A week or so ago at a conference in California some bigshots of varied flavor got to talking on stage about climate change, politics, and space travel. One of them suggested, heh heh hardy har, launching inconveniently obstructionist folks into orbit, one-way. Then Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, got in on the laffs with a comment maybe and maybe not implying he’d happily send to interplanetary space a few people who make his life tougher too.

Of interest is how Grist, and its reporter Mark Hertsgaard, wrote this up. And then, under fire by various bloggers, fairly elaborately corrected it.

Related blogs:

• Center for Environmental Journalism blog – Tom Yulsman: Who should be rocketed into space? Yulsman thinks the correx at Grist do not go far enough.
• NYTimes DotEarth Blog – Andrew C. Revkin: Climate Panel Needs to Follow its Own Advice ; Revkin believes Pachauri has gotten excessively and openly policy-partisan to fit his job description at the IPCC.

Much ado about nearly nothing, methinks. Sort of like taking seriously the whining among climate scientists in their emails about the mischievous doubters who barraged them with requests for their data, while at the same time being in alliance with people who called those same scientists frauds and liars who distort their data on purpose for grant money. Who wouldn’t mumble a few unkind things in such circumstance?  Ditto for a few gents on stage giggling with one another. But it’s instructive reading.

- Charlie Petit

The saving of the California condor was big news a few decades ago, when it looked near-certain that these huge scavengers, which evolved in the Pleistocene when there was serious carrion on which to feed – mammoths and the occasional whales on the beach. Today they are flying and not only in Southern California where the first captive birds were reintroduced before their wild cousins all disappeared. They live along the Big Sur coast and range as far north as the San Francisco Bay Area.

And even farther out from what looked so recently like their last redoubts before their demise. New Scientist‘s Zoe Corbyn has a report from Arizona, and a reference to their return a few years ago to long-ago haunts in Mexico. Perhaps, some day, they’ll come off the endangered species list .Hmm. Did you know that 10,000 years ago they lived on the East Coast too?

Grist for the Mill: Ventana Wilderness Society condor page ; Nat’l Park Service Grand Canyon condors ; California Condor Mexican Wilderness Chick ;

- Charlie Petit

A person can get into a whole lot of trouble by combining assumption with confusion, and swallowing a stupid pill. Yesterday, late in the morning here in California, I  expected and then saw a wave of stories arrive as NASA announced discovery of two planets of a distant star, each roughly the size of Earth. An embargo had lapsed, springing them. The planets as expected are no way livable. They would have long-since roasted any possibility for life into cinders. But the worlds are proof that the Kepler space telescope, a giant and very sensitive light meter, can detect the minute dimming of a star should so small a planet cross its face. That’s its purpose, and after finding scads of bigger planets it finally had a few of the size it was built to get. These ones zip around their sun in days or a few weeks, so often that Kepler gang could sum data from many passages – but the success indicates that the broader, lazier orbits of such planets farther from their stars, out where oceans may shimmer under blue skies, should eventually arise from the noise of Kepler’s ridiculously immense data bank.

Where was I? Oh yes, confusion + assumption etc. (ie, a lapse of diligence). I saw the first batch and went postal, as in berserker blogposting mode. The stories were leaving out the best part of the story! Twenty minutes or more passed as I furiously read the first stories, amazed at their blunders, and trotted out some appropriate, flabbergasted prose. Those of you out there privy to embargoed news notices may suspect already what had happened. I’d read the advance stuff, quickly, on OTHER interesting-sized planets and not paid attention to exactly when they’d come off embargo. I’d read the  paper itself, and was excited by it.  I’d read that NASA was hosting an important exoplanet teleconference for reporters yesterday. And assumed it had to be the same ones. So when the news came, I had my expectation filters rigged for utter self-delusion.

I’ll append, this morning after that embargo lapses, some of those stories on news that I thought I was getting yesterday. It finally dawned on me that I was the one walking along naked in the parade and not knowing it. As  yesterday’s deadline for the day’s postings pressed my brain to a frenzied craze, I pulled out of my dive at the last moment. Gadzooks. I went and told Mrs. Tracker I darned near revealed to readers myself in full-throated idiot mode.

One wonders why NASA held the press conference when it did, right on the eve of another announcement, of which it was surely aware, of two more Earth-sized worlds. Surely not to ambush that second one, keep the first rush of heady excitement for itself? No, that’s not it. Both are discoveries off Kepler data. Both are in Nature – but with different embargoes and by one measly day. Why not coordinate the news (or, as some might murmer, why not a free-for-all, why do some journals and other gate-keepers get away with the embargo system in the first place)? Any of these four planets is enough to prove Kepler’s got the chops to find a real second-Earth out there, warm but not hot, rocky but not huge, wet but not wholly flooded, airy and maybe with lots of O2 and not choked under thick, Neptunian gas.

1) The Two Terrestrial-scale Planets that Kepler revealed and may once have been in their sunlike star’s habitable zone stories:

• NYTimes – Dennis Overbye: Two Earth-Size Planets Are Discovered ; A holiday gift, he calls this news. Note also the correction at the end. It appears that the Times accidentally put an illus for the second, still-embargoed set of planets into this one (thank you Nadia Drake at ScienceNews for seeing the skinback and sending a tip our way).
• AP – Malcolm Ritter: 2 Earth-size planets spotted around distant star ; Uses the right one-word quote from one author to describe the star Kepler 20s’s overall system of alternating gas giant and rocky Earthish worlds: “Crazy.”
• Reuters – Ian Simpson: NASA finds Earth-size planets outside solar system ;
• Nature.com – Eric Hand: Kepler discovers first Earth-sized exoplanets ; A major milestone indeed, he writes. This headline also raises a style question. Exoplanet as a word has been around for a long time, and does the job. How and why did the clunkier term extrasolar planet come into use over the last ten or 15 years? Is exoplanet making a comeback in jargon-land?
• LA Times – Eryn Brown: Two Earth-sized planets found orbiting another star ;
• Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts: First Earth-size planet found around distant star – in a bizarre solar system ; Pete writes it up swell, but the hed raises a question. If we have exoplanets to denote things outside the solar system, why not a term for exo-solar systems? Stellar system is taken. But the root word ‘sol’ rather narrows solar system’s most logical etymological application.
• Telegraph: Nasa detect Earth’s ‘twin’ Kepler 20f orbiting star; Hed doesn’t mean much – what does ‘twin’ mean in quotes? That usually means so-called. Who called it a twin? Not the story, which is a brief and decent, if unambitious rewrite of the handouts.
• Science News – Nadia Drake: First Earth-sized planets netted ;
• PC World/Geektech – Elizabeth Fish: Kepler Finds Earth-Sized Planets, But These Aren’t Earth’s Twins ; And that is what the previous bullet’s hed means. The quotes denote not really. Funny, isn’t it, how many advertisements put quotes around terms they wish to emphasize and exalt, not realizing such marks are formal warnings to readers not to necessary believe what’s inside.
• Scientific American – John Matson: It’s a Small World: Kepler Spacecraft Discovers First Known Earth-Size Exoplanets ;
• The Guardian – Alok Jha – Two new planets are most Earth-like ever seen – but hot as hell ; That’s a plain, perfect hed.
• Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Big Question for 2012: Will We Find Earth 2.0? ; Quick and forward looking story that dwells first on this discovery’s context – and why there is much more sleuthing ahead for the Kepler gang. Explained here also is why that team may have big things to reveal in the coming year.
• Space.com – Mike Wall: First True ‘Alien Earth’ May Be Found in 2012 ; Similar in spirit to immedieately preceding piece.
• AFP via The Australian: Scientist find two Earth-sized planets with NASA Kepler space telescope ;
• BBC – Pallab Ghosh: First Earth-like planets spotted ;
• Space.com – Clara Moskowitz: Two Earthsize planets spotted around distant star ;
• Time Magazine -Michael D. Lemonick: The Really, Truly, Newest, Earthiest Planets Yet – Until the Next Ones ; So complete that he even explains the nomenclature for labeling these worlds.

A story, or video, or media mashup, or talkathon, or gabfest, or something interesting

• Universe Today – Frazer Cain: Discovery of Earth-Sized Worlds – Google+Hangout ; Where UT editor and boss sits and talks via Skype or other VIP video protocol and chats with Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait, MSNBC’s Cosmic Log man Alan Boyle, and his own team member, reporter Nancy Atkinson.

Grist for the Mill:

Nature Abstract ; Harvard-Smithsonian Ctr. for Astrophysics Press Release ; MIT Press Release ; NASA -Ames Press Release ; San Jose State U. Press Release ;

2) Stories on the two sort-of terrestrial-type planets that once orbited in an extraordinarily tough endo-stellar neighborhood and lived to tell their tale ;

We have one already (at about noon Eastern), an apparent embargo breaker, below. More Coming up, pending embargo lapse and depending on whether much coverage of this occurs after yesterday’s exoplanet splash. To my mind, this is the far more interesting story – that a Kepler team, looking through data to discern the internal structure of a star that not so long ago went through a Red Giant phase and has shrunk back down, but not looking for planets, found some anyway. The worlds seem to be the blasted innards of one-giant planets. The swollen star’s tenuous outer atmosphere rose to engulf them. They spend thousands or more likely,many  millions of years in there, spiralling closer while losing their atmospheres and outer layers. What’s left is not much more than a scorched core – and each is a bit smaller than Earth. The first lot above in this post are interesting mainly because they point the way to discovery of even better things, something with a long list of Earth-like specs. They are news but frustrating news – their news  merit lies in what they do not have and we’d prefer in our Earth-centric way that they did. But these second two, they are amazing in themselves.

• Christian Science Monitor (filed yesterday) Pete Spotts: What will happen after sun vaporizes Earth? Scorched planets hold clues. This spread a bit further, picked up by the Alaska Dispatch. Maybe Spotts, as was I, got all turned around and saw planets and embargoes everywhere and conflated the whole mess – and filed on what he had in hand. Then also did the story that officially broke yesterday, too.

Late Addition: Post-embargo stories:

• Ars technica – John Timmer: Remains of gas giants, swallowed by red giant star, now orbit as small planets ;
• Space.com – Mike Wall: Hard-to-Kill Alien Planets survive Dying Star’s Last Gasp ; Actually, the stars may be in terminal decline but it’s still there, gasping. The story itself is fine, and delineates what astrophysicists will consider the key new bit of science here. These planets, in their close and for a time internal orbits of the star, radically affects the star’s evolution and contributed to its loss of mass to interstellar space.
• BBC – Jonathan Amos: Newly found planets are ‘roasted remains’ ;
• UK Press Association: Scientists study burned-out planets ;
• Bloomberg – Elizabeth Lopatto: Red Giant Stars May Be Shaped by Jupiter-Size Planets, Research Shows ;
• Mail (UK) Ted Thornhill: Burned-out planets offer vision of how Earth will die (in five billion years time) ; Whoop hooray. The Mail, often prone to, uh, hyperenthusiasm in covering news with embellishment, not only gets this story pretty well straight, but acknowledges in a few last lines that yes dear readers you may have already heard something about Earthish planets, and that these make four for the week.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Planets May Have Survived Star’s Death ; She finds an outside source with another hypothesis for explaining how these planets could exist inside what had been the star’s border.
• Science News – Nadia Drake: Toasty planets circle stellar heart ; Some, finds Ms. Drake, are skeptical of the interpretation that the Letter to Nature presents.

Grist for the Mill: U. Arizona Press Release (which says embargoed, but this embargo was blown yesterday), Iowa State U. Press Release ;

Related News, Red Giant Department, + Bonus Hypothesis born of ignorance:

University of Sydney Press Release: Red giants reveal sun’s future ; Yet another Kepler-photometry astroseismology story, with no planets accidentally discovered but also reported, a few weeks ago, in Nature. This press release says that two astronomers infer that the interiors of red giants spin much faster than their outer envelopes. Well, here’s your tracker brainstorm. If fast-spinning cores of such stars can, maybe via magnetic entrainment of plasma, transfer some of the core’s angular momentum to the outer envelope, then maybe any planets that get engulfed out there – and conveniently approaching in the ecliptic plane – would  find themselves in a plasma that is nearly co-rotated to orbital speed. Ergo, hardly any headwind. And that could prolong their lives inside the star, perhaps enough to explain how their blasted remains could reemerge a billion years later.

Would somebody please knit all this news into one comprehensive story?

- Charlie Petit

Marshall Allen at ProPublica has written a heartbreaking story about a woman whose husband died suddenly and mysteriously in a hospital. An autopsy failed to determine the cause of death, and the case has been tied up in litigation for years.

It’s a good story, but what I’m interested in here is an innovation that ProPublica developed for this story–something called Explore Sources. It allows a reader to click on any highlighted portion of the story to see a small pop-up with the original document that supports that highlighted section.

For example, Allen writes, near the top of the story, “…at about 5 a.m., a phlebotomist entered Jerry’s room to draw blood and found him lying across the bottom of his bed…” If you read the story with “Explore Sources” turned off, you don’t see anything unusual. But if you go to the top of the story and click “Explore Sources: ON,” you see yellow highlights throughout the story. In this sentence, the words “found him” are highlighted. Click on them, and you see a pop-up with an excerpt from a legal document with testimony about how the body was found.

Further, if you click on the pop-up, you go to the entire legal document. Or you can simply close it and keep reading.

Al Shaw, a ProPublica applications developer, explains on ProPublica’s Nerd Blog how he did it. Allen had uploaded 64 documents that he used for the story to DocumentCloud, where they could be annotated and accessed online. He annotated the sections he was using, and was able to link them to appropriate parts of the story. This involved a lot of programming and the cooperation of DocumentCloud (another innovation you should take a look at).

Explore Sources is a fascinating experiment, and I’m all for experiments. But I’m not sure Allen and Shaw have hit on the right formula yet. Reading the story, I felt a bit like a fact-checker. I trust that ProPublica does a good job of checking facts, and I’m not sure I need to see the original source for everything in the story. If I were a competing news organization trying to match the story, this would be a huge help. But I don’t think that’s what ProPublica had in mind. And much the same kind of thing is done with links, although, as ProPublica points out, links take readers away from the story.

I would like to have Explore Sources for what I think are questionable stories, but the writers of such stories are not likely to be eager to show where they got their “facts.”

But Allen and Shaw are on to something here. I’d love to see them try it with a story that relies on scientific documents, of the kind that many of us deal in every day. And I’d like to see them make Explore Sources available to others, if that’s technically possible without a lot of programming.

I consider Explore Sources to be a work in progress. And I’m eager to see where it leads.

- Paul Raeburn

How’d I miss this most stunning, mystifying, and enigmatic archeology until now? Just not reading the right magazines, I suppose. I finally learned of it a few days ago. The last issue of the New Yorker for 2011 carried in it a story called simply The Sanctuary, by Elif Batuman. (To read it on line, alas but so it goes, you may need to pay.) She recently traveled to Anatolia in Turkey. Near the city of Urfa and not far north of the border with Syria she climbed a hill where archeology teams sweated at pulling dirt away from artifacts. And what artifacts they are. Perhaps 11,500 years old they are, and tall handsome things to boot. These monuments of stone, some reaching 16 feet high, are perhaps akin to the stelae in ancient Mayan cities but have no writing. Carvings of animals and strange geometric designs adorn them. Hardly crude, they are confident, polished works by crafters who clearly had trained in a highly refined form of art.

Go back a few phrases and ponder that date. 11,500 years. That’s early neolithic. That predates known cities. It predates organized agriculture. The closest analogy to this place, Stonehenge, was made less than half as far back as this place’s birth. That was a time of hunter-gatherers. This article on it has a dizzy structure, appropriate for a dizzying topic. Batuman leaps about, from the deep implications of the place to the practical realities of going there to see it first hand, back and forth, present to deep past, she dashes up to the mystery and falls back, up and back. She writes:

Because the bas-reliefs of Göbeckli Tepe, unlike the cave paintings of the Upper Paleolithic, offer no picture of daily life – no hunting scenes, and very few of the aurochs, gazelles, and deer that made up most of the hunter-gatherer diet – they are believed to by symbols, a message we don’t know how to read.

Recognizable animals tend to be male – aroused males at that – and predators. Are they “mystical characters, symbolic scapegoats, tribal families, mnemonic devices, or perhaps totemic scarecrows, guarding the pillars from evil” she asks.

Who knows? The New Yorker does not run any photos of the place, just a painterly and near-abstract illustration (that is, as we’ll see, clearly akin to a photo in National Geographic earlier this year). Searching around reveals this category-defying place has been getting steady attention in serious media. Some of them have sharp photographs.

Previous Stories include:

• Smithsonian (November, 2008) Andrew Curry: Gobekli Tepe, The World’s First Temple ;
• Archaeology (Nov 2008)  Sandra Scham: The World’s First Temple ;
• National Geographic (June 2011)  Charles C. Mann: The Birth of Religion ; He writes that when these pillars were emplaced “much of the human race lived in small nomadic bands that survived by foraging for plants and hunting wild animals. Construction of the site would have required more people coming together in one place than had likely occurred before… The pilgrims who came to Göbeckli Tepe lived in a world without writing, metal, or pottery; To those approaching the temple from below, its pillars must have loomed over head like rigid giants, the animals on the stones shivering in the firelight…”

The suspicion, one reads from this, is that an idea needs reexamination. At issue is whether village and then cities, coupled with the rise of agriculture and the division of labor into organized guilds and master-worker relationships, permit development of  major spiritual centers and religions. Or, did group worship come first and set the stage for the rise of farming and urban societies?

Another strange part is that these ruins were sticking in places out of the ground, the hill holding them is a prominent landmark. Yet archeologists didn’t recognize their age or novelty until less than 20 years ago. The first western-trained scientists to see them had declared the place to be an uninsteresting, historic graveyad, steering other scholars elsewhere.

 Grist for the Mill: German Archeological Institute ;

- Charlie Petit

Arthur Brisbane

In a post earlier today, I criticized The New York Times for failing to respond to a letter signed by 45 neuroscientists that challenged the accuracy of a Times op-ed piece. The op-ed was written by a branding consultant who claimed to find scientific evidence for an iPhone addiction. The neuroscientists found numerous problems with the piece. I wrote that the Times was wrong not to address the criticism with a correction, if appropriate–and it certainly seemed to be appropriate.

I sent the link to Arthur Brisbane, the public editor at the Times, and he gave me permission to post his response. Here is the email, in full, unedited:

Mr. Raeburn, thanks for your message. I don’t plan to write anything on this, although I can’t disagree with your logic. The Times offers various avenues to address errors. The best is a simple correction. As a practical reality, that works best in news coverage and less well in the world of Op-Ed. This is, in part, because the intrinsically opinion-based nature of Op-Eds makes arguments over facts more complex (translation: the writers often argue longer and harder about whether a real error has been made). The fact that The Times published a letter of the type you cite below is a tacit acknowledgment of a problem.

Best,

Art Brisbane

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Spanish paleoanthropologists say they have identified a new genus of primate that  lived 11 million years ago, and could help to understand the origin of monkeys in Eurasia. They infer this from a mere 15 teeth discovered in the 70’s. A few stories have been published, but none explains how the researchers ascertain that this is a new genus, and they don’t have independent opinions of other paleoanthropologists. That’s a common pattern: we very rarely perceive skepticism in paleontological news in Spanish press.

Also from Spain, in 2007 the Department of Health commissioned a study to analyze the situation and efficacy of alternatives therapies in the country. The main conclusions are that there is a huge amount of unregulated therapists without any medical training, that the majority of the 139 natural therapies analyzed haven’t proved any positive effects, that acupuncture seems to work for a few specific discomforts, and that homeopathy didn’t work better than placebo. El País writes the most detailed story, but it doesn’t indicate what’s going to do the government with the conclusions of the report. A more critical story says “health department admits that homeopathy does nothing, but it will do nothing”. And shockingly, another story from wires says that “homeopathy works better in animals than in persons because animals don’t have placebo effect”. The veterinarian that centers the story says she has also proved homeopathy in plants, and that it heals mental disorders. That’s ridicule, and the newspapers that reproduce this in their website should be ashamed of doing it. 

Paleontólogos españoles encontraron en los años 70 unos dientes de una primate hembra de hace 11 millones de años, y ahora dicen que se trata de un nuevo género de primate. Barberapithacus huerzeleri le llaman. ¿Cómo a partir de unos dientes deducen que es un nuevo genero? No lo sabemos porque ninguna nota lo explica. ¿Debemos confiar en ellos en que se trata de un descubrimiento remarcable que “ayuda a conocer el origen de los monos en eurasia”? Quien sabe. Ellos dicen que lo han publicado en la prestigiosa “Americal journal of physical anthropology”, con factor de impacto 2.6. Pero… En una ciencia tan subjetiva como esta; ¿Qué opinan otros paleoantropólogos no relacionados con la investigación? Tampoco lo sabemos porque nadie les ha preguntado.

El País no lo ha sacado (porque posiblemente no lo merece), Público y La Vanguardia sacan notas de agencias con ese nulo espíritu crítico. La única que presenta una nota trabajada es Rosa Tristán “Barberapithecus: un primate catalán con 11 millones de años” (El Mundo). Rosa entrevista al autor principal, y da muy buen grado de detalle sobre las investigaciones, pero deja en el tintero aspectos fundamentales: cual es la evidencia experimental que demuestra las conclusiones del estudio, y qué valoración hacen otros expertos. Sin estos datos, el lector escéptico siente la obligación de la duda.

Vamos a una historia más jugosa: El ministerio de sanidad español ha elaborado un informe sobre las terapias alternativas, cuyo uso va en aumento, en vistas de una posible regulación. Reyes Rincón prepara el buen texto “Sanidad concluye que el principal efecto de la homeopatía es placebo” en El País. Acertada elección la de centrar el titular en la homeopatía, pues es la terapia que más polémica encarna en España. Y bueno empezar citando que sí se encuentra beneficios a la acupuntura en algunos casos como vómitos y efectos de quimioterapia (no por ejemplo para dejar de fumar o adelgazar). Es lo segundo más destacable del estudio, que por lo general concluye que la mayoría de estas terapias naturales o alternativas no tienen ningún efecto beneficioso más allá del placebo.

Volviendo a la homeopatía, la conclusión del informe tras revisar 9 artículos científicos es que la homeopatía es segura, pero no más que el placebo. Y que hay gran cantidad de gente aplicando terapias naturales sin ninguna formación ni regulación. Aquí es donde el artículo queda cojo: ¿Qué pretende hacer el ministerio tras conocer estos datos? El texto llama a gritos alguna declaración oficial en este sentido. O si no es oficial, de alguna voz respetada en el ámbito médico o de salud pública. La sensación que queda es que el ministerio habrá encargado un estudio para confirmar lo que ya se sospechaba, pero no va a hacerle ningún caso. En esta línea apunta el blog escéptico en El Correo de Luis Alfonso Gámez “Sanidad admite que la homeopatía es nada, pero no pasará nada”. En contraste, vergüenza que ABC publique la nota “La homeopatía es más eficaz en animales porque no se sugestionan”. Esta sí que es buena: una veterinaria asegura que como los animales no experimentan placebo, la homeopatía es más eficaz. El mundo al revés. Alucinante que EFE se atreva a ofrecer esta nota y ABC la compre, dando bola a una pseudocientífica que dice haber probado la homeopatía en plantas. Pierden credibilidad. Disculpad que insista, pero es intolerable. El texto está lleno de sandeces en boca de la veterinaria extraterrestre, como que “la medicina convencional sólo trata los síntomas del asma pero la homeopatía lo cura”, que “es el futuro de la medicina a pesar de los intereses económicos que se interponen” (gracioso), que “puede curar los problemas mentales de perros y gatos”, y que es “la única medicina probada directamente en seres humanos”. Denunciable.

- Pere Estupinyà

When a scientist takes such stunning photos as does marine biologist Edith Widder, the subject of Science Times’s lead story by Erik Olsen, the reporter has a tremendous head start. She is a gadget-happy specialist in bioluminenscence in the deep sea. Just look at the sample here, showing a shrimp expelling glowing vomitus and thus to perhaps evade a trip down a thoroughly creepy-looking gullet. Few editors could resist a story that not only has important content, but is loaded with amazing photos of strange creatures in eery surroundings. Widder is clearly an easy sell to editors and a good and willing source. A search finds she’s not been in the news a good deal. A few years ago Nova did a profile of her. That’s all I could find. If you’d like to see the six-foot-long previously unknown squid to which Olsen refers, it’s on the Nova video.

She is not a widely-known celebrity scientist. That makes the structure of this story – engaging as it is – a puzzle. After all, if one learns that E. O. Wilson, the ant and biophilia king, also is a super duper violinist who records under pseudonym with the Cleveland Orchestra (I made this up, in case you missed that) one could make swift reference to his known public persona before getting into his handling of Bartok’s Sonata No. 1. However, one offers that this story on Widder might move more swiftly if it started with the fascinating and visually engaging work that makes Widder so famous among her colleagues – the clever research into luminous creatures of the deep sea – before relating that she’s now immersed in using bioluminous microbes to assay the pollutant levels in tidal estuary sediment. The story even looks schizo on the page. The lede on greenish muck in a lagoon is next to an enormous image of a deep-sea scaleless dragon fish. I’d'a started with how one gets such cool pictures of dragon fish and vomiting shrimp before moving on to the more societally and practically useful study of polluted waterways.

Other headlines to note:

• James Gorman (News Analysis): Elevation of the Chimp May Reshape Research ; After news last week that NIH is going to sharply restrict invasive research on chimpanzees this gives a good sense not only of why, but how, and how hard it will be to define clearly just what is to be allowed. The transition, one gathers, will be neither fast nor smooth.
•  Gina Kolata: GPS Watch Can Be an Unreliable Running Partner; The fitness warrior discovers that her run-logging watch can be rather loose with the truth asks around. She’s not alone. And the makers of GPS watches say people expect too much of the little gizmos.
• Jim Robbins – For Many Species, Moving Day Has Added Stress ; Migration corridors could help animals that depend on being able to move with the seasons. Most are birds. Runs with a glorious picture, from the Wildlife Conservation Society, of pronghorns migrating across a snowy expanse. I didn’t know these animals make massed migrations, but found a similar image at the website of the National Wildlife Federation. It must be so.

As always, much more. Whole Section.

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2011/12/20/science/

- Charlie Petit

UPDATE: The public editor of The New York Times has responded to this post. Here’s the link.

When something in the paper is wrong, The New York Times is supposed to correct it. Sometimes it is so eager to do so that its corrections border on the trivial. When an article in the Nov. 13 issue of the Times Magazine on rubber duckies referred to the Seiberling Rubber Company, the paper was careful to note, in last Sunday’s magazine, that it should have been the Seiberling Latex Products Company. (The correction is also appended to the story online.)

Read on for a different example–egregious errors in a Times story, a highly unusual letter signed by 45 neuroscientists, and an inexplicable response from the Times.

Martin Lindstrom, who calls himself a branding consultant, wrote in an Oct. 1 op-ed that he did an experiment to “find out whether iPhones were really, truly addictive, no less so than alcohol, cocaine, shopping or video games.” That’s a tall order. He enlisted the help of a marketing company (red flag No. 1), and slid eight men and eight women (red flag No. 2–too few patients) into an fMRI scanner. They were exposed to audio and video of a ringing and vibrating iPhone (red flag No. 3–is he testing addiction to the phone, or the ring?). And he found all kinds of changes in the subjects’ brains, including in the insular cortex. Red flag No. 4–and now I’m going to stop counting–this seemed not to be a very specific response.

Most science writers would see this as the flaky “science” that it is. But not the Times, even when people smarter than I pointed it out. Indeed, 45 neuroscientists, led by Russell Poldrack of the University of Texas, signed a letter to the Times saying, among other things, that “the kind of reasoning that Mr. Lindstrom uses is well known to be flawed, because there is rarely a one-to-one mapping between any brain region and a single mental state; insular cortex activity could reflect one or more of several psychological processes…

“We find it surprising that The Times would publish claims like this that lack scientific validity.”

So do I. (And so does Neuron Culture blogger David Dobbs, who was much quicker to note this than I was.)

So how did the Times react to this unusual letter? It didn’t. Nothing. It published only one of the authors’ names, and linked to a website where the full list could be found. One can conclude that the Times is not concerned about publishing inaccurate reports; otherwise it would have responded with an editor’s note or appended a correction to the op-ed.

Poldrack did a similar thing a few years ago, enlisting colleagues to sign a letter objecting to a Times op-ed on using brain scanners to draw conclusions about American voters. He’s apparently some kind of troublemaker. (And we need more or those.)

Oh, and how did the Times respond to that earlier letter?

It didn’t.

- Paul Raeburn

(Thanks to Hannah Waters, whose nice post on the evolution of grief led me back to this example.)

Last week’s no-news-in-physics-can-still-be-news event,  the teasingly optimistic but inconclusive progress report on the hunt for the mass-moderating Higgs boson from CERN and its Large Hadron Collider, spawned several essays in popular media worth a look. Some surely even have merit. I’m undecided which to hitch myself to. The first of these is by a journalist. The others not. Editors give public intellectuals more slack than they accord mere staff scriveners and  freelance reporters who don’t make their real living in the academy. Most of these professors’ stories below, were they submitted by lay writers, would have been covered in questions and demands for dropping the jargon and for explanations mere mortals could understand.

1) First up is a ruminative piece at Scientific American by the provocative old-time science writer, John Horgan, who ties the news to the idea that gained him great notoriety 15 years ago and is stated plainly in the title of his 1996 book, “The End of Science.” That was a remarkable work, effective and entertaining even while demanding that readers apply some common sense as antidote. The idea was that the main elements of how the universe works have been grasped, and that few if any additional fundamental revolutions in science are likely. We’ve listed and characterized chemical elements, charted the main particles of matter and the carriers of forces, embraced evolution and natural selection, have the age of the universe well-determined, and we even know what we don’t know fairly well and have labels for things yet to be determined such as the nature of dark matter and dark energy (actually, Horgan’s book preceded dark energy, but one can squeeze it in to Horgan’s world view too). Biology and health are not fully understood, but only due to their complexity. The rule books of chemistry and physics that govern living systems are known. We’re just filling in blanks, not likely to erase much or add whole new things, etc etc.   Horgan’s book consisted of a train of engrossing vignettes in which he confronted luminaries of science with his proposition. Nearly all rejected it. He somehow turned that rejection on its head to imply he had it right yet several of the greatest minds of our time don’t. The book may not have provided much reason to believe its thesis but its writer did get portraits of the various, agitated scientists who rejected it. That may have been Horgan’s real purpose. (for more on this interpretation, see my review of his book that ran first in the SF Chronicle, and which lives on thanks to the stubborn immortality of the web).

Such wry chutzpah enlivens this piece on the Higgs. Horgan is  now director of a center for science writing at Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. He also is author of an imminently upcoming book “The End of War” that makes one wonder if Steven Pinker beat him to a punch (here’s Horgan’s own, positive review of Pinker’s “Better Angels” tome).  Horgan’s article on the Higgs updates his End of Science thinking by citing his involvement in the Long Now Foundation, and the bets – with real money – has had made and still believes in and that assert that no Theory of Everything will be found any time soon. The readers’ comments are a particularly striking mix of polysyllabic drivel and the occasional brilliant remark.

2) Another essay, with a wholly different flavor and a wonderful word that leads to an evn better word, is in India’s Daily Hindu (Correction – see comment and thank you) make that the Times of India) by Sunil Khilnani and running under the hed  The greatest mystery.  Khilnani is a bona fide intellectual: Delhi-born, former professor at Johns Hopkins, and now director of the  India Institute at King’s College London. He knows how to throw language around. While offering the Higgs quest as a sublime illustration of scientific progress, a tone opposite to Horgan’s, he mentions that the scientific method has a fundamental paradox: “The more one breaks the material world down into its constituent elements, the more elusive it becomes to pinpoint what it’s actually made of.” Oh my, reductive science as trivial pursuit? Perhaps – for in the next paragraph he writes, “Where then, does the mass of an object come from? What gives the universe its quiddity?” Holy moly, quiddity!! What a choice, and yes I had to look it up to be sure I knew its meaning, which I mostly did not. It is a yin yang word, denoting primarily the fundamental distinctive property of any given thing, while alternatively meaning “quibble.” As in meaningless detail. Word fans, that’s only the half of it. In my gigantic old Merriam-Webster unabridged quiddity’s definition includes this: “See haecceity.” Heck-say-what? I’d never heard the word. It says here  it has roots in Latin and French, with meanings that include thisness. So, if ever one fears that quiddity will be taken by readers as too commonplace or even cliche, keep haecceity on standby as contingency.

Anyway, back to Khilnani’s essay. One presumes it runs in other outlets but I cannot find it anywhere else. It manages to take the uncertain results from CERN and turn them into a discussion of scientific method, the perils of reductionism, the necessity of beliefs that do not depend of scientific method, and what he twice calls the method’s “intellectual rampage.” That, plus the Euro zone crisis and “scientism’s imperiousness.” This is rich stew.

Other aftershocks of the big Higgs maybe:

• Newsweek/Daily Beast – Martin Rees: Higgs Boson Might Yield Origins of Universe But Questions Remain; Rees is, of course, a noted astronomer, writer of popular books, and gov’t adviser in the UK. In taking the broadest possible perspective on the Higgs hunt, Rees may also be providing ammunition for John Horgan. That is, it is getting exceedingly difficult in physics to find anything really new.  But he explicitly rejects that interpretation when he writes, “..unification would not be the end of science; indeed, we could still be near the beginning.”
• Newsweek/Daily Beast – Lisa Randall: How the Higgs Boson Could Change the Universe ; Another ringer as author – Randall is a theoretical and particle physicist of high public profile at Harvard University. Lots of physics and maybes in this. One sampling to reveal a fine simile: “When electricity was discovered, no one knew the globe would be fairly quickly blanketed with lightbulbs.” She points out that while confirmation of the Higgs would be spectacular vindication of contemporary science, failure to find it would bode far better for science yet to come.
• The Guardian (UK) Jon Butterworth: Higgs boson in massless-particle coupling shock, and other stories/If the Higgs boson is responsible for the mass of fundamental particles, how can we see it via massless photons? And what is it doing on stage in Hammersmith anyway?” ; The author is a member of the LHC’s ATLAS collaboration, one of two teams whose results were so deliciously ambiguous last week. The column is entertaining and, apropos of the slack to which I referred in this post’s opening, has lines no journalist could get in. Editors would look fishy eyeed at me if I ever trotted past with “In the summer, the “hint” was in the WW decay mode of the Higgs. For reasons I described here, this mode is not very good for telling us the mass of any candidate Higgs boson there might be. The neutrinos, from the decaying W bosons, carry away too much information that we don’t see“. Uh huh.

- Charlie Petit

Last March, in the midst of the Charlie Sheen media explosion, or implosion, I wrote a post criticizing psychologists for diagnosing patients whom they’d never examined or even met. The issue there was Dr. Drew Pinsky’s claim that Sheen was in an acute manic state at the time.

With the death of Kim Jong-Il over the weekend, we risk the same sort of thing. Was the North Korean dictator suffering from one or more mental illnesses?

I don’t see any diagnosis from Pinsky yet, but I do find a thoughtful post by Jason G. Goldman at Scientific American. Entitled ”The Psychology of Dictatorship: Kim Jong-Il,” the piece looks at efforts by psychologists to evaluate such people as Hitler, Mussolini, and Saddam Hussein. And while I still have doubts about the value of such long-distance diagnosis, I find plenty here to make me think more carefully about that.

Goldman reviews studies by the personality psychologists Frederick L. Coolidge and Daniel L. Segal of the University of Colorado on Hitler and Saddam Hussein, in which they evaluated the two dictators on the basis of standard psychiatric criteria. The diagnosis of Hitler was based on comments from Hitler experts. “The consensus among the experts,” Goldman writes, “was that Hitler had highly elevated scores on the following personality disorder scales: paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, and sadistic. Hitler’s derived personality profile also suggested that he probably had schizophrenic tendencies, including excessive grandiosity and aberrant thinking.”

With Saddam, the researchers relied on “reports from eleven Iraqi adults who “knew Hussein intimately” for a median of 24 years.” The researchers found that Saddam

had high scores on the same personality disorder scales: paranoid, antisocial, narcissistic, and sadistic, though sadistic features were stronger in Hussein than in Hitler. Like Hitler, the Hussein study revealed probable schizophrenic symptoms as well. There was a relatively high correlation (.79) between the derived personality profiles for the two men.”

Combining the results from both studies, Coolidge and Segal hypothesized a “big six” constellation of personality disorders that may commonly reflect the personalities of dictators more generally: sadistic, antisocial, paranoid, narcissistic, schizoid, and scizotypal.

In 2009, they did a similar analysis of Kim Jong-Il, in which they found “ the same ‘big six’ constellation of personality disorders: sadistic, antisocial, paranoid, narcissistic, schizoid,and scizotypal.” (If you’re wondering why Goldman didn’t link to these studies, as I was, you’ll find that he references them at the end of the post, in academic style.)

Goldman also wisely adds caveats at the end of his post. He notes that there are many people with these disorders who do not become dictators–an obvious point, perhaps, but perhaps a useful reminder, if you know or are related to people with these ailments, that you shouldn’t decide they are bad people. He also notes the difficulty of making psychiatric diagnoses across different cultures, and the problems inherent in long-distance diagnoses.

And he ends with a nuanced conclusion: We might never know how accurate these diagnostic profiles are, but correlations among Hitler, Saddam, and Kim make them “hard to ignore.”

Goldman’s post is one of several that popped up like mushrooms overnight on Scientific American’s blogs. Gary Stix does his own fine analysis of the Coolidge and Segal study of Kim (“Anatomy of a Megalomaniac: Psychological Analysis of Kim Jong-Il from Afar“), and Steven Hamblin addresses a question raised by Goldman: How can people with devastating psychiatric illnesses attain positions of power? In a post entitled “What Can the Animal Kingdom Teach Us About North Korea?” Hamblin looks at studies on group dynamics and leadership in animals. Animals can tell us more about North Korea than you might think.

Scientific American blog Editor Bora Zivkovic promises that there is more to come today, including the opening of relevant archived Scientific American articles.

I’ve always enjoyed pursuing stories that don’t seem like science stories but have interesting or unsuspected connections to scientific research. Scientific American’s coverage of North Korea and Kim Jong-Il fits squarely into that category. SciAm might not be the first place you’d think of for coverage of North Korea, but you will find plenty there that you won’t hear discussed today, tomorrow, or all week on cable news.

- Paul Raeburn

Today brings another chance to show off pictures of cool rockets, even if they exist in part on drawing boards and in artists’ imaginations. The theme, getting steady play in the last year or two, is that the post-shuttle NASA is serious about leaving routing access to near-Earth space a service for private companies to provide.

    1) First up, just because this is the niftiest imagery of the lot, one needs to have some mention of the ginormous airplane, a space rocket slung under its immense span, that onetime Microsoft mogul, sports fanatic, and high-tech philanthropy and start-up sugar daddy Paul Allen is cooking up with innovative designer Burt Rutan. This had lots of ink earlier this week. In case you missed it, here are the fruits of a few reporters’ labors:

• Seattle Times – Dominic Gates: Paul Allen space venture begins with ‘largest aircraft ever constructed’ ; see also a few associated stories, blogs, and sidebars: Brier DudleySinonyi on Allen’s space venture: Audacious ; Jon TaltonPaul Allen is my kind of 1 percent, but he can’t fill U.S. space void ;
• AP: Donna Blankinship, Seth Borenstein: Stratolauncher plane could make space tourism affordable ;
• Aviation Week – Michael Mecham: Stratolaunch Aims to Break Affordability Barrier ;
• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor, Dionne Searcey : Paul Allen, Supersizing Space Flight ;
• Portland Oregonian – Allan Brettman: Paul Allen’s Stratolaunch Systems will dare to go where NASA rockets have dared to go before ;
• Space.com – Denise Chow: Humongous plane to serve as flying launch pad for space tourists ;

Grist for the Mill: Stratolaunch Systems Press Kit;

2) Second, NASA is changing its system for getting private rocket companies into its stable of launch providers.

• MSNBC Cosmic Log – Allan Boyle: NASA revises its spaceship plans ; Here’s the place to start on this news. Boyle walks readers through the pluses and minuses. It has to do with how close NASA stands as it peers over the shoulders of the companies as they refine hardware able to take cargo or people to orbit.
• Wall St. Journal – Andy Pasztor: NASA Budget Woes Delay Space-Taxi Plans ;
• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: NASA decision increases risk in commercial crew program ;
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: NASA revamps, delays commercial space taxi work ;
• Gannett/Florida Today – Ledyard King: Capsule builder gain new options ;

Grist for the Mill: NASA commercial space transport site ;

- Charlie Petit