muchos otros aspectos . Desde Madrid,  Judith de Jorge preparó el martes “Un nuevo volcán se forma en El Hierro”, donde un investigador quita hierro al asunto diciendo que sólo se percibirá un inofensivo burbujeo y que la explosión es una buena noticia porque podría aligerar la tensión sísmica y reducir los temblores de tierra.  J. de Jorge también publica hoy “Supererupciones volcánicas, ¿qué las provoca?”; sobre un estudio no relacionado con la erupción de El Hierro, pero que da una posible explicación de la aparición puntual de descomunales erupciones en base a estructura de la cámara que contiene el magma. Bien aprovechada la ocasión para sacar una información que en otro momento no habría sido de ningún interés.

El Mundo ha tirado bastante de notas de agencias. En una de ellas dice que la erupción no afectará a la vida marina, pero el titular que pone en la portada de la sección de ciencia es un sorprendente “la erupción fertilizará el agua del mar”. Desde El Hierro, Michel Martin establece que la cosa está fea, a pesar de la incertidumbre. Intentaremos actualizar este post si aparecen historias con ángulos originales.

- Pere Estupinyà

One must marvel, while gritting teeth over the klepto-jupilee it represents, at the thoroughness with which a Huffington Post posting by an anonymous and industrious rip-and-read artist revels in its elaborately honest sourcing. This comes in the service of relaying news from NASA on the asteroid Vesta. Every sentence or two has a pale blue stretch of hypertext that takes readers to a press release, a website, a story from another and usually more legitimate news agency (AP, Space.com, Sky and Telescope..). The images are varied and terrific. The basic news is plainly put. The effort is rightly transparent in its origin. But..yechhh.

In many mattters and on many beats, the HP delivers news from a distinct perspective, bloggy but at least providing the voice of somebody who may know something about the topic and may even have done more than troll for information upturned by outsiders. That is, reported something that took more initiative than to put a search term in a Bing, Google, or other engine. But did HP pay for a jot of the information gathered for it by outside reporters beyond the wage for whoever taped together? It has an excerpt from AP. Is it an AP client? I dunno. The aggregater horse has been out of the barn and running around the digital pastures of journalism a long time, but this one just got to me. It’s polished, it is honest (all those links to sources), and it is empty of journalistic substance.

And yes I recognize the irony of whacking HuffPost for providing a link-circus to stories from legit news agencies, because that is exactly what we do here at ksjtracker. Critic’s license? And those who follow the links do click into somebody else’s ad spaces and thus maybe enhance revenue for some of the people who displayed initiative and persistence in getting the news. And ever since the first newspapers, probably since the first clay tablets, there have been writers who put their own names on rewrites of other people’s work. But should not such a stunning on line success as the Huffington Post enlist more talents with their own set of voices,  even some reporting initiative, for such things as this dispatch on a minor world -  rather than to mash-up a stew of scrapings off the web? Scavengers – beetles and buzzards and hagfish and slime molds – play a vital role in both made and natural ecosystems. But that doesn’t mean we have to respect those that choose that lifestyle.

Whew, and apologies to those reporters at HuffPost who work hard for their credit lines (and to their editors), this started off to be a round up of reports off a press conference yesterday regarding the latest from the Dawn spacecraft in orbit of Vesta. The highlight is exactly that – closeup imagery of a polar mountain thrice the height of Everest.

Other stories:

• Space.com : Giant Asteroid Mountain Taller Than Mt. Everest Photographed ;
  
• Universe Today – Ken Kremer: Amazing New View of the Mt. Everest of Vesta ; A lovely, short piece. ‘Like the hed’s quasi-alliteration, says one who’s a sucker for such wordsmithery. Also like the use of the adjective “Vestan” for the landslides. One further gets here a fine tagline – in a year the emissary from Earth will “fire up its revolutionary ion propulsion system to depart for Ceres, the largest asteroid in the main belt…” We thus get an adios with narrative drive.
  
• Nature.com (Oct 4)  Ron Cowen: Dawn mission revealing secrets of the early Solar System : This was filed last week from the meeting in France where the news officially was released yesterday. Pride of place to a guy there to report it on his own, prompt schedule. This week’s mountain news had its punch somewhat stolen by a dribble of roughly similar news last week from several outlets.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Asteroid Has Mountain 3 Times Bigger than Everest ; Shorty.
• Daily Mail (Oct. 11) Rob Waugh: Stunning 3D view of 13-mile-high mountain on asteroid – surrounded by landslide debris ; Not bad, if a little hyperbolic (unsure if this image has a 3-D version, or just looks like it due to perspective, and the landslides appear seen only from one side. So how to know if they surround?). The usual Mail collection of diverse and sharp illustration, and a cool embedded video.
• Daily Mail (Oct 5) : Monster asteroid has a mountain taller than Mount Everest;  A rewrite, but also posted last week before the official delivery of the news.
• Sky and Telescope (Oct 5) Shweta Krishnan: First Science Results from Dawn ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) On Monday we read in El Pais (Spain) that Doctors Without Borders announced  that they are forced to stop diagnosing Chagas disease in Paraguay and to suspend new projects in endemic areas in Bolivia. The reason is shortage of the drug Benznidazole, produced in Brazil. The shortage would leave thousands of Chagas patients without treatment. We immediately checked Bolivian and Paraguayan press. Initially there were no stories in Bolivia, and only general ones from wires in Paraguay. Fortunately, today we’ve found new stories with local information and sources. One in Bolivia’s La Razon puts specific numbers: the prospects are that from now to February there will be treatment available for only 1800 of the 4500 people infected. Bolivia’s  government is already asking Brazilian colleagues to push the pharma company Lafete, which argues that the supplier Nortech is not sending enough active ingredient to prepare the drug.

El lunes este tracker leyó en El País (España) la nota de Emilio de Benito “Se acaba el tratamiento para el mal de Chagas” explicando que según un comunicado de la organización Médicos Sin Fronteras “Miles de personas se quedarán sin tratamiento de la enfermedad de Chagas en los próximos meses”, debido a la falta de fabricación del medicamento utilizado para su tratamiento: el benznidazol. En concreto, la organización aseguraba que en Paraguay se han visto obligados a parar programas de diagnóstico porque no tenían con qué tratarlos, y en Bolivia detendrán programas de tratamiento en zonas endémicas. Esto es grave. El chagas es una enfermedad grave, en ocasiones mortal, que se puede curar si el tratamiento se administra al poco de producirse la infección.

Las razones de este corte en la producción son que el único laboratorio que produce el medicamento benznidazol (el brasileño Lafete) dice que no le llega suficiente principio activo de otro laboratorio 8el chino nortech). Evidentemente ya han empezado las presiones institucionales para que la situación se solvente cuanto antes.

Al leer la nota en El País, el tracker buscó en seguida en los medios paraguayos y bolivianos. Sorpresa relativa: la información no aparecía por ningún lado en Bolivia, y sólo alguna nota de agencias en Paraguay. Se contuvo de escribir una nota crítica, y bien que hizo. Quizás un poco tarde, pero ya han aparecido buenas notas en los medios latinoamericanos.

La mejor de todas en La Razón (Bolivia) donde Wilma Pérez “Se suspende fabricación de fármaco contra chagas, en Bolivia hay alerta” da más detalles sobre la situación en su país: de aquí a febrero sólo se podrán tratar 1800 de las 4500 personas infectadas que están recibiendo tratamiento gratuito. MSF responsabiliza a la brasileña Lafete, y el gobierno está contemplando conseguir otro fármaco alternativo. Buena e informativa nota de Wilma, que cuenta además con una infografía (arriba)

En Paraguay encontramos notas genéricas con información de agencias en ABC Color “Enfermos de Chagas se quedan sin tratamiento por escasez de medicamento” y ABC Color “Cancelan proyecto de Chagas por la falta de fármaco”. Con un poco de más detalle La Nación “Falta de medicamento para Chagas afectará a más de 150 mil paraguayos”, y la nota de Última Hora “Enfermos de Chagas ya no tendrán tratamientos”. Justo ayer apareció un buen artículo de opinión en ABC Color de Lorena Peralta “La manzanita y el benznidazol”, ironizando con los desequilibrios que existen en este mundo en que combinamos tan bien opulencia con miseria, y cuya selección de lo que es noticia resulta tan peculiar. Por otra parte, buscamos reacciones en la prensa brasileña, peor no encontramos.

- Pere Estupinyà

Photo: Bill Bottke

This was last week, but nobody else much did the story. At Nature‘s newsblog, space reporter Ron Cowen moved beyond a dry account of a new ‘theory’ (I’d say hypothesis is all it is, for now) on how our solar system and perhaps most such systems formed. He keyed it on the speaker’s witty anticipation and defusing of scorn for his idea and its distance from standard models’ assumptions.

The meeting was in Nantes, France, and Cowen managed to get himself there for it (an achievement in itself). I doubt many there know what an old-fashioned baseball catcher’s mask is. And anyway, baseball catchers these days often wear hockey-mask style face protectors. But its purpose is plain. By recognizing the speaker’s own humor as the way to catch the mood, Cowen got himself a free pass to go on to limn the potentially offending model for planetary formation while keeping its speculative nature topmost. Cowen, it further appears, went to some lengths to get pics of the presenter in his get-up.

This coverage might be called a process story, a glimpse of scientific method and messiness. It broadly fits in the same niche as did yesterday’s batch of stories tracked here. Those were on the so-called kraken that one fellow believes was grabbing and dining upon ichthyosaurs back in the Triassic – then lining their circular spine bones up to resemble its own suckered tentacles. Far out. Great conversation starter. A bit tangential to confirmed science. It is a door to its discussion but not to be taken as, uh, new truth. Not yet or even close to a prime time theory. How to write usefully about a scientific conclusion that most or many think is wrong always presents a challenge and, sometimes, opportunity.

Back to planetary musings. One does offer a question about this pea-shooter vision of their formation, migration through the accretion disk, evolution and so on. Does the researcher have easy explanation for hot jupiters – those commonly-discovered gas giants that seem to have migrated in close to their stars from colder, gassier realms nearer the outskirts of their stars’ systems? Did they make a round trip? What kind of orbital dynamics would impel a growing planet outward from its natal womb for a few million years, and then draw it back even closer? I’m sure there’s an answer. Maybe a good one. Just wonder what it is.

- Charlie Petit

This is, as doctor-writer Ford Vox reports for The Atlantic, a weird one. Vox looked into and reviewed a wave of outrage in organized medicine. It came after news outlets in Florida reported that one of their tribe had seen his license suspended for violating a state statute requiring all cases of suspected sexual activity by children under age 16 to be reported to authorities. The physician, it said, had provided care to a pregnant 12-year-old and discussed it only with the girl’s family. Physicians on a national web discussion board erupted at the idea that a doctor’s license may hinge on reporting all cases of sex, including consensual sex among minors, as a case of regulatory overkill that would torpedo the trust that young patients must have in their physicians.

What he found was in one small detail different from the news accounts. And he learned of the difference by straightforward route – he contacted the news team that broke the story. They said they’d made an error of omission in their initial report. Read Vox’s account, it’s not a long piece. So, no need here to summarize it all and thus drain the drama from Vox’s tale

But there are two conclusions here. One, the obvious, is that all news stories but especially ones on topics as delicate as sex and minors must be read and reread to remove as many errors and misleading omissions as possible. They can matter. Second, as Vox also ponders in a communication with ksjtracker, it would be worth deeper investigation to learn what if anything the harsh penalty on the physician had to do with another large issue with huge political impact. He provides abortions.

- Charlie Petit