The 16 scientists and engineers, some of them trained and experienced in climate sciences, who wrote a Wall Street Journal opinion letter published in late January have recently stuck to their guns in a second such missive. They wrote this to un-repudiate a contrary rebuke the journal later printed from 38 scientists – essentially all of them noted authorities in climate change – led by Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The core of this round 3 is that because one can compare warming data (which is in itself concession that the warming is real) since 1989 with the first report the IPCC issued at about the same, one may see that the IPCC’s preferred best-guess rate of warming exceeds what happened. Therefore something is falsified. They call what is falsified IPCC computer models. All of’em. And therefore one may disregard the mewlings of those with PhDs who are alarmed about global warming because their belief’s core has been falsified.

Hmpfffft. A pretty good demolition of the second letter from this group, I just learned, is at the blog-by-experts site RealClimate, posted by Brigham Young University geologist Barry Bickmore.

If you want to know more about Bickmore, and you should, here is a YouTube video of a talk he gave not so long ago, called How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change. In it, he explains how he went from an inattentive skeptic to a true-CO2 believer when he turned his mind to the topic. And if you’d like to read something at Bickmore’s own blog, “Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah” but not by Bickmore himself but by a former Wall Street quant, here it is by Bob Fischer. He marvels at the ironic spectacle of the journal giving tacit approval of those who mock the IPCC’s forecasts when the journal itself has failed utterly at forecasting what it is suppose to know about: Economic Trends. And yet it keeps on declaring what’s coming up with stocks and business cycles.

*UPDATE: NY Review of Books – William D. Nordhaus : Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong ; Nordhaus, a deep believer in the power of markets to shape behavior, and thus one might erroneously think to conservative and therefore apt to doubt global warming, and although his work was cited by the Original Sixteen, he is on the side of science. He debunks the Wall Street Journal Sixteen. He does not debunk their letter to the editor in a collegial fashion either. He sledgehammers it into smithereens.

- Charlie Petit

Perhaps all the would-be candidates with a remote chance to take over the US Presidency believe that the Heartland Institute is a scientific repository for interpretation of climate trends. But the American people largely remain with the sitting President on the issue of global warming. It’s real, it’s almost all our fault, so it is time to grow up and do something about it. Well, maybe that last part is excessively wishful thinking. The rest can be inferred from a new poll making news today.

“I’m pleased that Americans believe in thermometers,” said Canadian scientist Andrew Weaver, as reported in an AP story by Seth Borenstein. Weaver we should all recall was in the news just recently (and before that in 2010) during the AAAS meeting in Vancouver. He was in the middle of protests to the Ottawa government’s efforts to manage and some  would say muzzle what its ministries’ scientists tell the press about the subject.

The news is that late last fall researchers at the University of Michigan and Muhlenberg College (Pennslvania) conducted an iteration of their National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change. The analysis is now done: 62 percent think the Earth is getting warmer. That’s up from the high 50s in the last year or so. But still short of 1998, the poll’s first year, when 72 percent said they believe that climate is warming. Republicans are split about 50-50 on the issue, but Democrats go along with global warming by a three to one ratio. Those who disagree tend to say scientists and media are distorting things.

As Borenstein reports, many Americans attribute their belief not to the declarations of scientists, but to their own observation that temperatures are up and the weather is changing in other ways as well.

Other stories:

• SAPA (South Afr) / AFP – More American accept climate change is real ;

Related News:

• Ars Technica via Wired – Scott K. Johnson : Americans Listening to Politicians, Not Climate Scientists ; Johnson here explores why such a sizeable minority continues to scoff.

Grist for the Mill: Full Report ; U. Michigan Press Release ;

- Charlie Petit

The new diagnostic manual being prepared by the American Psychiatric Association, known as the DSM-5, has been the subject of enormous controversy. See this chronicle of the controversy from Psychology Today a couple of years ago, and this from The Huffington Post just a few weeks ago. A Google search will bury you in stories.

So the American Psychiatric Association, which is preparing the manual for publication in May, 2013, should be accustomed to criticism. And isn’t that the way scientific progress is made? Galileo was sentenced to prison for proposing that the Earth revolved around the Sun. Apparently, the APA would like to send its critics to jail, too. With that remedy unavailable, it has resorted to a legal threat that has effectively silenced the author of a critical blog.

In an enlightening and thorough post Monday for Reporting on Health, William Heisel recounts the sad–and disturbing–tale of the British blogger Suzy Chapman, who has been charting the diagnostic changes proposed for the DSM-5 (or, formally, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).

Heisel reports that she had a loyal following of patients and practitioners until, over Christmas, 2011, she received two cease-and-desist letters from American Psychiatric Publishing, the publishing arm of the psychiatric association. It demanded that she remove “dsm5″ from her URL, which was dsm5watch.wordpress.com. Chapman changed the URL to http://dxrevisionwatch.wordpress.com/ and promptly lost many of her followers, who couldn’t find her.

For those followers, Chapman was effectively silenced by the APA.

Heisel says it’s important to note that Chapman doesn’t make money from her blog, but I’m not so sure that’s important. Even if she were making money, the APA was, in my view, in violation of normal scientific practice, which prizes public discussion and debate. It was also a bully. And it was foolish: Attempts to silence critics always backfire, and the end result of this scrap is likely to be more criticism of the APA and less confidence in its decisions.

And is this really copyright infringement? I’d like to hear from a lawyer. Does the APA’s protection for the name of its manual extend to all variations of that name, such as “dsm5watch”? How about “dsmfivewatch”? Or “dsmfivegossip”? Heisel notes that sites such as  Starbucks Gossip and Making Change at Wal-Mart were able to establish themselves as critics of their respective targets without being shut down. What constitutes fair use in these situations?

We’re not concerned here with the damage this does to the APA. We’re concerned with the damage it does to a free press. Bloggers are especially vulnerable to legal intimidation. Large news organizations can dispatch their lawyers to fight back; bloggers can’t.

This isn’t the first such legal attempt to shut down a blog, by any means, and it won’t be the last. But a cease-and-desist order from the nation’s psychiatrists? That’s hardly reassuring, coming, as it does, from the people who expect you to share with them your deepest secrets.

Beware.

- Paul Raeburn

It had to be there – ah yes, Helium-3 in paragraph 16, nearly half way through a story on setting up mining camps on the moon and that comprises a paragraph break after almost every sentence. He-3 is an isotope that could be valuable many years from now. That’s if something like the Int’l Tokomak Experimental Reactor under construction in France actually shows how in principle to get competitive, abundant fusion energy out of magnetic bottles of plasma. The energetics and low neutron flux of fusing deuterium and He-3 are attractive. Some say the surface of the Moon is significantly enriched in He-3 by the solar wind. And assuming that electric rail gun launchers or something else cheap could be developed to shoot it into space for redirection to controlled landing on Earth, one could make a bunch of money. Y’know, pile up enough ifs and maybes then even with a few probablies what you may have is fat chance.

I read this morning about that in a Canadian Press story by Peter Rakobowchuk. I’ve read it before – just pulled from the shelf a 16-year-old book, Mining the Sky, by John S. Lewis, now an emeritus processor of cosmochemistry at the Univ. of Arizona. Opened it to be sure he drummed on He-3, and along with confirmation was surprised to read that the ITER reactor was to have been running for six years already, by now. The CP story has enough sources with enough seriousness to them to show that the idea still has some traction.  The theme is that the future of big-time space exploration is somewhat in doubt, but if space mining takes off Canada could potentially be among its leaders. This is pure old-fashioned space age boosterism. It triggers nostalgia for a more confident time, decades ago. It notes that water on the moon is a necessity to lunar mining’s success. It notes that it now costs about a quarter of a million dollars to deliver a liter-bottle of water to the Moon’s surface. It does not note that his indicates how costly it would be to get valuable minerals back from there. It goes on to mention gold up there. Gold is very heavy.

But there is news underway. This week in Quebec City the Canadian Space Agency is hosting a meeting of space agencies deeply invested in the International Space Station:those of  Canada, US, Japan, Europe, and Russia. The head of each agency is there, including NASA Charles Bolden. A press conference with all five tomorrow will share whatever decisions are being made (see Grist below for details). That includes, perhaps, some consensus on what to do with the station, now penciled in for retirement in 2020 and then destruction, poof there goes $100 billion or so.

The moon mining story is the CP’s curtain-raiser for the meeting. It is an apt way to remind readers of the sentiments that led to such big-time space engineering projects as the ISS.  The voices of a few skeptics on the economics of lunar mining might also have helped captured the mixed feelings space nations now have about devoting large budgets to expanding human occupation of the solar system.

This morning, Rakobowchuk filed a story from the meeting focussed on the business at hand. His diligence presumably will include a report tomorrow on any decision the agencies’ delegations reach. I find no other news reports on it. One hopes that, given the turmoil in NASA over its budget and its missions, several other reporters tune in to the press conference. The ISS may be among the closest things to a white elephant in space, but surely after all the sweat and engineering it has required it must be worth something better than the trash can. Just look at the image up there, in hi defand be sure to click on this one to see it in full. It could become the world’s biggest motel with rooms for only half a dozen guests or so. Maybe reporters will have to buy a ticket to get to the press conference – unsure whether it is a teleconference, or purely one for corporeal attendance. Am checking on that.

Related News:

NASA Watch – Keith Cowing: CASIS Webinar Today: Learn What They Are – and Are Not Doing : Never heard of CASIS? Neither had your tracker. It means Center for the Advancement of Science in Space. It is a US non-profit more or less chartered by NASA to promote and manage both NASA and private sector research aboard ISS. The station’s US portion, meaning most of it, is a National Laboratory like Los Alamos or Brookhaven. I didn’t know that. CASIS is also having an event this week. This story links to related recent posts by the indispensable Cowing, a long-time critic and qualified fan of NASA (ie, gadfly).

Grist for the Mill: Canadian Space Agency Press Release on ISS meeting; Ctr for the Advancement of Science in Space About Us Page ;

- Charlie Petit

Recently, William (Bill) Broad has been raising hackles among lots of yoga devotees. Today’s ScienceTimes front pager adds to the list of reasons some, maybe most of them, are unhappy with him. Broad is himself a man who does his yoga. He has written a book about it which, I gather, includes not only the expected history and method, but some of the health dangers. The NYT Magazine in January ran an excerpt, How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body. And today’s article turns that around in a fashion that may make yoga more appealing for some. It suggests that yoga by its nature sexes people up. Mainly via anecdotal evidence he reports that many famous yoga teachers – including one recently in the news – have taken and some presumably still are taking full advantage of students who were, presumably, suddenly but unnaturally willing to get personal. Blame that, this story suggests, on all that yogic stretching, manipulation, and body-focus unleashing of  yearnings. One reads about spontaneous orgasm. Hmm. For sure, being very, very flexible has to improve things in the special-friend department.

Broad’s reporting style is not at all provocative itself. The story in fact leaves one feeling leery and queasy about what happens in some yoga sessions. (And, maybe, just a tad jealous). Its recounting of the openly sexual aspect of several, medieval Indian yoga movements is important. But one has to ask. Where is the needed perspective and reductivism one ought to include in such an article? We read regularly already that fitness improves sex lives – so how does yoga compare to other disciplines, whether it is performed at 24-Hour Fitness or a Pilates studio? How does the kanoodling quotient – and regrets it may inspire later – of yoga compare to other practices that put people together for prolonged periods, in intense concentration, physically touching, and breathing rapidly? Personal coaches? Family therapists? Dance instructors? Podiatrists even? Etc. One accepts easily that Broad’s general aim is a legitimate one – to demystify yoga, take it off its high tatami mat of ethereal superiority and put it on the plane of the many other things people do without looking so darned blissfully self-improved about it. Good things, bad things, and other things happen and that’s life. But if he’s going to single it out for a peculiarly intense ability to foment sexual experiences beyond what is wanted beforehand, not to mention ethically defensible, one would like to see more rigor. The headline on the story is apt: Yoga and Sex Scandals: No Surprise Here.

Other Headlines to Note:

• Natalie Angier – Each Flick of a Digist Is a Job for All 5 ; Not sure what’s new here, but one gets a delightful tour of the human hand. I enjoyed the part implying that our wonderful thumbs started out as side-effects of change in feet for efficient walking. She brings up robot hands that can overcome some of the tangles in tendons that keep our hands from even better function. So – how might a teleoperated machanical hand take advantage of such improvements if it is slaved to one of mortal flesh?
• Jane E. Brody: Americans Get Reacquainted With IUDs : I’d bet others have written of this, but I’d not noticed. IUD sales are jumping. Odd perhaps that she says not a jot about the current furor over contraception, thank you oh so much Senator Santorum, and whether IUDs and which ones might pass muster if the move in some quarters to declare personhood and for all I know demand social security numbers for every fertilized human egg in America, gets enshrined in law.
• Douglas Quenqua: They’re Like, Way Ahead of the Linguistic Curve ; It cannot be a surprise that the people who talk the most and the most incessantly – teenage girls – lead the way in putting twists on the common tongue. But that it’s so well documented is. Here is science anybody can understand. But Quenqua says in a lead example that  ‘bitchin’ is mostly the creation of young women. That surprises. I grew up in Southern California, finished high school in 1963. We said bitchin a lot, and that means every few sentences (means good, fantastic, etc.). When I went to college I learned it was not universally in use. But it was mostly a guy word as I recall, and it seems, looking back, it was associated tightly with the guys who did a lot of surfing (not me). Is it having a femme-led renaissance? Bitchin.
•  And from a few days ago, Nicholas Wade: Scientists Use Stem Cells to Generate Human Eggs ; Lots of qualifiers, and that’s good. Maybe so many it shouldn’t even be news yet.

As usual, lots more: whole section

- Charlie Petit

Shiva as time crystal? http://tinyurl.com/869ce6b

All by itself, even without explanation, ‘time crystal’ is a term that sends the imagination racing. Wow, like a little chunk of something that, uh, crystallizes time! Maybe that’s what makes Ironman’s chest-implant heart thing  glow? But truth is, for the last two weeks or so I’ve passed on reading deeply into it despite seeing occasional headlines. One reason: a fear that it would be too arcane to grasp, and it is so mortifying to face one’s mental limits while others sail onward.

Fear justified. Several reporters have tackled it, but it still baffles this old brain. The news is that a well-known theoretical physicist, Frank Wilczek at MIT, has come up with a way to have a perpetual motion machine without violating the laws of physics, all well-bolstered by solvable and deterministic mathematics. He imagines a crystal, a time crystal, that keeps moving in some fashion pretty much forever in a precisely rhythmic, repeating pattern. And, the behavior occurs while it is in its most serene, lowest energy state. It could do no work. It is merely, mainly for now an intellectual curiosity. So don’t go dreaming of patenting any 4-D hypertoroidal magneto zero-point quanticrystal dynamo gizmo that makes electricity forever for free. And, don’t we already have perpetual motion of that sort?  Even at absolute zero atoms and molecules move about in a little quantum weirdness dance, which I’ve written about as have a lot of others in the ksjtracker community and I was in the subset that didn’t quite get that either. Another example (in Wilczek’s paper, see grist below) is the forever-running current in a well-designed superconducting loop circuit.

I look in vain for the solution to most hurdles in explanation, when the abstract and general just don’t penetrate. Which is to come up with an example, something that, for instance, says here’s what would be going on if a salt crystal were really a time crystal. Would the sodium atoms do-se-do with the chlorine in some kind of evolving stereospecific state (steric was a cross word answer the other day, and the word stuck), would the crystal faces change angular alignments in a cyclical fashion, go from rhombohedral to orthorhombic etc. to WHAT? I don’t get it. This is not easy terrain for your average science journalist. Not even for the really good ones.

The news broke Feb. 16 after the Physics arXiv Blog entry, posted by one KentuckyFC, which I think is a nom de poultry, revealed the paper’s publication (see Grist) on arXiv and explained its exploitation of the equivalence of laws of conservation and symmetries when they break. He lost me at iTime. But the notion that such crystals would be clocks does intrigue. Can one attach a zero net energy loss escapement to a time crystal, one wonders. It doesn’t say. Can one even observer such a crystal – that is, interact with it  – yet not excite it out of its zero energy state?

On Feb. 16, at ScienceNews the estimable Alexandra Witze called these things “like the title of a bad fantasy movie” which is a good line, and she does evoke the image of a crystal in which the atomic constituents swap around and occupy position periodically. Still I ask – would they sidle here and there, or do a poof-I’m-gone-here-I-am quantum teleportation thing? She describes it a little bit like Earth repeating its orbit over and over again, without much net loss on energy state.

On Feb. 21, at the wing of LiveScience it calls Life’s Little Mysteries, Natalie Wolchover gave it a spin. She wisely points out Wilczek’s achievement’s primary element: it’s FIRST. Nobody else has even stopped to imagine things like these. And they could be engineered and thus their reality tests. He already has one Nobel Prize. This looks like a testable and thoroughly brainy hypothesis that could lead to something useful, maybe. But she has a quote from Prof. Wilczek maddening in its ambiguity: “The simplest realization would be some system whose geometry allows it to move in a circle andcome around after a certain time to the same place.” Is that physical translation in a plane, or a circle as a set of configurations laid out in a diagram where the stations are in a circle, just as a route to abstract understanding? Would they need to be in a perfect vacuum, and zero-g, so not friction occurs.

And yesterday, in the rendition that got me to break my zero-energy time-symmetry and do something, at Scientific American one of the more reliable explorers of the arcane, Ron Cowen  wrote it with heavy emphasis on this as potentially the first fully legal perpetual motion machine, even better than those persistent superconducting loop currents. He quickly works in theoretical physicist Sean Carroll’s endorsement of the notion’s plausibility, and a reference to quantum chromodynamics. Best is his revelation that the idea came to Wilczek not merely during his teaching of a course in crystallography, which other reporters have, but that the course’s underlying topic was the mathematical domain of group theory. The dimensions of space that can occupy an equations matrix can share the matrices with time, it says here, which pretty soon expanded for Wilczek the possibilit expressions of symmetries. Something like that.

But none of these stories provide an example, one in which a crystal does something one can see. Does it wobble, wander, or just resort its innards and change shape? And again, if this is a minimum energy state behavior, how can one observe it without disturbing or in some way disrupting it?

- Charlie Petit

Grist for the Mill:

Wilczek’s paper on arXiv ; associated paper on classical physics time crystals by Wilczek and Alfred Shapere.

- Charlie Petit

(English intro to Spanish lang post) Mexico’s government has announced a patent for a new vaccine against heroin addiction. Researchers at the National Institute of Psychiatry and colleagues at the US’s NIH and its NIDA got good results with it  in mice.  Clinical trials with humans are going to start soon. That’s about all we know. Therapeutic vaccines against addiction are at an interesting phase, with plenty of angles and unsolved questions to write about. But shockingly, not a single science reporter in Mexico has elaborated on the story. We’ve just found the basic official information, but no explanation of its mode of action, no details about the studies in rats, and nothing on the researchers who did it. We’ve asked journalists in Mexico about this. They tell us they know of nobody who did anything extensive. El Universal, Milenio, Reforma, La Jornada, Crónica… all have the same kind of stories with some superficial information from EFE, Reuters (Reuters account in English here) or Notimex. The announcement of the heroin vaccine and the Mexican patent has also spread among US, Latin American, and Spanish outlets. But we’ve been unable to find any information about the experiments, results, or how it works.  This lack of interest among Mexican reporters is odd. And it forces one to be suspicious of the merits of the work..

Impresionante: el gobierno mexicano anuncia por todo lo alto que acaban de patentar una vacuna contra la adicción a la heroína desarrollada en el Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría, y ni un solo periodista de ciencia prepara una nota explicando su mecanismo de acción, los estudios que han llevado a obtenerla, o qué investigadores están detrás de ella. Todo refritos de agencias. Cierto que de momento sólo ha demostrado ser efectiva en ratas, pero en principio si se patenta y se anuncia que los estudios clínicos en humanos van a empezar pronto, es que la cosa va en serio. ¿Cómo es que ningún periodista de ciencia de El Universal, de Reforma, de La Jornada, de Milenio, de Crónica… le ha prestado atención al asunto? No tiene sentido. Sobre todo porque el tema da muchísimo juego, tanto por su carga científica tan original, por los gráficos que se pueden realizar, por la historia que hay detrás, y por discutir los grandes límites que presentan las vacunas terapéuticas contra las adicciones.

En EEUU ya hay ensayos en humanos con vacunas contra nicotina y cocaína. Tienen potencial pero enormes dificultades. El planteamiento de estas vacunas contra adicciones es diferente al de las convencionales. La idea básica es inyectar en el torrente sanguíneo moléculas de heroína unidas a proteínas bacterianas para que tu sistema inmunológico genere anticuerpos contra la droga. De esta manera, si posteriormente se consume cocaína, los anticuerpos se unirán a ella y no podrá llegar al cerebro porque le impedirán superar la barrera hematoencefálica. Así no notarás los efectos de la droga. A no ser que tomes más. Este es un punto importante que ninguna nota de agencias ha comentado: la vacuna nunca se aplicaría de manera masiva a título preventivo. Ni cuando alguien está adicto. Sólo se puede aplicar de manera terapéutica cuando alguien está intentando desengancharse, para que si en un momento de debilidad consume, no haga efecto y no tenga la recaída. En realidad sólo es una salvaguarda ante los momentos difíciles que causan recaídas. Simplemente suministrando la vacuna a un adicto no le vas a curar. Entre otras cosas porque puede aumentar su consumo. Y en su torrente sanguíneo no tendrá suficientes anticuerpos para bloquear todas las moléculas de heroína. Este es uno de los limitantes más grandes de todas estas investigaciones: generar una respuesta inmune suficiente. Esto no está solucionado todavía. Y como en ningún sitio nos dan la más mínima información sobre los resultados en ratas de la vacuna mexicana, no tenemos manera de saberlo. De hecho nadie cita artículos científicos, ni quienes son los investigadores detrás de los experimentos. Sólo ha hablado a prensa la directora del centro.

Realmente, patentar una vacuna que ha dado resultados positivos en animales es una buena noticia. Pero no encontramos información científica en ningún sitio de México. Es decepcionante. En su blog La ciencia por gusto, Martín Bonfill Olivera también se queja de lo mismo, y llega a dudar que sea una noticia tan valiosa.

Aquí están las noticias todas idénticas de Notimex (1) a principios de febrero y EFE o Reuters (2) hace unos días (esta última mejor trabajada por la agencia que la primera) en Crónica de Hoy 1 y 2, Universal 1 y 2, Reforma 1 y 2, Milenio 1 y 2…. Y fuera de México la CNN, Univisión, El Mundo, ABC, El Tiempo, El Comercio, La República, ABC Color…

La verdad es que ciertamente el hecho de que se patente no es gran noticia (además el asunto no es nuevo: ver nota en 2002 de El Universal). Es lógico que fuera del país se reproduzcan notas de agencias sin más. Pero en México es lamentable que nadie se lo haya tomado más en serio. Genera desconfianza. Como si la institución tuviera algo que esconder. Quien sabe. Quizás todo es un poco bluf.

- Pere Estupinyà

Back to the Future: Mars, as viewed from here by Hubble

The last two weeks or so have seen a lot of news on NASA’s nearly-flat budget which, while not hit as hard as those of many other agencies, as proposed by the White House would call a nearly full stop to the agency’s long-running saga of Mars probes. The US has landed a small parade of rovers with the biggest-yet due to touch down later this year, plonked other stationary instrument packages on the surface and (along with the European Space Agency) and put a series of orbiting remote-sensing platforms zipping around it taking pictures and performing spectroscopic examinations. The show may be ending for a long time to come – other than anything Europe sends.

This morning the AP’s Seth Borenstein provided a narrative story to bring some life to the stats and the wails of lamentation from American  Mars scientists.  His lede: NASA is making a cosmic U-turn on the road to Mars. That is a little cold, as NASA vows to keep plunking away. It’s not about to shut down the orbiters and rovers. But it is pulling over to the side of the road, out of gas and no AAA answering the distress call. But scientists, Borenstein reports, do feel utterly rejected. He characterizes the mood as “bye-bye, Mars.”

The researchers are meeting with NASA’s bosses at an annual meeting today and tomorrw, near Dulles Int’l Airport, of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program Analysis Group . Borenstein says he’s paying attention and will update as warranted.

It’s not quite journalism, but here’s one that amounts to the same thing on the same topic from a longtime space policy analysis in DC:

• Space Policy Online – Marcia S. Smith: Mars Shaping Up as NASA Budget Battleground ; Where one learns that astronomers fear that their greatest, longest running hits may have run out of luck – the so-called Decadal Reviews by which, every ten years, the field has drawn up a prioritized set of wish lists that Congress followed closely in deciding what to buy for them. This year, it looks like the chopping block lineup is not in accord with the last decadal list’s recommendation for what should go first. And, we read here, Mars may be generating the most noise. but the agency’s series of missions to outer planets is also going bye-bye. Cassini will keep running at Saturn, and the New Horizons Mission to Pluto is in transit, but nobody is talking up a visit to Europa.

*UPDATE (Feb 28):

• AP – Seth Borenstein, Alicia Chang: Mars Mission Cuts IN NASA Budget Have Space Scientists Seeing Red ; The AP duo puts a new topper on the previous day’s story, with minor adjustments throughout. Big addition: While NASA will miss the next easy-flight shot at Mars in 2016, says here its Mars planners still hope to get something – if not something gigantic like a sample return – at the 2018 window when Mars and Earth’s orbits are not only generally aligned for an easy trip, the coincidences in their distances from the sun will add up to the shortest, least-energy demanding such route in 15 years.

Grist for the Mill:

Planetary Society Press Release ; NASA Press Release on the new Mars plan such as it is ; MEPAG meeting agenda ;

- Charlie Petit

Worm with skull? No - chikilidae saecilian!

We have a lesson in innocently composed but quite dreadful natural history and science reporting right here, and it saved from ksjtracker neglect a news event of considerable interest, if obscure and useful for nothing saving to bolster the general philosophy of environmental conservation.

• The Daily Activist/Just Weird Beat -  Maelie Arocho: Unearthed Nightmares / Legless Amphibian’s Creepy Eggs ; Her lede: The latest creature to be added to the stuff nightmares are made of is an entirely new family of amphibians found in India.

Nothing personal here. I am trying to keep in perspective this rendering of some diverting and, by the standards of the diverse behaviors of natural creatures not at all particularly disturbing or disgusting, news from the wonderful field of systematic. Ms. Arocho, whose signer mini-bio notes that she enjoys zombies (and hence is presumably drawn to fictitious adventure of the creepy sort), seems to be trying to provide light-hearted relief from this progressive and earnest news agency’s primary diet of social and political activism. She has a job to do and it, from the looks of it, it does not leave time to call around and get news that isn’t already reported by other agencies.  So, the reader is told that the earthworm like creatures are up to three feet long, and are a new family within the ancient, legless, and  rarely-seen, saecilian order of amphibians. They represent to science not only several species but an entire family new to science dubbed chikilidae.  Researchers in India found them after great labor mucking and digging through swampy terrain in their nation’s tropical northeast. And we also ‘learn’ here that they secrete a toxin, have the same nesting habits as the queen mother in sci-fi’s Alien movies, and that one should watch an accompanying video only if eager to lose sleep afterward.

All in fun, but it is irritating enough to me to post on this news in a larger roundup. That’s good, because it broke last week when the work was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, with the Associated Press circulating it widely around the world, and I feared it had already gotten too stale for a post. Then I came across this late-arriving piece. I’ll get to the better stuff shortly.

First, the Daily Activist’s short item illustrates the journalistic  hazard, such as with a prank that goes bad, that comes of turning a harmless and instructive nature story into a diverting,  shivery amusement. In seven brief paragraphs it not only strikes a decidedly undeserved tone, it makes outright errors. These Indian chikilidae do not grow three feet long, and they don’t secrete toxins – or at least, in my rapid research on this class of animals, it appears that such traits are found in previously known species of the larger caecilian order but not in this one. They are all a little bit creepy, being wiggly and wormy and faster-moving than the overgrown earthworms they resemble. To repeat : they don’t stand at all high in the annals of horrifying nature. (Disclosure: To be sure, when I showed pictures of Caecilians to Mrs. Tracker this morning, she shrieked.)

The video against which The Daily Activist warns is in truth a charmer, and a welcome glimpse at the vigor of scientists at the University of Delhi. which provides the video. Its team, working with British and Belgian colleagues to compile a complete listing of their country’s species, seeks to marshall programs to save those in danger. The peril includes these particular ones/ Agriculture is turning much of their habitat into plowed fields. Another fine video is a news piece at CNN-IBN Live by video journalist Arul Prakasam.

Other stories, told straight:

• AP – Katy Daigle: New family of legless amphibians found in India; A fine job, filed from New Delhi with quotes from the leader of the expedition – for whom she limns a tidy profile – and plenty of detail. She writes that ‘only’ 186 species of caecilian are known. Only is relative. Among vertebrates it is small compared to frogs or birds – but huge compared to cats (about three dozen) or whales (fewer than 100). But this is natural history news writing done with sensitivity and grace.
• Nature.com – Daniel Cressey: Limbless amphibian family discovered in India ;
• The Telegraph (India) From Africa to Northeast, no need for legs ;
• BBC – Richard Black: New amphibian family find for India ;
• Times of India – Manash Pratim Gohain: Delhi ‘Frogman’ finds rare amphibian family ;
• AFP – New legless amphibian found in India ;
• Hindustan Times – Chetan Chauhan: New family of amphibians found in NE ;
• LiveScience – Stephanie Pappas: Newly Discovered Legless Amphibians Are Horrifying ; No they are not. Horrifying (natural history division) is Annie Dillard’s description of a pretty, unmoving frog that gradually is seen to be subtly collapsing as it sits – a giant waterbug, almost hidden under the water’s surface, that has latched on and is slowly draining froggy of its juice. THAT is a scene from a horror movie.  These are just worms. Sort of. But with teeth. And wriggly as all get-out.

This is, by the way, not the first time that the Delhi University systematics team has found a new caecilian. One example, from 2009, was reported in the  Telegraph in Kolkata (Calcutta) by one of India’s most respected science writers, G. S. Mudur (house ad: Ganapati Mudur also was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, which provides my paycheck, back in 1999).

Grist for the Mill:

Proceedings of Royal Society – B full paper. Delhi University Amphibians of India ;

Please let us know if there is a press release, anybody.

- Charlie Petit

Update: Note links to two excellent blog posts mentioned in Ed Yong’s comment, below. They are from Maryn McKenna and Tara Smith. And note this nice post from Katherine Harmon at Scientific American, thanks to heads-up from Bora Zivkovic:

Staph Turns into Drug-Resistant Superbug on Farms

So I’ve removed “bloggers” from the hed, above. As Ed points out, the bloggers we would have expected to cover the story did so. Reporters missed the story; the bloggers didn’t. And thanks for the help.–PR

Last week, researchers at the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Arizona published a study strongly suggesting that a relatively harmless bacterium had been transformed into a life-threatening, drug-resistant superbug by exposure to antibiotics in animal feed. This particular strain of the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus was treatable in humans before it jumped to farm animals; then was exposed to antibiotics in their feed; and finally jumped back into humans–where it is now resistant to treatment with methicillin and tetracycline. That made it yet another strain of what’s called MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staph aureus, a dangerous group of organisms appearing with increasing frequency around the world.

What was interesting about the study was that the researchers actually traced the evolution of the resistant bug, analyzing 89 genomes from humans and animals in 19 countries on four continents.

Richard Knox of NPR put the results bluntly: “Researchers have nailed down something scientists, government officials and agribusiness proponents have argued about for years: whether antibiotics in livestock feed give rise to antibiotic-resistant germs that can threaten humans.” More from Knox:

This “pig MRSA” has been detected in nearly half of all meat sampled in U.S. commerce, according to the American Society for Microbiology. Most staph found in meat can be eliminated by cooking food well, but it can still pose a risk to consumers if handled unsafely or if it cross-contaminates with other things in the kitchen.

I could not find this important piece of news in an NPR on-air report. And Knox’s story didn’t even make NPR’s health blog; it appeared on the NPR food blog, along with such items as Why Astronauts Crave Tabasco Sauce, Popcorn Gets Its Moment on the Red Carpet, and In Rice, How Much Arsenic is Too Much?

This story, which provides strong evidence for the human health hazards associated with antibiotics in animal feed, is not a food story.

Elsewhere, reporters and bloggers largely seemed to miss the story altogether. Reporters and editors who attended the annual ScienceWriters’ meeting, in Flagstaff, last November should have been partly tipped off: Lance Price and Paul Keim, who did the study, spoke at the meeting (disclosure: I invited them to speak during the CASW’s New Horizons in Science meeting that followed the NASW workshops).

The Chicago Tribune reprinted a U.S. News and World Report item but did not do its own story, a particularly egregious absence in the onetime capital of the meatpacking industry and the home of the Union Stock Yards.

News Track India ran the story. So did Gizmodo Australia.

Where was everyone else?

- Paul Raeburn

Gotta go, but just raced through a badly-needed story on the downside of wind energy. It doesn’t come from some climate change denying quarter that just things the whole thing is economic and politically-popular foolishness. This is a bipartisan piece of crusading journalism. Before the weekend commences for me, an urging to read:

Christian Science Monitor – Erik Vance: The ‘wind rush’: Green energy blows trouble into Mexico; with Part II: Wind power: Clean energy, dirty business? ;

This is long-form journalism. You’ll meet a lot of people for whom to feel sympathy, anger, and things in between, peruse maps and graphics, stop to ponder implications, and realize that just because there’s a need to be filled for reasons of both profit and the general welfare of the human community is no reason to assume the people who show up to fill it are all good guys. “Colonialism” comes up. Maybe that’s the right word. Maybe a better one is the free market and big-money graft.

- Charlie Petit

This is unexpected news about the things in the gloaming far from stars. A statistics-heavy extrapolation from the leading theories of how planets and small stars form, plus the growing count of known planets orbiting other stars, concludes that for every one of the billions of stars in the Milky Way there could be 100,000 planets and dwarf planets (down to the mass of Plut0). That’s a lot. Ergo, most of them could be nomads – no mere metaphor but the proffered technical term – long since ejected by the gravitational monkey business of their parent star’s planet-making episode. And even that sort of ruckus may not be enough to explain the numbers that the conclusion permits. Many may have formed directly from processes in the interstellar medium and not modulated by stars and their accretion disks. Some might be accompanied by moons. Maybe a few nomads support ecosystems, microbial perhaps, kept from frostbite by the warmth of radioactive decay in these planets’ interiors and by the insulation of a thick atmosphere.

You astronomy buffs may remember that microlensing observations already made the news not long ago with convincing evidence for a lot of such un-moored worlds. See earlier post, May 18, 2011. But this new estimate from three Stanford researchers and an Oxford colleagues seems ridiculous. And news.

Stories:

• San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: ‘Nomad’ planets may outnumber stars in Milky Way ; Bracing reading on what conditions for these things might be. Less clear is how the number was estimated – it may not involve filling a dramatic shortage in the overall mass of the galaxy with unseen planets, as it says here. Altogether these planets, the paper says, add up to only a smidgen of just the thin vapor of oxygen atoms between the stars. It does involve, says this brain after scanning the ten page paper, a “power law” extrapolation of abundance distribution of known stars and planets down into realms that so far are not observable. The galaxy’s overall mass of already-visible stuff plus dark matter, it appears, puts an upper, not lower, bound on how many wandering planets are conceivable. But as pal Perlman reports, planned orbiting observatories should confirm or refute the estimates.
• Discovery News – Irene Klotz: Nomad Planets Roam Our Galaxy ; Klotz makes no real stab at how the estimate was made – writing merely that it involved “the gravitational pull of the Milky Way, how much material it contains and how that material might be divided among bodies ranging from Jupiter-sized objects down to tiny worlds like Pluto.” Yeh, but how?
• Universe Today – Nancy Atkinson: ‘Nomad’ Planets Could Outnumber Stars 100,000 to 1: Clearer explanation that this number stems from a plausibility argument, based on limited data. Still doesn’t mention the simple-minded (which isn’t the same as stupid) power-law extrapolation downward from known populations of brown dwarfs, extra-solar planets, Kuiper Belt objects, etc. The lead author tells Atkinson the exercise simply “quantifies our ignorance.”

There’s more, mostly aggregators. By the way, nobody I saw did anything with the exotic panspermia angle. The paper says right on its first page that, if life is possible on a significant number of such nomads and it they are scattered so thickly as the implications allow, then “space is a vast ecosystem, exchanging mass through chips (meteoroids to you and me) from rare direct collisions, (which) is intriguing with obvious implications for the instigation of life on earth.” Fred Hoyle would like that.

Grist for the Mill: Stanford University Press Release ; arXiv preprint of paper.

- Charlie Petit