At the Australian Broadcasting Corporation‘s Science Unit, reporter Stuart Gary tackled a tough, wholly arcane topic but really should have put in another paragraph or two to describe a virtual mirror. See, I already don’t even know what I just wrote. It usually takes longer than this. His topic is the creation of light from a vacuum, a glowing of nothing, achieved by somehow or other compelling virtual particles warbling into and out of existence to become real particles. One assumes the effect is akin to the virtual particles that form in pairs, one inside and once outside a black hole’s event horizon, with the ones of the outside unable to reconnect with their corresponding partners and, thus, becoming a black hole radiation carrying mass and energy away from the so-called inescapable.

That’s not even the hard part. Tougher is explanation how the energetic barriers to making a real mirror travel near the speed of light – necessary to cleave the virtual pairs – are circumvented. It involves a SQUID, or superconducting quantum interference device of the sort well-known from some scientific instruments, and something else called the dynamical Casimir effect. This brief story is a fine sample of the pocket mystery – a science story on a topic arcane but fascinating. A long feature is not in order. But just a bit more on what, physically, is happening in the lab apparatus seems necessary. Is anything like a mirror moving near light speed, or does it make subatomic particles treat it as though it is moving, or what? Does this have something to do with zero-point energy, catalyst for some interesting physics scams? One thinks that the item in this cryptic account definitely is blinking in and out of existence as one reads along: comprehension.

Further research reveals how simply the nearly superluminal mirror is created. It is, as seen in the Swedish press release just tracked down and placed below in Grist, a sort of microwave reflector, depicted in the illus up there. It is composed I suppose by a field effect formed in a SQUID fed a current the varies very fast, and putting a jitter on the mirror-effect. That is still a bit beyond my physical intuition. But, at least, its essence seems to be twinkling in and out of grasp, evanescing then reforming just enough to induce a comforting illusion of comprehension. Sometimes that is enough to get one through the day.

Grist for the Mill: Nature letter abstract, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Your tracker hasn’t much to say about the section leading story by Abby Ellin, on the efforts of truck drivers and some health advocates and allies to cut back on their trade’s obesity. Many drivers are starting in the logical place – themselves, and putting themselves somewhere other than truck stop diners. Good pictures, good profiles, but no surprises -  and that goes for the science of nutrition and of exercise too. This should’a been in another section, one where it might have more impact such as up front in news. Or even biz. One does appreciate the great picture.

Other headlines to note:

• Felicity Barringer: A Rare Isotope Helps Track an Ancient Water Source ; You may not be alone in failing to understand exactly how the cosmogenic isotope Krypton-81 provides a way to gauge the age of waters in the Saharan (as in vast, and as in literal) Nubian aquifer. Here’s a technical paper to explain it, and which I believe Barringer included in her research, but I still don’t follow the story’s allusion to optical tweezers and Steven Chu. The yarn is fascinating anyway. All that water, so old, so sluggish, so heavily pumped for agriculture, “the font of fabled oases” as it is so felicitously put in all senses of the word in this account, that aquifer is mind-stretching.
• Jim Robbins : A Quiet Push to Grow Crops Under Cover of Trees ; Best story of the section if the metric is desire to know more. This one got the mind racing. Robbins tells of the advantages of growing trees among row crops, or in cattle pastures, or other places where their mere presence alters and in some ways improves a farm’s output. He  does not grapple directly with the necessary drop in plants’ growth when they are in a shade, photosynthetically challenged. It provides no yield data, or costs and profits. Why did the bees leave? But the image, of farms growing row crops scattered among trees, is beguiling. One wants more.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr. : New Cases of AIDS Hit Plateau ; This news could support a whole post on its own. McNeil takes a sober approach to the latest HIV statistics from U.N.AIDS. Other outlets pump harder on the idea that the rates are now plunging, a contrast to McNei’ls “plateau.” Here for example, a story on ABC-Australia and another at BBC. Plateau or plunge, this is a bigger story than its play might indicate.
• John Tierney: A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day ; A holiday yarn, better than most. There is a science of almost anything, so why not gratitude? This is the gentlest, best-targeted, most enjoyable Tierney column’s I can recall, right from his neo-coinage of the term “psychologically correct holiday” in the lede.
• Nicholas Wade: In Body’s Shield Against Cancer, a Culprit in Aging May Lurk ; This news got a lot of coverage about three weeks ago, but I didn’t read much of it then. Wade had his own hurry-up version Nov. 2 when it broke in Nature. This one today  carries the ball forward with more detail, and backward with more historic and big-picture context. I do have a question. Without senescent cells, and thus presumably blessed with less aging, does a creature then pay a price in cancer risk?

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Yesterday Charlie tracked about the AP and ScienceInsider stories on a phenomenal fossil whale site in the Atacama that contains one of the world’s biggest concentrations of cetacean fossils, plus other animals. The two main lines of the stories were the mystery why all those fossils accumulated in that precise corner of the Atacama Desert, and that the team of paleontologists is in a hurry to remove the fossils and to take 3D images before the site is damaged. Checking Chilean press, we found interesting stories in Mercurio and La Tercera. None of them reflect worries because of the road construction, but to other threats. Last January 2011 La Tercera wrote a long story explaining all the history of the discovery of the site, and alerting that fossils might be damaged now that they are exposed to tough conditions. In a story last week, a reporter documents some cases of fossils being stolenby traffickers; even one that was recovered from a German Museum after being sold illegally. Mercurio presents an article giving lots of details about the fossils found up to date, and it recovers a nice story from 2003 when a New Zealander paleontologist found a huge whale skull, and suggested the site should be explored. 

Como ayer apuntaba Charlie Petit en el Tracker, la semana pasada paleontólogos chilenos y del Smithsonian hablaron a la prensa sobre uno de los mayores y más peculiares yacimientos fósiles de ballenas del mundo. Situado en el desierto de Atacama, el yacimiento cuenta con una tan inusitada concentración de restos de ballenas, especies de delfines extintos, tiburones, focas, aves y osos perezosos, que se presenta como un misterio averiguar porqué perecieron todos en un espacio tan pequeño. El otro ángulo importante de la historia de AP es las prisas de los paleontólogos en conseguir los restos y fotografiarlos en 3D por el rápido desgaste que están sufriendo desde que han sido expuestos a las duras condiciones climáticas del desierto.

Pero buceando en la prensa chilena, encontramos nuevos enfoques. En La Tercera, lo que primero nos llama la atención es la detallada nota “Cementerio de ballenas descubierto en Caldera es el más grande de Sudamérica”, que ya escribió Francisco Rodríguez en enero de este año. Leyéndola, no encontramos muchas diferencias en la información actual. Francisco explica cómo ya en la década de los 60 se descubrieron los primeros fósiles, pero no se les dio importancia hasta 2010 aprovechando la construcción de una carretera por la zona el paleontólogo chileno Mario Suárez descubrió dicha inusual concentración de especies, que es quizás el aspecto más relevante científicamente yacimiento. Ya en la historia de Rodrigo se hablaba de la preocupación por la preservación del tesoro, tanto por deterioro de las piezas como por saqueo.

Este último punto es el foco de la historia actualizada la semana pasada por Camila Braco “El tesoro que esconde la caldera”. Camila explica que varias piezas han desaparecido. Que algunas han sido recuperadas como la del ave voladora más grande del mundo, que fue vendida a un europeo por un traficante internacional, y trasladada a un museo alemán desde donde se pudo traer de vuelta a Chile. El objetivo de crear un parque para proteger e investigar también está presente en la historia de Camila.

El Mercurio también ofrece buena información, y su cobertura se remonta incluso más atrás en el tiempo. Ya en 2003 Richard García reportó que un paleontólogo neozelandés sintió curiosidad por un cráneo de ballena “de los más grandes que había visto”. Eso empezó a generar interés por la zona, sin poder en ese momento imaginar que aparecerían tantísimos nuevos especimenes. El tamaño del cráneo de ballena se quedaría sólo en una anécdota. El propio Richard García cubre 8 años después la noticia “Paleontólogos rescatan casi 80 ballenas fósiles en Caldera, algunas totalmente articuladas”, centrada en el tipo de fósiles encontrados, especulaciones sobre nuevas especies y épocas geológicas, y fascinación por lo que todavía queda por explorar en la zona. Emol presenta una nota de contenido parecido, pero con abundante material gráfico. En definitiva, interesante cobertura, que sin duda poco a poco irá dando publicaciones científicas y más noticias que transmitir a los chilenos y el resto del mundo.

- Pere Estupinyà

Several large, syndicated news outlets are carrying modest-sized stories on the annual accounting of collective global refusal to do much about global warming’s main, almost only, cause: Rising concentrations of CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases. There are few tricky or slick new ways to write news on deadline when it is no surprise, is bad, and when the official word comes from the same agency as generally does this sort of thing namely the UN and its World Meteorological Organization, and gets endorsed from others among such usual suspects as NOAA.

The AP‘s Seth Borenstein gave the worlds foremost English language wire service’s readers a well condensed summary of the whole thing in his lede, so take this one to Newswriting 101 at the j-school:

Heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the  atmosphere are building up so high, so fast, that some scientists now think the world can no longer limit global warming to the level world leaders have agreed upon as safe.

It goes on with quotes and numbers and historic context and the regulatory agenda by IPCC et al to discuss actions that ought to occur. Other than a difficult to decipher reference to a tipping point, darn that Malcolm G,  nice job. Borenstein took the time to think about the news, not just spit the press release out after a mild chew, and call around for reaction. Put it in in an envelope that says “Yes, We Were Warned” in a time capsule for your surviving great grandchildren to open in 90 years – and hope they are not climate refugees somewhere. Who knows? Maybe they’ll be sitting around sleek and happy, chortling “But it all turned out to be a socialist and scientist-grifter scam, didn’t it?” But … probably not, probably not.

Other stories:

• Reuters – Tom Miles: Record high  greenhouse gases to linger for decades ; Is this a joke, this headline? No of course not, it’s no joke. But it makes no sense even if it is derived from a quote attributed to the WMO boss. Decades? If only. The residence time of CO2 is, roughly, 400 years. Some say it’s more. It is a statistical figure, and individual CO2 molecules do shuttle pretty fast between air and ocean. But it would take the better part of a millennium and maybe two, one wagers, even if mankind totally stopped emitting extra CO2 right now, for the air to settle down to its pre-industrial level. Mr. Miles should have checked it out, even on deadline.
• AFP – Greenhouse gases rise to record high in 2010: UN ; Same quote here, about lingering for decades, from the WMO chief. Must be a rational interpretation of facts that accords with the quote. Dunno what it is.
• Telegraph – Nick Collins: Greenhouse gases reach record levels / ..exceeding even the worst case scenarios predicted by experts a decade ago… ; Same quote from the WMO man.
• BBC – No let up in greenhouse gas rise ;

Grist for the Mill:

UN WMO Press Release; In which the “lingering for decades” quote has its news origin, which no reporter apparently sought to explore including those who are science and environmental beat writers who ought to know something about CO2 by now. It makes no sense here either. Maybe he was talking about nitrous oxide? Or methane?

UN Greenhouse Gas Bulletin (pdf)

Last night on Fox news it got little credence – I walked past as the TV, accidentally left on that channel, had Mitt Romney sitting with news celebrity reactor Sean Hannity. Mitt said he believes global warming exists, but is insufficiently convinced we know reasons why that is so, not enough to commit billions of dollars to do anything about it. So Hannity brought up things like the load guarantees to Solyndra, and to electric car manufacturers, bringing nods of agreement as things not to do from his guest, the GOP’s candidate who supposedly is the only sane member of the front-runners.

- Charlie Petit

It is stunning to us old time car guys that, if new regulations hold, new cars in less than 15 years will be averaging more than 50 miles per gallon. That’ll inlcude a lot of full sized sedans, perhaps with an electric hybrid helper. A lot of us remember when VWs were thought to be amazing for getting 20 mpg or so.

There was a flow of news in the last week about the raised standards, some of them reporting the surprise that it got so little resistance from industry. At the LA Times, its circulation area full of automobile fanatics as well as agencies that pioneered the regulation of automobile exhaust, staffer Neela Banerjee produced a quickie feature-story reprise of the deal-making and technology advances behind the new standard. A key was California’s long leadership in regulating auto emissions and the distinct power it has in federal rule making. This is good reporting and good story telling.

Grist for the Mill: EPA Press Release ; EPA fuel economy info page ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) The Amazon is more interesting, one may easily believe, than the universe beyond our planet but it doesn’t have NASA’s Office of Communications. There are far more potentially amazing environmental stories in Latin American forests than in US and Europe together. But they seem invisible to Latin American reporters. They are missing the opportunity to share with readers the richness of the diverse natural environment so close at hand.

Nine environmental journalists from Latin America received grants to attend the Society for Environmental Journalists (SEJ) meeting in Miami three weeks ago. The Spanish lang tracker was also there to ask them to send him stories related to the conference or are important to its topics in their countries. By far the most prolific is Costa Rican reporter Michelle Soto. In only two weeks Michelle produced original stories abou topics including the problems and solutions of jaguars and pumas entering rural areas in northern Costa Rica, illegal traffic in rare plants that can be sold as art pieces for thousands of dollars (and  sometimes are found by using papers that researchers publish, about silvertip sharks living permanently in a bay of Coco Island, and about a Costa Rican engineer who is designing a wind generator to study hurricanes and materials resistance.

Other stories received are about Cousteau’s granddaughter visit to Chile in order to film a documentary, a Brazilian scientists taking air samples of Antarctica to track pollution, the equilibrium between turtle preservation and sustainable tourism, and a extensive report about the economic profits of preserving biodiversity in Latin America. 

El periodismo medioambiental y de naturaleza tiene muchísimas más posibilidades en América Latina que en EEUU o Europa. Salvando el asunto del cambio climático, los periodistas latinoamericanos deberían ser los líderes de aspectos como la biodiversidad, gestión del agua, protección de espacios naturales, bioprospección, turismo sostenible, transgénicos, conocimiento local… tienen en sus países historias apasionantes que no están explotando suficiente. No es sólo su responsabilidad; es todo el mecanismo que no facilita esta labor. Pero las oportunidades están allí, esperando a que alguien decida aprovecharlas.

9 periodistas latinoamericanos fueron becados para asistir al encuentro de la Society for Environmental Journalists hace 3 semanas en Miami. No todos ellos reportaban específicamente sobre medioambiente. El tracker también participó en encuentro, charló con ellos, y les pidió que le enviaran algunas notas sobre el encuentro o de aspectos ambientales importantes para sus países. Los que respondieron fueron:

Michelle Soto (La Nación – Costa Rica) envió varias excelentes notas. En “Hoy las plantas raras se comercializan como obras de arte” Michelle Soto entrevista a una experta en plantas raras asegurando que cada una puede costar miles de dólares en el mercado ilegal, y que en un caso los traficantes tomaron los datos de un artículo científico describiendo las coordenadas y características de una nueva especie de cactus hallada en Jamaica, para ir a extraerla y venderla. En “Tico participa en proyecto de simulación de huracanes” Michelle habla con un joven tico afincado en Florida que construye un conjunto de turbinas que genera vientos superiores a los 225 km/h con los que hacer estudios de aerodinámica. Michelle también habla en un amplísimo texto de las soluciones a la difícil convivencia entre grandes felinos y población rural (dos notas antecedentes con los primeros problemas de ataque a ganado y el dato de que era un puma y no un jaguar), y de una colonia de tiburones punta blanca residentes en una bahía de la costarricense isla del Coco. Todo ello es material original de Michelle, con abundante información, y entrevistando directamente a los protagonistas. El trabajo de Michelle Soto y Aldea Global son una referencia a tener en cuenta en otros países.

La chilena Andrea Obaid también aprovechó bien la visita a Miami. Publicó en La Tercera un artículo sobre la futura visita a Chile de la nieta de Jacques Cousteau para filmar un documental (A. Obaid) sobre los alacalufes; una comunidad nómada de la que sólo quedan 12 individuos puros. Habló de ello también en su programa radiofónico Tecnociencia, y en cooperativa.cl.

También habló de la nieta de Cousteau y su vocación por comunicar la problemática ambiental la argentina Gabriela Vizental. Los hizo en su blog junto a una interesante pieza sobre el equilibrio entre conservación y turismo llevado a cabo en Costa Rica con sus tortugas marinas.

Todavía no reportaron específicamente sobre material del congreso, pero la panameña Sofia Kalormakis envió un extenso reportaje sobre el enorme potencial que tiene Latinoamérica en la megadiversidad de especies y espacios naturales. El artículo explora la vertiente económica del aprovechamiento de la biodiversidad, un aspecto que ya hemos dicho varias veces se olvida y es el que más puede cuajar en los oídos de políticos y población. El brasileño Henrique Kugler también publica (no online) una interesante nota sobre un investigador brasileño que colecta muestras de aire en la Antártica para analizar los restos de la polución que le llegan de otras partes del planeta.

- Pere Estupinyà

Late last week Chilean researchers and a team of fossil whale specialists from the Smithsonian Institution showed off to reporters a phenomenal bone bed containing remains of balleen whales millions of years old, plus at least one , extinct tusked dolphin and one sperm whale. Highway construction revealed them first,  setting off an urgent effort to gather as much data and specimens as possible before road crews go back to work. Puzzles abound. Perhaps they got there in a mass stranding, or somehow accumulated over an extended period in some sort of lagoon trap. Now well back from shore, the site has some of the most perfectly preserved whale fossils ever seen, it says here. Remains of more than 75 whales have been counted so far.

The AP‘s Eva Vargara filed it from Santiago, and co-author Ian James pitched in from Caracas, Venezuela. Chilean press has been attentive too. At ScienceInsider, Carolyn Gramling does a nice job explaining some of the technical tools at work, including an elaborate laser scanning project to digitally preserve the bone bedin a sort of virtual in-situ tableau. The high-tech savvy of the scientific team is grasped at its direct outreach to the public, a series of blogposts compiled by the leader and members of the Smithsonian team. They include videos of the expedition and the tented studio built over one of the better-preserved skeletons for full digitization. These are worth a look, especially the time-lapse sequences that capture the frenzy. We thus see another chapter of the recurring struggle of scientists to grab what they can when a construction crew finds something. Those have to be mixed emotions – without the construction one wouldn’t even know about this or that relic or fossil. But the same bunch is hanging around with its backhoes and jackhammers, ready to reduce it all to gravel. At least this one let paleontologists in on it. The site is right next to a two land road being widened (see pic with brief account at The Inquisitr). One imagines that the original road crew’s foreman probably saw lots of huge bones too but told the heavy equipment operators to keep on keepin’ on.

The lines of dead whales to have a familiar look. For the latest on why, we have from Tasmania ….

Other, Pertinent News:

• AFP (Nov. 17): Last whale dies in mass Australian beaching ; Not pilot whales or porpoises, either. Sperm and minke whales.
• but we do have pilot whales – AFP – 61 whales die in New Zealand mass stranding ;

- Charlie Petit

With grand expectations the tracker clicked to open a story Time Mag‘s Science page offers this morning, from Jeffrey Kluger: An Elevator to Space? Better Take the Stairs. The hoary concept of a space elevator merits examination. This is because the Google empire has it as a glamour model in its lineup of far-horizon projects that it and its money could supposedly make happen.

As one reads here, the materials science challenges of constructing a system of centrifugally stabilized cables extending several tens of thousands of miles straight up from the equator are beyond daunting. But persnickety and reflexive eyeball-rolling kicked in after reading Kluger’s confident declaration that “the idea is simple,” and then a bollixed key fact about it. This occurred, again,  even though his overall point is right. As he puts it with technical precision, a prediction that a space elevator will exist in maybe 50 years is geek-speak for “like, um, never?”

He writes:

In order for the castle, or orbital counterweight, to remain stationary relative to the rotating earth, it would have to be located 22,238 miles (37,790 im) in space – or about 10% of the distance to the moon – where the time it takes to complete a single orbit matches the 24 hours it takes the earth to turn.

No, no, and NO. The first two nos refer to niggly points about efficient and proper usage. The first for his writing that the counterweight must be located 22,238 miles up when one can take out the “located” and save the reader time because if it must BE somewhere it must automatically also BE LOCATED there. So delete located (and for Strunk’s sake never write something is situated someplace like all the gracious homes with their warmly welcoming great rooms situated on delightfully tended verdant hillsides in real-estate display ads, repositories of perhaps the most consistently dreadful properly-spelled writing on Earth). The second no is even smaller, for not capitalizing Earth.

The big NO is that the counterweight must be well beyond geostationary altitude and be hefty enough to put the center of mass of the contraption at least at said altitude and it better be a bit beyond it to be safe. If parked among other geostationary com-sats and such, a space depot just hovers. It is not trying to lift itself any higher. Were one to hang a ladder from it the weight would bring it crashing down or something else awful. The counterweight has to be farther out, like the hammer just before a whirling field athlete lets it go. That keeps the line tight. It IS simple.

Little errors such as that are like the old science fiction movies in which space explosions, witnessed from afar, are noisy AND make billowing clouds of slowing debris as though the particles were encountering air resistance. Not essential to the plot but they always broke the spell.

Kluger’s appears to be a blog post. Errors, don’t I know first hand, are easy to make. No editor. That’s scary. But blogs are also easy to fix too. Then it’ll be a smooth ride top to bottom.

- Charlie Petit

With the sound of great relief many media outlets welcomed a decision made by the EU commission on Monday. It eventually allowed a sweetener made from the South American stevia plant to enter the European market. A ten-year struggle comes to an end – for now.

Stevia rebaudiana, also called sugar- or sweetleaf, originates from Paraguay and is used there as a sweetener for a long time. But it wasn’t approved for use in Europe because the legislation says, that novel foods need special authorization. According to the definition, novel foods have no history of “significant consumption” in the EU before the legislation became effective in May 1997.

Safety evaluations, initiated by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), established an acceptable daily intake of four milligram per kilogram bodyweight. On the basis of this limitation the EU commission approved stevia, finally. With the beginning of next month the first products could hit the shelves.

The breaking stevia news made it into many major German media. They unisonous appreciated the agencies move, often hailing the sweetener as “natural”, “teeth friendly” and “non-caloric”. Some managed to include the tight margins, within the substance can be used safely. Only Christina Berndt at the Süddeutsche Zeitung put them in context with the maximum amount allowed for artificial sweeteners. She also explained, that the claim “natural” not necessarily guarantees, that the product is harmless. Like Berndt also other writers mentioned, that stevia was already on the European market even without approval. It was sold in some stores, camouflaged as additive for hot baths, “fertilizer” or “mouth wash”. One knows that trick from designer drugs sold as “bath salts” and “air freshener”.

Two outlets told their audience, how much stevia might end in certain products, but they came to very different results. Maria Braun at Handelsblatt quotes a source that the amount of stevia-sweetener necessary to replace the sugar in one liter of soda will be well below the maximum permissible value for an average adult. Whereas Christoph Froehlich at Stern.de found a source telling him, that the soda companies have to exceed the maximum level in a soda by the factor three to replace the sugar entirely. He comes to the conclusion, that the sweet revolution is still far away.

Two points are entirely missing in the swell of stories: The new regulation includes a clause, that the commission might ask the EFSA to perform an exposure analysis for the new sweetener, taking into account its real use.

The other and more important thing is the origin of the plant. Everybody treats it like a common good and does not think about ethical issues of commercializing indigenous knowledge. The EU already spent money to find out how to grow the plant in South Europe.

Also, an unrelated story:

Chicks on drugs

An investigation in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia caused a big stir: Veterinarians found that 96.4 percent of the controlled chicken got antibiotics during their life, which lasts just 30 days. Some of them carried eight different drugs in their blood. This is not only illegal but also dangerous for people. Earlier this year, the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment communicated, that  22 percent of the broilers carry germs that are resistant against several antibiotic. Only one year ago, the Robert-Koch-Institute found MRSA in every third frozen poultry sample, writes the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Hanno Charisius

A meeting of delegates to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Uganda concluded today that the world must prepare for more frequent and perhaps more severe episodes of wild and disruptive weather : heat waves most assuredly and a high risk of more floods, droughts, violent wind storms, and downpours .This does not sound like a different story than we’ve heard many times, but the certainty is a bit higher. Thus reporters have a tedious but important chore: write it again, try to find a wrinkle that is different, prepare to get flack from contrarians who don’t believe a bit of it

Brief Aside: Those scientists. They just mess with data to get more grant money. I just saw it explained, perhaps you already have, but The Daily Show had the scoop last month on their white-coated  shenanigans. Parody can be the most serious commentary of all.

Today’s new burst arrives with plenty of warning in previous stories. Tracker posts already run:

• Nov. 15 : BBC: A glimpse at IPCC’s upcoming report on weather extremes. We’ll get more of them soonish. Not so sure, but pretty sure, they’re already here.
• Nov. 1: AP, AFP: Draft of an IPCC report says duck: here comes even wilder weatehr. Perps are anthropogenic GH gases, natch..

Todays’ Stories:

• AP – Seth Borenstein: Science Panel: Get ready for extreme weather ;
• Reuters – Ellis Biryambarema (filed from Kamapal, Uganda): Extreme weather to worsen with climate change ;
• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh: IPCC Report:Global Warming — and Changing Population – Will Worsen the Toll of Extreme Weather ; Always a problem to try to say two things in one headline even if they are both true. MOre important, this blog post meditates on the challenge of finding new terms to use as old ones lose their punch. It’s an explainer that in conversational tone walks readers through the levels of confidence the IPCC team has that things will worsen. Heat – for sure. Cyclones – probably. And even if weather does not change, targets of its wrath (people) are rising in number. So total suffering, it says here,  surely will rise.
• Washington Post – Juliet Eilperin: Report: Climate change means more frequent droughts, floods to come ; She puts right at the top why it is useless to list the many record low temperatures that were set last year in the US or world to shake confidence in the reality of the trend. It is the ratio that matters. High and low records once were equally likely. Now, two out of three are on the warmer side.
• Washington Post WonkBlog – Brad Plumer : When can we blame natural disasters on global warming? ; Not a bad job of focussing on one of the points in the preceding news story. I’ve however gone on too long, before, on the logical fallacy of even asking if this or that event is caused by global warming. The difficulty is Wittgensteinian, a failure to grasp category and the aptness of language. ALL our specific weather events would not happen if there had never been all that extra CO2 put in the air. There are not categories of ones that are, and ones that are not, a result of that. The debate is about the frequencies with which types of events occur, not the meaningless sorting of them into make-believe bins. See also WaPost Capital Weather Gang blog – Andrew Freedman: NASA scientist Hansen warns “Climate Dice” already loaded for more extreme weather. He shows a very interesting plot, not from IPCC but from Jim Hansen, indicating how different weather is getting, already. And gets a telling quote declaring that some kinds of events are happening lately that just about could not possibly have occurred a century or even less long ago.
• Wall St. Journal: Nicholas Bariyo, John M. Biers, filed from Kampala: U.N. Panel Sees Extreme Weather Tie to Climate Change ;
• NYTimes – Justin Gillis: U.N. Panel Finds Climate Change Behind Some Extreme Weather Events ; Pretty tepid, if true, hed. The story starts with this point but moves immediately to the caveat: so far. The panel does expect a faster rate of weather extremes to become incontrovertibly evident.
• USA Today: Dan Vergano, Doyle Rice: Report: Climate change worsens extreme weather events ; The two reporters – whose names are on a fairly brief piece – had chat with readers today. Judging from the advance comments, one might expect lively conversation ripe with scorn for scientists who study the pertinent topics. I took a peek at the exchange. Very different, most civil, most questions appear to be coming from people curious to know more. Not all, but most. They did let one or two convinced skeptics in. Vergano’s and Rice’s answers are well-reasoned. How questions were selected for answer is impossible to tell from here – but as this is not a talk chat but a hunt-peck-and-touch type chat, it would be hard to go through more than a dozen or two Qs and As.
• Guardian (UK) Fiona Harvey: Extreme weather will strike as climate change takes hold, IPCC warns. See also a Guardian blog post from Damian Carrington: Extreme weather: We’re gambling with lives at ever worsening odds ;

Grist for the Mill: United National Environment Programme Press Release ; Summary for Policy Makers ;

- Charlie Petit

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This has gotten delightfully nuts. Reporters who called around to theorists and other kinds of particle and field physicists the last time – nearly  two months ago – found few that took it all that seriously after one team of European physicists said they’d caught neutrinos arriving at the Gran Sasso Lab in an Italian mountain from CERN on the French-Swiss border at an integrated velocity slightly faster than light. Systematic errors blah blah blah. Maybe now the conversations will get REALLY complicated.

The news arose the moment members of the OPERA Collaboration, with 40+ authors on the paper’s title line and another 122 of them in an appendix somewhere, posted their update and apparent confirmation at the arXiv site for breaking (and pre-peer-reviewed) physics type papers. It goes on for 32 pages of data plots, charts, tables, and the occasional equation. It has only 42 footnotes. Naturally. Nobody’s made this observation except their own selves, before, so who you gonna cite? Actually, lots of references to GPS literature. They even looked for some kind of energy dependence in the velocity departure from standard physics. No dice. They asked operators at CERN to make the neutrino bunches really tight, leaving less room for measurement error. Same result.

News coverage is distinct and, of course, non-illuminating which is counter-intuitive or maybe just ironic when the topic is superluminality. I’ll get to it momentarily but am putting it off because there’s so much of it. Skip to it right off, next graf, to evade my personal blather. See the end of our earlier post where you may read my own theory, one made confidently as it is unburdened by actual knowledge. Ignorance, as one sees in politics, breeds boldness of assertion. Knowledge just clutters the mind with maybes, which is why scientists make such disappointing presentations at Congressional hearings. My assertion: Neutrinos GO the right speed, but they are BORN, due to entanglement and extra-dimensionality twinkly wormhole M-brane gobbledy gook, a few meters along their paths from the supposed real birth scene. Sort of out of wedlock, or beam lock, or something. Ergo, one thing to do if this isn’t cleared up quick is to put a detector at some greater distance from CERN, and see if the buggers get there at the same averaged impossible speed, or seem to have settled prudently to one just below that of light.

The illus above comes via BBC, which quickly bundled its previous coverage and capped it with Jason Palmer‘s fresh story. It says in 2d graf “If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics.” He also promptly spells out what OPERA stands for, Oscillation Project with Emulsion (T)racking Apparatus. In French or Italian the acronym works better?  Palmer points out that while the tighter bunching of the neutrino bursts reduces some potential sources of error, others remain. The metrology, or measurement of time and space, demands seem high. After all, .00000006 seconds is not a big discrepancy. He has few outside sources commenting, but it’s early. He doesn’t bring up theoft-cited  counter-evidence that neutrinos obey speed limits – they get here from distant supernovas in good sequence with the light waves born in the same maelstrom.

   By the way, with Palmer’s story at BBC, as pointed out to ksjtracker by reader Daniel Griscom, is a photo of a tubelike structure aimed at distant mountains. One believes it to be part of the Gran Sasso highway tunnel administration building. A  confusing  caption says “Neutrinos travel through 700km of rock before reaching Gran Sasso’s underground laboratories.” Yes, but what’s that tube? A pedestrian tunnel, that’s the easy answer. Y’know what I think? It’s a rail gun the Italian military is building, in case the monetary crisis reaches the shooting stage, to fling bundles of worthless Euros labeled “Austerity THIS!” and shot clean over Switzerland and into Germany and its volk looking down their noses to the south at their profligate Latin and Greek co-Continentals.

Other stories:

• NatureNews – Eugenie Samuel Reich: Neutrino experiment replicates faster-than-light finding ; Others not on that long list of authors, says here, remain skeptical,. Many of the authors are probably skeptical too even though many (it says here) had declined to sign the earlier paper. The Gran Sasso team may, in essence, be asking colleagues to please look at this and see if we overlooked something. Reich also names where a replication test, by different people with different hardward, may occur, involving Fermilab near Chicago.
• ScienceInsider – Edwin Cartlidge: Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos: OPERA Confirms and Submits Results, But Unease Remains ; More like reaffirms or reattests than confirms. Cartlidge is perhaps the first to notice that several members of the OPERA collaboration have thus far refused to have their names on either of these reports. Here also is insight into the team’s condition: many are exhausted by the efforts required to run this issue to ground.
• AP – Frank Jordans: CERN excludes 1 error in faster-than-light finding ; Dullest, most accurate hed of the lot. But parse this lede: “The odds have shrunk that Einstein was wrong about a fundamental law of the Universe.” Haven’t they grown that he was wrong? Of course odds are a ratio, maybe they’re still odds if one inverts it. Still, if the odds went from one in a thousand to ten in a thousand he was wrong, they grew.
• Reuters – Kate Kelland: New test finds neutrinos still faster than light ; Nice bit here about one guy who may have to eat his shorts. But also, it’s not correct to say that the new test appeared to confirm a startling finding that neutrinos could “travel fractions of a second faster” than light speed. That gets the sense of things, but seconds are not a measure of velocity. They reached a detector fractions of a second sooner than light speed would permit. The story also mentions that other sources of potential systematic error remain.
• Register (UK) Brid-Aine Parnell: Neutrinos still FASTER THAN LIGHT in second test ;
• Guardian (UK Alok Jha: Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment ; Quite a smooth job..
• Forbes – Alex Knapp: New Tests Appear to Confirm Claim That Neutrinos Traveled Faster Than Light ; Strong tone of skepticism. Notable also is a story linked to this one, and that Knapp wrote last month, about a possible source of error that I’ve wondered on too. EArth’s gravity field is lumpy, due to inhomogeneous distribution of its mass, and gravity dilates time. So perhaps the different rates of the GPS and other clocks involved, as well as slight variations in the relative pace of time along the path the neutrinos took, have not been properly summed. Nature’s Eugenie Reich has, one learns here, also written on this timing wrinkle.
• MSNBC Cosmic Log  – Alan Boyle : Faster-then-light neutrinos confirmed ; Loose use of the word ‘confirmed,’ but Boyle gets it right: not everyone is convinced. Results have not been repeated by others. So “not refuted” is the meaning.
• The Economist – Still faster than light ; The usual anonymous cleverness from Economist staff, and I learned something. In Britain a furor may be a furore, as in this story’s lede. Not only that, they say it funny: few-ror-ee. This writer also prefers supraluminal to superluminal. Same difference.
• Science 2.0 (blog) Sascha Vongehr: OPERA Confirms Fast Than Light Neutrinos And Indicates Superluminal Small Initial Jumps ; Whoah whoah whoah there. Hmm. I was joking around with wordplay on my personal theory. Now this post declares that one serious thought by people with credentials is that “the neutrinos do not travel with superluminal velocity all the way. They only ‘jump’ a small initial distance shorter than 20 meters..” But then it goes on to say one needs no wormholes, extra dimensions or other fancy dancing short cut. Oh. The author of this blog is, one learns, a physicist.
• Wired – Mark Brown: Faster-than-light neutrino results replicated ;
• … lots more

GRIST for the Mill: OPERA Collaboration ArXiv version 2 of report ;CERN Opera Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

One would expect that after lying for millions of years miles down in Antarctica’s gigantic ice sheet, any jagged mountains down there would get pretty radically smoothed over by the continent’s repeated glaciations and other erosive weather. So it’s been a mystery for years how a range some call the South Pole region’s “ghost alps” could still exist and look almost new. We’ve tracked news on this frozen landscape before. Now there’s an update.

In Nature, researchers with the British Antarctic Survey reveal they have looked and looked, and think they see a double-orogeny here. That means mountain building episode. It appears that the mountains did get ground down, some anyway, in an ancient glaciation preceding the current ice cap. Then rifts in the earth and the deep roots of the original range caused a new uplift which has survived the current episode of deep ice. Ergo, young-looking mountains in the middle of an old continent.

Stories:

• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Gamburtsev ‘ghost mountains mystery solved’; Amos gets a lot of space to explain it.
• National Geographic – Richard A. Lovett:  Antarctica’s “Ghost” Mountains Explained ;
  
• Reuters – Nina Chestney: “Alps under the ice” gives clues to global warming  ; Just a thought, but the global warming angle seems one of the lesser reasons this research found its way to Nature.
• Our Amazing Planet – Charles Q. Choi: Light Shed on Origin of Antarctica’s Buried Mountains ;
• Popular Mechanics – Stephanie Warren: How did Antarctica’s Mysterous Ice-Covered Mountains Get There? ;

Grist for the Mill: British Antarctic Survey Press Release, NSF Press Release;