At first glance, there is little apparent reason that a paean to a medical center administrator – one that shouts “puff piece” from the get-go – should lead today’s NYT science section. And not all that misgiving evaporates before the last graf. But Denise Grady‘s profile of the chancellor of the UC San Francisco Medical Center, who was a practicing physician before she jumped into cancer drug invetnion at Genentech, is mesmerizing. Mostly becuase, sort of like the life bios of the late Steve Jobs left me and probably you exhausted, it is bracing just to imagine so much energy, imagination, and force of will all in one person. Except, it appears, that this lady is a lot easier to get along with than was the driven, demanding Mr. Jobs.

Maybe it’s because I once covered that medical center, 20+ years ago, and even then thought it was very near the top of the heap and didn’t have to feel second-class in the company of the Mayo Clinic, that the underlying thesis that UCSF is not already a shining facility seems odd. More important is the profile and the vision it offers of the future of medical education in general that will keep most readers all the way through to the end.

Before listing a few other Scitimes stories to look at, one tangent. In other sections are two Japan nuke stories by one reporter:

• Hiroko Tabuchi: In Japan, a Long-Term Study on Radiation Leaks’ Effects ; A solid main news section account of the correct move in Japan to collect long term epidemiological data on youngsters from around Fukushima. One would however like to have seen reference (perhaps NYT has reported this before) to any similar study of the workers who risked a great deal to be on site in the first several weeks after the mass meltdowns.
• Hiroko Tabuchi (Biz section) Japan Courts the Money in Reactors ; Another solid piece on the marketing of Japan’s nuclear technology to other nations, and explicitly on its irony in the wake of Fukishima. Eyebrows may go up at this line, however: “While Fukishima Daiichi could not withstand the magnitude 9 quake and the tsunami that revaged much of Japan’s northest cost in March...” . That’s arguable whether the quake alone would have done much more than force a shutdown, with little public hazard. I recently heard a comprehensive review of the plant’s catastrophic systemic failure. It places essentially all the blame for its abysmal performance on failure by its builders and by government overseers to heed the clear geological evidence that the region periodically sees immense tsunamis – more than twice the height of the berm. See the video of a  talk by Berkeley Nat’l Lab veteran nuke safety analyst Robert Budnitz. It goes through it woeful by woeful moment. Earthquakes can be bad for reactors. But writers should be careful not to lump the quake’s seismic waves, and the later sea wave as equal, proximate causes for Fukushima. Nearly ALL the tragedy from the earthquake was not from the shaking, but the resulting wedge of ocean that plowed relentlessly onshore. Japan is pretty ready for earthquakes. But it didn’t think the problem all the way through.

Other Science Times headlines of note:

• John Markoff: Government Aims to Build a ‘Date Eye in the Sky’ ; Fuel for paranoia here – the kind that might mean somebody really is watching you. Markoff joins media interest recently in the info buried in the masses of data reflected in crowd info, whether from wiretaps or the topics on Twitter or the entries in search engines, and more. All that’s left out is surveillance cameras – but we have TV’s new and interesting program, Person of Interest, to (fictionally) fill that hole.
• 2 stories on one issue, Gardiner Harris: Outside Panel Backs Prostate Test Advisory ; and Tara Parker-Pope: Prostate Test Finding Leaves a Swirl of Confusion ;
• David Tuller: Questions on Tactic to Prevent H.I.V. ; Fine look, with no answers but that would be too much to expect, at spreading interest in use of costly and somewhat scarce anti-retroviral drugs as an anti-HIV prophylactic for healthy people, mostly men.
• Felicity Barringer: Ban Hybrids From the Fast Lane, and Everyone Slows Down ; Or, the law of unexpected consequences kicks in again.

As usual lots more. Whole Section;

- Charlie Petit

The kraken that demolished a sailing ship in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest was bigger, but the one in the news today is a pretty tall tale too. Krakens don’t all you forever-adolescent monster fans know, is a mythological beast, more squid than octopus but it’s a myth so it’s your pick. It was huge. Old woodcuts show ships foundering in their arms. Then along came a paleontologist from  Mount Holyoke College to tell a meeting of the Geological Society of America that by a long tentacle of inference he thinks a 100-foot long beast of krakenish appearance once broke ichthyosaurs’ necks and ate them, back in the Triassic. The evidence lies in Davey Jones’s locker – lined up vertebral disks, in regular patterns and rearranged from their natural sequence in a living creature. Today’s are in Nevada, stranded by geological uplift of a vanished sea.  They are strange – who’s to say they cannot be a deliberate mimicking of the suckers on its arms by a colossal cephalopod at the entry to its abyssal lair? A self-portrait, if you will. Octopi are darned smart for a spineless creature, squid maybe too, and a big one might have done this.

    Hmppphhhhtt. Sure. It’s possible. But possible means maybe and maybe usually means probably not in my book just because the cosmos has more maybes than realities. One does not pass up a story like this easily. But, one ought to call around just to be sure there aren’t other experts giggling at the notion. A few did. The story, if one has to write it, ought to be the persistently deep mystery of this one fossil bed, as illustrated by the lengths to which some (one) expert went to make sense of them. This is a stab in the dark.

Still, hard not to get on board with the imagery this fabulation inspires.

STORIES:

• LiveScience – Jeanna Bryner: Lair of Ancient ‘Kraken’ Sea Monster Possibly Discovered ; The story does say that the hypothesis needs more evidence to be persuasive. But has nobody but the prime source to provide detail.
• Daily Mail (UK) Leon Watson: Could this be the lair of the Karken? Scientist claims existence of mythical 100ft sea monster that ate the ocean’s biggest predators for breakfast ; Self-contradictory hed, since if kraken’s were real they made their breakfast snacks, at most, second biggest predators in the sea. He does have a skeptic, but made no phone or email call – picked it up from the next item down.
• Wired /Laelaps Blog – Brian Switek: The Giant, Prehistoric Squid That Ate Common Sense ; Switek is a paleontology expert, and critic. For this post he links to some of the first press, and the official abstract to the talk. Direct evidence for the thesis is, he writes, in one word: nothing.
• Houston Chronicle – Eric Berger : Scientist says he’s found evidence for an ancient kraken ; Short piece. But he does link to a fairly well-known video of a large octopus in an aquarium taking out a fairly big shark.
• Discovery News – Sarah Simpson: Smokin’ Kraken?: A blog post, nicely done. Key investigative paragraph quoted in its entirety to reflect its every nuance: “Really? C’mon.”
• Washington Post (blog) Elizabeth Flock: ‘Kraken’ sea monster’s lair possibly disovered ;
• Pharyngula (blog) PZ Meyers: Traces of a Triassic Kraken? ; Meyers confesses to initial eagerness at this news, then “reality sinks in” and “the evidence is pathetic.” And, he finds another instance of the same paleontologist making assertions that, uh, push the envelope of science.

*UPDATES:

• NatureNews – Sid Perkins: Kraken versus ichthyosaur: let battle commence ; The mood is set right off the top. Perkins writes that the report “has blurred the lines between science and science fiction.” Which is exactly right – at one time (before magic became a core feature of a lot of sci-fi) the idea was to embed a fictional plot in a matrix of known science. Still fiction, and maybe the warp drives were fantasy, but the old time “hard” science fiction stories were not dependent on ESP, unicorns, or wizards. This is a (and another) good job by Sid – the stress being on the mystery of those aligned spinal disks and the lengths, perhaps desperate lengths, some go to stitch up a narrative that fits. After infusing skepticism in the piece, Perkins wraps it up with a few quotes from outsiders. Skeptics too, they are. How about aliens? That’s consistent with the evidence, too.

Grist for the Mill: GSA Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Storing stem cells from teeth for future regenerative treatments? La Nación (Costa Rica) has one of the best science-health-technology-environment daily section in Latin America. We’ve tracked many great local stories from its solid team of science reporters. It should inspire other media  in the region. But yesterday they did a mistake that we think it’s useful to comment here in the tracker: they published an article explaining that some Costa Rican families are already paying a US company to store the baby teeth of their children in order to have stem cells for future treatments. The story only quotes the director of the company, and it gives credit to the company’s unrealistic promises. In an insignificant last paragraph a local scientist expresses the classical yet empty caveat, “more research is needed”. We know that baby teeth contain stem cells, but we also know from independent experts that the possibility of using this kind of cells in the future is negligible. The angle of the story shouldn’t have been to describe a possible new medical application, but also to Costa Ricans not to fully trust a company created to make money off parents’ worries.

El suplemento diario “Aldea Global” de La Nación (Costa Rica) es uno de los mejores espacios de información científica, de salud, medioambiental y tecnológica de América Latina. Muchas veces hemos comentado las excelentes notas de Alejandra, Debbie, Irene, Pablo o Michelle; reporteros especializados con una clara vocación de cubrir la ciencia local además de la internacional. Lo consideramos una verdadera referencia de trabajo bien hecho para otros medios de la región. Pero en esta ocasión les han colado un gol. El artículo de Irene Rodríguez “Ticos guardan dientes para aprovechar células madre” explica que ya hay familias costarricenses pagando entre $700 y $1600 (más $100 al año) a una empresa privada estadounidense para que guarde los dientes de leche de sus hijos por si en el futuro se pueden extraer células madre y aplicarlas a la regeneración de tejido óseo y otras enfermedades.

Eso es lo que anuncia la empresa, pero en realidad es una manera infundada científicamente de ganar dinero jugando con la esperanza de las personas. El artículo de Irene no debería haber enfocado el tema como una nueva esperanza médica, sino como una alerta de fraude a la población costarricense.

Cierto que existen estudios científicos demostrando que se pueden obtener células madre de los dientes de leche y muelas cordales. Pero que estas puedan ser viables y eficientes para terapias varias décadas más tarde está mucho más que en entredicho. Evidentemente, si sólo entrevistas al director de la clínica claro que te va a vender sus posibilidades. Incluso con gran caradura te puede decir que son “un seguro de vida”. Pero tú sabes que no hay evidencias suficientes que lo apoyen, y que las opiniones de los de expertos independientes y serios son totalmente contrarias. Has leído otros artículos sobre el tema (NYT por poner un ejemplo), y sabes que se trata de una de esas clínicas estadounidenses que con ética dispersa han visto en los bancos de células madre un negocio muy rentable.

Lo sabes. O al menos lo intuyes. O como mínimo lo sospechas. Y no debes menospreciar esta sensación. Cuando intentas confirmar la versión de la empresa, te topas con el consenso científico de que esas células madre guardadas en “un líquido especial” no van a servir a nadie. Si decides escribir el artículo, no puedes darles coba y fomentar que otras personas caigan en la trampa. Y no sirve de nada el escueto párrafo final donde una investigadora demasiado cautelosa no se atreve a criticar abiertamente la técnica, y se limita a decir el topicazo de “faltan todavía muchas investigaciones”. Posiblemente esa académica no estaba suficientemente informada, o por los motivos que sea no quería dejar mal a la empresa. Porque de otra manera no hubiera desprendido un mensaje tan vago.

Pero es que… ¿Cómo se nos ocurre fiarnos a ciegas de lo que diga una empresa? ¿sabéis que hay otra clínica que guarda sangre de la menstruación porque dice que en ese “milagro mensual” también hay células madre? Qué gran avance, no? Sí; somos desconfiados, escépticos y críticos. Es nuestra labor serlo. También con la ciencia.

El razonamiento que te dará el director de la empresa “en el futuro pueden ser útiles; es como un seguro” es el mismo detrás de los bancos de sangre de cordón umbilical. Controvertidos también. Cuando como periodista tienes la oportunidad de hablar con reconocidos investigadores en células madre, siempre te confiesan sus enormes dudas. Tampoco parece que merezcan la pena. Lo que ocurre es que en el caso de la sangre del cordón por lo menos podría existir la remota posibilidad de poderse aplicar pocos años después para enfermedades sanguíneas graves que podrían aparecer en edades tempranas. Pero… ¿células madre de diente por si 40 o 50 años más adelante se pueden utilizar para tu maltrecha rodilla? Anda ya! No compensa en absoluto. Y que no nos cuenten monsergas con la diabetes 1, porque no hay garantía alguna de que eso pueda funcionar. La empresa estadounidense a la que La Nación da publicidad está construida bajo planteamientos económicos no científicos. No podemos hablar de ella sin un espíritu crítico. Sería bueno que La Nación corrigiera su nota.

- Pere Estupinyà

Last week a little dollop of news, led by the New York Times and its veteran science writer and analyst Cornelia Dean, revealed a high-level nod of approval for a major US initiative on geoengineering. The Bipartisan Policy Center, founded by a handful of senators of various political stripe and which apparently tries to really be bipartisan, issued a report Tuesday. Not that it calls for any specific tactic, whether painting the increasingly iceless arctic white or mounting CO2 scrubbers on everybody’s garage or (more seriously) pumping the stratosphere full of sulfate aerosols. But it does say the topic needs sustained, frontline research and perhaps prototype testing through a well-coordinated national program. Dean handles it straight up. She provides readers with sufficient history on this line of thinking and sketches the misgivings that have kept it near the periphery. One (me anyway) expects that deployment of planetary measures to offset greenhouse gases’ physics would be among the most contentious deliberate moves in the history of technology with reaction dwarfing the likes of anti-nuclear protests. She doesn’t get into that.

   Tip of the hat to Physics Today and its media analyst Steven Corneliussen who last week put out a prompt analysis of the initial coverage of this news. That is the first place your tracker saw mention of it, this morning. (I largely ignored the world over the US Columbus Day holiday and spent Thur-Fri in Chevy Chase – for a media panel on evolutionary fact and theory for a lot of bright high school students – at the lush, plush, and impressive Howard Hughes Med. Inst. campus.)

Some other media also perked up at the news. At one time  I’d wager (do I hear the tune of an old and tired song?) that one or two dozen major metropolitan newspapers and their once-bountiful sci-enviro beat writers would have made this move a part of the national conversation’s savvier wing. Now, a few websites and specialty pubs, a sprinkling of major outlets, some blogs, that’s about it.

The general public eventually will be hearing more on the topic. Policy decision makers, from right to left, will already be pondering it.  This seems to be a significant step into the main ring for would-be planet hackers. Legal ramifications could be immense. It’s hard to sue the entire world’s petro-coal industry if the Colorado River goes dry. But not so hard to dun the specific agency that jiggers the jetstream and kills a year’s corn and wheat harvests in the Great Plains.

One question. How bipartisan is this report? Go down to Grist and look at the report and its up-front list of panel members. Looks to be topnotch. Not to be a trouble-maker, but I gotta note that a significant slice of Congress with a distinct view of which notch is tops believes that such places as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Heartland Institute are where sound science is to be found. To scan the members but without checking the cv’s closely, there is nobody who jumps out as even remotely representing the contrarian and libertarian wings of climate discussion.

Other stories:

• ScienceNOW (AAAS/Science) Daniel Strain: New Report Urges U.S. to Fund Research on Geoengineering ;
• Wash. Post (blog) Brad Plumer: So you want to manipulate the Earth’s climate …; It’s a blog, so you can write like this and still be useful: “Geoengineering has always been the wacky, mad-scientist climate scheme no one wants to discuss.” True enough except for the hyperbolic  “no one.” And that’s the lede. Plumer spends 5½ grafs defining the terms of the issue before getting to the meat of the new report.
• Miller-McCune – Michael Todd: Bipartisan Group Wants U.S. to Get Serious About Geoengineering ; Notes prominently that geoengineering is what’s done on purpose to alter the habitability of Earth for us and our fellow biospherians. We’ve been fiddling with climate since hunter gatherers burned off vegetation, and really got going after the first plow turned its first clod. He also notes prominently that the term geoengineering is so controversial that the report urging accelerated study of it does not even use the term. That leaves, one supposes, planet hacking (a term boosted by Eli Kintisch‘s recent book). Lots of this web posting leans heavily, with attribution, on the NYT story.
• Nature Newsblog – Jeff Tollefson: Panel recommends US geoengineering research program ;

Grist for the Mill:

BiPartisan Policy Center Task Force On Climate Remediation Research report ; Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

A field cricket of the species studied

It’s been a while since the Tracker did an animal story, so the threshold is low.

When pairs of crickets are threatened by an approaching predator or other scare, they run to their burrows. But when they get to the entrance, a Spanish researcher working in England has found, the male waits for the female to go in first. Then he follows, if he isn’t eaten first. The research, based on observations in the wild, were published in Current Biology.

It’s good, old sociobiology. The researcher concludes that while the behavior may seem chivalrous, he suspects it improves the male’s chances of mating with the female–if he doesn’t get killed by waiting. It may also mean that he is protecting a female with whom he has mated and who is carrying eggs with his genes. Even if he does die in the process, his genes are safe.

Gunnar De Winter has an excellent account, complete with data and graphs in Science 2.0. That site, which is intended as an open publishing vehicle for the scientific community, lists 54 “featured writers” as its contributors.

At MSNBC.com Charles Choi explains that the findings are based on analysis of some 200,000 hours of infrared video footage of marked crickets recorded at night, when the insects are out.

At Discover magazine’s Web site, Ed Yong writes the story in his ”Not Exactly Rocket Science” column.

The Reuters take, with no byline, as published in the Montreal Gazette.

-Boyce Rensberger

Click the image for enlargement showing the third and fourth (just barely visible) rainbows close to the sun.

We’ve all seen primary rainbows. Some may have seen the secondary rainbow, which is usually a fainter arc a little ways outside the primary.

Turns out there can be two more rainbows, but not near the first two. To find them, you have to turn your head about 40 degrees toward the direction the sunlight is coming from. But don’t expect to see them. According to Loren Grush at Foxnews.com (yes, Fox, but this ain’t politics), there are only five recorded reports of tertiary rainbows in the last 250 years. Quadruple, or quaternary, rainbows are even more rare, but a German storm chaser has captured an image of it, above. Yes, it’s hard to see the fourth bow here, but if you click on the image, you should get a blow-up in which it is more obvious. The first two rainbows are out of the picture.  (Yes, we believe they were there.)

Sightings may become more common because meteorologists have just recently developed a technique, which anyone can use, to find the extra spectra. Grush explains the method in her story.

Attention to the phenomenon has been generated by a new report in the journal Applied Optics, which explains that the third and fourth rainbows show up only in just the right combination of lighting conditions and rain droplet sizes. And, as one might expect, the photographed image must be digitally enhanced to bring up the colors.

Perhaps the best account is Alan Boyle‘s at MSNBC.com, which has nice, big versions of the images. Boyle also has more on the photographic details, which figures since his story appears in the Web site’s Photoblog department.

Other stories:

Jason Palmer at BBC News, who is more up-front about the digital enhancement.

Jeff Hecht has more on the details of the image processing at New Scientist.

Photonics Online, a journal we don’t often check, has a good account, unbylined.

-Boyce Rensberger

The original Hubble image at left and the processed version at right, showing three planets

Paleontologists do this a lot: They look in dusty museum cabinets and drawers and find species that went unnoticed by naturalists of old. Now astronomers are doing their version: Re-analyzing old Hubble Space Telescope images to look for planets outside our solar system, so-called exoplanets. The trick is new software that “cleans up” old images, removing star-glare, flare and other digital noise.

So far, few mainstream publications have picked this up. It’s a process-of-science story of the kind that doesn’t wow non-science editors. Alan Boyle, MSNBC‘s crack cosmology writer, reports that so-far the new methods have simply been proven by finding exoplanets that were known from other studies. Having worked well, the new software is soon to be applied to other Hubble images to find unknown exoplanets.

The catalog of exoplanets, already approaching 500 entries, is likely to boom.

Ian O’Neill has a detailed look at the process of this science at DiscoveryNews.com.

-Boyce Rensberger

(English intro to Spanish lang post) This week Panama held the international preparatory meeting to the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Compared to last year’s meeting in Tianjin prior Cancun, and especially to the one in Barcelona prior to Copenhagen, this year’s received far less attention by the Spanish speaking media. In Spain, nobody has covered it. No interest either in most of the Latin American countries. Only wires and some reporters in Central America are writing specific stories. That’s probably due to the location nearby in Panama. Another factor may be that representatives of nations in the Central American Integration System (SICA) have been more categorical in demands that their region is one of the most vulnerable to climate change, and that it needs immediate economic resources for adaptation.

El interés mediático por el cambio climático alcanzó su punto más álgido en Copenhague 2009. Desde entonces ha ido perdiendo fuelle. Y es normal: no hay avance. No hay noticias. No ocurre nada. Los gobernantes no logran dar pasos significativos adelante. Los “progresos” que anuncian son casi una broma. Hace dos años en un post del tracker analizábamos la cobertura que había tenido la cumbre en Barcelona preparatoria de Copenhague. Buen número de notas, y reporteros quejándose de que Latinoamérica estaba siendo marginada. Hace un año hablábamos de la reunión de Tianjin previa a Cancún diciendo que los países perjudicados debían empezar a cobrar, y que la cobertura era más agria pero menor que un año atrás. Esta semana se ha realizado en Atrapa (Panamá) el encuentro preparatorio de la Cumbre del Cambio Climático de Durban que tendrá lugar entre el 28 de noviembre. Los mismos mensajes de reivindicación del fondo verde (esos insuficientes 100 mil millones de dólares que en Copenhague se aprobó recoger de los países que habían históricamente estado contaminando y darlos en proyectos a países afectados, pero que sea porque implica aceptar la responsabilidad o sea por la crisis están todavía sin asignar), acordar la siguiente fase de Kyoto tras 2012, y las justas exigencias de países pobres. Pero mucha menos presencia mediática. En España durante la semana no salieron notas al respecto. Nadie se enteró de la cumbre. Más atención sí percibió el tema en algunos países latinoamericanos. Especialmente de Centroamérica, que como informa EFE reivindican ser reconocidos como una de las regiones más vulnerables. Las agencias son quienes han estado suministrando la mayoría de notas. EFE ha sido muy prolífica, y Prensa Latina ha preparado notas muy reivindicativas y con lenguaje directo. A título de ejemplo: “Optimismo sobre convención marco de cambio climático en Panamá” (P. Latina) donde se detalla la posición de las 4 partes en pugna sobre la renovación de Kyoto (Rusia, Japón y Canadá pasan, Europa quiere adelantar pero si los otros se comprometen,  EEUU se hacen los despistados, y los países en desarrollo aumentan sus exigencias). O una buena nota resumen de Luis Manuel Arce Isaac, que ilustra el poco avance real de las negociaciones.

A falta de ver qué aparece durante el fin de semana, revisando notas aparecidas estos días, la prensa panameña siguió con interés la inauguración e intenciones de esta conferencia técnica. La Estrella de Panamá recogía en un escueto artículo las declaraciones de Cristina Figueres (directora ejecutiva de la Secretaría del Cambio Climático de Naciones Unidas) sobre los avances necesarios que se han de producir en esta reunión cara a tomar decisiones definitivas en Durban. En El Siglo Kemy Loo Pinzón “Buscan acuerdo sobre reducción de emisiones” ampliaba con visiones y efectos a escala local. La Prensa era todavía más batalladora por medio de Joniel Omaña “Ambientalistas se defienden de la minería” dando voz a las reivindicaciones ambientalistas y a los países miembros del ALBA. Fuera del contenido estricto de la cumbre, La Estrella informa que el Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo (BID) dará 100 millones a Panamá para enfrentar fenómenos naturales y adaptarse al cambio climático.

Fuera de eso, pocas notas y todo de agencias escondidas en las versiones online. Artículos recogiendo la inauguración y objetivos pero sin seguimiento, como por ejemplo El Universal en México El País de Costa Rica, El Nacional (Venezuela), Prensa Libre en Guatemala… Conclusión: estamos hartos de escuchar los mismo. Ya no quedan fuerzas ni para reivindicar. En el amor y en la guerra no avanzar es retroceder. En el cambio climático desgraciadamente ocurre lo mismo.

- Pere Estupinyà

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which got into so much trouble almost two years ago over its recommendations to cut back on breast-cancer screening, is now advising doctors to abandon prostate cancer screening for healthy men.

I was critical of the breast-cancer coverage in Nov., 2009, because too many reporters seemed to think their own opinions were more important than the studied conclusions of the task force. Here I focus on The New York Times, which has three stories on the subject, and which either broke the story, or was alone in picking up a tip from The Cancer Letter, a respected industry-insider newsletter. (The recommendations are not scheduled to be released until next week, so I cannot link to the task force’s findings or announcement.) [Update: The Washington Post, which originally ran an AP story online, now has its own story, by Rob Stein. The Los Angeles Times has a story as well, posted late last night.]

Gardiner Harris tells it like it is in The New York Times. The task force, according to Harris, is recommending that the prostate-specific antigen test be thrown out altogether for healthy men. It’s a dramatic conclusion. And Harris has the stats and the quote that remove any uncertainty about much of the expert thinking on the subject:

From 1986 through 2005, one million men received surgery, radiation therapy or both who would not have been treated without a P.S.A. test, according to the task force. Among them, at least 5,000 died soon after surgery and 10,000 to 70,000 suffered serious complications. Half had persistent blood in their semen, and 200,000 to 300,000 suffered impotence, incontinence or both. As a result of these complications, the man who developed the test, Dr. Richard J. Ablin, has called its widespread use a “public health disaster.” [See NYT correction below in comments: Ablin did not develop the test, the Times says now.]

Wow. The originator of the test, who has as large a stake in it as anybody, not only says it’s being misused–he calls its use a disaster. Nicely reported, and nicely written. The Times also weighs in with a separate Q-and-A for patients by Tara Parker-Pope on her Well blog. It’s a smart way to handle the story–the news on page 1, and the sidebar for patients in the online health section.

So far, so good. Now, here’s the surprise: The Cancer Letter, which did a brief but valuable recap of the breast-cancer controversy, contains the revelation that this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine will carry a story on the controversy by the freelance investigative science reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer.

If the coverage of the prostate-cancer story has not so far generated the kind of controversy sparked by the breast-cancer recommendations, the article by Brownlee and Lenzer is certain to ignite it. The story begins with the point of view of critics of the recommendation, including a personal attack on the American Cancer Society’s chief scientific officer, Otis Webb Brawley:

… it can be more than a little jarring to hear, for example, James Mohler, chairman of the urology department and associate director of the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, say of his friend: “I have known Otis for over 20 years. He doesn’t come off as being ignorant or stupid, but when it comes to prostate-cancer screening, he must not be as intelligent as he seems.” Or Skip Lockwood, the head of Zero, a prostate-cancer patient advocacy group, charge that Brawley is more concerned about saving men’s sex lives than about saving the men themselves.

This attack is a response to Brawley’s skepticism about the prostate cancer test. And the article online includes this jarring graphic:

When it’s put that way, who wouldn’t want to know? A different and more reassuring graphic might have used the choices that doctors face in interpreting the test: You have cancer. You don’t have cancer. Or, We don’t know. And for almost all patients, according to the task force, the check mark would go in the third box: We don’t know.

Brownlee and Lenzer do a very nice job of recounting the history of the P.S.A., and the story is nicely balanced, despite the frightening lede. (We might raise the question of whether the lede was pushed upon the writers by the editors. Frightening stories often attract more readers than balanced stories. You can look for this one to be one of the most emailed stories at the Times when it comes out. Harris’s story is already No. 2 this morning, and it’s not the frightening one.)

Also, Harris makes an important point (sadly, unattributed) that I couldn’t find in the magazine story–that “the task force can also expect resistance from some drug makers and doctors. Treating men with high P.S.A. levels has become a lucrative business.”

Kudos to the Times for its extensive coverage. My only complaint would seem to be that the editors did not look at both stories and think about how they worked together, with the result that the Times is delivering two somewhat different messages to its readers.

- Paul Raeburn

We don’t often cover technology on the Tracker, and we rarely cover the kinds of things that made Steve Jobs famous, such as the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. All the same, I found myself devouring much of the coverage in the wake of his death, and I thought some of it was worth a mention here.

Jobs lived in some world of his own making that involved not only technical innovation, vision, and and an iron hand, but also a brilliant business and marketing sense. If he’s to be compared to Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, it should be not only by virtue of his innovations and vision, but also by virtue of his command of business and marketing. Jobs never seemed to be especially fond of accumulating cash, but he did say that he wanted to make money so he and his team could continue to do the things they loved.

Henry Ford and Thomas Edison shared that mix of business acumen and technical innovation, and both reshaped our world in their day, too. Will Pixar, the iPhone, the iMac, and the rest of the iProducts have the same impact over time as Edison’s light bulb? Will his manufacturing genius reshape the world the way Ford’s invention of mass production did? Was the Apple II the computer equivalent of the Model T? We won’t know for a while. But for now, in a nod to Jobs, let’s say yes. Let’s just give him that until we know better.

My favorite story was a personal reminiscence by Walt Mossberg, the personal tech columnist at the Wall Street Journal. Mossberg, who reviewed Apple products–and not always favorably–recalled the Sunday night calls he would get from Jobs, who would complain about some of Mossberg’s reviews. But some of the calls were about much more than complaints, Mossberg writes. “They turned into marathon, 90-minute, wide-ranging, off-the-record discussions that revealed to me the stunning breadth of the man. One minute he’d be talking about sweeping ideas for the digital revolution. The next about why Apple’s current products were awful, and how a color, or angle, or curve, or icon was embarrassing.”

John Markoff did a nice job of reviewing Jobs’s career in a very long obit in The New York Times, in which he noted that Jobs was a child of the 60s, taking inspiration from such things as The Whole Earth Catalog and experiences with LSD which, Jobs said, was one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.

Steven Levy, writing in Wired, took a kind of geek love approach (appropriate for Wired) which also did a fine job of reviewing Jobs’s life and career, with a slightly different emphasis than Markoff’s piece. Levy makes a good case for why Jobs should be seen as a superb businessman as well as a technology innovator. And make sure you watch the video atop Levy’s piece.

There are many, many more, and I’ll leave you to Google them; let me know in the comments what you like.

Me, I’m signing off to watch Toy Story.

- Paul Raeburn

The Web today is loaded with stories on one piece of news and containing such phrases as “for the first time,” “an important achievement,” “a major step,” “a groundbreaking achievement.” Science journalists can imagine why; some editor asked why they should run this story now, and the hype machine had to be cranked up.

The news was that a research team found a new way to create something that resembles an embryonic stem cell without using in-vitro fertilization and confronting moral objections from some people. Unfortunately, the resulting cells cannot be used to treat anybody. The main reason is that they contain one entire extra set of 23 chromosomes. Just a single extra chromosome causes Down Syndrome. That’s not an entirely apt comparison, but it makes the point that extra chromosomes can wreak havoc in the body.

So what good is the development, reported in this week’s Nature?

To grasp that, you need to know that the old method was to remove the nucleus from an ovum and replace it with the nucleus from an adult cell of a potential patient. Something in the egg’s cytoplasm reprogrammed the adult nucleus and caused the cell to start dividing. But the cells never progressed to an early stage called a blastocyst with the so-called inner cell mass that would become the embryo. That clump of cells is where you would find embryonic stem cells if development proceeded that far.

The new trick was to leave the egg’s nucleus with its half-set of chromosomes in place and simply add a nucleus from an adult cell. With that, the cells did progress to the blastocyst stage with an inner cell mass. The conclusion: You need something in the egg’s genome to make the process go far enough. Maybe someday researchers will figure out what that something is and find a way to add it to the mix without using the entire egg genome. That’s the long-term hope.

Depending on who you read, the hope-diminishing facts come early in the story or relatively late. Among the best at balance was the AP‘s Seth Borenstein. His lede graf gives the news and adds, “But the first-of-its-kind result comes with a big hitch.” The second graf, twice as long as the lede, explains the problem and deftly puts the result in perspective.

Rob Stein at the Washington Post waits until the third graf to temper readers’ conclusions. After calling it a “a long-sought, potentially pivotal advance,” Stein’s third graf says, “The scientists so far have managed only to produce genetically abnormal cells useful for research.”  As printed on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, that third graf includes the clause: “but they were confident they could overcome that hurdle.” That phrase does not appear Stein’s original story. As edited by the Chronicle, Stein’s story also hails the advance as something that could lead to creating “cells that could cure widespread suffering.” This is  good example of how a reporter’s original story can be warped by editors at other publications.

But hang on. Faraway editors can and often do mash-up different reporters’ stories to make their own hybrid. The Seattle Times picked up Stein’s story but made its third graf say this: “The first-of-its-kind result comes with a big hitch,” a sentence lifted from Borenstein’s AP story. Is it plagiarism? Maybe not. At the bottom of the story the Seattle editors appended this note, “Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.”

Other takes:

In one of the cleanest balanced stories, The Boston Globe‘s Carolyn Y. Johnson gets the news and the downside into her first sentence.

Nicholas Wade‘s story in the New York Times, backs gingerly into the news.

Time‘s Alice Park says the advance moves stem cell research closer to its ultimate goal, but that it ”also moves science closer to human cloning.”  Up go the red flags. She links the new technique to the one used to create Dolly the sheep.

Eryn Brown writes in the Los Angeles Times that the research moves medicine closer to treating…and then she lists the usual range of dread diseases. Talk about hope and hype.

The lede on CNN‘s version, written by Miriam Falco, begins with the tried-and-tired, “For the first time…” At least it omitted the unnecessary “ever” from that formulation.

-Boyce Rensberger

Click on image for enlargement.

The Dawn spacecraft that has been orbiting the asteroid Vesta since July continues to send back excellent pictures of a member of our solar system that is looking more and more interesting. For example, it now looks as if Vesta has an iron core and has had ancient basaltic lava flows on its surface. It has a mountain bigger than Earth’s largest and almost as tall as Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest in the solar system. Moreover, the surface is heavily pocked with craters billions of years old, making it look rather like the moon.

All this came out of a session yesterday at the joint meeting of the  European Planetary Science Congress and the Division for Planetary Sciences in Nantes, France.

Though Vesta measures only about 330 miles in diameter, Space.com, which has a fine roundup today of the latest on Vesta, quotes Dawn’s P.I. calling the asteroid “the smallest terrestrial planet.” The piece, oddly unbylined, does not elaborate on that characterization, which is curious given the flap a few years ago over whether Pluto should be called a planet. Vesta has been considered a possible dwarf planet, but no official designation seems to have been set.

Vesta’s iron core presumably indicates that its mass was great enough to create the internal heat required to melt its substance, allowing iron to separate out and sink to the center. Startlingly sharp images of Vesta, some accessible on the Web site, show its shape to have developed a good part of the way toward becoming spherical. It also shows regions that look as if some ancient collision had smashed away big chunks.

Ron Cowen, writing in Nature.com,  goes beyond the official report to divulge other findings that he says the Dawn researchers deemed “not quite ready for prime time.” Cowen, nonetheless, takes readers inside the lab meeting. Among the suggestive interpretations of new data: The asteroid belt once “was a much more crowded and rowdy place” with crashes and rebounds galore; Vesta was “walloped” from several directions by giant objects in at least four different cataclysmic events; that the asteroid belt once extended much closer to the Sun; and that a bashed region on one side of Vesta could be the source of many meteorites recovered on Earth.

-Boyce Rensberger