Archeology is interesting in most cases, but it gets sublime – maybe because it’s so easy to identify with and so impressive to look at – when it comes to petroglyphs, petroliths, and other drawings on a wall. I don’t look at flint arrowheads or Assyrian pottery and imagine making such things. But a picture, sure. As the recent ScienceWriters2011 meeting closed in Flagstaff, the most memorable moment of the field trip was to see the figures that some of the original residents left limned into the desert varnish on the bottom of a Glen Canyon cliff (check it out here). So it’s no wonder that a little spot of news has hit paydirt in news media. In the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from Germany, the UK, and elsewhere report that new DNA analysis from the bones of ancient horses reveals – contrary to an earlier analysis – the gene patterns asssociated with spotted horses today were in some of their ancestors many thousands of years ago. A hypothesis that pastoral breeding created the spots seems dead – or at most it modified a pattern already in the wild.

Lots of outlets let this one out of the corral:

• ScienceNOW – Michael Balter: Cave Paintings Showed True Colors of Stone Age Horses ; Emphasizes that whle the oldtimers in Europe did paint spotted horses, they didn’t do it often.
• Guardian (UK, blog)  Jonathan Jones:  What DNA can’t tell us about the spotty horses ; I dunno what this writer’s problem is – the story seems to tell us that he was swept away first time and every time he’s seen some of the magnificent old works of art, and now he appears to be somehow offended that maybe this research robs the art of its magic. Or is it just me? CP Snow’s “two cultures” analysis may apply, and maybe this writer is in the science-phobic camp. It’s like he’s saying don’t try to explain it, for just to feel it is better. Reminds me of Yoda.
• NYTimes – Hillary Rosner: Spotted Horses in Cave Art Wern’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows ;
• AP – Alicia Chang: Cave painters were realists, DNA study finds ;
• BBC – Jennifer Carpenter : Ancient horses’ spotted history reflected in cave art ;
• LA Times – Eryn Brown: Ice age horse painters really did see sots, scientists say ;
• AFP : Cave Painters of ancient horses were realists: study ; Clearly, it’s convergent evolution. No, not the horses. This hed and the one at AP.
• Cosmos (Australia, filed from Cambridge, UK) Taylor Burns: Leopard print horse DNA sheds light on cave painting ;
• … Lots more..

Grist for the Mill: U. of York Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Did you, should you be another compulsive reader of popularized science journalism, find your heart also sinking just a little on seeing that John Markoff’s lead story of the nation’s top science section is about Charles Babbage and a machine he logically derived but never contrived? I am paid to read onward and hence did so, which readers generally should also have done to see for sure if the yawn had merit. Surprise! This story is not on his plans for the marvelous difference engine, which later researcher-hobbyists did create don’t we all know. Rather, it concerns an even more wondrous but never realized device, his analytical machine. A big project is now underway to build one, a far more challenging task for reasons the story spells out.  This I don’t recall reading about. Markoff takes readers right up to speed on the challenges of this incompletely imagined, mechanical logic-follower from what he calls the Age of Steam. The pic is better in higher def – click it or go to it here, and the NYT’s full version with caption is here. A perfectly satisfying story. The most interesting aspect is well-along. Markoff includes a long appreciation for Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. While Babbage may be the father of the digital calculating machine, Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron) sneaked her big brains to the fore in a time when ladies were not supposed to present themselves as among the intellectual elite. She was first to see the broad potential of such machines. She was, in short, the grandmistress of computer programming and hence, in a way, of the likes of the iPhone. She too is well enough known even today but probably not as well as she deserves.

Other Headlines to Note:

• Douglas Quenqua – For a Baby Okapi, Don’t Push Too Hard ; Fine job of natural history. Most striking to me is the photo of mom and tot. That’s in New York City? Says here it’s the Congo Gorilla Forest at the Bronx Zoo. There’s a huge mangrove or something there in the full-width image. Is that concrete or a real tree? Just curious.
• Henry Fountain: Restored: Fading Account From the Heart of Africa ; Mostly a history tale about David Livingston – carried along by the great technical lengths to which a team of old book restorers went to make visible the entries in a diary he kept up after his writing paper and proper ink ran out.
• Leslie Kaufman – After Years of Conflict, a New Dynamic in Wolf Country from Saturday, and today a blogpost How Is a Grizzly Bear Like a Wolf? ; Not from ScienceTimes, but the regular and on line sections. This duo serves as a model. First, the standard news story on Saturday was an expert, insightful account of political, business, and wildlife worries in the Northern Rockies. And today’s blog provides context and the reporter’s sense of where things are going now.
• Hilary Rosner: Spotted Horses in Cave Art Weren’t Just a Figment, DNA Shows ; Separate post today tracks this and other accounts of the news that Cro Magnon artists were not just winging it by torchlight. But why – as other outlets had examples- did the NYT  illus not include an ancient painting showing spotted horses?
• John Tierney: A Tool to Quit Smoking Has Some Unlikely Critics ; Methinks Tierney overdoes the political-temperament angle here. Sure, liberals and conservatives display patterns of typical behavior that can be statistically demonstrated. But there is danger in trying to so neatly sort behaviors and ring bells when the scatter has somebody acting like their big, fuzzy category might seem to discourage. He should’a stuck to facts about health, epidemiology,efficacy, risks, benefits, and such as that.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section ;

 - Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) El Mundo’s renowned health section has a special site on Sexual Health. We don’t know of any similar section in the main Spanish speaking newspapers. The health editor of El Mundo presents it as rigorous and scientific information about sexual medical conditions and treatments. He also says it’s going to avoid kinky content. For the moment they have reported about two surveys of adolescents and university students n  Spain about their sexual behavior, and a paper published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine discussing simultaneous orgasms. There is also a story about the increase of STDs due to declining fear of HIV and AIDS. And a great multimedia content about erectile dysfunction. Section’s stories were among the top ten most read at elmundo.es over the whole weekend.  

El Mundo acaba de inaugurar un espacio de salud sexual dentro de su sección de salud. Ya era el medio de comunicación que más a menudo incluía investigaciones científicas relacionadas con la sexualidad. Pero con este espacio se pueden convertir en una referencia. Entre los grandes medios de comunicación masivos, desconocemos la existencia de un espacio específico para la ciencia y la salud del sexo.

Como el director de la sección de salud de El Mundo J. L de la Serna anuncia en un video blog, ya está universalmente reconocido que la sexualidad es un componente esencial de la salud, pero en muchos aspectos ha estado relegado por perjuicios. De la Serna explica que obviarán el morbo pero buscarán historias humanas, y que su principal objetivo es informar con rigor, ciencia y amenidad sobre algo tan trascendental en nuestra vida como la sexualidad.

Para garantizar esta aproximación médica y científica a la información sobre sexualidad, la sección está dirigida por el urólogo Juan Ignacio Martínez-Salamanca, que además responderá semanalmente las preguntas de los lectores en un videoblog.

Sobre los primeros contenidos, lo más destacable es que han estado constantemente entre las 10 noticias más leídas de la web de El Mundo. Una de las más exitosas fue la nota de Patricia Matey “Te invito a unas copas porque quiero sexo”. Esta nota refleja una de las metodologías científicas para bordar aspectos de comportamiento sexual: las encuestas. En concreta esta es una consulta a universitarios españoles reflejando que el 28% de los chicos invita a alcohol como medio para intentar conseguir relaciones sexuales. No vemos tan obvia la relación que el artículo establece entre esto y los problemas de agresiones sexuales y alcoholismo. Pero nota interesante. La misma metodología de encuestas está detrás de la nota de P. Matey “Las chicas tienen el mando”, explicando que las adolescentes españolas no sienten la presión o “obligación” que sí sentían sus madres o abuelas a consentir relaciones sexuales con sus parejas cuando éstas lo solicitaban. La interpretación de los datos tiene una gran carga de opinión por los especialistas.

Ambos estudios son de ámbito local, y no tan trascendentes en el campo de la sexología. Pero Patricia Matey repite con “La búsqueda del orgasmo simultáneo”, citando un estudio del Journal of Sexual Medicine, la principal revista científica del campo. Lo que Patricia destaca del estudio es que el 17% de mujeres participantes nunca llegaron al orgasmo vaginalmente, y que el orgasmo simultáneo sí resulta más satisfactorio y refuerza los vínculos. Peor no es ni mucho menos tan frecuente.

Vemos también una nota sobre  el aumento de las enfermedades de transmisión sexual debido a la mayor despreocupación por el éxito de los antiretovirales. Pero queremos destacar el esfuerzo divulgativo del soporte multimedia sobre la disfunción eréctil, firmado por Gracia Pablos. El diseño es clarísimo, y la información muy directa e informativa. Es contenido muy básico. Pero sorprende lo desconocido que resulta para tantos hombres y mujeres. Claramente en temas de salud sexual estamos infrainformados. El espacio de El Mundo sin duda cumplirá una gran función. Lo seguiremos.

- Pere Estupinyà   

National Geographic to be sure is, and always has been, a publication with global reach and a penchant for the most remote datelines possible. Nonetheless here’s a salute for reporting from Africa a topic not often seen in any sort of US press: alternative energy in developing countries.

Freelance writer Bolanle Omisore datelines it Lagos, Nigeria but she spent most of her time reporting from just west of the city, out in Lagos Lagoon. She describes, from that microcosm, the way things are in a country with great natural resources and considerable wealth, but where most of the people are out of reach of the nation’s electrical grid. Some are getting solar power – but many of those project languish and break down not long after completion. And a few others do magnificently well.

Well done, Nat’l Geo and the agencies that are credited with helping make the assignment possible, the Ford Foundation and the International Center for Journalists. Of some interest, the NG page with this story also has a logo and “sponsored by” sign from Shell Oil. Among the story’s main, initial points is that the struggling village that is the story’s focus sits just a short  way from the port through which its oil is exported, and into which come the goods purchased the nation’s elite. Omisore writes of the people that have been left behind.

Not recalling seeing that byline before, a quick search led to a short bio of Ms. Omisore. The name leads one to suspect she’s African, and while maybe she is, it is not necessarily so. She also is out of Howard University and NYU, is primarily a video journalist, and this print article shows she can hit to all fields. One hopes she keeps environmental reporting in her portfolio.

- Charlie Petit

The Miller-McCune magazine (its about page) has out today from writer Jim Morrison an enterprising long account from the Alligator River Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. Some of us have read about this place before because of its program to save red wolves, and also because the low-lying area is vulnerable to erosion and to its main enabler, sea level rise. One learns here a further discouraging word from a grand old man of coastal erosion science, Orrin Pilkey of Duke U – in just one century, sea level seven feet higher than now. Maybe it won’t be that much, but the people in charge are making aggressive plans to be ready, one learns from this extensively reported feature story.

What is left of mainstream media in the US has largely soured on big global warming stories. One reason is that contrarians have many publications cowed, and another is that the basic news has been out for a long time and editors are bored.  There are exceptions, such as when something really new comes along like the recent record increase in atmospheric CO2 levels, or monster new losses of floating sea ice near the poles. But there is more to do than repeat the old news that climate change is real and is humankind’s doing and that it poses enormous peril.What to do?  One can tackle feature stories such as this, telling readers things they have not heard before – while reinforcing the forecast one hears again and again from the world’s top scientific societies.

- Charlie Petit

The sour economy and forced budget cuts may mean a halt, and soon, to NASA’s decades-long habit of dispatching probes to Mars every two years or so. The Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag got an earful after sitting down with NASA bosses, researchers, and various academic Mars researchers. The immediate news is that the US space agency is markedly reluctant to commit. Actually, it already did commit, so this is more of a betrayal of European Space Agency colleagues after telling them two years ago that the US would help plan and pay for related missions in 2016 and 2018. They are part of a stepwise program aiming to return of samples, sometime after 2020, from the red planet for analysis in Earth laboratories. The near-sacred Webb Space Telescope project plus a move to build a new generation of deep-space, human exploration vehicles are soaking up money, it says here, while Congress angles toward reducing the space budget by billions of dollars. Already, after first saying it would provide an Atlas rocket for the 2016 mission, NASA changed its mind. The Europeans are now seeking a Russian ride.

Updates from the past: While the Post story moves the ball forward vividly with its depiction of the sour feelings among US researchers, several readers gently nudged the tracker to wit: the bones of this news have been around. Examples:

• NatureNews (Oct 14) Ron Cowen: Europe looks to Russia after NASA fall short on ExoMars ;
• Universe Today (Oct 1) Jason Rhian: ESA’s ExoMars Mission in Jeopardy ;
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Russia asked to joint ExoMars project ;
• Spacenews.com (Sept 30) Peter B. de Selding: NASA Cannot Launch 2016 ExoMars Orbiter ; and on Oct 13: ESA Formally Invites Roscosmos To Join ExoMars Mission as Full-fledged Partner ;

Grist for the Mill: ESA Aurora Program ;

Related News: Meanwhile, an old program is thinking of Mars, or at least its moon Phobos. In Cyrillic, this project name surely looks better: Phobos-Grunt ;

• AFP – Stuart Williams: Russia aims for first conquest of Mars ; Launch is set for tomorrow. Also on board, a piggy backing Chinese satellite that will be ejected into orbit of Mars, while the main ship is to retrieve a piece of its larger moon.
• Space Review – Douglas Messier: Will Russia end its curse at Mars? ;
• Scientific American – John Matson: Planetary Scientists Hope to Bring Back Mars Moondust ;

**UPDATE: The Great Galactic Ghoul that devours space probes to Mars, especially ones with Cyrillic lettering in their innards, may be ba-a-a-ck.

• AP (Nov 9) Vladimir Isachenkov: Russians desperately try to  save Mars moon probe ; One is unsure it’s a big deal, in terms of risk on the ground, that it has seven tons of fuel on board and looks plausibly headed for a flaming return to Earth. Could be wrong. This piece certainly does not, however, put Russia’s attempted interplanetary renaissance in a good light in reciting the historic program’s dismal history at targeting Mars.
• Reuters (Nov 9) Alissa de Carbonnel: Russian spacecraft fails to head for Mars moon ;

- Charlie Petit

News outlets in US regional markets have long since retired most of the science writers they once had, if any. Thus other than from a few national or international agencies coverage of the weekend’s flurry of moderate to small earthquake’s in Oklahoma dealt mainly with broken dishes and chimneys. It is news mainly because the state is within the North American craton, a solid hunk of very old, worn down and nearly seamless, crystalline crust. It is not very often host to such things.

By the way, in Grist below is the best plain language semi-technical account of what happened, from the UC Berkeley Seismology Lab’s seismoblog, written as a public service by local science writer Horst Rademacher.

Here are some that tried to say something geologically informative:

• LA Times – Molly Hennessy-Fiske: Oklahoma earthquake:More aftershocks, no major  damage reported ; Seismologists are quoted, the Oklahoma Geological Survey is consulted, ditto USGS, and seismometers mentioned.
• AP – Justin Juozapavicius, Ken Miller, Alicia Chang: : Scientists puzzled by recent seismic activity after biggest earthquake in Oklahoma history ; Mostly about broken crockery, but has USGS experts’ opinions, and ackowledges the some-what plausibly well grounded suspicion that perhaps natural gas fracking is involved. A lot of blogs jumped on that angle, spurred one suspects, and acknowleded in some posts, by the AP’s more carefully couched reporting;
• CNN - Oklahoma’s largest quake in decades buckles highway; rattles residents ;
• NewsOK/Oklahoman – Matt Dinger, Tiffany Gibson: Oklahoma’s seismic activity may not be over, experts say ;
• NYTimes – Sarah Maslin Nir: For a Weekend, Oklahoma is Earthquake Country ; Again, a decent check with seismologists. They are not sure what is happening, but they say so with authority and contextual asides.

*UPDATEs : Hardly had I filed the day’s post than this hit the wire. The message- These were ordinary quakes in a part of the country where they happen only occasionally. But they happen. And don’t blame our fossil fuel appetite for this interruption of nature’s routine.

• AP – Seth Borenfeld: Experts: Okla. quakes too powerful to be man-made ;

And along came more..

• Washington Post / Capital Weather Gang – Jason Samenow: Oklahoma earthquake: just one of state’s several record-setting natural events in 2011 ; Looks like all facts, but it’d have been better if it acknowledged that weather and seismic activity, except perhaps for rare convergences I can’t at the moment imagine, have no connection to one another.
• The WaPost item, just above, tips hat to this: Minneapolis Star Tribune / OnWeather – Paul Douglas: First Snow?, a collection of quick weather bits including a remarkable image by Doppler Radar (YouTube version) showing swarms of bugs and flocks of birds rising into the air after the Oklahoma 5.6 shaker.

Grist for the Mill:

UC Berkeley Seismological Lab SeismoBlog ; US Geological Survey Earthquake Hazards Program ; Oklahoma State Geological Survey Report on Hydraulic Fracturing and Earthquakes ;

*UPDATE: UC Berkeley SeismoBlog (Nov 9) explains why Oklahoma’s quake was felt at greater distances than similar quakes in California. Our rocks have shock absorbers in them (ie lots of other faults). Oklahoma is on a rigid hunk of plate that rings like a bell.

- Charlie Petit

A large rock is coming by tonight (Correction,TOMORROW night). The AP‘s Marcia Dunn puts reassurance in her nearish-miss asteroid story at least three times. (..’scientists say not to worry. It won’t hit’…’100 percent confident that this is not a threat’…’both the Earth and moon are safe ‘this time” ..), and she manages to then inject a little science involving radar observations of this thing big as an aircraft carrier, the faint threat per year of anything so large or larger hitting us and with the soonest plausible one, excluding long-period comets, not for more than 20 years and it’s a longshot. Asteroid-landing astronaut missions come up. Darned near perfect, even if nearly all the info is in NASA and Purdue U. press releases. She did call Don Yeomans of JPL, and Jay Melosh at Purdue University, so I’m not suggesting any laziness of approach.This asteroid has been on the schedule that asteroid specialists keep, its orbit well charted years in advance. So, to such experts, everything is as expected.

If you wish minor thrill entertainment, check on line the asteroid impact scenario calculator that Purdue and Imperial College London sponsor. Dunn includes the link with the story she filed. Plug in some parameters and learn what would probably happen.  I discovered that if a one-mile-wide porous rock asteroid struck at 30 km per second at a 45 degree angle in 500 feet of water and 1000 km away from me, I’d probably be just fine unless I’m on the beach when a modest tsunami pours in.

The news got wide pickup, mostly as calmly expressed as Dunn’s. Personally, while not by disposition enthusiastic about human expeditions to anywhere off Earth on taxpayer money, the idea of an asteroid landing for planetary protection contingency reasons makes a lot of sense.

Other stories

•  Mail (UK) Ted Thornhill: The end of the world might not be that bad, as new model predicts fallout from meteorite strike ;Criticism is of the headline, and not much even there, for this is an interesting story free of egregious tabloid operatics. To wit, meteorite’s are what are left on or in Earth’s crust after a meteoroid strikes. Hmm, if the debris and ejecta that make a second impact include pieces of the original body, those are meteorites strikes I suppose. The story is mostly about one German team’s refinement of calculations of the scale of catastrophe that a monster asteroid might wreak.
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Huge asteroid headed for close encounter with Earth ; “Huge” doesn’t seem to leave much room for adjectival escalation if a genuinely huge one comes near. It’s big, that would have sufficed. As did Dunn, Klotz covers the basics well and with no histrionics.

Millennium Dome

A pause for a solid geometry lesson, and comment on failure of reporters, including me until I’d read this news several times, to think things through -  even if they ARE seeing them in a press release. Both the NASA and Purdue releases compare this rock, named 2005 YU55, to an aircraft carrier in size. Everything I’ve read so far uses the same unit: 1.0 aircraft carrier – a sort of stick about 1000 feet long. Also, somewhere in here, it is declared that it is roughly spherical. Is a beach ball about the size of, oh, a bowling pin? Is your average NFL wide receiver the same size as the average interior lineman even if each is six feet tall? Is a grizzly bear the same size as an ostrich? Size refers to width, length, width the other way (no height in space, y’know) and so on. It is an expression of volume. This ball of rock is far larger than any aircraft carrier. It’s a bit larger than the Superdome but more like London’s Millennium Dome if they continued into the ground, or something else roundish to evoke the right image. Icebergs can be the size of Rhode Island, as both are essentially two-dimensional. This is no ship. It’s a rock ball. Does all this matter? No, not much. Except for the fact of the matter.

•   Space.com – Tariq Malik: Giant asteroid coming our way … but don’t panic ;  Also filing for space.com, Mike Wall: Deflecting Killer Asteroids Away From Earth, How We Could Do It.
•  USA Today – Dan Vergano: Asteroid 2005 YU55 will zip by Earth next week ; Nice, this is a close encounter of the harmless kind, he writes. (still, it’s an aircraft carrier…)
• KQED Quest blog – Ben Burress: Asteroid 2005 YU55 Scores! ; Oh whew. Ben says it’s 1,300 feet across, roughly spherical, and compares it to … wait for it …. a football stadium, including the parking lot. He even has a point-after-touchdown and goal posts simile.
• CBC Quirks and Quarks – Bob McDonald: Asteroid 2005 YU55 : Another close call for Earth ; Another broadcaster nails the size, by evading simile altogether. It’s a sphere 400 meters wide. That’s it.
• Guardian (UK) Ian Sample: Asteroid YU55 on course for close encounter with Earth ; No aircraft carrier here either.
• INS via Hindustan Times: Closest encounter by asteroid in 35 years ; A true way, technically, to express the size. It is “larger than an aircraft carrier.” Indeed .
• SF Chronicle – David Perlman : Asteroid headed our way will miss by thi-i-i-is much ; Perlman eschews ships, says it’s the size of four city blocks. Better – it evokes the size of the cross section ann that’s okay. The world’s seniorest science writer also does a better job than most explaining the asteroid’s discovery history and tells readers of a local, public observatory that will be tracking the thing this evening (correcton, TOMORROW evening).
• …much  more out there…

Grist for the Mill: NASA JPL Press Release ; Purdue U. Press Release ;

If you’re in the mood for something crazed..

• The Intel Hub: Corporate Media Claims YU55 Has NO Chance of Hitting Earth or Moon as NASA Coverup Continues ; How ignorant! Media is plural. It takes a plural verb form. Sheesh.

- Charlie Petit

A well-reported and constructed feature story from a small magazine has been brought to our attention. The publication, The Tyee in British Columbia, has a feature from science writer Jude Isabella on the unappreciated, once immensely huge shoals of herring that until recent decades were mainstays of many Pacific Northwest and Alaskan communities. One has heard of herring shortages already, and has read laments that purse seiners and others have scooped them toward collapse world wide. I think but am not sure that they are or at least were a significant prey for the humpback whales that frequent the Inside Passage from Seattle to Juneau. But now I know a great deal more.

Isabella, also an anthropology grad student at the University of Victoria, provides heavy detail and bright color on these fish, ones she declares confidently are far more important to the region, both ecologically and culturally over the course of history, than the far more iconic salmon. Not that she’s not a salmon fan, for she’s working on a book about them. But she makes a case that herring need respect too. By the way, Ms. Isabella is also managing editor of a Victoria-based science publication: Yes Magazine. It’s aimed at school kids.

- Charlie Petit

As if things weren’t frightening enough for those of us worried climate is going to pot and humanity’s collective intelligence is vastly ovverrated, now this. Word broke yesterday that the latest figures on atmospheric carbon dioxide have punched right past the worst case scenarios from scientists who probably thought global decision makers would have stood up by now and ordered industrialists to cut back on fossil fuels already.

The story, nearly as I can tell, ran first on AP early yesterday afternoon in the eastern US, from Seth Borenstein. His lead gets the guts of the story – the jump in emissions now underway is the biggest on record and it reveals how feeble are efforts to do anything about it. One must add that it’s not as though nothing has been done. Only that the something that it would take to stabilize things is nowhere in sight. Up by six percent in 2010 over the previous year. He also notes that a few countries, developed ones that ratified the Kyoto Protocol agreement, have eased their emissions down. The US did not ratify, has not eased. Borenstein tells ksjtracker that, in getting ahead on this story, he first noticed that the customary CO2 ledger item from the Oak Ridge National Lab had not yet been published. He went looking for it. The paper that is the usual vehicle for its going public, he learned, is in limbo at a journal. But the lab had quietly posted the figures on its site.Then he called around and found out what a few experts think. One says this is a monster. This is good beat reporting.

Nobody else in mainstream media seems to have picked up on it. A few bloggers however have.

• Climate Progress- Joe Romm: Biggest Jump Ever in Global Warming POllution in 2010, Chinese
  CO2 Emissions Now Exceed U.S.’s by 50% ;
• The Energy Collective – Tyler Hamilton: Global CO2 Emissions Take a “Monster”  Jump in 2010 Gue To Increases in China, US. ; Source of image up right, apparently prepared prior to this news and off projections.

Grist for the Mill: Oak Ridge National Lab. CO2 Info Center ;

-Charlie Petit

A solar storm with a large, roiling dark sunspot at its root got some attention in the news today after it rolled into view on the rotating sun (that sparkly spot toward the upper left of the righthand pic). At Wired Adam Mann calls it (or his editor does) a behemoth in the headline, at AP Seth Borenstein labels it a benevolent monster (it kindly aimed its eruption column in another direction than Earthward), and at Universe Today Nancy Atkinson fills readers in a bit on the hefty X-class flare that shot out of this ‘bad boy’ among solar active regions.

  There really is not much more to say about this latest sign that the sun seems to be easing back from its threat of recent years to go into a profound and long spotless funk. That would be the sort of thing that can slightly dim sunlight and cool the Earth (sunspots, in visible light, are dark, but as the image shows a lot of energy comes out and, even in visible light, the overall sun is brighter when it has spots on it. I think.)

Te pictures are terrific. Bigger headlines will come if this region fires off another big one when it comes around farther and aims in our direction.

Grist for the Mill: NASA Solar Dynamics Observatory site.

- Charlie Petit

A few weeks ago a highly speculative spot of news circulated widely. It seems a researcher made public his notion that certain arrangements of fossilized vertebra from extinct marine reptiles in old ocean sediments imply that the seas once housed monster octopi or squid or something else resembling the mythical kraken. Evidence:  the alignment of the vertebra looked sort of like sucker-lined tentacles, and hence could maybe have been the work of krakens making self portraits on their porches. That’s right. Home-decorating cephalopods with an artist’s grandiose eye.

We posted on the news here at ksjtracker, but didn’t think much about it except that, and I wish I’d phrased it this way, the news seems as insubstantial as a kraken’s skeleton – which is to say there were probably no krakens and if there were, they probably had no skeletons. Hmm, that’s a discovery: a double negative that does not cancel itself.

Well, it comes up again this week,  at the Philadelphia Inquirer,  in a discouraging and insight-sharing blog post by wise head and veteran science journalist Faye Flam. The apt hed: Kraken Scandal Reveals the Real Problem With Science Journalism.

- Charlie Petit