Perhaps the story most interesting, yet puzzling from a journalistic point of view, in the Science Times today is, on the front page and below the fold, Canadian freelancer Alanna Mitchell‘s catch-up on news about prehistoric Homo sapien couplings with other Homo species – Neanderthal mainly, Denisovan too for sure, and maybe even the Hobbits of Flores. After ten paragraphs I was still sighing to myself that everything I’d read was just about what has already been widely reported including in the New York Times.Perhaps it is just that the reporter, who writes well-received books, likes to tell a story in a logical timeline fashion rather than start with the new stuff and then jitterbug around with the context needed to appreciate it. Standard news structure does tend to sap a tale of its narrative tension. Plus, to guide the reader through all what’s already gone on, before the good stuff (news), is not a promising tactic for getting a story past the NYT’s editors. It’s a puzzle. But worth the wrestle. One is well savvied up for details on how modern technology is helping to move the research beyond its first and already reported stages. The end has a real surprise, at least to me. Maybe the tiny admixtures of genes many modern peoples carry, delivered by lateral transfer from now-vanished species of the hominin kind, are crucial to our own remarkable success. Even our immune systems may be better. Maybe.

The top story is a Natalie Angier ode, starting with a little poem that sounds somewhat like Ogden Nash (or Dixon Lanier Merritt), and perhaps Angier wrote it. It’s about skunks, hedgehogs, deer, Capuchin monkeys, and other mammals that arm themselves with chemical poisons. Much of it is vaguely familiar, but she wisely starts with something few of us known anything about: The African crested rat. I never knew of this extravagant creature, rat though it be. Boy, put on a furry tail and body-length mohawk, and a rat is as cute as a chipmunk.

Other headlines of note:

• Kenneth Chang: For Scientists, Hope Diamond’s Blue May Offer Geology Lesson ;
• Ron Cowen – Restored Edison Records Revive Giants of 19th-Century Germany ; Cowen is a bit of a bug on the history of audio recordings (see his recent article in Science on a historian of sound), and shows his stuff here.
• Claudia Dreifus (Q&A): “To become a biologist in the Soviet Union wasn’t simple … I had some fortunate encounters” ; Wonderful tale of scientific spirit.
• Donald G. McNeil Jr: AIDS Prevention Inspires Ways to Make Circumcisions Easier ; Sometimes near painless too.

As usual, lots more. Whole Section.

- Charlie Petit

..This one had a 6' alligator inside

For awhile now the news of pythons and other huge constrictors breeding in the swamps of southern Florida could be put in the brain’s slot for drolly amusing scenes from horror movies. Mankind’s carelessness and hubris, creepy creatures, and brave rangers and police officers tracking them down while local golfers know that  “water hazard” is not just a place to lose their little white balls. Just a new version of the endless encounter with gators down there – except these beasts have no legs, bigger stomachs, and are even longer from nose to tail.

This week a report in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, by a team of researchers from the US Geological Survey and several universities, offers a perverse hope for a reason the infestation will burn out. Maybe the great snakes will starve. That’s just me talking, but the figures indicate that they are not only competing with alligators for food and for the top link in the food chain, they are eating just about everything. It’s a reptilian clean plate club. No rabbits, just about no raccoons or possums left, deer getting scarce, bobcats ditto, no foxes, and less of lots more. It’s just a road kill survey, but it must be a good proxy for what’s running around. And these are just the mammals. How about birds, turtles…?

Naturally, lots of reporters recognized that this marks a change in the general perception of the snake invasion from eery curiosity to all-out environmental disaster. Wildlife specialists warned us. Now it is clear for all to see. I mean, no rabbits? At all? Somebody go to Burma and figure out what makes the rabbits and other swamp animals there so snake-savvy while ours just get digested. And how about those invasive nutria? One hopes they’re not the one species doing just fine. I won’t highlight passages in all these stories but reporters have a variety of engaging ways to say how horrid yet fascinating this tableau of wildlife destruction is.

Stories:

• Time Mag – Bryan Walsh: Invaders: How Burmese Pythons Are Devouring the Everglades;
• AP – Matt Sednesky: Study:Pythons, other big snakes apparently killed off huge numbers of mammals in Everglades ;
• BBC – Paul Rincon: Pythons linked to Florida Everglades mammal decline ;
• LiveScience – Jennifer Welsh: Huge pythons annihilating Everglades wildlife, report scientists ;
• Reuters – James Kelleher : Invasive pythons wiping out native Everglades animals ;

• NPR – Christopher Joyce: Pythons blamed for Everglades Disappearing Animals ;
• Science News – Janet Raloff: Predatory pythons shift Everglades ecology ; She says wood rats are disappearing – as snake chow – on Key Largo off the mainland coast. The pythons get around.
• Miami Herald/McClatchy – Curtis Morgan: Pythons likely wiping out Glades mammals, study finds ;
• Washington Post – Darryl Fears: In Florida Everglades, pythons and anacondas dominate food chain ;
• National Geographic – Christine Dell’Amore:Pythons Eating Through Everglades Mammals at “Astonishing” Rate?
• Atlantic Wire – Dashiell Bennett: Pythons Are Wiping Out Mammals in the Everglades;
• And finally, one with an enterprising, feature angle, Charlotte Observer – David Perlmutt: Davidson prof’s lielong interest turns into career. It is, one gathers, a sidebar to the main news, which the Observer delivered by McClatchy (see Miami Herald piece a few bullets up).

Grist for the Mill: USGS Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

Four days ago we received notice that the Washington Post‘s Brian Vastag had a melancholy, powerful story on the anniversary of the Apollo capsule fire. It struck 45 years ago during a routine test on the launch pad and with no blast off yet on the schedule. I finally got around to reading his look-back at what the day was like, as recounted by the former wire service reporter who was NASA press officer on duty.

It is a fine, tailored vignette and fitting tribute to the times, to the astronauts who perished suddenly and awfully – Roger Chafee, Gus Grissom, and Ed White -and timely reminder that private companies trying to to fill the space-exploration void left by the shuttles’ retirement face a high-stakes and difficult job. This in no time for assuming the lowest-cost bid for a ride to space is the right one to accept.

As one who often blogs along blithely dismissing as scientifically wasted the taxpayer money spent on putting people into space, the story also is a personal rap on the head to never belittle the phenomenal skill,  courage, and heroism  displayed by the astronaut corps and the entire manned space program since its inception. It is rightly a bright star for the US and its self-image.

But it does raise a question about future space tragedy. Once and if space taxis are privately run services with, in essence, ticket windows for anybody and not just those who are collectively “our” men and women, deeply wrapped in the flag, will any fatal accidents continue to be viewed as national tragedies? Or just more of the sort of awful accidents that come along with depressing regularity in all sorts of circumstance?

- Charlie Petit

Artist: Andy Potts

What a terrific story. New Scientist’s Anil Ananthaswamy throws his vision into full-fisheye, wide-angle mode to put human use of energy into long term future-history context. Do that, he writes, and it starts to become clear that at some point, there can be too much energy even if it is all green energy. This is an outlier scenario that puts today’s arguments over the price of energy – both directly economic and indirectly environmental – into sharper focus.

The theme question embraces such things as whether solar panels with their surface albedo change, wind turbines with their sapping of wind, and all such energy use by civilization with its heat production, don’t eventually become environment disruptors themselves.

We’re not there yet, he reports, except in a few local and regional instances. But it’s surprising that a “green” energy global eco-fiasco is even foreseeable. The message is that if our civilization is to continue to thrive into the distant future, somehow we must figure out how to get almost entirely on the solar energy that would become waste heat in the lower atmosphere even if humans disappear.

Ananthaswamy, who is based I learn right here in Berkeley, relies largelon on one study, and finds plenty of other experts who quarrel vigorously over that study’s conclusions on the magnitude at which various forms of green energy might start to backfire. The overall message reinforces something I and I bet a lot of people have long felt but had nothing but intuition to back it up: in the end what we need is expensive energy, not cheap energy. Otherwise sheer energy consumption will throw the globe’s natural systems out of whack. A corollary is that we need to control global population growth that is driving energy demand, a mega-topic this article does not tackle.

- Charlie Petit

Source: NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies

A couple of stories got to this tracker over the weekend:

1) The Wall Street Journal‘s Op-Ed page on Friday provided it’s opinion (again) that rising CO2 is probably good for us and won’t change the climate much and that those scientists who say so are doing it for the grant money while shutting out contrary voices within science. I don’t ordinarily read the Journal’s editorial pages, but a brother-in-law to whom I am very close even though we reside at opposite poles in politics asked me to read it and tell him what I think.

It’s a letter, signed by 16 scientists and engineers. It has several points: More and more scientists and engineers doubt GW’s magnitude is great enough to spur significant action, global warming has stopped for at least the last ten years and was already rising more slowly than various groups expected, CO2 is not a pollutant because it is already in the air and not toxic at levels now or foreseeable, young scientists who don’t worry about global warming are being told the shut up by their academic bosses, noted economist William Nordhaus says we can wait 50 years to put any costly CO2 controls in place, and so on.

So I looked at the 16 signatories. I found five, which I put in bold in the following otherwise unchanged signature block from the journal, with clearly apparent expertise in climatology or pertinent aspects of meteorology, atmospheric physics, or other such fields. Anybody can do it:

Claude Allegre, former director of the Institute for the Study of the Earth, University of Paris; J. Scott Armstrong, cofounder of the Journal of Forecasting and the International Journal of Forecasting; Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism, Rockefeller University; Roger Cohen, fellow, American Physical Society; Edward David, member, National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Sciences; William Happer, professor of physics, Princeton; Michael Kelly, professor of technology, University of Cambridge, U.K.; William Kininmonth, former head of climate research at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology; Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT; James McGrath, professor of chemistry, Virginia Technical University; Rodney Nichols, former president and CEO of the New York Academy of Sciences; Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer, designer of Voyager and SpaceShipOne; Harrison H. Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator; Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem; Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service; Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists, Geneva.

Also on the list are men (all are men) who are authorities on atherosclerosis, aircraft engineering, nanotechnology, economic forecasting, plastics and other polymers, and geology. Two are physicists whose jobs have included senior positions at Exxon Mobil.

My take: A recent flattening of the temperature trend in the last decade may be real, but I put that graph up there to show that such episodes have occurred earlier in this century, including the mid-70s and early 80s and early 90s. The trend didn’t stop after such earlier episodes. No reason to think it will now. It might be statistically weirder to have an end to such wriggles against the trend. And with 2010 perhaps the hottest year yet, the pause now does not look like much of one. Moving on – Yale economist Nordhaus, while perhaps unpersuaded by need for some explicit policies against CO2 emissions, has no doubt that they are bad news already and will do more serious harm if not curbed. He promotes a global carbon tax, for crying out loud, so citing him to build a case against global warming seems inappropriate.  (Wm. Nordhaus, incidentally, is uncle to Ted Nordhaus, co-author of the consequential book “The Death of Environmentalism”). So I told my brother-in-law that mixing a few genuine experts in with a lot of people with largely irrelevant expertise that is not spelled out is an intellectually bankrupt way to pad the letter’s implied authority. I added added that the arguments they make are nothing new for contrarians to say. Besides that, I’ve never noticed that the global warming authorities at AGU or AAAS meeting wear more expensive shoes than the rest of the earth scientists. The “doing it for the money” trope is not impossible to imagine (I heard that the old War on Cancer increased the number of papers saying they were about cancer), but it’d be tough to verify. Finally, unexplained is why these 16 people sent this letter to the journal now, and whether any larger organization is behind the signature gathering.

Other reax: At Climate Progress, Joe Romm takes cudgel in hand. He reveals that the journal turned down an article/letter on the same topic, signed by 255 members of the National Academy of Sciences. Well of course – who has room for 255 signatures? Sixteen is so much more manageable. Late Addition: at the NYTimes’s DotEarth, Andrew C. Revkin, dives into the letter’s reference to Nordhaus’s work. Nordhaus tells him, much as I expected when writing the passage above, that the letter “completely misrepresented my work.” Thank you Andy for calling Nordhaus and getting actual info. Beats my surmising, even if it agrees with your confirmation. Also just in, the Union of Concerned Scientists‘s Peter Frumhoff dissected the journal letter.

2) Another story making the rounds on climate change is that the recent pause in global warming is now official, sort of, via the Met Office in the UK, and that even if the sun’s output flags a bit in coming decades global warming’s long term trend upward will hardly change as a result.

The most strident, and professionally well done if one is talking only about the writing style, is in the Daily Mail, by David Rose, under the hed Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again). It is so bad yet good (ie persuasive) that the Met Office rushed out a News blog complaint over its errors, and the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein, at the Wonkblog, added his voice to the retort: No, the Thames isn’t about to freeze over. Another debunker is at the Union of Concerned Scientists‘s News Center.

One odd thing about Rose’s story, despite his suggestion up top that NASA thinks another Little Ice Age may soon be upon us, is that the Met Office thinks that is bosh and Rose says so deeper on. Plus, the head’s implication that NASA thinks the Thames may freeze over has absolutely no backup in the story itself. The following illogic appears to have occurred: A: NASA scientists say dimming in coming decades might equal that of the Maunder Minimum during the Little Ice Age,  B: The Thames froze during that time, ergo C: It would freeze again. In other words, Mr. Rose and his headline writer made up that part about the Thames freezing all by themselves.

Aside from all that, there is just out a study from the University of Colorado declaring the pivotal trigger for the Little Ice Age was volcanic activity under the Atlantic. Solar output also fell,, but one infers that it wasn’t the only factor. Late Addition: the BBC‘s Richard Black reported already today on the Volcano-Global Cooling study.

Grist for the Mill: Met Office Press Release ; Univ. Reading Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) A few stories from Chile today: the first is about extremely fast decision making in elite athletes. The article is extensive and very well written, but it is presented to the readers as if scientists were analyzing Lionel Messi’s brain (the Barça world’s best soccer player). They are not. It seems that researchers cited Messi as an example, and the reporter created a whole story about his “unique” capabilities. The second story is about software that analyzes climate, economic factors, darkness of streets, previous delinquency and many other elements to predict crimes in specific areas and moments.

We also reflect on a story suggesting that Chile needs to support research on lithium batteries to take full advantage of its huge resources. The point is that Chile may get lots of money as one of the world’s biggest exporters of lithium, butit can get much more if it built the batteries itself. But will take investment in research now to get such an industry any time soon.

Nos gusta mucho el suplemento Tendencias que ofrece los sábados el chileno “La Tercera“. Si bien a veces se sitúa en la frontera de la exageración, siempre busca temas originales y novedosos con los que sorprender al lector. Cada semana te propone contenidos de interés sobre aspectos de la vida cotidiana interpretados desde la óptica científica. Fantástica apuesta.Con cierto punto de elucubración, esta semana hay tres de ellos que merecen ser destacados.

El primero es sobre un estudio científico aparentemente acerca del cerebro del futbolista Messi. La primera reacción al leer el titular de Marcelo Córdova “Los secretos del cerebro de Messi” es: ¿Cómo un tema tan goloso no lo han tratado antes en Barcelona o Argentina? Al leer el artículo identificas la respuesta: porque en realidad hay poco a explicar y el planteamiento tiene un punto de tomadura de pelo. Pero la atención del lector ya está ganada. Y a partir de allí le puedes explicar cosas interesantes.

¿Tiene el cerebro de Messi algo sustancialmente diferente al de Iniesta o Xavi? No. Quizás el reconocer que no ha leído un libro en su vida. ¿Y la rapidez del fútbol respecto la del baloncesto? Tampoco. Lo que el estudio holandés pretende averiguar son diferencias entre cerebros de deportistas de élite y de personas no entrenadas. Da igual utilizar como sujeto a Messi que a Ronaldo. La “trampa” del artículo es insinuar que lo especial es el cerebro de Messi en si. Y hacer creer al lector que alguien lo está estudiando, cuando el investigador sólo cita el nombre de Messi como ejemplo al igual que podría haber dicho Ronaldo. Fronterizo enfoque, pero ciertamente complementado con entrevista exclusiva al investigador principal y referencias a otros estudios sobre decisiones instantáneas, que es de lo que en realidad trata el artículo. Tema interesante, pero menos contagioso sin el nombre de Messi. Curiosa la hipótesis sobre el rol de las ondas alfa que comunican varias zonas del cerebro, y de la predisposición a creer que el cerebro puede cambiar. Buen artículo en global.

Marcelo repite con otro reportaje también peculiar: “Precrimen: la ciencia de predecir delitos ya se hace realidad” M. Córdova. La película Minority Report forzaba al máximo el determinismo en nuestro comportamiento al sugerir que no teníamos nada de libre albedrío, y que analizando estados cerebrales podríamos predecir acciones futuras. Lo que han hecho en una ciudad estadounidense comparte objetivo parecido, pero analiza factores diferentes. Marcelo explica muy bien cómo analizando clima, factores urbanísticos de la ciudad, momentos de pagos, características comunes de lugares donde se realizan crímenes, etc. se puede deducir con herramientas informáticas y modelos matemáticos qué personas, lugares y momentos tienen más posibilidades de sufrir crímenes. Y pone ejemplos de ciudades estadounidenses donde se han puesto en práctica programas piloto con buenos resultados. Buena elección de tema, que no sólo utiliza fuentes de artículos en inglés sino que también entrevista de manera exclusiva a experto.

Y todavía en Tendencias, comentario breve sobre el artículo de Jennifer Abate “¿Por qué los niños franceses se portan bien?“. Versa sobre una escritora indagando las razones en la educación de niños franceses que hacen que se comporten mejor que niños de otras nacionalidades. Saca sus conclusiones respecto la actitud de madres convencidas que no deben cambiar radicalmente su vida, el no hacer exagerado caso a los berrinches del bebé, y que el niño por pequeño que sea puede aprender a controlar su comportamiento. La carga científica no es lo principal, pero Jenifer se las apaña para citar varios estudios y darle un peso importante a la ciencia, que probablemente en textos de otras revistas hubiera sido prescindible. Se nota la vocación de Tendencias de buscar siempre la parte científica de la cotidianidad.

Y sin salir de Chile, también queremos reflexionar sobre la nota en El Mercurio de Amalia Torres “Chile entra a la carrera por desarrollar baterías de litio“. Hace ya un tiempo hablábamos en el tracker sobre la oportunidad que tenía Bolivia de ganar mucho dinero convertiéndose en el máximo exportador mundial de Litio, pero de ganar todavía muchísimo más desarrollando algún tipo de industria alrededor de él. Pero para eso hace falta investigación. Esto es lo que muy claramente transmite el artículo de Amalia: Chile es uno de los mayores exportadores, pero pensando a largo plazo, no quiere simplemente vender esta material escaso y clave en la fabricación de baterías eléctricas, sino también desarrollar tecnologías para generar mucho más valor agregado. Esta es la actitud, y un ejemplo del largo plazo en el que no suelen pensar los políticos. Todavía falta para que los coches eléctricos sean una realidad masiva. El petróleo no es tan escaso como nos decían. Se van descubriendo (o dándose a conocer) nuevos pozos y la gasolina continuará siendo absurdamente barata. Pero tarde o temprano los coches eléctricos coparán gran parte del mercado, y es muy probable que las baterías de litio jueguen un papel fundamental. Si esto es así, los países que produzcan estas baterías generarán grandes ingresos. ¿Por qué no podrían ser Chile o Bolivia? De ello depende lo que inviertan ahora. Lograr que Haití produzca zumo de mango en lugar de sólo exportar fruta es relativamente fácil con apoyo internacional y compromiso local. Desarrollar pilas de combustible requiere un knowhow que todavía no existe. Un conocimiento que se debe generar todavía con investigación científica. Una inversión poco atractiva porque los resultados se reciben a largo plazo, pero que viendo la historia del siglo XX nadie puede negar que es la más inteligente.

- Pere Estupinyà  

From Bangkok comes what the AP says is an exclusive story, and is definitely a good example of how to use a dramatic development to illuminate a larger, chronic issue. The development, writes reporter Thanyarat Doksone,  is that an official of Thailand’s wildlife agency reports that poachers are not only killing Asian elephants for their tusks, but their meat, giblets, sweetmeats, and other edible parts. The issue is the near-global concern that growing, hungry human populations may eat many endangered species out of existence.

The story illustrates the sort of small detail that can make news come alive. It reports that the poachers were filling an order from restauants in the resort, seaside town of Phuket. Official near Phuket, it also reports, are offended and deny that their restaurants are serving up elephant stew or anything of the sort.

- Charlie Petit

Nice piece here  of enterprise writing about the Russian rush to make money in the Arctic Ocean. (alliteration is wit almost as cheap as puns. Almost but not quite. I try to draw the line at puns.) Reuters‘s Albina Kovalyova and Alissa de Carbonnel spoke with the captain of the Russian tanker that just delivered fuel oil to Nome, Alaska (with the help of the overworked USCG ice breaker Healey ). They filed from Severodvinsk after reaching the skipper by phone in Vladivostok. A tagline credit goes to reporter Gleb Bryanski.

The enterprise is not just in reaching the man, but in using this news event as a springboard to the larger Russian ambition to dominate commerce in the Arctic Basin, now that a good part of it can be navigated without icebreaker escort during the late summer and, with global warming running apace, sure to get even more navigable soon.

- Charlie Petit

Lunar Newt (via jubbling.com, tinyurl.com/8xnryeb )

The last week has seen intense coverage from Florida of the two main remaining contenders sparring over how they would revive and invigorate NASA. Last night I watched the latest debate, in which Newt Gingrich repeated his intention to use prizes as one way to get private industry to pour big dollars into entrepreneurial efforts. He implied that a colony on the moon within ten years or less might be one result. And I watched as Mitt Romney said something smart in reply: it is ludicrous to think private companies are just itching to build houses on the moon. He’s right. Not unless they are paid by the government because that’s the only customer with pockets that deep. The quote I found from Romney, at the account on Space.com by Mike Wall, is “If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, ‘You’re Fired.’”

Wall’s story is fine as an account of what did happen among all four remaining candidates. But what about what did NOT happen during all this space talk? Other than the occasional mention of science and scientists as being integral to NASA’s mission, these four candidates all seem to entirely equate the space program with people in space suits.

That is so 1969, and even during the Apollo era the US was sending plenty of automated probes out to distant worlds. One reason, or so I’ve heard, that Apollo landings were terminated early was that the public didn’t pay much attention anymore. After the first landing, a golf shot, and the moon buggy, yawn. I’m going to keep looking, but one would think somebody who knows something about the space program, and surely there are a few people like that covering this interminable GOP winnowing process, would mention that the public interest in space is overwhelmingly dominated by such missions as the Hubble Space Telescope, visits to comets, the Cassini probe’s odyssey through the Saturnian system, Kepler’s discoveries of distant planets, and above all, the orbiters and rovers near and on Mars. A dozen robots on a dozen moons and other worlds are easily more entertaining and inspiring to the iPad and virtual reality generation than a more expensive astronaut village on the moon. (Mrs. Tracker just walked in and said you’re writing an Op-Ed, not an objective tracker post, aren’t you Charlie? Yes, I said.)

I don’t have fresh numbers, but it was not so long ago that I found somebody at NASA to divulge its web traffic sorted by program. Unless astronauts had died or were in danger, the public paid hardly any attention to the now-shuttered shuttle program or the int’l space station. Not compared to those visiting sites for space probes and telescopes, for sure. Just wait to see the public interest next August when the new Curiosity Rover is to land on Mars (a lot more will tune in to that than to any human trick or Soyuz resupply mission on the space station). Science and space writers don’t need to be on the campaign trail to compose articles clarifying what the space program does well and where it is falling short, and pointing out the rather narrow view of NASA’s job that these candidates are sharing with the public.

One is unsure, I hasten to add, whether the Dems and President Obama are any savvier about the enormously productive science side of NASA compared to the costly, low-return ambition to put shoulders with American flag patches on them into orbit.

Here are a few samples of news coverage focussed on GOP visions for a new NASA:

• Spaceflight Now – Stephen Clark: Presidential candidates clash over future of space program ;
• NPR – Brian Naylor: On Florida’s Space Coast, Gingrich Aims For The Moon ;
• Washington Post – Joel Achenbach: Is Newt Gingrich’s space plan science fiction? ; Well done but even this one doesn’t challenge the political assumption that the space program’s appeal is mainly about  humans in spaceships. It does say Gingrich is merely running with the policy that the Obama administration started.
• Time Magazine – Jeffrey Kluger: Newt for President – of the Moon ; Quite clever, but myopic as the rest of the crowd. Very nice line in here: Gingrich “either doesn’t understand that ‘grand’ and ‘grandiose’ are two very different things, or does understand and is copping to more delusion and fabulism than one might want in a president.” And more in that wickedly righteous vein. He makes a mistake when he says the last serious effort to build a single-state-to-orbit vehicle was the Reagan-era National Aerospace Plane. No, the last serious one was the X-33 of the Clinton-Gore years.
• Scientific American – John Matson: Newt to NASA: Stop Talking about Space Exploration – Just Do It ; Again, no mention of the twist-in-the-wind predicament of such things as the Webb Telescope, the Hubble replacement, buffeted by budget woes and possible cancellation. Good context on today’s NASA compared to the size of the agency in Apollo’s heyday.
• Reuters – Irene Klotz: Newt Gingrich: Space visionary and future Geek-in-Chief? ; Not sure Gingrich is geek material. More like wonk, or space cowboy.
• PopSci – Rebecca Boyle: The Moon Should Be the 51st State, and Other Space Dreams From Newt Gingrich ; Still no science context, but a super review and dissection of Gingrich’s ideas, through his career, on how to do space right.

- Charlie Petit

At the Philadelphia Inquirer the clever Faye Flam went into full deconstruction mode on Monday, quarreling with creationists’ glee over their declaration that big shot scientists just stumbled across the creator. She did so in her column, Planet of the Apes, which revolves around evolution issues and, one has to say, cosmic evolution surely can be squeezed in among them.

The news she parses is that a big meeting in the UK among cosmologists led to discussion of Stephen Hawking, whose 70th birthday was the meeting’s cause even though he was too ill to attend, and specifically Hawking’s allusion to god in context of efforts to divine (heh heh) the mechanisms by which the universe arose. This in turn led New Scientist to run a story by Lisa Grossman earlier this month entitled “Why physicists can’t avoid a creation event,” followed by an editorial “The Genesis Problem.” Your tracker has not read either to its end, as they are mostly hidden by a pay wall I’ve not had energy to breach. Flam says the magazine did deliberately imply that the physicists entertained the Almighty as an explanation for everything. Could be.

But one suspects that whatever was said at the party, they are not literal proclamations that scientific method has led physicists to Jehovah or other lord above. Scripture, not just biblical but all kinds, includes a large share of the most vivid and unforgettable writing ever composed. So it is no wonder writers and thinkers of all sorts borrow from its parables and cosmologies to give their words extra oomph. It doesn’t mean they believe it, but they appreciate it. After all, Einstein once said he doesn’t believe that god plays dice with the world. That’s a figure of speech. It’s not a prayer, or a revelation (gad, scriptural imagery all over) that if there is a god it would ever roll dice as tie-breakers.

Anyway….apparently creationists took New Scientist’s reporting as Good News. And Flam took that as a cue to write some savvy lines. They include explanation, via her sources and herself, that when science runs out of hypotheses or evidence to explain something, it may be a mystery but that doesn’t make it a miracle from heaven.

    – Charlie Petit

A little announcement at the National Arboretum in DC, about a new version of the handy climate zone maps that the USDA and its Agricultural Research Service publishes to help home gardeners and others know whether figs, peonies, or passion flower vines will do well in the yard, included a delightful round of fast-talking. That is, if the AP‘s Seth Borenstein got it right, and he’s a diligent reporter. AP has a video by Lee Powell on the news, too.

Now, he could have written portentiously that the affair reflects recognition by a federal agency that global warming is making a practical impact, and compared the kibosh laid down on such revisions when they were considered during the administration of George W. Bush.

Instead, one gets a delightful vignette in which a USDA spokeswoman insists that the map should not be taken as evidence of global warming (was she also there during the Bush administration and still feeling the sting? Yes, if this press release from 2002 is any indication) . Seth immediately follows his sketch of the evasive tap dance with quotes from several horticultural authorities who say of course it’s global warming, sheesh and wottayathinking? The USDA woman had one good point, one thinks. What wipes out many plants is cold weather, so the maps rely only on a region’s cold extremes, not the average temp. But, one bets, there is a pretty strong correlation between the two in how they change.

   There is more to this, one suspects after hunting around for the previous map, pasted here. the colors are a bit different so it’s hard to be sure whether zones are heading north without a  ponder.  Go to this site where I found it and see that there was a 2006 edition of the map too. But USDA didn’t publish it. The National Arbor Day Foundation, apparently stepping into the breach, did that one. It includes a swell subtraction-comparison of zones to show the migration north that was apparent even then. See the arbor day group ‘s own posting of the 2006 effort and the press release it had that year. Nobody that I’ve seen in this weeks news round gives any credit toe NADF for its intermediate map, which sure looks as nicely done as the USDA’s. The Tracker had a brief post on it at the time.

The USDA is not going to make printed posters of the new map, reports say, relying on the web to circulate it. Maybe the nice people at the arbor day organization will step into this breach, too, and run some off.

Other stories on the USDA’s 2012 catch-up hardiness map:

• NPR – Dan Charles: Gardening Map of Warming U.S. Has Plant Zones Moving North ;
• San Francisco Chronicle – Stacy Finz: USDA releases new Plant Hardiness Zone Map ; Gives a plug to Sunset Magazine – a source says it does better job on its maps, for the western US,  than does the USDA.
• Newsday – Jessica Damiano: New Plant Hardiness Zone map released today ;
• USA Today – Janice Lloyd: New USDA climate zone map reflects northward warming trends ;
• Washington Post – Adrian Higgins: New plant map shifts area to warmer zone ;

Grist for the Mill: USDA Ag.Res. Service Press Release, Oregon State U. Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

At IPS  a general news service that includes a good deal on  climate change, (*Correction 1:  earlier post erred in saying it runs mainly climate news,and there was an even bigger error as noted below) Canadian crusading journalist Stephen Leahy reports a surprise, if it’s true. But one sees in the story an element of bait and switch. It’s not enough to refute the main point, which could well be perfectly valid. But the brush is broad.

Compare the lede, “The only green in biodiesel fuel is the money producers make from it, new research has revealed,” with the followup: “Biodiesel from palm oil plantations may be the world’s dirtiest fuel – far worse than burning diesel made from oil when the entire production life cycle is considered.”

Thus the target is just one way of making biodiesel. It is a widely used and still-growing one to be sure. It would be no surprise that clearing vast natural forest tracts to grow palm oil makes biodiesel overall a product that accelerates rather than retards global warming. But the story ought to tell readers whether there are are some biodiesels that are as green as advertised. I’m thinking of the small operations that turn used cooking oil into biodiesel, but one can imagine others that pass muster on the greenhouse gas scale.

[*Correction 2: As Leahy politely notes in comments, the story does, well along but it's there, tell readers that cooking oil-derived biofuel may be a net plus in the carbon department. ]

Leahy, whose work has been posted on here several times, is among the more innovative freelancers in the struggle to get the money to keep working. Among his strategies for covering travel and other expenses is to seek donations on the web. I’ve made a small one myself to his community supported journalism venture. He uses it to do good, if clearly agenda-driven, work. Being a crusader and being honest are not incompatible.

[*Correction 2 Cont'd: Scratch this whole graf. I'll still maintain Leahy's lede is too strong, but he has the caveats explicitly] He already did what I asked But one more paragraph in this story would be welcome, one that might reassure the public-spirited lady driving her old Mercedes diesel around the streets of Cambridge or Berkeley that she is doing the world a favor when fueling up (for high cost) at a little neighborhood biodiesel outlet.

Other Biodiesel News (some may enforce Leahy’s angle):

• Reuters – Michael Hogan: Green fuel taxes choking German biodiesel growth ;
• Des Moines Register – Dan Piller: Fragile future for biofuel industry foretold ; This is off topic, but a prime source here is named Joe Jobe. He is executive officer of the National Biodiesel Board in Missouri. I usually have the discipline to suppress puns, and also making much of people whose names seem right for the job. Not this time. Jojoba plants, full of wax and natural oil, were for a while the hottest-promoted feedstock for biodiesel. If I were a reporter, I’d ask about that mellifluous name of his. Maybe it’s his given name, or not. Apt for sure.
• Bikya Masr (Egypt independent news) Sharifa Ghanem: Biodiesel buses on the move in UAE ; A little hunting around reveals that the supplier, Lootah Biofuels, says it makes it from used cooking oil. It doesn’t say if it is palm oil, which seems unlikely. The problem, one gathers from Leahy’s story, is palm oil produced for direct conversion to biodiesel.
• Forbes – James Glassman: Liberate Biofuels From Abroad ;He cites Elisabeth Rosenthal of the NYTimes and quotes a five-year-old article of hers, quite badly out of contest, to build enthusiasm for import to the US of exactly the palm oil-based biofuel that energizes Leahy’s report. The headline on Rosenthal’s story (to which Glassman links): Once a Dream Fuel, Palm Oil May Be an Eco-Nightmare. Had any editor at Forbes read Rosenthal’s story, he or she would have done well to tell Mr. Glassman he may not cite it as ammo for his argument. Glassman, one notes, is a free-market crusader and head of the George W. Bush Institute, at the library of the same eponym at Southern Methodist University.
• Malaysia Star – Hanim Adnan: Cries of EU biofuel discrimination grow louder ; This one was in he paper yesterday. Ms. Adnan is quite the fan of her nation’s palm oil – here‘s what she wrote in October.

Grist for the Mill: US Dept. of Energy Biodiesel Production page. Main reference is to conversion of vegetable and animal fats; doesn’t mention palm oil. Implies production in US relies on used and locally-produced feed stock materials.

- Charlie Petit